It seems everyone in the blogosphere has an opinion of Wikileaks latest release of classified U.S. State Department cables. Adding one more voice to the mix, I come to this as someone who has spent the past four years going through the tedious process of getting these kinds of U.S. cables declassified through the legal route – the Freedom of Information Act.

When you begin, the process itself is utterly overwhelming. But once you do a few requests, you get the hang of the system and it becomes manageable. Especially so if you have, like I’ve had, the help of people who work this declassification process fulltime. And when you are trying to get similar sorts of paperwork out of other bodies that have no workable formal system – the UN for example – – you start to develop a solid appreciation for the fact that the U.S. does at least have an established pathway through which you can make declassification requests.

Is the process frustrating? Yes. Firstly it’s excruciatingly slow: There are documents I requested in 2006 that didn’t come through until 2010 (in some cases by the time they came through the information “declassified” in them had been fully available in the public realm for years) and I expect I’ll still be receiving documents long after Fighting for Darfur has gone out of print. Secondly it’s over-cautious (charitably phrased). Often names that have been redacted are names that you can identify from the rest of the cable’s context, and in many such cases I have found that the redactions cover information that I already had from interviews. Parenthetically, the FOIA system needs someone with an environmental conscience to overhaul it – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been sent a “declassified” document with a few words on the first page followed by as many as ten blank pages, with the bottom of the final page left to state redundantly “END.”

But would I trade those frustrations for Wikileaks-style data dumps? For now at least, no. I say “for now” because I’m open to the possibility that I could turn out to have a hypocritical position on this: Of the 611 U.S. cables released so far by Wikileaks, only 18 reference Sudan, all are comments in passing, and none tell me anything I didn’t already know. If in their next release there’s a stack of Sudan cables with details I’ve been trying, and failing, to get at regarding the true value of U.S.-Sudan counter-terrorism cooperation, I fear I may find myself revisiting my current position.

That possibility aside, here is my basic problem with #cablegate: I want diplomacy to work. And I think that on balance, diplomacy does better when diplomats (of any country) posted in say, Sudan, are free to write their assessments back to their capitals without worrying they will appear across the internet the next day. And – perhaps more importantly – – when people inside Sudan feel safe to pass diplomats sensitive information without the same concern. In short, there is value in being able to trust that some information will not be readily available in the public sphere. Now the cover of diplomacy can certainly take secrecy too far and those inside the system can forget that diplomacy is not a virtue in and of itself. But openness (contrary Julian Assange’s beliefs) is also not a virtue in and of itself.

Conscious of sounding like one of my old law professors, there are competing interests that need to be balanced. And FOIA, frustrating as it is, at least makes some effort to go through that weighing process. Do I always agree with the declassification decisions made? Of course not. But I don’t think the mass kind of data dump Wikileaks has just done is the solution.

Wikileaks might get me some documents I haven’t been able to get through FOIA. But the price paid for those documents is a chilling affect on information flows throughout the entirety of the state system. Moreover, it is not as though the choice is a binary one between overly cautious FOIA and overly open Wikileaks.  There is already an informal system of leaks that doesn’t do a bad job of pushing discrete pieces of sensitive information into the public sphere for the purpose of challenging government on specific policies – and it does so without the mass chilling costs that this latest Wikileaks release risks bringing.