Wikileaks: Team Obama continues to fail

Obama administration is weak in the face of WikiLeaks

Is the United States of America really powerless to stop a nomadic cyber-hacker – who sleeps on people’s couches and changes his hair color to avoid surveillance – from causing enormous damage to our national security?

Apparently, in the age of Obama, we are…

Is the Obama administration going to do anything – anything at all – to stop these serial disclosures of our nation’s most closely guarded secrets? Just this past week, the federal government took decisive action to shut down more than 70 Web sites that were disseminating pirated music and movies. Hollywood is safe, but WikiLeaks is free to disseminate classified documents without consequence…

WikiLeaks’ first disclosures caught the Obama administration by surprise. But how does the administration explain its inaction in the face of WikiLeaks’ two subsequent, and increasingly dangerous, releases? In both cases, it had fair warning: Assange announced what kinds of documents he possessed, and he made clear his intention to release them.

The Obama administration has the ability to bring Assange to justice and to put WikiLeaks out of business. The new U.S. Cyber Command could shut down WilkiLeaks’ servers and prevent them from releasing more classified information on President Obama’s orders. But, as The Post reported this month, the Obama administration has been paralyzed by infighting over how, and when, it might use these new offensive capabilities in cyberspace. One objection: “The State Department is concerned about diplomatic backlash” from any offensive actions in cyberspace, The Post reported. Well, now the State Department can deal with the “diplomatic backlash” that comes from standing by helplessly, while WikiLeaks releases hundreds of thousands of its most sensitive diplomatic cables.

Because of its failure to act, responsibility for the damage done by these most recent disclosures now rests with the Obama administration. Perhaps this latest release crosses a line that will finally spur the administration to action. After all, the previous disclosures harmed only our war efforts. But this latest disclosure is a blow to a cause Democrats really care about – our diplomatic efforts. Maybe now, finally, the gloves will come off. Or is posting mournful tweets about the damage done to our national security the best this administration can do?

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