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Sunlight is the best disinfectant - let WikiLeaks shine on

When 92,000 individual military logs from Afghanistan, covering the period from 2004 to 2009 were simultaneously revealed by The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel on July 25, attention focused as much on Wikileaks, the shadowy organisation which made them public, as on their contents.

Wikileaks is an extremely high-tech whistleblowers’ forum built by Julian Assange, a lanky Australian hacker and self-professed “information activist”, who is ideologically committed to transparency and openness.

Should we celebrate Assange and Wikileaks for allowing people to speak truth to power in relative safety? Or should we fear the power of the site, and acknowledge that there are some truths the government is right to keep secret?