Bill Keller v. Jack Goldsmith on the war on leaks
Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has a column in today's edition of the paper he used to edit arguing that the much-ballyhooed spill of U.S. military and diplomatic secrets to Wikileaks has not ushered in a new era of transparency, as some apparently expected.
Citing a series of Obama administration prosecutions against alleged leakers, Keller argues: "The most palpable legacy of the WikiLeaks campaign for transparency is that the U.S. government is more secretive than ever."
Not so, former Bush Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith replies in a post at the Lawfare blog. Goldsmith says the technological balance still favors leakers over those trying to keep secrets.
"My sense of the competition is that the government is obviously able to classify more than ever because of its sheer size and because of the unthinkable amounts of information generated and stored by modern technologies; but that the government also, at the same time, has a harder time than ever keeping important secrets related to national security," writes Goldsmith, now a law professor at Harvard.