Hacks and hackers – A fatal combination?

WikiLeaks gained massive exposure for collaborating with major media outlets in the release of diplomatic and military secrets. Harry Browne wonders if this meeting of old and new media caused more harm than good.

For most people, Wikileaks entered our consciousness just over a year ago, with the release of the extraordinary Collateral Murder package, which both recorded and followed-up a US atrocity in Baghdad in 2007, when two Reuters journalists were among a dozen or more people killed.

It is incredible that after all the work of journalism and beyond-journalism that Wikileaks did on that story - decrypting the military video it had acquired, locating and interviewing survivors of the slaughter - the organisation’s reputation is, to a large extent, that of undifferentiated, ill-considered ‘dumper’ of leaks. (I wouldn’t make that generalisation about Wikileaks’s reputation had I not sat, slack-jawed, through a college debate in which speaker after speaker, both pro- and anti-Wikileaks, made exactly that assumption about its essential nature.) It only takes a few seconds’ searching online to reveal that, for example, fewer than 3% of the US diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has in its possession have actually been released, almost always in conjunction with redaction and interpretative work by one or another partner organisation. Nonetheless, the ignorance lives on.

Indeed, on one occasion when Wikileaks was widely criticised for publishing a cable that might have endangered members of the Zimbabwean opposition, including Morgan Tsvangirai, it turned out that the blame lay entirely with the Guardian, as the paper itself more or less admitted, albeit rather snootily.

Even Bill Keller of the New York Times, now cast as Wikileaks’s arch-enemy after writing a long piece that cast Julian Assange as a smelly loser, admitted that WikiLeaks, after some criticism for its indifference to informants who might be identifiable in its Afghan-war-logs release, was ultra-careful about what was published and how it appeared:

it has largely... redacted material that could get people jailed or killed. Assange described it as a ‘harm minimization’ policy. In the case of the Iraq war documents, WikiLeaks applied a kind of robo-redaction software that stripped away names (and rendered the documents almost illegible). With the embassy cables, WikiLeaks posted mostly documents that had already been redacted by The [New York] Times and its fellow news organizations. And there were instances in which WikiLeaks volunteers suggested measures to enhance the protection of innocents. For example, someone at WikiLeaks noticed that if the redaction of a phrase revealed the exact length of the words, an alert foreign security service might match the number of letters to a name and affiliation and thus identify the source. WikiLeaks advised everyone to substitute a dozen uppercase X’s for each redacted passage, no matter how long or short.

This was about all there was by way of complimentary material about Wikileaks, in a very long article. Keller and Assange, by the way, have recently held a public debate in California, via Skype of course.

But what was Wikileaks doing entering into relationships with elite mainstream publications in order to publish its material? According to Nick Davies, a very fine journalist, the idea actually came from him: Davies approached Wikileaks last June suggesting a partnership model for publication, and the Guardian’s editor decided to bring in the New York Times. But Davies freely admits that he subsequently fell out with Assange, and it is Davies’s byline on the Guardian piece that has given the world its clearest and most damning picture to date of the sexual-assault allegations against Assange in Sweden. Given the high repute of both Davies and the Guardian, most readers have assumed that it was a fair picture. However, an article by respected Australian journalist Guy Rundle in the latest print edition of CounterPunch does cast some reasonable doubt on this benign view of the Guardian story: Rundle (who has written fascinatingly elsewhere about the politics of Wikileaks) has seen the police report on which the Davies story was based and makes a convincing case that exculpatory or at least ambiguous material was left out of the Guardian’s account of it, thus damning Assange more than was merited.

The proverbial advice not to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel springs to mind. If Assange was going to get friendly with such powerful media organisations, the Keller and Davies stories suggest that perhaps he should have been more careful about staying friends.

Frankly, while partners such as those certainly helped gain exposure for the Wikileaks Iraq war-logs and the diplomatic cables, in the latter case in particular it is debatable as to whether that exposure came with commensurate insight. In terms of class, education and worldview, there is little to choose between the US diplomatics who authored those 250,000 (not-highly-) classified cables and most successful journalists at a newspaper like the New York Times. This became startlingly clear last December when an analysis piece in the paper bizarrely heaped praise upon the literary style and insight to be found in the cables. Neither would most Guardian journalists (not including Nick Davies) be a million miles away socially and culturally. (In American life, the State Department is often seen as a bastion of liberalism.) Those newspapers may have poured considerable resources into selection and redaction, but the most insightful readings of those cables have tended to come from elsewhere in the world.

This partnering with elite organisations looks likely to be, coincidentally or otherwise, the terminal phase of the Wikileaks experiment. In its brief first phase, Wikileaks was, as the name suggests, meant to use a wiki approach to the interpretation of material. Indeed, I myself got an invitational email from “Julian A” in 2007 when he was trying to build a wide range of editorial and political expertise into his then-new organisation. (My actual journalistic nous is probably best demonstrated by the fact that I completely ignored the email and indeed forget it existed until it turned up in a recent search of my inbox.) Between 2007 and 2009 the actual practice of the organisation - which focused, as the email suggests, on countries other than the US - was never really terribly wiki; in this second phase as Rundle suggests, it used a small ‘elite’, ‘vanguard’ group of technical experts and activists. Leaving aside questions of Assange’s personality, it is clear that the move from this approach to the third phase, characterised by high-visibility partnerships with mainstream organisations, is part of the reason for the well-documented splits in Wikileaks, and the establishment of the likes of OpenLeaks with a rather different approach.

Even if the US government were not waging war on Wikileaks - best seen in its torture of Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of all the material seen in the last year or so - there is an argument that the organisation has been mortally wounded by ‘friendly fire’. The question of whether the material revealed by organisations such as Wikileaks actually makes a difference politically is still up for debate; but any future organisations committed to the notion that ‘the truth will set us free’ might be wise to spread that truth by potentially slow, deliberate channels outside the mainstream, rather than seeking the quick-fix of elite-media recognition.