What About Wikileaks?

Here's a video (from the UK's Guardian newspaper) of supporters rallying in Australia:



Personally, I lie in the nuanced middle. The release by Wikileaks of videos kept secret by the US military about the deaths of a Reuters photojournalists and Iraqi civilians is reprehensible and I applaud Wikileaks for releasing this info.

I'm happy to fight for more transparency in government, but I don't believe that releasing diplomatic correspondence or military communications is the way to get "more open government".

On the other hand, it is outrageous that the US government is manipulating things to shut down Wikileaks servers, to shut down payment systems servicing Wikileaks, and to bullying the Swedish authorities (and Britain) into extradicting Julian Assange to Sweden from which he can then be whisked off to the US. And the idea that the US is going to indict Assange for "espionage" is completely bizarre. He's a middleman passing on information. He didn't "spy" on anything. If he is a "spy" then every media outlet in the US are spies, all government people and legislators are "spies" because they handle government "information" without explicit permission to read, talk about, write on, or deal with this information. Nutty!

Meanwhile, attacks on businesses by "supporters" of Julian Assange seem to me to simply be confusing the situation by mixing in quasi-criminal activity into an issue of free speech rights and policies on secrecy.