PBS – Joshua Foust: The Stratfor files: Much ado about nothing
In his column for PBS Need to Know, ASP fellow Joshua Foust writes about Wikileaks’ latest investigation on Stratfor.
Neither interpretation of this leak really makes a moral argument for exposing a private company’s proprietary information. Disliking Stratfor — as I do — does not give one the right or remit to steal their information and publish it on the Internet, especially when that theft does not expose any criminal wrongdoing. Much like WikiLeaks’ last major data dump, this one is filled with lots of banal information that was either public already or not furthering a noble goal like transparency. And like the Cablegate, it will go a long way toward making both the government and the corporations who work with government agencies more secretive and less transparent.
When compared with dedicated researchers who legally uncover and declassify national security secrets, like George Washington University’s excellent National Security Archive or Steven Aftergood’s Project on Government Secrecy, the reckless data vandalism of WikiLeaks seems amateurish and shortsighted. Using strong-arm tactics like data theft to “force transparency” is counterproductive, and the huge volume of data makes it difficult to isolate important information. As time goes on, it is increasingly difficult to understand just what WikiLeaks is trying to accomplish.
