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WikiLeaks Is the New Journalism
Diane Francis, Huffington Post
… Secrets are sometimes essential, but the vast majority are not, nor should they be. Clearly, criminal investigations, military and security issues must be protected for the safety of everyone. And insider info that affects shareholders should be too. These must be protected by impenetrable firewalls, but aren’t for the most part. Look at the ease with which the U.S. State Department archive could be accessed, stolen and shipped to WikiLeaks.
Arguably, WikiLeaks has performed a public service by exposing the government’s digital negligence or its proclivity to keep dirty little secrets about other nations that the public has a right to know.
… It’s mostly gossip, diplomatic opinion and pretty tame so far. Consider the so-called revelations: Russia is a kleptocracy? Canada has an “inferiority complex”? Canadians don’t understand terrorist threats? Canadian courts are soft on terrorist suspects as well as criminals? Berlusconi’s ridiculous? Merkel is uncreative and Sarkozy’s personal popularity is wobbly? That Afghanistan is a hopeless mess and the Karzai family questionable? Tunisia tortures people? China’s worried about North Korea, too?
Maybe more serious intel that could cause damage is on its way. This is what Washington is claiming and why it’s talking tough to its employees and others about a legal crackdown against WikiLeaks and its sources.
But this is shooting the messenger.
The fault lies entirely with the US government for allowing everything to be so accessible.
Even if controls are imposed on top-secret info, governments cannot control leaks. WikiLeaks is the new journalism. It’s the globalization of the scoop. It allows a disgruntled employee, corporate saboteur, criminal, or hedge fund searching for insider information, rival or shareholder to spread information instantly everywhere. Leaks are the media’s stock in trade.
Mr. Assange has created a model that will be replicated, as long as the Digital Commons demands transparency and as long as juicy secrets are left around unguarded. WikiLeaks is not a business. It is a volunteer organization, based on donations, and its site is fed from servers scattered around the world. Lacking assets to seize or sue, it falls through the jurisdictional cracks and legal attempts to curb its site, based on privacy concerns, have gone nowhere in the US and other democracies.
Diane Francis is Editor at Large, The National Post
(10 December 2010)
Could Wikileaks change or destroy the Internet as we know it?
David Gewirtz, ZDNet
But even though Wikileaks continues to take a licking, it still keeps on ticking.
How is it possible that a simple Web site can so infuriate governments the world over, but still remain active?
That, loyal readers, is the nature of the Internet.
A Web site is, essentially, nothing but a folder of files living on a hard drive somewhere. Almost nothing is easier to fling around the ‘net than a folder of files (especially when compressed into your basic zip file). Further, almost nothing is easier to duplicate than a folder of files, and so we’ve seen mirror after mirror spring up all across the world.
Mirror sites and torrents are decentralized, but our Internet naming systems are, at their core, centrally controlled, right? So even if the sites are mirrored, if governments cut off the DNS system and search engines de-list them, they’ll effectively disappear, right? Not anymore. Dave Winer points out that Wikileaks fans have effectively used Twitter to route around the DNS failures, simply by posting “where to find Wikileaks” tweats, creating what he calls a human DNS.
But why Wikileaks? Why, assuming he actually did what he seems to have done, did Bradley Manning take his stolen classified documents and send them to Wikileaks? Why didn’t he just zip them up, throw them into a torrent, and let them propagate like just so many illegal copies of that horrid Avatar movie?
Why, indeed.
The answer is that Wikileaks has become something more than a mere folder of files. Wikileaks has become a brand, a cause, a rallying cry for both antiwar protesters and those who want to seed unrest among Western governments.
(10 December 2010)
Keeping Secrets WikiSafe
Scott Shane, New York Times
Can the government still keep a secret? In an age of WikiLeaks, flash drives and instant Web postings, leaks have begun to seem unstoppable.
… there’s been a change. Traditional watchdog journalism, which has long accepted leaked information in dribs and drabs, has been joined by a new counterculture of information vigilantism that now promises disclosures by the terabyte. A bureaucrat can hide a library’s worth of documents on a key fob, and scatter them over the Internet to a dozen countries during a cigarette break.
That accounts for how, in the three big WikiLeaks document dumps since July, the usual trickle of leaks became a torrent.
(11 December 2010)
Predicting the future of WikiLeaks: Follow the media!
Evgeny Morozov , Foreign Policy
The New York Times asked me to do a short piece for their Room for Debate forum on WikiLeaks. Go read the whole piece; below is a paragraph that I’d like to discuss in more detail on this blog:
One possible future for WikiLeaks is to morph into a gigantic media intermediary — perhaps, even something of a clearing house for investigative reporting — where even low-level leaks would be matched with the appropriate journalists to pursue and report on them and, perhaps, even with appropriate N.G.O.’s to advocate on their causes. Under this model, WikiLeaks staffers would act as idea salesmen relying on one very impressive digital Rolodex.
The argument I’m making in the Times piece rests on three premises:
a) WikiLeaks, at least in its post-Cablegate reincarnation, has two major assets: an easily recognizable brand and an extensive network of contacts in the media
b) If the Cablegate release ends up having significant global repercussions — resignations of politicians, alterations in the behavior of governments and corporations — this is bound to encourage more people to take risks and start leaking
c) The buzz generated by the Cablegate makes it clear that WikiLeaks is only as effective as their media partners: they are the ones screening the cables, identifying narrative threads, redacting the names, and, most importantly, embarrassing the parties involved.
Thus, one of the most important questions about the future of WikiLeaks is how they will choose to structure their relationship with the media.
… For WikiLeaks to be truly effective, someone knowledgeable — i.e. not just a geek on a quest for global justice — needs to look at the cables and tell a captivating story about them. In fact, the story needs to be so captivating that it would even make Cambodian cables from Macedonia look like a treat. This is also the conclusion of my piece in the Times:
As I note above, it’s possible to do this by pursuing partnerships with the media — but in this case, it’s still not clear what value WikiLeaks actually adds to the process other than providing safe technology for leaking.
… As the above should have made obvious by now, I clearly don’t think that the story of WikiLeaks is nearing its end with the full release of all the cables. I know for a fact that Assange has been thinking about the kind of relationship that WikiLeaks needs to have with their media partners for years. I suspect his thinking has evolved quite a bit this year, not least because WikiLeaks has become a media’s darling after spending a few years in relative obscurity.
Whatever strategy Assange chooses to pursue, I don’t think it’s possible to get the future of WikiLeaks right without first addressing the media relationship piece of the puzzle.
(10 December 2010)
New York Times piece by the author.
Pentagon scrambles to prep for ‘thermonuclear’ Wikileaks release
Anna Mulrine, Christian Science Monitor
Perhaps more than any other organization, the Pentagon is trying to figure out what, precisely, is contained in the so-called “thermonuclear” file that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has promised to share with the world if “something happens” to him or to his staff.
With the threat of Wikileaks releases looming earlier this year, the Defense Department made the decision to create a team of some 120 intelligence analysts to cull through files that they deemed Wikileaks most likely to have in its possession.
(10 December 2010)
Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks
Faculty of the College of Ontopoetic Machines, Cryptome
Following “Twelve theses on WikiLeaks” by Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens
1. Wikileaks exposes the slippery moralism of global capital.
The corporate abdication of non-discrimination prefigures more scrutiny of online activity. Visa, Amazon, Mastercard, Tableau, PayPal, PostFinance, and EveryDNS: each severed their relationship with one or more aspects of the WikiLeaks organization due to technicalities. None were served with legal documents requiring that they stop supporting “illegal” activity; rather, some caved due to vague public and private requests by functionaries within US government offices. Yet, these business have no moral qualms as to provide similar services to the Ku Klux clan, homophobic sites and just about anything else. As to the decision to cut Wikileaks off they justified their actions via the legalese of their Terms of Service (ToS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), contracts that we all accept as the necessary evil of using free services online. AUPs, once the interest of legal scholars or small actors who fell afoul of them, now become the prime means for ending of services to the undesirable.
… 4. Wikileaks demonstrates that the human ‘factor’ is the weak spot of networks.
The “Cablegate” release also shows the importance of having collaborators within governmental and military institutions. If we assume that Manning is the source of the diplomatic and military cables—and this has not been proven yet—then we can see how individuals within these organizations are disgusted with the conduct of the war. This is of a piece with other projects such as Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Veteran’s Book Project that aim to present the personal side of the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a way of organizing public outrage. Do not discount the power of solidarity with disgruntled soldiers. We only have to recall the Abril Revolution in 1974 in Portugal, where the military supported the peaceful transition from the Salazar dictatorship, to understand how important it is to have military forces on one’s side. Recall as well that the main technical tool used to anonymize submissions to WikiLeaks, Tor (The Onion Router), came out of a US Naval Research Laboratory project to protect clandestine activities overseas. In fact, members of the military are some of the most vocal opponents of current attempts in the US to require person-level attribution of data packets online.
5. WikiLeaks is a classic example of using media as a tool for de-dehumanizing.
The actions of Anonymous on the websites of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, PostFinance, and others are in a lineage with the FloodNet by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. While many mainstream media sources see these as “attacks”, others, such as the editors of The Guardian, realize them to be “non-violent action or civil disobedience”.
… 6. Wikileaks suggests an understanding of a notion of networks as media assemblages.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the recent Wikileaks phenomenon has to do with what it portends for future networked tendencies. Given what we stated in anti-thesis 1, we ought to pay more attention to the movement of information outside of Internet-based networks. There is a tendency to conflate network sharing of data with the Internet proper, but this is not a necessary condition. Indeed, there are multitudinous methods of arranging networks of humans and things that do not rely on corporate or government controlled conduits for the passage of bits. Consider, for example, the host of artistic projects in this space just from the past couple of years: netless, Feral Trade, deadswap, Dead Drops, Fluid Nexus, Autonet, etc. These projects rely on assemblages of humans and infrastructure in motion. And, they rely in part on a prior agreement among participants with respect to protocols to follow. This is already at work in the Wikileaks project with respect to their main members. Only they know who they are; we are in the dark, and rightly so.
(10 December 2010)
After 12 days of WikiLeaks cables, the world looks on US with new eyes (country-by-country round-up)
Staff, Guardian
Reaction across the globe to the leaked US embassy cables has ranged from anger and bitterness to extreme indifference
South America
Brazil
President Lula says he is to register his protest at Assange’s arrest on his blog. “This chap was only publishing something he read,” he said. “And if he read it, it is because somebody wrote it. The guilty one is not the publisher, it is the person who wrote [these things]. Blame the person who wrote this nonsense because there would be no scandal if they hadn’t.” Many leaks relate to the security situation in Rio de Janeiro. A 2009 cable warned that pre-Olympic attempts to expel drug traffickers from some of the city’s most violent favelas could resemble “the battles in Fallujah more than a conventional urban police operation”.
… Venezuela
Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, has called on Hillary Clinton to resign in the wake of “all of this spying and delinquency in the State Department”.
“Look at how they treat the leaders of powerful countries,” Chavez told state TV channel Telesur, describing the cables as proof of the “dirty war of Yankee embassies in the whole world”.
“Look how they are mistreating this great friend of ours, Vladimir Putin. What a lack of respect!”
Ecuador and Bolivia
The Ecuadorian government has been Wikileaks’ most vocal supporter in the region, offering the under-fire Julian Assange residency “without any conditions”. Bolivia has also expressed its irritation at its portrayal in the US diplomatic cables. The country’s vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, this week posted Bolivia-focused Wikileaks cables, in full, on his official website in response to what he called “insults” and “third rate espionage”.
US authorities have been lampooned by much of the Bolivian press.
Juan José Toro Montoya, a columnist for the Cochabamba newspaper Los Tiempos newspaper described the accusations against Wikileaks’ founder as “laughable”.
“Julian Assange may be under arrest but he has been transformed into a hero and will go down in history as being the first human being to massively reveal the dirty-tricks of government,” he wrote yesterday.
(10 December 2010)
