"Jeudi après-midi, le rapporteur du texte au Parlement, l’eurodéputé français Kader Arif, a annoncé qu’il quittait son poste de rapporteur. “Je ne participerai pas à cette mascarade”, explique-t-il dans un message publié sur son blog. Dénonçant “la non-association de la société civile”, le “manque de transparence depuis le début des négociations”, la “mise à l’écart des revendications du Parlement européen” mais aussi “des manœuvres inédites de la droite de ce Parlement pour imposer un calendrier accéléré visant à faire passer l’accord au plus vite”, l’eurodéputé dit vouloir “envoyer un signal fort et alerter l’opinion publique sur cette situation inacceptable”."
— Contrefaçon : l’Union européenne signe le traité ACTA - LeMonde.fr
"WikiLeaks should be treated by our government as a terrorist organization, their goal from the start has been to damage the U.S standing in the world as the super power. For average Americans, lives are not yet directly impacted by the leaks, but the goal of the sites founder Julian Assange is to strip us of our credibility, and put us on the road to becoming a less powerful nation. Releasing classified documents is infuriating enough, but to have it masterminded by someone in another country screams espionage, and Assange should be captured, punished, and made an example of. Lives have been put in danger, and American diplomats, as well as our allies, have been compromised."
— Is WikiLeaks the Internet Al Queda? | What’s Hot Washington
"Quel est l’unique effet concret de ces révélations ? L’impossibilité de continuer à affirmer des vérités officielles, à produire au kilomètre des contre-vérités flagrantes en espérant que quelqu’un les tiendra pour exactes. Le seul véritable changement induit par les révélations de Wikileaks est la sanction désormais définitive du fait que le public croit de moins en moins ce que disent dirigeants de la planète. Il est désormais officiel que toutes les déclarations officielles sont vraisemblablement vides de toute vérité. Chacun le savait déjà, mais c’est désormais vérifiable et validé."
— Lignes de fuites - Article11
"A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon’s own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence — zero — that any of WikiLeaks’ actions has caused even a single death."
— What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010 - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
"
L’administration Obama avait bien juré de faire appliquer à la lettre la loi fédérale d’accès à l’information (Freedom of Information Act), de rendre publique toute information d’intérêt public. Elle aura mis quatre mois à trahir sa parole, passée l’investiture de janvier 2009. Sécurité nationale, encore et toujours. WikiLeaks surgit alors et tourne à plein régime. La suite est connue mais pas finie. Et aucune démocratie, si grande soit-elle, ne peut plus espérer taire des pratiques qui bousculent sa réputation.
Trente ans après la divulgation des «Papiers du Pentagone» sur la guerre du Vietnam par le New York Times, les Etats-Unis se croyaient-ils à l’abri d’une nouvelle fuite d’envergure, en pleine mise en question de leur politique étrangère?
"
— WikiLeaks, l’impossible traque | Slate
"Now, we find we are witnessing a new level of info-struggle. We are witnessing how the emperor wears no clothes. We can see the lies made bare, we can see the posturing and propositioning that our governments participate in. We can see the collusion that occurs with transnational corporations and with global media giants. WikiLeaks and others are battling against powerful institutions bent on curtailing our knowledge of and influence over policies and structures that impact our lives: they are information heroes, not information villains. We see all this being done in our name, and we condemn it."
— WikiLeaks: the emperor wears no clothes | John Pilger and others | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
"In Ellsberg’s day, it took nearly a year to photocopy the 7,000-page Pentagon papers and most of another year to get excerpts published. The push-button model of WikiLeaks compresses the timeline radically and permits the universal broadcast of voluminous archives in full, so much so that leak hardly seems to suffice as a metaphor. This year’s breach of containment spilled nearly half a million documents, including 76,607 military reports from Afghanistan, 391,832 from Iraq and, beginning Nov. 28, a stream of diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks says will eventually number 251,287."
— Runner-Up: Julian Assange - Person of the Year 2010 - TIME
"Les Etats démocratiques ont le droit de garder des secrets et d’agir, dans les formes légales, à l’abri de règles reconnues de confidentialité. Mais les organes d’information, sur le Net ou ailleurs, ne sont pas et ne doivent pas être des prolongements des Etats. Ils sont des contre-pouvoirs. Ils ont pour fonction d’informer le citoyen et s’efforcent, pour ce faire, de comprendre ce qui se passe dans les coulisses des organisations, publiques ou privées."
— Pourquoi «Libé» abrite WikiLeaks - Libération
"Diplomatic relations have always been a matter of common interests and wether or not country leaders were on the same page. Of course diplomacy needs subtlety which in turns needs discretion, but I don’t really think it needs obscurity. Why would it ? Why would a diplomat need obscurity when he is suppose to represent (indirectly of course) his people (ideally in a transparent way) ? The answer is quite simple : because diplomats act in a way that would not be tolerated in a democratic country !"
— Transparency is not the opposite of discretion : A defense of Wikileaks.
"But as we can see from what has been leaked, there is much we should know—actions taken in our name—that government holds from us. We also know that the revelation of these secrets has not been devastating. America’s and Germany’s relationship has not collapsed because one undiplomatic diplomat called Angela Merkel uncreative. Wikileaks head Julian Assange told the Guardian that in four years, “there has been no credible allegation, even by organizations like the Pentagon, that even a single person has come to harm as a result of our activities.” So perhaps the lesson of Wikileaks should be that the open air is less fearsome than we’d thought. That should lead to less secrecy. After all, the only sure defense against leaks is transparency."
— BuzzMachine
