What the heck is going on at WikiLeaks? In the last two weeks, the font of digital secrets has doxed millions of Turkish women, leaked Democratic National Committee emails that made Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign look bad but also suggested the site was colluding with the Russian government, and fired off some seriously anti-Semitic tweets. It’s…weird.
WikiLeaks is always going to be releasing information some people don’t like. That is the point of them. But lately the timing of and tone surrounding their leaks have felt a little off, and in cases like the DNC leak, more than a little biased. At times, they haven’t looked so much like a group speaking truth to power as an alt-right subreddit, right down to their defense of Milo Yiannopoulos, a (let’s be honest, kind of trollish) writer at Breitbart. But the way WikiLeaks behaves on the Internet means a lot more than some basement-dwelling MRA activist. “WikiLeaks’ initial self-presentation was as merely a conduit, simply neutral, like any technology,” says Mark Fenster, a lawyer at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. “As a conduit, it made a lot of sense, and had a lot of influence, immediately. The problem is, WikiLeaks is not just a technology. It’s humans too.”
WikiLeaks has endangered individuals before, but their release of the so-called Erdogan Emails was particularly egregious. The organization said that the infodump would expose the machinations of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately after the attempted coup against him, but instead turned out to be mostly correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens. Worse, it included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters. That’s irresponsible any time, and disastrous in the week of a coup.
The provenance and truth of the DNC emails looks more solid—but those sketchy ties to Russia make the whole thing seem like a foreign government trying to influence the US presidential election. It’s a little weird (tinfoil hat alert) that Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, has a show on RT, a Russian government-funded (read: propaganda) television network.
Assange openly said he hoped the DNC leak damaged the Clinton campaign. “There was the hope that in the wake of WikiLeaks’ emergence, a thousand WikiLeaks would bloom, in the same way that the Arab Spring was a really romantic ideal of the effect that digital communication can have on geopolitics,” says Fenster. “But the ideal of WikiLeaks as an information conduit that is stateless and can serve as a neutral technology isn’t working. States fight back.” WikiLeaks’ moral high ground depends on its ability to act as an honest conduit. Right now it’s acting like a damaged filter.
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/wikileaks-officially-lost-moral-high-ground/
WikiLeaks is always going to be releasing information some people don’t like. That is the point of them. But lately the timing of and tone surrounding their leaks have felt a little off, and in cases like the DNC leak, more than a little biased. At times, they haven’t looked so much like a group speaking truth to power as an alt-right subreddit, right down to their defense of Milo Yiannopoulos, a (let’s be honest, kind of trollish) writer at Breitbart. But the way WikiLeaks behaves on the Internet means a lot more than some basement-dwelling MRA activist. “WikiLeaks’ initial self-presentation was as merely a conduit, simply neutral, like any technology,” says Mark Fenster, a lawyer at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. “As a conduit, it made a lot of sense, and had a lot of influence, immediately. The problem is, WikiLeaks is not just a technology. It’s humans too.”
WikiLeaks has endangered individuals before, but their release of the so-called Erdogan Emails was particularly egregious. The organization said that the infodump would expose the machinations of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately after the attempted coup against him, but instead turned out to be mostly correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens. Worse, it included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters. That’s irresponsible any time, and disastrous in the week of a coup.
The provenance and truth of the DNC emails looks more solid—but those sketchy ties to Russia make the whole thing seem like a foreign government trying to influence the US presidential election. It’s a little weird (tinfoil hat alert) that Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, has a show on RT, a Russian government-funded (read: propaganda) television network.
Assange openly said he hoped the DNC leak damaged the Clinton campaign. “There was the hope that in the wake of WikiLeaks’ emergence, a thousand WikiLeaks would bloom, in the same way that the Arab Spring was a really romantic ideal of the effect that digital communication can have on geopolitics,” says Fenster. “But the ideal of WikiLeaks as an information conduit that is stateless and can serve as a neutral technology isn’t working. States fight back.” WikiLeaks’ moral high ground depends on its ability to act as an honest conduit. Right now it’s acting like a damaged filter.
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/wikileaks-officially-lost-moral-high-ground/
