Wikileaks is not just passing on, but also checking and cleaning material. Otherwise it would be Openleaks. Nobody doubted that the Stratfor leak was a fake.
Huh? "Cleaning material"? "Openleaks", the guys who papershred the leaked materials they had? "Nobody doubted that the Stratfor leak was a fake"... "Nobody"? Wait, how exactly do you know it is indeed "fake"? "The trouble with Wikileaks is selection bias"... Hum yes, an organisation dedicated to transparency will usually publish materials which document wrongdoings, that's the bias.
Why would Wikileaks' credibility be undermined? Wikileaks' primary purpose is to publish what is leaked to them, and they did just that in this case:
WikiLeaks believes that best way to truly determine if a story is authentic, is not just our expertise, but to provide the full source document to the broader community - and particularly the community of interest around the document
From the 1987 LA Times article:
And for that, there was an additional private cost: resentment on the part of those who had been hoping to avoid, at least in part, official blame. It came from corporate executives, and from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Morton Thiokol's biggest customer. And it came from colleagues fearful that too much exposure of truth might hurt business and cost them their jobs.
"If you wreck this company, I'm gonna put my kids on your doorstep," grumbled one. Someone finally dubbed the engineers "the five lepers."
This is the sad reality: Whistle-blowers are often the target of ostracism from their contemporaries, while usually unanimously admired later in historical context. It's still not easy to be a whistle-blower, if anything, it's harder than ever.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
