Elspeth Reeve at Atlantic has some interesting reactions to The Leaks. Among them are these.
How Were the Files Leaked? The Guardian's David Leigh explains that the cables arrived at his newspaper on an "innocuous-looking memory stick," whose 1.6 gigabytes of text files contained 251,287 dispatches. The leaker is suspected to be Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old soldier, who reportedly confessed to stealing the info while he was downrange. "It was childishly easy," Leigh writes, noting Bradley bragged, "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months."
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This Was Inevitable, Abraham R. Wagner argues at The Huffington Post. The leaks are "a serious problem of the Government's own making," massive amount of classified materials, unsteady adoption of new technology, and the "sheer number of people with security clearances." In every large population, you'll find a significant number of people with psychiatric disorders or who are in general disgruntled.____
Ours Is the Age of the Leak, Hua Hsu writes at The Atlantic. "To me, the leak is such a quintessentially 'now' phenomenon. It's the logic that divines pure, flowing, overwhelming data--the words, websites, Tweets, etc. that inundate us daily--from data that seems somehow more worthwhile. It's a gloss of intrigue, a wrinkle in the official narrative, a few bytes of data gone astray, a secret liberated for all to share--or so we assume. An NAACP speech? I'd rather re-watch this clip of a dog vomiting. A clip of an NAACP speech someone leaked to someone else, under the hush of secrecy? Tell me more."
Face it. A lot of Americans really believe that if they can do something, they should do it no matter the consequences. Thus Bradley Manning. Wow! Took a CD-RW in there and "no one suspected a thing." No prob! What's not to love!
Abraham Wagner is on target with the complaint about government classification. Steve Aftergood has been on the government's case for years.
As for that dog vomit, Hua Hsu is exactly right. If thousands of bound volumes containing exactly the same material turned up at your local public library, would you rush to read it? Yeah, sure you would! It's not the content that turns us on, it's the drama of a leak made more pleasurable and interesting as video clips of angry, embarrassed officials wringing their hands and issuing threats are seen for days, weeks.
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