Eric Dively 
WikiLeaks has been in the news a lot recently, since its release of over 130,000 U.S. government documents. Informants confidentially communicate with U.S. agents. WikiLeaks exposed some of them. This has caused much debate as to whether or not it was morally right to publish these cables. WikiLeaks is an anti-secrecy organization. According to its website, this is what it admittedly does and its reason for existing, so is WikiLeaks fighting evil?
National security is an important aspect to the functionality of foreign relations in a world where trust is minimal. It’s common knowledge that government secrets are out of control. Government applies the CONFIDENTIAL stamp on information as a means of not having to tell its citizens anything. This makes it difficult to hold officials accountable for their decisions or behavior.
Brian Warwick is a concerned American citizen. “Does everything need to be leaked? No, I don’t think so but if it’s showing someone who’s doing wrong to somebody else then I think it should be exposed.” he says. Most of us would probably agree with this statement. What condemning information to reveal to society will always be a topic of debate, as peoples’ opinions tend to differ.
Warwick states, “They (reporters) should protect their sources as much as they can.” Did WikiLeaks factor in the impact of what showing the names of these U.S. sources would be? Maybe they did. It may be true that the only source that WikiLeaks should’ve cared about was Bradley Manning. He was WikiLeaks source and the others were American sources.
Here is part of the WikiLeaks policy concerning its source anonymity: “As far as we can ascertain, WikiLeaks has never revealed any of its sources. We can not provide details about the security of our media organisation or its anonymous drop box for sources because to do so would help those who would like to compromise the security of our organisation and its sources. What we can say is that we operate a number of servers across multiple international jurisdictions and we do not keep logs. Hence these logs cannot be seized. Anonymization occurs early in the WikiLeaks network, long before information passes to our web servers. Without specialized global internet traffic analysis, multiple parts of our organisation must conspire with each other to strip submitters of their anonymity…” Here is the entire policy.
WikiLeaks’ intentions remain to be seen. The fallout of Julian Assange, its founder, is yet to be determined. Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison by a military judge in Aug. 2013. It is clear that WikiLeaks is not a supporter of the U.S. government or maybe any other government either. It may be the ally of the common citizens of this planet though.
