Is the era of WikiLeaks over?
It's been less than a year since the underground organization made its first big splash with the release of thousands of U.S. military files from Afghanistan. And it's been only two months since WikiLeaks began releasing documents from its trove of 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables.
But with fewer than 3,000 cables released, the newspapers that were given access to the database have found that it has already reached the point of diminishing returns. Journalists working on the project say they (naturally) published the most interesting stuff first; what remains, apparently, is mostly a vast collection of diplomatic trivia.
And what of WikiLeaks itself? The organization is in tatters; its early successes have prompted both new competition and new controls on leaks.
As WikiLeaks' founder, the mercurial cyber-militant Julian Assange, faces criminal investigations in Sweden and the United States, some of his lieutenants — alienated by Assange's domineering ways — have split to form a new, competing leak depository called "OpenLeaks." Even more threatening, the New York Times is considering a plan to cut out the middleman by opening an electronic leak channel of its own. "The aim would be to facilitate tips and information from sources who are afraid to directly approach a reporter," the Times' editor, Bill Keller, told me via e-mail.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government has taken steps to prevent others from doing what a soldier based in Iraq, Pfc. Bradley Manning, allegedly did for WikiLeaks, downloading secret cables onto compact disks and spiriting them away. "Bradley Manning could not do today what he did a year ago," an official said.
Leaks will continue with or without WikiLeaks, but that's nothing new. As John Adams, America's second president, lamented: 'How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not."
The question is, now that we've survived WikiLeaks, what have we learned?
The WikiLeaks documents contained few blockbusters. These were not the Pentagon Papers. What they primarily showed was that American diplomats told the truth most of the time, that their perceptions of foreign leaders were more acerbic and interesting than anyone knew, and that many of them are quite good writers.
