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Wikileaks getting out of control

by on23 August 2016


Assange harms ordinary people to keep the spotlight on him

As he fights to catch the attention of the world spotlight, Julian Assange is getting more careless with the lives of “ordinary people” who he claims to be protecting.

According to Associated Press, Wikileaks has been putting the lives of ordinary people at risk with its latest batch of information leaks, including a case where it outed a gay Saudi Arabian man in a country where he could face the death penalty.

Desperate to get attention, er expose government secrets, Assange released a trove of Saudi diplomatic cables. While this sounds cool, it mostly was medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens.

In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay.

AP found the guy  who told them that WikiLeaks published his phone, address, name, details. If the family of his wife saw this he would be destroyed.

Ironically WikiLeaks claims to champion privacy but at the same time it is getting clear that the organisation is not vetting any of the material it is leaking. For example the Saudi diplomatic cables held 124 medical files with people with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children or refugees who were being aided by the embassy.

Many of the victims are unaware that they have been outed. In Saudi Arabia WikiLeaks is censored in the country. Several of them were horrified.

One, a partially disabled Saudi woman who'd secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, said she was devastated. She'd kept her plight from members of her own family.

AP found that WikiLeaks also routinely publishes identity records, phone numbers and other information which is being exploited by criminals.

The DNC files published last month carried more than two dozen Social Security and credit card numbers, according to an AP analysis assisted by New Hampshire-based compliance firm DataGravity.

Two of the people named in the files told AP they were targeted by identity thieves following the leak, including a retired US diplomat who said he also had to change his number after being bombarded by threatening messages.

Paul Dietrich, a transparency activist, said a partial scan of the Saudi cables alone turned up more than 500 passport, identity, academic or employment files.

Last modified on 23 August 2016
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