Over the past week, I've read many different reactions to the latest WikiLeaks document dump. I've found the commentary on it both scandalous and thrilling and do admit to losing some sleep upon discovering WikiLeaks' fancy Cablegate, which lets you sort through cables based on their country of origin and classification.Of course, once I found this function, I rushed to read all the cables marked "Top Secret," figuring that section would provide me with the most earth-shattering news and mind-boggling stories about my country's diplomats.

And then, in the midst of my mad rush, it occurred to me that my instinct upon reading the cables-which many in our nation undoubtedly shared-wasn't very unlike another website I had read before. In a moment of clarity, I realized that WikiLeaks was sort of like JuicyCampus for the government.

Remember JuicyCampus? Around two years ago, this website was the subject of great controversy on college campuses. Just to recap: Created in August 2007 by Duke graduate Matt Ivester, JuicyCampus hosted a collection of forums unique to 500 individual colleges (Brandeis included) for users to discuss anonymously and explicitly the newest, juiciest and oftentimes vulgar and mean-spirited gossip. In November 2008, I urged readers of this newspaper not to visit the website:

"Although college students created JuicyCampus, the Web site does not embody the goals and needs of students within a university setting. Free speech should not be taken for granted. In a society in which this right is considered an absolute, we must consider its limitations.

We are obliged to curb free speech for the sake of our classmates' emotional well-being. Four years of college grant us the opportunity to take advantage of the various media that advance this right. We don't need to take it out on our peers.

As college students who claim to positively influence our society, we should encourage free speech. But not in this twisted, libelous manner. Channel your first amendment right into a more productive form, not the profane gossip forums of JuicyCampus."

Harsh? Perhaps. But at the time, the site really did ruin people's lives. It called them out by name and exposed their sexual lives and drug habits. Here at Brandeis, the forums had some students so distraught that one student initiated a petition to the administration to ban the website on campus.

At the time, Dean of Student Life Rick Sawyer said that blocking access to JuicyCampus at Brandeis was under serious consideration-even though Brandeis had never before blocked any websites of similarly questionable nature.

The problem solved itself when JuicyCampus shut down in February 2009 due to plummeting online ad revenue and the loss of venture capital funding, according to Ivester's press release then. Fortunately for many, the site that could have done good reputation damage ended up being a short-lived fad.

While JuicyCampus lives on-sometimes fondly, sometimes with horror-in the memories of many college students who are still around to tell the tale, I think it's safe to say that once the site disappeared from our collective mentality, the desire to know everybody's dirty secrets for the sake of knowing everybody's dirty secrets disappeared as well.

Now back to WikiLeaks, whose founder Julian Assange probably didn't intend to create a gossip forum for the world's diplomatic representatives. Such a thing would most likely be quite unproductive, considering a diplomat makes a living from being kind to and cooperative with other diplomats. Imagine if the world had access to a website that chronicled the secret lives and private conversations of the diplomats around the world! Wouldn't that be-

Oh, wait.

It's true that Assange's stated purpose-"to humiliate the U.S. government," according to Bloomberg News' Albert R. Hunt's letter from Washington published in Sunday's New York Times-reflects nothing more than his desire to exploit the functions of a good democracy. But gradually, after reading cable after cable of U.S.-Arab relations and discovering nothing particularly new and exciting (Persian egoism has affected international relations since Biblical times), I think the world has come to realize that WikiLeaks has done nothing but what it planned on doing. Having exposed many secrets of many states, Assange has created a global forum open to any ordinary person to simply humiliate the government.

I wholeheartedly agree with the short-term result Hunt predicted, which, to the detriment of open, serious diplomacy among nations, "will be to discourage candor in cables." Why? Because it's just plain embarrassing for people who are simply trying to do their jobs to have a world full of critical citizens have a look a bit too far behind the scenes.

Think back to the less significant stories posted on JuicyCampus two years ago. Despite their relative unimportance, at the time, the crucial thing was the mental health of our classmates. It seems that diplomats should deserve the same kind of respect-the ability to work unimpeded by global gossip channels toward a safer, more peaceful world.

In the meantime, as long as it's up on WikiLeaks for everyone to see, I may just have to revisit the Cablegate's "Top Secret" classification. Good democracy is good democracy, after all.