So, I was browsing the web and found that articles regarding wikileaks have been more prevalent than ever.
Here's a video summarizing what wikileaks is http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=387_1287960666
Anyways, wikileaks serves as a source of information composed of thousands of documents from the current war in Iraq, and they soon plan to expand their documents in order to include the Afghanistan war as well.
Their releases have been deemed highly controversial, some call it free speech whereas others call it a threat to the United States. Their documents reveal countless known incidents of torture, murder, and other war crimes committed by many different countries.
www.wikileaks.org used to be up, but its been under attack by many different organizations. Whenever they find a server to host their website, the server hosts get a visit from the government and soon after the hosting is terminated. Even massive corporations like amazon censor wikileaks once confronted by the government (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/01/wikileaks-amazon-servers-_n_790652.html).
Many of the sources and founders have also found new problems in their lives. Scandals and rumors regarding the founder's private life soon surfaced after the creation of the documents and many of the sources face dangers and threats to their every day lives (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8180528/Wikileaks-new-diplomatic-cables-contain-UFO-details-says-Julian-Assange.html).
Since there are many individuals who remain divided on this subject, I wanted to ask you guys if you thought wikileaks has the right to expose these documents and why or why not? Is it freedom of speech or is it an endangerment to United States?
Points of Interest-
Excerpt from one of the controversial releases of an apache gunship killing a journalist and two children (1:41)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTXSexxGRsg
Full Video of the above excerpt (5:29 more interesting if you have time)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25EWUUBjPMo&feature=related
Type wikileaks into youtube or google and countless more results come up.
Anyways, let me know what you think.
-Lukas
"Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain."
ReplyDelete"The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of "The Iraq War Logs", the world's previously largest classified information release)."
"Key figures:
* 15, 652 secret
* 101,748 confidential
* 133,887 unclassified "
Only 837 documents out of 251,287 have been released so far by Wikileaks.
Source: http://213.251.145.96/cablegate.html