At time of writing the front page of Newsroom has a post:
Hunt Nearly Over – The search for the sources of leaked sensitive Government plans to open up protected conservation land to mining and merge parts of the state sector is close to an end.
We the people have much to thank whistleblowers for. From the famous ones internationally, to the local ones like the Hollow Men leakers or those involved in the mining leak. But authority certainly doesn’t like whistleblowers, and language such as this “hunt” is indicative of their attitudes.
Spare a thought just now for the man who brought whistleblowing into the web age, Julian Assange, a prime mover in wikileaks.org, currently being “hunted” by The Pentagon. The Guardian reports:
Pentagon hunts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in bid to gag website
Soldier Bradley Manning said to have leaked diplomatic cables to whistleblower, plus video of US troops killing Iraqis
American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.
The Daily Beast, a US news reporting and opinion website, reported that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Julian Assange an Australian citizen who moves frequently between countries after the arrest of a US soldier last week who is alleged to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad.
The soldier, Bradley Manning, also claimed to have given WikiLeaks 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables and intelligence assessments. The US authorities fear their release could “do serious damage to national security”, said the Daily Beast, which is published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and New Yorker magazines.
More details here, here, here and see Manning’s site here.
Like most other activities in the complicated real world, whistleblowing can be a grey area. Some thugs, like Paula Bennet with her attacks on individual beneficiaries, or Cameron Slater with his violation of name suppression, might think of themselves as whistleblowers, but they are not. To my mind the crucial distinctions are (1) whether information being released relates to an individual (probably wrong) or to an organisation like a company or the state (probably right), and (2) the level of genuine public interest in socially significant issues. When a whistleblower takes on a big organisation over a matter of genuine public significance they are taking a risk, in some cases a huge risk (see the discussions of legal protection, and the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative). I for one salute such whistleblowers, and hope that there will always be people who are brave enough to make sure that we the people know the truth.
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