WikiLeaks| Wikileaks, Surveillance and Transparency (original) (raw)

Beyond Transparency : Politics after Wkileaks

Digital platforms have been differently seen, throughout the last decade: 1) as a device of citizen participation in public affairs; 2) as a weapon for terrorist movements, which use sophisticated communication networks; 3) as a means to supply intelligence agencies with a capacity to control people such as we had never seen before; 4) as a means to discover and make known what governments secretly do. All these perspectives correspond to real changes internet brought to politics, and people are unconditionally supporting the ones mentioned in 1) and 4). Participation and transparency are indisputable values in democracy. However, in order to be efficient, political deliberation has always required secrecy, which places democracy at a crossroads: to be realistic it has to keep the so called state secret; to remain democratic it has to be transparent. Is this compromise feasible in the digital era? That is the challenge.

WikiLeaks and the Changing Forms of Information Politics in the “Network Society”

Future Trends in Social Media, 2012

This chapter offers an analysis of one instance of "mass self-communication" namely the website WikiLeaks. Founded in 2006 by Australian internet activist Julian Paul Assange, WikiLeaks aimed to facilitate an anonymous electronic drop box for whistleblowers. WikiLeaks has promoted the cause of investigative journalism, organising citizens into a powerful force of news-gatherers, and laying bare a wealth of privileged information. By first disrupting and then decentralising relations of power, WikiLeaks encourages new ways of thinking. At the heart of this process is a radical recasting of what counts as a public service ethos, one which promises to reinvigorate traditional conceptions of journalism's role and responsibilities in a democratic culture.

Governance of the Facebook Privacy Crisis

SSRN Electronic Journal

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page story describing how Facebook concealed knowledge and disclosure of Russian-linked activity and exploitation resulting in Kremlin led disruption of the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, through the use of global hate campaigns and propaganda warfare. By mid-December 2018, it became clear that the Russian efforts leading up to the 2016 U.S. elections were much more extensive than previously thought. Two studies conducted for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), by: (1) Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika; and (2) New Knowledge, provide considerable new information and analysis about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) influence operations targeting American citizens. By early 2019 it became apparent that a number of influential and successful high-growth social media platforms had been used by nation states for propaganda purposes. Over two years earlier, Russia was called out by the U.S. intelligence community for their meddling with the 2016 American presidential elections. The extent to which prominent social media platforms have been used, either willingly or without their knowledge, by foreign powers continues to be investigated as this Article goes to press. Reporting by The New York Times suggests that it was not until the Facebook board meeting held September 6, 2017 that board audit committee chairman, Erskin Bowles, became aware of Facebook's internal awareness of the extent to which Russian operatives had utilized the Facebook and Instagram platforms for influence campaigns in the United States. As this Article goes to press, the degree to which the allure of advertising revenues blinded Facebook to their complicit role in offering the highest bidder access to Facebook users is not yet fully known. This Article cannot be a complete chapter in the corporate governance challenge of managing, monitoring, and oversight of individual privacy issues and content integrity on prominent social media platforms. The full extent of Facebook's experience is just now becoming known, with new revelations yet to come. All interested parties: Facebook users; shareholders; the board of directors at Facebook; government regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and Congress must now figure out what has transpired and what to do about it. These and other revelations have resulted in a crisis for Facebook. American democracy has been and continues to be under attack. This article contributes to the

WikiLeaks| WikiLeaks and the Shifting Terrain of Knowledge Authority

International Journal of Communication, 2014

Since 2010, there has been a deluge of reporting and commentary in the traditional press and online about the consequences and implications of WikiLeaks and its activities for journalism, diplomacy, democracy, law, and trust. Reactions to its releases of huge caches of classified documents and diplomatic correspondence throughout 2010 ranged from outrage and borderline hysteria (U.S. politicians Sarah Palin and Senator Joseph Lieberman called for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange) to bemused skepticism ("It would be an exaggeration to say that diplomacy will never be the same again"; "Unpluggable," 2010, p. 34). Somewhere in between, some officials and journalists took a more nuanced view, at least some of the time. While calling for aggressive criminal prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also praised the high level of professionalism, acute observation, and stylish writing on view in the leaked State Department cables. In a November 2010 Pentagon press briefing, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed, "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest" (Bumiller, 2010, para. 7). In January 2011, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, defended its publication of classified documents obtained from WikiLeaks: The idea that mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable.. .. David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me, "At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I've heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings. .. but the conversations are happening.. .. American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt." (Keller, 2011, p. 46) In September 2011, the WikiLeaks saga took another turn with the unexpurgated release of WikiLeaks' entire remaining inventory of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange and WikiLeaks claimed that the release was inadvertent, blaming it on the publication of the decryption key to the file containing the cables in a book by David Leigh, a journalist for The Guardian, and Luke Harding.

Digital organizing outside organizations, WikiLeaks' whistle and Snowden's flute

2023

Research on information and organization is used to highlight how organizations and their practices are digitalized. In this contribution, the opposite angle is taken: the focus is on how values and organizing practices originated on the internet avoid, encounter, and clash-not without controversies-with existing organizations. WikiLeaks and Snowden's revelations regarding governments' secret activities marked a breakdown in journalist organizations, just as they have been having largely unimaginable consequences including the widely spreading adoption of cryptography and the European Union GDPR. The peculiar ways in which WikiLeaks and Snowden pulled together people and information technologies exemplify two distinct modes of digital organizing: one more closely derived from the original culture of the internet based on radical openness, the other more sensitive to broadly established Western institutions such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The contrast between these distinct modes of organizing suggests that recognizable narratives fill the gaps left open by the diverse social orders spanned by digital infrastructures. Overall, these case studies illustrate some peculiarities of digital transformation in contemporary organizations and societies.

Privacy, Security, and Government Surveillance: WikiLeaks and the New Accountability

I have argued elsewhere that individuals have moral privacy rights that limit the surveillance activities of governments. While not absolute, privacy rights shield individuals from the prying eyes and ears of neighbors, corporations, and the state. The question that I will consider in this article is one of balance when are security interests weighty enough to overbalance individual privacy rights? Before defending my own account, I will critique three rival views. One way to strike a balance between privacy and security is to let those in power decide. In most cases, these individuals seek public office for noble purposes—we should let them decide how best to protect privacy and security. I call this position “just trust us.” A second view minimizes privacy interests by calling into doubt the activities privacy may shield. This view, called “nothing to hide,” maintains that individuals should not worry about being monitored. Only those who are engaged in immoral and illegal activity should worry about government surveillance. Similar to “nothing to hide” is the view that “security trumps.” This latter account holds that security interests are—by their nature weightier than privacy claims. After offering a critique of these attempts at balancing, I will defend my own account. I will argue that by insisting on judicial discretion for issuing warrants, demonstrating probable cause for an intrusion, and allowing public oversight of the process and reasoning involved, we may promote both privacy and security. Finally, in the concluding section I will consider the WikiLeaks movement and its impact on accountability.