In my last entry, I argued about Bradley Manning's conduct. I guess some people just didn't register my chief objection. Manning never turned himself in, he was exposed by another person. He didn't walk into the FBI or Army Investigative or whatever headquarters and say "I'm here, and I did this."
I never argued that he should have been mistreated, but some have conflated mistreatment with the fury with which the Government's gone after them. Well, I'd say to him that it's far easier to disappear after leaking a few hundred secrets than when you leak a few hundred thousand. You can't do a document dump of that magnitude and not draw a whole lot of unwanted attention. You also can't really read through all you're going to release, and make sure it's stuff that SHOULD see the light of day.
If you want your source to remain secure, the secrets can only come out in dribbles and drabbles. Otherwise people will notice, and will look for them. If you really want the truth to come out in greater amounts, we need to change the law.
9/11 made secrecy cool again, more or less. Laws were passed to allow more invasive searches with less oversight. Policies were changed to consider more things classified, and broaden the authority. While we may praise those who, pained by their conscience, release information, we're poking pin holes in the pipes, more or less.
And what's the reaction to leaks? Tightened security. What Manning did was clumsy, overkill. He wanted to be real heroic, so he just dumped out whole bunches of files.
Want to bet it won't be so easy for the next guy?
The question you want to ask yourself, concerning the Manning case and similar leaking cases is this: is the problem that people are going after these leakers in the first place, with their having broken internal regulations, if not the law itself, or is the problem with the national security state as it stands now?
If we're going to have a nice, stable system here, where people reliably follow the rules, then we have to change the formal structure. The diamonds have to be treated like diamonds, and the toothbrushes like toothbrushes. If we just wear away at the system over time with leaks, what we'll eventually get is a system where they still have the formal authority to block or punishing the leaking of information that should be public, but not the integrity to safeguard the secrets that ought to be preserved.
What we need is a movement to reform our system of national secrets, not peck around at its edges with leaks to reporters. Leaks are only an expedient solution to a bigger problem. They are not the best permanent solution.