FED:Consequence of leaks will be bad: expert

AAP General News (Australia)
12-14-2010
FED:Consequence of leaks will be bad: expert

By Peter Veness

CANBERRA, Dec 14 AAP - Foreign policy expert Rory Medcalf has called for a considered
debate on the impact of the ongoing publishing of classified diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks.

Mr Medcalf, a senior policy analyst at the Lowy Institute, argues the release of the
cables would hurt western diplomacies more than authoritarian nations such as Russia and
China.

The website is bad for diplomacy and encourages voyeurism, Mr Medcalf said.

"My focus is very much on the consequences," Mr Medcalf told AAP on Tuesday.

"I'm trying not to attack WikiLeaks as such."

In an earlier blog posting, he attacked the media for focusing so heavily on the continued
publication of cables, suggesting newspapers were doing it for commercial reasons.

"The commercial motive for certain Australian newspapers' sensational treatment of
the story would be less distasteful if they were also willing to follow the example of
The Guardian and publish the quoted cables in full," Mr Medcalf wrote in his blog on Tuesday.

"If the public really needs to know, then there's no time like the present and no reason
we should not see the original documents."

"The leaking of a cable spelling out sensitive US-NATO nuclear discussions is really
defensible only if equivalent Chinese and Russian secret memos are going online any time
soon.

"It is interesting that The Guardian has already had second thoughts, taking the nuclear
cable off its website."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange previously has voiced his desire to radically downgrade
US power.

Mr Medcalf says one partial winner from the leaked cables is the intelligence world.

"A new world of large-scale diplomatic leaks will also mean extra duties for counter-intelligence
players, like the FBI and ASIO.

"This will help boost their budgets, but will also be a damaging diversion of their
capabilities, since they already have plenty of threats to manage in an age of terrorism
and great-power tensions."

At 11am (AEDT) on Tuesday, the WikiLeaks site had published 1344 of the promised 251,287 cables.

AAP pv/sb/jh

KEYWORD: WIKILEAKS MEDCALF UPDATE

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