Wikileads

Check out this fascinating article about Wikileaks from the Toronto Globe and Mail. The article’s writer, Ivor Tossell, discusses Wikileaks in the grand sense — what the site means for governments, dissidents and the Internet, and how the group’s legal invincibility and pro-citizen moral code have allowed it to take full advantage of the Internet age.

Some of Tossell’s conclusions:

• Wikileaks is one of the first fully post-national organizations produced during the Internet age. Meaning Wikileaks operates outside the legal, geographical and technological constraints of any one country (or any group of countries). It makes its own rules, based on its own moral code, and it has set itself up so that no single nation can shut it down.
• Wikileaks is agnostic to law, or at least to the laws created by nations. To Wikileaks, what seems to matter is a higher moral code, based on individual rights and the idea that governments should belong to the governed.
• Individual privacy matters to Wikileaks. The privacy of corporations, governments and individuals committing criminal or immoral acts — acts that harm other individuals — does not deserve protection.
• Transparency trumps secrecy. There’s almost no such thing as a legitimate government secret, according to Wikileaks. Governments are in place to serve the people they govern. When citizens know what their governments are up to, governments are less likely to do hugely stupid things.

Interesting stuff. Definitely worth reading.