re: #206 Mark Winter

Of those 250000 cables, only 15,652 are classified as “secret” (and most of those still are nothing more than political evaluations, stories about arms dealings etc.) Names are x-d out. Every cable has been vetted by editors of one of those 5 major newspapers.

Of the rest 101,748 are classified as confidential. If a confidential cable puts lives at risk I’d rather go to the guy who classified them in the first place and allowed them to be read by 2,5 million people with a clearance that a simple Private would have.

The remaining 133,887 are unclassified. They can’t be a security risk. I find lovely witty stories like “Bruno the Problem Bear running wild in Bavaria”.

OK.

Suppose you’re a government official in, say, Egypt or Syria, and you’ve been communicating with counterparts via classified diplomatic cables. Here comes Wikileaks and dumps all your classified cables for the past year, but “redacts” your name out of them.

How safe would you feel?