In the article, Assange endorsed the idea of what he calls as “scientific journalism” as the new way of doing journalistic work. He’s asserting that like any scientific study, anyone who makes a claim about something needs to publish the dataset that he or she used in arriving at the said finding.

This is one of the reasons why he and his volunteers are publishing everything they’ve got with regards to, for example, the State Department cables, which were obtained surreptitiously.

Assange and his people are leaving it up to John Q. Public to mine the data and find the information which purportedly enlighten us and help us become better citizens of the world.

While I agree with the notion of transparency and the value of a well-informed public, there’s still that concept of “world order” that we need to carefully consider. David Brooks of the NY Times talked very eloquently about this middle ground, and about the desire to prevent complete anarchy and social disorder by putting some sensible value judgment in releasing information, specially stolen information.More...