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While we're on the topic of free speech and the internet, here's an interesting site: Wikileaks.
The front page of Wikileaks proudly proclaims:
Have documents the world needs to see?
We protect you and get your disclosure out to the world
And so it has. In the 18 months it's been operational, the site has released some explosive material, such as never-before-seen operating manuals for the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, lists of U.S. munitions in Iraq, including stores of banned chemical weapons, and a suppressed report on the looting of the African nation of Kenya by former president Daniel Arap Moi, a leak that led to an upset in Kenya's presidential election. The Gitmo material was particularly interesting because it showed that the United States had a policy for hiding some detainees from the International Red Cross, and used dogs to intimidate prisoners.
The owner of the site doesn't know who actually runs it or how it works, on purpose. It has mirrors all around the world so when the site was briefly taken down in the US it stayed online regardless.
When online troublemaker Julian Assange co-founded Wikileaks, the net's premiere document-leaking site last year, some were skeptical that the service would produce anything of interest.
Now, after 18 months of publishing government, industry and military secrets that have sparked international scandals, led to takedown threats and briefly gotten the site banned in the United States, Assange says Wikileaks is just getting started changing the world.
"In every negotiation, in every planning meeting and in every workplace dispute, a perception is slowly forming that the public interest may have a silent advocate in the room," Assange writes.
In February, the site published the Pentagon's 2005 rules of engagement for troops in Iraq, revealing that troops were authorized to pursue former officials in Saddam Hussein's government, as well as terrorists, into neighboring Iran and Syria. The document was classified "secret", meaning that in the eyes of the military, its release could be expected to cause "serious damage" to U.S. national security.The world's governments and press have taken notice. The New York Times reported on the rules of engagement leak, and the Iranian government held a press conference to warn the United States about crossing its border. The Washington Post reported on the Guantanamo documents, forcing the Pentagon to respond.
More controversially, the site has begun posting confidential documents from the secretive and litigious Church of Scientology, and from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Julian Assange
Julian Assange (pictured) is a hacker born in Australia. He lives in east Africa now and says he does the stuff he does because he has a conscience. Still, Wikileaks doesn't only publish highly political content. It also leaked the complete script to the new Indiana Jones movie and the tax returns of at least one Hollywood actor, leading many to claim the site is simply irresponsible and undermining society. It's interesting that no-one is questioning its accuracy however.
The Pentagon isn't the only group with no love of Wikileaks. In January, Wikileaks published secret banking documents from the Cayman Islands branch of the Swiss private bank Julius Baer, despite not being certain of their veracity. The documents allegedly show the bank knew about, and even aided, money laundering. The bank sued Wikileaks in a federal court in California, briefly convincing a judge to order Wikileaks' domain registrar to de-list the site from web.
Predictably, the censorship attempt backfired as netizens posted the IP address of Wikileaks, whose servers were unaffected. Press groups, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, which brought more attention to Wikileaks than any of its previous -- and more spectacular -- document leaks.
The judge in the case soon reversed himself, and Julius Baer, which declined to comment on Wikileaks, dropped the suit, realizing that the attempt to censor brought more attention to the documents than if they had just ignored it.
This again shows that governments are still slow to catch onto the idea that you can't beat the internet into submission with a club. It's almost a living organism, or at least a shared consciousness, able to reproduce. Whether you agree with what Wikileaks does or not, people will have to change their approach to account for a world in which the internet exists and thrives.
If Assange is unflustered by criticism of Wikileaks, he acknowledges that one of its founding ideas has not panned out. As conceived, Wikileaks would employ an army of volunteers to collaboratively evaluate the documents it leaks -- that's the "wiki" in Wikileaks. But despite the site's growing reputation and its emergence as a cause celebre on the net, nobody's shown much interest in poring over pages of documents that reveal the world's secret workings.
Instead that work of vetting and analyzing documents has fallen to academics, journalists and Wikileaks' own staff, including Assange. Now Wikileaks is planning to drop the wiki model entirely. In the future, it plans to pre-release selected documents to investigative journalists, then publish them once a story appears. That gives the favored reporters time to analyze and verify documents without fear of being scooped.
Assange is even toying with the idea of making his site a subscription service that pre-releases secret documents to paying reporters. The reporters would have the option of writing about a given leak, or passing on it and getting another, if the reporter doesn't find it useful.
The change is partly due to economics, he says. Academics and journalists are among the few who have time to spend poring over documents. It's also partly because people online seem more inclined to comment on something that's already been analyzed, than analyze it themselves, says Assange.
Economics is what decides everything in the end, it seems. The internet is still a wild an untamed frontier far from being able to support mature business or economic models. Still, it's clearly here to stay. It will be fun to see how it all pans out.
Read the full Wired article here.
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