It isn't what I'd planned for Wednesday's class.
As you recall, we were going to discuss the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics and how it relates to Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Now we've got bigger fish to fry. But, if you get my drift, you'll still get the opportunity to express yourself in writing about the SPJ Code of Ethics. In fact, why don't you open a new window now? That way you'll have the Code handy as we go over the WikiLeaks story in class.
So let's get started.
Background.This is a major developing story worldwide, and it's confusing. It takes off in all directions, from the threat of war with Iran and diplomatic jockeying over China's relationship with North Korea to gossip about whether a foreign leader's wife had Botox treatments. Not to mention WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's legal problems, ranging from an allegation of sex crimes in Sweden to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into violation of espionage laws. Even Sarah Palin is Twittering about it. I have no idea what the story going to look like by class time Wednesday, but CNN News filed a pretty good explanation this morning (Tuesday) of some of the background. (Scroll down to "Revealing secrets online" box w/ graphic of WikiLeaks page in background, and click on box.) Arguably the most objective news organization in the world is the British Broadcasting Corp. And BBC Washington correspondent Kim Ghattas' initial report, which aired Monday, is an even-handed summary. And the Washington Post has a fascinating, must-read story about how The New York Times got it from The Guardian "as a result of a leak of a leak."
Issues. We aren't going to be able to sort all this stuff out in class. We're not even going to try. But there are several points here that relate to what we're studying in COMM 150. Among them:
- Technology and the ability of new media to evade the gatekeepers. From the time of Gutenberg and Martin Luther, innovations in the means of communication have allowed people get their message out despite opposition from the authorities. Amsterdam's unlicensed printing presses played the same role as WikiMedia's web servers in the 16th century. Is this any different?
- How is this story being covered by American media? I think the New York Times' main story summarizing the leaks (linked below) was more entertaining -- i.e. included more funny little details, like the lady's Botox treatments, than the Guardian of the Spiegel. But maybe that's because I've been reading too much Neil Postman lately. How much ink and air time are the leaks getting?
- One of the final chapters in John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication" is about globalization. How many global angles do you find here? Where are the papers that are publishing the leaked documents? Where is Assange from? Where is he now? What is WikiLeaks doing in Iceland? How international is the internet, anyway? Is WikiLeaks an international entity?
- Journalistic ethics. Is it right to publish secret documents? What are the pros and cons? (There are some of each.) What safeguards are reasonable? What would the SPJ Code of Ethics counsel? How do you tell the truth and minimize harm? I'm especially concerned with this last question.
In class we'll watch an eight-minute webcast by editors of the Guardian that examines some of the implications of the leaks, again from a British viewpoint, and also shows some of the effort that went into preparing the leaked information for publication:
US embassy leaks: 'The data deluge is coming ...'Jonathan Powell [former chief of staff to then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair], Alan Rusbridger [editor of The Guardian], David Leigh [investigations executive editor], Timothy Garton-Ash [historian and Guardian foreign affairs columnist] and Heather Brooke [free-lance journalist, writer, and freedom of information activist] discuss the leaked US embassy cables ...
The New York Times has set up a website called State Secrets to archive its coverage. It includes editor Bill Keller's explanation of why the Times is publishing the leaked documents. Keller says:
The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online.Keller's "Note to Readers" should be read in full. It makes it clear the decision to publish was not taken lightly.
After its own redactions, The Times sent Obama administration officials the cables it planned to post and invited them to challenge publication of any information that, in the official view, would harm the national interest. After reviewing the cables, the officials — while making clear they condemn the publication of secret material — suggested additional redactions. The Times agreed to some, but not all. The Times is forwarding the administration’s concerns to other news organizations and, at the suggestion of the State Department, to WikiLeaks itself. In all, The Times plans to post on its Web site the text of about 100 cables — some edited, some in full — that illuminate aspects of American foreign policy.
The question of dealing with classified information is rarely easy, and never to be taken lightly. Editors try to balance the value of the material to public understanding against potential dangers to the national interest. As a general rule we withhold secret information that would expose confidential sources to reprisals or that would reveal operational intelligence that might be useful to adversaries in war. We excise material that might lead terrorists to unsecured weapons material, compromise intelligence-gathering programs aimed at hostile countries, or disclose information about the capabilities of American weapons that could be helpful to an enemy.
On the other hand, we are less likely to censor candid remarks simply because they might cause a diplomatic controversy or embarrass officials. ...
Commentary. Heather Brooke, the FOI activist who was quoted in the Guardian's video, had an op-ed piece in today's paper arguing publication of the leaks is a good thing. (She also said she got ahold of the data from a third-party source, not WikiLeaks, which is an interesting sidelight. Once this stuff gets out there, it takes on a life of its own.) Brooke argues:
Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.Her solution: More transparency on the part of government.
Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn't sharing information that had put the nation's security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous "lost opportunities" to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.
But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.
Another view.Luke Allnutt, who writes a blog called Tangled Web, says in a post on Radio Free Europe that the WikiLeaks information dumps could have an opposite effect to what Brooke and the WikiLeakers hope for. He has an informed opinion: His blog "focuses on the smart ways people in closed societies are using social media, mobile phones, and the Internet to circumvent their governments. It also covers the efforts of less-than-democratic governments to control the web. Now and then, it might also cover shiny new gadgets." Here's what he says about the diplomatic cables:
The leaks, of course, were meant to embarrass the United States, but in the end the opposite seemed true.... when being candid has [bad] consequences, diplomats will either be less candid or more cautious. Diplomats will use different channels: either retreating to an analogue world of hidden notes and snatched conversations, or using top-secret channels, with much higher levels of encryption, for even the most mundane chatter.
Those looking for skullduggery won't find very much, although of course as they will remind us, that is because all the skullduggery is hidden behind much higher layers of secrecy. As Timothy Garton Ash writes, "from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of."
Rather than die-hard imperialists bent on a nefarious masterplan, U.S. diplomats appear to be honest brokers dealing with a complex world. The cables show what a flawed and decidedly human game diplomacy is, where foreign policy is at the mercy of personalities, hearsay, high-level gossip, and charlatans.
One of the biggest ironies, though, is that a WikiLeaks world could end up being a world with less transparency rather than more. In a commentary for "The Guardian," Heather Brooke talks about how the digital revolution has just begun. It's all rather techno-deterministic, in the same vein as old arguments that "information wants to be free" and how the Internet just routes around censorship. ...
Or diplomats will simply censor themselves, writing with greater candor so that information becomes sanitized to the point of banality -- just as we might censor ourselves in our emails at work, never knowing whose in-box our message will end up in. Diplomats will write cables, but perhaps always with an audience beyond the intended recipients in mind.,/blockquote>
All five papers withheld certain parts of the information from publication, mostly for security reasons. They published accounts of how they decided what to withhold:
- Der Spiegel (English-language website). "With a team of more than 50 reporters and researchers, SPIEGEL has viewed, analyzed and vetted the mass of documents. In most cases, the magazine has sought to protect the identities of the Americans' informants, unless the person who served as the informant was senior enough to be politically relevant. In some cases, the US government expressed security concerns and SPIEGEL accepted a number of such objections. In other cases, however, SPIEGEL felt the public interest in reporting the news was greater than the threat to security. Throughout our research, SPIEGEL reporters and editors weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality."
- Le Monde (Paris). "Les journaux ont aussi établi des listes communes de personnes à protéger, notamment dans les pays dictatoriaux, criminalisés ou en guerre. Toutes les identités de personnes dont ils estiment qu'elles seraient menacées ont été masquées. WikiLeaks a accepté de ne pas diffuser dans l'immédiat les 250 000 télégrammes. Seuls les mémos ayant servi à la rédaction des articles des cinq journaux seront, après protection des identités, publiés."
- El Pais (Madrid). "Ese [editing] proceso se ha llevado a cabo bajo una exigente condición de no poner en peligro en ningún momento fuentes protegidas de antemano o personas cuya vida podría verse amenazada al desvelarse su identidad. Al mismo tiempo, todos los medios han hecho un esfuerzo supremo por evitar la revelación de episodios que pudieran suponer un riesgo para la seguridad de cualquier país, particularmente de Estados Unidos, el más expuesto por estas revelaciones. Por esa razón, algunos de los documentos que serán puestos a disposición de nuestros lectores a partir de hoy aparecerán parcialmente mutilados."
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