WikiLeaks revelations embarrassed, enraged

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2010 (5481 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This was no ordinary brown envelope.

When WikiLeaks began publishing 251,287 diplomatic cables from the United States Nov. 28, it was easily the most widely anticipated leak of government documents in recent history.

The documents had been fodder for speculation among government workers and media since May, when the disgruntled army private who downloaded them to a rewritable CD while posted in Iraq bragged about his feat in a chat room.

In the days leading up to the planned release from WikiLeaks, top U.S. officials scrambled to prepare their allies and in the days since, they have been working to repair relationships damaged by the documents and reassure friends that information given to the U.S. is safe.

The U.S. Congress launched an immediate debate on outdated American espionage laws and the constitutional question about freedom of speech versus the protection of national security.

International corporations have heeded the pressure to make it harder for WikiLeaks to do its work, with Internet servers booting WikiLeaks out. Credit-card companies such as Visa and MasterCard have refused to accept donations to WikiLeaks and the British government has arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in England to face rape charges in Sweden.

Supporters called his arrest and the corporate backlash politically motivated and a group of hackers pooled forces to launch Operation Payback, which took down websites of companies withdrawing support for WikiLeaks.

If WikiLeaks wasn’t a household name before, it is now.

Assange was the people’s choice for Time person of the year, although Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was the magazine’s choice. The New York Daily News lists WikiLeaks first in a list of sites that can change the news.

WikiLeaks was also selected by the editors of the Free Press as the international story of the year.

Editor Margo Goodhand said WikiLeaks has been around for awhile, but the sheer volume of documents released in the fall was “overwhelming” and resulted in front-page headlines for weeks.

“Throw in the Stieg Larsson-type drama — a besieged and persecuted charismatic leader, the sexual accusations, hackers rallying to preserve the new media’s free and unfettered flow of information, a powerful establishment trying to shut it down — and you have the makings of an unparalleled and intriguing story,” Goodhand said.

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 and has published myriad leaked and hacked documents in the last four years, ranging from government corruption in Kenya to the private email of U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, membership lists of political parties and secret manuals from the controversial Church of Scientology.

It gleans its information from people who pass along documents electronically, using WikiLeaks as the go-between to protect the leaker’s identity. Assange brags that leaking through WikiLeaks is different than leaking to mainstream media directly because it publishes entire reams of documents in raw form, whereas newspapers release pieces of information in stories that include analyses of what the information means.

Conventional media have been critical of Assange for not caring who he hurts, as have organizations such as Amnesty International, which criticized him for refusing to black out the names of civilians working alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

Much of the data in the WikiLeaks cables is irrelevant, but not all.

Last weekend, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden called Assange a “high-tech terrorist” who has made it more difficult for America to conduct business with its allies and has put lives at risk.

Even Assange admits that one day he and WikiLeaks might end up with “blood on our hands”.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Washington think-tank Hudson Institute and author of the recent book, Necessary Secrets, said the immediate impact of the release WikiLeaks has dubbed Cable Gate will be a clampdown on the storage and dissemination of sensitive files.

Schoenfeld said he would not be surprised if recordable-DVD drives in many government computers are destroyed. “It is less likely now, I think, that we will see massive document dumps,” he said.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca