Rem Rieder

USA TODAY

"We don't want innocent people who have a decent chance of being hurt to be hurt," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told PBS in 2011.

Guess he changed his mind.

In the past year alone, WikiLeaks has published highly personal information about hundreds and hundreds of private citizens with absolutely no public policy implications, material that ranges from embarrassing to life-threatening, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

The AP says "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."

Which is a complete disgrace.

WikiLeaks Spills Secrets, Exposes Private Lives

Since its inception, WikiLeaks, under Assange's domination, has been committed to exposing government secrets. But there is no excuse for not editing out private material that has no earthly reason to be made public.

As Gawker Media founder Nick Denton said when he repudiated and took down an atrocious story that essentially outed an unknown media executive, "secrets ... are not all equally worthy of exposure."

Rieder: The downside of Gawker.com's death

The gratuitous cruelty to the WikiLeaks approach is staggering.

Assange, stuck in Ecuador's London embassy for more than four years to avoid questioning in Sweden about a sexual assault, didn't respond to the AP's requests for an interview. After the article appeared, the organization reacted in the manner of a third-rate political hack, tweeting, “US big media scramble to side with presumptive winner #Clinton. We expect many more recycled attacks like AP’s today as our leaks continue.” It cast the matter as a political flap — its most recent big splash was its release of hacked Democratic National Committee records — rather than addressing the substantial merits of the AP story and its own repugnant behavior. It did tweet a denial of leaking the info about the Saudi gay, blaming the government.

Say what you will about former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He commendably did not resort to the document dump when he released his government secrets. Instead, he worked closely with top news organizations so the disclosures had proper context and unneeded personal information could be redacted, reducing the risk of collateral damage a la WikiLeaks.

Assange took that approach years ago, working with The New York Times. the British newspaper The Guardian and the German publication Der Spiegel when reporting on classified military documents leaked by Chelsea Manning in 2010.

But over the years he has become a freedom of information absolutist. In 2013, the group took the position that failing to release any information "legitimizes the false propaganda of 'information is dangerous.' "

It's a position as breathtakingly arrogant as it is pernicious.

Consider the reactions of some of the people whose most personal information was exposed to the world. "They published everything: my phone, address, name, details," the AP quoted one Saudi man as saying. He was stunned WikiLeaks had published details of a paternity dispute. "If the family of my wife saw this ... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people," he said.

"This has nothing to do with politics or corruption," a doctor in Jordan, whose brain cancer patient's medical records were published by WikiLeaks, told the AP.

Said a Saudi woman who had secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, "This is a disaster. What if my brothers, neighbors, people I know or even don't know, have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?"

An excellent question.

Think of how you would feel if your own private information was thrust into the spotlight, for no reason.

Make no mistake, uncovering government secrets can play an important, positive role. Think of the Pentagon Papers and the disclosure of the Watergate horrors. I'd argue Snowden performed a public service when he revealed hitherto unknown government surveillance, prompting a critical national debate. More recently, the Panama Papers and their revelations about shadowy offshore financial transactions had international impact.

Rieder: How Panama Papers came together

Bringing truth to light is what journalism — at its best — is all about. But minimizing harm is also a vital part of the equation. All of the ambitious goals and lofty rhetoric are no excuse for gratuitously damaging innocent people in the process.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder