There was  fair debate about the propriety of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks disclosure of classified documents, but one man was clearly supportive:  Daniel Ellsberg.  You remember him, of the Pentagon Papers fame?  Back in the days when Apple was a record** label?

Like Assange, Ellsberg was called an enemy of the state for revealing classified document to the New York Times, revealing to the American public the truth behind the United State’s involvement in Vietnam.  While no tangential and ridiculous claims of unprotected sex emerged from Scandinavia, Ellsberg was nonetheless the target of government unpleasantness, as was the Times for doing the unthinkable: publishing the Pentagon Papers.

On this case, now-heralded First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams made his bones.  But the one-time firebrand, Cahill Gordon partner, says that was then and this is now.  In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal , Abrams says Assange is no Ellsberg.

The Pentagon Papers revelations dealt with a discrete topic, the ever-increasing level of duplicity of our leaders over a score of years in increasing the nation’s involvement in Vietnam while denying it. It revealed official wrongdoing or, at the least, a pervasive lack of candor by the government to its people.

WikiLeaks is different. It revels in the revelation of “secrets” simply because they are secret. It assaults the very notion of diplomacy that is not presented live on C-Span. It has sometimes served the public by its revelations but it also offers, at considerable potential price, a vast amount of material that discloses no abuses of power at all.

Floyd goes on to note why his critical distinction is, well, critical.

Mr. Assange is no boon to American journalists. His activities have already doomed proposed federal shield-law legislation protecting journalists’ use of confidential sources in the just-adjourned Congress. An indictment of him could be followed by the judicial articulation of far more speech-limiting legal principles than currently exist with respect to even the most responsible reporting about both diplomacy and defense. If he is not charged or is acquitted of whatever charges may be made, that may well lead to the adoption of new and dangerously restrictive legislation. In more than one way, Mr. Assange may yet have much to answer for.

This criticism is fairly common among people who are generally on the same side of an issue, where the challenge is whether change should come by evolution or revolution, whether the strategy of one conforms to the expectations of another, whether one has “gone too far” and damaged the progress made, setting back the cause.  We see it in everything from issues of racial equality to the right to keep and bear arms.

Jack Shafer in  Slate says Floyd “whizzed” in his attack on Assange.

Oddly, for all the condemnation that Abrams slings Assange’s way, he doesn’t pinpoint any lasting “damage” to diplomacy done by the leaked cables and the news reports based on them. Struggling to find something bad to say about Assange, he quotes historian Sean Wilentz of Princeton, who described WikiLeaks as being rooted in a “simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency” and said it is “simply offended by any actions that are cloaked.”

Shafer suggests that Floyd’s dislike of Assange is less conceptual than personal.

What’s the true source of Abrams’ wrath? It’s not the leaking that bothers him—Lord knows he’s defended leakers aplenty in his career. And it’s not the subject matter of the cables, which even he must concede has yet to start World War III. What starches his shorts is the scale of the WikiLeaks leaks, which violate his sense of tidiness. I also suspect that he worries about Assange and Assange-ites disrupting the control over news that his legal clients have long enjoyed.

When the outsiders come in from the cold, and start enjoying the fruits of their one-time fight, there’s a tendency to conclude that the boat’s been rocked enough.  They grow complacent, even defensive, about any further boat-rocking that could topple the gains made, the circumstances they’ve come to enjoy. 

Floyd Abrams is a senior partner at a big law firm, and represents old media.  Wikileaks isn’t his client, not that Assange could afford his hourly fees with the half-dozen kids who carry his bags and fetch him coffee, and the interests of Wikileaks don’t line up particularly well with the interests of the New York Times these days.  Whether his antagonism toward Assange is more a product of his sensibilities or the concern that its revolutionary approach will leave his clients’ more pressing concerns, such as the reporter shield law, can’t be discerned from the op-ed.  Sometimes, lawyers mask their personal feelings behind the arguments that best serve their clients.

While it’s true that the concept of Wikileaks may be simplistic in its absolutist approach, and definitely “untidy” in its lack of nuanced strategy for smaller, more discrete gains in the war on governmental secrecy, it’s also not up to Floyd Abrams, or even the New York Times, to dictate how the battle over governmental secrecy will be fought. 

Wikileaks opened Pandora’s box, even though Floyd Abrams would have preferred the free speech fight to proceed in an orderly fashion.  The argument that Assange may have set the cause back may be true, or may not.  If we could predict the future, there are plenty of fights that could be handled better.  But the cause of transparency is bigger than Floyd, bigger even than the New York Times.  Maybe it’s even bigger than Julian Assange, that untidy, condom-challenged simpleton.

But now that Pandora’s box has been opened, there’s little benefit to the fighters for free speech to gripe about it and criticize Assange for having gone and screwed up their sweet deal.  The fight is happening, whether Floyd Abrams likes it or not.  The only choice left to him is which side he’ll be on. 

From the content of his op-ed, not to mention his choice of newspapers as a medium for dissemination, it appears that the former hero of free speech has no plans on giving up his corner office.
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* The title of this post was taken from a  phrase coined by the Trial Warrior, Antonin Pribetic.

** Record: a vinyl disc with grooves that was placed on a record player with a stylus set into the grooves, causing it to emit sound.  See also “LP.”