Normally, I don’t discuss politics at this blog. But because many secular humanists are passionate about free speech issues, I want to elicit your opinions.

For those who don’t know, WikiLeaks is a non-profit organization founded in 2006 that publishes confidential corporate and government materials. Among the biggest leaks were the LDS Church Handbook, reams of documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of private diplomatic cables.

The Obama administration has forcefully condemned WikiLeaks as a threat to national security; Vice President Joe Biden even went so far as to call WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a “hi-tech terrorist.” The American public overwhelmingly disapproves of the group, but my friends—if my Facebook newsfeed is any indication—seem to overwhelmingly support it.

Like a ‘good liberal’, I initially toed the ideological line and defended WikiLeaks. In researching this topic with my debate students, however, my position has become more nuanced.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for freedom of the press and exposing government deceit and corruption. Leaking confidential information, even when national security is compromised, can sometimes be justified by the public’s right to know. So I am not categorically against leaks, and I count whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers among my political heroes. My problem is with Wikileaks itself.

Julian Assange is not a journalist. By his own admission, Assange doesn’t care about government transparency. He and his organization are driven by a suspect political agenda (not to mention Assange’s own ego). To quote the Wall Street Journal:

The reason [Assange] … launched WikiLeaks is not that he’s a whistleblower—there’s no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance.” He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed,” he writes. “Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate,” he writes, and “pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result.”

…

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange’s view this way: “While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to ‘think’ as a system, to communicate with itself.” Mr. Assange’s idea is that with enough leaks, “the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.”

Or as Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it’s our goal to achieve a more just society.” If leaks cause U.S. officials to “lock down internally and to balkanize,” they will “cease to be as efficient as they were.”

If Assange is successful, the US government will actually become less transparent and more secretive as a result of WikiLeaks. And this lack of info-sharing may, in turn, weaken our national security (remember that the 9/11 attacks happened in part because the CIA and FBI were reluctant to share information with each other).

Again, these security risks would arguably be justified if the leaks had some revelatory news value, but they don’t appear to. In the hundreds of thousands of pages leaked about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have learned precious little. They confirmed existing suspicions and detailed the horrors of war, but they hardly merit the all-too-frequent comparison to the Pentagon Papers. The leaking of 250,000 diplomatic cables was especially reckless. A lot of these cables read like petty political tabloid stuff. Sure, it’s interesting reading our diplomats’ frank and often snarky assessment of foreign leaders, but was it worth the damage the leaks will doubtless cause to international relations?

WikiLeaks lack of editorial discretion may do more than merely embarrass US diplomats and offend world leaders. It may also cost several Afghans their lives. In the documents relating to the Afghan War, WikiLeaks failed to redact the names of Afghans who are sympathetic to our presence and collaborating with our forces. Consequently, the Taliban has been combing the leaks to compile a potential hit list. (In fairness to WikiLeaks, they have started to sell leaks to prominent newspapers who have been more careful in what they choose to print.)

All that said, I think many government officials have inflated the threat posed by WikiLeaks. The Pentagon has admitted that there is no evidence that implicates WikiLeaks in the death of a single person, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the effect on foreign policy will prove “fairly modest.”

I suppose the only other thing I can say in WikiLeaks defense is that, long-term, it may actually improve national security by forcing the United States to either (a) better protect confidential information or (b) develop policies that, if leaked, wouldn’t embarrass us!

Time will tell.

In the meantime, I’d appreciate your thoughts.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably have at least one online profile, be it at Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, or any of the myriad social networking web sites. You’re probably also aware that the combination of Web 2.0, geopositioning technology (such as GPS, Wi-Fi location databases, and cell tower triangulation), and the explosive growth of mobile data networks has taken social networking and the location-aware web to new heights. Facebook lets you meet people and make friends with those in your same town. Many Twitter-based services show you if any of your friends are nearby and looking to catch a movie or go to dinner. Google Maps helps you get driving directions and public transit information based on your current location, and Google Latitude even e-mails you when people you know break out of their ordinary routine and are nearby (e.g., friends who have the night off, or family visiting from out of town). LinkedIn helps you get a job in your area through the power of word-of-mouth. There are countless useful applications for a location-aware web, but at what cost?

Please Rob Me is a new web site trying to bring attention to the practice of publicly posting your location on the Internet and why it might be dangerous.

The way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome. The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

Public location data is nothing new — government documents have listed home addresses and other such details for years, and you can easily look across the street to see if your neighbors have their lights on or not — but the web adds time as a forth dimension. Never before has there been such vast public information in real-time about where people are located. The privacy concerns here are more interesting because this location data is volunteered by users. Is providing the world with up-to-the-minute information on where you are useful or dangerous? Should people be concerned about making location-specific data publicly available online, or is there nothing to worry about? Does Please Rob Me raise a legitimate concern or is it simply a publicity stunt? Perhaps there is an ethical question to be answered here, too: Do people realize what geopositioning information they are providing? Do you use any location-aware services and what are your thoughts?