How is the weather on your planet?

Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should. Just being secret does not make anything interesting.

I have been trying for some weeks to get my head around the Wikileaks thing, and all the furore being whipped up. The way that I see it, nothing that I have read is either unknown, intuited or not boring. The only titillation flowed from the fact that all this verbiage was classified, not meant for general consumption.

A declaration of secrecy very often does not correspond to the content of the document. The power to make anything secret can be irresistible to many, reinforcing their own sense of importance. Claiming to know secrets, and not sharing them, enhances your sense of self. If those secrets then get divulged, the holder feels diminished.

Now we all know that the diplomats’ views on their interlocutors diverged depending on whether their statements were made to the world at large or to their bosses. Is that lying? Who among us has not smiled on somebody that we really hate?. Such are the social compromises that lubricate human interactions. My grandmother used to demand that we do not speak ill of the absent, but who is able to live up to that exalted standard?

When we negotiate a deal among us, each of the parties hopes to have some asset that will ensure the other side’s compliance to our wishes. The whole crux of the matter is that this asset remain secret until the deal is clinched. Why should negotiations between governments be any different? They happen between humans after all.

Suddenly Julian Assange, unknown to most of us, is a celebrity on the strength of millions of words handed to his organization by other people in search of notoriety. Whether the crimes and misdemeanors that he is being charged with are real or manufactured he can hardly be seen as a victim. He must have known that he was making powerful enemies squirm.

To those of you who still believe that conspiracies have been unveiled, or that every last comma of government verbiage is sensational, please let me know how the weather in your planet is behaving at this time.