With the disclosure of secret information about security, foreign and military policies of U.S government in Wikileaks people started questioning about all the information that is being hidden from the public for the last few years.
Questions about how secure their lives are, what is the government doing with the money they collect from taxes, society started to fear for their lives. This information was not only unpleasant for Americans but also for leaders of other countries which names appeared in these documents.
United States is a free country in all ways. Politicians support the free of speech in every form from blogs, emails, and columns with personal opinions. President Barack Obama is one of these politicians that support the freedom of speech and information. He used networked technology in his 2008 election campaign. However, it seems that their words are not congruent with their actions because they are certainly keeping information away from the public. Most politicians, including Obama, have used the Internet to consolidate their power, not to empower others for any other purpose.
According to Micah L. Sifry there is a large gap between what American officials have told the public about their actions and what they have actually done. Transparency may be the best medicine for a healthy democracy, but from the government’s perspective, the problem with the WikiLeaks revelations from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, plus the State Department cables, may well be that they expose too much.
Filtering the information has never been the best way to protect the nation. Government has a duty to be transparent, and the public has the right to know what exactly is happening in the country, and they need to know how the president is leading them.
For instance, if the government starts to be more open with society, and stop keeping information, they would no longer have to fear for more leaks with their private documents. And people like Julian Assange would not be trying to hack the government databases to show the public the truth about its country.