re: #242 goddamnedfrank

Probably the same way the Chinese leadership feels about The Tienanmen Papers.

I’m not talking about the leadership. I’m talking about an official in the bureaucracy, who presumably has a family and a life like most other fairly successful people. What gives you or anyone else the right to arbitrarily decide that everything he wrote should now become public? Do his human rights and livelihood just not matter, because he was in a position to write classified cables?

And I mentioned Egypt and Syria as two examples where one of the best outcomes for someone who wrote something the regime didn’t like would be to lose their jobs. There might be real problems just for having your name appear, regardless of the content.

Redaction is meaningless, when they’re posting digital source documents that can easily be checked against originals. It’s trivial for the governments involved to figure out who wrote the cables.