Ethics assignment #1 Revised

Operation Payback When I was talking about my assignment for the first time, I kind of tried to go more in depth on the question whether or not if it was right or wrong what actually Paypal and Mastercard did that made anonymous react to the situation by bringing down their services for a period of time. If we go more in depth to the story, we have three events. The first event regards Wikileaks. Wikileaks released various top secret documents that exposed the US government. (Those documents were released after the events that were in the documents happened) The second event regards Paypal and Mastercard. Paypal and Mastercard decided to remove the possibility to fund Wikileaks through their services. The third event regards Anonymous. Due to Paypal and Mastercard's actions, Anonymous decided to attack them, and disable their services for a short period of time. The question now is, who is right and who is wrong? Is it ok to release top secret documents after a war? Is it ok to remove funding to an association that has no relationship at all with the funding sources? Is it ok to attack online banking providers to prove a point? If we bring the moral issues to this arguments, we would be arguing about the fact of who is right or wrong for countless days. Instead if we look at what the law says, we can objectively set apart the moral issues and solve the problem really easily. 1) Wikileaks broke the law by releasing those documents, so there is no arguing about that. I personally think that they did the right thing, because they exposed situations that otherwise would have not been exposed before, but that's my own opinion, that doesn't count when laws and rules are broken. The problem is that there is not a just or competent organ that can oversee and overrule in the situation of broken rules, laws and moralities that happened in the documents that were released. 2) Paypal and Mastercard did not break any rules, but they were wrong because they blocked their services with Wikileaks even if they did not have any political or lawful matter with Wikileaks themselves. AS used in the video as an example, while they were blocking their services towards Wikileaks, they still kept running their services on Neo-Nazi websites and so on. 3) Anonymous was wrong. They did want to prove a point, and they failed. Their actions were of little or no damage for a shot period of time, and they did not end up proving anything but being affiliated with Wikileaks and putting this whole situation under an even worst light. They should have used their resources to help people understand what was going on, or help Wikileaks get funds somewhere else. Instead they just worsened the situation. This is a very weird case, because yes, Wikileaks, Paypal, Mastercard and Anonymous all broke some rules/laws, but at the end of the day, what Wikileaks exposed, was never going to be exposed if it wasn't for them.