Tuesday, November 30, 2010

All Hail the Wikileaks

Because I have my finger to the pulse, I've had wikileaks bookmarked for several years now, but it's certainly been exploding lately. Up now, a giant leak of international diplomacy documents, most of which are pretty damning.

The article linked above hits some of the highlights, but most of them shouldn't be too surprising if you follow the news. You see, it turns out many world leaders may not do the things they say publicly but may (gasp!) do all sorts of shady things when they think no one's paying attention.

But even bigger than the leaks themselves are the reaction of the American press to them. While you could guess politicians wouldn't be too happy about them, as Glenn Greenwald points out, you might think the press would be interested in somebody doing their job for them. But that's not the case after all -- instead it seems most members of the mainstream press are incredulous that someone dare ever release information about our government. As Greenwald horrifyingly points out, when they finally received them, the New York Times -- you know the supposed investigative journalists who hold the government accountable -- made sure to run everything past the government (and censor what they were told to) before printing.

Because why would a free press ever run anything without government consent? That's just crazy! Man, it's a good thing we don't have censorship here, unlike all those scary countries without our beloved Freedoms™.

Oh, and don't forget to keep your eyes posted for more from those wikileaks rapscallions, as they've hinted they have a good deal of sensitive information on major banks and other financial institutions in the US...

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