dobbers wear nappies? Wikileaks

“This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.”
― Slavoj Žižek

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/wikileaks?auto_login_attempted=true

Dobbers wear nappies, wet ones too…..

Personally I believe that whether Julian Assange is a whistle blower, activist, terrorist or hacktivist depends entirely on who you are. If you are a government official, I would think Mr Assange was a terrorist. He displayed secret information which could have jepordised the lives of many military personnel. If you were a journalist, I would imagine you would think of Mr Assange as a whistle blower, people like him expose information that is so newsworthy it has made history.

I think that sitting here in my home behind a computer screen indicates I am not fully aware of the entire wiki leaks saga. My initial first reaction was disgust. How could army personnel, highly trained, gun down innocent civilians for no reason. Then I thought to myself, “I wonder if that was really the way it went down?” Of course we saw the video, we saw what happened right? There were muslim men standing on a street corner, possibly talking about the weather, and the army officers gunned them down. This must be what happened because the video showed it.

One of the very first things I learnt while studying at university is to critically analyse everything! How do we know that’s what happened? Maybe someone could have doctored the videos into one clip making it seem like all those terrible things happened. It’d make for an excellent news story right?

I think the government needs someone watching them, otherwise who would stop them from doing whatever they wanted? Wouldn’t that change them into a dictatorship eventually? If there are no consequences for your actions, what would you do? I’d like to think that I’m a nice person, but let’s be honest; If you could fly to Hawaii for free and have a luxury holiday all expenses paid just by claiming it was a ‘business trip’ and you knew no one would question you about it, would you do it? I’d like to say no, but the reality is unless we have boundaries in life, we don’t know when to stop. Wikileaks is the boundary to the government, they know people are watching, like big brother... (insert da dum da dum scary music here).