I believe in the rule of law. I believe that we must always be careful what we allow to become precedent, when power is in our hands, so that we don't suffer when power is not in our hands.
I spoke out vociferously against what Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Richard Armitage, and the others in the Bush Administration did against Valerie Plame. It seemed the height of hypocrisy to me, a betrayal of those who were serving this country, and betraying their own, dangerously enough, for our sake. It seemed a monstrous thing for political point-scoring to take so much higher a priority than National Security. I believed those things then, and I believe them now.
We can be just as blind, I believe. There is no flaw that one person can have, that another cannot also have. So, if we wish to be consistent, we must not let the understandable thirst to have the truth come out, to have the guilty punished motivate us to undermine the protections that keep us safe from enemies both foreign and domestic.
Maybe Assange is being careful. Will the next leaker be? Maybe this time, it's information that's only merely embarrassing to us. Will the next leak be so innocuous? When we stray from the rule of law, we begin to count on our government officials or our heroes who are acting against our government to act conscientiously, independent of any check and balance.
And do they always? Do the Fidel Castroes never turn into despotic leaders themselves? Do the Hugo Chavez's not take their legitimate greivances against their right wing opponents, and turn them into their own excuses to wield power without limit? So many democracies have imploded into new tyrannies under the weight of such a self-righteous expectation.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There must always be a tension in a functioning Democratic Republic between power and limits on power, or else the lack of moderation drowns us in the excesses of the self-righteous.
I don't trust my government to always tell us enough truth. I also don't trust Julian Assange to reveal only the secrets that won't get people killed, won't cause harm. Already, his site helped to public the so-called "climategate" e-mails, adding fuel to the fires of those denying Climate Science. We must not, in our idealism, underestimate the extent to which some, with axes to grind, may use people's thirst for secrets to push false or misleading information into the public debate.
We should not, also, underestimate the carelessness that may develop when it becomes fashionable to leak documents and information to satisfy personal political agendas. The revelation of Valerie Wilson's identity may have put many people in danger, the revelation of her front company so many more. With the need for human intelligence so great out in the world, it's not exactly the best advertisment for a career as one of our agents, to have those agents compromised so publically by self-serving politicians or political movements.
It's a difficult and complex thing, but I think our only sane option to deal with the issue of secrecy is through reform of the national security establishment. We need to push for secrecy and classifications standards that are based on the real needs of secrecy, not merely paranoid desperation. Like McGeorge Bundy said,
If you guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, you’ll probably lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds.
Merely beating at the walls with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning won't help. It will not do away with secrecy, it will not make the folks in the national security apparatus less paranoid, less able to keep those secrets. What we really need to be doing, is advocating for an approach to national security where fewer people keep fewer but more important secrets better, where the Diamonds are guarded with the urgency those jewels demand, and the toothbrushes are given the attention, or lack of same, that they deserve.
We need to stop fighting the institutions, and start changing them.
As for Whistleblowers?
I don't want document dumps. I don't want somebody who just got a beef with a policy, and decided to just fling out huge amounts of information, hoping that somebody who has sworn no oath to uphold the constitution and the laws of this country won't publish the stuff that shouldn't be published. Also, in practice, It's best to be short and sweet if you can be. Most members of the public will not be bothered to flip through thousands of pages of text. People watch the news and read the Newspapers for a reason: the reporters save them the time they don't have and the trouble they don't want to go through, to find the truth. That's what reporters are for.
Blow the whistle on something in particular, an actual event with actual connections. Get people focused on something meaningful instead of awash in a sea of trivial info. It's naive to believe that everybody will look at the same mass of undifferentiated information and be motivated to make the same changes. There are so many ways to spin all that information, it's not even funny. When the whistleblower is alerting us to something specific and provable, they can influence policy much more strongly, since the scandal hits at a specific matter and puts all its pressure on a smaller point. Attention should be kept strong and focused, not diffused and distracted.
Of all the challenges we face in dealing with intelligence information, the greatest challenge is recognizing the limits of our perceptions, our attention, and our ability to judge right from wrong. Those who apply snap judgments on what is in our nation's interests in terms of secrecy and classification, be they from the right or the left, fail to confront these problems properly.