WikiLeaks, a distraction?

Aaron Bady (zunguzungu) on why WikiLeaks is getting so much press:

Which is why I want to say this, as clearly as I can: it’s exactly because Assange and Wikileaks are relatively unimportant (compared to the gigantic scandal of the anti-democratic security state in which we now live) that the media has made him into a superstar, has tried to make the entire story about Wikileaks and a single eccentric and interesting character, rather than about the United States government’s actions as a system. The more we focus on him – and I’ve contributed to that, which is why I particularly want to write this post — the more we take attention away from the real story, the substance of the things Wikileaks has revealed.

It tells you a great deal about how our media works, after all, that so very many of the people pronouncing moralistically on Wikileaks and Assange — either pro- or con- — seem more or less completely unblemished by more than a casual familiarity with the most sketchy and incomplete details of the case or the cabledump. .... Wikileaks has done a great deal to illuminate what our government actually does, but as Glenn Greenwald is absolutely right to point out, by far the most immediately revelatory effect of the Wikileaks dump was not in the cables, but in our government’s reaction to them.

By way of qualification, I note that it is not simply governmental secrecy that's at issue. WikiLeaks has promised leaks from a major bank. Banks, of course, are private enterprises and so do not do business in the name of the citizenry. Major banks are also international in scope. But how do they manipulate opportunities afforded them by nations?

TheAtlantic.com on Aaron Bady.