Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the Middle East for meetings with Persian Gulf leaders, acknowledged Sunday that it would take years to undo the damage caused by the WikiLeaks revelations, likening her recent travels to an extended "apology tour" to reassure allies who suffered embarrassment or worse because of the disclosures.

OpenLeaks, as it is called, is just one of many of web-based leaks organizations that has sprung up in recent months on the coattails of the famous original. A group of former European Union officials and journalists have launched BrusselsLeaks, focusing on the EU’s secrets. Then there are various geographical sites, such as IndoLeaks, BalkanLeaks, TuniLeaks and the Czech Republic’s PirateLeaks.

In one respect, media coverage of the WikiLeaks release of classified American cables has resembled American diplomacy itself: lots of attention paid to conflict zones (Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf) and economic competitors (Europe, China), but not a whole lot of interest in less restive, less threatening locales. Latin America, for example.

When I came to Brussels just over three years now, European Politicians were not on Facebook, election ads were not made or broken by one’s twitter adeptness and no one in the European Commission had been told that any of these should be an option.

Last year, early on Christmas Eve morning, representatives from the U.S., United Kingdom, Netherlands, and the European Union arrived for a meeting with Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Appointed prime minister earlier that year as part of a power-sharing agreement after the fraud- and violence-ridden 2008 presidential election, Tsvangirai and his political party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), are considered Zimbabwe's greatest hopes for unseating the country's long-time de facto dictator Robert Mugabe and bringing democratic reforms to the country.

What has changed, however — and this has made governments vulnerable to citizens’ legitimate criticism as never before (which is a good thing) — is that the sheer extent of potentially embarrassing and even “endangering” information that can be divulged by anyone motivated to do so...

There is the official Indian response to WikiLeaks at last. Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao has defended the confidentiality principle of diplomatic communication between ambassadors and the home government, while launching the new website of the publicity and public diplomacy wing for the ministry of external affairs on Saturday.