[2010] Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity? - By Farhad Manjoo. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, doesn't know who leaked the thousands of Afghanistan war documents that his site posted this week. That's not unusual—it's how WikiLeaks works. To get a scoop to WikiLeaks, a would-be whistle-blower clicks the Submit Documents button on the site's home page, then uploads a file through a form that encrypts every interaction between the source and the site. WikiLeaks keeps no logs of the submission, and the site says that it is legally bound, under Sweden's press secrecy laws, never to cooperate with any investigation into the identity of the source. The site takes several additional measures to scrub submitted documents of any information that could compromise the leaker, removing any ID trails left by word processing software, for instance.
The site also constantly feeds fake submissions through its network in order to fool potential attackers. At the same time, WikiLeaks says its founding mission is radical transparency. We don't know. [2010] Who watches WikiLeaks? | Media. It has proclaimed itself the "intelligence service of the people", and plans to have more agents than the CIA. They will be you and me. WikiLeaks is a long way from that goal, but this week it staked its claim to be the dead drop of choice for whistleblowers after releasing video the Pentagon claimed to have lost of US helicopter crews excitedly killing Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007. The dead included two Reuters news agency staff. The release of the shocking footage prompted an unusual degree of hand-wringing in a country weary of the Iraq war, and garnered WikiLeaks more than $150,000 in donations to keep its cash-starved operation on the road.
It also drew fresh attention to a largely anonymous group that has outpaced the competition in just a few short years by releasing to the world more than a million confidential documents from highly classified military secrets to Sarah Palin's hacked emails. WikiLeaks has promised to change the world by abolishing official secrecy.
[2010] Is WikiLeaks Too Full of Itself? [2010] I love WikiLeaks for restoring distrust in our most important institutions. - By Jack Shafer. International scandals—such as the one precipitated by this week's WikiLeaks cable dump—serve us by illustrating how our governments work. Better than any civics textbook, revisionist history, political speech, bumper sticker, or five-part investigative series, an international scandal unmasks presidents and kings, military commanders and buck privates, cabinet secretaries and diplomats, corporate leaders and bankers, and arms-makers and arms-merchants as the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers they are.
The recent WikiLeaks release, for example, shows the low regard U.S. secretaries of state hold for international treaties that bar spying at the United Nations. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, systematically and serially violated those treaties to gain an incremental upper hand. And they did it in writing! We shouldn't be surprised by the recurrence of scandals, but, of course, we always are.
What am I smoking? [2010] Le Napster du journalisme » Article » OWNI, Digital Journalism. WikiLeaks est-il vraiment transparent? Fallait-il publier les mémos diplomatiques? Nous apprennent-ils quelque chose? Le processus est-il réversible? Assiste-t-on à une évolution structurelle de la société? OWNI essaie de répondre à ces interrogations. Près d’une semaine après le début de leur mise en ligne, les mémos diplomatiques révélés par WikiLeaks continuent d’agiter le landerneau politico-médiatique. Alors que les précédentes fuites orchestrées par Julian Assange étaient vite circonscrites – le bruit sourd était suivi d’un silence de mort -, cette nouvelle publication fait durer l’acouphène, et les oreilles n’ont pas fini de siffler. Transparence = totalitarisme, vraiment? NON.
La transparence, ça veut dire qu’il n’y a plus d’intimité, plus de discrétion [...] Quel rapport? Tous ces télégrammes ont été publiés après que les cinq rédactions partenaires (le Guardian, le New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde et El Pais) les aient parcourus, étudiés, contextualisés, vérifiés. OUI.