This afternoon I was briefly on LBC with James Whale who asked some questions about the impact of Wikileaking.

My core points ran something like this.

All organisations including LBC and firms which LBC listeners worked for had some reasonable expectation of privacy. Governments were no different.

Some of the information which had come out might end up being not a bad thing (eg the Iranians knowing that the Saudis had (apparently) been keen on military action against Iran).

Some information which was embarrassing might well do no real damage – eg the private views of world leaders about each other.

But a really damaging category of leak involved reports of named individuals privately passing on information in trust to the USA which their governments or others might not like. In extreme cases this could lead to death or severe punishment for those individuals and/or their families. NB that the information concerned might not catch any headlines in the Guardian, so the eventual fate of such people might well never be known.

Note: Assange asserts an answer to this point at the Guardian today. Totally unconvincing in my view:

Julian Assange:
WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time there has been no credible allegation, even by organisations like the Pentagon that even a single person has come to harm as a result of our activities. This is despite much-attempted manipulation and spin trying to lead people to a counter-factual conclusion. We do not expect any change in this regard.

I also said that part of the job of senior diplomats was helping give key character judgements of foreign leaders. For example, my mid-2007 private briefing for Tony Blair on the Kaczynski twins before the Lisbon Treaty negotiations had made a significant positive impact for UK national interests in helping us finely calibrate the Poles’ reactions at the looming EU Summit. That was a matter of record. Had those notes been leaked before the Summit my own position in Poland would have been untenable, and key British interests would have been harmed. Fact.

I said that it was one thing to support Animal Rights – quite another thing to break open London Zoo and cause all sorts of random accidents as the animals freely streamed out. Quite a few animals might make it to the wild and regain their freedom. Many others would not, plus all sorts of other unpredictable damage would be done.

In the case of the USA and UK where extensive FOI and other provisions were made for publishing official information, the reckless public dumping of so many classified documents was inexcusable. Death sentences could certainly be passed in many countries on anyone doing the same thing, a fact which no doubt concentrated the minds of officials working there. Mr Assange wanted the benefit of being seen by many as a hero – he should hand himself over to the law and accept some of the responsibility too.

I concluded that the main ‘existential’ damage caused by these leaks lay in the perception created in many countries that the West was weak and unable to convince its own key people to adhere to minimal loyalty. We had seen earlier this week the World Cup bid result, where too many countries had turned against us ostensibly because we had ‘too much’ media freedom.

And so on.

This one will run and run.

What I find baffling is quite how one US soldier (if it was indeed same) managed to steal quite so much material so readily.

But there again it maybe does not matter how many layers of protection you build into any system, be it a bank or a foreign ministry – there always have to be some people, often quite junior, who have access to huge amounts of material if databases are to be useful.

Which of course is why as well as protecting our systems against malevolent outsiders, we’ll probably have to devote a lot of new oppressive unpleasantness to protecting them against deluded or disloyal insiders. As we have seen, it takes only one self-absorbed loner in a vast bureaucracy to do untold damage.

In which connection read this short excellent Economist piece by Nasim Taleb on the world in 2036, which as if by magic develops up a key concluding idea in my recent TEDx Krakow presentation:

The Age of Big Slow Things is ending

The Age of Small Fast Things is beginning

 

You always need Mass

But in diplomacy as in life, Velocity is the smart way to bet

 

Nassim Taleb:

Although fragile bridges can take a long time to collapse, 25 years in the 21st century should be sufficient to make hidden risks salient: connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by then.

Nothing much smaller and faster than a USB stick with tens of thousands of stolen documents on it.

Events such as the latest Wikileaks embroglio exemplify the pell-mell course we are all now on towards a dangerous ‘randomising’ of world events and a decay in institutional authority.

In the looming conflicts as long-established but in any case Big systems abruptly decay (see the Eurozone), the most ruthless – and least committed to freedom in any sense that matters – may have a clear edge.

Thanks for that, Julian Assange.