A good point from Hugo Rifkind in the Times (£), on Wikileaks – targeting Hillary Clinton while autocratic regimes across the world carry on as usual:
Some forms of government, also, are inevitably leakier than others. Do you think officials send each other dangerous, indiscreet, chatty emails in Russia? In Erdogan’s Turkey? In China, Saudi Arabia or Iran? To gossip with confidence, the stakes have to be low. You have to live somewhere, in other words, that is fairly open already.
Journalism is not activism, and it is not the duty of any hack or hacker — even Assange — to save politicians from themselves. All the same, considering the grisly state of the world today, with its Trumps and Putins aplenty, it is simply perverse for the supposed freedom evangelists of WikiLeaks to have positioned themselves as a thorn in the side of Hillary Clinton. Yet those who today call the organisation a tool of Russia, or even a tool of Trump, miss the vital point that it doesn’t even need to be.
For any western liberal, ten years on, the WikiLeaks experiment should have been a worrying one. Do we really believe in maximum transparency? After all? Or are we starting to realise that an insistence on openness mainly hurts those already more open than most, the countries full of officials who behave pretty much like the people they represent, warts and all? Meanwhile the bad guys watch, with fists still clenched, and can’t quite believe their luck.
It's the same story with those relentless critics of the US or Israel, who stay silent on somewhere like China: so much easier to go for the open societies where all the hard work of digging up the information has already been done for you. Tibet? Forget it. How many killed or in prison? No one knows. The latest atrocity? They keep quiet about it. Stick to the Palestinians, where you only have to open Haaretz, say, to read about the latest (supposed) Israeli crimes.
Mick Hartley 
Leave a comment