Inside Politics

WikileaksWatch - While we wait for the Canadian embassy cable collection to drop ...

by Kady O'Malley Posted: November 28, 2010 8:52 PM Last Updated: November 29, 2010 10:48 AM
... here's a teaser of what some of the highlights might be. 

CBCnews.ca datawrangler John Bowman has been hard at work extracting useful tidbits from the limited data dump by Wikileaks media partner The Guardian earlier today -- a Google Fusion table with the tags and dates from all 251,000+ cables, only a few hundred of which have been made public.

He set up a filter to pull out every cable that listed a Canadian address as the source, which came out to 2,422 documents in total, the bulk of which, not surprisingly, originating from the US Embassy in Ottawa, but with dispatches from US consulates in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax as well.  

Here, then, are the top 20 most frequently appearing tags -- which likely correspond to topics of discussion, and the number of times that each appears:

(Note that while most of the tags appear in the glossary provided by The Guardian, there are two still to be decoded: SENV and KPAO.)

Canada 2280
External Political Relations 1275
Internal Governmental Affairs 754
Economic Conditions 432
Foreign Trade 413
Human Rights 306
Terrorists and Terrorism 303
Financial and Monetary Affairs 245
Arms Controls and Disarmament 221
Foreign Economic Assistance 201
Military Operations 168
Military and Defense Arrangements 164
Afghanistan 161
SENV  157
Energy and Power 149
Security 141
KPAO  137
Intelligence 122
Trade and Technology Controls 110
Foreign Investments 108

Not nearly as frequently occurring, but still worthy of note are a few of the other tags that he spotted during the datacrunching process:
IV Program 35
Iraq 30
Border Patrol 26
Liberal Party 25
Terrorist Finance 21
Conservative Party 20
Missile Defense 17
Paul Martin 12
Ralph Goodale 9
Softwood lumber 9
Stephen Harper 9
SARS 8
Security and Prosperity Partnership 8
Danny Williams 6
Beef 4
Avian Influenza 3
Download the full spreadsheet here -- and share your finds in the comments -- or if you'd prefer to sift through the data, you can test out our totally awesome-seeming online database search app here.

Tags: cablegate, john bowman, look! we do too bear mention! take that inferiority complex!, wikileaks, wikileakswatch: the canadian connection