In my TED roundup on Saturday, I linked to a conversation with Julian Assange of Wikileaks, an organization which has, according to Assange, released more classified documents in the last few years than the world’s media organizations combined. Their latest release, the Afghan War Diary, has caused some pretty massive reaction online and in the traditional media, including comparisons to the Pentagon Papers.
Here are some reactions and background:
Summaries from the NY Times and the Washington Post.
Jay Rosen does a far better roundup than I’m capable of. What’s more important about his piece, however, are his impressions on our reactions to it.
4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”
Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.
Go read Rosen’s whole piece, and look in the comments stream as well.
Adrian Lamo, a former hacker for Wikileaks, blasts the organization for releasing the information.
Frank Gardner of the BBC suggests this is a blow to NATO as well.
Michael Crowley suggests there’s nothing new here.
Julian Assange says there’s another 15,000 documents to come.
Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation offers a big picture of the leak and the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
