Free The Passion of Bradley Manning by Chase Madar

account of Bradley Manning can omit an account of his alleged leaks: their context, their content and their reception.

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THE LEAKS
    (1:11:54 PM ) bradass87: and… its important that it gets out… i feel, for some bizarre reason
    (1:12:02 PM ) bradass87: it might actually change something
    The Afghan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, the Guantánamo files, the State Department Cables: this is what the fuss is all about, why Manning is viewed as a tragic patriot and hero by some, by others as a traitor. My quick perusal of Manning’s alleged disclosures will start with a study of the context of the leaks: the measures that Washington does and does not take to control information, and whether these steps actually secure information or are merely theatrical. Second, we will survey the leaks themselves, their content and their meaning. Finally, I will examine the reception of the leaks, both in the United States and abroad. At every step it will become apparent that the logic of secrecy and security in twenty-first-century United States is anything but straightforward.
    I. The Context
    Washington expends enormous effort to control the information it generates—through hair-trigger classification of official documents, the censorship of government employees and the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. At the very same time, Washington condones any number of leaks from elite officials who make no secret of their illegal disclosures. As for the national security state’s data security apparatus, though expanding and costly, it is dysfunctional: incontinent and constantly sloshing classified material. This conflicting set of policies and impulses can be described as paradoxical, and though paradox, at the level of pure ideas, can be charming, at the level of giant bureaucracies the term denotes chaos. In fact the bizarre combination of lackadaisical security, punitive response and official hypocrisy make the nation’s information security regime a macrocosm of the Manning affair itself.

    First, Washington’s habit of classifying public documents goes well beyond the protection of legitimate state secrets like nuclear launch codes. Instead, the federal agencies tend to mark every last public record even tangentially related to military and diplomatic policy as a state secret of some degree of confidentiality. Because the total of such documents is so astronomically high, no precise figure exists. According to the Information Security Oversight Office, the federal agency tasked with maintaining information security, officials classified nearly seventy-seven million documents in 2010.
    What are the consequences to public discourse of such rampant overclassification? The question is not new. James Madison wrote, “a popular government, without popular information, is but a prelude to a tragedy or farce, or perhaps both.” And though the nation’s fourth president could not have envisioned the modern administrative state or an American military presence in over a hundred foreign nations we can also be sure that Madison would never have foreseen that documents from his own presidency would, over two hundred years later, still be locked away as state secrets. And yet it was only in the middle of 2011 that the National Security Agency got around to declassifying a cache of military documents dating to 1809, the first year of Madison’s presidency. Declassification seems to occur at a geological tempo: the CIA still keeps documents from the First World War classified, and only in 2010 released records from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
    Diplomatic historians, who serve as an indispensable repository of national memory, complain bitterly about the gratuitous, reflexive and often apparently irrational classification and redaction of public records. Others have criticized the current regime of overclassification, which leads inevitably to a kind of self-willed societal dementia, as a national