What occurred on the floor of the People's House on Tuesday afternoon was quite possibly the first ever congressional wiki debate. Lawmakers are privy to all sorts of classified information and confidential briefings about national security, but as they argued about a new spending bill to fund the war in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, they spent a good bit of the afternoon bickering about things they'd seen on the Internet.
WikiLeaks is an international organization, based in Sweden, which publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by the Sunshine Press. The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. (www.wikileaks.org/)
Earlier this week, the site became an issue when thousands of classified U.S. military documents, regarding whether or not the U.S. should leave Pakistan, were posted on the website.
Currently, no information in our society is secret and with the updates and changes in cell phones and the creation of social media sites such as blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc. anyone can share information easily. No longer do we need to depend on journalists and news sites to be the gatekeepers. This raises a question to me, who is a journalist? What classifies someone as a journalist? I think the line between who is and who is not, is very thin.
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