Humor me for a moment: if your life was in danger, would you trust Julian Assange to keep your identity a secret? Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has dedicated himself to exposing secrets he feels should not be kept but how he decides whats worth staying secret and what isnt is anyones guess. The latest leak from WikiLeaks, which posts 92,000 classified documents to the Internet and dares readers to find something noteworthy inside, puts a huge number of people at risk. And Assange doesnt seem to care.
This is a much more serious issue than most people realize. Abaceen Nasimi, an Afghan whos traveling around the country and tweeting about it, worries this morning, The Wiki leaks is going to get lots of people into the hit list of Taleban, even if the names are not real.
What a mess, he adds.
Adam Serwer, a staff writer for the American Prospect, tweeted this morning, Former Military Intelligence Officer sez of wikileaks, Its an AQ/Taliban execution teams treasure trove.
This is a very real worry despite Assanges assurances that his organization is withholding 15,000 documents to redact or change any names, what assurances can we have that WikiLeaks will do a good job?
Can an organization whose sole purpose is exposing secret information really do a good job safeguarding the lives it endangers through exposure? They really cannot. The New York Times admitted as much, saying they took much greater pains not to provide readers the means to uncover the identities of anyone in the reports they mention (some of these efforts, like not linking to WikiLeaks, are almost cutesy on the Internet, but are nevertheless honest). At the request of the White House, the Times editors say, [we] urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.
Small comfort, since WikiLeaks is barely trying. The materials in question mostly consist of immediate incident reports seemingly downloaded directly from CIDNE, a massive reporting database the military maintains in Afghanistan and Iraq. These reports are about as accurate as first reports from a crime scene: often accurate in atmosphere, but usually wrong on details.
The military is rightly accused of overclassifying material, but in this case we have some idea of why: even with the names removed from these reports, you know where they happened (many still have place names). You know when they happened. And you know an Afghan was speaking to a U.S. soldier or intelligence agent. If you have times, locations and half the participants, you dont need names to identify who was involved in a conversation with some very basic detective work, you can find out (and its much easier to do in Afghanistan, which loves gossip).
If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer and lots of them have access to computers Id start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then Id kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to WikiLeaks.
