ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a theoretical and critical understanding of how disclosure platform and transparency champion website WikiLeaks has shaken and shaped scandal discourses in the public sphere. It reviews the literature on WikiLeaks in relation to transparency and openness and explains debates on scandals. The chapter argues that in order for the acts to reach their full political potential, they need to be expressed in a way that can foster a strong public response. Transparency is thought to be a precondition for scandals, and yet at the same time, scandals are thought to foster transparency. Scandals can be instrumental in this process, generating virtual lines that cut across the overlapping spheres of the public and the private, and reifying them through the very performative denunciation of their transgression. For any modality of scandal to be treated as such, it needs to be framed as a situation with deep ethical or moral implications.
