Wednesday 1 December 2010

Wiki wiki

Philip Stephens of the FT (courtesy Business Day) has the best take on the latest Wikileaks 'cables' debate. His punchline, for me anyway, is that having this information in the public domain will a) bruise some egos but not make international politics any harder or easier, and b) should knock some foreign policy moralisers, idealists, and activists off their high horses, for a little while at least.

4 comments:

Greg said...

I cant work out what i think about the whole wikileaks thing. I mean i applaud the 'keep the bastards honest' philosophy, but Wikileaks seems intent on only harming the US. The latest leaks were nonsense, nothing more than diplomatic blushes- so why bother? All the talk of bringing down a major US bank is worrying. To what end? Whats your point? There an anarchic overtone to the whole thing that i find disturbing, and to be honest, i kind of support the idea of a country's secret service being able to keep their own secrets. The USandA suck but they're better than the alternative...

Dr Phil said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dr Phil said...

Getting hawkish in your old age there Grek...

Turns out I completely agree. For once. It does seem to me that some people consider the mere act of 'leaking' classified information - whatever that information may be - important. These are the conspiracy theory kids, anarchists, idealists and moralists. Me when I was 21.

As I've grown older though, I've come to apprecite the value of good editors and good investigative newspapers. Being able to intelligently filter, analyse, repackage, and summarise this sort of 'explosive material' - or choose to barely write about it all - is an extremely valuable skill.

Greg said...

Ja, i agree. The whole concept seems so poorly thought through... Their website is full of hippy rubbish about free and open access to information, but doesn't seem to tackle questions about public airing of stolen documents or simple right to privacy. Of course governments are accountable to their citizens, but citizens allowed the governments to keep secrets, so who is to blame, really? This Robin Hood imagery is a bit fanciful, if you ask me.

I'm quite surprised that Assange has played this game so naively. As a 'pioneer of the new publishing paradigm', he hasnt played the established media very well - I expect a big backlash in the next few weeks...