WikiLeaks: From Popular Culture to Political Economy

By Christian Christensen, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, William Uricchio and 14 more

“Little did I know that I was getting involved with WikiLeaks at the time of the biggest leaks in human history.” — Birgitta Jónsdóttir

Within a relatively short period of time, WikiLeaks became the best-known whistle-blowing organization in the world. Due in large part to the release of massive quantities of classified data on the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the notoriety of its founder, Julian Assange, and the trial and imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks has been the subject of widespread attention and debate.

In this collection, influential and innovative scholars from a wide variety of research backgrounds speculate about why and how WikiLeaks does (or does not) matter. These of essays demonstrate that WikiLeaks and their activities are relevant to more areas of academic study than have been addressed to date. Also, in a rare interview, editor Christian Christensen asks Birgitta Jonsdittir about her astonishing activity with WikiLeaks and the important role she played in the making of the Collateral Murder video.

The authors are rigorous in their arguments, but also offer opinions and even speculation about WikiLeaks in relation to a range of areas of study. Readers of the essays in WikiLeaks. From Popular Culture to Political Economy will appreciate that the contributors have managed to be concrete and precise in their thinking, but also provocative and sharp in their argumentation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: USC Annenberg Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625176349

Christian Christensen

Christian Christensen is a Professor of Journalism Studies at Stockholm University. His work focuses on the relationship between technology, journalism and political power.

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Authors

WikiLeaks:

From Popular Culture to

Political Economy

Introduction

CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN

Stockholm University, Sweden

Within a relatively short period of time, WikiLeaks became the best-known whistle-blowing organization in the world. Due in part to the release of massive quantities of classified data on the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the notoriety of its founder, Julian Assange, and the trial and imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks has been the subject of widespread attention and debate. The evolution of WikiLeaks since its foundation in 2006 can be seen in three distinct phases: (1) as an alternative to the mainstream media (from 2006–2009); (2) as adapting to the mainstream via collaboration (2009–2011), and (3), as abstaining from and/or attacking the mainstream (2011-present) (Christensen, 2015). While the events from the latter two stages are the most well-known—primarily the release of the Collateral Murder video, the Iraq and Afghanistan war documents, and the diplomatic cables (WikiLeaks, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2010d)—the material leaked by WikiLeaks during their early years was also impressive. Between 2008–2010, for example, WikiLeaks released documents showing potential money laundering by the major Swiss bank Julius Baer (WikiLeaks, 2008a), potential policy-making corruption within of the World Health Organization (WikiLeaks, 2008b), illegal dumping of toxic waste off of the Ivory Coast (WikiLeaks, 2009a), membership lists of the far-right British National Party (WikiLeaks 2009b), and arm-twisting by the U.S. government during the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference (Carrington, 2010).

Despite their early work, it was the leaked material that came from Chelsea Manning that threw WikiLeaks into the international spotlight, and, thus, made the organization a topic of scholarly interest. To date, the most in-depth single work on WikiLeaks has come from Brevini, Hintz, and McCurdy (2013), but a number of other scholars have investigated the relationship between the organization and, for example, journalism (e.g., Coddington, 2012; Handley & Rutigliano, 2012; Lynch, 2010, 2013; McNair, 2012; Tambini, 2013), law (e.g., Benkler, 2012; Cannon 2013; Davidson 2011; Fenster 2012; Peters 2011; Rothe & Steinmetz 2013; Wells 2012), and resistance and activism (e.g., Cammaerts, 2013; Lindgren & Lundström, 2011; Zajácz, 2013). The idea behind this collection of essays about WikiLeaks was influenced by the fact that WikiLeaks, their activities, and the sociopolitical incrustations around the organization resonate in so many areas within media studies and related disciplines—more, I would argue, than have been addressed to date. Thus, when I began to approach authors regarding potential contributions to this collection, I was interested in asking influential and innovative scholars from a wide variety of research backgrounds.

In addition to widening the scope of scholarly discussion on WikiLeaks, two more observations motivated my putting this special section together. First, scholarship and writing addressing topical, technology-related material can, unfortunately, lose resonance in a relatively short period of time. This is not so much a critique of the modus operandi of academic publishing and its output (which requires more time and review than popular publications) as it is an observation about the rapidly changing research environment within which we work. With this in mind, I wanted contributors to consider WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks-related issues within the big picture of media studies: to speculate about the impact, relevance, and/or importance of the organization over the long-term. The goal was to discuss the particularities of the WikiLeaks phenomenon, of course, but also to link those particularities to broader issues of intellectual inquiry. The (admittedly ambitious) idea was to produce a series of essays that would maintain salience over time and not just act as a source of new information about WikiLeaks that would quickly date. Second, WikiLeaks is a provocative topic. When I first considered putting together this collection, I realized that a fruitful format for discussing WikiLeaks might be to invite scholars to submit their ideas in essay form and to encourage them to speculate about why WikiLeaks does (or does not) matter. I wanted them to be rigorous in their arguments, but also to proffer opinions and even speculation about WikiLeaks in relation to our academic field. I hope as readers look through the essays in this collection they will notice that the contributors have managed to be concrete and precise in their thinking, but also provocative and sharp in their argumentation.

With these issues in mind, this special section on WikiLeaks begins with an interview by Christian Christensen with the Icelandic MP, activist, and former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jónsdóttir (WikiLeaks, Transparency, and Privacy: A Discussion with Birgitta Jonsdottir). As a former volunteer and key member of the group that worked on significant portions of the material obtained from Chelsea Manning, Jónsdóttir is in a unique position to discuss the work of the organization, the impact it has had on her life, and the relationship between transparency and politics.

The interview with Jónsdóttir is followed by 14 essays in three general thematic areas: WikiLeaks in relation to storytelling and journalism; WikiLeaks and information policy, surveillance, and information storage/archiving; and WikiLeaks and political activism, freedom of speech, and the political economy of media. The first section, titled Narrative and Truth, contains essays by William Uricchio (True Confessions: WikiLeaks, Contested Truths, and Narrative Containment), Toby Miller (WikiLeaks, the State, and Middle-Aged Media), Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Is WikiLeaks Challenging the Paradigm of Journalism? Boundary Work and Beyond), and Christian Christensen ("WikiLeaks and the Afterlife of Collateral Murder").

The second section, Information and Surveillance, features essays by Sandra Braman (We Are Bradley Manning: Information Policy, the Legal Subject, and the WikiLeaks Complex"), Mark Andrejevic (WikiLeaks, Surveillance, and Transparency), Leah A. Lievrouw (WikiLeaks and the Shifting Terrain of Knowledge Authority), Axel Bruns (WikiLeaks: The Napster of Secrets), Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey (Liquid Information Leaks), and Pelle Snickars (Himalaya of Data).

The final section, Activism, Law and Political Economy, contains pieces by Lisa Lynch (‘Oh, WikiLeaks, I would so love to RT you.’ WikiLeaks, Twitter, and Information Activism), Angela Daly (The Privatization of the Internet, WikiLeaks, and Free Expression), Athina Karatzogianni and Andy Robinson (Digital Prometheus: WikiLeaks, the State-Network Dichotomy, and the Antinomies of Academic Reason), and Christian Fuchs (WikiLeaks and the Critique of the Political Economy).

References

Benkler, Y. (2012). A free irresponsible press: WikiLeaks and the battle over the soul of the networked fourth estate. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 47(1), 311–397.

Brevini, B., Hintz, A., & McCurdy, P. (Eds.). (2013). Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the future of communications, journalism and society. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cammaerts, B. (2013). Networked resistance: The case of WikiLeaks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18(4), 420–436.

Cannon, S. C. (2013). Terrorizing WikiLeaks: Why the embargo against WikiLeaks will fail. Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, 11, 305–325.

Carrington, D. (2010, December 3). U.S. goes to basics over Copenhagen Accord tactics. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/dec/03/us-basics-copenhagen-accord-tactics?guni=Article:in%20body%20link

Christensen, C. (2015, in press). WikiLeaks and indirect media reform. In D. Freedman, J. Obar, C. Martens, & R. McChesney (Eds.), Strategies for media reform: International perspectives. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Coddington, M. (2012). Defending a paradigm by patrolling a boundary: Two global newspapers’ approach to WikiLeaks. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 89(3), 377–396.

Davidson, S. (2011). Leaks, leakers, and journalists: Adding historical context to the age of WikiLeaks. Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal, 34, 27–91.

Fenster, M. (2012). Disclosure’s effects: WikiLeaks and transparency. Iowa Law Review, 97(3), 753–807.

Handley, R. L., & Rutigliano, L. (2012). Journalistic field wars: Defending and attacking the national narrative in a diversifying journalistic field. Media, Culture & Society, 34(6), 744–760.

Lindgren, S., & Lundström, R. (2011). Pirate culture and hacktivist mobilization: The cultural and social protocols of WikiLeaks on Twitter. New Media & Society, 13(6), 999–1018.

Lynch, L. (2010). We’re going to crack the world open: WikiLeaks and the future of investigative reporting. Journalism Practice, 4(3), 309–318.

Lynch, L. (2013). WikiLeaks after megaleaks: The organization’s impact on journalism and journalism studies. Digital Journalism, 1(3), 314–334.

McNair, B. (2012). WikiLeaks, journalism and the consequences of chaos. Media International Australia, 144, 77–86

Peters, J. (2011). WikiLeaks would not qualify to claim federal reporter’s privilege in any form. Federal Communications Law Journal, 63, 667–696.

Rothe, D. L., & Steinmetz, K. F. (2013). The case of Bradley Manning: State victimization, realpolitik and WikiLeaks. Contemporary Justice Review, 16(2), 280–292.

Tambini, D. (2013). Responsible journalism? WikiLeaks, the diplomatic cables and freedom of expression in a UK context. Policy & Internet, 5(3), 270–288.

Wells, C. E. (2012). Contextualizing disclosure’s effects: WikiLeaks, balancing, and the First Amendment. Yale Law Journal, 1448, 1479–1483.

WikiLeaks. (2008a, March 1). Bank Julius Baer: The Baer essentials part 1. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Bank_Julius_Baer#Swiss_bank_clients_exposed_by_Cayman_leak

WikiLeaks. (2008b, August 14). World Health Organization avian flu draft 2008. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_Avian_Flu_draft_2008

WikiLeaks. (2009a, September 14). Minton report: Trafigura toxic dumping along the Ivory Coast broke EU regulations, September 14, 2006. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Minton_report:_Trafigura_toxic_dumping_along_the_Ivory_Coast_broke_EU_regulations,_14_Sep_2006

WikiLeaks. (2009b, October 20). British National Party membership list and other information, 15 Apr 2009. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/wiki/British_National_Party_membership_list_and_other_information,_15_Apr_2009

WikiLeaks. (2010a, April 5). Collateral murder. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Collateral_Murder,_5_Apr_2010

WikiLeaks. (2010b, July 25). Kabul war diary. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://www.wikileaks.org/afg

WikiLeaks. (2010c, October 22). Baghdad war diary. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://www.wikileaks.org/irq/

WikiLeaks. (2010d, November 28). Secret U.S. embassy cables. WikiLeaks. Retrieved from https://www.wikileaks.org/cablegate.html

Zajácz, R. (2013). WikiLeaks and the problem of anonymity: A network control perspective. Media, Culture & Society, 35(4), 489–505.

PART I

NARRATIVE AND TRUTH

WikiLeaks, Transparency, and Privacy:

A Discussion with Birgitta Jónsdóttir

CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN

Stockholm University, Sweden

BIRGITTA JÓNSDÓTTIR

International Modern Media Institute, Iceland

Birgitta Jónsdóttir is currently a member of the Icelandic Parliament, where she represents the Pirate Party. Jónsdóttir was an early WikiLeaks volunteer and was one of the key members of the team in Iceland that put together the famous Collateral Murder video. In this wide-ranging discussion with Christian Christensen, Jónsdóttir talks about her work with WikiLeaks, politics, and her ideas about technology, transparency, and privacy. She also discusses how she has been placed under surveillance because of her work with WikiLeaks and other organizations.

Christian Christensen:

What led you to work with WikiLeaks?

Birgitta Jónsdóttir:

I come from various different backgrounds. I’m primarily a poet, and if you’re a poet in Iceland, you have to do all sorts of other stuff. You can’t live off it, so I have worked as a jack-of-all-trades but also always been an activist and thus organized all sorts of different events, political or creative or sometimes both. I organized Poets Against the War and Artists Against the War right before the Iraq invasion. I got into Web development in 1995. I was the second Icelandic woman to wander into that sort of work. I don’t have any formal education; I’m self-educated in everything because I think that I have some kind of ADD or something. I am only inspired to learn what I need, and that’s how I learned how to code: I learned to code exactly what I needed, and was very good at that. So, I became an award-winning Web developer in Iceland in the early days, and I even organized the first live broadcast on the Internet from Iceland in 1996. And, since I was working with all sorts of people that were taking the first steps, were innovative, I felt it was very important to create a bridge between creative thinking and technology. I got into the loop of the innovators of the Internet that were making the Internet accessible for ordinary people. And then, I have always been an activist, and because of that I got very heavily involved in the protest movement that popped up after the [financial] crisis in Iceland, and somehow that led into two very important ideas:

One was that we needed a new constitution that was written by and for the people of Iceland, and the other was that we needed to create a bridge between the public and places of power, and in order to do that we needed to create a political hit-and-run movement that was called the Civic Movement. By some freak accident I ended up in the Icelandic Parliament for the Civic Movement, and, because I was the only geek in the parliament, I was invited very shortly after I became a member to speak at an event by the Digital Freedom Society in Iceland. At the same event, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg were speaking. They had built their speech on an idea, which, I don’t know if Julian had already discussed with John Perry Barlow or not, but Barlow was a year earlier, the first of December 2008, talking at the same conference about Switzerland of Bits and that Iceland could resurrect from this collapse as a transparency haven. And so they talked about it, and it had been advanced by some people in Iceland as well, and I guess it was just perfect timing. I don’t remember if I was speaking before or after them, but I approached Julian after it and we had a little bit of discussion, and the following evening there was a grassroots meeting where we got a deeper introduction into where WikiLeaks was going, and there was also somebody from Creative Commons there, and I just said to Assange after the meeting, Well . . . why don’t we just do this? And that’s how my collaboration with WikiLeaks started, and that was primarily from a legal perspective. To go and look if it would be possible to create a safe haven for freedom of information, expression, and speech, which later became the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative [IMMI].

This is like in December 2009. Little did I know that I was getting involved with WikiLeaks at the time of the biggest leaks in human history. And so, it sort of happened that in this work around IMMI they trusted me with the stuff that was coming in, and we decided to do an experiment on the cables. The first cables were an experiment from the first cables in Iceland. And so I assisted with that, and basically assisted with connecting them with journalists and volunteers. And then, with the Collateral Murder video, when I saw that, I really just felt that I should help with that, and I became sort of one of the prime volunteers in that project. I would do it again anytime. So, we were both working on these really intensive leaks and then, at some stage, when Julian was stuck in Australia, I offered to act as a WikiLeaks spokesperson. But I would have also done that at any time, because I felt at the time, when all of this was happening, that WikiLeaks, the service it was rendering, was one of the most important ones in the wake of these global financial crises and all these wars that were being waged in relation to them. These were the big resource wars, and we will be seeing may more, and I wanted to do anything I could to prevent more wars from happening.

Christian Christensen:

When you made the Collateral Murder video, did you have a range of material that you could have chosen from, or did this particular piece just jump out as the most obvious?

Birgitta Jónsdóttir:

This was a really long video. The second part, which we also produced but not in so much detail, was released on the same platform. It’s just as intense, but it doesn’t involve [the killing of] journalists; it involves obvious killings of pedestrians walking outside a building, which was also a building where ordinary citizens were living which was bombed to kingdom come. What we did was that we went into really intense research work, trying to figure out who were the people in this video, and it was an incredibly long process—much longer than most people realize—both trying to figure out exactly what is happening, who are the people behind it, who are the people being killed, and why. Why is this happening? So, we collaborated with the Icelandic state broadcaster, RÚV, to send a journalist to Iraq in order to do some investigative journalism for us. That journalist was Kristinn Hrafnsson. He and Ingi Hrafn Ingason, a cameraman, went to New Baghdad to try and find the relatives of the deceased Reuters staff and the wife of the driver of the van and, of course, the children in the van. So it was very intense; it was very dangerous to do in Iraq because elections were happening and [it was] not easy to obtain a visa into the country. My many tasks included doing research and writing with Julian the texts that would then be used to explain the different scenarios in the video. But the most intense part was to pull out the stills that we would later use to publish on the website so that journalists wouldn’t have to waste time doing that. It was a part of a massive impact plan. We wanted this spread really quickly, in all possible global media, because we felt that it was an important piece of whistle-blowing and a very significant way of seeing what is happening in Iraq, every day. This wasn’t just a single incident. This was happening every day in the name of very many nations, including Iceland, because we were members of the Coalition of the Willing.

Christian Christensen:

I wrote a piece about Collateral Murder, and one of things that I argued in that piece was that Collateral Murder had a particular impact precisely because it was visual . . .

Birgitta Jónsdóttir:

Yes . . .

Christian Christensen:

. . . a lot of WikiLeaks material is highly detailed and textual—it requires a certain amount of skill and understanding about diplomatic language, about military language—but Collateral Murder is a very raw, emotional piece of work. And I’m just wondering, as someone who worked on the piece and has looked at what has happened to it over the last five years, what do you think is the longer-term legacy of that video?

Birgitta Jónsdóttir:

This is the beauty of it. As hard as it is to watch it—if I watch it in its entirety I still weep—there is just something about it. I mean, I’ve seen many, many horrible videos from Syria and so forth, but just the way it is . . . there is just something about it that is such a huge wake-up call about the detachment in these particular detached war zones where the soldiers are either in a drone center in the States, killing civilians, or are in this computer-game scenario where they are completely detached from the human tragedy of what they are doing. So, just about everything about the video has a huge impact. And young people can relate to it, which is quite important. I have seen this video, parts from it, in so many different scenarios. It’s impossible to make an assessment on how much impact it already had. I have heard that bits of it were used in The Wall by Roger Waters. I was at a Massive Attack gig a couple of days ago, and I could see that they had panels with the visuals behind them, and I could see the lingo that they had in one really political piece that was driven by the lingo in the Collateral Murder video. It was the same language. So, it has had a really profound, deep impact, and what I want to see—and that’s why I went specifically to the States on the third anniversary of the video—I really wanted everyone to project it, in a joint effort, all over the United States. In every state, there would be some form of projection from the video, because too few people in the States have seen it. And now that we are talking about yet another war in Iraq, it has never been more relevant that people actually sit down and watch it, and allow themselves to feel what any person that’s not a psychopath would feel when they watch this.

Christian Christensen:

And the consequences for you personally, having worked for WikiLeaks? We know about the Department of Justice request in terms of your Twitter data. I was wondering if you could talk a little about what working for WikiLeaks has meant for you, both as a politician in Iceland and as an international citizen.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir:

Yes, well, you know, what it meant was that just after the video and the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs and the files from Guantanamo Bay were released—and, of course, when the diplomatic cables came as well—there was a frenzy in the States. I don’t think the authorities there had any idea how to deal with what was happening. So, they went completely overboard, and we were classified as terrorists. And anybody that knows anything about the United States knows that that is a very dangerous classification. And it wasn’t like classification by lower-level administrators: It was a classification by some of the most powerful people in the United States. Saying it in public. People saying that Julian Assange should be killed, and anyone that worked for the organization was a target. And then there were all of these targeted invasions into our lives. And so, when Stratfor was hired to character-assassinate people in WikiLeaks, of course Julian Assange was the prime target, but all of us were targets. And people tend to forget that. The Twitter case became apparent when I got an e-mail from Twitter saying that they had managed to take to court and unseal the secret document from the DOJ [Department of Justice], where the U.S. government demanded to be handed over all of my personal data, and then I’m talking about metadata, primarily, and messages. To them. Without my knowledge. Within three days. Twitter suggested in the e-mail to me that I would contact lawyers, either from EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] or ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] in order to protect my rights. I contacted Cindy Coen from the EFF, and she became my prime lawyer alongside Aden Fine from the ACLU, pro bono, and we decided that we should take this right-for-privacy fight to court. I knew I would lose. [Laughs.] I knew that I would lose on every level, and that’s why we didn’t take it to the final level. The reason I took it to court was to raise awareness about how far the DOJ were willing to reach into our privacy.

It is worth being aware that, in my case, there are two very significant milestones. The first milestone is in the first ruling, where the judge basically ruled that that no individual—not you, me, or anybody else—has the right to look after our own backs when it comes to our private data. We have to trust Google and other social media companies to look after our backs. It is clear that they are not capable of doing that because there are so many requests, and secondly the pressure is so great and there are all these different ways of getting our most sacred private information, information that is just as important to be able to keep private as it is in the offline world. We have to make ourselves aware of the reality that there is absolutely no difference whatsoever, even if it is easier to access it online. The other important information that I became aware of through the U.S. court battle was that there are also three different other companies that actually did hand over my data without a court ruling. Without my knowledge. So, they probably got a similar letter like Twitter, because it is obvious in the subpoena to Twitter that it’s a standard letter, because they are requesting to get stuff from Twitter that Twitter doesn’t hold, like credit card information. Nobody pays for anything on Twitter. So that’s probably Facebook data, or Amazon data, or something that they want. When the DOJ are willing to invade the privacy to such an extent of