What's information theft in one climate is a liberation movement in another

Stolen emails. Adam Morton in The Age, November 24, last year:

IN one of thousands of emails and documents stolen from the British University of East Anglia last week, Professor Jones tells colleagues he has completed the "trick of adding in the real temps" for the past 20 years "to hide the decline".

Climategate was theft . . . Deborah Smith, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 25, 2009:

THE theft of British researchers' private emails on climate change reveals how desperate the sceptics have become in the lead-up to the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, Australian scientists say. Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, said the timing of the theft was suspicious. "It reveals the depth to which climate sceptics will go to influence the course of events."

Purloined . . . Andrew C. Rivkin blogs for The New York Times, November 29, 2009:

A THICK file of private emails and unpublished documents generated by an array of climate scientists over 13 years was obtained by a hacker from a British university climate research centre and has since spread widely across the internet, starting Thursday afternoon. Before they propagated them, the purloined documents, were uploaded surreptitiously to a server supporting the global warming website realclimate.org, along with a draft mock post, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist managing that blog. He pulled the plug before the fake post was published. The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here.

But WikiLeaks was liberated. Simon Mann in The Age, November 30:

THOUSANDS of diplomatic cables released by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks include damning evidence that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered diplomats to spy on high-ranking UN officials.

Ben Saul in The Age, December 2:

HAVE [Julian] Assange or WikiLeaks broken Australian law? The short answer is no. The crimes of treason and treachery [and] espionage would [not] apply to WikiLeaks, because Assange did not release security information with the intention of harming Australia's interests, but purportedly in the public interest. Any espionage prosecution under US law would probably fail for a similar reason.

Disaster! Steve Lewis in The Daily Telegraph yesterday:

KEVIN Rudd's brutally candid remarks about China -- as relayed to the world via WikiLeaks -- have the potential to damage Australia's relationship with Beijing. In one unguarded moment in Washington, Rudd may have undermined years of careful nurturing of relations with China by successive Australian governments. Imagine the reaction in Beijing when the full text of Rudd's bellicose remarks were translated at the highest levels of power. It is one thing to lecture China on the need to show more tolerance towards Tibet and the Dalai Lama, as Rudd did during his 2008 address at Peking University. It is quite another to use such inflammatory language during a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, language that likely would have filtered back to China, even if WikiLeaks hadn't published the full cable.

Or not. The Daily Telegraph editorialises yesterday:

THE most surprising thing so far about the WikiLeaks revelations is how few genuine surprises they contain. That pattern continues with the latest leak, involving former PM and current Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.

Jay Leno on The Tonight Show:

WIKILEAKS continues to release thousands of classified documents, but some of the leaks are just gossip. Like the one saying Iranian President Ahmadinejad was once offered a 10pm show on NBC. I guess they were just trying to ruin his reputation.

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