Everyone is up in arms about Bradley Manning, the guy who leaked footage of the 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad. Apparently much worse than the attack footage, he has allegedly delivered thousands of classified State Department cables to Wikileaks. The Pentagon worries that the publication of these cables could negatively impact national security.
Perhaps that's so, but perhaps it doesn't have to be so. What if not only U.S. cables were published, but radicals in every country published their cables? Then everyone would know everything, and it seems to me that there would be no security issue. So what if the world knows that the U.S. is engaged in some secret and probably illegal operation? The world would also know that every country is doing the same thing. This excerpt from the article grabs my attention:
Manning took credit for having leaked a classified diplomatic cable that has already appeared on the site—a memo prepared by the United States embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland, that described a meeting there between American and Icelandic officials over that country’s banking meltdown.
See, I'm not so sure that anyone should be having secret meetings that concern the lives of millions of people. (Yes, there are only a few hundred thousand living there, but their economy has effects beyond their borders.) It seems to me that transparent government is exactly what we need in the world today. No more secrets. Let everyone see what everyone else is doing. Make it really hard for shady deals to take place. I think that Wikileaks is a huge step in the right direction for humanity.
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Interesting idea- more transparency and more information seems to be the direction we are moving whether we like it or not- so we might as well adjust to it.
ReplyDeleteCJ