"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"
Same as governments, then.
Same as governments, then.
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.
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.
Indeed, this is a strawman argument. Governments shouldn't hide information from people. That's the point.
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.
2) that would only be effecting your life through inaction. defunding wikileaks would have the same effect.
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?
This is exactly the same rationale for why the U.S. government doesn't want their secret diplomatic cables published.
In other words, he describes Wikileaks as a last-resort channel for addressing institutional wrong-doing.