What’s Really Wrong with WikiLeaks

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The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say.

The dissolution of the distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of totalitarianism. Opening and reading other people’s e-mails is not different in principle from opening and reading other people’s letters. In effect, WikiLeaks has assumed the role of censor to the world, a role that requires an astonishing moral grandiosity and arrogance to have assumed. Even if some evils are exposed by it, or some necessary truths aired, the end does not justify the means.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal, the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of Not with a Bang but a Whimper and other books.

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  • http://www.mysapce.com/freddawes1776/ Fred Dawes

    The system is coming apart what WILL replace this system will be real evil, people are people and all hate each other for many reasons the same can and has been said about wikileaks it is a burning rage government has inside ITS own system that want's to control and will.
    What is really wrong with wikileaks nothing. Face facts our real privacy is long disappeared from all nation states and with that has come the police state, some say we our not a police state ask the people who have been shot down like dogs inside the so called USA, This nation is dead nad it died long ago you can say no to that but just get something on the cops or some political people who are not In a desired/ favorite political place with the big boys and see what will happen.

    soon your political people will only want you to get in line for the prison state and all of you will, some may not and that will be the end of any who say no.

  • Humbug

    If they see no need for secrecy, who are all thier members and where are their websites hosted? No need to hide. Information just wants to be free! /sarc

  • tagalog

    Maybe Wikileaks can find and disclose President Obama's birth certificate!

  • Don from BC

    "A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say."

    Vestiges of doublethink and thoughtcrime methinks.

  • Tim in MN

    The goal of Wikileaks has nothing to do with government transparency and everything to do with bringing down western civilization. And of course the personal cowardice of its founder. Notice that only America has been targeted. Why? Because he knows if he went after any other country he would become the victim of a terible tragedy or just simply disappeared. I'm sure Assange would love to go after Israel if he wasn't afraid of Mossad. He probably could go after Britain with impunity but the Brit's secrets are under the control of adults and harder to get at than ours.