What is the difference between Wikileaks and a British Newspaper?

[sudopod]

Money? Backing by a large publishing firm?

No one seems advocating breaking the legs of, detonating, and/or poisoning the editor-in-chief of the Guardian.

What's the difference?

[LostInAnomie]

1. The bell was already rung.

That's the difference.

[sudopod]

2. Actually,

The newspapers got to pick through and release things into public well before the general internet release. They "rung the bell" first, even if they didn't do any of the leg work.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

3. How about being subject to the Official Secrets Act

There is real problem with territoriality when it comes to Wikileaks. What is its business nexus and which country's laws, if any, is it subject to?

[sudopod]

5. One assumes wherever their servers are located

since that is where money and information is transferred. Which would be Iceland, and maybe Sweden, since the Pirate Party is hosting some of their stuff, if I remember correctly.

I am not a lawyer, though.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

10. IRC, they have many mirrors in many nations, most of them not opperated by them

You may remember that is how the attempt to take the domain name was circumvented

[sudopod]

14. There are also many mirrors maintained by volunteers.

They aren't shy with releasing their content, after all. Not to mention the thousands of torrent peers floating out there in the tubes.

[pnwmom]

4. For one thing, a newspaper is a public company, with a known structure

finances and activities that must be carried out according to the law.

Wikileaks is working outside of the law. For all its talk of transparency, it is working behind its own curtains.

[sudopod]

6. It's working outside of our law.

As far as I can tell, which is admittedly from a layman's perspective, they are operating within the laws of Iceland and Sweden on a relatively small budget (< $1,000,000).

[pnwmom]

8. The question was about a British newspaper, which does have

to abide by British law.

How do we know what the Wikileaks budget is -- or where the money is coming from or going to?

[sudopod]

12. would an .xls of their budget satsify you?

Assuming they would supply that, then the same could be said of any media company, after all.

Hell, we say it all the time about Fox News and Newscorp, but no one here is making vocal calls to take out Rupert Murdoch, and rightly so.

[pnwmom]

9. delete (dupe)

[sudopod]

7. What would you want to know about them before they

got taken of the hit list?

An org chart? A nice .xls file of what they spent on server hardware, maintenance, and bandwidth?

[spanone]

11. nations will not allow this to go on much longer...too much at stake

[ProgressiveProfessor]

13. I am afeared you may be correct

When it was just a Swiss bank or the US being pilloried, it was fine with most countries. Now that many will get exposed, it is not.

[sudopod]

15. Bamp. nt