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Point Park Globe

Point Park University's Student-Run Newspaper

Point Park Globe

Point Park University's Student-Run Newspaper

Point Park Globe

Are Wikileaks essential to a free republic?

When Wikileaks saw the light for the first time in the early months of 2007, its ambition was a game changer. It set out as a volunteer collaboration between dissidents, journalists, entrepreneurs and engineers all over the glove to be an untraceable, legally invulnerable and uncensorable medium for leaked – and sometimes classified – information from government sources. It provides a safe harbor for whistleblowers to dump documents they feel have a place within the spectrum of legitimate public concern – and within its short lifetime, Wikileaks shed light on several high-level cases, including the U.S. Army’s Guantánamo Bay procedures guide.

Rupert Wright of Abu Dhabi newspaper The National went as far to say that “Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years.”

If that claim hasn’t blown you back, it should.

Wikileaks isn’t just a Web site – it’s one of the harbingers of a new philosophy of knowledge dissemination. Once data is put out there on the Internet, it is backed up, mirrored and digested almost immediately. Before, governments could step in and block the publishing of leaked data in newspapers or in broadcasts. Now, once the content is published online, it can never be censored again. It’s out there, and it’s going to stay out there.

It’s a crown jewel in the effort to democratize sensitive information and is an essential tool to maintain a democratic society – and it’s taking root as you read this, whether you like it or not.

But let’s face it: leaks are nothing new. In the news media, leaks are an important facet in the process of gathering groundbreaking news – that’s how anybody knew about Valerie Plame in the first place.

The site adds nothing new to the importance of leaked information. We still need leaks to inform the public of what goes on under its tax-funded surface – and we still need leaks to bring need-to-know information that will be classified for many, many years to light. The use of the Internet to leak this kind of information isn’t a new thing, either. What Wikileaks adds to the concept is an incredibly important layer of parity and transparency that keeps critical information accessible, even through legal turbulence. These are layers not always present in traditional news media.

In 2008, a California judge successfully litigated on behalf of the Bank Julius Baer, a bank in Switzerland. Wikileaks had previously hosted a leak of evidence that the Swiss bank had been arranging trust accounts in the Cayman Islands for clients. The judge ruled that Wikileaks main domain name, Wikileaks.org, was to be disabled. Though the ‘.org’ domain was shut down, Wikileaks was still accessible from one of its many other Web addresses. Even in China, where the site is actively filtered, Wikileaks could still be accessed from nondescript sources.

Wikileaks is arranged in what is known as a ‘bulletproof hosting’ plan. This means that the site is maintained by people in undisclosed locations, encrypted to military-grade specifications and keeps no logs of its activity. This is what powers Wikileaks to be a monolith of anonymity – and what keeps it steadily afloat.

The Church of Scientology is an organization that will readily sue any person, organization or Web site that publishes the religious texts usually reserved for its inner cloister. They won’t always win cases, but will happily challenge anybody to a legal endurance race – and win. Many of the religious texts of the Church of Scientology were released through Wikileaks in April of 2007. When the Church threatened with litigation, Wikileaks responded by releasing several thousand more pages of restricted materials.

When an organization like this can stand up to a multi-billion dollar challenger like the Church of Scientology, that’s a sign of an important institution. It’s a sign that it’s becoming harder and harder to regulate something as fundamental as information. Although it might blink in and out of existence due to funding, Wikileaks, and its philosophy of freedom of right-to-know information, is here to stay – and that’s good for the people and the press alike.

As Thomas Jefferson once said, “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

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