Bad for the US and its allies, good for China and Russia: The leak of 250,000 US cables will do more harm to Washington and its democratic allies in Asia and Europe than to authoritarian-leaning powers. It will neither precipitate some miracle of complete openness by Western governments nor encourage China or Russia to move a millimetre in that direction. But it will weaken the US and its allies in their ability to coordinate with and trust one another while trying to manage the risks arising from a changing global balance of power. For instance, the leaking of a cable spelling out sensitive US-NATO nuclear discussions is really defensible only if equivalent Chinese and Russian secret memos are going online any time soon – and it is interesting that The Guardian has already had second thoughts, taking the nuclear cable off its website. Casual readers might find many of the leaked cables underwhelming, but collectively they are an intelligence gift to America's rivals, including for the gaps they reveal in Washington's intelligence collection.

Bad for cohesion in the democratic world: Complex global relationships of trust and transaction – spanning the private and public spheres – are being damaged as WikiLeaks' supporters and opponents wage the world's first prolonged cyber conflict, involving hackers, corporations and governments. This is a virtual struggle being waged almost exclusively within the Western world, a cyber civil war.  

Bad for freedom of information: Officials will find it harder to access their own government's classified documents. Indeed, the more sensitive workings of policy and diplomacy in Western countries may regress to become the preserve of a small number of individuals, with increased reliance on personal channels like emails and phone conversations and less information recorded in formal documents. After the intelligence failures of 9/11, there was a push towards information-sharing between agencies and allies; this will now face fresh scrutiny and a probable rollback. (Mind you, a system in which a 23-year-old soldier can download a hoard of sensitive cables was a disaster waiting to happen.)

Restrictions on providing sensitive information to the media and the public could well be tightened. Australian diplomats already have a tough time accessing cables written by their colleagues. Right now American (and I suspect Australian) officials are ridiculously not even allowed to use their office computers to access the leaked trove, even though there is a strong national interest in their knowing precisely what is out there. This is a sign of the unfortunate information clampdown to come.

Bad for diplomats and good for spooks: In a complex and globalised world, flexible, well-resourced – and, yes, relatively transparent – diplomatic services are needed more than ever. Yet as diplomatic networks, trust and access to information dry up, foreign ministries could become even less effective and adaptive.

One entity that stands to benefit at their expense is clandestine intelligence agencies. Since 9/11, Western foreign services have lost resources and influence relative to their secret cousins. In Australia, the DFAT budget has declined while those of ASIS, ASIO and DSD have shot up. If diplomatic information channels become less trusted, governments may place even more emphasis on the truly hidden empire of covert intelligence-gathering, which is less leak-prone but worse value for money (and often less useful) than normal diplomatic reporting.

A new world of large-scale diplomatic leaks will also mean extra duties for counter-intelligence players, like the FBI and ASIO. This will help boost their budgets, but will also be a damaging diversion of their capabilities, since they already have plenty of threats to manage in an age of terrorism and great-power tensions.

Bad for peacemakers: Vicious conflicts are rarely resolved purely through open negotiation. Civil and communal wars, in particular, end only when leaders are willing to break with the violent extremists on their own side by holding talks with their enemies – and such talk must begin in secret if the leaders want to survive to round two. The successful Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s, for example, would never have stood a chance in a cablegate world.

Bad for journalism: For some mainstream media organisations, cablegate seems better than a goldmine: every day a new nugget, no digging needed. Yet by being so closely co-opted in treating indiscriminate leaks as headline news, day after day, parts of the old media risk hastening their own marginalisation and further dulling their already-diminished investigative faculties.

Moreover, such organisations are wading into new ethical and legal grey areas, which may yet ensnare them. For a start, how do the laws of defamation (or copyright) apply to material from leaked diplomatic cables? It is also at the very least a double-standard not to remove the names of individual diplomats and their contacts from news stories based on leaked cables, when journalists themselves assert a right to protect off-record sources. 

Bad for Obama and those who put faith in him: Wikileaks and its supporters are further damaging the most internationalist US Administration they will see in their lifetimes. This may turn out to be an own goal by part of the global liberal left. Wikileaks is fanning patriotic anger in America, and this will translate into political capital for the Republican right. 

Bad for Australia's Gillard Government: The Labor minority government is fragile, and the localised cablegate game being played by Australia's centre-left Fairfax broadsheets will carve fresh rifts and reopen old ones, whether between the foreign minister and prime minister, Labor's left and right wings, and Labor and its Green/independent partners.

Of course, these are preliminary and highly speculative judgments, and on at least some of them I hope to be entirely wrong.

Bad for freedom of information: A real issue. There is a culture of over-classification among many Western governments, including our own. Yet the wholesale changes wrought on our FoI system, the introduction of the Information Commissioner and the powerful push for open licensing of public sector information will make unnecessary classification progressively more difficult.

No doubt, there will be abuses, but if those seeking information and those administering it play fair, we will end up in a measurably better position than we were before. With more a more open view of the way government works, citizen satisfaction with how informed they are could act as a deterrent to unwanted information exposures.

Bad for peacemakers: Current Western practice in peacekeeping and peace-building operations, which has largely consisted of dropping in pre-packaged democratic models tied up with a bow, has been a disaster. More than one internationally recognised authority, including David Kilcullen and the Folke Bernadotte Academy in Sweden, are critical of this approach, preferring activity that more closely aligns with direct local population needs and rebuilds governance through more open collaborations. This is a major change in outlook, and one which is yet to see broad adoption, but is realising real successes. Open peace-building can and does work, though there's no question that it's difficult and still requires a level of confidentiality.

Bad for journalism: Absolutely not. The mainstream media, with a few notable exceptions, enjoys its proximity to power and is often overwhelmed by it. In a world where a new journalism exists — one where truth can be told and separated from the ugly symbiosis between politics and journalism — we will be in a far better place; one where the Fourth Estate reasserts its place as a limiting factor on disingenuousness and deception by otherwise democratic governments.

More than this, we may finally see the end of the interminable arguments over just what constitutes journalism in our hyperconnected world. Perhaps the old media will realise they are simply a part of the picture and that fine journalism is being done by people with subject expertise everywhere, but whose work sees them outside the traditional media environment.

Bad for Obama: Short term pain, I think. Yes, the Administration is far more internationalist than recent others, and yes, they have a black eye over this. But why? More than anything it's because the man who preached 'Change' and 'Yes we can' has largely proven to be more of the same. The cable leaks are more opportunity than cost; an opportunity to shake up Washington as promised and remake US politics.

Bad for the Gillard Government: Certainly for the PM, who is yet to withdraw her foolish declaration of illegality against Assange and Wikileaks. With a growing number of voices in Australian politics and society lining up to support the rule of law in Assange's case, there is hope that he will get fair treatment in any court that chooses to charge him with respect to these leaks — something that is yet to happen in spite of speculation that a Grand Jury has been empanelled in Virginia to do just such a thing.

Like Rory, my thoughts are speculative. I hope he is wrong and I am right. I hope that the matters WikiLeaks has brought to light in 2010 are a catalyst for change and not a trigger for a lockdown.

How best to avoid this? One way is to shut down WikiLeaks, though that seems unlikely to succeed, and would just open up territory for imitators. So here's an alternative suggestion for the governments of the world: stop taking self-defeating and counterproductive action. Rather than tighten security in response to these leaks, why not loosen it? Instead of investing more in spooks and less in diplomats, as Rory thinks will happen, why not adapt to this new reality by shifting away from the presumption in favour of secrecy?

Maybe this would make life easier for the West's rivals. But the 'intelligence gifts' to America's rivals that Rory sees in the Wikileaks cables are tactical victories.

You can draw an analogy with the free trade debate. Opponents of free trade often make the 'level playing field' argument — there's no sense putting our own economy at risk by lowering tariff barriers if the other side won't reciprocate. Clearly it would be better if tariff protection was lowered all around, and it would be preferable if China's political system was just as transparent as America's. But whether the other side reciprocates or not, we can be strengthened when the barriers to the free flow of information and goods are lowered.

As to whether WikiLeaks is 'bad for journalism', I should say so! After all, WikiLeaks has comprehensively scooped the mainstream media. But let's be clear what Rory is talking about when he refers to 'journalism'. He's talking about a profession that is traditionally practiced inside a newspaper or TV station. But journalism is not solely a profession, it is an activity, and increasingly it can be practiced by anyone.

I would also like to hear more from Rory about what makes the WikiLeaks cables so special. The media has always trafficked in leaks, so if this one is so damaging, where does that leave the practice of leaking? Is all leaking bad?

My guess is that Rory's reply would have something to do with the 'indiscriminate' nature of WikiLeaks. But as Fergus just pointed out, only a tiny percentage of WikiLeaks' cables have been released so far, and its been done in consultation with major newspapers, who advised on any redactions that were thought necessary. WikiLeaks and the NY Times even sought State Department help for the redactions.

To close, I want to extend the free trade analogy a little. One of the greatest barriers to economic liberalisation is the fact that its victims are highly concentrated and vocal, and tend to be politically powerful. By contrast, the benefits of a free economy, while pretty overwhelming, are quite diffuse, so liberalisation does not have a strong political or lobbying base.

For instance, when a government proposes to lower farm tariffs, you will see farmers marching in the street and lots of sympathetic media coverage. But you won't see counter-rallies by consumers demanding that the government drop tariffs so that a litre of milk is 10 cents cheaper — after all, it's only 10 cents. Yet when multiplied by 22 million milk consumers, that 10 cents represents a huge efficiency gain across the economy. It's just that no single individual is likely to notice the difference.

Something similar is true for information. I'm sure Rory is absolutely right that the Northern Ireland peace process would not have survived a WikiLeaks dump, and those who are invested in the current system of classification will come up with lots of specific cases where leaks have caused damage.

By contrast, the case for greater freedom of information is more diffuse and less dramatic. Yes, the Daniel Ellsberg and Deep Throat examples demonstrate that leaks can have specific public benefits, but that may not be the main point. The more mundane but important point is that free citizens ought to have a really good idea of what governments are doing in their name. No specific piece of information will be transformative, but in sum the health of our society is enhanced when they know more.

It bothers me that, in his introduction, Rory's apparently sincere reference to the value of 'freedom and truth' transforms, in the very same sentence, into 'libertarian righteousness'. There clearly are people (and Julian Assange may be among them) who take pleasure in just 'sticking it to the man', but it is surely possible to take some satisfaction from the release of the WikiLeaks cables without resorting to such undergraduate anti-authoritarianism.

You don't have to be an anarchist to be in favour of greater transparency, just as you don't need to be an authoritarian to appreciate the need for occasional secrecy.

Photo by Flickr user John Kannenberg.

Does Mr Assange really believe no-one is entitled to secrets? Would the world be safer, saner or more pleasant if nothing could be held in confidence? How could wars be averted in such a world? How could peace negotiations take place? Would news sources talk to journalists? Would business be done and jobs created? Could families enjoy each other's company? (I wonder whether the recent posting of Mr Assange's online dating profile will alter his view that transparency must trump every other right and every other interest. I will not link to the profile because I believe people have a right to privacy.)

3. It seems that Mr Assange has something against diplomacy. During the Bush Administration's years, especially in its first term, the left was rightly critical of George W Bush's over-reliance on military force. Now WikiLeaks is setting out to punish Washington for pursuing its aims through peaceful means — and undermining those peaceful means in the future. Thanks Julian, but I'd take the late Richard Holbrooke over you any day.

4. The playing field WikiLeaks has established is not a level one. It is much easier to steal information from open, democratic societies than from closed, authoritarian ones. WikiLeaks has hinted about future Russian leaks, but so far the vast preponderance of material is American in origin. Therefore the world sees the frailties of US diplomacy in much sharper focus than that that of, say, China or Iran. Do US diplomats look good in every exchange on which they report? No. But WikiLeaks doesn't allow us to compare them fairly to their foreign counterparts.

5. Even though WikiLeaks has rigged the game against the Americans, they don't come out of it as badly as you might think (and as Mr Assange doubtless hoped). If you squint your eyes and look at the totality of the information released so far, it turns out that the international problems about which Washington complains (for example, the Iranian nuclear program) are real and dangerous; that other capitals broadly agree with this; and that the American diplomats who are trying to address these problems often get little assistance from the rest of the world, including from those who egg them on privately. In other words, despite its clear intentions, WikiLeaks undercuts the view that America is arrogant, unilateral and bellicose.

I can't deny that WikiLeaks is fascinating. For a foreign policy think tank, it's great for business. Though many of the documents tell us nothing new, some are genuinely interesting and enlightening. Yet none of this takes away from the essential recklessness of WikiLeaks' conduct.

Even a sick tree can bear fruit. But we shouldn't pretend that the tree is healthy.

Photo by Flickr user Night Owl City.

WikiLeaks is a consequence of an absence of 'complex global relationships of trust and transaction', not a cause of their demise. Without existing levels of mistrust and suspicion surrounding government, WikiLeaks would have no market.

WikiLeaks will only be 'bad for freedom of information' if we allow people who work for us to conceal information from us. The assumption here is of an unaccountable state we have little or no influence over. We had better behave or they won't tell us anything! This is the picture of an authoritarian state, not a liberal democracy. We set the rules governing the transparency of our bureaucracies. If they aren't working properly we can change them.

Frankly, if our diplomats come to rely more heavily on open sources, we will be much better off. Having said that, the suggestions that diplomatic communications will collapse after WikiLeaks and that diplomats will no longer trade in gossip, are risible. Remarkably little will change.

Before it can be claimed that WikiLeaks is bad for peacemaking and would have stymied settlements such as the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s, an a priori question should be posed. How many intractable conflicts in the world have been prolonged by an absence of diplomatic transparency? Many, including the 'Irish problem', one would suspect. Diplomacy is used to perpetuate conflicts and to resolve them. Any cost-benefit analysis of WikiLeaks must consider both sides of this argument, not just the peacemaking angle.

If mainstream journalism is being marginalised by WikiLeaks – and I'd suggest it is – this is because it hasn't been doing it's job well enough. The old cosy relationship between journalists and the state has not served us well, even though they are actually helping WikiLeaks in this instance. Why is the status quo so good? Why must it be protected from competition?

People shouldn't put 'faith' in political leaders. That's just infantile. Judge them by their actions. If these revelations are good for the right or left, so be it. Let the public decide in light of the fullest possible disclosure of information. If the cables reveal discord between the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, we should know now, instead of finding out in a decade when Paul Kelly publishes his next 'insiders' tome.

There is an underlying fear of the public in these conclusions, as if they can't be trusted with information about their own government. Not very democratic in sentiment.

Hacker culture is perhaps the most democratic I know. Authority and, for want of a better word, power, are accorded based on knowledge and ability, on capacity to work with others, rather than on any artificial organisational construct. Those with the hacker mentality are patient, highly cooperative, strong collaborators who seek to expand and share their knowledge, rather than people who 'want quick results for little investment, and they work alone'.

Many of those working at the forefront of open government, both as public servants and on the outside of the public sector, are possessed of a rich vein of the hacker mentality. They seek, through their insatiable curiosity, to chip away at the edges of a closed system and break the door ajar to enable the collaboration and cooperation of government with its citizenry.

Brown also seems to think that hacker culture is disinclined to thoroughness and fact-checking. In the context of his piece, this is an interesting assertion, given he gets so much wrong in so few words.

As to Brown's assertions that WikiLeaks is outside the world of journalism, somehow different to any other organisation which might get leaked information dropped on its lap, perhaps he is unfamiliar with the debate in the media sector on the rapidly changing nature of the journalist; how journalism is no longer limited to those who are employed by 'media outlets'. Perhaps he should talk to the ABC's Mark Scott, or NYU professor Jay Rosen, or look at the way progressive media outfits such as The Guardian and The Huffington Post are doing their work.

Brown's last paragraph shows he simply didn't bother to look about very hard. While many people working in and around government have been quiet on the matter of WikiLeaks, very many others in several forums have been quite vociferous, both in Australia and overseas. A simple search will reveal comment on blogs, in the traditional media, and in forums where public sector workers gather to discuss the issues they face in their work.

Perhaps James Brown would have done well to spend some time talking with a few people who understand the hacker culture?

Photo by Flickr user Ian Sane.

Much needed efforts to strengthen information sharing and connect information systems will be reviewed, slowed or will stall completely. Any money available for information-sharing initiatives will be sucked into protecting existing systems. Lingering inter-agency mistrust will be given renewed life.  And at a personal level, individuals will think twice before committing something to writing or sharing it with a colleague.

This is why I find some of the 'it doesn't need to be this way' comments in response to Rory's article so misplaced. It is quaint to talk about a new era of diplomacy conducted in public. I'm not sure how that would work in practice. There's a suggestion that confidentiality is not itself a problem — and in fact is necessary in diplomacy — but that governments haven't got the calibration right between openness and confidentiality.

But let's be clear. This is not what WikiLeaks is about. WikiLeaks is not trying to reinvent statecraft. It is not trying to recalibrate government openness. It is not a whistle-blower. It is not practicing free speech. It is not just a publisher. It is not a media outlet. WikiLeaks has a political agenda that is anti-American and anti-government. And like most 'anti-' movements, it is not offering practical solutions, it is just against what other people are trying to do to solve problems. 

Why aren't diplomats and other officials' names removed from the US diplomatic cables it is posting to the internet? Because in WikiLeaks' eyes they are the enemy. Any real world personal damage to them is collateral to the WikiLeaks political objective.

So why do government agencies need to act in the way I describe? Because we don't know what's next. Yesterday it was tactical military reports, today it is diplomatic cables. Tomorrow it could be anything that WikiLeaks sees as promoting or defending its interests. It could be information from the Tax Office, the Federal Police, the Health Department, or any other institution of state or, for that matter, private enterprise.

True colours are beginning to emerge. The Australian Government has displeased WikiLeaks and is now under attack, per Julian Assange's thinly veiled threat in the Australian on 8 December. Who's next? Amazon? Financial institutions that have withdrawn their services from WikiLeaks? It will be interesting to see. If WikiLeaks truly believed in transparency it would reveal all about itself, its decisions and internal deliberations, and each and every source of funding — such an approach would certainly be consistent with the 'scientific' approach to journalism that it advocates, whereby the public can reach back to the source to judge for themselves what is true, and what is not.

Even if WikiLeaks disappeared tomorrow, its damage is done. There is certain to be copy cats. What remains to be seen is the cause they summon to justify their actions. And the tragic irony in all this is that many of those who currently support or sympathise with WikiLeaks will be the same ones outraged when the next preventable security incident occurs. They'll also argue for the right to privacy when there is some massive spillage of personal data onto the internet — for that's also a certain in a WikiLeaked world.

Photo by Flickr user Stian Eikeland.

The hacker manifesto describes the electronic world as a 'refuge from the day to day incompetencies'. But the hardest work in government, particularly diplomacy, is building consensus by managing those incompetencies and accommodating them as differences in opinion.

For hackers, it's all about a quick shortcut into a complex system, and WikiLeaks is the purest embodiment of this mentality. The system sucks, so let's lob a grenade over the wall and see what happens. Hacking is a lot like Victorian era medical care — just let fresh air in to improve circulation and all your diseases will be cleared up.

I'm happy to accept that Stephen and his online colleagues are patiently committed to reforming democracy by working within the system. I know all too well how traumatic it can be when a simplistic analysis overlooks the complexity of a group. I was still a serving military officer when WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video and painted all soldiers as baby killers. That's what concerns me most about WikiLeaks — that in our quest for simple truths, we overlook the complexities of a democratic system.

Photo by Flickr user Robert Marin.

And yet, it may not matter very much what Assange himself believes. In different ways, both our Canberra insider and Michael Fullilove have tried to put Assange's beliefs and character at the centre of this debate. Insider says WikiLeaks is 'not a media outlet' because it has 'a political agenda that is anti-American and anti-government.' Has Insider read The Age lately? Are all media outlets with an anti-American bent suspicious?

Michael Fullilove, meanwhile, points out that Assange is a tyrannical boss, and that therefore we shouldn't trust his judgment about which cables to release. But if Michael wants to create a character test for media professionals, I've got a few newspaper editors I'd like to introduce him to. (Assange may be a horrible boss, but I have yet to hear him accused of urinating in the sink during editorial meetings.)

None of the WikiLeaks critics have yet made a convincing case for why they are singling out this one organisation. It can't be because WikiLeaks has a radical political agenda, because there is a long tradition of that in journalism. And it can't be because WikiLeaks has indiscriminately dumped a quarter of a million cables on an unsuspecting world, because that just aint true. If WikiLeaks is so on-the-nose, why not also go after Bob Woodward or Australia's own Laurie Oakes, who have built entire careers on the use of leaks?

Looking at the posts in your Debate: Wikileaks tag, the concept of 'democracy' comes up in two different ways: as an ossified adjective along the lines of 'democratic governments like those in Australia and the US', or as an open and renegotiable concept at the heart of the debate about what WikiLeaks means. Here WikiLeaks represents a key new element in how we decide how we are governed (see Stephen Collins' and Mark Thirlwell's posts, for example).

I guess my question then goes back to the insiders in the Lowy Institute community — if security is at the heart of your thinking, is it human security, national security or state security that you really care about? If you're an insider in the castle, how interested are you in the opinions/needs/interests of the mob at the gate? 

My guess is that for many of the insiders represented in this debate, state security is paramount, and the mob outside can just accept this. But we're not really going to. It's this anti-democratic thinking that is why insider, security-focused arguments remain unlikely to change many people's opinions about Wikileaks.

Stephen Collins:

Can I clarify? My point about breadth of viewpoints was (probably unclearly on my part, so I carry a fair portion of the blame) more about how think tanks like Lowy staff themselves, rather than the viewpoints you present from your range of contributors. Lowy as a place that publishes a wide range of views couldn't be better. However, your staff and fellows do present a demographic that could be viewed as coming from a narrower set of fields. That said, unsurprising for a public policy institute focused on international affairs.

Laying claim to good intentions, good character and noble rhetoric is hardly enough to guarantee good outcomes for human welfare. What matters at least as much is a grown-up ethic of responsibility: the calculus of determining a deed's worth, not by its declared or even actual intentions, but by an unvarnished appraisal of its impact.

Such a commendable, real-world principle informs the unglamorous daily labours of many of the world's best officials and diplomats, America's included. Sometimes in the crooked reality of world politics, right brings about wrong, whereas seemingly amoral methods achieve good, or at least a minimisation of harm. Unfortunately, this seemingly obvious point about politics and diplomacy has been neglected in much of the effusion of transparency, outrage and glee surrounding cablegate.

Still, I have learned a lot from the ensuing exchange on The Interpreter, as well as parallel debates on Twitter and in the old-fashioned media.

In particular, I underestimated how little many Australians seem to trust or know about their federal government, especially the work of its foreign policy and security agencies. The assumption seems to be that government secrecy is primarily about avoiding public scrutiny rather than about thwarting external espionage and threats. This gulf of ignorance and mistrust has widened in the past decade, and government must bear a large measure of blame for this creeping alienation. 

Certainly, WikiLeaks could and should be a 'democratic opportunity' to seek to bridge that distance. But the clumsy way that parts of the media are exploiting cablegate (diplomatic interlocutors caricatured as sinister secret sources, selective quotes presented as sensational policy revelations, individual officials named needlessly and without context) is likely to push the government and its risk-averse servants deeper into their bunkers.

What can be done? The Australian foreign and security policy community absolutely should review its information policies, both to ensure that no indiscriminate cable spill can occur here (my professional opinion is that, for various technical and organisational reasons, it cannot) and to draw up options for leaders in increasing the transparency of diplomatic and security information.

Clearly there is a need for our diplomats to do more to explain their work to the public and the world, and this could be done in ways that do not compromise national security; my colleague Fergus Hanson's excellent recommendations on e-diplomacy offer one avenue. It is also high time we had a foreign policy white paper, and an annual statement to parliament about the purpose and nature of our diplomacy; both unfulfilled commitments of the Australian Government in recent years. Parliamentarians can and should do more to interrogate the thrust of foreign policy.

And it would make good sense if an exceptionally independent-minded, experienced and no-nonsense senior official — like current DFAT head Dennis Richardson — were to give a myth-puncturing public speech early in 2011 explaining the worth, methods and aspirations of Australia's contemporary diplomacy: what it is, why we need it, and how it is being improved.

As for good old cables, yes of course these diplomatic communications should be written against the possibility of their future release under Freedom of Information laws. As they are. And journalists and other citizens should pursue, assiduously, FOI requests on foreign policy issues that concern them. If the laws do not satisfy them, then they should lobby parliamentarians down a path of further FOI reform. Some sensitive cables and other official communications should always be tightly held, but chances are there is much that is over-classified.

Turning to address a few specific comments on my original post: both Scott and Stephen zeroed in on my concern that peace processes would suffer without diplomatic confidentiality. I do not believe that either of them substantially dented that point. It clouds the argument to mix up the essential early parleys of 'peacemaking' with the very different tasks of peacekeeping and (societal, reconciliation-based) peacebuilding. And while, there may be times when something vaguely called 'diplomacy' can be blamed for helping to perpetuate conflicts, it does seem a bit rich for beneficiaries of peaceful, prosperous democratic societies to announce that those who live in civil war zones should not have the benefit of discreet diplomacy to increase the chances of ending their daily grief. At the same time, transparent reporting of and accounting for atrocities is also essential to a just outcome (though cable dumps can hurt this too); secrecy and openness each has its place.

As for the assertion that diplomatic cables are owned by 'the people' and therefore do not merit protecting from public gaze, this raises the question: who consulted the American people before deciding to rip open thousands of their sealed diplomatic messages before the eyes of, among others, the foreign governments from whom those documents were meant to be screened?

Turning to Sam and Mark, is transparency in diplomatic and security information somehow like removing the barriers to trade in economic theory: a self-benefiting move even if nobody reciprocates? The analogy is too neat by half. In free trade, if you lose your artificial advantage in one economic activity you make up for it by exploiting your genuine knack for another. In the information competition between governments, the same happy theory does not apply.

Some secrets and lines of trusted diplomatic dialogue really are zero sum: their exclusive possession can advantage one nation over another, and exposure devalues them entirely. Moreover, not all information is of the same kind; while the widespread sharing of some data does indeed benefit everybody, the public dissemination of other kinds (say, lists of national vulnerabilities) might be of wildly disproportionate benefit to some foreign governments or less-than-friendly non-state entities. (Incidentally, I am not sure that friends of WikiLeaks are friends of free trade — for instance when it comes to Australia's restriction on parallel importation of books.)

In the end, I am not claiming that the existing systems of diplomacy are anywhere near perfect. Old-fashioned chanceries must engage with an information-saturated world and its anarchist discontents. But rejoicing in the indiscriminate leaking and dumping of the earnest superpower's classified communications is no solution. The onus should be on the proponents of revolutionary change to ensure and prove that their agenda of unsettling the existing system will do more good than harm. WikiLeaks, its 'everyone-wants-to-be-a-messiah' icon and its supporters remain a long way from meeting that fundamental test.

Photo by Flickr user SnaPsi.