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WIKILEAKS

Wikileaks is a non-profit organization that deals with collecting information and disseminating it after a thorough verification process that the information is true (O’Leary, 2010). The site has created uproar in many governments because of the kind of information being brought to the limelight concerning government officials. The release of supposedly classified and confidential information to the public brings to question just how much the public should know and how much the governments is keeping to itself. The paper is going to discuss the strategies and operations of WikiLeaks, how the governments involved in these leakages responded and the aftermath of the information leakage by WikiLeaks.

Strategy and operational actions

Within the short lifespan that WikiLeaks existed, a huge amount of information was released to the public which is estimated to be more than in formation written by some public news papers for 30 years (Riley, 2011). The decision made to release this information was however done strategically. WikiLeaks chose its strategic base in Sweden which has the best laws that protect the freedom of journalists provided the information was not obtained in an illegal way. A decision had to be made by Private Bradley Manning on releasing the “Collateral Murder” video which showed journalists and civilians in Iraq being killed by a helicopter in 2007 (Nation, 2010). This information had previously been hidden by US. The government of the United States had to make a decision on whether to prosecute the people behind the leaks since the information involved the US administration. The move to prosecute the Julian Assange is based on the fact that the information released by WikiLeaks compromised many lives and secrete information being held by governments to protect lives (Savage, 2010).  United States Government considers it an embarrassment and therefore wanted to brand Julian Assange as a terrorist and prosecute him for espionage. However such a move is hampered by the fact that an insurance over1.4 GB of information on Afghanistan was made by WikiLeaks and would be released if Julian Assange or any other person associated with WikiLeaks was arrested (Hosenball, 2010). This halts any move towards arresting any WikiLeaks associate because it would bring more embarrassment on United States which would strain relationship with other countries (Morozov, 2011). For now US considers not arresting Assange for possible damage which cannot be repaired could occur. Joe Lieberman made a decision not to deal with WikiLeaks and PayPal and Amazon had to make a decision on how to react to this move. PayPal and Amazon withdrew accounts through which donations could be made to WikiLeaks because they termed information by WikiLeaks as a compromise on national security and they did not want to be a part of it. BRMS would not be applicable in this case since Business Intelligence would be the one to provide insight in this situation. Data has to be available to enable one make a strategic decision (Ludlow, 2010).

WikiLeaks collects information from various strategic countries like the United States, Australia and Iraq. It used an honest approach in analyzing the content of information from various governments which made people get hooked to these releases. The main objective of WikiLeaks is to release secrete information from various governments especially on various decisions that these governments made to bring out the truth and support government transparency through information (Mitchell, 2011).

Julian Assange is someone whom all people mentioned by his organization would love to see sentenced to death. Assange is a man who wants cases of injustices like that in Afghanistan to corruption cases like that of Kenya which earned him an award. According to Nakashima and Markon (2010) Assange is being accused by the Federal authorities of violating criminal laws through releasing documents belonging to the government and could face charges under espionage act. The act can be used to prosecute anyone who is not authorized and has classified information that is potentially harmful to a country if willing fully published. These bases are put forward because the US government wrote a letter to Assange asking him to hand over any classified information in his possession. However such charges in the US are difficult because of First Amendment protections which protect actions by the media and the fact that Assange has to be turned over to US by another country (Nation, 2010). Moreover, the WikiLeaks organization is a disseminating site and it does not conduct the leaks because it is a site that offers an opportunity for whistleblowers to give information on injustices and corruption and remain anonymous. If Assange is prosecuted the press would protest because it would mean that they too would be targeted for publishing information on other stories from government officials. This would mean that press freedom would be compromised and so the US government has to find whoever is responsible for giving that information to WikiLeaks instead (Lazare & Harvey, 2010).

Affected Government responses to WikiLeaks

The United States government responded to WikiLeaks by denying access to information from WikiLeaks by the federal officials like Department of Homeland Security. US Secretary of States Hillary Clinton promised that the government was going to establish the persons responsible for pr0oviding WikiLeaks with the classified information with the army also looking to find who would have been responsible for releasing the tape on Afghanistan. Among the people being investigated by the Army Criminal Investigation Division is Bradley Manning who was a former army officer. Manning is accused of having released the videos on Afghanistan because he had confided to a hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he was responsible. US government officials say that the WikiLeaks information places the lives of civilians and army in Afghanistan and Iraq under threat because classified information was released (Calabresi, 2010). The US government has responded to this whole saga by devising new ways to classify information to avoid similar incidents from occurring.

Another country affected by the WikiLeaks is the Kenyan government which was indicted by the latest released information on private conversations of US diplomats. Michael Ranneberger is quoted in many of those leaked conversations as describing the Kenyan leaders as incapable of leading the country. This portrays that Washington views Kenya as a country that is full of flourishing corruption. Government spokesman Alfred Mutua said that the reports were malicious and they did not present the true Kenyan leaders. The resulting occurrences saw the replacement of Michael Ranneberger as the US representative to Kenya.

Through WikiLeaks Peru came into the realization of the arrogance that US employs in support of commercial copper mining in Peru. It showed how the US government was funding multinational companies while targeting the local people in the copper industry who were tortured and killed. These releases were from the US diplomat office in Peru written by Peru, US ambassador Curtis Struble. The WikiLeaks also stated that the US diplomat to Peru had accused the General Commander of Peruvian army of drug trafficking, allegations that the army commander refuted. The President Alan Garcia also denied the WikiLeaks reports saying that they were irrelevant.

Effects of WikiLeaks

As the founder of WikiLeaks says that the aim of the leaking classified information is to promote transparency while bringing justice, the WikiLeaks reports have just done the opposite. The governments are supposed to protect the public from knowledge of some information that may compromise national security through balancing the transparency law. However, WikiLeaks has breached this through closing the line on transparency resulting to exposure of classified information to the public. WikiLeaks exposed the vulnerability of today’s information that is stored in computers. It showed that it could easily fall into the wrong hands because hackers could access secrete information if they wished to (Greenberg, 2010). Everybody is wondering how classified information got to the wrong hands considering that it was always protected.

The release of classified materials has every government and the corporate sector rushing to protect its information through encryption. This is aimed at preventing information from being accessed into thus protecting the reputation of the government or business. It also displayed what the US government has been doing in the world where the diplomatic cables of US embassies all over the world were released. This brought strain over relationships between these countries and the US as they now consider the US as an enemy. It will be hard for any country to trust the US with its information given that it will not be protected enough and will end up being exposed (Allan &Andén-Papadopoulos, 2010). The leaks have embarrassed the US as a country that is after its interests no matter who gets hurt. It had been said that the US was in talks with countries to take some of those detained in Guantanamo bay in exchange of official favors. The US credibility has been ruined after handing over detainees to Iraq where they knew they would be tortured and the US remained quite when there were claims of torture by the military and Iraq.

Tunisia citizens began a revolution movement to kick out President Ben Ali for corruption allegations on WikiLeaks release of the US diplomatic cables on Robert Gordec. This was classified as the first aftermath of the WikiLeaks which gave the youths a reason to fight the president who had been in power for 23 Years. These leaks depicted the first family as corrupt and using the resources of the country to amass wealth. The WikiLeaks could have also caused the uproar that was witnessed in Yemen as they sought removal of President Saleh because he was covering up the attack of Al-Qaeda in Yemen by the US saying that the attacks were by the government (Calabresi &Harrell, 2010).

The WikiLeaks reports had an effect on the presidential campaign in Peru which connected one of the candidates Pedro Pablo with mining. WikiLeaks shows the impact that the web has on today’s world given that after announcing it had damaging information on Bank of America, the share price dropped by three percent.

In the US, the release of classified information on US diplomats resulted to the intelligence officers being ordered not to see any of the secret information. North Korea came to learn that China was not working to protect it from South Korea but that China was willing for the two countries, North and South Korea to unite under the South Korean leadership. This affected the relationship between China and North Korea because the other Arab countries were publicly urging the US to launch an attack on Tehran nuclear program unlike China that pretended to be an ally. This resulted into an immediate dismissal of China’s top aide in North Korea back to Beijing on the same day that the leaks were released (Greenberg, 2010). The United Nation also said that the US had violated its obligations to the United Nations when a cable was leaked saying that US diplomats had been ordered by Hillary Clinton to spy on the United Nation’s officials.

Among the aftermath of WikiLeaks is that several other similar sites have come up throughout the world with the hope of gathering information from whistleblowers. Among the sites inspired by WikiLeaks is Balkanleaks in Paris, Indoleaks in Indonesia, Brusselsleaks which is focused on exposing the European Union activities and Government leaks based in China (Gellman & Harrell, 2010: Greenberg, 2011).

The debate after the Wikileaks was on just how much information should be kept secret. Too much over classification harms the citizen since it is their right to get information from the government and the system itself. It becomes hard to identify which information is important when all information is classified. Many think that if the government had released the video on Afghanistan before it would not have had a negative effect in comparison to hen it was released by WikiLeaks. The Obama administration in the US has launched training for the ones involved in classification so that they can be taught on how to classify information so that not too much information is labeled classified because its exposure could be deleterious to the country (Foreman, 2011). The internet has become the hub of communication flow that has helped the media get information on the human right crisis in some countries around the world (Harvard Business Review, 2011). When there was an uprising in the North African countries, the only source of information is the internet because in most occasions the media were locked out. In today’s world, the internet has been treated as a means of freedom to speech where anyone can post anything. This has created the trend of people always looking for information from the internet where the authors can maintain their anonymity. It is difficult to control the flow of information from the internet though some countries have been able to block some sites from being accessed by its citizens. Sadly though, the computer technology has made it easy to copy contents from one site to another and so in most cases people would still receive the information through other sites that are allowed (Parkinson, 2011). The United States tried to keep the federal officials from accessing WikiLeaks so that they could not read the classified information but unfortunately, the news papers had such news on the front page and so it is impossible to contain the information flow.

In conclusion, WikiLeaks is a necessary evil that seeks to educate the uninformed what the elite are doing as has been witnessed by the release of US diplomatic cables. It exposes the things that need to be restructured like computer security and the relationships between countries and how much the government should classify as top secrete to ensure that such information is given priority in protection. WikiLeaks is a wakeup call for governments to beef up security on internet information to prevent breach of security.

References

Allan, S and Andén-Papadopoulos, K (2010). “Come on, let us shoot!”: WikiLeaks and the Cultures of Militarization Topia (York University), 23/24, 244-253.

Calabresi, M. (2010) The War on Secrecy Time, 176(24), 30-37.

Calabresi, M and Harrell, E. (2010) Winning the Info War Time, 176(25), 20-20.

Foreman, J (2011) The WikiLeaks War on America. Commentary, 131(1), 27-31

Greenberg, A. (2010) WikiLeaks Reveals The Biggest Classified Data Breach in History. Forbes, 186(9), 38-38

Greenberg, A. (2011) WikiLeaks’ Stepchildren Forbes, 187(1), 20-20,

Greenberg, A. (2010) Wikileaks’ Julian Assange wants to spill your corporate secrets. Forbes, 186(11), 70-86.

Gellman, B and Harrell, E (2010)3 Julian Assange Time, 176(26), 90-94,

Harvard Business Review, (2011) Lessons from WikiLeaks: Interaction. Harvard Business Review, 89(3), 22-23

Hosenball, M. (2010) The war within wikileaks. Newsweek, 156(11), 8-8.

Lazare, S and Harvey, R. (2010) WikiLeaks in Baghdad Nation, 291(7/8), 24-27

Ludlow, P. (2010) WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture Nation, 291(14), 25-26.

Morozov, E. (2011) WikiLeaks and the Perils of Extreme Glasnost NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly, 28(1), 7-11; DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5842.2011.01214.x

Mitchell, G. (2011) Why WikiLeaks Matters Nation, 292(5), 4-6

Nation, (2010) In Defense of WikiLeaks Nation, 291(26), 3-3.

Nation, (2010) WikiLeaks and War Crimes Nation, 291(9/10), 6-8.

O’Leary, M. (2010) Database Review. WikiLeaks on a Roll. Information Today, 27(9), 42-48.

Parkinson, D. (2011). Life after WikiLeaks SC Magazine: For IT Security Professionals, 20-26.

Riley, M. (2011) Is WikiLeaks Hacking For Secrets? Bloomberg. Businessweek, 4215, 46-48.

Savage, L C. (2010) A man of many secrets. Maclean’s, 123(50), 28-32.