WikiLeaks
(Once again it is 1:00 a.m., and all the sticky mucus in my lungs is making breathing and sleeping difficult.)
After seeing this unfold for several days now, I feel like I have a little broader perspective.
If hackers do actual or financial damage to a website which can be documented to the satisfaction of a jury of your peers, there should be some way to hold them accountable. But for the most part that is not what is happening in this situation. What with the anonymity of the web, and so many of the people using it employing fake names, this will be difficult to solve.
What WikiLeaks has been doing is really a different situation entirely. The New York Times and the Guardian Newspaper in England have printed much of the leaked stuff. These are largely governmental documents that have been classified. What we have found out in reading them is that in many cases having this information be out in the open just gives ordinary citizens and voters a better and more accurate view of what their governments really are doing. In many cases the government officials, even in democracies like the USA, have been saying one thing to the people, but actually pursuing a totally different course in secret.
In many, perhaps most, of the cases the purpose of this government secrecy appears to be only to protect the government from its own people. This is not how democracies are supposed to function. Over-classification is absolutely rampant, at least in America. So in this way what all this disclosing is doing is actually proving very positive. Uncomfortable for many of the people who this excessive secrecy has been protecting, but supportive indeed for government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
WikiLeaks, The New York Times, and others have tried to verify the accuracy of the information disclosed. They have even asked the government to help them weed out names or things which might put people in actual danger. WikiLeaks is not the one who stole and disclosed this information. I guess they encouraged it, but in many ways I am having a hard time defining big differences between what they did and what the New York Times has done.
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(It is 6:45 a.m. the next day. I made it through the night, even though last night I felt like a 50:50 chance of making it through the night was downright optimistic. I started showing signs of this respiratory infection five days ago, and so far it has gotten worse each day. My abdomen is very sore from all the coughing and trying to get rid of the mucus. My lungs and sinuses keep expelling large quantities of this mucus. The good news: One more day of one day at a time.)
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