Die Zeit philosophized about Wikileaks in an editorial last week. “To bring the truth to light,” it writes, “is a powerful motive in Western culture.” It quotes Aristotle who wrote “All human beings strive towards the truth.” “I wish the truth to be discovered,” echoes Heidegger. “I want everybody to recognize the truth,” asserts the 22-year-old soldier, Bradley Manning, in Facebook, after discovering that the U.S. Army had delivered Iraqi dissidents to the Iraqi police. This turned him into a whistleblower and made him fish out a quarter of a million secret documents from the servers of the American government to have them made public.
“It will not help our security,” Die Zeit writes, “to demonize the internet-terrorists…. It would in fact be grossly negligent to deny the moral impulse of a Julian Assange. For him and his colleagues true democracy is when all citizens know everything.”
Die Zeit would of course never approve naïve internet-anarchy. Still, it chose to put the matter into moral perspective.
The Berliner Zeitung takes a less philosophical view:
“The US is betraying one of its founding principles: the freedom of information,” it wrote on December 8. “And it’s doing so at a time when it is facing the loss of power over global information for the first time since the Cold War…. There is a certain irony in the fact that Hillary Clinton used the doctrine of the free flow of information to condemn Internet censorship in China and Egypt at a congress in Washington at the beginning of the year. She quoted President Barack Obama, who justified the necessity of free access to the Internet in China with the argument that it helps citizens to call their government to account, generates new ideas and fosters creativity. With its current steps against Wikileaks, the U.S. now forfeits any right to call China to account over its persecution of Internet activists.”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
What hypocritical nonsense from our German colleagues. Assange is hardly a disinterested journalist doggedly pursuing the truth. He hides his ideology under the premise of the free flow of information but in fact he is just another knee jerk anti-American. What Assange has done for the betterment of humanity is to declare war on so-called “cyberphilanthropists” who think the net is just another and better way of making money and attracting audiences. David Rieff in the New Republic http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/79868/wikileaks-cyber-warfare-hacking says that Assange has created a new disruptive technology and nothing will be the same again.
Readers may be interested in my experience in the issue of disclosure as against privacy. It was in the health field but the principles have a broader application. Thirty years ago I submitted my report of a commission of inquiry I conducted on the confidentially of health information. One of my recommendations, controversial at the time but 27 years later implemented by legislation, was that persons (patients) be entitled to their own information, traditionally kept secret from them. But I recognized that there is a valid societal interest in disclosure. Here is a paragraph in the report:
“…my starting point is a presumption that our society values privacy for health information, creating a need for the observance of, or respect for, confidentiality. To put it another way, other things being equal, we do not favour free and uninhibited disclosure of everyone’s health information. As with all generalizations, there are exceptions as, for example, the public’s interest in the health of heads of state and political leaders. This is not to say, of course, that persons in that category would agree with the validity of the exception. We have recently seen the consequence of public disclosure of psychiatric counselling for a candidate for high public office in another nation. In any event, to the extent that there is any case to be made for these exceptions, they are just that – exceptions, and not the rule. That conclusion is derived from the need we all have for privacy and the highly personal nature of the information that forms my subject matter.”
An acceptable reconciliation of the the two conflicting equally valid values is the goal that must be sought.
Assange is much more than just ‘anti-american’. This sells him short. He is an anarchist committed to the destabilizing of corporate hierarchies whether public (the US, Saudi Arabia, China) or private (Pfizer, BP, Shell). The instinct for domination at the root of these organizations is so obvious that we fail to see it. Corporatism is fascism. Assange is therefore right to try to bring this into public consiousness by a clever maneuvre where the technology of oppression is turned against itself. So long as these organizations lack internal democracy and continue to exploit the environment and the people, which is again obvious, they will remain illegitimate…