Artfully presented.

As crisis is opportunity, policy makers would do well to heed your call for transparency.

High unemployment among the under 25 demo may present the seeds of a solution. The under 25 set best understand social media, a core communication tool for organizers around the world. This demo must be leveraged for diplomacy through another technology meme: crowdsourcing.

Governments that engage, serve and mobilize their citizens reduce the risk of facing the ire of those citizens in the square, in the park, in the halls, or at the ballot box.

Didn't someone use a very similar analogy a couple of years back?

I stumbled across this post that talks about the same cathedral and bazaar analogy and an open source approach to diplomacy - were you aware of it?

http://sispdfive.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-pd-expansion-on-older-post.html

Thanks for sharing this post, which I hadn't seen. The essay it cites uses Eric Raymond's famous metaphor as a powerful framework for analyzing a branch of statecraft known as public diplomacy. Its author also cleverly puts into context the issues raised in Greg Fawcett's earlier post regarding modes of communication with the "under-25" demographic though such technology memes as crowd-sourcing. (My article notes the growing relevance of this demographic to diplomacy, which now comprises fully 45% of the world's population.)

The post adds yet more proof that Raymond's concept of the "cathedral and the bazaar" is now the central and most widely referenced metaphor for understanding the open-source software movement, and for explaining how open-source concepts can -- or should -- also extend beyond technology to other spheres of human activity -- from science, to education, capital markets, business and government.

On another point -- it is interesting to note that earlier this week, the lawyer for Bradley Manning, the US Army private accused of illegally passing classified documents to WikiLeaks, said in a court filing that the document dump did not do "any real damage to national security." (Link: http://bit.ly/uNUL9W)

I would disagree. The WikiLeaks breach had immediate impacts on important US relationships, diplomatic careers, and possibly certain national security initiatives. In the longer term, it may call into question the critical issue of trust: Can foreign leaders ever feel reasonably confident they can communicate opens and candidly with American government officials? The restoration of that trust will be an ongoing effort for American diplomats, and I argue in my essay that confidence-building will be facilitated by the integration of a more open-source outlook in the design and conduct of US diplomacy.

The traditional level of secrecy in government agencies is for another age. The world is a lot smaller now than ever.

I believe that much of the conflict and problems
currently filling our TV screens every evening are due to the world trying to adapt to this new reality of a true global village. Its not an easy adaptation process due to cultural, economic and still outstanding development issues, but also due to the practices of the traditional nation state governments who up to now had been operating in a much more dispersed world.

What the author argues truly is the future. But right now it seems our political leaders
lack the vision to move things forward more creatively to the space where we can have less stringent security. Less stringent security will naturally come when nations,
or rather humanity perhaps in general, adapts to this global village.

great article, well written and researched, and spot on.

a couple of thoughts to take your analysis a few steps further:

1. Wiki-leaks as a catalyst for the Arab spring: it is perhaps not coincidental that the two leaders taken out by the Arab street were viewed as staunch US allies and proteges of Washington; indeed it is common knowledge that former Tunisian intelligence chief Ben Ali was viewed -- rightly or wrongly -- as the CIA's man in Tunis. US support conferred an air on invincibility, if not impunity. When the Arab street realized -- thanks to the publication of State Department cables by Wiki Leaks -- that we Americans were as shocked and dismayed by the human rights abuses, corruption and injustice that Ben Ali and Mubarak presided over in their stagnant regimes, that was a game changer. The Arab street realized that Ben Ali and Mubarak were fair game, and the rest is history.

2. Paradox of thrift and paradox of secrecy: here's a bit of an economics analogy for you poli-sci types: in Econonmics 101 we all learn the paradox of thrift, which says that when one person saves money, that's good. But when everyone in the economy hoards their cash, you have a recession. That's bad. I would advance a similar paradigm with respect to secrecy and diplomacy. In the world of national security and diplomacy, protecting sources and methods is critical. So classifying a State Department cable conveying the intimate thoughts which a local leader confided to a US ambassador, or the ambassador's personal views on a specific political or economic issue in his country, makes absolute sense, if only to protect the privacy (and indeed in some cases, the lives) of the individuals concerned. In fact journalists try to do much the same thing to protect their sources. And that is good. But when everything the USG thinks and does is wrapped in a veil of secrecy, only the bad guys benefit, and that is bad. the Arab street still looks up to the United States, to our values and our ability to live by those values. We are after all a free and democratic society, reasonably free of corruption and with a justice system that works quite well most of the time. That is something that inspires the Arab street and people all over the world. Getting our own views out into the open a little more often -- as was done in a rather untidy fashion by Wiki Leaks -- is a good thing. Hoarding US views only plays into the hands of the corrupt cronies who pretend to be annointed by Washington.

Finally, three personal and somewhat contradictory anecdotes from my life in the State Department to illustrate how much I agree with your analysis, and the need to "reboot" US diplomacy:

1. Rwanda: I was a first tour FSO in Kigali during the invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF -- mainly Ugandan army elements who had "deserted") in 1990. This invasion and the subsequent war of attrition led to the attempted genocide of 1994. At the Embassy we produced copious reporting (I was wondering last year if any of my cables would end up on Wiki leaks!) trying to analyze who was fighting whom, why, and where the weapons were coming from. We conveyed the Rwandan government's pleas for intervention -- it wouldn't have taken much, a few hundered soldiers with some armor to separate the combattants -- but with apartheid ending in South Africa, Mobutu and Zaire dying, and UNITA finally coming to the negotiating table in Angola, there was no bandwidth in Washington to deal with Rwanda, where "our interests are solely humanitarian." (That's a real quote, and arguably true.) After a change of Ambassadors -- an inexperienced political appointee was replaced by a frustrated career diplomat with no Africa experience but intimate knowledge of how to get things done in Washington -- we resorted to sending cables to Washington with the highest classification -- in hopes that the "7th floor" would take notice. And this from an Embassy with no US Marines and no real physical security. But the highly classified cables did yield results, and ultimately led to engagement from Washington and the short lived Arusha peace accords between the Rwandan Government and the RPF. The perverted lesson learned by a junior FSO -- me -- was if you want to get your cables read in State, overclassify them. (Ironically, Rwanda was never really a focus of US foreign policy until CNN captured compelling images of the genocide in 1994, highly classified cables notwithstanding.)

2. Washington: I spent my third tour as an FSO in Washington running economic sanctions policy against Iraq, Libya and North Korea. This meant working closely with US allies in the UN Security Council, and the US intelligence community, to plug holes in the sanctions regimes, by identifying and stopping sanctions violations. The US intelligence community would regularly bring us proof positive -- intercepts, etc. -- of blatant violations of UN sanctions -- including proposed shipments of dual use or military equipment -- by various criminal organizations and individuals in Europe and Russia. At the time we had quite strong support for sanctions in New York. But more often than not, when we tried to get the information into a form that was releasable to other governments -- i.e. a smoking gun -- inevitably ran into the iron curtain of "protecting sources and methods." Finally I had to tell my intelligence community colleagues that much of their data was certainly interesting, but if I couldn't take action on it, I just didn't need to know. The second lesson for a junior FSO: highly classified information may be useful for soldiers and spies, but the benefit to business of diplomacy is marginal at best.

3. France: France at the time of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin was full of spies and informants, and led to the US Government's first use of encryption to keep its correspondence -- which was inevitably read by the French -- private. Encryption, by the way, is not just useful for keeping government secrets under wraps, it is an essential engine of electronic commerce over the internet (secure payments and data transmissions, for example). On my fourth and final tour in the US Foreign Servcie, I got involved in lengthy negotiations with the French in the mid 1990's on electronic commerce and encryption. This was when Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator software were opening the door to the internet on every desktop around the world. The US Government was convinced -- and they were right -- that the business of the internet -- electronic commerce, the buying and selling of physical goods and digital content -- could only flourish if it was protected from the asphyxiating embrace of European regulation, taxes and content quotas. (These are a traditional French specialty, as Franklin himself surmised at the time.) This led to long drawn out negotiations with the French Socialist government of the time, including Finance Minister Dominic Strauss Kahn of recent fame in NYC. The key to an agreement was understanding the motivations and objectives of the French side, which were in fact quite different from the US objectives. Our side was focused on the business objectives -- making the world safe for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and Cisco -- while the the French were focused on the social objectives -- education, tele-medicine, and rural access to information, etc. That was the easy part. The hard part was getting the information back to the Washington agencies participating in the talks -- USTR, the FCC, the White House, and Commerce. We quickly learned that outside of the State Department no one could read our classified cables from their desktops. We realized that 90% of the content in our cables were "open source," i.e. you could read the same content in the French press or by chatting with the French 'man in the street." The remaining 10% were the personal insights, opinions, and recommendations of the French officials with whom we spoke. We quickly learned to classify our cables paragraph by paragraph, putting the 10% of personal insights that were worthy of "Confidential" treatment in one or two paragraphs, and leaving all the rest unlassified, so that Washington agencies could read the material and act on it. It worked, we got a deal with the French (and the Japanese too, but that's a separate narrative) to preclude taxation and quotas on e-commerce, which has been an engine for economic growth, new jobs, business, and the expansion of the internet around the world. And the rest is history, as you so artfully capture in your piece.

all the best,
tom marten

ps sorry i missed you on your last trip to paris, i'm living in saudi arabia these days. and now i know what you've been doing with your free time in berkley! keep up the good work.