After Citizens United, which was decided two days after Democrats lost their 60-seat majority in the Senate, there was a push to respond to the Supreme Court ruling with some legislation adding transparency and disclosure to the process. If the Massachusetts race went another way it would have passed; Democrats consistently got 59 votes in the Senate for the DISCLOSE Act. But Republicans wouldn’t budget because they reasoned that the new campaign finance system – actually not a system at all but a recipe for massive spending by corporations and the wealthy – would advantage them. In 2010 they were right.

One of the biggest disasters with the broken campaign finance system is that we actually have no reporting mechanism for assessing how much money gets spent on campaigns, at least on television. Sometimes candidates and PACs will announce their spending on ads, but local stations are not obligated to report how much they make from political advertising. You see organizations like the Campaign Media Analysis Group quoted in articles about campaign finance, but they basically make educated guesses that involve a lot of legwork. The only way to truly find out how much one television station makes from political advertising is to physically go down to the station and find the person with that information.

The world is better off because the contents of the cables are known, but the United States policy is not. Its recoil and refusal to confront and apologize for the majority of what became known has put it on a path of further disgrace and shame. It remains committed to prosecuting accused whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning, even though he may have played a role in exposing Tunisians, Egyptians and others to details on corruption in their countries.

Around 1,700 pages on the US government’s use of private contractors for rendition flights have been disclosed in a case involving a business dispute between Richmor Aviation Inc. and SportsFlight Air. As AP reports, the documents “shed new light on the U.S. government’s reliance on private contractors for flights between Washington, foreign capitals, the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and, at times, landing points near once-secret, CIA-run overseas prisons.”

Every quarterly earnings statement and public comment from banks in the post-bubble period contains some discussion of a reserve fund for mortgage losses and liabilities. They always attach a dollar amount to it. If BofA knew about an AIG lawsuit seven months ago that would reshape the extent of their mortgage liabilities, and chose not to reveal that information, that’s a serious error. Is it criminal? Hard to say. The SEC has requested more disclosure on these matters. But if I were a BofA shareholder, I’d be mighty unhappy today.

One could make the argument that the fact people are rediscovering these “revelations” is giving the cache a second-life. The major news media organizations that had access to the entire cache had their chance to sift through the cables, now it’s time for citizens of the world to have a turn. Additionally, regional news organizations had access to cables relevant to their region. They wrote about the cables in their newspapers for the people of their country. Those stories did not always make international news. So, for the first time, people are seeing the cables that made big news in various countries, which perhaps even had the effect of creating a massive political crisis in the country.

The batch of US State Embassy cables recently published by the media organization WikiLeaks contain a few assessments of how other countries’ governments manage their terrorism watch lists. The assessments reveal much about how countries have tried to implement security regimes for travel in the aftermath of 9/11. And, each assessment is in the form of questionnaire.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg (DDB), founder of OpenLeaks who defected from the media organization WikiLeaks last year, has apparently destroyed a cache of documents he stole from WikiLeaks when he left the organization. According to reporter Holger Stark of the German news organization Der Spiegel, Domscheit-Berg told Stark some time on August 20 that the cache was gone forever.

Rania Khalek, a blogger and independent journalist who writes for AlterNet, published two major WikiLeaks stories that garnered a lot of attention—”5 WikiLeaks Hits of 2011 That are Turning the World on Its Head—And That the Media are Ignoring” and “5 WikiLeaks Revelations Exposing the Rapidly Growing Corporatism Dominating American Diplomacy Abroad.” She’s recently been writing about the militarization of police and the ever-expanding surveillance state in America. [*Follow her on Twitter at @rania_ak.]

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed published today, J. William Leonard, who worked for five years as the director of the Information Security Oversight Information Office when George W. Bush was president, calls on the Obama administration to sanction “those who inappropriately classify information, and it needs to take far greater care in what it decides to label secret.”