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- Age 31
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- Seen Jan 8, 2013
Wikileaks and Julian Assange
Wikileaks, for those not in the know, is a whistle-blower website that publishes confidential "leaks" (secret government documents) online in order to bring important news and otherwise hidden information to the public. The website has stirred up a furore among both governments and the people. Most governments, including those of US and Australian, condemn the actions of the website and its leader, Australian citizen Julian Assange, with some politicians even going as far as to suggest he should be executed (Sarah Palin) or his passport possibly cancelled (PM of Australia Julia Gillard).
Recently he's been charged in Sweden with a crime called "secret rape", which doesn't exist in many other countries, but put simply, whether this crime is serious or not isn't really important. What's important is that he's being held in isolation in London after turning himself into the police facing extradition to Sweden to face charges. Many believe this is just the US government's way of eventually bringing him to America to face charges.
So basically guys, there's a big debate going about whether Wikileaks is moral or not. Wikileaks have released many documents on the Afghan War, for example the video earlier this year that showed a US Army helicopter firing on two journalists and others which stirred a whole lot of controversy. On the other hand, some documents have allegedly given away many strategic plans and locations of soldiers fighting terrorists in the Middle East. So on one hand you have people going "the government shouldn't be able to keep the fact that some of their soldiers shot innocent civilians" and arguing that all of these leaks are important to keep the power with the people and governments responsible, whereas others argue that these leaks are harmful and the website needs to be shut down. Currently there are close to a million documents leaked.
The website is currently struggling as many companies such as Paypal and Mastercard have stopped letting their users donate to Wikileaks and many of the web hosting servers they were on have either cut them off or been shut down.
(Not all documents are necessarily about the war though, like for example one was a document which revealed the planned internet blacklist proposed by the Australian government a while back, which revealed that on that list was a Queensland dentist and a dog-boarding kennel, meaning the blacklist was going to block out stuff it wasn't meant to (one of the reasons why so many people were against the internet censorship).)
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tl;dr What are your opinions on Wikileaks? What do you think of Julian Assange's current predicament? Do you believe that it's a threat to international security that these documents are leaked, or do you reckon that the government needs to be kept honest and responsible?