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Thursday, April 08, 2010

Wikileaks trumps FOI processes

Wikileaks posting of a video of a US army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two Reuters news agency employees, comes after Reuters spent 2½ years without success trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. I imagine disclosure was claimed likely to damage national security or international relations. Perhaps the act itself did a lot in this regard amongst those in Iraq who heard about it in the three years since. The leaked video has now been seen more than 2 million times on YouTube. Oh and its the same Wikileaks that last year published the news that  proposed Australian legislation would ban some of its pages- for leaking information about the websites the Government proposed to ban.You've got to love them!
(Update: Richard Ackland in The Sydney Morning Herald on the same subject reminds us we live in a different world to when the Pentagon Papers made it into print after two years of court battles.)

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:38 pm

    And the same Wikileaks which published previously secret contracts between WorkCover NSW and the private insurers.

    Presumably all of these documents and more will be back online once Wikileaks meets its current funding requirements and returns the site to normal operation.

    (I note, however, that the WorkCover documents have now been republished elsewhere.)

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  2. Anonymous9:59 am

    Q & A on WikiLeaks http://cpj.org/blog/2010/04/technicalities-10-questions-on-wikileaks.php

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  3. Anonymous10:26 am

    BBC explains WikiLeaks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o2ZGk1djTU

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