Julian Lassange
I hear a lot of people, in the press and in the government, saying bad things about Julian Lassange. They’re talking about lawsuits. They’re saying he endangered America (well, first off, since he’s not American, that’s not really his lookout, is it?), that he has risked lives, all sorts of horrible things. I think Lassange is a hero, and someday the whole world will. I’m convinced of that.
Here’s what he did: His organization, Wikileaks (which consists of about 9 people, plus their site is open to the public, or was, that might not be true any more) has just published a few hundred pages of classified U.S. government documents. It’s not the first time they’ve done this. They blew the whistle on U.S. troops murdering civilians in Iraq, and have quite a few successes like that under their belts.
What was in the documents, at first, doesn’t seem like anything earth shaking. Back and forth e-mails between U.S. diplomats. That Karzai is sure a crook, amirite? Berlusconi’s got a fat ass. Stuff like that. There may be some substance buried deep within this pile of recorded thought-verbiage, 200,000+ is a lot of pages and I’d say it’s as likely that we’ll find a smoking gun among them as that we will find intelligent life somewhere on the next 200,000 planets we check.
In any event, governments concealing facts is not good. It’s never been good. For the last 10,000 years ago, ever since some ignorant, short sighted son of a bitch invented the world’s first government, they’ve been pulling this secrecy bullshit. Look where it’s gotten us.
It’s time to do things a different way.
They should make the government into a reality show, cameras on those sleazy weasels 24/7, make them show their work, keep checklists and, above all, they can be automatically thrown off the show for talking with lobbyists.
In this fast changing internet age, sad to say, privacy is dead. The flip side to that, the beautiful, beautiful flip side to that is that secrecy is dead, too.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
I think the leaders should not lower themselves to making personal insults toward others about issues they cannot help…appearance, etc. If these leaders would sit down like grown-ups, voice national issues and opinions face to face instead of acting like kids in a school yard playing ‘tag’ and whispering plots…..our world and the peace process would actually move forward toward a better condition.
While Washington politicians are disparaging Lassange in public, I think they must be doing high fives behind closed doors. Suddenly the worlds bad boys are finding themselves feeling far more isolated than they did before. China would like to give Kim Jung II a good paddling, Ahmadinejad’s neighbors would like to kick him out of the sand box, etc. Hmmmm. While the US takes the heat and hatred for being the world’s top cop, it would seem they actually have considerable foreign government support in that role. Suddenly less sure of himself, Ahmadinejad now claims WikiLeaks is a US government conspiracy. Sweet! Can’t you just see the high fives going on in Washington?!
As to the less than diplomatic remarks in the docs about other world leaders and diplomats behind their backs…..we’re all human and at the end of the day, if we’re honest, we’ve all been catty at one time or another. Hilary Clinton has heard this back from one of her counterparts….. “Don’t worry about it; you should see what we say about YOU.” That about says it in a nutshell. The worlds politicians know we’re all the same in this regard and thus this will be old and boring news very quickly.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2010/12/the-hazards-of-nerd-supremacy-the-case-of-wikileaks/68217/
“One problem is that information in oceanic magnitudes can confuse and confound as easily as it can clarify and empower, even when the information is correct. There is vastly more financial data set down in the world’s computers than there ever has been before, including publically accessible data, and yet the economy is a mess. How can this be, if information is the solution?”
More and more the masses are responding with a collective yawn, desensitized by too much information.