Wednesday, December 08, 2010

A quick comment I made over here.

People always complain that wikileaks is secretive, has no accountability and acts like a law unto itself. But wikileaks is entirely dependent on people of conscience being willing to leak to it, and gets a great deal of its legitimacy from working closely with mainstream newspapers.

If wikileaks stopped doing a good job, important leaks would almost immediately stop flowing to it.

And if some rogue troublemakers still leaked mere tittle-tattle, then papers like The Guardian and New York Times would soon distance themselves from it.

Compare those two powerful checks and balances to the very weak checks and balances that any institution now exerts over the US and UK governments and I can tell you which I feel safer with.

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