By throwing these cables out in the open, WikiLeaks essentially reduces the openness of the US government.
I hate Julian Assange. I hate the way he’s posing as a champion of truth and justice whilst hiding in the shadows and resorting to blackmail in a drawn-out attempt to avoid having to justify answer criminal charges in a publicly-accessible court of law. I hate the fact that he’s trading on a myth that We The People have a right to know everything our governments are saying and doing in our name when, in fact, we elect people to act in our best interests on a global stage without necessarily giving us a heads up every time they want to have an off-the-record chat with a dictator. (If every tiny decision has to be made based on how it will play in public, then we’ll soon end up with a whole load of crowd-pleasing decisions but very little actual diplomacy. Palling around with Chinese leaders or Arab kings might be a strategic no-brainer but it doesn’t play great in the heartland.)
But of course none of that seems to matter to the crowd at Le Web who applaud Wikileaks’ Assange and showed their displeasure towards Paypal’s Bedier. All that matters to them is that THE MAN is trying to HIDE SOMETHING, and he’s being assisted by EVIL CORPORATIONS like Paypal and Visa and Mastercard. Possessed by that belief, it seems perfectly right and proper that those corporations should be made to suffer, and those behind the retaliation should be applauded for their denial of service attacks. The fact that many of the “hacktivists” are the same people who share child porn and harass the parents of dead children is immaterial: the enemy of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.