WikiLeaks: A Force for Good or a National Security Threat?

This question is usually asked rhetorically by someone who has already answered it. Asked seriously, it splits into several smaller questions, and they do not all come out the same way.

The case for, at its strongest

Take the 2010 airstrike release on its own terms. The material was genuine. It documented deaths an internal inquiry had already closed. The employer of two of the dead had spent three years asking lawfully and received nothing. The verification work was thorough and the authenticity was never disputed.

The result was that millions of people saw how a decision to open fire is actually made, and the public conversation about civilian deaths in that war changed. No lawful route would have produced that, and none has produced anything comparable since.

If you had to defend one thing the organisation did, this is the thing, and it is a strong defence.

The case against, at its strongest

Now take the later releases. Hundreds of thousands of documents, released at a speed and scale that made genuine review impossible, including names of Afghans who had cooperated with coalition forces.

No public-interest argument covers publishing those names. The organisation itself accepted the criticism implicitly by handling the Iraq release more carefully. And a publisher who cannot read what they are publishing is not exercising editorial judgement, whatever they call it.

Add the diplomatic cables, where the argument is genuinely finely balanced: frank private assessments have real value, including to people living under the governments being assessed.

Two dates anchor the criticism. In July 2010 the Afghan field reports were published with names of Afghans who had cooperated with coalition forces still in them. By October 2010, after objections from its own newspaper partners, the organisation redacted the Iraq set far more carefully. That change is itself an admission, and it is the strongest evidence that the first release was done badly rather than unluckily.

Testing the loudest claims on each side

The two claims that survive testing

• It exposed people to risk. True, clearly, in the Afghan release.
• It changed newsroom practice and public expectation. Also true, and lasting. Everything between those two is contested.

The question that actually decides it

If you think the holder of a secret should always decide when it stops being a secret, the organisation was a threat by definition. If you think that arrangement fails in exactly the cases that matter most, then somebody outside the system has to decide sometimes, and the argument becomes about how well they did it.

On that second framing, the 2010 video release was done carefully and the later document releases were not. Both conclusions can be held at once.

A comparison that clears some of this up

When a major newspaper publishes classified material, it makes the same kind of decision: it has something a government says should stay secret, and it decides to print. The differences are of degree, and they are worth naming precisely rather than assuming.

A newspaper usually publishes a selection rather than a database, consults the government before printing so specific dangers can be flagged, has editors and lawyers reviewing each item, and carries reputational and legal consequences it cannot escape. WikiLeaks in 2010 did some of this some of the time. For the airstrike video it did most of it. For the Afghan documents it did not.

So the distinction people reach for, that newspapers are responsible and WikiLeaks was not, is real but narrower than it sounds. It is a difference in process and care, not in the underlying act, which is exactly why the 2019 indictment worried newspapers so much.

Separating the release from the organisation

Most arguments here collapse because people defend or attack a whole decade at once. The organisation of April 2010, working in Iceland on a single file with a small team, is not the organisation of 2016. Its methods changed, its partnerships collapsed, its leadership was under siege, and its later conduct is legitimately judged on its own.

The footage did not change. What it shows is the same as it was, and it is the same evidence whether the publisher is admired or despised.

The organisation of April 2010 — a small team working in Iceland on a single verified file — is not the organisation of 2016. Methods changed, partnerships collapsed, and staff left and became critics. What survived was the toolkit, not the institution, and the footage is the same evidence either way.

A verdict on WikiLeaks that satisfies nobody

On the airstrike video: publishing it served the public, was done with care, and produced a genuine good that no lawful process was going to produce. On the unredacted material: indefensible, and the strongest criticism of the project is one it eventually accepted in practice.

The label in the title does not fit either way, which is usually a sign the label is the problem rather than the subject. What can be said cleanly is narrower and more useful: one release in April 2010 was justified, and fifteen years later the deaths it documented have still never been examined by a court. That remains the loudest fact in the whole story.