The Chinese military and government, for example, is way more actively trying to get military secrets out of the US, and not for altruistic reasons either. What makes them saints compared to Wikileaks?
While our military is free to make port calls, joint maneuvers, etc. with PRC?
Equating an organization whose stated philosophical goal is promoting government transparency with clandestine intelligence services is ridiculous.
With all that said:
I am simply saying that the military has an extremely valid operational reason for drastically cracking down on servicemembers communicating with organizations like (and including) Wikileaks. The military cannot reasonably leave it up to random servicemembers to determine whether, what, and how things should be leaked. It employes over 1.2 million people.
What I'm arguing --- and I don't assume you agree, but here's my argument --- is that the alternative policy of saying "by all means it is just fine for servicemembers to collaborate with Wikileaks so long as that collaboration doesn't violate any of our other regulations" is so clearly fraught as to be unreasonable.
Pretending people are upset about the existence of classification system is silly. The question is why an organization devoted to promoting government transparency and engaged in supposedly-protected free speech is getting officially classified using language which is used to justify (illegal and criminal) warrantless detention, torture and extra-judicial assassination.
It is entirely possible that the US military could restrict service members from subscribing to the New York Times or the Washington Post, but I don't see Bob Woodward or Tom Friedman getting described as an enemy of the American Republic.
Surely you see the problem here, right? It has nothing to do with security processes.
Iran is clearly an enemy, I am sure there is at least one person in an official capacity in Iran that reads the New York Times, there for leaking information about Stuxnet to the Times is equivalent to leaking it to Iran.
So the New York Times is an 'enemy of the US' ? I am too dense to figure out how you arrive at the conclusion that this is OK for Wikileaks and not then also required to put the Times on that list.
(1) The New York Times does not have operatives on IM sessions with the people in charge of protecting military data in order to convince them to hand over archives wholesale and indiscriminately.
(2) The New York Times doesn't later publish that data so indiscriminately that it takes a crowdsourced data mining effort simply to figure out whether informants have been compromised by the disclosure.
"If a reporter with the NYT had an IM session with someone who had access to really explosive data and that someone wanted to share it,..." You're saying the NYT would counsel them for that the good of the country they shouldn't share it?
If Ellsberg contacted Sheehan with an IM and offered to send over the Pentagon Papers in '72 you think that Sheehan would have said, "No thanks, that is secret data even though it says the Government has been lying about the war." ?
I'm not convinced. Given the challenges the prosecution is facing with Manning I'm left wondering what evidence the government has that he was an operative or that Wikileaks was anything more than a opportunistic journalistic contact.
Your second claim is that the NYT doesn't publish indiscriminately. But you are trying to argue a possible behavior for a situation that didn't exist. Lets say for the sake of argument that the source was Manning, and that rather than Wikileaks he chose to dump the data on someone at the NYT, then suppose that the NYT spent several weeks going over that data with various understaffers, and the threat of someone else breaking the story came up.
Now are you going to argue that the NYT wouldn't just run with it at that point? How about if in all the weeks of looking they had yet to find anything that would hurt/compromise an innocent third party? Do you know the NYT that well? And unlike 1972 where they were constrained by how many pages of newspaper they could print, on the web you can print everything now and get those clicks early and often.
Given that the NYT has released comparably classified material in the past (I've heard one argument that the state department communications were actually a lower grade classification but cannot find a source for that), and probably still has lawyers on staff from the resulting court cases that caused, its easier for me to believe they would have run with the story.