Wednesday 18 May 2011

Wikileaks - with great power comes great responsibility!!

Watching an bog standard piece of investigative journalism (panorama) has brought to my attention the idea that Wikileaks may have gone too far, or has it just been getting bad press.
My issue is not with Julian Assinge, make what you will of him, for yourself, but how he and Wikileaks have acted in their powerful position.
I like most other humans aware of the concept of democracy, treasure it and know that good government is crucial to any nation hoping for a democracy. For a long time, government have kept secrets from us, involving wars, killings or arrests - Abu Grahib for example - no one would have known was it not for transparency and freedom of information. On this level, we owe a huge debt to Wikileaks - we now know about Americans killing innocent Iraqi civilians with helicopters.
Wikileaks has had  particularly bad press, but for me, its because Wikileaks has gone too far - beyond reasonable limits, if you will. To be publishing any documents revealing informants identities or details of anyone working for the allied forces - well that’s just a death wish.
I support what they are doing, but anyone with that amount of information and power, has to act responsibly. It could be argued that government’s haven’t set a good example of how to deal with information - America invaded Iraq based on false information- Wikileaks now has its chance to show how to deal with information and power responsibly. Can they prove that this much transparency is a good thing?

No comments:

Post a Comment