I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said “Without Freedom of thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public Liberty, without Freedom of speech”, and I also believe that Julian Assange express what he felt needed to be publicly known and available for the mass through the Wikileaks site.
Failed to get internet users attention by publishing restricted data on his website, he went to the Guardian newspapaer to jump start an interest in what he is publishing, and paid off. at the beginning it wasn't the public who caught attention of what Assange was puplishing, it was the activists who most of them happened to be hackers. DATA, mainly internet-hacked data started flowing at the Assange's mailbox and website. From documents reveling how the Kenyan former president steeling massive amounts from the country, to who was responsible for the leakage of toxics in the African rivers to documents incriminating banks in Iceland. Implications were mainly the elimination of access to the website.
But it was till the leakage of large amounts of documents (the largest in Wikileaks ever) that brought an outstanding public attention. in the documents published there were videos, pictures, and secret documents about the United States military action in Iraq and Cuba (Guantanamo Bay detention camp GBDC), videos shown US military helicopters intently shooting at armless civilians in different sites just for fun according to Assange, the officers were actually laughing after the shooting. different documents showed and reveled how prisoners in GBDC were inhumanly treated and Tortured, one of them was 15 years old.
So without mentioning specific names that could endanger its holders, does wikileaks exercies it's freedom of expression? or does it endanger the public security by reveling these documents?
the answer is a simple question, will the military have done these inhuman crimes (yet believed to be for the greater good) if it new that it was going to be published to the mass?
Wikileaks' response