Wikileaks is a Systems Failure

Wikileaks finally dropped the motherlode. What next? Judgment. What effect? Whose error? We should quickly dispense with the criminal charges against Pfc. Bradley Manning, assigning proper sentence for his serious violations. And anyone else subject to United States jurisdiction and also involved ought similarly to be charged. But the ultimate and perhaps penultimate recipients of the classified material, responsible for its publication, have done nothing chargeable. It is a curious paradox of national existence that, while a nation’s highest interest may be involved in safeguarding secrets of diplomatic maneuver, the disclosing of those secrets by other nations or non-citizens not subject to the nation’s jurisdiction cannot be made a crime.

What is not so very curious is the obvious fiduciary responsibility of the national administration for a secure apparatus to protect secrets both against spying by adversaries and allies and against misappropriation by nationals. The Wikileaks episode reveals a profoundly serious failure on the part of the national administration in the U.S. Note: these massive leaks all originate from U. S. security agencies. No other state has failed in so remarkable a fashion. The first real effect of the leaks, and the greatest harm, has been to reveal the U. S. as an unreliable partner. The responsibility for that must fall upon the shoulders of those responsible to safeguard national secrets. This was already evident in Defense Secretary Gates’s order for reviews of procedures last summer. The problem extends well beyond the Pentagon, however.

The tendency to blame the post-9/11 era of “information sharing” designed to avert the connect-the-dots error that fed into that humiliation in fact serves only to obscure and shift responsibility. This has been a systems failure, which means a system-design failure. “Eyes-only” information has been routed to a central collection point rather than literally to the eyes for which it was intended. That is what facilitated the theft of that information. This is a huge error of judgment, and there should be far more outrage directed towards its authors than the blustering fulminations against Wikileaks and the journal outlets that have highlighted the failure. Moreover, President Obama’s memorandum ordering a review of accessibility on an individual basis does not respond to the actual failure.

International partners of the United States will not be surprised to learn that diplomats report home candid assessments of their interactions with foreign counterparts and heads of state. They will be dismayed both to see their own candid observations published abroad and also to see in some cases with what little regard they are treated by their U. S. interlocutors. That will cost a great deal of effort to rebuild relationships of interest that are greased with mutual confidence in the future.