It was in December 2006 that Wikileaks first put a document online. It involved the Somali Islamic Courts Union authorising criminal hitmen to execute government officials. Since then, the Web site has gone on to ?leak? information ranging from secret Scientology manuals to the Collateral Murder video that showed a US helicopter attack annihilating dozens of Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists. The US defence secretary heatedly said, ?these people can put anything out they want and are never held accountable for it.? But till this week, Wikileaks? whistle-blowing didn?t really gain global traction. Do the 92,000 previously classified documents concerning Nato?s war in Afghanistan truly amount to a geopolitical game-changer? The majority argument appears to be that this is not the case. So something more subtle is going on in Wikileakland.
In this world, action reportedly mimics sexy spy-thrillers. Just read last month?s New Yorker profile of the man at the heart of all the action. Julian Paul Assange reportedly walked in to rent a century-old house in Reykjavik in grey full-body snow suit, saying his journalistic team were there to cover Eyjafjallaj?kull, the Icelandic volcano that brought European air traffic to a standstill. Instead, Assange and his international team of volunteer activists was working on the Collateral Murder video, codenamed project B. Before dismissing this cloak and dagger stuff out of hand, consider that Reuters had cited the Freedom of Information Act to get the video from the army for three years, obviously without success. Legitimate avenues had failed. Wikileaks went guerilla. It wouldn?t reveal its source. Protecting the source would mean deep scrubbing to erase digital traces. But Wikileaks was well-practised in this art. It had been encrypting submissions in junk layers, routing it through Swedish servers (so disclosing sources would be a crime) and so on. But the source, army analyst Bradley Manning, went rogue, boasted indiscreetly and got caught. He is behind bars in Kuwait and looking at 52 years in there.
This time, Assange went mainstream. Without revealing sources, he gave a select trinity?Guardian, NYT and Der Spiegel?advance access to the leaks. Each publication met with Assange?s release date moratorium, with the NYT also meeting the White House?s enjoinder to withhold ?harmful? material. None of these papers, however, have claimed that Wikileaks is somehow telling a story hitherto untold. That the Afghan government is corrupt, that the Pakistani intelligence is compromised, that the US forces are not fond favourites on the ground and so on?none of this is new news. Yet, Wikileaks has piggybacked onto hitherto unreachable heights of public attention.
For the media industry (as against the various national security establishments), the key backdrop of this development is the Internet vs print battle. Struck first by the backlash against the ?restrained? coverage of the Iraq invasion and then the business woes ushered in by the economic downturn, newspapers in the West have been printing their own obituaries and also railing against the Internet. In well-noted commentaries, heavyweights like Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt have tried to counter this gloom and doom mood by arguing that new collaborative models can rewrite newspapers? fortunes. After all, even if traditional revenue models have been drying up, nobody can argue that the same has been happening to interest in news itself. The Internet, and Wikileaks to a smaller extent, provides evidence for this prognosis.
One of Assange?s earliest profiles was titled Mendax, aka nobly truthful. In his current avatar, he survives as much on donations as on the traditional ideals of investigative journalism. Claims relating to the latter have, of course, engendered sour grapes in the print community. The man is becoming a megalomaniac, it is suggested. Why? Because he sees himself as some kind of editor-in-chief now. But if the Internet is reinventing other social norms, no identity can escape unscathed. A recent Microsoft survey found that 75% of US recruiters say they are required to do online research about candidates and 70% of them report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online. And few would know more about such trends than the US President who rode into the White House on a wave of Internet support. All of this means that governments can no longer protect documents as they used to. Neither the morality nor the technology of today are in secrecy?s favour.
Ingenuity is the biggest enemy, of course. There is Assange?s elaborate multi-jurisdictional strategy for evading convictions. But there is the simpler Manning too. He was banned from using zip drives and similar storage devices at work. So he said he was playing Lady Gaga on his CD. He lipsynched. And secret military video went online.
renuka.bisht@expressindia.com