I voted evil. Before I explain why, some clarifications:
* I am of the view that government is or should be in the service of the common good.
* Citizens have a general but not absolute right to know what government is doing, provided the common good is being served.
* Further, I think the current phase of Big Government with Laws About Everything is outgrageous. By and large, governments are too powerful, too large, too intrusive, too regulating, too controlling.
* Governments are historically the biggest repressors, oppressors and violators of human dignity and freedom, and we need serious curbs (including oversight and review) on the nature and extent of their power if the liberty and dignity of persons is to be preserved and promoted. Getting the balance right is a matter of high and serious deliberation and politics.
* All persons, both natural and juridic, have a right to privacy in the conduct of their ordinary affairs; this right itself serves both the individidual and the common good.
That said, a random-ordered braindump of why I voted 'evil':
* WikiLeaks does not restrict itself to publicising just government information. It is indiscriminate. Much private information, often obtained through the commission of a crime (subterfuge, theft, fraud, or misprepresenttion, in violation of natural and legal privacy rights) is also 'leaked' or publicised on WikiLeaks. Check for yourself. Despite it high-sounding claims to the contrary, the indiscriminate publication of other peoples' private information is wrong, immoral, and subversive of the common good.
* Claims that everything and anything governments do should be open and public are puerile, myopic and ill-considered. There are legitimate areas where the public interest requires that governments act secretly. Some obvious ones for starters: Should the police publicise full details of ongoing investigations into criminals and their secret networks? It is ludicrous to expect the State to be utterly open and transparent in its monitoring of (spying on) the activities of genuinely evil people, or the seditious, or the malcontents and fanatics who daily plan acts of subversion, terror or serious crime. What about the ordinary gathering of information about the often secret activities of real or potential enemies, or aggressors, or those who could hold one to economic ransom? What about confidentially tracking foreign persons and organisations who pose a real or potential threat to the common good or to the safety and security of indidivual citizens, civic and social institutions, commercial organisations both locally and internationally? Should all this take place in the public gaze? If you answer in the affirmative you are in dreamland, and your vote exercised in support of that agenda becomes a threat to the common good. This only establishes the principle that some government actions and internal communications must be secret and remain confidential until threats have clearly passed. Once you grant the principle, prudential judgment decides the scope and degree of that privilege. Obviously governments are staffed by ordinary people who themselves have privacy rights that antecede those of their status as employees in the state bureaucracy.
* The public interest is not to be confused with those things that the public find interesting. The distinction is subtle but vital. If appeals to the public interest always and everywhere trump ordinary citizen rights, then where do your rights to privacy actually begin and end?
* I can think of no genuine good that has come, or indeed can come, of any WikiLeaks exposures. It provides nothing more than the cheap thrills of the Peeping Tom who thinks that by seeing the private foibles and failing of others he is somehow cleaner and more righteous. It provides the same titillation that narcissists and the paranoid get from listening in to other people's private conversations, and it does so on a global scale. It breeds gossip, cyncism, and skepticism, which in turn seriously erode community and undermine society. Despite all its high moral claims, the actual actions of WikiLeaks reveal its true nature -- it panders to the adolescent and shallow prurience of "exposure" publications that feed and drive the celebrity culture that infects our society and holds untold millions in its meaningless and mindless thrall.
* What further information do we need to make judgments about the rightness of wrongness of government actions? For example, how do the latest WikiLeaks leaks change your view about say the Iraq invasion, or the operations of the American government? You didn't know before? You got this from WikiLeaks? Please tell.
* I strongly hold that governments around the world have arrogated far too much power to themselves, and they routinely, daily and openly violate the basic natural rights of people. It's easy to spot and oppose a brute in jackboots crudely repressing and killing; the real danger we in modern Western democracies face is much more subtle and insidious: the jackboot in velvet galoshes, voted in and financed by voters who know everyone else's secrets and gossip but who know nothing of statecraft or how justice, equality, privacy and publicity are best balanced, nor especially how state power ought to be limited. Our modern world does not suffer from a lack of information or too much secrecy in governments. Our ills cannot be cured by merely exposing linen (whether clean or dirty) on WikiLeaks or anywhere else. We have swallowed the old lie that knowledge is power, and WikiLeaks panders to that. (Yes, knowledge is essential and good, but it is not the same as power - never has been, just look at all the history's ignorant dick-heads who wielded great power, with horiffic effect). The endless and mindless media chatter around "leaks" distract us from the real and serious issues our societies face, and prevent us from acting to address them. Why is it that the best-informed and most knowledge-drenched people in history feel so powerless, and act so wimpshly? This grand distraction is the consequence of our insatiable appetitie for information and technology, and more especially by information technology. What should be tools that enable and enrich our lives have become the means and media of cheap thrills and even shallower politics. Ignorant of history, more and more people call on the State to do more things, regulate more, ban more, control more, lulled into a stupor because we think knowledge is the same as wisdom. We are rearing a leviathan that will devour us, as it always has in the past. My cry is the same as those Frenchman in the late 18th Century: laissez-faire! That includes far more privacy and a lot less government.
Viva the Revolution! Viva!
PS. All that said, the WikiLeaks leaks are largely boring. Next hot leak, believe it or not: The Pope is Catholic!
