Private lives are exposed as WikiLeaks spills its secrets

CAIRO — Its scoops have rattled the Saudi foreign ministry, the National Security Agency and the U.S. Democratic Party. But WikiLeaks’ spectacular mass-disclosures have also hit hundreds of average people — including sick children, rape victims and mental patients — who just happened to find their personal information included in the group’s giant data dumps, The Associated Press has found.

In the past year alone, the radical transparency organization has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens; hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality can lead to a prison sentence or even death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.

“They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,” said another Saudi man who told AP that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. “If the family of my wife saw this … Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.”

WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft. And it’s drawing criticism from longtime allies.

Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for an interview over the past month have been unsuccessful. In a series of tweets following the publication of the AP’s story, WikiLeaks dismissed the privacy concerns as “recycled news” saying they were “not even worth a headline.”

Assange gave no indication that the offending material would be taken down. He has been holed up for the past four years in Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he sought refuge when Swedish prosecutors sought to question him over sexual assault allegations.

WikiLeaks’ stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material “involving war, spying and corruption” into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a “giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.”

The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the U.S. Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s ruling party and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and personal information.

Lisa Lynch, who teaches media and communications at Drew University and has followed WikiLeaks for years, said Assange may not have had the resources to properly vet what he published. Or maybe he felt that the urgency of his mission trumped privacy concerns.

“For him the ends justify the means,” she said.