Re: The surprise is not the leakiness
"It seems they want to right to read our emails, but take umbridge at the thought of us reading theirs."
Bingo! Widespread pooh-poohing of these leaks (eh, Mr Orlowski) as being inconsequential ("You can check which underpants Kim Jong-Il is wearing today on other sites!") misses the point: that diplomacy is a bunch of people representing one set of bigwigs chatting to another set of people representing some other set of bigwigs and it's seen as being in everyone's best interests not to let the nature of various discussions get out, perhaps because rival powers might benefit from it (for example, Iran finds out that everyone is out to get them), but frequently because it would be embarrassing to some people ("Russia's new dynamic duo outed at last!").
Yet the pooh-poohing goes a long way in showing who the diplomatic secrecy really protects from embarrassment. The pooh-poohers will tell you that "everyone knows" that Medvedev is Robin and Putin is Batman, for example, but what they really mean is that "everyone in media circles" or "everyone in diplomatic circles" or even "everyone in a Western nation" knows and can talk about it. Meanwhile, it might be highly embarrassing for "Batman and Robin" if Russians openly referred to their leaders in such a way. So diplomacy is frequently there to protect people running not-exactly-democratic places from popular criticism or derision.
There's another source of embarrassment, too: that people in democracies suddenly discover that the people appointed to represent everyone are actually cooking up deals for their own benefit (noting the criticism of things like ACTA) - that they aren't actually doing what their job description says. Ultimately, things like peace are about the people on this planet all getting along and not fighting over stuff, and when the media talks about hostility between nations, it's often the case that a state has decided to do something about another state, not that the actual people in, say, the US want to punish the actual people in, say, Iran.
And that's where imbeciles like Sarah Palin come in. They don't want stuff like transparency: it'd undermine all the side-deals and general lack of scrutiny upon which such people thrive. For them, it's far better to manipulate the populace (get them wound up about Iran and Iranians) and profit from the consequences, all under the name of "patriotism" - a term which should, in a country like the US, describe the preservation of a decent and free way of life, not the slavish adherence to a hidden agenda that profits some governing clique.