I’ve writ­ten before about the var­i­ous machi­na­tions of Wik­iLeaks. The lat­est round is par­tic­u­larly troubling.

This week, Wik­iLeaks released a new round of diplo­matic cables. This time, they included infor­ma­tion iden­ti­fy­ing cit­i­zens of var­i­ous coun­tries, whose activ­i­ties place them at risk of impris­on­ment as polit­i­cal dissidents.

The orga­ni­za­tion pro­claims its inno­cence, alleg­ing (in a thinly-​​veiled man­ner) that The New York Times was respon­si­ble for dis­trib­ut­ing the unredacted data. But this doesn’t pass the smell test. If Wik­iLeaks is in pos­ses­sion of the unredacted data, and dis­trib­uted it to the Times, then Wik­iLeaks is respon­si­ble for dis­trib­ut­ing the data. This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily absolve the Times of all respon­si­bil­ity, but Wik­iLeaks doesn’t earn a halo.

If Wik­iLeaks believes, as they claim, that the iden­ti­ties should have been redacted, Wik­iLeaks has the power to enforce it. They chose not to.

An orga­ni­za­tion whose very exis­tence is based on the recog­ni­tion that data con­fi­den­tial­ity is a big deal is an orga­ni­za­tion who has both the respon­si­bil­ity to care­fully man­age the data and the exper­tise to do so.

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