Republicans have made their stand on WikiLeaks clear: the Obama administration needs to destroy both the organization itself and its founder, Julian Assange. “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” demands Sarah Palin. “Is there no way to counter-attack against the attackers?” asks Bill Kristol. The Obama administration’s response, 
writes Jonah Goldberg, has been pitiful, little more than a “tersely worded cease-and-desist letter to Assange, asking him to pretty please stop publishing thousands of state secrets.” WikiLeaks should be designated a terrorist group, thunders Rep. Peter King (R–NY).
I don’t know how much of this is pure politics and how much is just ignorance, but surely all these people know that WikiLeaks itself isn’t the problem. It’s the people who supply WikiLeaks with their leaks who are the problem. Even if the U.S. government somehow magically shut down WikiLeaks all over the world and tossed Julian Assange into a Supermax cell, there’s nothing they can do to keep someone else from doing the exact same thing. It’s just too easy to do. All it takes is access to the internet from some friendly country, and there’s simply no way to shut down every possible entry to the internet. Like it or not, that’s the era we live in.
In any case, I doubt the United States has any legal recourse against Assange or WikiLeaks. Assange is an Australian national not living in the U.S. and WikiLeaks is a distributed site not dependent on any single country’s goodwill. What’s more, despite some huffing and puffing to the contrary, I find it extremely unlikely that Assange has actually broken any existing laws. Perhaps new laws could be written, but it’s hard for me to conceive of a law prohibiting actions like this that was both (a) effective and (b) not so broad that even Bill Kristol would oppose it. The United States has considerable control over actions by its own citizens on its own territory, but not over noncitizens who reside overseas and work primarily in cyberspace.
But then, I suspect most of the bloviators know this. WikiLeaks is, for most of them, just a good opportunity to bash the Obama administration (as if George Bush would have been able to act any differently) without having to actually offer any concrete solutions. And what makes this especially great for Obama’s critics is that there’s not really a lot Obama can do about it, aside from bloviating a bit in return.
Bloviating aside, though, we should be focused not on Julian Assange, but on figuring out how to keep anyone from providing this kind of information to him in the first place. That’s more boring, but much more effective.
