I am in favour of freedom of speech, of information freedom and open, transparent government. The ongoing development of WikiLeaks as now essentially a vehicle to keep Julian Assange out of court to face allegations of rape and other sex crimes threatens all of these essential freedoms, and now has to be removed as a threat.
Today’s leak of a list of overseas infrastructure deemed critical to the United States creates an opportunity for terrorist groups and would-be terrorist groups to score easy goals by attacking poorly defended infrastructure deemed irreplaceable and non-redundant to the USA. In the past, people who wanted to inflict military damage on the USA had to get on a plane to the Hindu Kush. Now they can try to hijack truckloads of parts for the F35 in any one of six factories worldwide. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so dreadful.
Enemies of the USA who couldn’t previously get their shit together sufficiently to build a decent attack on a well defended nuclear submarine base, or for whom chobham armour is just too difficult to penetrate with 1970s vintage RPGs can now very easily emerge and put together car bombs to begin attacking engineering firms, take a hatchet to the windows at snake venom factories and take hacksaws to transatlantic telecommunications cable landing points.
WikiLeaks’ resident apologists say that this information isn’t dangerous, because the actual addresses aren’t given in the leak. This is so much phooey. By lowering the bar for an attack The website has gone from an entity promoting open government to its current manifestation as a genuine threat to the security of the USA and NATO.
It cannot now be too far an exaggeration to suggest the unwarranted and unlawful release of these documents poses a risk to the alliance and international peace; if that analysis is correct, it would surely now be reasonable to consider the sort of non-lethal action needed to re-establish that security.
