It's not ironic, this was one of the points for me "writing them off". Wikileaks reponse to inquiry about their financial matters was basicaly "none of your business" and since then I see them as Assange's personal PR tool, nothing more, despite the claims.
Before jumping in quick judgement you guys should be aware that giving away such information will simply generate a lot of attack vectors by those who want to take down wikileaks.
I'm not even saying I agree or disagree with wikileaks itself, but heck, considering the amount of pressure they get from everywhere, giving away information about how they spend their money would be plain stupid and would take them down in a eyeblink. Just two cents.
The key difference of course is that they are not a government. If you knew the slightest about Assange you would realize that he has always been a campion of individual privacy, while he at the same Itime attacks the privacy of nations and nation sized organizations.
It takes some seriously warped logic to see hypocrisy in this, but hell, americas seem to think corporations are people, so I guess I shouldn't be that suprised.
You seem to think the term "privacy" (i) can be applied to large organizations such as governments, and (ii) it bears a significant resemblance with an individual's privacy. I can understand (i) (though I would prefer the word "secrecy"), but you really really need to explain (ii).
By the way, even if (ii) is correct, it makes little matter, because of the power balance. As Chomsky often points out, when the powerful obtain information about the powerless, they gain even more power over them than the powerless would have gained over the powerful from similar information. Which means that a more "open" society, with less privacy for individuals and less secrecy from trusts and governments, will inevitably tip the power balance even further.
It is just unreasonable to treat state (and corporate) secrecy and individual privacy the same way. Assange may be a hypocrite, but on this particular issue, he's clean.
Yes, yes it does. What if Wikileaks is taking especially large donations from powerful interests and chooses to censor its output as a result?
To say that transparency only applies to governments is to miss the whole point of transparency. If that is indeed Wikileaks' position as you say, then they've missed the point from the get-go.
No, it doesn't. If you don't support Wikileaks you can choose not to donate money.
You can't choose not to pay your taxes (at least without breaking the law). You can choose the kind of politicians you vote, but again, those politicians may choose to do something else with your money when they have the power.
If you do support WL, and believe in what they have achieved so far, I think that it's wise to trust them, given the amount of criticism they face from almost every government in the world. I haven't read about any government denying anything that was published, but I've read a lot about those governments trying to censor what is published. So, who's the censor here?
In his "60 Minutes" interview, Assange acknowledged that governments and corporations have privacy rights as well. His position is that Wikileaks provides a way for whistle-blowers to publicize information that they feel is being ignored or suppressed by the authorities within the organization.
In other words, he describes Wikileaks as a last-resort channel for addressing institutional wrong-doing.
