The article keeps using the word "whistleblower", which I think may be inaccurate. A whistleblower is someone who breaks secrecy in order to expose something that's wrong. But leaking 260,000 state department cables just seems like leaking for the sake of leaking. The ethics of this are, at least, peculiar.
You can figure out the ethics by thinking about the question : "Does the leaked stuff pose a national security risk or does it pose a national security embarrassment over basic human rights violations, waste, carelessness and so on?". > But leaking 260,000 state department cables just seems like leaking for the sake of leaking. The original leak was probably just a leak for leak's sake. They already caught that guy.…
I have no idea, I haven't seen the leaked stuff. But where diplomacy is concerned the line between "embarrassment" and "risk" is pretty thin, especially where the embarrassment is to another country. There could easily be things like candid discussions of personal weaknesses of foreign dignitaries, diplomatic tricks played to fool other countries into doing things, invoices for the hookers they hired to entertain the Saudi ambassador... if these sorts of things become public they could turn allies into enemies, and that's not good for anyone.