Loose Lips Sink Ships??

In World War II we had signs warning "Loose Lips Sink Ships". People were super conscious of security (my folks were suspected of being German spies because of the lights in the henhouse --might be a signal to German bombers).

But both ends of the blogging spectrum have a casual attitude towards security today. Background: the US report on the killing of the Italian agent in Iraq was released in an edited form--classified information was blacked out. There was, however, an easy work-around, so bloggers posted the full report on the web. Kevin Drum on the left mocked the ineffectiveness of the bureaucrats; Orin Kerr on the right mocked the NPR ombudsman who expressed concern over the release.

As a former bureaucrat, I'll stipulate the release was bad and the editing quite possibly pointless. I'll also stipulate the "war on terror" is hardly a war and is not at all comparable to WWII. Although the Privacy Act may restrict releasing names, I'm skeptical that bureaucrats, including soldiers, have much right of privacy, even when they kill an innocent civilian. Finally, the Pentagon Papers established the idea that media can publish first and we'll sort out whether there's any real damage to the public interest later.

On the other hand, I question whether there isn't an ethical question here that Drum and Kerr skate over. In the broad sense I'd frame it as a decent respect for the intentions of others--sort of an application of the Golden Rule to everyday life. I'd like to think if I stumble across a laptop on the DC Metro I would only check to see if I could figure the owner from the contents. I wouldn't, I don't think, go prying into either personal or classified information. I don't think the ineptness of the bureaucrats in this case offers any justification for revealing the full document. Would we agree that Robert Hansen's spying crimes were mitigated by the fact the FBI didn't understand how to run computers?

I think anyone posting the full document should accompany it with a justification of why the publication is in the public interest. In this case the hurdle is probably very low. But surely we can imagine cases where damage is likely? Or maybe both Drum and Kerr are so libertarian that they deny the idea of a public interest to be damaged?