the year of my birth.

so it's way after 10pm, and i have digested cold medicine.

but i am thinking very coherently. as far as i can tell.

here is whats on my mind.

there's a website called WikiLeaks. it's a place where people leak information about governments around the world, that they feel the public needs to know.

a few months ago, someone leaked a video about some action in afghanistan, where some U.S. soldiers attacked civilians who weren't doing anything (including children...). they didn't have guns, they were literally just walking down the street. it was released because the families of a couple photographers killed wanted their deaths investigated, and they found out they had been lied to about what really happened.

anyway, that's when i first became aware of the website. it's been around for a few years, apparently. the creator of the site is being hunted down. he travels around from place to place, so his location can't be traced.

i'm really curious to read more on the site.

but at the same time...

i'm actually afraid to. i'm sure visits to the site are being monitored. by my own government.

this feels like something george orwell wrote. except it's real.

afraid to visit a website? this is the opposite of what the founders of our country had in mind for its citizens. they escaped tyranny, because they believed you shouldn't be afraid of your government.

our government is actually trying to scare people away from talking to WikiLeaks, because they're so afraid of secrets getting out.

a government that tries to scare people.

a government that claims to value whistleblowing, actually arrests whistleblowers.

if you're curious about wikileaks, i found a couple quotes from glenn greenwald's blog on salon.com about it:

"Any rational person would have to acknowledge that government secrecy in rare cases is justifiable and that it's possible for leaks of legitimate secrets to result in serious harm. I'm not aware of a single instance where any leak from WikiLeaks has done so, but it's certainly possible that, at some point, it might. But right now, the scales are tipped so far in the other direction -- toward excessive, all-consuming secrecy -- that the far greater danger comes from allowing that to fester and grow even more. It's not even a close call. Any efforts to subvert that secrecy cult are commendable in the extreme, and nobody is doing that as effectively as WikiLeaks..."

"Just in the last week alone, several people have expressed to me fears that supporting or otherwise enabling WikiLeaks could subject them to liability or worse. There's no reason to believe that's true, but given the powers the U.S. Government claims -- lawless detentions, renditions, assassinations even of American citizens -- that's the climate of intimidation that has been created. This latest incident is clearly being used to impede WikiLeaks' vital function of checking powerful factions and imposing transparency, and for that reason alone, this is an extremely serious case that merits substantial scrutiny, along with genuine skepticism to understand what happened."