This summer, when Wired.com reported that WikiLeaks was in possession of tens of thousands of State Department internal communiques, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, engaged in what might be called a small act of public diplomacy. Wired had identified one of his confidential sources, a low-level Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning, who had privately confessed to a hacker that he had given Assange “260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world.” The revelation put WikiLeaks in a difficult position—as it would have for any news organization. How was Assange to respond to the story in a way that was truthful, but neither compromised his source nor confirmed the substance of a massively complex leak that he was not yet ready to publish?
As Henry Kissinger once said, “Sometimes the art of diplomacy is to keep the obvious obscured.” Assange denied knowing whether Manning had provided his organization anything, and on June 7th WikiLeaks released a statement on Twitter: “Allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.” We now know for certain that this statement was true in its particulars but untrue in its meaning. This week, WikiLeaks has been publishing a tranche of 251,287 State Department cables (not 260,000), and it has stated that a little more than half of them are actually unclassified. A conventional newspaper would probably have declined to comment; misleading statements, even if technically true, can tarnish the most important asset of any news organization—its credibility. In an organization like the New York Times, for instance, the end product, a news story, is produced by many employees, with the reporting, writing, and editing of a story, its overall quality, reflecting the institution as a whole. But WikiLeaks, as a wholesaler of information, draws its credibility from raw materials that other people have created, from its ability to vet and manage the information, and from the anonymity that it guarantees to leakers who turn over those materials. Its documents and videos, for the most part, are left to speak for themselves.
This week’s leak, unprecedented in its size, has prompted a Republican legislator to try to bully the Obama Administration into declaring WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. This is an extreme and wrongheaded idea—Assange does not use violence to further a political aim—and in many ways ironic because WikiLeaks appears to be acting more like a conventional media organization with each successive project. I met with Assange this spring in Iceland and spent time with WikiLeaks volunteers who were working on a video called “Collateral Murder,” and Assange stridently did not want to contact the American military before the video’s release. In a subsequent leak, the so-called Afghan War Logs, news organizations that were given early access to the thousands of military field reports that Assange had obtained were able to reach out to government officials before the WikiLeaks embargo date, and Assange made an effort—a regrettably imperfect one—to withhold documents that identified military informants who might face violent reprisals. In the Iraq War Logs, published this October, WikiLeaks protected people’s identities in a way that was more thoughtful and thorough. WikiLeaks began to redact documents before posting them.
With the American embassy cables, Assange contacted the State Department personally to ask for the government’s input. On November 26th, he wrote to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and said, “WikiLeaks would be grateful for the United States Government to privately nominate any specific instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information would put individual persons at significant risk of harm that has not already been addressed.” Assange even noted—without irony, it seems—that “WikiLeaks will respect the confidentiality of advice provided by the United States Government and is prepared to consider any such submissions made without delay.” Needless to say, the Obama Administration declined his offer and demanded that he return all of the cables. “We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials,” a State Department lawyer responded, even as the government appears to have engaged in similar negotiations with the New York Times, for the newspaper’s packaging of a subset of the same cables.
The Obama Administration’s suggestion that WikiLeaks has acted illegally is questionable—media organizations often handle classified documents. (By legal precedent, it is typically the leaker, not the publisher, who has broken the law in such cases.) Likewise, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s allegation that this particular leak threatens national security has the appearance of hyperbole. Still, Assange should not look upon the State Department’s unwillingness to negotiate with WikiLeaks as a totem of his organization’s independent status, but as a problem that requires a solution. It is possible to engage with democratic governments constructively without being subservient to them, and it is in Assange’s long-term interests to eventually be able to do so. WikiLeaks needs to evolve into an institution that is more stable, with coherent protocols that can readily accommodate situations where the just and unjust are unclearly delineated, as they often are, without diluting the core WikiLeaks mission: unearthing wrongdoing and giving genuine whistleblowers a safe harbor. Like many Internet startups, WikiLeaks appears to be in a messy transitional state of growth, but unlike Facebook, for example, WikiLeaks has a very small margin of error within which it can effectively grow. When Mark Zuckerberg blunders, he must face clients who are upset about their privacy settings. Assange’s mistakes have far more serious implications.
Since its inception, WikiLeaks has focussed on “untraceable mass document leaking.” This is a novel phenomenon, one that Assange and conventional media must reckon with. The Pentagon Papers were a mass document leak, but in a sense they formed a single work of history and analysis. Assange’s most recent leaks are aggregations of thousands of disconnected but related reports. They are database leaks. And they suggest a different kind of whistleblower at work: someone whose goal is not to reveal a single act of abuse (and who may not even be entirely familiar with all of the material being turned over), but rather to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system, to call the world in to help judge its morality. An upcoming leak that Assange plans to publish involves tens of thousands of documents from a large American bank. “There will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that comes out, and that’s tremendously valuable,” he recently told Forbes. “Like the Iraq War Logs, yes there were mass casualty incidents that were very newsworthy, but the great value is seeing the full spectrum of the war. You could call it the ecosystem of corruption.”
The database leak, while intended to reveal the ecosystem of behavior within a particular institution, also creates a certain blinding or distorting effect by suddenly making so much information available simultaneously. Suppose Assange had decided to break apart the database of State Department cables and release them in tiny increments—without branding them together, under the name “Cablegate,” and grandly announcing that they amounted to a single trove of 251,287 documents, but with the total number obscured, and the most embarrassing bits culled and revealed in a multipart series over, say, a twenty-month period. Suppose that on December 22nd, there was a small news item in the Times about a few cables from Turkey, and on March 12, 2011, there was an item in the paper about several cables from Saudi Arabia. Would that look like the work of an anarchist—as one columnist recently called Assange—or an act of espionage or terrorism, or would it simply look like news?
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Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
