23 October 2010

The Leaky Courier Bag

Just a very short comment on the Iraq war logs/WikiLeaks controversy:

It was a good thing for the nation when Daniel Ellsberg provided the documents that became the Pentagon Papers. In my experience as a military historian, custodian of historical secure materials, etc., an extraordinarily high proportion of such documents were and are improperly classified in the first place... which necessarily diminishes the protection accorded to those that are properly classified, if only by diluting what it means to be classified.

I can and will say nothing further on the subject, due to my own nondisclosure agreement (that expires after the heat-death of the universe).