WikiLeaks evolves

„The Obama Administration’s suggestion that WikiLeaks has acted illegally is questionable—media organizations often handle classified documents. (By legal precedent, it is typically the leaker, not the publisher, who has broken the law in such cases.) Likewise, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s allegation that this particular leak threatens national security has the appearance of hyperbole. Still, Assange should not look upon the State Department’s unwillingness to negotiate with WikiLeaks as a totem of his organization’s independent status, but as a problem that requires a solution. It is possible to engage with democratic governments constructively without being subservient to them, and it is in Assange’s long-term interests to eventually be able to do so.

WikiLeaks needs to evolve into an institution that is more stable, with coherent protocols that can readily accommodate situations where the just and unjust are unclearly delineated, as they often are, without diluting the core WikiLeaks mission: unearthing wrongdoing and giving genuine whistleblowers a safe harbor. Like many Internet startups, WikiLeaks appears to be in a messy transitional state of growth, but unlike Facebook, for example, WikiLeaks has a very small margin of error within which it can effectively grow. When Mark Zuckerberg blunders, he must face clients who are upset about their privacy settings. Assange’s mistakes have far more serious implications.

Since its inception, WikiLeaks has focussed on untraceable mass document leaking. This is a novel phenomenon, one that Assange and conventional media must reckon with. The Pentagon Papers were a mass document leak, but in a sense they formed a single work of history and analysis. Assange’s most recent leaks are aggregations of thousands of disconnected but related reports. They are database leaks. And they suggest a different kind of whistleblower at work: someone whose goal is not to reveal a single act of abuse (and who may not even be entirely familiar with all of the material being turned over), but rather to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system, to call the world in to help judge its morality. An upcoming leak that Assange plans to publish involves tens of thousands of documents from a large American bank.”