Free Flow of Information

        It's no news that the government has been suppressing and hiding information from US citizens since its conception. In modern times, it is very common for the average person to have a general distrust for the government and their operations. More people now know to always take statements from the government officials with a grain of salt. After being caught in so many lies, there is no reason to fully believe everything being told to us. However, it wasn't always this way. For many years people had faith in the government, and felt they were open and honest about what was going on in and out of the country. It wasn't until the 1960's when things started to go south for the government due to their involvement in the Vietnam War. Initially the biggest outcry against the war was the countless deaths of U.S. soldiers over the many years we'd already been fighting the war. US citizens, and soldiers in particular were beginning to question the importance of being in Vietnam when so many people were dying. It wasn't long before images were being released to the public of the atrocities in Vietnam. People quickly realized that the innocent civilians in Vietnam were being relentlessly murdered. This really caused people to lose a lot of trust in the government. It wasn't much later when the Watergate scandal happened and people now realized that our own president could be lying right to our faces. When it comes to Julian Assange I think he should be praised for his work and not be considered a criminal. He is obviously a genius for what he's done and basically sacrificed his life to spread the truth. Daniel Ellsberg discussed how he was worried that if Assange was extradited to the US, more journalists would follow the same fate. WikiLeaks set a new standard for information for the public. Since WikiLeaks, I believe that the government has definitely had a harder time keeping things like the death of civilians a secret, but they still manage to get away with it. 

Sifry, Micah L. Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency. Counterpoint, 2011.