On Oct. 21, Wikileaks released CIA Director John Brennan’s private emails from the late 2000s. The emails provide insight into shifts in government policy, but also contained personal information, including the social security numbers of Brennan and his wife, their home addresses and home telephone number. While leaks can increase transparency between government and citizens, releasing personal information is malicious, undermining the credibility of such activity in furthering public discourse.
A discussion of leaks would be incomplete without mention of Edward Snowden, an undoubtable paradigm to many aspiring political hackers. Though it would appear that the publication of political figures and organizations’ clandestine information is a common thread between the 2013 National Security Agency leak and the Brennan email release, the similarities end there. Snowden entrusted journalists to scrub documents of sensitive information prior to release and the documents themselves were of government activities affecting U.S. citizens — and many others — without their knowledge or consent. This practice had pre-Internet precedent; Daniel Ellsberg also approached journalists with the information that would eventually become the Pentagon Papers. This kind of screening lends leaks an air of legitimacy, as they are not intended to harm or malign individuals, but to further policy-oriented discussion. For the full article click here
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