Sunday, October 21, 2012

Why Doesn't the US Just Mark All Secret Documents "Copyrighted" and Use Copyright Law?

It is amazing how much controversy the WikiLeaks release of confidential, secret, and classified information has caused the world. Such events trouble our military, and they appear to have hurt our State Department which is quite a fortunate. You see, we need to keep opening channels of communication between our allies, trading partners, and even our enemies. And we need to assess all those communications, as there are cultural differences, and we need to talk about that amongst our own team.

Every nation has to do that because people come from different places, ways of thinking, and even religious backgrounds. Such information needs to be kept close to the vest, as each side discusses how they're going to go about negotiating, or deal with the differences in culture. Unfortunately, when such discussions get blasted into the world media it may cause hurt feelings, and therefore, in the future there may be less communication, because there is more mistrust.
After all, if your communications which you talk about in private are blasted all over the media, the chances of you having future communications are less likely. Fewer communications can cause a more likelihood for political impasse, which could lead to war. So, whereas, WikiLeaks believes that it is helping by putting all this information out of the public, actually, it creates an atmosphere of animosity and mistrust, therefore it could lead to war sometime in the future. That's not okay, and that is what much of the concern is about.

Nevertheless, we talk a lot about the need for whistleblowers to keep our politicians, decision-makers, and even our government honest with the people, not only the people the United States, but all the people in other countries, and around the world. So there seems to be a challenge of where the balance should be. It is amazing how much of a stir this whole WikiLeaks fiasco has caused, but there are solutions to these problems you know.

You see, if we truly care about whistleblowers, and we want to keep our world leaders honest, and if we demand transparency, then it is very hard to jump out of the political correctness to put the Wiki Leaks founder in prison for disrupting the government. After all we want freedom of the press, because we all believe in that, or at least we do the United States.

One way to combat this problem is simply to stamp a little "C" (for copyright) at the bottom of each memorandum, whether it is classified, secret, or confidential. This way if anyone gets a hold of it, they are not allowed to copy it, to put it in the media, or to place it on a website. If they do they are breaking international copyright laws, and therefore, we could shut down the website for breaking those laws. Indeed, I hope you will please consider this, because I guarantee our world leaders are, because what's happened is a detriment to human societies and the future of peace on earth.

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