Whistle-blowing site shrouded in own secrecy - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Whistle-blowing site shrouded in own secrecy

WikiLeaks emerged in 2007 as a self-described check on unjustified government secrecy and the abuses that can come with it, yet the organization itself is shrouded in no small amount of secrecy.

WikiLeaks has no corporate headquarters or base of operations. Its founder, Julian Assange, demurred at a news conference in London on Monday when asked about the people he employs to review and authenticate the leaked documents it posts on the Internet. He concedes that the sources of those documents often are secret even to WikiLeaks.

"Secrecy is sometimes perfectly legitimate," said Assange, citing personal medical records.

Since 2007, WikiLeaks has been redefining where the line of legitimate secrecy begins and ends. Its official position, posted on its website, is that "public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive institutions forces them to consider the ethical implications of their actions."

Now, with its online posting of more than 76,000 classified U.S. military documents from Afghanistan, WikiLeaks is responsible for one of the biggest disclosures of secret information in modern history. The debate on whether that disclosure is responsible has spurred some to question the transparency of an organization that requires secrecy to do its job.

"Who are these people? I get concerned about this," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which fights for journalists' rights to obtain and publish secret information.

Dalglish says WikiLeaks, which characterizes itself as a journalistic endeavor, is something entirely different. It is a new sort of entity, she says, enabled by the technological advances of the digital age to put reams of secret or confidential material in the public domain with virtually no accountability.

"This is not journalism," she says. "Did they write stories, talk to sources, analyze the information, go to the government for a response or put it in context? Did they do something to inform the public about what these documents show? No."

Assange doesn't dispute that notion. He concedes that no more than about 2,000 pages of documents released this week were reviewed substantially by his own staff or those of the three news organizations that got an advance peek at the material. That, he says, is up to journalists, historians or anyone with an interest in sifting through the documents.

The WikiLeaks philosophy, he says, is to serve mainly as a conduit. With no base of operations — its computer systems are hidden all over the world — the organization is removed from the jurisdiction of any given nation's laws. The U.S. government is looking for the leaker, and Assange says that is precisely why WikiLeaks' secrecy about its sources and vetting methods is necessary and justified.

"Our greatest fear is that we will be too successful too fast and we won't be able to do justice to the material we are getting in fast enough," he says.

WikiLeaks has raised questions by "indiscriminately publishing records of private groups, including religious and social organizations, even when such records showed no misconduct," says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists. But this latest release seems more defensible, he adds, "because they have withheld certain records recognizing that they could pose a threat to individuals. That is a welcome sign of discrimination."

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