Opinion The unclassifiable

“The world’s first stateless media organisation”,it publishes anonymous dirt on corporations,governments and anything else it deems fit (Scientology? The BNP?). WikiLeaks is not only stateless,it is stake-less — it doesn’t need favours from any government,it is not looking to turn over profits. There are no strings to yank. Its public face is Julian Assange,hacker and subversive,obsessed all his life with exposing institutional misdeeds (like the Millennium Trilogy’s Blomkvist and Salander rolled into one). As he said in a TED interview,WikiLeaks uses “state of the art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet,to hide trails,pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium.”

Given the impossibility of complete takedowns on the Internet and the proliferation of mirror sites,once it hits WikiLeaks,this information can be earthshaking. It hosted the controversial emails of East Anglia climate scientists that created such a flap before the Copenhagen summit. It published a list of websites censored by various governments,it exposed toxic dumping in Africa,it altered the course of the Kenyan election with a sensitively-timed leak of a government report. Its biggest break-out moment,until now,was this April’s “Collateral Murders” video — US military footage showing a sloppy 2007 Baghdad airstrike that killed 12 people,including two Reuters journalists. Even as Defence Secretary Robert Gates trashed the video,saying it was like looking at war “through a soda straw”,it remains one of YouTube’s greatest hits,and has been replayed around the world,to galvanic effect.

Leaks have been a venerable tradition for all the years that the press has existed — disillusioned or self-interested insiders often slip the untold story to the general public,either to embarrass power or to change the outcome. With WikiLeaks,whistleblowers are mostly secure,unless they give themselves away — as happened with 22-year-old Bradley Manning,a US intelligence analyst who boastfully revealed,in an online chat,how he stored top-secret military information on CDs labelled Lady Gaga. (WikiLeaks neither confirms nor denies the Manning story,though they have offered to pick up his legal tab.)

Manning boasted that his actions were all about “the non-PR version of world events and crises” — and that is central to the WikiLeaks self-image. It wants to cut through the spin and soft lies of media organisations,the pro forma bull of companies and governments. It aims to check systemic abuses wherever they happen,by turning a harsh glare on them.

This concept of radical transparency has its critics — Stephen Aftergood,a campaigner for open government,has called the WikiLeaks model “information vandalism” for not respecting the rule of law or rights of individuals. Technology lawyer and visionary Lawrence Lessig has nuanced the idea of “naked transparency” — saying that more data without intelligent context can detract from better decisions,and lead to dangerous insinuation.

As Assange told The New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian,WikiLeaks sees itself not as the press,but as a megaphone for sources. “The source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.” Like an unsocialised toddler,it had little regard for propriety or side-effects — it once published social security numbers of soldiers as part of a larger leak,and shrugged off the costs.

But this latest revelation of the Afghanistan papers shows that WikiLeaks has wised up,in terms of how it works with traditional media. After all,the site might be a relentless gush of great information,but that is no guarantee of impact,because it doesn’t mean that the media and public would sift through all that data. If it had simply posted this material online,available to all,it would have been desultorily discussed,possibly ignored. So instead,in a brilliant buzz-making move,it let three handpicked newspapers — The Guardian,The New York Times,and Der Spiegel — refine and release the information simultaneously after careful fact-checking. While the news outlets presented their own key takeaways and analyses,the original raw feed remains on WikiLeaks.

As this Afghanistan episode also reveals,WikiLeaks appears to be discarding its slash and burn approach — it has withheld some parts of the leak,for fear it might endanger certain people,and it has avoided all editorialising. Right now,it needs all the good sense it can manage — the demonstration of its outsized power has certainly earned it newer,more powerful adversaries. However,Julian Assange remains unflappable,only saying,“it is our experience that courage is contagious.”

amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com