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It just keeps rolling on.....and getting bigger and bigger

The WiliLeaks / Assange saga continues and grows by the hour. It is almost impossible to keep up to date as events unfold. One thing seems almost beyond question......the people are behind and with Assange and the leaks which have come from WikiLeaks, whilst the politicians appear beside themselves. Confected outrage or not, the pollies seem out of sync with popular opinion.

The ramifications of all the aspects of the WikiLeaks and now the arrest of Assange are ever-widening. A selection, below, of various topical commentary from here and there.

  • Richard Ackland, well-known lawyer, writing in "WikiLeaks opens the door to a new enlightenment" the SMH
"What is of lasting significance is that politicians and captains of industry and even the courts have lost the power to control the way information is drip-fed in their self-interest. That was the way it was done in the old world. Journalists grasped at snippets and morsels to assist the insider in some undeclared agenda. This new world represents as big a change for journalism as it does for the rest of the established order.

To use a horrid, new age expression, journalists have been ''disintermediated''. They are now required to distil and present information that has been obtained and published by another source. We see much the same thing happening in the world of ''open media'', also known as social media. This runs in a parallel stream with mainstream media, but pays no heed to usual restraints or conventions."

Meanwhile, "the man" himself, Assange, can be read in an op-ed piece by him "Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomortable truths" in today's Australian newspaper, here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Wikileak is more change Obama can imaging. We NEED transparency for our global society that we created an cannot control.To many crises. Would we have gone to Iraq over Weapons of mass destruction is we could read the cables first ? Climate Summit ? Redesign our 200 years old political system now. How can a few wise people understand these complex global issues pending ? How can we survive ? Shutting down WL is naive. At least the cork out of the bottle. Fact is that secrets are harder to keep anno 2010. Discuss it is the only option.

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