A WikiLeaks Arms Race?

[Joanne98]

Earlier this month, Al Jazeera launched a new feature on its Web site called the Transparency Unit—the network’s in-house version of WikiLeaks. When the unit first went online, there was not much coverage about it in English, but that changed over the weekend when Al Jazeera announced that it had gained access to a large tranche of confidential documents, now being called the “Palestine Papers.” The papers appear to reveal internal diplomatic negotiations among Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the United States, to further the peace process in the Middle East. (Al Jazeera has shared the documents with the Guardian, which has published extensive reporting on them.) In a previous post, I noted that WikiLeaks was increasingly adapting to the standards of conventional journalism in its editorial policy. The emergence of the Transparency Unit suggests that an opposite trend may also be slowly at work.

So far, Al Jazeera has not revealed much about the functionality of the Transparency Unit, except for a few details on its submissions page. The network promises that it has created a “secure terminal” for leaks. “All materials are encrypted while they are transmitted to us, and they remain encrypted on our servers,” it says. Al Jazeera also promises that anonymity will be maintained in a variety of ways. (It vows that the I.P. addresses of computers logging onto the site will not be recorded, and electronic documents will be scrubbed of identifying information after they are submitted.) And it encourages leakers to use Tor—a way to send information over the Internet that is difficult to trace—and to take measures to safeguard their material before they even submit it. These are things that WikiLeaks does, too. Publication of the Palestine Papers suggests that at least someone thought that Al Jazeera was secure enough to submit to it many internal documents about a highly incendiary issue.

Has Al Jazeera taken the first step in a journalism arms race to begin acquiring mass document leaks? It would be surprising if other large news organizations are not already at work on their own encrypted WikiLeaks-style portals. The New York Times and the Guardian, for instance, have every incentive to follow in Al Jazeera’s footsteps and give people a way to submit sensitive material directly to them rather than through an intermediary, such as WikiLeaks. If they aren’t doing this, they most likely will start doing it eventually, and this raises several questions: In a future where in-house WikiLeaks portals are common to mainstream news organizations, is there a role for the original site? Will Julian Assange’s creation become a victim of its own success? And if his movement is taken over by established news organizations, how might it change?

I haven’t worked out answers to all of this just yet, but here are some quick thoughts



Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/01/transparency-unit-wikileaks.html#ixzz1C46HR1yu

[bemildred]

1. Should have patented the idea when he had the chance.

Now it's public domain.
(Just kidding.)