Government integrity has sprung a couple of wikileaks (Week 9 Blog)

I suspect I'm going to get a lot of grief about the title for this one, but it's the best I can do at 2am.

Last month Wikileaks released the cables that it was holding, giving everyone access to the content provided that they could download it. Most of these are fairly innocent in nature or contain nothing of any any interest. However others are the exact opposite, containing information that is damning and has great political and economic implications.

There has been some speculation however as to whether this is the best method of delivering the information to the public. The matter is complex and requires some unpacking before it can be properly addressed.

First and foremost to be considered is that the information had no other avenue of being released for the public. Previous cases such as the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike involving the deaths of Reuters journalists,  have demonstrated that freedom of information acts do not always get the desired details and that without Wikileaks this would most likely have remained buried. The main avenues that people use for dissemination of news as well, such as media organizations like Al-Jazeera have been shown within these cables to be complicit with US government requests to filter their coverage of events.

So in this sense it can be stated that there is some information that will not be distributed to the public unless Wikileaks steps in and so it can be described as performing an important social function, the fourth estate.

The second common idea on the topic and one against Wikileaks is that the information puts people in danger when they are undercover and also in the middle of military operations.

This is a very interesting point that some people make, in that if we try to research corruption we may instead be endangering the lives of others. But if this is the case, we have to ask what type of situation are we dealing with? To me it appears to be nothing more than a hostage situation in that a corrupt government can hide their deeds in such a way that uncovering them may endanger innocent lives.

But to argue the ethics of hostage situations is not the point of this blog and would serve as nothing more than a distraction from the topic at hand. These two points are for me the crux of the issue and for many others as well. But here’s the interesting thing – neither of these states that corruption isn’t occurring, isn’t in itself endangering lives or other things that we value but is an argument about whether the public should know about it.

Overall I would state that some people are going to be worse off because of Wikileaks – mainly company directors, politicians and other world figures. There will of course be some individuals at risk but mostly it will be the criminals and others that are revealed and in this sense I would like to think that the risks are worth it and that Wikileaks serves a vital social function.