(Caution: This post is longer than usual, so please bear with me :))
Should Wikleaks be stopped from spreading leaked confidential U.S documents?
I wish to bring to notice other perspectives on the issue, before I go on to answer that.
- A fellow blogger and a die-hard Hillary Clinton fan, has reiterated Sarah Palin's comparison of Julian Assange (Wikileaks founder) with Osama Bin Laden (Al-Qaeda terrorist), in her blogpost. To her mind, Wikileaks is a form of terrorism. "Both attack multiple nations, yet neither is a nation or (sic) truly affiliated with one," reads her blog, and hence, she says, it should be banned.
- British reporter Sam Leith attempts to break "the myth"of freedom of speech associated with Wikileaks, by equating the Wikileaks leaks to "rifling through your neighbor's bins and publishing his bank statements on the internet'.
First, the Clinton fan. Hillary is doing a great job as the U.S. Secretary of State. In a recent speech, she said she was a "big believer" in internet freedom and added "we have to be very careful that governments don't overreact to information [that they do not like being aired in public]. It is always better to err on the side of more expression, more information, and then try to counter it with other information."
All this, when the U.S. State department looks for ways to prosecute Assange, has Amazon remove Wikileaks from its servers, gets Paypal and Mastercard to dump Wikileaks donations and asks its employees not to read Wikileaks. What hypocrisy! Or should I say, what diplomacy!
Also, as Luis Anderson points out in his blog, "Assange has no allegiance to the U.S, same as 96% of the world's population." So he cannot be accused of treason and the cables should continue to be leaked.
Had Assange obtained the documents legally (that is to say, they were not leaked, but handed over by the government), there would have been no need to raise the above question. For the rule in journalism is - If it is in PUBLIC INTEREST, it makes a news story. (This is not to say, Wikileaks is journalism. That would have to be another post).
Which makes Leith's argument weak as our neighbors' bank statements are of no public interest, whatsoever.
But, it is important to realize that in NO WAY could Julian have obtained this information legally, for every report would have been censored to market a "transparent" government that sportingly obliges to the right to information. So perhaps in this case, the end justifies the means. Otherwise, the public would have been deprived of this knowledge.
Moreover, as blogger Emmanuel writes, "When other countries (especially those unfriendly to America) [read: China and the Google saga] perform cyber-censure by claiming to apply law, it's a violation of free speech. When the U.S. attempts to do the same, it's an illegal act that must be brought to justice."
So to answer the question I posed - No, Wikileaks should not be stopped from making its revelations.
