Monday, December 27, 2010

File Under Wikileaks Not Just For Laughs

Will wikileaks get anyone killed?  This story suggests that the possibility is more than a fantasy.*  While we can be entertained by some of the leaks, and others might be useful for revealing significant stuff, the indiscriminate dumping of all of this stuff onto the net may end up doing far more harm than good.  Assange can dress up his efforts in as self-righteous gloss as possible, but it seems more lazy than path-breaking to just dump stuff online.  Editing, vetting, selecting--these would take time and effort.  So, instead, Assange can play the role of anarchist when he is just lazy, looking for fame and fortune.  He is no Daniel Ellsberg, who did some hard work and faced the possibility of hard time, even if Ellsberg says nice things about him.

Oh, and Ellsberg was not a (insert epithet here).  The ironies pile up as Assange has no problem revealing anything about anyone else but his friends in the media are far more discrete:

The Guardian, which first published portions of the police report, left this out; the reporter who did so originally brokered the deal with Wikileaks and has been described as a friend of Assange's, and his own editor said he had "left out a lot of graphic and damaging material in the allegations [about Assanage's sexual offenses] because he thought it would be too cruel to publish them.") Jezebel


HT to http://milnewsca.wordpress.com/

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