I tried reading some of the leaks, but gosh are they ever dry...nothing exciting at all, just letters between diplomats. Some guy preparing to visit Germany got a nice long boring memo about the state of the country and whom he should say what to.
There was another memo from some intelligence guy who had interviewed everyday people for their opinions on political happenings in Armenia or something.
Great...the U.S. does pays people to gather pointless information...I'm sure there are some neat things in there, but most of it is just boring prattle.
I gotta say though, instead of throwing the guy in jail the U.S. should be trying to get in his good graces...plus it's not his fault, I'd be going after whoever did the actual leaking.
As for actual freedom of speech, I'd say this isn't even a big deal, it's just the cup spilling over...people are seeing so much crap flying in the face of freedom and democracy.
My dad grew up in communist Hungary, and more and more often he says things are getting just as bad for freedom of speech in the capitalist world as they were in the communist.
People with opposing views to the majority or those in power often get in trouble. I've seen a lot of cases over the past 3 or 4 years...from priests being told they can no longer preach, to journalists looking for answers being forcibly removed by police, to angry protesters preventing speakers or presentations AND getting away with it, to things being horribly skewed by the media to favor a certain political leaning, to just simple humiliation by teachers or professors in front of your peers.
So as I see this going on and then the government starts arresting people saying things they don't want said, I start to get worried...there's a poem actually.... goes something like, "they came for the jews and I didn't speak up because I was not a jew, then they came for the...<goes on about different groups and how I did not speak up because I wasn't part of their group> and then they came for me...and there was no one left to speak up."
anyways, I sometimes worry that pretty soon it's going to be my freedoms that are going to be taken away.
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