Is this the ’9/11 of diplomacy’? That’s how Italy’s foreign minister has described the furore over WikiLeaks decision to release cables from the US embassy. After revelations including Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah exhortations to the US to bomb Iran, and allegations of serious misconduct by a member of the British Royal Family, there must be one or two Washington diplomats wishing they’d been a little more, well, diplomatic.
But will these leaks make a difference to the way diplomats behave? And would the prospect of your confidential correspondence becoming headline news make you more cautious about what you write? After all, it’s happened before. Remember the banker’s email that cost him his job a couple of years ago?
Research by Newcastle University suggests that when we think we’re being watched, we are more likely to police our own behaviour. (A picture of a pair of eyes above an honesty box made people put nearly three times as much money in as when the picture was a bunch of flowers). But are we now so used to publishing our private thoughts on Twitter, Facebook et al that we no longer distinguish between our public and private selves? If a woman can tweet about her miscarriage, is there anything she won’t reveal?
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