Wikileaks - for good or evil?

I have eagerly followed Julian Assange and his organization Wikileaks for about the last year, and this last week has been full of debate on the man and his mission.

First off the guy is actually really fascinating. I found an old blog he wrote that talks about a lot of his motivations. Along with a couple interviews (here is a good one) I have begun to feel a lot of admiration for the man - I can't believe he is still alive. In a way he is a modern day Robin Hood, stealing (well actually just distributing) information from the knowledge rich, and handing it to the spin-free information deprived masses.

Part of the reason I think his mission resonates so strongly with me is because I have really begun to see the evil of mainstream news this last year. Fox Business plays 24 hours a day in the halls of my school, and I have subscribed to the Wall Street Journal to round out my academic reading. It is disgusting the level of spin that is layed on through both outlets (I know... same owner) and I am surprised how often I am directly lied to. Liberal Viewer Presents does a good job of highlighting some of the more grievous errors, and NewLeftMedia does a good job showing how it impacts the voting public.

So when an organization releases pure fact news. No spin, no opinion, just fact, it's the Reuters of politics. That seems very good, in fact it's hard to see the downside. I guess the catch is that sometimes people get hurt. The leakers go to jail, or sensitive military information is released. But the more I dig, the more it seems that the good far outweighs the bad.

First off the information is usually fairly stale (no troop movement for next week documents), and Wikileaks seems to be pretty careful about only putting things out that are controversial, instead of private. For instance, a conversation between diplomats who represents nations is published, personal information about staffers is not. But there are still people who are caught in the cross hairs, whistle blowers, or parties unknowingly aiding the corrupt. My view is that in almost all cases the net good of the release outweighs the individual cost (good ole utilitarian logic I guess). It's really nice to hear the Afghanistan story unfiltered through intelligence reports, instead of wrapped up in "mission completed" rhetoric on Fox or even CBC. 

I will admit a small transgression. I hardly read the leaks. Does that make me just as bad as the Fox News watcher? In a way it kinda does, if I prefer packaged media to fact driven media, I'm willfully ignorant and that is a true evil. But I rationalize it this way. Wikileaks so far has published mostly geo-political stories, I'm not terribly interested (and currently have no real time for) geo-politics, so for me knowing that those with interest finally have a good outlet is enough. For now the geo-political news stories I do read in the WSJ are compared with the corresponding article in The Economist, and I assume that both have some spin.

This said Assange was quoted by Forbes saying that the next leak will be on banks. I will definitely read those with interest.