Tag Archives: wikileaks

Wikileaks: Twitter deserves credit for defending its users’ rights – Telegraph Blogs

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Wikileaks: Twitter deserves credit for defending its users’ rights – Telegraph Blogs.

Just one article out of many exploring the media issues & debates surrounding the “Wikileaks” case.

This is a campaign of harassment against people who are seeking to hold the powerful to account. Worse, the US government is attempting to carry this out in secret. We know about it only because Twitter went out of its way to tell its users. Anyone who cares about free speech, journalism and curtailing the actions of illiberal governments should sympathise with Wikileaks.

The Times’s Dealings With Julian Assange – NYTimes.com

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Fascinating article from Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times about how the NYT handled the wikileaks material and Julian Assange. Well worth reading if you have any interest in the procedures and ethics of journalism in the age of the internet. Particularly interesting is the way they worked with The Guardian, and the different interpretations of the material each paper made.

Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it. That is what we did.

via The Times’s Dealings With Julian Assange – NYTimes.com.

Paranoia over legal status of WikiLeaks breeds new generation of scams | Media | guardian.co.uk

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For any student looking at wikileaks for a case study or coursework essay this article will be useful for you.

Paranoia over legal status of WikiLeaks breeds new generation of scams | Media | guardian.co.uk.

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The Anonymous WikiLeaks protests are a mass demo against control | Richard Stallman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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This article makes some interesting points about the actions of Anonymous in relation to the ongoing WikiLeaks situation.

The internet cannot function if websites are frequently blocked by crowds, just as a city cannot function if its streets are constantly full by protesters. But before you advocate a crackdown on internet protests, consider what they are protesting: on the internet, users have no rights. As the WikiLeaks case has demonstrated, what we do online, we do on sufferance.

In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a website we need the co-operation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off. In the US, no law explicitly establishes this precarity. Rather, it is embodied in contracts that we have allowed those companies to establish as normal. It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment’s notice.

via The Anonymous WikiLeaks protests are a mass demo against control | Richard Stallman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

WikiLeaks on We Study Media

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Typically good post on We Study Media about the WikiLeaks situation in the context of a new media case study:

The Wikileaks controversy is a great opportunity for an impact of new media case study. Here’s why:

1. It crosses platforms, from the interwebs to press and broadcast media;

2. it’s one of those plus ça change things: there is nothing happening on Wikileaks that hasn’t happened before with photocopiers and/or CD ROMs etc.;

3. it highlights the culture clash between the “information wants to be free” web culture and traditional authority;

4. it’s a sign of the globalised times – although these are US cables, they involve the whole globe, and involve both national governments and large, powerful corporations like Shell Oil;

5. the cyber-attacks on Wikileaks to try to take the site down have been met with retaliatory attacks against credit card companies and PayPal – are we at the beginning of the First World Cyber War?

If you’ve ever read any science fiction, you know that this Cyber War thing doesn’t end well. Say goodbye to civilisation.

via We Study Media.

WikiLeaks fallout continues

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In the last couple of days the WikiLeaks saga has taken an interesting turn. Founder Julian Assange has been arrested in London for unrelated charges that many of his supporters reject as an attempt to frame him. Meanwhile, the group of hackers known as Anonymous have stepped in to attack those who they see as suppressing free speech.

Thus far they have succeeded in taking down the websites and some of the webservices of Mastercard, Visa and PayPal (who all stopped taking donation payments for WikiLeaks) in DDOS attacks.

This is pretty serious stuff for the online financial industries, and there are suggestions that Twitter will be next for allegedly suppressing the #wikileaks hashtag. Meanwhile, after Amazon stopped hosting the site, over 1,000 mirrors of it have appeared on the net, and the cables are being widely distributed via bittorrent. I’d imagine Amazon are concerned, too.

This thing is not going to go away, no matter how much the US government wants it to, and no matter how many arms they twist in their attempts. Some are calling this the first great cyber war.

Wikileaks and the Long Haul « Clay Shirky

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The WikiLeaks saga rolls on, with the US authorities having taken some controversial measures in the past week. The site is no longer hosted on Amazon’s servers, PayPal no longer accept donations for them, and their DNS has been revoked (meaning that when people type the web address into a browser, the site no longer appears). Clay Shirky weighs in with a nuanced piece on the topic:

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us “You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

via Wikileaks and the Long Haul « Clay Shirky.

WikiLeaks: The revolution has begun – and it will be digitised | Heather Brooke | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Another decent article on the significance of the WikiLeaks cables

Thanks to the internet, we have come to expect a greater level of knowledge and participation in most areas of our lives. Politics, however, has remained resolutely unreconstructed. Politicians, see themselves as parents to a public they view as children – a public that cannot be trusted with the truth, nor with the real power that knowledge brings.

Much of the outrage about WikiLeaks is not over the content of the leaks but from the audacity of breaching previously inviable strongholds of authority. In the past, we deferred to authority and if an official told us something would damage national security we took that as true. Now the raw data behind these claims is increasingly getting into the public domain. What we have seen from disclosures like MPs’ expenses or revelations about the complicity of government in torture is that when politicians speak of a threat to “national security”, often what they mean is that the security of their own position is threatened.

WikiLeaks: The revolution has begun – and it will be digitised | Heather Brooke | Comment is free | The Guardian.

via We Study Media

A few questions about the WikiLeaks release – Dan Gillmor – Salon.com

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The current furore surrounding the WikiLeaks release of the US Embassy cables is fascinating for anyone interested in news or journalism. It poses all kinds of ethical questions, many of which are raised in this excellent article from Dan Gillmor:

For journalists who get the documents directly from WikiLeaks:

  • You are treating WikiLeaks as much as a partner as a source, no matter how much you might deny this. How comfortable are you in this bargain?
  • Why does it take WikiLeaks to get the information you agree is so worthy of public exposure? Why aren’t you doing your own jobs better in the first place?

For the U.S. government:

  • When it comes to invading other people’s lives, with increasingly oppressive security and surveillance, your mantra is “You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.” Will you give that a little more thought in the future?

This is essential reading.

A few questions about the WikiLeaks release – Dan Gillmor – Salon.com.

via Boing Boing