Leaking pain

With the recent release of classified US documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has caused a furore. What are the lessons WikiLeaks is teaching us? We look at media comment on the subject.

An enemy?

The Wall Street Journal writes that while WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is "an enemy of the U.S.", the U.S. keeps too many secrets.

... One lesson is that it is much harder to keep secrets in the Internet age, so that the U.S. government is going to have to learn to keep fewer secrets and confine them to fewer people. It is amazing to discover that so many thousands of cables might have been accessible by Private First Class Bradley Manning, who is suspected of being the main source for the Wikileaks documents. The bureaucratic excuse is that the government was trying to encourage more cross-agency cooperation post-9/11, but why does an Army private need access to the deails of a conversation between Yemen's dictator and General David Petraeus?. ...

Too powerful?

Having the facts about how their governments operate helps citizens make better decisions about their leaders. However, WikiLeaks has a duty to use the information they receive responsibly, writes the Financial Times.

... The bigger concern about WikiLeaks is that it is structured to be beyond the reach of any jurisdiction. This is understandable for a small organisation taking on the world’s powers-that-be. But it gives WikiLeaks power without accountability — which is precisely what it claims to be fighting. ...