In the run-up to a debate on WikiLeaks, Julian Assange’s attorney discusses the uncomfortable relationship between the free flow of ideas and the inclination of governments to make everything a secret.
By Emily Badger, Miller-McCune
Miller-McCune: In what way has WikiLeaks permanently altered what you refer to in this debate as “the information war”?
Mark Stephens: The genius of Julian Assange was really to spot the gap in the market.
For years, traditional media have had the drop box where you can anonymously put a brown envelope to the newspapers, and many people have done that. But the problem with this [type of] whistle-blowing was that people are often able to identify the leaker by the documents, because many of the documents are now in a situation where governments put secret identification features into them, such as a zero or an O will be filled in on page 12, 13, 14, 15, depending on which personnel it was distributed to. That’s a very basic idea, but there are similar kinds of things you can do so you can go back and track — if you ever get the document — who it came from.
What Julian did was he made an organization which was stateless, and therefore, not as susceptible to the national laws in any individual state. He also made the organization international in the sense that a thousand people work with WikiLeaks around the world, and so if he becomes indisposed — as he was when he was in prison — for any length of time, there are many other people who can step in and did, and the organization carries on. He’s got resilience built in. And as far as the person who is leaking is concerned, through his computer genius, he’s been able to devise code which makes it impossible for the person receiving the electronic files to know who sent them.
This is incredibly important, as documents which are given to journalists [today] tend to come in CDs full of material, rather than the old-fashioned folders of documents. The material is downloaded from computers, it’s a lot more material, a lot more to digest. From that perspective, you’ve got a sea change in the way in which information is flowing to the media. And of course, what has happened is it’s obviously been successful by the very fact that traditional media has followed WikiLeaks to try and develop their own electronic drop boxes.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment