The argument would be almost amusing if the potential consequences weren't so grave.
Last Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accused the Guardian newspaper—one of the five news organizations with which he collaborated in publishing edited versions of confidential U.S. State Department cables—of disclosing the password to his entire, unredacted cache of 250,000 cables. They are now freely available on the Internet. Not so, replied an indignant Guardian, which insisted it had been assured by Mr. Assange that "it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours."
We're (somewhat) inclined to believe the Guardian on this one, especially since Mr. Assange seems to have made up his mind long ago to release all the files anyway. He has now done so, and the damage is already being felt: On Friday, Australia's Attorney General confirmed that one of the cables gives away the name of an Australian intelligence officer. Expect many more covers blown, careers ruined, and lives placed in jeopardy before all this is over.
Then again, there's a saying about sleeping with dogs, and the Guardian's editors are responsible for trusting Mr. Assange that the password they published would be changed. The paper and its fellow Wikileaks collaborators have now issued a joint statement in which they say they are "united in condemning" the release of the unredacted cables. "The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone," they say. Maybe so. But they have been his witting—and unwitting—enablers, and the consequences of the latest disclosures rest on their shoulders, too.
