Has WikiLeaks finally leaked too much?

The whistleblower website says people have a right to know how the U.S. conducts international relations, but some wonder if its unveiling of 250,000 diplomatic cables is a leak too far

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: Some are calling his latest dump of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables "information vandalism."
(Image credit: Corbis)

WikiLeaks has struck again. This time, the whistleblower organization has disclosed the contents of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies, making the full cache of information available to a few select newspapers, including The New York Times. The treasure trove of revelations — including sensitive information about American relations with Pakistan, China, and Afghanistan — has left the U.S. government fuming. (See the 10 biggest revelations.) A statement from the White House said, in part: "We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information." Is WikiLeaks endangering people's lives, or just their reputations? (Watch a Fox News discussion about WikiLeaks and global security)

Shame on WikiLeaks... Journalists break sensitive stories all the time, says Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy. "That's our job." But leaking a quarter million of them all at once seems more like "information vandalism" than journalism. WikiLeaks' argument that the public deserves to know what the U.S. government is up to is unconvincing. It released these cables because it could. I call that "grotesque and irresponsible."

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