The latest news with regard to Wikileaks is that the organization is being brought down by the actions of individuals and companies. For instance, Pay Pal has stopped servicing the Wikileaks account since the funds being raised by Wikileaks were being used to promote illegal activities. The Wiki website has been under attack by hackers almost non-stop since the disclosure of the diplomatic cables. Other companies have severed business relationships with Wikileaks. In short, Wikileaks is off the net and unable to function as a result of the acts of private individuals and firms. After six months of criminal behavior by Wikileaks, the government had not done anything to stop the site from exposing government secrets. Instead, the people had to step in and get the job done.
A second interesting aspect of the Wikileaks saga is the disparity in treatment between the reaction to a mention that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative and the intentional exposure of hundreds of thousands of secret documents. The exposure of Plame’s job status became a cause célèbre; it resulted in the appointment of a special prosecutor and relentless brouhaha over the dastardly deed of exposing this former covert operative. Indeed, the Plame case is still reverberating with a motion picture being released that tells the story in a much more sinister way than really was the case. So, the disclosure of Plame’s status by Richard Armitage who had no intent to harm her in any way led to a media frenzy to find and punish the perpetrators. By contrast, wikileaks multiple intentional disclosures of US secrets is criminal, and for Americans involved treasonous. Aside from a few news outlets like O’Reilly on Fox, however, essentially no one in the government or the media seems to be demanding that the perpetrators be caught and punished. It has taken the wrath of the American people to get there to be any negative consequences at all for Wikileaks.
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