Too many secrets drove WikiLeaks
David Rothkopf looks on the bright side of WikiLeaks:
Yet to prevent further security breaches of this sort, the administration must address their attention not to a single misguided enlisted man, or to a mercurial Internet gadfly. Rather, they must recognise that there cannot be true secrecy in a system in which over 3m people have security clearances.This is a system in which millions of documents each year are unnecessarily classified â?? even though, as a top general once asserted to me, well over 95 per cent of the information being classified is already publicly available. In shining a light on this, WikiLeaks fully reveals the perverse and flawed information culture within US government.
The secret to keeping secrets is to have fewer of them, shared among fewer people. And a massive, comprehensive review and reform of how America keeps, shares and thinks about its secrets is one of the few benefits this unfortunate incident could produce.
