—By David Kushner
Tue Apr. 6, 2010 12:21 PM PDT
... When I contacted the impressive figures listed on its advisory board, some didn't know they were mentioned on the site or had little idea how they got there. Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, a former representative of the Dalai Lama, recalls getting a cryptic email from WikiLeaks a few years ago, but says he never agreed to be an advisor. Noam Chomsky is listed as a volunteer administrator of the WikiLeaks Facebook group. This is news to him. "I know nothing about it," he says ...
WikiLeaks' stance that all leaks are good leaks and its disregard for the established protocols for verifying them also alarms some journalists. The site suffers from "a distorted sense of transparency," according to Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "They're giving you everything they've got, but when journalists go through process of granting someone confidentiality, when they do it well, they determine that source has good information and that the source is somehow deserving of confidentiality." Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, thinks WikiLeaks' approach gives fresh ammunition to those who seek to pressure journalists to cough up the names of their unnamed sources. She forbids her staff from using the site as a source ...
Assange's efforts have undeniably had an impact, but whether that impact has been entirely positive is debatable. Not long after Assange claims he was targeted in Kenya, WikiLeaks published a report from the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights linking the national police to the torture and death of 500 young men suspected of opposition activity. The Kenyan government had buried the report, but after WikiLeaks published it, the Sunday Times of London picked up the story, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Execution called for Kenya's attorney general and police commissioner to be fired.
WikiLeaks paid a price for its coup. Two Kenyan human rights activists were assassinated in broad daylight—the result, Assange says, of their links to the leaking of the report. The problem, he says, was not that WikiLeaks failed to protect their identities but that they "weren't acting in an anonymous way." Assange might be accused of a similar disregard for security—after all, he'd traveled to Nairobi after WikiLeaks' first big Kenyan leak. Nevertheless, Assange says there's been a concerted campaign to silence him and his collaborators, vaguely citing an "ambush" of a colleague last year. (He's since described it as an encounter with a "'James Bond' character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere 'we think it would be in your interest to…'"
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/04/wikileaks-julian-assange-iraq-video?page=1
Just dumping a shitload of stuff without knowing what you're doing isn't a favor to anybody. And as the Kenyan case suggests, it might get people killed
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