By: Theodora Tsentas
"Of course I'm a goddamn journalist", Julian Assange snapped when asked if he considered himself such at the News World Summit in Hong Kong the day after WikiLeaks was awarded the Australian Walkley Award for outstanding contribution to journalism. Despite the award and Assange's vehement insistence of belonging to the world of journalism, many within the establishment still view the whistle-blowing website and its founder as outliers.
Yet, eliminating the chasm that exists between WikiLeaks and its new way of business, and the media and its grip on the status quo, is precisely the challenge that information activists are faced with if they are to be taken seriously, according to Lisa Lynch, Assistant Professor at the Department of Journalism, Concordia University.
"In order to change the shape of the information landscape, such activists will have to find a way to have themselves written into the story, not as outliers, but as legitimate actors within the rapidly changing media landscape," she says, speaking at last week's Media@McGill roundtable, "Beyond WikiLeaks: Journalism, Politics and Activism One Year after Cablegate".
The panel discussion took place on November 29th, intentionally marking the one-year anniversary (plus a day) of the public release of some 250,000 US embassy diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks and a carefully chosen selection of media partners.
Lisa Lynch, Concordia University, and Patrick McCurdy, University of Ottawa
A plan to vigilantly publish redacted versions of the cables was marred by what Lynch calls a "20th century framing of a 21st century event", with certain incidents of self-interested journalists and journalist institutions attempting to manipulate the process.
She speaks of three phases in the controversial release that has come to be known as cablegate, which precipitated the estrangement of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange from the journalist milieu and equated cablegate to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
Phase one occurred in the summer of 2010 when Assange had agreed to provide a copy of the cables to investigative journalist David Leigh with an embargo on their publication. However, after a freelance investigative journalist, Heather Brookes, swiped a copy of the cables and showed them to Leigh, Leigh decided to publish them in the Guardian (where he is executive editor of investigations) and to share them with The New York Times, claiming Assange had violated the terms and was incapable of controlling the material. Though Assange was conversing with the Guardian, he had excluded The Times from his choice of media partners in vindication of an article that had insulted him personally and, more importantly, as a way to overcome a potential legal vulnerability in the United States.
The focus of phase two was, like with The New York Times, another publication that Assange had not authorized to receive a copy of the cables: the Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten. This leak, which also included further leaks to other national newspapers by Aftenposten, prompted Assange to designate 5 national newspapers - the Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and Le Monde - to publish cables that were regionally relevant to each paper.
Phase three saw the unraveling of this agreement with WikiLeaks' decision to publish the full unredacted cables, after an incident where they had already been made accessible to download by bit torrent using a password publicized by David Leigh in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (PublicAffairs, 2011). As a result, all five newspapers unanimously denounced Assange's decision to breach their original embargo agreement in a joint statement in September this year; officially bringing an end to WikiLeaks' relations with its former news partners.
Summarizing the lessons learned from WikiLeaks' interaction with the media, Lynch says: "The essential tenet of cablegate has been the notion that the media are uniquely suited not only to play a custodial role over sensitive information, but also to exclude non-institutional actors from their rank in order to win custody battles over such information".
While Lynch spoke of the information landscape with regard to media and information activism, Patrick McCurdy, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa's Department of Communications, focused on the information landscape from a digitalization perspective.
Drawing on the theory of risk society by German sociologist Ulrich Beck, McCurdy claims that the risks associated with information and whistle blowing have grown exponentially in light of the digitalization of the information landscape. "There is no delete button on the internet," he says, repeating a phrase that was coined in a Greenpeace YouTube campaign against car manufacturer, Volkswagon.
In addition to the infallibility of information on the World Wide Web, McCurdy illustrates how the change in access to information and the creation of massive shared databases has changed the profile of a leaker by juxtaposing the case of Private Bradley Manning, the US soldier alleged to have leaked the cables to WikiLeaks, to that of the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg.
Whereas Ellsberg belonged to the highest echelons of the RAND Corporation and had clearance to the classified documents he later came to disseminate on the Vietnam War, Private Manning was a junior military analyst who had the same access as an estimated 2.5 million people to the US diplomatic cables.
Moreover, the same ease and efficiency with which Manning was able to copy and transfer the 251,287 cables on a CD marked "Lady Gaga" was by no means possible for Ellsberg in 1971. "Once the information gets out, there is no delete button on the internet, and it's precisely because of this fact that we see information being positioned as a threat or a risk," says McCurdy.
Stefania Milan, The Citizen Lab, and Arne Hintz, McGill University
The perception of information as a threat by governments - as witnessed in the contested treatment of Private Manning by the Obama administration - has created a backlash in the form of cyber activism, says Stefania Milan, a Post-doctoral Fellow at The Citizen Lab, University of Toronto.
Though not initially involved with WikiLeaks, cyber activists such as Anonymous swiftly reacted to the threat posed to online freedoms through the persistent denunciation of WikiLeaks, Assange and Manning by the US government especially and the active embargoing of funding of the organization. Operation Avenge Assange took effect in December 2010 when several of the financial organizations freezing donations to WikiLeaks - including PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard - had their systems brought to a brief standstill by Anonymous though the a distributed-denial-of-service attack. Linked to WikiLeaks in this way, "hacktivism", the politically motivated use of technical expertise through programming, has become a new and established tool of social protest. "What we have seen as a consequence of cablegate is a manifestation of a movement's activity that is mutually distributed and individualized - where the Internet is the main platform for action, recruitment and identification of activists," says Milan. From a policy perspective, WikiLeaks - as well as more recently the Arab Spring and the Occupy protests - has called attention to the power of the digital age, prompting both the public and private sectors to revisit (if not yet revise) laws and policies governing the dissemination of sensitive information. Arne Hintz, Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, argues that the WikiLeaks and cablegate phenomena have highlighted five crucial areas that are either key to or a weakness of online freedom of expression and information activism. These are: (1) access to information, including access to state secrets; (2) access to infrastructure, targeted in the shutting down of internet services; (3) the critical resources and intermediaries necessary to maintain an organization's activities; (4) surveillance, particularly through social media and collaborations between the state and the private sector; and (5) criminalization and physical violence used to curtail freedom of expression, seen in the death threats received by Assange and the torturous conditions of Manning's confinement at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. The "WikiLeaks case shows us some of the key challenges to freedom of expression in a digital age: the policy needs for safeguarding freedom of expression, the critical points of invervention by various actors, [and] therefore, the overall struggles and contestations for freedom of expression at this very moment in history," says Hintz. As certain members of government and the private sector look at new ways of impinging on the freedom of expressions afforded to leakers and activists by the information landscape, others have begun researching the creation of a new set of legal protections for whistleblowers and investigative journalists. In this respect, Hintz points to Iceland and the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative: a patchwork of different national laws for freedom of expression put together by the Reykjavik-based International Modern Media Institute (IMMI) to "help better protect freedom of the press the world over by researching best practices in law and promoting their widespread adoption". Though still in its nascent stages, the Initiative shows promise, having recently succeeded in persuading the Icelandic Parliament to task the government to enforce laws for what IMMI terms "modern freedom of expression". The four panelists - Lisa Lynch, Patrick McCurdy, Stefania Milan and Arne Hintz - will be expanding their perspectives of WikiLeaks and its effects on the information landscape in a book titled, Beyond WikiLeaks. The book is currently in production.
