The US government continues to blather on about national security and blood on the hands of Wikileaks over this latest unleashing of information by concerned US citizens (who also happen to be serving in that selfsame US government). They are, of course, a tail seeking to wag the media dog. What they are really pissed about is the outing of our diplomats from the Department of State as ad hoc spies.

The cables give a laundry list of instructions for how State Department employees can fulfill the demands of a “National Humint Collection Directive.” (“Humint” is spy-world jargon for human intelligence collection.) One cable asks officers overseas to gather information about “office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cellphones, pagers and faxes,” as well as “internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.”

This will put a bit of a botch on our ability to do backhanded backroom diplomacy. While I’m sure we never truly trust one another unless we’ve grown up together, the fact that our diplomats have been told to spy from the highest levels will up the anti-trust ante in the game of international diplomacy. I presume it’s assumed that eyes and ears are always open, but I reckon people have felt the real information gathering (humint, as they say) was up to TLA-level agencies and the dips were more passive, conversation miners instead of data miners.

Tags: NY Times, wikileaks

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2010 at 04:17.