Unpluggable
How WikiLeaks embarrassed and enraged America, gripped the public and rewrote the rules of diplomacy
SECRETS are as old as states, and so are enemies', critics' and busybodies' efforts to uncover them. But the impact and scale of the latest disclosures by WikiLeaks, a secretive and autocratic outfit that campaigns for openness, are on a new level. A disillusioned 23-year-old American official, Bradley Manning, downloaded from a supposedly secure government network more than 250,000 diplomatic “cables”: in effect, government e-mails. They ranged from the almost-public to those classified “secret”. He gave them to WikiLeaks, which has provided them to international news outlets, including Germany's Der Spiegel, El País in Spain and Britain's Guardian (which, in turn, passed them to the New York Times).
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Unpluggable"
From the December 4th 2010 edition
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