Abstract
Did WikiLeaks change the world? Lost in the sensationalism, personalization and media spasm of the event was any historical or political assessment of how or even whether the revelation of state secrets actually a ects the conduct of diplomacy and war. Taking one step back, two steps forward, this essay compares historic whistle blowing – like Trotsky’s opening of the Tsarist diplomatic archives after the Russian revolution and Wilson’s call for a transparent new diplomacy after the First World War – to the polarized reaction that fol- lowed the passing of over a half million classi ed documents and two videos by Private Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks. e signi cance of the event should be judged less by the content of the documents and more by the emergence of a new networked medium of global transmission that further erodes the institutions and prerogatives of statecraft.
Highlights
JAMES DER DERIANTEMA cause injury to the United States. As the investigation continued, 22 additional charges were laid, including leaking over a half million documents and two videos as well as posting wrongfully obtained classified material on the Internet with the knowledge that it would aid the enemy, a serious crime that comes with a death penalty (the prosecutors have said that they will only seek life imprisonment). Manning spent the nine months in solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, before being moved to a military correctional facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he awaits a general-court martial
Has WikiLeaks changed the world?1 The tweets, blogs and instant messaging of the digerati say yes, and much for the better
Assange faced possible extradition to the United States, where he is under investigation by a grand jury sitting in Northern Virginia, a venue known for reaching outcomes preferred by national security denizens
Summary
TEMA cause injury to the United States. As the investigation continued, 22 additional charges were laid, including leaking over a half million documents and two videos as well as posting wrongfully obtained classified material on the Internet with the knowledge that it would aid the enemy, a serious crime that comes with a death penalty (the prosecutors have said that they will only seek life imprisonment). Manning spent the nine months in solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, before being moved to a military correctional facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he awaits a general-court martial. The first WikiLeaks, numerous and regular, were hardly world-changers They included the November 2007 post of the U.S Army’s S(tandard) O(perating) P(rocedures) at Camp Delta, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp; the March 2008 posts of 35 videos censored by the Chinese of civil unrest in Tibet and the secret protocols of the Church of Scientology; the September 2008 post of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo email account (yes, she had good cause to go after Assange); the November 2008 posts of extrajudicial killings by Kenyan police of human rights activists and the secret membership list of the extreme-right British National Party; and the March 2009 posts of documents revealing Barclay Bank’s tax avoidance schemes and the alleged effort by the Australian and Danish governments to ban websites that resulted in the censoring of websites unrelated to their original targets of terrorism and child pornography; the July 2009 post of a nuclear accident happening at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility (which corresponded to later media reports of the Stuxnet cyber-attack on the facility’s centrifuges); and the November 2009 post of 570,000 intercepted pager messages on the day of the 9/11 attack.. In October 2009 it posted the British Ministry of Defense’s secret Joint Service Protocol 440, on how to prevent information leaks by hackers, journalists and spies
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