Wikileaks founder Julian Assange hopes that the leak will inspire more people to come forward with classified documents. “Courage is contagious,” he says, well pleased with himself. But I don’t think Assange’s actions can be called courageous at all. They are thoughtless at best, mad at worst, and they tell us something truly alarming about the trajectory of internet culture.  The White House has said that Assange was “irresponsible”. Well, that’s putting it mildly. The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel all claim to have redacted material that might threaten troops’ lives – but do we trust them to be the judges, when each of them has a vested interest in depicting the war in Afghanistan as shambolic and ineffectual? And, despite its claim to be politically disinterested, Wikileaks comes from the same stable: it’s well known that Assange is passionately opposed to the war.  Admittedly, the leak isn’t quite the revelation that some people have made out. “Like most of the stunts pulled by Assange,” wrote Adam Weinstein from US website Mother Jones, “this one’s long on light and short on heat.” The Guardian itself admits that the intelligence files, “mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants [...] are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated”.  On the other hand, as the White House has now explained, while most of the main war narrative was already public knowledge, the sort of granular information revealed this week could expose military personnel to fresh attacks and jeopardise future operations. As I write, the Pentagon is desperately trying to discover to what extent Assange’s actions have put troops’ lives at risk. It could take weeks to assess the threat fully.  And there’s another significant risk, too: that good work being done in Afghanistan will lose public support because the military effort will come to be seen as fruitless and more chaotic than it actually is.  Let’s put this in context. There is now an established and growing appetite in the blogosphere for “transparency” and disruption at any cost – and a reckless glee at embarrassing leaks, whether they come from governments, the recording industry or Microsoft. Pick an “evil” corporation or Western government and I’ll find you 50 blogs dedicated to publishing their secret internal documents. It doesn’t seem to be about the particular company or administration so much as a childlike obsession with embarrassing the grown-ups.  We’re seeing the emergence of a fetish, enabled by technology, that allows leakers to remain anonymous (where their incompetence doesn’t trip them up – as seems to be the case with Bradley Manning, the man in the frame for Afghanistan) and enables infinite numbers of copies of documents to be disseminated rapidly across the globe. Information-hungry bloggers greedily hoover up PDFs and republish them, delivering their own facile verdicts underneath, facilitated by free and easy-to-use software and methods of concealing identity.  Sometimes the consequences of this democratisation of knowledge are good: for example, we’d never know about the cover-ups and botched science carried out by Phil Jones’s Climatic Research Unit if it weren’t for a few intrepid bloggers, whose work was picked up by the mainstream press. Brilliant forensic work mushroomed into an international scandal when our own James Delingpole started publicising their efforts, dubbing the whole thing “Climategate”.  But this latest leak has the potential to be life-threatening. And something tells me that these 90,000 documents are just the start. The blogosphere has become obsessed with uncovering “the truth” with no regard for the consequences, thinking it better to uncover the necessary euphemisms and omissions of a government at war than to safeguard the lives of troops fighting to bring human rights to some of the most hellish places on earth. It is only a matter of time before something devastating happens as a result.
The internet's gleeful insistence on publishing sensitive data will end up    killing people, says Milo Yiannopoulos.