Government officials need to be more judicious in determining what truly should be kept private for national security reasons and what should be available to citizens, regardless of inconvenience or embarrassment. It is the public, after all, that funds the government that is supposed to be acting in our best interests. And as we've seen far too many times, government can't be trusted to always do the right thing on its own.

The media also has a chance to support the cause. Instead of passively sitting back and being vilified by grandstanding politicians for being complicit in disseminating secret information from Wikileaks, it's time for the media to make it abundantly clear that it will not subordinate itself to acts of government officials that are illegal, and even unethical, in nature. The Wikileaks controversy should be a call to arms in the fight for open government, not a cause to retreat.

Many have drawn an apt analogy between the recent releases on Wikileaks to the publishing of The Pentagon Papers by the New York Times in 1971. There, classified documents showed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks — none of which had been reported by the media covering the Vietnam War.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to defeat a federal court injunction to stop the release of the articles in the newspaper. In his passionate opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."