Friday, December 3, 2010

Once More Into The Wikileaks

Noted privacy expert Steve Aftergood castigates Wikileaks because they exposed secrets he wouldn't have. He errs, I would argue, because he mistakes disagreement on a specific case as evidence that all things of that kind are protected by the same right of privacy. None of the kinds he mentions, sorority rites, religious rites, secret society rites, police investigations, and etc, are of a nature that they are categorically above exposure.  Indeed, each one is liable to abuse, sororities haze, the police punish innocents and let off the guilty if powerful, and so on, and in those cases require energetic pursuit and exposure. Aftergood is right, I think, that illegally publishing a book is wrong, and he is right that everyone has some right to privacy. 

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