What is WikiLeaks?!
Before this week and the release of thousands of classified reports about the war in Afghanistan, you never heard of WikiLeaks. Now you’ve heard it but you still don’t know what it is. Dinner Topics to the rescue!
WikiLeaks is a website (wikileaks.org) which lets people anonymously submit documents and reports that were previously classified. Special focus is paid on the “anonymous” part, giving submitters the ability to do such things as… post confidential war documents without consent. The site is run by an organization in Sweden and is treated in wiki-fashion, in that anyone can submit material. Some additional controls have been put in place since the site’s origin, however, so now only documents regarded as important will be cleared for submission. In other words, a spurned lover can no longer post his/her significant other’s credit card statement rife with hotel charges. Directly from WikiLeaks.org:
“For online submissions, all a whistleblower needs to do is upload the document and specify the language, country and industry of origin, likely audience, reasons for leaking and approaches to verification.
All documents go into queue to obscure the date and time of their acquisition, and are then assessed by our editors to see if they fit our editorial criteria. Internally the document is distributed to backup servers immediately.” 1
Editors review the submission and determine if it is worthy of making public on the site. It’s a fascinating topic because the issue of anonymity raises plenty of debatable pros and cons. On one side, a whistleblower making a moral attempt at outing a wrong is safely protected. On the other side, people with ulterior motives can sabotage a mission/company/organization without punishment, not to mention the questionable freedom of legally submitting a document which may have been obtained illegally. It’s a great topic, and one more debate you can now bring with you tonight wherever you may be headed.
Read on:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment