"On 25 November 2009, WikiLeaks released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages sent on the day of the September 11 attacks."
Clearly a gross invasion of privacy for many individuals involved.
"In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks"
An astoundingly clear violation of an individual's privacy. One gives up a certain level of privacy when entering public life, but that was ridiculous.
"After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008."
If anyone's the "little guy", it's the British National Party, a hard-working group of political idealists fighting for what they believe in against tremendous odds. Of course they also happen to be a bunch of openly racist jerks, but they're also an oppressed minority.
How on earth do you square that with opposing what wikileaks does? Liber-authoritarian? Is it just because they published Sarah Palin's email? (BTW, it's illegal to conduct public business over private email, that's why the leak was noteworthy).
The more I read supporters of wikileaks in this event the more evident it is that it all depends on who you think "deserves it" As long as its somebody you don't like who's ox is getting gored, life is good.
If this is truly the "age of involuntary transparency", then this problem will solve itself. Sooner or later we'll get around to dumping in public something you find precious. At that point, you'll be up in arms about cyber criminals.
Perspective and context are wondrous things. Many times instead of trying to find the general rule we're just happy that one group we like is leveling the score with another group we don't like. Once that is accomplished, we all can be quite nimble with the details of which principles we're upholding and the rationalization for our positions.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell (1946)