In my last post I talked about WikiLeaks while the case was still rather new, and very fluid. Since then a lot has changed (however not my opinion) and in discussing it with people I’ve come to realize that while many people know the name WikiLeaks, they don’t understand what it is or how it works. In the 1970’s the media did a good job of understanding and explaining what Watergate was and how it worked. In 2010 the mainstream media seems to be just as clueless as the politicians who are trying to shut down what is basically a new form of press.
Also Julian Assange has been accused of “rape” (I’ll get to why that’s in quotes in a moment) which is obviously a serious crime.
I’m going to try to do the media’s job for them and explain some of the facts in this case and let anyone who reads this form their own opinions. Lets start with the rape accusation.
The crime that WikiLeaks founder is accused of isn’t rape in the traditional sense that we have here in the US. In fact as far as I know Sweden is the ONLY country where what he is being accused of is a crime. Basically if a couple has consensual relations but the man does not use some form of barrier protection (i.e. a condom) the woman has up to 72 hours to claim rape, even if at the time of intercourse she agreed to the lack of protection (as she admitted happened in this case.) The woman who accused Assange of this case brought the charges, dropped them, then talked to a number of politicians and brought them a second time, all within that 72 hour period. I’m not going to claim it was a setup, but there are a number of people who would.
Now as for what WikiLeaks is. People seem to have this image of the staff of WikiLeaks poking around in the Pentagon digging through their desk drawers for things to release. They’re not. Basically it’s a website where anyone can anonymously upload/”leak” documents that the uploader has access to for whatever reason. It would be the same as if I created a fake Facebook account and released my companies secrets there, it may be a crime for me to steal that company info, but Facebook didn’t do anything wrong.
WikiLeaks specifically, and the internet in general is the future of the press. To censor or block them is to deny that the citizens have a right to information (again we get back to those pesky amendments to the Constitution about freedom of speech and freedom of the press.) Other than one being on the screen and one being on paper how is a website different from a newspaper? What is the definition of a journalist? Am I one for keeping a blog or do I need X amount of readers? If it’s a matter of the number of readers what is that number? Are small community newspapers that don’t reach that number then not covered by freedom of the press?
Also ask yourself, if the information published by WikiLeaks wasn’t from the US, but from China or Iran would you have as big a problem? If a country is doing something wrong, even if it’s your country, shouldn’t we know about it? In 2009 WikiLeaks was the first to report about a serious nuclear accident in Iran, which was then picked up by major news outlets, similar to the way the Monica Lewinski case was first released by Matt Drudge on the internet and then only later picked up by news outlets. This is the future, and while WikiLeaks may have an anti-US agenda, they also have a right to free speech and since there is no law against publishing classified materials, only in leaking them in the first place, they are not guilty of any crime and have not been accused of any at this time.
