Gay’s life at risk after Wikileaks exposure
WikiLeaks has put hundreds of lives at risk by exposing details of people’s private lives, including outing a gay man in Saudi Arabia where homosexuality is punishable by death, according to rights groups.
The whistleblower website aims to fight repression through publishing restricted government material. Over the past year it has posted more than half million files, among them police reports, medical documents, credit card details and scans of passports.
In one instance, the group identified a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay as part of a leak of 120,000 files from Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry. Rights groups fear that he is at risk of vigilante reprisal attacks and could face harsher treatment in the kingdom, where same-sex relations are punished with long jail terms and in some cases execution.
‘‘Exposing him could have devastating consequences for his family, his work, his capacity to live and survive,’’ Scott Long, an activist, said.
Among the same Saudi diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks named two young rape victims. It also provided the names and passport numbers of several domestic workers who had been tortured or sexually abused by their employers.
Paul Dietrich, a transparency activist who is critical of WikiLeaks’ unedited exposure, said his partial scan of the Saudi cables alone found more than 500 passport, identity, academic or employment documents.
They also included at least 124 medical files, identifying HIV patients, people with mental health issues, sick children and refugees, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.
A bewildered consultant in Amman, Jordan, confirmed to The Times that the details of his cancer patients were among those listed. ‘‘It is completely illegal. Medical files are confidential documents between patient and physician. Revealing such private information puts people in serious danger,’’ Dr Nayef al-Fayez said.
A Saudi man, who found the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner online, said that it could ‘‘destroy’’ lives. ‘‘They published everything: my phone, address, name, details. Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people,’’ he said.
WikiLeaks, founded by the Australian computer programmer and activist Julian Assange in 2006, claims to offer a platform for whistleblowers to publish restricted official material ‘‘involving war, spying and corruption’’.
Many have questioned the group’s actions as the files are increasingly posted without vetting. Assange, who has sought refugee for the last four years in Ecuadorean embassy in London, has said that censoring them takes too long. ‘‘We can’t sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line by line,’’ he told the Frontline Club in 2010.
The group did not answer a request for comment from The Times.
It defended its actions on Wednesday, posting on Twitter that it did not ‘‘disclose gays to the Saudi government’’ as the data came from the regime itself. But it failed to answer criticism that naming a gay man could endanger his life or encourage a harsher crackdown.
Activists said that WikiLeaks was mirroring the actions of regimes it was trying to combat. ‘‘It needs to distinguish between figures of public interest and information [about] private individuals who need to be protected,’’ Long said.