Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The latest edition of WikiLeaks: voyeurism by an anarchist

I am far from impressed with what has been reported from the latest WikiLeaks dump.  "Pentagon Papers" this aint.  I am all the more convinced now that Assange and WikiLeaks are, at best, hacker anarchists.  There is nothing particularly bad at being an anarchist.  But, pretending that this is all in the public interest and nothing but, and the world's papers going along with that song is, well, like the warm piss on oneself on a cold day!

I like what Spiked has:

This idea that the publication of private conversations and communications is in the public interest – whether it’s done by tabloids or by sanctimonious candidates for the next Pulitzer Prize – is a self-serving attempt to present voyeurism as an important public duty. It is not unlike the claims made by reality TV producers, who frequently argue that their tawdry offerings ‘raise awareness’ and serve the ‘public interest’.
How is the public interest served by the purposeless leaking of information? Since when has it been obligatory for institutions to expose their private deliberations to everyone on the internet? Has the public learnt something important from all this? Has some wrong been put right by the mass dumping of communiqués on to the world wide web? Or is this really a case of the narrow interests of the news organisations involved getting confused with the interests of the public?

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