Artful Dodger:

> There's a huge difference between an individual or an organization reporting abuses in government or business one at a time and the same people stealing enough classified material to run a spy agency.

At what point does it become "reporting" or "spying"? The truth is that western governments have lived in a culture of secrecy for decades. The Cold War was used as an excuse to give broad powers to spy agencies. Governments got used to run just about everything as a secret. National security became an excuse for doing anything they wanted.

Once exposed, politicians now cry foul and try to hide their embarrassing crap behind "national security". If they could, governments would remain secretive, spy on people, abuse their power, and the voting public would be none the wiser.

Wikileaks is far from a spy agency. They simply put out government secrets in the public eye. The Obama administration can go and say that people's lives will be put at risk. What is put at risk is the government's ability to save face. Embassy personnel give recounts of their impressions of other powerful foreigners. Those people are being exposed for who they are. The American government does not want to appear to be spying on the rich and the powerful among their allies. Yet that is what they did, and now they call Wikileaks a spy agency? There is no free speech in this case, only Big Brother trying to tell others what they can and cannot report.

If governments don't want to be embarrassed, maybe they should start by giving up their culture of secrecy and their paranoia.

To add to this, if instead of American files, they had released 250,000 classified files from the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China, would people make such a fuss about it? If that were the case, the American government would probably be giving them a medal and massive funding for their projects!