This week a website called Wikileaks, run by a team of just five journalists will change the world.

by Robert Hart-Fletcher

This story is an excellent opportunity for parents and teens to discuss. It illustrates:

• The power and value of information

• The secrets governments, military and corporations keep from the public

• How technology can be a "double-edged sword" and how a government's own technology can be turned against it by the lowliest in their ranks

• How a few people can change the world (for better or worse) through the power of the Web

It raises questions about secrecy and personal privacy, honesty and pragmatism, right and wrong, integrity and falsity, courage and recklessness. We encourage parents to use this unfolding event as a focus for discussion with young people. Here are some questions you might discuss together:

1. QUESTION: "How can we tell what is true and what is false on the Web?"

2. QUESTION: "Was Wikileaks wrong or right to leak the information?".

3. QUESTION: "What should be kept secret?" What should the citizens of a country know about what their elected government is doing in their names?

4. QUESTION: Who should decide what will be secret? In the past the leaders in the government decided what to keep secret and what to reveal. Now with new technology almost anyone who works for the government or the military (including a lowly Private in the US army) can decide to reveal government secrets to the whole world. Is this a good or a bad thing? Or is it just different?

What is Wikileaks?
Wikileaks is a non-profit organisation launched in 2007. They are journalists whose mission is to bring important news and information to the public. That often means exposing secrets of the military, government and big corporations on their website.

What has Wikileaks done?
This summer the Wikileaks published secret information about the United States action in the wars in Afghanistan. In October 2010 they exposed secret documents about the war in Iraq. These were reports from soldiers to their military leaders, which had been copied from a US Government data base. They were 'leaked' to the Wikileaks journalists by US soldiers without permission and have since been reported in the Guardian and other newspapers. They revealed, for example, that the US ordered troops to ignore the torture of prisoners by the Iraqi authorities.

More recently a low ranking, low paid, intelligence analyst in the US Army, Private Bradley Manning, allegedly (while singing along to his Lady Gaga album) copied 251,287 United States embassy cables from a government database and sent them to Wikileaks. On Sunday November 28th Wikileaks started publishing the cables – messages which were, since 1966, sent by US diplomats around the world to the government in Washington. 15,652 of the messages are classified as Secret.

Why does it matter?
The messages will be very embarrassing for the US government. They will reveal, for example, how the US ordered its diplomats to spy on the leaders of friendly countries in the United Nations and get hold of their private personal information, including: "Credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers…"

The cables will also reveal the private actions of leaders of other countries, for example how the King of Saudi Arabia urged the US to attack Iran: "Al-Jubier recalled the King's frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons programme."

The leaks will be difficult for the US government, which is bracing itself for the world's reaction.

What do journalists think of it?
Many journalists are rubbing their hands in glee, since the leaked messages will provide them with stories for many months to come. The Guardian is now choosing the most reliable and interesting messages to write about. Journalists also see this as a victory for freedom of speech.

Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange "is serving our [American] democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country."

What do different countries think of it?
The USA is concerned about its international reputation and claims that the leaks will be a threat to their national security. Peter King, the ranking Republican on Homeland Security, said that WikiLeaks is 'engaged in terrorist activity.' He said that by releasing secret documents, the organisation is 'enabling terrorists to kill Americans.' The US has threatened legal action against Wikileaks leader, Julian Assange, so has the Australian government.

The government of Iceland on the other hand, after talking to Julian Assange, unanimously voted to pass new laws that protect journalists and whistle blowers from persecution and has created a new international award for free speech. The government of Ecuador has invited Assange to come and live there and offered him protection "so he can freely present the information he possesses and all the documentation, not just over the Internet but in a variety of public forums".

Was Wikileaks right or wrong?
Politicians, big corporations and the military keep a great deal of what they do secret from the public. This can be for good reasons – to protect national security or to keep individual people from harm or it could be for bad reasons.

For example, in Kenya in 2009, politicians were getting away with murdering lots of innocent people and keeping it secret. Wikileaks found out about the murders and told newspapers round the world. This made a real difference because it stopped the murderers from being elected to government. This 'leak' won Wikileaks leader, Julian Assange the Amnesty International Media Award.

We are told that George Washington, the first US President could never tell a lie and you could say every secret is hiding the truth, so every secret is lie. But it's impossible to run a country or a company or an army without keeping some things secret, including personal observations and opinions.

Who runs Wikileaks?
The Wikileak  team is headed by journalist Julian Assange. He was born in Australia, but now travels around the world, spending, as he says "most of my time in airports".

He is highly respected by many journalists and has won several awards for his work including the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.

Some of the top magazines in the world have recognised him as a man who is changing the world:

• In September 2010, he was voted 23rd among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010" by the British magazine New Statesman.

• In their November issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."

• On 12 November he was leading in the poll for Time magazine's "person of the year, 2010".

Link:

Wikileaks

Related articles on kidsandmedia.co.uk:

Children and the News

Teach children a healthy critical sense