What is your opinion of Wikileaks?

I don’t think we should concern ourself with why Julian Assange does – if he’s looking for publicity, that doesn’t affect whether what he’s doing has value.

ETPro stated my position best here. We should be seeing this information, and I don’t believe that it should be held from us. However, what parts of it we see verbatim is up for debate – and the parts of it that could lead to individuals being harmed should be redacted as much as possible.

This of course leads us to questions of who should do the redacting – my ambivalence about transparency and harm is obvious.

I don’t think that wikileaks does us a public service.

I would rather have what is classified be decided by the government or when appropriate the courts rather than private individuals with questionable motives.

I heard a brilliant metaphor on NPR – if a man says something about his mother-in-law to his wife, and then the wife goes and tells her mother, the man isn’t going to trust his wife anymore. Continuing with this, I think the big problem is that it’s like posting the jokes the man makes about the mother-in-law, but not posting about how he beats his wife – that may be because he doesn’t beat his wife, but until it’s something of that magnitude, it’s none of my goddamned business.

Is Wikileaks out to expose all governments, or just the US? Why am I not hearing anything about what they’ve got on other countries – is it because they don’t care, or they have no leaks to wiki about?

Wikileaks is awesome. I don’t believe that Julian Assange seeks attention but believe that he may have issues with the U.S puppeteer elite. Julian Assange cannot be compared to or Daniel Ellsberg as Assange does not steal information but merely relays it on his website. He will however be persecuted by the elite, he is already facing conveniently timed rape charges and Im sure there is more persecution to come. I respect the man for his bravery.
The truth will set us free.

@papayalily bear in mind that it is not wikileaks doing the actual “leaking” the leaks came from a citizen of the USA. Wikileaks contains hundreds of leaks from countries all over the world it just seems that the ones from the USA are the most spectacular . Go have a look http://mirror.wikileaks.info/

@papayalily – Actually, Wikileaks was leaking stuff about several other governments for awhile before it started on the US government. In fact, Julian Assange won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya. You can read more about the leaks in other countries here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks

It depends.

Har dee har..

I think it’s a good idea. It will keep people more mindful of what they are doing, considering whether it gets out to the public or not..

It’s one of the few issues I’m really ambivalent about and I’m kind of enjoying the novelty of my uncertainty.

It’s a stunt by a bitter angry man who despises the USA….PERIOD!

@Cruiser , A stunt?
Maybe we use the English language differently but I would call a stunt something that is fake and contrived. I see no denials from the U.S govt that these documents are fake.

@Odysseus A “stunt” where I come from is a contrived “over-the-top” event to garner more attention to a typically narcissistic individual than is otherwise due! And in his case, to gain as much fame and attention as he can. His first “stunt” brought fame and fortune and he knows “stunt” number two will immortalize him forever!

I think that the idea of a Wikileaks, is good, but so far, the execution by its editorial staff stinks to high heaven. I hope the Justice Department finds criminal wrongdoing and brings them to justice. The State Department cables released show the ambassadorial staff not doing wrong, but simply doing their jobs. They were discussing things frankly in private with our allies around the world. There were a few cover-ups that actually needed exposing, such as the US army helicopter attack in Iraq that killed two reporters. But most of the material is not about government malfeasance. It only serves to embarrass allies who spoke frankly, and to put at risk of assassination people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have helped us. This works profoundly to help al Qaeda. It also substantially increases the likelihood of armed conflict with Iran.

This in NOTHING like the release of the Pentagon Papers, which needed to be don to expose a cover-up. The Pentagon Papers showed that the Johnson Administration was routinely lying to the American People and to Congress about the Vietnam War.

What strikes me about all three major leaks is that nothing was really embarrassing to the United States.

The Afghan logs did not contain any significant new information about the war.

The Iraq logs’ most important revelation, I think, was the brutal, torture-happy state of Iraqi-run prisons. Americans could perhaps be blamed for “turning a blind eye,” but I’m not sure how much power or resources we actually had to deal with the problem.

The diplomatic cables are far more embarrassing to foreign leaders than the diplomats writing about them.

My main problem with Wikileaks is that Assange seems to be a fanatic who doesn’t care if he endangers people’s lives. Leaking the names of Afghan and Iraqi informants will very likely get some people killed, and their blood will be on Assange’s hands. Now, it’s good that Wikileaks has actively censored a lot of the material to try to prevent this from happening, but every newspaper has said that the published documents still contain a lot of names. This strikes me as similar to someone leaking the rosters of the witness protection program in an attempt to bring down a corrupt police department. It’s just fundamentally misguided and immoral.

Aside from that, I’m actually glad that a lot of these documents are seeing the light of day, because they provide valuable perspective and fodder for historians. But I don’t think “transparency” is some unalloyed good. Everyone who is the subject of these leaks is a professional doing their jobs. I would not want my every communication at my job viewable by anyone on the Internet; it’s creepy enough that IT can view what I write on my computer.

Transparency can be used to hold people accountable and to expose cover-ups or other criminal activities, but Wikileaks has simply not done that, at least not yet. I am looking forward to the leaked e-mails from the US bank that Assange is talking about, though.

In times where governments do nothing but lie to those who they are supposed to serve and where main stream media have devolved into mouth pieces for politics instead of delivering truth and exposing the lies of those in power, we need entities like Wikileaks, and the fact that certain extremist elements in us politics now want to classify Wikileaks as a “terrorist organisation” only reinforces that need.
The people at Wikileaks are heroes.

No it’s great, the ruling class is mendacious and the Chickens are coming home to roost. People who engage in worldly affairs and manipulate them with such insincerity have chosen the crooked path to ruin, they aren’t helping themselves and they definately aren’t helping us. As for the hysterics of Palin and Clinton, who deem it reasonable to punish journalism as terrorist activity, they need a good old fashion horse whipping. Palin missed her time as Mussolini’s moll freak or something…hideous.

Look the American government like to torture people in order to extract the truth…at least this was a voluntary disclosure. I can’t believe some of the reactionary idiots on fluther who are so shamelessly outraged by the truth. Has lying become so normative that anything else is treated with outrage? This is like Watergate. it keeps democracy moderately honest.

Julian Assange is a tribune, pure and simple and Power to him.

@Qingu personally i’ll take the truth warts and all. No one cares about our personal correspondence anyway, well not mine, i find it queer you have so much faith in your government, a government that doesn’t abide by international standards of behaviour. That creates concentration camps outside of legal jurisdiction in order to impose an abnormal prison regime. That cannot behave decently when threatened by a group of rag tag fanatics, with pitifully limited resources. You are being far too squeamish. Peoples lives are at risk because America has created a situation that puts peoples lives in peril, by the million.

I hope they catch the loyal trustworthy individual who is leaking the stuff to this guy and hang him/her. It could extract a hell of a price just for a nut case’s 15 minutes of fame. One would think his being suspected of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion by Swedish prosecutors because of his encounters with two women would have been enough limelight for him.

@mammal, I don’t have faith in the government. My opposition to Wikileaks has nothing to do with my faith in the government. It has to do with the fact that Wikileaks reveals the identities of informants in war zones who are targets for assassination.

Also, none of the grave injustices you mentioned were brought to light by Wikileaks.

@Qingu
Wikileaks offered to redact the names of endangered informants to the US.
The US refused that offer.

@ragingloli, do you have a link? I don’t remember it going down like that.

Wikileaks has tried to redact such information (what Assange called a “harm minimization process” or something). But in some cases they have failed to do so. I don’t remember this being contingent on an “offer” to the US government.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/28/wikileaks-document-release-state-department_n_788842.html

It would be nice if the government was willing to take up Wikileaks on its offer, but then I can see why they wouldn’t want to negotiate.

In any case, Wikileaks published names that were known to be informants by journalists; I don’t really see how it’s incumbent on the US government to id those people in order for Wikileaks not to mention them.

@Qingu
It is their people (or pawns if you will), and Wikileaks does not have the manpower, time, or expertise (or obligation) to analyse hundreds of thousands of documents to find the names of informants and decide which ones to redact. The US government does.

What? Three journalists had the manpower and expertise to analyze and those documents.

And they absolutely have the obligation to do so. If I am given a secret document containing the names of informants targeted by assassins, I have the moral obligation either to not publish it or to censor those names. I don’t get the high and mighty attitude here.

@Qingu
And they are. But unless you know what you are looking for, you can not find all, certainly not if you have almost 3 million documents.
I sincerely doubt that 3 journalists went through 3 million documents and found all the names.
(if that what is meant by “seven times the size of its October leak of 400,000 Iraq war documents”)

Three guys from three papers went through all the Afghan documents in a month.

I think you are exaggerating how hard it is. If you see anyone’s name in the document, black it out. I read a bunch of the Afghan logs; names and identifying places of Afghans who cooperated with US forces were routinely mentioned. It is well known that the Taliban is targeting such people for assassination.

@Qingu
Mayhaps you are right, and I am overestimating the difficulty, especially when talking about a broad brush approach.
It must also be said, that despite the risk of the information being used by the Taliban to retaliate against informants, according to this article from October, it has not actually happened.

Whether or not it’s happened yet, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.

I suppose this doesn’t apply to the diplomatic cables, though, and I haven’t read more than a few of the Iraq ones. So I don’t know if Wikileaks learned their lesson.