Digital media continues to intercede with everyone's daily lives and is continuing to become more prevalent with every new advance in technology. Whether it's checking your cellphone every morning when you wake up to instantly get a weather forecast of your day or the more subtle effects such as the work and design that goes into the websites you browse while bored at work. It may seem to be helpful to everyone involved, but when are the lines pushed too far on what you can and can't share with people on the internet? A prime example of this that i'll be talking about mainly in this blog post is that of the recent controversy over Julian Assange and his site WikiLeaks. For a little background information before I get into what all this about, i'll just quote the best summary of it from it's inspiration for the website, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
"WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.[2] Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.[6] The organisation has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.[2] Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director.[7]
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award.[8] In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances",[9] a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya.[10] In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".[11] Russia extended its support to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange by issuing a statement which suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in the aftermath of the United States diplomatic cables leak.[12]
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.[13] In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.
WikiLeaks was originally launched as a user-editable wiki site, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model, and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. The site is available on multiple servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.[14][15]"
WikiLeaks is a site that has been much debated over, and has been all the buzz in the news lately with the release of over 251,287 documented reports of diplomatic communications between said diplomats and the U.S. State Department. While in the past I've agreed with the actions and ideas of the WikiLeaks site, I can't help but wonder if they're pushing the line between what people have the right to know about what they're government is doing behind the scenes, and what should be kept from the public eye for the good of the nation. Personally, I see the recent publication of the diplomatic cables as having no effect but to damage relations between the U.S. and it's allies while hiding behind Assange's claim of Free Speech over the internet. Topics that have been revealed in the past by the site such as the 2007 murder of innocent civilians by armed U.S. air forces even including video of the act were in my eyes, while horrible and perfect examples of the horrors and collateral that come with war, well within the right of people knowing what could come of recklessness and ignorance when trained professionals in the armed forces do not take the proper actions to keep events like that from happening so such events can be avoided in the future. The diplomatic cable leaks have no endgame, no positive purpose in the future other than to discredit and cause controversy between America and it's Allies. Julian Assange seems to be under the impression that the U.S. is wrong for keeping these documents classified because they're keeping tabs on other countries without us knowing of such background activity. While I can see his point of free speech and the right to express it over the internet and it's various forms of media, I can also agree with our country wanting to know what everyone else is doing in the world. Not to sound too paranoid and the typical U.S. of A. fanatic, but it's not like other countries do it to us too, right?
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