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>>It has experienced reporters who understand the issues involved.

You mean it has experienced reporters who editorialize the leaks. Because that's one of the many benefits of Wikileaks: you get the data in its raw form and can reach your own, independent conclusions if you choose to do so.

>>It has a process through which the public can contact the organization and correct errors.

This is well and good, but the process is not efficient enough to deal with the sheer volume of leaks in a timely manner. Just as an example, Wikileaks released 400,000 leaked documents in October 2010. How much time would it have taken for The Guardian to process them, and would the information still be relevant by the time they were released?

OP pointed out the editorializing on the 'Collateral Murder' video as evidence that you can't avoid this.

Seriously, I have a hard time accepting a lack of editorializing as a serious argument in favor of Wikileaks. Collateral Murder was editorialized to the point that it hurt Wikileaks' credibility, if anything.

Yes, we got the raw information as well, but often after highly publicized, deeply editorialized publicity stunts.

I agree with the premise of the headline: an organization like Wikileaks is incredibly valuable to a functional and transparent democracy. Wikileaks itself, however, suffers from far too many fundamental problems to serve as anything other than a vague outline of what such an organization should be.

To be fair, Assange advocates what he calls “scientific journalism”[1] in which the editorialized piece is presented along with the raw and unedited primary source(s)†.

He also acknowledges that Wikileaks is an “activist organization” that uses “transparency as its method”[2].

I do not necessarily agree with the editorial voice of Wikileaks but the style of journalism that it promotes is obviously a Good Thing.

[1] http://goo.gl/GGJWz

[2] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/04/logan-symposium-explor...

† Redaction to protect the life and/or livelihood is an exception.

EDIT: I meant “kind of journalism” rather than “style of journalism”.

>but the style of journalism that it promotes is obviously a Good Thing.

I very much disagree.

The type of editorializing Wikileaks engages in fundamentally undermines their credibility as an information clearing house. When the raw information takes a back seat to the editorial content, it makes it easier for those that would seek to suppress that information to discredit them as a source.

It simply comes down to trust, and I have personal issues trusting a source that has a stated goal of editing and framing the information they release to suit their agenda.

The Collateral Murder release really is a great example of some of the many issues with Wikileaks' approach. It deliberately presents the footage out of context with post-hoc commentary that frames the entire thing in a pretty misleading light, all wrapped up in an intentionally incendiary title.

And the real tragedy of that?

The story behind the footage is tragic enough that it doesn't need that sort of spin to be effective. Wikileaks tried to tack on claims of deliberate maliciousness to what is, in reality, a clear illustration of the brutal, wasteful, and confusing nature of war in the real world. And, by doing so, Wikileaks made it easier for their critics to dismiss them as propagandists since that's essentially what they were engaging in.

I want an information clearing house that I can trust to simply perform the role of disseminating information while protecting themselves and their sources. I simply don't believe that such a clearing house can be trusted and taken seriously while also pushing an editorial agenda.

Julian Assange has said a lot of times that he doesn't like to edit the leaks in general because it is a slippery slope. Many times they do it to prevent dishonest attacks from people regarding some information, stealing impact from the more relevant worthwhile information of the leaks. I agree that the edited version of the collateral murder video was unfortunate but it hardly changed the substance of the video: collateral murder. The changes were minimal, specially if you take into account the impact that the video had. You're giving too much weight to the editorialization of that video, which amounts to nearly nothing in context of subsequent (and previous) leaks from wikileaks. To top it all off, there is not other news organization at the same level of wikileaks in this stuff (I wish there were tho) so for now we're stuck with them, and they are more than good at what they do.

>You're giving too much weight to the editorialization of that video, which amounts to nearly nothing in context of subsequent (and previous) leaks from wikileaks.

I completely disagree with this.

Collateral Murder frames the entire incident as the intentional, deliberate killing of civilians and a journalist. It's filled with commentary telling you exactly how to interpret what you're seeing. You're told that this guy on the video is clearly carrying around a camera. You're told that, sure, some of these guys were carrying around rifles, but they were just calmly hanging around. You're shown a quote from the military saying that they did not deliberately civilians, then shown images of a van with big arrows pointing at it labeled "CHILDREN." The entire thing is presented with the clear implication that these were deliberate killings of innocent people.

The actual context of that video? A mechanized infantry unit in the area was taking fire from unknown sources and the Apache was there to provide air cover. The Apache gunner is sitting in a helicopter being buffeted in the air while peering through a 5"x5" monochrome display -- something roughly the size of two iPhones sitting side by side -- and sees a large group of men obviously armed with rifles nearby. He sees a large cylindrical object and calls RPG because large groups of armed men in a war zone with active shooting going on are more likely to be carrying around an RPG than a Nikon. He opens fire on them.

The result is the same: a bunch of people died absolutely needlessly and tragically. It never should have happened.

But in one context, you're telling people that the military is going around deliberately killing innocent people for no reason. In the other context, people are dying despite the best intentions of the troops involved because war is a messy, confusing, and terrible thing.

Presenting it in one context is just going to turn off anyone who -- rightly -- thinks you're just trying to sell an agenda. The other just might get people realizing that war is something to be avoided because there's no such thing as a clean war.

Wikileaks has two audiences: the people that agree with its editorial voice and the people that are interested in the raw data.

The former are not going to be easily dissuaded from taking Wikileaks seriously because of loyalty (perhaps misguided), nor will the latter because you cannot discredit raw data (except for denying its provenance).

Furthermore, by providing the raw data, scientific journalist give other organizations a chance to provide alternative context and/or analysis.

>Wikileaks has two audiences: the people that agree with its editorial voice and the people that are interested in the raw data.

This borderlines on being paternalistic in overlooking another audience -- arguably the most important one for an information clearing house -- those whose opinions can be swayed by new information if they trust the source of that information.

Engaging in editorial commentary that overshadows the content of the actual data undermines that trust in a very real way. When you're pushing an editorial agenda, people are going to dismiss the data because it's coming from a source they consider ultimately untrustworthy.

>Furthermore, by providing the raw data, scientific journalist give other organizations a chance to provide alternative context and/or analysis.

This is exactly why the clearing house and the editorial voice need to be separate entities. If the data is available, then anyone is free to (and will) perform analysis on it without tainting the data itself with the reputation of agenda of the organization releasing it.

The trustworthiness of data is a function of its provenance, not its accompanying analysis or commentary.

Conversely, the trustworthiness of information (i.e. analysis and commentary) is a function of the degree of bias of the source and not the data that informs it.

If the raw data is universally accessible then there should be no shortage of trustworthy information sources for the third audience you mention. Unbiased sources are ideal but that’s too much to hope for, so the next best thing for that audience is to consult a multitude of sources that are known to be examining the same data.

Finally, I do not think Wikileaks is ideal (I prefer something more like what Nate Silver does). But I take it as axiomatic that a free press — even one with an editorial voice — is a Good Thing. A journalistic organization that also releases its sources is a Better Thing and hence must also be a Good Thing.

>The trustworthiness of data is a function of its provenance, not its accompanying analysis or commentary.

From an idealistic standpoint, sure. From a real world standpoint, trustworthiness colors peoples' perception of the data itself. Including commentary with the release has lead to Wikileaks being viewed as untrustworthy in many people's eyes, resulting in them dismissing the analysis of data sourced from them outright.

Again, in an ideal world, the data would rule all, but that's simply not the way it actually plays out. It's not hard to find examples of exactly this playing out with Wikileaks, and it lessens the overall value of the data they do release in swaying public perception.

>(I prefer something more like what Nate Silver does).

Nate Silver does meta-analysis. He doesn't perform any data gathering himself. He represents the third-party editorial voice I'm advocating. In fact, Silver's model even further illustrates what I'm getting at because it accounts for and weights the reliability of the sources of the raw data.

>> You mean it has experienced reporters who editorialize the leaks.

You mean like @wikileaks, the official Wikileaks twitter?

>> you get the data in its raw form

The Guardian provided raw information as well. You can download the FISA court decision here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...

EDIT: And by download, I mean view the decision in a silly embedded thing-of-a-bob.

>This is well and good, but the process is not efficient enough to deal with the sheer volume of leaks in a timely manner.

You seem to imply that anything that can be leaked should be leaked. There is no morality in haphazardly leaking any and all classified information. This is precisely why established news organizations are effective. They have the will to actually vet classified information for things that would count as whistleblowing. Wikileaks has no such motivation.

Wikileaks is not interested in confidence nor is it trying to compete with "the media".

It's interested in obstructing the ability of governments and organisations in power to "conspire" against it's populations through technology.

It should be judged on that, not on the aesthetics of it's delivery.

Well, FWIW, Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke this story, has been a staunch supporter of WikiLeaks.

See: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/4/29/glenn_greenwald_o...

It is not black and white. Both models have their flaws.

By and large most reporters of The New York Times towed the line before the Iraq invasion and the Wall Street melt down. When you get called into a room by very important people, and are told do it for the sake of the country, few people are going to push back. That's where overly paranoid folk like Assange have a role to play. They force the system to reevaluate the status quo.

> and are told do it for the sake of the country

Or for the sake of advertisers. And they usually don't need to be told.

>newspapers have a long, successful history of defending their first amendment rights in the courts.

They are also dying. Newspapers make their money from advertising. The price you pay for the paper barely covers the cost of printing and delivering it. But print advertising has fallen off a cliff in the face of the web. You can hear all the old hands complaining about how it's all Google's fault (or whatever), but it isn't anybody's fault, it's just a fact. It's a fact that leaves newspapers without the level of resources they had thirty years ago to fight against government overreach.

And it's another fact that most of those "missing" advertising dollars have gone to the tech sector. Which means we have a responsibility to pick up the slack, one way or another.

Well, the article says "an entity like WikiLeaks," and appears to be referring to its statelessness and ability (or at least willingness) to stay online despite governmental efforts to take the service down. You may be right that WikiLeaks itself is a low-quality or irresponsible example of such an entity, but I still think it's a valid point that these types of entities are beneficial.

Absolutely. I'm completely on board with the concept of an organization acting as an information clearing house for leakers; I just feel that Wikileaks is the wrong organization to be doing the job.

Whether it's intentionally making releases dripping with spin or the inability to function internally (e.g., resulting in the destruction of the Citibank documents), it's clear to me that Wikileaks just isn't up to the job of serving as that sort of clearing house in a credible manner.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyone else stepping up to the plate to take up that challenge at the moment.

> I have a lot more confidence in, say, The New York Times or The Guardian than Wikileaks

So do governments. It's much easier to deal with a newspaper :)

FYI the redactions of the cables as originally published were done with the assistance of several established news organizations. One of which was The Guardian. Therefore the result you criticize was the result of the same editorial process that you extol.

(As for Wikileaks itself, they eventually released all of the cables without redaction.)

One difference is that I can email or call the Times and they are generally responsive. I couldn't contact Wikileaks.

Yes, at first journalists from reputable publications guided the redaction process. However, Wikileaks also gave access to unredacted documents to some very dodgy people, including Israel Shamir, who may have shared documents with the Belarusian dictatorship, leading to arrests of activists (c.f. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/why-i-had-to-lea...)

Of course the unredacted documents were ultimately released. This was done, as I understand it, by a combination of a Guardian journalist revealing the password to a file that he thought was not public and WikiLeaks putting that same file on a server.

To quote from The Guardian: >>The newly published archive contains more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists; several thousand labelled with a tag used by the US to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger; and more than 150 specifically mentioning whistleblowers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/julian-assange-a...

I'm not suggesting that The New York Times or The Guardian are perfect - they aren't - but they have decades of experience balancing the costs and benefits of leaks and overall they do a good job (from the Pentagon Papers to today's report). By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?

By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?

Historians will argue that one for decades. However I've seen it claimed and argued by knowledgeable people that learning what the US thought about their local dictatorships was a major contributing factor that made the Arab Spring possible. Contributing to the freeing of over 100 million people from dictatorship is a pretty good counterbalance to the ways in which some dictatorships have been able to abuse the information released.

See http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-l... for information on how wikileaks contributed to starting the Arab Spring.

The point that the World Affairs Journal writer seems to be making is that it wasn't the content of the cables that was significant - everyone in Tunisia knew that the Ben Ali regime was corrupt - it was the fact that these cables came from an American source that was particularly humiliating.

I think that's a highly speculative argument. In many of these countries dissatisfaction with the government, social inequality and major unrest have been going on for decades. The kinds of issues that the writer talks about have been discussed very openly in the Arab world (take for example, the Egyptian book and film The Yacoubian Building). I think Wikileaks may have contributed to this milieu, but I don't think it was revelatory.

I acknowledged that it was not an open and shut theory when I said that historians will debate this for decades. However I first heard about it from Teri Gross' interview with Bill Keller, at the time the executive editor of The New York Times.

I have every reason to believe that his opinion was highly informed. Certainly it is more so than mine. And if he gives Wikileaks credit, then Wikileaks likely deserves some credit.

Amnesty also cited Wikileaks as a catalyst for the Arab Spring.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-internat...

> By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?

Sorry, are we talking about actual events or is this fiction? Because that didn't happen.

http://www.salon.com/2011/01/19/wikileaks_24/

Just more sources for you, since that myth needs to die.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/u-s-officials-re...

The US officially claims that there was little to no actual harm caused by the leaks.

> By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?

Who was arrested or killed?

For starters, here's a piece by a Guardian journalist who worked closely with WikiLeaks: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/why-i-had-to-lea...

> So I decided to grit my teeth and carry on. Dismay mounted, however, with the arrival of Israel Shamir, a self-styled Russian "peace campaigner" with a long history of antisemitic writing. Shamir was introduced to the team under the pseudonym Adam, and it was only several weeks after he had left – with a huge cache of unredacted cables – that most of us started to find out who he was.

> Press enquiries started to trickle in. A little research revealed his unsavoury history, but I was told Julian would be unwilling for WikiLeaks to publish anything critical of Shamir. Instead, shamefully, we put out a statement simply distancing WikiLeaks from him.

> There followed even more damning allegations. Shamir had been seen leaving the interior ministry of Belarus, an eastern European dictatorship.

> The next day, the country's dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, boasted he would start a Belarusian WikiLeaks showing the US was funding his political rivals.

> Scores of arrests of opposition activists followed the country's elections – but Shamir wrote a piece painting an idyllic picture of free, fair, elections in a happy country.

> Human rights groups demanded answers, amid fears that Belarus may have received material from the cables. No answers were supplied. Julian would not look into the matter.

Notwithstanding that the credibility of James Ball is questionable at best there just isn't any reasonable evidence that someone was arrested or killed in that piece. Surely it does not serve as the basis for your claim?

We're sure of Bradley Manning I guess.

> It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public.

It is neither well known nor respected. The process is not public and there is a great deal of self-censorship that has nothing to do with public safety. There were examples of this even in the publication of the Wikileaks cables.

The New York Times and other media organizations have an independent public editor whose job is to examine and explain how the paper has handled a particular issue and to provide criticism if they feel it is appropriate. They also publish letters to the editor and op-eds by people who disagree.

Again, I'm not saying that the New York Times is perfect, but its a lot better than Wikileaks.

Those are weak checks and balances and are essentially ineffective for those most important problem: Stories which are never reported.

There are serious systemic faults that the NYT cannot solve. For example, 1. Corporate influence 2. Government influence 3. NYT management self-interest 4. NYT institution self-interest.

I'm not saying Wikileaks is perfect, but it certainly plugs those holes.

Finally, you needn't choose between NYT and Wikileaks, both can co-exist. But the world certainly could use more Wikileaks-like organizations than NYT-like ones.

> It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public.

Unfortunately, the well-known and respected editorial process isn't transparent to the public. I'm not implying this is bad; just that it is vulnerable to being used for hushing up stuff, dusting important (but inconvenient) information under the "not important" carpet.

I'm with you. The article assumed that making leaks easier is a good thing. I contend that it should be hard to leak stuff -- you should, at the very least, have to convince an editor whose own credibility (and potentially their job) could be on the line. That sort of process makes it less likely that you'll recklessly endanger people over minor issues.

Ironically the unredacted release of the diplomatic cables was caused by the Guardian journalist David Leigh, when he published the password as a chapter heading for his book about Wikileaks.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/unredacted_us_...

http://www.amazon.com/WikiLeaks-Inside-Julian-Assanges-Secre...