Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Can we as ordinary citizens create our own version of WikiLeaks and expose anomalies in the Government?

The constitution provides that the right of the people to information on matters of public concern shall be recognized. Access to official records, and to documents, and papers pertaining to official acts, transactions, or decisions, as well as to government research data used as basis for policy development, shall be afforded the citizen, subject to such limitations as maybe provided by law.
Clearly, disseminating factual information for the nation to digest is not a crime but in fact a requirement under the ultimate law of the land. The wikileaks may thus be an allowable means subject to certain limitation as provided by the law. The problem however is that the limitation is not clear this is one aspect where jurisprudence and law has to evolve. The freedom of Information Bill is presently being debated which is hoped as a solution.
In the case of Asange, qouting time dated December 9, 2010 wherein the weakness of the case against Asange himself was evident. There is no law in th US that punishes the act.
"But the law is too broad a brush to try to draw a distinction between WikiLeaks' indiscriminate posting of the cables — which Burns called "nihilistic" — and the more careful vetting evidenced by The New York Times, Abrams said. How do you draft a law that targets WikiLeaks but leaves intact our system of press freedoms? "It's very difficult to do," Abrams said. Besides, he said, "the courts have never required responsibility as a prerequisite to press freedom. That's never been the legal standard." In addition, claims that Assange has simply dumped the documents without reviewing them, much like a traditional editor would, have been disputed. Assange himself told TIME that each diplomatic cable his site has published has been vetted by his own team or by the editors of newspapers with whom he has shared the documents."
Relatively, whether Assange case will prosper is relavant in this issue and it will surely affect future laws and jurisprudence in the Philippines.

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