I hear people say this all of the time, and it was the initial reaction of many people when I told them about the US Department of State Cables leak.
However, the first time I heard of Wikileaks was after the 2007 election in Kenya when there was a significant change in the vote, suddenly, due to documents leaked there [0]. There are plenty of other examples where the US government was not the one being "attacked" but that is an early example, if not the first, which brought Wikileaks to the world's attention.
Maybe the US only seems to be the main target because it is US citizens who are most empowered and/or motivated to leak those documents to Wikileaks in the first place.
And sure, Manning is worthy of praise, but the point of Wikileaks presenting the information was to keep Manning anonymous - it was his own confession to Lamo at Wired which got him in trouble in the end. I don't see what Snowden has to do with it - does he have any formal relationship with Wikileaks? Other than fighting alongside each other for a similar/the same cause, and speaking at events together etc. I don't know how that is relevant. Wikileaks has had value to the world and hopefully will have a further positive impact in the time to come.
I was personally interested if there are any leaks on Russia and China. Nothing really of note. But somehow those two countries don't strike me as somehow less likely to do creepy shit than U.S.
you need someone within those nations to leak information. then you need to get it into the relevant media. With most russian and chinese media being state controlled they are not going to run with these stories. If Western media run with them they will get little coverage in these countries and will be denoucned by russia/china as lies. Perhaps there are chinese and russian versions of wikileaks but we in the west dont know about them or the language barrier prevents the media easily picking up the stories.
That was the old wikileaks which I also supported. The new wikileaks, after they closed their leaks website, and when their team fractured internally, is a quite different thing.
The new wikileaks is not about leaks, it's about a particular agenda set by Assange.
However, the first time I heard of Wikileaks was after the 2007 election in Kenya when there was a significant change in the vote, suddenly, due to documents leaked there [0]. There are plenty of other examples where the US government was not the one being "attacked" but that is an early example, if not the first, which brought Wikileaks to the world's attention.
Maybe the US only seems to be the main target because it is US citizens who are most empowered and/or motivated to leak those documents to Wikileaks in the first place.
And sure, Manning is worthy of praise, but the point of Wikileaks presenting the information was to keep Manning anonymous - it was his own confession to Lamo at Wired which got him in trouble in the end. I don't see what Snowden has to do with it - does he have any formal relationship with Wikileaks? Other than fighting alongside each other for a similar/the same cause, and speaking at events together etc. I don't know how that is relevant. Wikileaks has had value to the world and hopefully will have a further positive impact in the time to come.
[0] http://www.dw.de/wikileaks-website-offers-promising-outlet-f...