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look, I have had defended him, in this very own thread... but I also have and had, sometime ago, a very deep feeling of false and deception around this guy... I don't know... Is not easy to explain.
There will be a time, when evil will look good and the opposite...
If you could turn back the clock...and change things...so would you have rather for wikileaks and Assange never to have existed at all ? After everything...how much poorer and in the dark would we have been ?
So one of your primary gripes with WikiLeaks is the behavior of a loose assortment of unrelated individuals that nobody in the world can control, let alone them.
Everyone who shares secret info "helps" WikiLeaks which makes secrets public if submitted. Including more altruistic sources. Blaming WikiLeaks for only certain arbitrary sources you don't personally happen to like, let alone for the later individual opinions of some of the unrelated people in those sources, is:
Somehow in your logic it seems the "crux" of the problem isn't corrupt governments or companies, the problem isn't people sharing the info of their own corrupt governments or companies, the problem isn't the reaction of bystanders or peripheral victims reacting to the corruption -- no, the real crux of the problem is the source that enabled these people to see each other in the first place. That really is displacement of responsibility on a major scale.
Yes, everything is a matter of learning from experience. There was no predecessor to WikiLeaks to have learned such hard lessons from. So they are the ones that had to trip over it. They learned, they changed.
So a 'someone' should have magically 'known' 'which' of 400,000 submitted documents 'might' have been 'appropriate' to share versus not.
Part of the element of being non-biased is literally BEING non-biased which means not having some "internal filter" who sits around deciding what should be exposed and what shouldn't because all such decisions are arbitrary.
People who are not WikiLeaks.
However, what one might call "politically non-dominational" global groups have no reason to have loyalty to and protection for any given government.
Now, had this publication made the government of a small African peoples look like the villains they are, you'd be happy for that as you indicate. You're distressed there isn't more of that submitted.
But as it made the government of a huge American peoples look like the villains they are, you're not happy about that. You're distressed it might upset the Americans who will behave stupidly in response.
Your definition of harm given your OP is "unfortunate chaos in the USA resulting from the people getting fed up with government misdeeds." That is likely because you are an American who doesn't want chaos and/or the government being even meaner to us. That makes sense, as an individual.
However, WikiLeaks is not an American organization, and as such has no reason to define "harm" the way you define harm. I suspect tens or hundreds of millions of people actually would define harm more like "letting sources such as the US Govt get away with crap without providing an outlet where even their own people can reveal it."
Make people dumbed-down enough to over-govern and miserable enough through mercenary mistreatment of their economic and other environments, and they may react like the livestock you've made them, that's always a risk for governments. But this problem, timeless and global, though perhaps iterating locally at the moment, is not WikiLeaks'.
Governments, like people, have life spans. If the sheer incompetence and/or corruption of a government leads to the dissolution or devolution of its form in the response of its people, this is not something that can or should be blamed on unrelated sources.
Wikileaks did a great job in the beginning, when Domscheit-Berg was there to review and edit the files so that no harm was done.
But I would have gladly wished that Wikileaks would have never released all those 400 000 un-edited files against the US. Already that the media and "loose" organisations were starting to promote revolution, it was really not a good idea to dump all those files in the minds of people already starting to hate the government.
"In a time of pervasive lying, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
swanne It is hardly a neutral party if we can't know who's feeding the information.
Since the smaller party cannot use force without triggering a war which it would lose, the smaller party leaks "truth" about the greater party, thus providing a leverage to influence the greater party. Perhaps to influence the US government towards a more Left-ist direction?
To show the US that Wikileaks won't hesitate to leak if the US makes a mistake, Wikileaks periodically leaks "truth" about the government.
This tactic, know for ages, is called "blackmail". Where the blackmailer uses truth as a weapon. Sure, truth in itself may appear noble and just, but this is only a mean to achieve something far more darker.
Now, who would want to blackmail the US government, or, at least, direct its media and people to a more left-ist direction? Well, what about an old communist or national-socialist party? Perhaps the Russians realized that a physical MAD (mutually assured destruction) was a very real threat during the Cold War. Perhaps they also realized that by steering the masses of the Western democratic, they could actually turn most North-Americans into extreme Left, or Communist, sympathizers (Operation Infektion). Perhaps China realized this. Perhaps the remainders of Nazi Germany realized this (Operation Paperclip). All of these dogmas would have a very strong motive in conveniently exposing "shocking truth" about the Western world.
Now, from where does Wikileaks receives its shocking informations? That's the point: nobody can know.
We can't just discard the possibility that perhaps alot of "shocking truths" are dug up by Anonymous member having tie to communists, neonazis, or even mafia organizations, in an attempt to re-structure the Western world according to their conveniences and
Truth... are the new kind of bombs. Bombs which no armour can shield against.
I merely point out that to whatever degree people may be doing so, causation/fault rests at home. WikiLeaks is not responsible for the well being of any company or government. That literally contradicts the entire point of being unbiased and international. If governments do not want dirty secrets becoming public they should cease to do dirty things. ....
..... So, no worries about how the peasants are going to revolt and upset the USA and why it's WikiLeaks' fault; it's not WikiLeaks' fault, but the chance that the peasants would succeed in anything more than getting a lot of themselves imprisoned and killed and getting yet more oppressive laws is unlikely anyway. Since revolution is a big bloody mess, I suppose that's probably a good thing.
Peace.
You seem to care more for the US to conceal the lying the cheating the killing...just so the people don't hate the Gov. How very noble of you.
In the end...when you protect these things that have surfaced...you are only protecting higher financial interests...you are not protecting the American people.
I really don't understand human beings who feel that interests, politics and economics come before the truth.