Wikileaks

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/07/wikileaks

What to make of Wikileaks, the organization that exposed more than 90,000 classified U.S. government documents about Afghanistan that are the subject of a front-page news article in today's New York Times?

NYU's Jay Rosen: "the world's first stateless news organization....Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system."

An Obama "administration official," via Mike Allen's Politico Playbook: "It's worth noting that WikiLeaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan." (As opposed to, say, the New York Times?)

The very pro-transparency Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the leftish Federation of American Scientists, via the New York Times: "WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals."

None of this is to say that all 90,000 of these documents were properly classified as secret or that there's nothing in them that the public can benefit from knowing. But it's something the way that same press that froths that every letter of complex and perhaps unconstitutional corporate law must be observed by entrepreneurs and punished with prison for violations is so callous about the clear-cut violation of laws that involve the disclosure of classified documents.

by Ira Stoll  |  Jul 26, 2010 at 10:05 am Related Topics:  Politics, President Obama, Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list