Wikileaks why is it good

In fact, neither Podesta nor the DNC have disputed any of them, even the ones most outrageously proving the torpedoing of Bernie Sanders and the pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation. And why does wikileaks alone have to satisfy any requirement for even-handedness? Hare might also have mentioned the NYT publishing Trump tax returns, which is indisputably cause for civil action and probably criminal prosecution as well. Completely agree with the above comments.

Bravo Andrew Wolfe! I cannot stand this article lack of biases. Oh Boston so sad to see the ignorance exuberant in the collegiate level-so blind and yes so dumb. This entire article uses Ad Hominem attacks on Julian Assange. This is largely just a character assassination of Assange.

There are some claims that things would be better if some other organisation handled the investigation, but given that no organisation handling the investigation has any actual power, the only way to achieve any power over corrupt government is widespread dissemination of knowledge.

Corrupt journalism has cost billions of dollars of unaccounted for public debt. Yes Assange is a hero. The truest hero in decades. Secrets kill. Remember WMDs? While much of the information that Wikileaks has exposed was necessary to expose, it should also be remembered and noted that within those big dumps of documents, etc, they have often included information that was unnecessary to exposing what they wanted to expose AND harmful or compromising.

Mission is noble, but Assange is a selfish hack in this regard—not a hero. Typical leftist babble that says nothing. Your article forgot to mention what innocent person was wrongly damaged or wounded by wikileaks? Your email address will not be published. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases.

To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. Many governments — some governments — deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us.

They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Is it awkward? Consequences for U. I think fairly modest. But it is important to acknowledge three things. First, as the government itself has admitted, there is no evidence that anyone has actually been harmed as a result of the disclosures in the six months since the first release of documents. Second, WikiLeaks has reformed its practices since the first release, as McClatchy acknowledged in the article linked to above:.

Le Monde also said U. When the first batch of documents was released this summer, WikiLeaks unapologetically released the names of Afghan informants, which U. That request was formally rejected. The State Department has obviously made a calculated decision that working with WikiLeaks is worse than putting lives in danger.

That indicates either that the US government is more worried about legitimizing WikiLeaks than it is about saving lives or — more likely — that it recognizes that the threat of harm is not actually all that significant. At no point in its history has the US government been more contemptuous of transparency. Lies about WMDs, abuse of the state-secrets privilege, black sites for torture, warrantless wiretapping, secret government spying on human-rights activists, misuse of FOIA and classification rules — the list goes on and on.

Add in a media whose docility is equally unprecedented, and it is easy to see why the US needs WikiLeaks. All of the dangers that Roger mentions are speculative, however real they may be. By contrast, the benefits of the disclosures are both real and immediate.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai routinely pardons drug dealers and corrupt officials. End Note. He denies the report. Mubarak had vigorously opposed the US march to war against Iraq in How safe is it? Not very," WikiLeaks tweeted last week—a bold statement after the organization's best source has spent two and a half years behind bars.

Julian Assange announced Monday that WikiLeaks won't publish anything new until it figures out how to raise money. When it launched, the site's call to action was, in their own words , "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.

Revealing splashy secrets was always part of the site's appeal, but so was the process. As they wrote in their early manifesto: "That is why the time has come for an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see. WikiLeaks has had some major successes -- we noted earlier this year how its cache of State Department cables have become a new reference library for mainstream media.

But judged by its own ambitions -- and the worst fears of its detractors cited in the many very serious essays on the future of journalism and privacy and the Internet -- the grand experiment of turning WikiLeaks into a conduit for "mass document leaking" has been an abysmal failure.

It's not just that the sources for its most high-profile leaks have a troubling history of being thrown in a jail, there have been precious few of them. Its highest profile leaks -- the dribs and drabs of that massive stash of confidential cables and the video of an horrific Apache helicopter attack in Iraq -- can all be traced back to exactly one person: Bradley Manning.

Yet those innovations are real and disruptive and, like those of any Web startup, can be imitated by other, perhaps more sustainable ventures with better modes of business. I suggest that his creation may not survive very long, because the state, with all its powers, will resent any attempt by an avowed enemy to explode its mysteries.

One disgruntled former WikiLeaks volunteer, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, has said he will create a competing, less politically threatening platform called OpenLeaks.

Others are sprouting up. Is all this a good thing? In writing my review, I evaded any moral or political judgment, but the question preoccupied me.

Personally, I distrust transparency. I am by birth and education a member of the establishment, and politically a Whig that is, a sort of progressive conservative. I think the rights we enjoy are not natural but derive ultimately from the laws of a properly constituted state, and I am wary of attacks upon its institutions.