Hundreds of People Exposed – At Least One Man in Nation Where LGBT People Are Executed Has Been Outed, Some Are Victims of Horrific Violent CrimesÂ
The ongoing massive data dumps by the Wikileaks organization is creating more than security headaches for the National Security Agency, the U.S. Democratic Party, and the Saudi foreign ministry, to name a few. Private individuals are now finding their confidential medical records and other personal details disclosed as well. The Associated Press has noted the data included the personal information of hundreds of people — including sick children, rape victims and mental health patients, and more alarming in the mostly LGBTQ intolerant countries of the Middle East, including the Saudi Kingdom, gay men and women as well as some transgender persons.Â
According to the Associated Press, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many 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 case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality can lead to social ostracism, a prison sentence or even death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.
“Three Saudi cables published by WikiLeaks identified domestic workers who’d been tortured or sexually abused by their employers, giving the women’s full names and passport numbers,” the AP reports. “One cable named a male teenager who was raped by a man while abroad; a second identified another male teenager who was so violently raped his legs were broken; a third outlined the details of a Saudi man detained for “sexual deviation” — a derogatory term for homosexuality.”
The AP notes that the mass publication of personal data is at odds with Wikileaks’ claim to have championed privacy even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, drawing criticism from longtime allies.
Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for an interview over the past month have been unsuccessful and the ex-hacker did not reply to written questions. In a series of tweets following the publication of the AP’s story, WikiLeaks dismissed the privacy concerns as “recycled news” and said they were “not even worth a headline.”
Some responses via Twitter:
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