How long before the secret details of all our lives are leaked on the net?
By Max HastingsLast updated at 1:42 AM on 30th November 2010
Pimply geek: Bradley Manning, thought to be the origin of the leaks
Private Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old U.S. soldier who says ‘information should be free’, has laid bare his Government’s cable traffic on a scale that makes the outcome of the 1943 Dambusters’ raid seem like a mere dripping tap.
By passing a vast archive of diplomatic cables to Julian Assange, the Australian anarchist founder of WikiLeaks, Manning has made headlines around the world, turned faces in Washington redder than revolution, and shown that, in the new wired-up universe, almost nothing can safely be called a secret.
Here is the jumbo jet version of the electronic leaks we have grown accustomed to in Britain: bank details and personal NHS records broadcast to the four winds, company systems hacked, private correspondence laid bare.
The simple truth about our computer-dominated, 21st-century societies is that if something is recorded on a database or transmitted electronically, it is vulnerable to penetration or exposure.
Governments are hacking each other’s systems almost daily. Secrets are safer on dreary old paper, which can be locked in a safe, than in a billion-dollar brain.
How important is the information Manning and Assange have revealed?
On the evidence of yesterday’s first tranche of 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables that Wiki-Leaks plans to drip-feed to us all in the days ahead, not very.
There is plenty to titillate and authoritative confirmation of many things we knew already: that Iran’s neighbours are more frightened of its nuclear programme than we are; that Israel is considering bombing President Ahmadinejad’s atomic plants; that the Americans think poorly of Afghanistan’s President Karzai and his monumentally corrupt family.
Washington was informed that a British Labour minister was ‘a hound dog’ with women, that the U.S. embassy in London was underwhelmed by David Cameron and that the Bank of England allegedly considered George Osborne a lightweight.
But there is no killer revelation of U.S. duplicity or misconduct.
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We learn that the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad warned her government that its policy towards Pakistan ‘risked destabilising the Pakistani state, alienating the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis without finally achieving the goal’.
It is heartening to know that Anne Patterson is wise enough to see this and brave enough to say so to her bosses.
For years, many journalists like me have heard such convictions expressed privately by American and British diplomats and soldiers
The embarrassment, of course, is to find frank speaking made official and publicly revealed.
In our own homes, we can live for years with neighbours whom we suspect of thinking us antisocial idiots who don’t cut our leylandii, drape our house in vulgar Christmas lights and have no idea how to bring up children.
But if someone handed us a copy of a letter written by the neighbours, setting out in black and white all the reasons they despise us, it is likely we would hit the roof.
The Russian people, anyway, dislike the West. After reading in their newspapers yesterday that the U.S. regards their country as ‘a virtual mafia state’, they will be livid — the more so because, of course, it is true.
In the days ahead, WikiLeaks is expected to pass on more rude remarks from America’s embassy in London about David Cameron and the Tories.
Compared to Hitler: But is that unfair on the Holocaust denier Ahmadinejad?
We shall also be told exactly why the U.S. thinks little of what our soldiers have been doing in Afghanistan.
Since the war is unpopular in Britain and there is always an undercurrent of irritation towards the U.S., many people are likely to vent their spleen about this in the local pub.
Silvio Berluscoi of Italy is described as 'feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader'
WikiLeaks’s earlier disclosures of material about the handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan caused genuine shock by providing explicit details about the killing of civilians during U.S. military operations.
Everyone knew this had been happening, but the files gave chapter and verse on hundreds of incidents, emphasising the promiscuity with which some soldiers open fire on the innocent.
The latest files, so far at least, simply show U.S. embassies doing their job.
In one report, President Ahmadinejad of Iran is compared to Hitler. This seems not unreasonable, since he constantly threatens to eradicate Israel from the face of the earth and denies the Holocaust happened.
Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, meanwhile, is described as ‘feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader’.
Past examples: Anyone who read Winston Churchill's wartime correspondence at the time would have dismissed him as a lunatic
The new material confirms what we have long known: that the U.S. and Israel have debated the merits of air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but have held back out of fears that these would not be fully effective and would precipitate a massive international crisis.
I heard one of our wisest strategic gurus say not long ago: ‘It may be that the only thing worse than living with an Iranian bomb would be the consequences of trying to stop it by force.’
The leaks confirm this uncertainty persists in the minds of Americans and sensible Israelis.
We should have cause to be much more scared if the cables showed either nation pretending that the fantastically difficult decision — to bomb or not to bomb — was easy.
The WikiLeaks revelations show most nations’ leaders have been saying privately almost exactly what we had supposed them to think about Iran, Russia, China or each other.
The good news, therefore, is that the world looks no more or less a dangerous place after trawling through some of America’s secret correspondence than it did before we saw this.
No hero: Julian Assange is an irresponsible mischief-maker
All of us at every level, especially the highest, need to be able to exchange ideas, offer proposals and consider and reject some wild notions before making decisions in our personal lives, jobs and, above all, in running nations.
Anyone who has read Winston Churchill’s wartime correspondence knows that if his papers and letters had been revealed while he was prime minister, he would have been derided as a lunatic and probably forced from power.
Happily, we are able to judge his achievement by what he did, not by what he sometimes thought or said before acting.
Part of the craziness of the modern world is a belief that it would be a better place if we knew absolutely everything about absolutely everyone.
This is rubbish.
Just as some measure of privacy is vital in our personal lives, so confidentiality and security are essential tools of government — even if they are often abused.
Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are not heroes of freedom, but irresponsible mischief-makers. Thus far, at least, their efforts have not done serious harm to Western interests; but not for want of trying.
That they feel able to act so recklessly reflects the fact we live in liberal societies.
China, Russia and other dictatorships have not experienced such disclosures, as those who might be tempted to make them know they would face firing squads.
But even if we recoil from the sententious twaddle in the Guardian about what a fine thing WikiLeaks has done for democracy, it serves little purpose to wring our hands.
This is an inescapable fallout from the computer age. In future, every public servant who writes anything down will know that it could form the stuff of tomorrow’s front pages.
Even the rest of us must accustom ourselves to an existence in which every detail of our lives — finances, health and relationships — is available to anyone with the expertise to hack into one of the myriad systems on which these things are recorded.
This is the new world: just let us not pretend it represents good news.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1334284/MAX-HASTINGS-How-long-secret-details-lives-leaked-net.html#ixzz16kXwfu3A
