Privacy lost but you've got to love WikiLeaks

THE battlelines are well and truly drawn. 

WikiLeaks, representing an alternative society of geeks and visionaries that constantly questions the world view handed down to it from above, is at war with the elite who inhabit and maintain that mysterious above.
It's like when, in those years before the Reformation, a few brave seekers of truth printed and distributed Bibles in the vernacular, so that the people might read and judge for themselves rather than mutely accept the possibly jaundiced interpretations of their supposed betters - betters who stood to gain much from retaining the status quo.
The very name WikiLeaks reflects their brutal straightforwardness. They're completely upfront that the operation is about leaks and plenty of them.

It's a classic case of doing what it says on the tin. Even Wookiepedia feels the need to add "the Star Wars wiki" as an explanatory subtitle. Likewise, Chickipedia employs the byline "the wiki of hot women". WikiLeaks speaks for itself.
Even if Julian Assange turns out to be guilty as charged, it should not distract from the frightening beauty of his creation.
WikiLeaks, on one level, tunes into our worst nightmare. That sudden, dreadful fear that we experience when we're criticising a friend, and it occurs to us that we might have accidentally pocket-dialled them, that they might be listening to all our muffled bitterness - that fear is why we shudder at WikiLeaks's revelations.
On the other hand, the nagging suspicion that the stuff we're fed about wars, foreign policy and general political decision-making is all sleight of hand makes WikiLeaks utterly compulsive.
Some of us, of course, don't want to know how the trick's done, or even if there is a trick, but WikiLeaks takes us by the hair and forces us to peer into the mirrored cabinet.
They're not the first. They're part of a continuing movement. An Irish friend of mine told me that when the first tampon advert was shown on Irish television, his mother, avoiding the eyes of her family, stood up and left the room muttering: "Ah, there's no secrets any more."
She had recognised the trend - the slow but unavoidable death of privacy.
But privacy is overrated. We may associate it with peace, with being left alone, but privacy also gave us sexed-up dossiers, bombmaking in Yorkshire bedsits and Josef Fritzl. There would have been no British MPs' expenses revelations if privacy had been fit and well.
I went to watch a comedy show a while back and it said on Twitter that I "never laughed once". It was true but, by the time it became cyber-gossip, I'd diplomatically told the comedian how brilliant they'd been. I recently arrived home on a snowy night and told my girlfriend I'd had to take the Underground.
"I know," she said, "it was on Twitter." Thank goodness I'm not sleeping around.
I got three points on my licence because CCTV saw me going through a red light. The BBC is being pressured to publish artists' fees. In short, it's getting harder and harder for people, especially those in public life, to be unkind, deceitful, irresponsible or greedy.
People used to behave well because they thought God was watching. Now the secular world has come up with its own hidden observers. I wasn't terribly happy that Twitter caught me not laughing or that CCTV caught me breaking the law, but I took a breath, set my jaw, and nodded respectfully to the truth - thus acknowledging the time-honoured concept of the fair cop.
The enigmatic elite, behind their smoke and mirrors, never pay homage to an intrusive truth. They rail at it and seek angry retribution. Let's face it, international diplomacy is just a type of lying. It's ridiculous that extremely important relationships between countries are conducted like a schoolyard romance - the fear of being oneself, the worry they'll dump you on the basis of a trifling misunderstanding and the terrible anxiety about what your friends think. If diplomats and statesmen refuse to embrace honesty, it's time that it was roughly imposed upon them.
WikiLeaks seems to honour a Reithian obligation to educate, inform and entertain. We may learn much about French foreign policy when reading that President Nicolas Sarkozy's plane was re-routed in case seeing the Eiffel Tower lit in Turkish colours made him angry.
But also, don't you just love the Dr Strangelove nature of it all? We've learnt from reality TV - another manifestation of the death of privacy - that, as with The Phantom of the Opera, the really interesting stuff comes when the mask falls off.
It's true that the dispersal of significant information is a dangerous business, but isn't it time that, like those 16th-century reformers, we stopped letting a secretive elite decide what's good for us? WikiLeaks is scary. That which brings liberation can also bring bloodshed but, at the moment, I trust their motives slightly more than I trust those of any government.
WikiLeaks's aim is to illuminate, with a secondary recreational desire to embarrass. The aims of the world's governments are considerably less apparent - but not for much longer.
The truth has been released from captivity and is running wild and free. Our fear of its sharp teeth competes with our desire to look it straight in the eye.

Source: The Australian