American Helicopter in Iraq attacks Civilians..Video Leaked

When a nonprofit group this week released video footage, leaked via a source in the Pentagon, showing a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack on a group of civilians in Baghdad, the clip unleashed a viral online sensation and ignited an intense debate about the conduct of U.S. forces in Iraq.
But the simple fact of the video's release also reflects the ongoing revolution in how news gets produced and published.

The group, called WikiLeaks, released the Pentagon video on Monday. Less than 24 hours later, the clip had netted more than 1.3 million viewers on YouTube alone.
The transmission of information, in and out of regularly authorized channels, has become much more immediate and far more viral than at any point in history. Virtually anyone with a browser and a DSL connection can now bring news to light in dramatic and instantaneous fashion. All these trends converged with the WikiLeaks video.
Seven noncombatants were killed in the Baghdad attack. Among them a driver (Saeed Chmagh) and photographer (Namir Noor-Eldeen) employed by the Reuters news service. Reuters, indeed, had been seeking to obtain internal Pentagon materials pertaining to the attack, including the footage that went online yesterday for the past three years, using the Freedom of Information Act. The agency's efforts had so far proved fruitless.

And that's where WikiLeaks came in. The nonprofit website launched in 2006 as an online clearinghouse for whistleblowers seeking to publicize leaked government documents across the world. But prior to posting the video footage, the site had functioned as repository of information; with this latest scoop, which it says came from "a courageous source" within the U.S. military, it has morphed into an investigative news source in its own right. (The full 18-minute video can be viewed , albeit with the clear warning that the material is quite disturbing .
"The material was encrypted with a code, and we broke the code," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told wired.com. "In terms of journalism efficiency, I think we discovered a lot with a small amount of resources."

Is this good news or bad news?? I"m not sure. If we have access to all this information, doesn't that mean anyone in the world has access to it, including the bad guys??