The power of the written word has been a dominant force throughout the age of history: the letters of the Apostles, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, and the United States Constitution. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century those powerful words have been posted on the internet… at Wikileaks.org. As the question has been in the past, should anyone, and if so who, be held responsible for the morality of mere words?
The Wikileaks website, unveiled in December 2006 and since removed but relentlessly mirrored, stated its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations." Although the site was originally set up to accept user comments and edits, it moved to a traditional type of publication no longer allowing user control.
Australian born, publisher, journalist, software developer and internet activist, Julian Assange, began the whistle-blowing media and set the philosophy for the Wikileaks site. In his blog he wrote, "the more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.... Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."
A list of documents attracting media attention on the Wikileaks site can be found in Wikipedia’s article, “Information published by WikiLeaks” and includes among others: an apparent Somali assassination order, Guantanamo Bay procedures, killings by Kenyan police, contributors to Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, the 2008 Peru oil scandal, a nuclear accident in Iran, toxic dumping in Africa, an internal document from the Kaupthing Bank just prior to the collapse of Iceland’s banking sector, the Afghan War Diary (almost 77,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan) and a package of 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs which allowed every death in Iraq and across the border in Iran, to be mapped.
The Wikileaks site has been both praised and condemned. The New York City Daily News listed Wikileaks at the top of a list of websites “that could totally change the news.” A number of awards have been bestowed upon the organization including The Economist’s New Media Award in 2008 and Amnesty International’s UK Media Award in 2009. Julian Assange himself was named Reader’s Choice for Time’s Person of the Year in 2010. At this same time, there have been claims that Assange is a terrorist and government officials of the United States have criticized Wikileaks that the leaked classified information could harm national security and compromise international peace efforts.
Currently, Mr. Assange is being held under partial house arrest in Britain while authorities decide whether to honor a Swedish warrant for his extradition in order to face sexual assault charges. His lawyers, besides saying the accusations are false and politically motivated, are apparently fighting the order with concern that Sweden would then extradite him to the U.S. where there are calls for his arrest for the disclosure of top secret government documents and Assange fears execution. In early December 2010, Assange went so far as to hint that a heavily downloaded encrypted file would be sent a key to unlock should anything happen to him or the Wikileaks website.
This past week, a former colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, in his new book, “Inside Wikileaks” claims Julian Assange had started assuming the characteristics of the kinds of institutions he was trying to bring down, going from “imaginative, energetic, brilliant” to a “paranoid, power-hungry, megalomaniac.” When Berg left the organization in September 2010, he took with him employees, key software and 3,000-3,500 documents claiming it would be "irresponsible" to leave them with Assange. A new site, OpenLeaks, was begun in January as a more transparent secret-sharing website. Berg says the new website, which he and a few previous Wikileaks employees started, has a "technical mechanism whereby sources can be protected" and whistleblowers can decide for themselves to which outlets they want to release their information.
Now on a newer website, it continues, anonymous leaks of confidential information in a world where “news travels fast”… faster than ever in history. Who should be held accountable for the morality of those words? Will the power bring Daniel down, just as it did Julian? How long will it take? Is the world now hostage to technology and those who can wield the code? Time will tell us all.
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