Your view of Wikileaks.com will depend on where you are sitting. If you are one of those people who hate US, you are happy and curious about what has been leaked. If you are a believer in US intentions, you are appalled and worried about the fallout.
My observation about this is the pattern of flip-side of a strategy shift. After 9/11 commission report, one of the major findings was that how CIA/FBI/NSA/DOD, other federal alphabet soups and local agencies were not able to share information to prevent attacks. So, department of Homeland security was created and lot of money was spent to make systems interoperable and data widely available. This proliferation of sharing made it easy for few bad actors to cause major damage by stealing data. Why didn’t the government put in safeguards or chain of custody for sensitive data? Because that was not a priority – making data widely available was the main goal.
Lesson for organizations, especially when they shift strategies: make a detailed analysis about flipside risks when you embrace new strategies. What you don’t know CAN hurt you.
Politically, this is a mess. US government has to fight this theft while not being heavy-handed at either the leakers or publishers.
The whole world needs to rethink their attitude towards private data. If someone stole bunch of objects (cars, printers, paperclips, you name it) from the US government and tried to sell/give away to foreign nationals, the very same people peddling the wikileaks content would find it criminal and would stay from the deal. Our sense of outrage for stolen data has to reach the same level. Google, Facebooks of the world have desensitized us for data ownership. It will take few more scandals and many years for this to change.
Strategy, Marketing, Orthogonal thinking, Newton's law 