In an opinion piece in The Guardian published on Monday 6 December under the headline Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice, columnist John Naughton writes that Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster, and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger:
The intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.
This is an excellent piece which highlights the hypocrisy of governments that extol the virtues of openness, and the timidity of the internet service providers who have so easily fallen into line with the US Government and suddenly discovered that WikiLeaks and/or Julian Assange are in violation of the terms of their agreement. These admirable companies seem to have made no such discovery so far in relation to the major newspapers that have published the material to a far larger audience than would ever access the WikiLeaks website, and in a far more accessible form.
Read the piece in full here.
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