出版社：School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney
摘要：Much concern has been expressed about the political power wielded by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to challenging established power by providing a safe, anonymous conduit for whistleblowers. Some view this organization as treasonous, or in violation of laws prohibiting espionage, and have called for the assassination of its founder, Julian Assange. This paper sketches some of the different ethical parameters and nodal points involved in the WikiLeaks phenomenon: the anonymous leakers, the WikiLeaks organization, the mass media outlets favoured by WikiLeaks, the general public, and possible political and legal responses to the leakages. The issue connects with some familiar ethical questions: the newspaper publisher’s treatment of leaks from anonymous sources, the ethics of (non-anonymous) whistle-blowing, the ethics of violating secrecy, and the ethics of propaganda use.
I review Margaret Somerville’s arguments leading to her conclusion that WikiLeaks are on the whole a bad thing. I argue, making use of historical examples, that she doesn’t take sufficiently into account the potential for good from WikiLeaks, particularly in the light of an increasingly propagandized society where truth is obscured by muzzling government or corporate officials, discouraging investigative reporting, and making use of sophisticated public relations techniques to condition the public mind. I conclude that WikiLeaks could well be a good thing, but the potential could be undermined by irresponsible behaviour by the operators. Its effectiveness could also be undermined by pseudo-leakages or other ways of discrediting the personnel and operations of WikiLeaks.
