Monte Sonnenberg’s piece on Wikileaks (“With friends like these, who needs enemies?”, Dec 7) walks a curious tightrope. More people have laid eyes on the leaked diplomatic cables through The Guardian, The New York Times and the Washington Post than through the original Wikileaks site itself, but he is not calling for their chief editors to be waterboarded at Gitmo. What gives?
The howling and hysteria over the leaked cables is every bit as much a danger to the establishment media as it is to the fragile ego and careers of high ranking political leaders. Neither seem to be able to decide whether the content is trivial and petty chatter between diplomats, or a lethal compromise of national security priorities. The “innocent lives placed in danger” is a perfect diversion from the real threat posed by Wikileaks; a pattern where governments everywhere have their sanctity and legitimacy stripped away, and the eventual (and predictable) attempt to achieve information lockdown, which is ultimately impossible in a networked, digital age. And of course, as Mr. Sonnenberg unwittingly reminds us, a desperate effort by archaic institutions to maintain their hallowed role as protected gatekeepers of our knowledge of the world.
One crucial aspect of a free and open society, Mr. Sonnenberg, is the right of people to decide for themselves when and if their government can keep secrets, and why. Perhaps if the mainstream media aspired to something more significant than stenographers of the political class, Wikileaks and the underground media culture would not be rendering them obsolete.
