Transparency: a society with no secrets?

The about pages of the Wikileaks site claim that 'Publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people' (Wikileaks 2011). First of all, this suggestion of transparency touches upon ideas of a society with no secrets, and implies notions of communication, openness, clarity, words which portray that the site is merely trying to create a more open, communicative publishing system, something which has the ability to create a better ‘society’ for the majority. Assange’s views on transparency could possibly mean that the release of certain documents is positive, because if people are aware then this, perhaps, creates a stronger democracy?

A guardian article from December 2010; ‘Wikileaks the cause of transparency’ suggests that; ‘the WikiLeaks saga reminds us of something we already knew: there is no privacy anymore’ (Schiffrin, 2010). Therefore, among claims from the Wikileaks site, that the organisation is creating something different (‘A new model of journalism’ – Wikileaks, 2011), Schriffin argues that the site is simply reminding us that there is no longer any privacy. She also suggests that ‘much of what Wikileaks reveals, adds to what was known or suspected by people in the know, and so shows again that transparency is often the best way to defuse conspiracy theories’ (Schriffin, 2010).  I believe Schriffin is trying to convey that WikiLeaks is not revealing anything we did not, perhaps, already suspect, which means that whilst the site is exposing many government documents it is not actually teaching us more then what we may have expected already. In fact, the article even argues that this idea of transparency is a good thing as it obliterates conspiracy theories and replaces them with truth, and frankly I happen to agree.