C’mon, you remember the lyrics, don’t you?

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape; you don’t blow into the wind. You don’t take the mask off that ole Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim!”

OK, maybe you Gen Y types never heard of Jim Croce’s song “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” but that’s neither her nor there. But heeding the sentiments of that song might have been a good idea for Julian Assange and the rest of the WikiLeaks gang.

Now, I’m not a big fan of unnecessary secrecy. I don’t like horrible, terrible things being buried by governments or corporations or any entity or person, really. I don’t like things that are uncomfortable being swept under the rug so as not to embarrass certain people. I do believe that secrecy is often taken too far and that the term “national security” is often misused to hide things that shouldn’t be hidden.

That being said, I think WikiLeaks was an irresponsible operation. Yes, they’ve brought some important things to light, but the problem is that everyone involved, most particularly founder Julian Assange, decided it was the job of WikiLeaks to eliminate all secrecy.

A totally transparent world with no secrets, my friends, is not a good one. If nations had no secrets, they would also have no security. If companies had no secrecy, they would not be able to keep the unique things that give them competitive edge and make their products unique.

Things like open-source coding are great. The Freedom of Information Act is necessary. Investigative reporting and whistle-blowing are important to keep us free, informed and to make governments and companies accountable.

But we should not feel entitled to know everything. That just doesn’t make any fucking sense.

And WikiLeaks showed that it didn’t care about context or what was important to let people know about, but rather that it got its collective rocks off by finding any secrets it could and simply throwing them out there to spit in the face of anyone who would dare to want to keep anything confidential. That arrogance was perhaps shown most recently and messily by releasing a shit-ton of U.S. diplomatic cables. There were no particular smoking guns in there, but there sure was a lot of potential to create unnecessary tensions between nations and to get a whole lot of diplomats in trouble with their own governments and with nations neighboring them for doing the job that diplomats are supposed to do.

So, given that WikiLeaks simply likes spitting into the face of the powers that be “just because it can” and not because we need to know all this shit, is this any surprise?

WikiLeaks suspends publishing to fight financial blockade

I like people who dig for truth; I don’t like irresponsible bastards. Good riddance to WikiLeaks, I hope, and here’s to someone filling that void who will actually think about what really needs to be revealed, and what’s simply a pointless exercise in showing off and pissing people off.