Its no surprise that the headlines this Monday that weren’t about the online shopping Bacchanal known as Cyber Monday were about the latest purge of confidential documents from Wikileaks.
The Web site, which made a name for itself by publishing leaked documents concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made the first down payment on what it promises is a treasure trove of more than 250,000 pages of diplomatic correspondence dating back more than forty years. The initial release of around 200 documents has already roiled international circles, as stories hit the wire from publications across the globe that were granted early access to parts of the document trove, even as the Wikileaks Web site suffered through periodic outages attributed to denial of service attacks Sunday and Monday.
The drip, drip, drip of disclosures will continue for months to come, ensuring that U.S. diplomats and military leaders will have a hard time putting the leak behind them, as new revelations from the documents — most of which would have stayed confidential for decades to come — hit the Web. In the meantime, Wikileaks is doing what it can to help the curious find their way through the massive collection of sensitive communications. Our image of the day is a graph depicting the organization of the quarter million diplomatic documents by subject. It’s a snapshot of what topics are on the collective mind of U.S. diplomats and the countries with which the U.S. engages diplomatically. Subjects #1-5, at the left hand side of the graphic: External Political Relations, Internal Governmental Affairs, Human Rights, Economic Conditions and Terrorists andTerrorism.
To view the document in high-res and see additional graphs, click here.
