No technology can protect whistle-blowers from themselves

MUCH can be lost because of the loose talk of a 22-year-old. Wikileaks, an international publishing service for whistle-blowers, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its sources, but it cannot control them. At the end of May the American army arrested Bradley Manning, who was said to be the source of a leaked video, shown on Wikileaks, revealing how soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed unarmed civilians in Iraq. Mr Manning, an intelligence analyst, apparently betrayed himself by boasting of his actions to a stranger in an e-mail. The case is a reminder that Wikileaks is only as robust as the humans who use it.

Julian Assange, an Australian former hacker, founded the service in 2007. It now has perhaps 800 volunteer technologists, activists and lawyers around the world. Media groups such as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times provide legal advice. In addition to the Iraq footage, it has published evidence of corruption in Kenya, financial improprieties in Iceland, procedures for detainees in Guantanamo Bay and a string of Sarah Palin’s e-mails. It has been so well run that Daniel Ellsberg, an ex-Pentagon analyst who leaked an internal history of the Vietnam war in 1971, assumed on first sight that it was a honeypot run by American intelligence. …