Silicon Valley Mercury News : Pro Wikileaks article

[muman613]

Just because I want to present both sides of the question let us read an article which supports the action of the Wikileaks...

I do not necessarily agree with this article but we can discuss it...



http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16762752?source=rss

O'Brien: Why we should applaud Wikileaks

By Chris O'Brien

Mercury News Columnist
Posted: 12/05/2010 12:01:00 AM PST
Updated: 12/05/2010 07:47:51 AM PST

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was just on his way to achieving international notoriety when I met him last April at a journalism conference in Berkeley. Dressed in a loose fitting brown suit over his slight, almost frail frame, with white hair and pasty skin to match, he seemed an unlikely candidate to become one of the U.S. government's most reviled antagonists.

While his words could be savage at times, he nevertheless struck me then as a canny, committed activist who genuinely believed that exposing government secrets was a path to achieving greater social justice in the world.

The Internet, he explained, had created a mechanism where massive amounts of secret information could be pried loose and easily distributed. "We could achieve a big amount of political reform with a small bit of energy," he said.

Assange's appearance, probably the last time he will set foot in this country, came just two weeks after Wiki- Leaks posted a shocking video of a U.S. military helicopter gunning down unarmed civilians and journalists in Iraq. Since then, his organization has published hundreds of thousands of previously secret U.S. documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and, most recently, secret diplomatic cables.

The reaction has been fierce. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., and ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, said this week that WikiLeaks should be labeled a terrorist organization. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
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called the disclosures an "attack on America's foreign policy interests."

But the reaction is misguided. Our government is undermining its own credibility with this overheated rhetoric. And this lashing out says more about our politicians than it does about Assange or WikiLeaks.

Over the past decade, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. has become even more obsessed with secrecy, in order, it says, to protect the country. But as the WikiLeaks disclosures have shown, much of the information is being kept from the public to avoid embarrassment or the exposure of mistakes, rather than protecting genuinely vital state secrets.

What's really happening is that WikiLeaks represents a terrifying loss of control. That fear lies at the heart of our government's reaction, rather than the content of any of the disclosures.

Because for all the thousands of documents that WikiLeaks has exposed, there has been very little impact. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Congress in October that documents disclosed by WikiLeaks "to date (have) not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure." I don't expect the release last week of diplomatic cables to change that assessment.

When Assange spoke at Berkeley, his words were so calm and measured that it almost masked the somewhat brutal nature of what he was saying, like "crushing his opponents like a bug" or explaining that the leaking of secret documents was "basically an anarchist act" or talking about "taking the scalp" of a prime minister.

Statements like these can easily be taken out of context to make him sound like a lunatic. But they mask the nature of his agenda. His motivation is not just transparency, but social change.

"We are a freedom of information activist organization," Assange said at the Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium, a prestigious annual gathering hosted by the journalism school at UC Berkeley.

Assange's approach to disclosure is more restrained and more deliberative than commonly assumed.

WikiLeaks has been created to take advantage of the distributed architecture of the Web. Assange said the organization places its servers in countries with the greatest press freedoms to make them difficult to take down either through legal challenges or cyberattacks.

Of course, that hasn't stopped many governments from trying. But they miss the point. The rise of such an organization in the Internet age was inevitable. Take this one down and another will pop right back up.

Just this week, for instance, the authors of a blog called "StimulatingBroad.com" put up a Web page urging staff members of the Federal Communications Commission to leak a copy of the new net neutrality proposal. While a summary was announced by the chairman, the actual document remained secret.

The proper response to WikiLeaks should be a national conversation about what material should be kept secret -- and to keep that at an absolute minimum.

No one is arguing that there aren't some secrets the government needs to keep. Even WikiLeaks has held back some of the documents it received. But the circle around the stuff that falls into this category should be drawn as small as possible.

Assange and WikiLeaks might be less than perfect. He may indeed be a deeply flawed person, one who is wanted for sexual assault in Sweden.

But there should be no doubt that WikiLeaks' efforts to expose government secrets have done a great public service by puncturing a hole in the government's arguments that it needs to keep expanding its bubble of secrecy to keep us safe.