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> WL is fine with dumping United States State Department secrets, but if they had dumped all your financial and personal records, that would be bad? I have yet

• DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  "Why is it okay for the New York Times to publish this information, but it's not okay for WikiLeaks to do it? Are we not distinguishing between the leaking and the publishing anymore?" Because the NYT is an agency dedicated to telling stories -- some of which happen to be political and/or secret in nature. Wikileaks is dedicated to attacking the structure of the government by mass releases of documents covering all sorts of things. When you have a leaker which wants some injustice fixed and a publisher who publishes to tell that story, you are then able to make some informed judgment on what was best for society, ie, there is a rational conversation. See the Pentagon Papers. But when you leak 200K documents -- who has the ability to review or digest all of that? I doubt anybody could make a statement on what the impact is or whether the leak was worth it or not. They'll be debating the impact of these leaks 50 years from now. It takes away the conversation between the voters and the government. Which is the entire point, of course. If the purpose is to destroy the relationship between voters and the government, then you are no longer a publisher, ie, you are no longer relating a thematic story with some sort of political or secret overtones. Your right of free speech -- the ability to relate stories, demonstrate, protest, and persuade me of a certain cause is not applicable any more. You can't have any sort of reasonable conversation about how to fix things using 200K documents to do so. This would be like calling myself a musician if I played every note on the keyboard on a thousand instruments at once. I would be something -- noisemaker or something, but not a musician. There is no theme or point except chaos and anarchy. Beats the hell out of me what wikileaks is, but its not a publisher. Information sprinkler? I'd go with "cyber terrorist", but nobody was purposely killed to effect political change, just massive amounts of information leaked, so the word "terrorism" doesn't work. It's a very strange semantic place we've ended up.
  • ibejoeb 16y ago
    Wikileaks gave these "dedicated storytellers" first shot at analyzing the information. They've release .3% of the documents to the public. "The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice." It seems they've given consideration to the sensitivity of the material.
    • DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      It seems they've given consideration to the sensitivity of the material. But consideration to the sensitivity of the material was never at issue.