WikiLeaks: Do they have a right to privacy?

This article was published in The Telegraph 9 December 2010

The candid diplomatic information revealed by WikiLeaks is embarrassing, but it could also cause real harm.

Henry Stimson, a predecessor of Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, once remarked that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”. If that remains the case, there must be precious few gentlemen left in the United States, and Barack Obama’s Administration must start by blaming itself for the mess it now finds itself in.

The 250,000 dispatches and diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks have, apparently, been on a Pentagon-run electronic database that could be accessed, quite properly, by at least tens of thousands and, possibly, hundreds of thousands of officials and military personnel with the appropriate security clearance.

The intention appears to have been to ensure that information available to any one of the US’s intelligence agencies should be available to the whole of its intelligence community, in the national interest. While that was reasonable, it is disturbing that so little care was taken to ensure that highly sensitive material reached only those who needed to know