WikiLeaks: Security breach burns American sources

WikiLeaks has endangered the lives of those who helped the U.S., said the London Guardian in an editorial. The guerrilla whistle-blower group, led by Australian Julian Assange, has lost control of its entire trove of 251,287 leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. Every unedited cable, replete with names of informants, is now visible to the world on the Web, and easily searchable by any regime bent on vengeance. WikiLeaks blames The Guardian for the breach, saying that one of our reporters divulged the secret password to the master file in a book published earlier this year. But that password was supposed to have been changed, and anyway that’s not how the leak occurred. It turns out that the master file was accessible without a password at one site because of an oversight by WikiLeaks employees. In any case, before the news of the data dump broke, Assange himself had long said that he intended to make all cables public, “regardless of possible reprisals to named individuals.” Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an estranged former colleague, said Assange was “egocentric and completely irrational.”

There’s a lot of juicy stuff in these unredacted cables, said Elena Chernenko in the Moscow Kommersant. Is anyone interested in knowing which Russian citizen bad-mouthed President Dmitry Medvedev’s wife? Or how much Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin is really worth? One missive from the U.S. Embassy in Estonia contains a fascinating theory that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hates Estonia because his father, a Soviet soldier, was betrayed to the Germans by Estonians during World War II. But there’s more here than just gossip. Among the “shocking revelations” are details of secret CIA prisons in Poland, as well as an account of U.S. troops shooting children and old people in Iraq and then covering it up with an airstrike that obliterated the evidence.

This is not journalism, said the Madrid El País. When WikiLeaks first began releasing carefully screened U.S. diplomatic cables, the group seemed a force for good. By exposing the gulf between what governments tell their own people and what they tell the Americans, WikiLeaks was a potent tool for “all citizens whose claims were offset by state secrecy and opacity.” But this wanton dumping of sensitive cables “completely transforms” the mission. Whistle-blowers and informants are now potential victims, and WikiLeaks is not their friend but their betrayer.

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The brave informants who gave the U.S. sensitive data about oppressive regimes must now be “living in fear,” said Georg Fahrion in the German Financial Times Deutschland. “The crusaders against the all-powerful weren’t up to the challenge of wielding their own power responsibly.” And that means the end of WikiLeaks as a clearinghouse for whistle-blowers. Now nobody will trust the group with sensitive information. Julian Assange’s “grand idea is dead.”