WikiLeaks updates

News coverage of the WikiLeaks affair has been so dominated by the criminal charges against Julian Assange and debates about whether the leaks are good or bad, that it’s easy to forget that the release of the embassy cables are still proceeding according to schedule. So far, we’re on day 23 of the leak and 1,862 cables released out of the total cache of 251,287. The main WikiLeaks website is hard to access, but there are still plenty of easily available mirrors, such as this one. But it’s probably easier to read the summaries released by The Guardian here.

As I previously stated, most of the leaks aren’t really revolutionary stuff, so that’s another reason why press coverage about the actual content of the leaks has been less intensive recently. Relatively few of the cables are genuinely surprising. The best stuff probably include the following:

  • Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi may be deriving handsome personal profits from energy deals negotiated with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
  • Foreign contractors, including the US-owned DynCorp which runs training centres in Afghanistan, have hired local “dancing boys” for entertainment. There is apparently a local tradition in the country of dressing young boys as girls to dance for adult men and this sometimes extends to performing sexual services.
  • The ruling elite of Saudi Arabia, including members of the royal family, regularly attend parties, that contrary to the precepts of Islam, involve plenty of sex and alcohol.

Some other stuff are interesting only inasmuch that they confirm existing suspicions, such as these instances of corporate malfeasance:

  • A top executive of Shell in Nigeria claims that the company has infiltrated all relevant ministries of the government and knows all of their plans.
  • In a story straight out of The Constant Gardener, it emerged that Pfizer has paid investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the attorney general of Nigeria to avoid having to pay damages for claims that one of their antibiotics had harmed children during a drug trial in 1996.

Other bits are just plain weird, most notably the revelation that the military junta that rules Burma considered paying a billion US dollars to buy the UK soccer team Manchester United in an attempt to use football to distract the country’s population from its economic and political problems.

Unless something really important pops up, it looks increasingly likely that the main impact of Cablegate will be the precedent that it sets rather the contents of the leak, providing an inspiration for countless copycat outfits and reminding those with secrets that it’s hard to keep them off the Internet. As The Economist recently wrote, governments are only now just realizing what the music and film industries have known for over a decade: it is impossible to stop people from distributing files over the Internet.

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