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.

The biggest news this week, and likely something that will stay in the headlines for months to come, is of course the rolling release of over 250,000 cables from the US State Department by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, many of the documents are of doubtful value. It’s clear for example that a significant percentage of the documents are gossipy nonsense. Salacious details like what kind of girls Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is into no doubt attracts plenty of eyeballs, but it’s hard to see what kind of public interest is being served by publishing them.

Of the rest, some are interesting but don’t really tell us anything that we didn’t already know. Should we be surprised that the US aggressively spies on top UN officials, or that half the countries in the Middle East are apparently more eager to bomb Iran than even the craziest American neo-con? As satisfying as it is to see these suspicions confirmed, that’s not worth the damage that making this all public will do to international diplomacy. Outing Saudi Arabia in this way for example will simply put more pressure on their government to cave in to their local Islamist factions and compel them to turn up the anti-American rhetoric. In the same way, China seems to be more open to a unified Korea under Seoul than they’d henceforth admitted but this public revelation will simply make them clam up again to appease their nationalist faction.

On the other hand, good can and has many times in the past been served by whistle-blowing. Western governments have certainly been happy to encourage workers to blow the whistle on employers who have broken laws and have recently made it much easier and safer to do so. Why should governments themselves be held as an exception? This editorial from The Economist for example argues that while such leaks damage the effectiveness of government, they also improve the quality of democracy by allowing voters to peer into the inner workings of the bureaucracy and to know what’s really going on. The example it cites, of the Bush administration pressuring Germany not to prosecute CIA operatives involved in the “extraordinary rendition” of somone who was ultimately proved to be innocent, is a solid case of government malfeasance that would not have come to light without leaks of this kind.

The conundrum therefore is that it is in the public interest that morally corrupt government wrongdoing be exposed and that the legitimate business of government that needs to be secret should remain so, but we trust no one to be an impartial and infallible judge of which category any particular case might fall into. Due to this, I guess Wikileaks is not such a bad compromise after all if it could live up to its mission statement of being open to everyone and of being impartial. Sadly, judging from the personal history of its founder Julian Assange and the anti-US editorial Wikileaks chose to attach to this round of leaks, this does not seem to be the case.