Dec 03 2010
Is WikiLeaks Good for Democracy?
Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial website WikiLeaks, is now wanted by the International Criminal Police Organization or Interpol for sexual assault charges in Sweden. Assange is in hiding in the UK and is expected to be arrested by British authorities soon. It is unclear if the British government will extradite him to Sweden, the US, or Australia, his home country. However, both of the women Assange that had sexual contact in August have said in interviews that their encounters with him were completely consensual. Mark Stephens, Assange’s lawyer, has described the charges as being a “cynical smear campaign” by the Swedish government in collaboration with the US. Here in the US earlier this week, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Pentagon has launched a criminal investigation into the latest document release on WikiLeaks, invoking the rarely-used Espionage Act. Amazon.com, which had temporarily hosted the website, withdrew its services. Additionally, after a series of intense cyber attacks against Wikileaks.org, the California based company EveryDNS, dropped the site’s domain, saying the attacks were endangering their other clients. Wikileaks has now effectively lost its domain name and can currently be found online at www.wikileaks.ch, a Swiss domain name. The New York based organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) issued a statement on November 30 that supports the actions of the controversial website Wikileaks, saying that the release of classified and top-secret US documents on the internet is “good for democracy.”
GUEST: Bill Quigley, Legal Director of Center for Constitutional Rights
Find out more at www.ccrjustice.org and read Quigley’s article here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/30-8
2 Responses to “Is WikiLeaks Good for Democracy?”
Fact: Secrets are hard to keep. Cork out of the bottle. post-it-all 1-to:world. Yous school or corporate emails? Problem ? Just as much the printed book once was. Main question: what’s next: E-Power to the people. Maybe it is good thing, because together we can control what no government can (ie. the global society we need to survive) Technology is a thread, it always was.. it always was unstoppable. However we NEED it to survive. So live with this and let’s discuss it
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