How to tell our enemies how we plan to track them down and kill them
I keep hearing more details about how the U.S. government pulled off the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. These tactics and strategies are all being leaked by U.S. government employees, of course, because no one else was in a position to leak this valuable and sensitive technical information to the press. Government officials are energetically crowing about how to trace a wanted figure, details on how to do electronic surveillance, how to plan a surgical attack and how to carry it out, down to minute details. Everything a enemy might want to know. It seems to me that this is the type of information that should be kept secret, lest some other enemy of the U.S. might need to be tracked down in the future. Now compare to the details leading up to Osama Bin Laden's death to the types of information being leaked by Wikileaks, most of which falls into the categories of exposing lies, revealing torture, revealing civilian deaths, and revealing hypocrisy on behalf of U.S. officials. I suppose that it matters more who is leaking the secrets than what kind of secret is being leaked.