The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Assange says that “Wikileaks’ goal is to create “a world where companies and government must keep the public, or their employees, or both, happy with their plans and behavior”. He believes that secrecy cannot be justified, due to the fact that systems themselves are unjust. Wikileaks and Assange represent a mindset and security threat to the United States. Assange states that there is a censorship in the West and he says that it is a problem. He says that it is used to legitimize the censorship in various other countries.

This is an excuse for abuses among other countries. These countries are countries that follow the mutual law that were used by the British. Libel law is used in African countries to imprison journalists. He quotes Alexandr Solzhenitsyn who was Russian philosopher, where Solzhenitsyn says, “in the right moment one word of truth outweighs the world”. What Solzhenitsyn was getting at is he was referring to a world of lies.

Assange says that in the West particularly, one video that is classified can stop a war.

He tried to create an organization that gathered censored, restricted material, and material that would achieve political reform. They have become the “publisher of last resort”. They route information through countries to take over laws that are formed in those countries in order to have protection and source publishing. He put over one million new records into the already old records. Assange quotes Steven Orwell’s 1984 novel “who controls the past controls the future”. What this initially means who controls the internet servers essentially controls the intellectual record.

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Assange is saying that there are sites that are unable to be traced and that is due to the fact that they have been permanently deleted, he says that this is controlling our own perceptions of who we are as a people, and by controlling this it is controlling the laws and regulations we have passed into society. Assange gives examples of how there are over 300 gag orders in place to prevent the press itself from reporting on corruption on abuse. He says that censorship itself is not only used as a mechanism by the state rather it is something that can be hijacked by big companies. This is through the process of coercive mechanisms of the state through judicial systems. There is unequal access to this judicial system which is through these patronage networks in order to have material removed permanently the historical records.

Looking at the paths of countries, we see that Assange asks a question of the United States, which had a tradition of freedom of the press, “is it really holding those values anymore?”. He answers his own question with: if we do not have these Western Countries as an encouragement values, what countries are left? Assange highlights. Assange gives an example from World War II in regard to the Nazi’s, where they put this statement on the concentration camps “work brings freedom”. Exposing documents by Assange include abuses by the United States military in general. These include, manuals for prison camps, like Abu Gharib. These camps had a slogan that mean to defend freedom. The slogan “defense of freedom” is on the front of Guantanamo Bay, he is correlating this to World War II.

Assange calls this a perversion of truth that is worse work brings freedom as seen in WWII. The West itself needs to be aware of this perversion of freedom. They are to understand that the Alliance that preexisted before our time, between liberals, libertarians as well as the military industrial complex that opposed Soviet abuses, is not here anymore. Assange says that the press and others are in association with those who opposed the Soviet Union, for geopolitical reasons. This alliance was to morally beat these so-called abuses of the Soviet Union and relating this to censorship. He says that this alliance since 1991 is long gone. There is now a split and reversion back to different kind of standard one of natural interests of these authorities, natural interests of intelligence agencies and the natural interests of the military is now in close reportage of abuses. This reversion is now be reasserted into Western countries.

What Wikileaks strives to do is to build a historical and intellectual record of how civilization is supposed to work. He says that all of their decisions, political decisions are based upon what they know. throughout every country. What they have can be replaced and destroys quickly. They know everything and what it is supposed to be. Assange says that it is impossible for us to know where we are unless we know where are going first. It’s impossible to correct these abuses unless they know exactly what is going on with those said abuses. He says that “secret planning” is secret for a reason.

However, I do not feel that Assange is correct in this matter, by saying that secret abusive plans are opposed. Abuses should not be seen as opposed while withholding secrets is not right and using those secrets to destroy companies is not correct. It is up to the company to decide what is abusive and what is not; not an organization that is revealing secrets that could potentially harm the company. According to Ghillyer he specifically defines when whistleblowing becomes an issue as stated here: “when there is evidence that the employee is motivated by the opportunity for financial gain or media attention or that the employee is carrying out an individual vendetta against the company, then the legitimacy of the act of whistle-blowing must be questioned.” It is clear to say that there is evidence that is unethical in my opinion in reference to Assange’s illegal leaking of documentations.

Looking at the 2016 campaign during Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, Assange’s organization “WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton.”. This was a clear use of top-secret information that affected Hillary Clintons campaign due to the reporting of it by multiple media outlets. Overall the title of the conference being titled “The Whistleblower” was a good title being that the Wikileaks organization was flooding the servers and other records with new records, under secrecy. This in my opinion is unethical and I do agree with Ghillyer that it does become a problem when an organization has a vendetta against another company, so it is safe to say that Assange had a vendetta.

References

1. Assange, J. (2020). WikiLeaks – Hillary Clinton Email Archive. Retrieved 13 June 2020, from https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/
2. Ghillyer, Andrew. Business Ethics Now (p. 145). McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Kindle Edition.
3. Sterner, E. (2011). Wikileaks and Cyberspace Cultures in Conflict. Retrieved 14 June 2020, from https://www.arifyildirim.com/ilt510/eric.sterner.pdf