WikiLeaks and MLK

During the civil rights era of the 1960’s, Martin Luther King, Jr. was willing to deliberately violate segregation laws and go to prison if need be, as an act of civil disobedience. Similarly, Rosa Parks refuse to change her sear on a bus to follow a law she thought was unfair. King and Parks and other civil rights leaders were later vindicated, as the old Jim Crow segregation laws gradually disappeared. Civil disobedience to support civil rights was later praised as a virtue.

Today, Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks organization are publishing classified documents on the Internet. By so doing, they may be either breaking the law or aiding and abetting other law-breakers. It appears that Assange is not doing this for personal gain, but rather to expose unethical behavior in government and industry. In a sense, by publishing classified information WikiLeaks is also opposing excessive classification of documents that it believes the public should be able to see.

Some prominent government and business leaders have praised Assange, others have denounced him as a “terrorist.” What he is doing is, in essence, deliberating publishing documents that he thinks should be available to the public, but which other powerful forces think should be withheld. Is this not a form of civil disobedience, much like Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement of the 1960’s? And should not those people that support Assange join to create an organization that will formally work to oppose excessive government secrecy, just as groups like the NAACP worked to overturn the Jim Crow laws many years ago?