I’m the one who’s always telling you there’s no such thing as privacy, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that international diplomats are not immune from this fact. But that doesn’t change the fact that those who reveal information just because they can – people like WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange – are the lowest form of life and are far beneath contempt.

Remember during the campaign just passed, when some dude claimed to have had a one-night stand with a candidate of some national prominence, and a certain web site published his story in full? Never mind the identities of any of the people involved. You could find them if you really wanted to look, but you won’t get any help from me. The point is that there was no news value to the tale, and even many commentators who oozed disdain for the candidate in question condemned the gratuitousness of the story.

Julian Assange’s document dump is basically that incident on a much larger scale. Assange got ahold of as many classified and secret documents as he could, just because he could, and released them to the public without regard to the implications or consequences of doing so, just because he had an outlet for doing so.

The resulting web traffic to his site has the potential to make him rich overnight, at least if he played his cards right with network advertising contracts, which he probably did.

It also has the potential to endanger a lot of U.S. foreign policy initiatives, and to get U.S. troops killed. Julian Assange doesn’t care because he is, as the Wall Street Journal correctly labels him, an enemy of the United States. I suspect he does not take this stance solely or even primarily for ideological reasons, though. He is an enemy of anyone whose harm can bring him attention, riches or both.

In the piece linked above, the Journal’s editors make the case that the U.S. helped get itself into this situation by keeping too many secrets to begin with. The truth is that you can scarcely keep a secret at all anymore, given the technology available to reveal it instantly.

This is one of the reasons I find conspiracy idiots like Alex Jones so hilarious. It was very easy for Julian Assange to get just about any “secret” document he wanted, because you can almost always find someone willing to give up information for money. And yet conspiracy kooks think there are massive, broad-based conspiracies to control the world and everyone in it – and these conspiracies have endured for decades without anyone spilling the beans? (And yet somehow Alex Jones knows about them?)

You can’t keep anything secret, whether it’s the most sensitive diplomatic missive, your sexual history, your financial information or the appearance of your junk. You may think it’s a bad thing, but those who treasure their privacy are living in a difficult age, and it will only become more so. There are too many ways for secrets to be told, and there are too many douchebags like Julian Assange with the means and the opportunity to tell them.

And the only reason they need to tell your secret is the fact that it is a secret. But not for long.

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