Manning, who has been in U.S. custody for more than two years, is the government source who allegedly provided WikiLeaks with the “Collateral Murder” video of a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq, as well as tens of thousands of classified government cables, which the organization released in a massive document dump in late 2010. A number of newspapers and other mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times and The Guardian, also printed some of the cables and wrote stories on them as part of a partnership arrangement with WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks is a media entity in every way that matters

As Glenn Greenwald points out in a post at The Guardian, the military prosecutor in Manning’s trial has provided one of the best justifications for seeing WikiLeaks as a media entity, and therefore deserving of the same protections as a newspaper. In court on Thursday, Captain Angel Overgaard was asked whether Manning would be on trial if he had delivered the same classified information to the New York Times, and the prosecutor said simply: “Yes ma’am.” In other words, for the purposes of the government, WikiLeaks and the NYT are interchangeable. As Greenwald describes it:

“[The government's claim against Manning] applies to virtually every leak of classified information to any media organization, thus transforming standard whistle-blowing into the equivalent of treason.”

The conventional wisdom for some time has been that WikiLeaks was simply an intermediary — like the brown envelope that leaked documents come in, or the parking garage that Watergate mole Deep Throat used — and that newspapers and other media have performed the actual journalistic work by filtering through the cables, verifying facts, etc. During a discussion about the media and WikiLeaks in 2010, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said of founder Julian Assange: “I don’t regard him as a kindred spirit — he’s not the kind of journalist I am.”

Last summer, however, in an email interview with me after I wrote a blog post arguing that WikiLeaks should be thought of as a media entity, Keller admitted that both Assange and the organization deserve the support of all journalists — for the simple reason that an attack on WikiLeaks is effectively an attack on free speech and the free press as a whole (although Keller still didn’t want to call Assange a journalist). As the former NYT editor put it:

“I would regard an attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks’ publication of these documents as an attack on all of us, and I believe the mainstream media should come to his defense. You don’t have to embrace Julian Assange as a kindred spirit to believe that what he did in publishing those cables falls under the protection of the First Amendment.”

The media could be the next target

The risk isn’t just that the government will apply the same tactics or rationale to other leakers that it has to Bradley Manning, even if they leak documents to the New York Times — the real risk is that seeing the NYT and other outlets as equivalent to WikiLeaks will encourage the government to try and prosecute them as well, just as the State Department is trying to pursue Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for what it believes to be their acts of espionage.

This is more than just idle speculation: the blog post Bill Keller was responding to when he emailed me was about a discussion that took place in Congress, in which several legislators asked legal experts who were giving testimony to the House judiciary subcommittee whether there was a legal rationale for prosecuting media outlets like the New York Times under the Espionage Act for publishing classified information the way WikiLeaks did.

This may be far-fetched, but identifying the New York Times and WikiLeaks as equivalent is a clear step in that direction. If Manning providing documents to the former counts as treason, because this is defined as “aiding and abetting the enemy,” then how is a someone providing data to the New York Times any different? Or for that matter, a senior member of the national security establishment giving documents to Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward, as Greenwald notes in his piece?

The justification for supporting WikiLeaks’ rights as a journalistic entity seems clear: as Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

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To some extent, WikiLeaks has always been as much myth as substance, and possibly even more so. The idea of a secretive group of information outlaws with servers located in Iceland or deep inside a Swedish mountain, especially a group headed by a white-haired fellow right out of a spy novel, always seemed almost too good to be true. And anyone who has gotten close to the organization, from Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir — who helped edit the infamous Collateral Murder video showing a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq — to former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, has found that the reality lacks a certain something when compared to the myth.

The spotlight on Assange blinds us to the real issues

As Glenn Greenwald noted in a post at The Guardian this week, much of what has been written about WikiLeaks over the past year has focused exclusively on Assange and the rape charges that Sweden is expected to level against him if and when he is ever handed over to that country. There has been little or no coverage — at least from the mainstream media — about the effects of the ongoing financial blockade of WikiLeaks that was instituted last year by PayPal and Visa and MasterCard (which the organization is trying to get around by using the peer-to-peer money system known as Bitcoin) or who might be behind the recent denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeaks that seem to have been orchestrated by U.S.-based sources. Why? Greenwald has a theory:

“There are several obvious reasons why Assange provokes such unhinged media contempt. The most obvious among them is competition: the resentment generated by watching someone outside their profession generate more critical scoops in a year than all other media outlets combined.”

Whatever the reason, with Assange and his legal and personal problems hogging the spotlight, it’s easy to lose sight of what WikiLeaks has accomplished, whether because of or in spite of Assange’s leadership (or possibly both). Whatever you think of the U.S. government or the U.S. military, the Collateral Murder video was a groundbreaking moment in coverage of the country’s activities in Iraq and by extension the rest of the Middle East, and the release of hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables was also a watershed event, even if the tangible effects of that document dump are difficult to quantify in political terms.

Would any of that information have come to light without WikiLeaks? Perhaps. And it’s important to remember that WikiLeaks didn’t come up with all of those documents on its own — they were delivered to it by the original leaker, who may or may not be former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, the man the government has been holding in a military prison for more than two years without a trial on accusations of espionage.

A former colleague of mine, the Globe and Mail’s European correspondent Doug Saunders, has argued that WikiLeaks was no more than a virtual “brown envelope” for the data that Manning (or whoever it was) came up with, a simple mechanism for distributing the leaks, in the same way that Deep Throat handed over documents to the Washington Post‘s Watergate team in a parking garage. In other words, there shouldn’t be any more attention paid to WikiLeaks than there was to the U.S. postal system or to parking garages. But is that true, or does WikiLeaks represent a significant shift in the global flow of information?

We need a stateless news organization, however flawed

I think it’s the latter. It’s true that WikiLeaks has used publications like the New York Times and The Guardian and Die Zeit to help it sift through and publicize the information that has come out of the leaks it acquired — but that was as much about marketing as anything else. The reality is that WikiLeaks is a publisher, and a radically new variation on the species: one that has no state affiliation, either express or implied, as journalism professor Jay Rosen suggested when he called it the world’s first “stateless news organization.” In a world where even the New York Times fails to discharge its duty properly during events like the coverage of the Iraq war, such an entity is more important than ever.

WikiLeaks has also spawned a kind of mini-explosion of imitators, including leak dumps that are devoted to environmental data, or information about the corrupt political system in the Balkans, or about dozens of other topics. As a recent piece at Radio Free Europe pointed out, many of these have either failed or are in a state of disrepair for a variety of reasons (not least of which is the fact that running an anonymous document archive that can’t be traced or hacked into is exceedingly difficult), and the most famous of all — OpenLeaks, which was set up by former WikiLeaks insider Daniel Domscheit-Berg — is still mostly nonfunctional.

As flawed as they might be, however, they continue to exist. And the example set by WikiLeaks can be seen even in smaller incidents, like the recent “document dump” that Gawker provided of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s financial records. While there may be no smoking gun in those files, just the fact that they have been made public has changed the game to some extent, and will likely encourage more of the same.

It’s worth noting that even those who have had a falling out with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks, including both Jonsdottir and the NYT’s Keller, have repeatedly said that the organization and its mercurial founder need to be supported, in the interests of freedom of speech. Keller said in an email to me recently that whatever we may think of Assange or his organization, it is a journalistic outlet or entity just as the New York Times or any other newspaper is — and we should be just as protective of its right to free speech and a free press.

That is the true legacy of WikiLeaks: flawed or not, mythical or substantive, it is an engine of free speech and free information, and as such it is worth defending, whatever we might think of its leader.

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Take Britain’s royal family, who contacted the editors of the UK’s newspapers after TMZ published a series of photographs of the man third in line to the throne cavorting, naked, with young women in Las Vegas. Don’t print those photos, they asked: it’d be an invasion of Harry’s privacy.

Whether or not you believe that royals deserve such privacy, or whether there was public interest in exposing his exposure, the reality was that on a practical level it seemed like a ludicrous request. The images had already been seen by millions online, through social networks and on the web — in Britain as well as around the world.

And yet, incredibly, the request worked … at least for a while.

It took an entire day for Rupert Murdoch’s arch-tabloid Sun to break the silence, and by the time it did, it was forced to admit the absurdity of its position.

“Heir it is!” punned the headline. “Pics of naked Harry you’ve already seen on the internet.”

Just think about that for a second. What an astonishing admission of its own irrelevance for a newspaper to make.

And yet we’re seeing this sort of situation come up again and again in different ways as the world of secrets rubs up against the era of democratized distribution and radical transparency.

Streisand versus the super-injunction

Most of the time the friction is when one group — one with a secret of some sort to protect — misunderstands the unruly way information can behave online: The Streisand Effect famously describes the way that the attempt to keep something quiet, actually ends up amplifying it for the internet.

There are countless examples of this — some of them very important, others less so. In 2009, The Guardian was not only barred by the British courts from publishing a story about the Dutch firm Trafigura dumping toxic waste in Africa, it was banned from writing about the injunction. But things fall apart: the details of the super-injunction hit the web, and Trafigura’s attempt to hide its activities was not just over — it was bigger news than ever. It’s the cover-up, after all, that kills you.

Trafigura was a prime example of what the media, and groups like the royal family, still need to understand: that the internet’s great magic trick is to make mass distribution possible, while simultaneously making control impossible.

It’s a pattern that is being repeated over and over.

Forget what you think of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange: the organization’s publication of secret State Department memos changed the game for the way information moves. The U.S. government knew that publication was coming, but it also knew that it was almost impossible to prevent once it had hit the public sphere.

Just look at Gawker’s audacious dump of 950 pages of documents detailing Mitt Romney’s financial affairs. Many will wring their hands over the ethics of such a move. Should it be public? Should it be private? Was it right for Gawker’s boss Nick Denton (another trouble-making Brit) to publish?

Right now those arguments don’t matter: the fact is that data is out there and it can’t go back. Whether it’s right or wrong, the barriers have been broken down.

What happened with Prince Harry and the British press was not quite the Streisand Effect, because the photos weren’t a secret, even in litigious, furtive Britain. But it is a form of radical transparency — and not just in the way it exposed Harry’s backside to the planet.

Harry and his henchmen should realize that we are now way beyond Stewart Brand’s famous dictum that “information wants to be free”. We now live in a world where information struggles to be anything else: if it can be digitized, it can be distributed… and if it can be distributed, then nobody — not even the Queen of England — can control it.

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When WikiLeaks made its first big media appearance by publishing tens of thousands of top-secret diplomatic cables in 2010, we argued the group headed by controversial front man Julian Assange was a media entity, albeit an unusual one. The broader implications of this status extend far beyond the question of whether we support the organization or its motives: As a blog post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, threats aimed at WikiLeaks are by implication also threats to any other media outlet that dares to publish government information. And some members of Congress say they want to make this connection explicit by changing laws so that journalists can also be sanctioned.

In his post Trevor Timm notes that signs have been accumulating for some time now that members of the government are looking for ways to go after journalists who publish official secrets. During a recent hearing of a House Judiciary subcommittee, several members of Congress questioned legal experts about whether existing laws such as the Espionage Act could be used to target journalists who published classified information. As Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) put it to the committee:

Put them in front of the grand jury. You either answer the question or you’re going to be held in contempt and go to jail, which is what I thought all reporters aspire to do anyway.

Targeting not just leakers, but publishers

According to the legal scholars who attended the hearing, going after a journalist or a media entity such as the New York Times would be difficult because of the First Amendment and protection for freedom of the press — but at least one commenter said he believed that under certain circumstances, journalists could be prosecuted for publishing government secrets, provided it could be shown they knew the consequences of their actions would affect national security. Said Kenneth Wainstein:

If someone acting with impunity and knowledge of the consequences goes ahead and publishes it, that is something that I think would be worthy of prosecution and punishment.

And this is more than just some idle speculation by hawkish members of the judiciary subcommittee: As Timm points out in his EFF post, a senior Justice Department official told the Washingtonian recently that journalists who speak to government sources about top-secret information should be careful, because doing so could “put them at risk of prosecution.” In the wake of the diplomatic-cable incident, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) also proposed something called the SHIELD law, which would make it a crime for anyone to publish classified information that might be “contrary to the national interest,” legislation he continues to promote.

When WikiLeaks was initially targeted by the Justice Department for investigation under the Espionage Act, there was very little criticism of the move, either from traditional media outlets like the New York Times (which has had a somewhat fractious relationship with WikiLeaks in the past) or from free-press advocates. It was as though no one wanted to admit that the same forces that were going after WikiLeaks for revealing government data could just as easily be directed at mainstream journalists. Now those particular chickens appear to be coming home to roost.

A threat to WikiLeaks is a threat to a free press

Obviously, there are differences between what the New York Times does and what WikiLeaks does, as I discussed in an earlier post on this topic: The NYT is a major media operation, with thousands of trained journalists around the globe and an established track record of factual reporting, and WikiLeaks is a relatively new and poorly understood agency run by a controversial figure and backed by donations (donations that were shut down when payment-processing firms such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to deal with WikiLeaks).

That said, however, the fundamental purpose of both organizations is very similar: to acquire and publish important information about important or newsworthy global events, information that frequently comes from sources inside the government leaking classified intelligence. That similarity of purpose is why legendary leaker Daniel Ellsberg said WikiLeaks’ handling of the diplomatic cables was the closest thing he had seen to the Pentagon Papers, and it’s why journalism professor Jay Rosen described the entity as “the world’s first stateless news organization.”

As Timm notes, the kind of legislative attack that Congress and the Justice Department seem to be intent on pursuing is a threat to media entities of all kinds — both traditional forms like the New York Times as well as newer iterations like WikiLeaks. That doesn’t mean mainstream media outlets have to allow Assange to become a member of the National Press Club, but it does mean they should be a lot more concerned about what the investigation of WikiLeaks portends for freedom of speech and a free press.

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It has been some time since WikiLeaks stunned the world with classified video of U.S. military attacks on civilians in Iraq and thousands of secret diplomatic cables — revelations that triggered an all-out attack on founder Julian Assange by the U.S. government, which roped in Amazon and other companies as accomplices. On Sunday, the shadowy organization announced what it called an “extraordinary” new release of information: namely, a cache of several million emails from the security-consulting firm Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting). But the nature of the emails and WikiLeaks’ new partnership with the hacker collective Anonymous raise some pointed questions about the future relevance of the organization.

The rise of WikiLeaks, led by the almost mythical figure of Assange, has been something straight out of a science fiction novel. A global organization made up of hackers and borderline anarchists, aided by freedom-of-information advocates like Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir and activist/hacker Jacob Appelbaum, releases a massive trove of military and governmental documents and video, which it obtains from a courageous whistle-blowing former military intelligence analyst (Bradley Manning, who has now been in prison on espionage charges for more than 18 months).

The military information that WikiLeaks released, including video of U.S. military aircraft killing civilians in Iraq, shocked the nation and the world, but the follow-up to that release was somewhat less of a blockbuster in intelligence terms. The thousands of diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks published — with the help of the New York Times and the Guardian newspaper, among other partners in the mainstream media — drew criticism because some argued they might put U.S. agents or foreign activists at risk, but for the most part, there was little of real and urgent value in most of the cables.

While some of WikiLeaks’ partners published cables that showed U.S. diplomatic sources thought Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi was a loud-mouthed idiot with a penchant for voluptuous blonde nurses, this was hardly a revelation for most who have followed events in that country. Some of the cables referring to events in the Middle East were cited as a trigger for the uprisings in Tunisia that precipitated the Arab Spring demonstrations in that country, but others argued that those links were a stretch and that the cables were not crucial intelligence information in most cases.

So far, the Stratfor emails seem underwhelming

Now WikiLeaks has millions of emails from Stratfor, a security-consulting firm that works with corporate clients and also has ties to the U.S. government. While it may make the release of these emails seem more interesting, it seems like a stretch to describe Stratfor as being “somewhat akin to a privatized CIA,” as Wired magazine has called it. The company is known to have ties to the U.S. military intelligence establishment, as the release from WikiLeaks makes clear, but there doesn’t seem to be much that qualifies as a smoking gun in the email dump (although WikiLeaks and its media partners are apparently still combing through them).

When it comes to partners, WikiLeaks is no longer working with any leading U.S. or British newspapers as it did earlier — a development that probably isn’t surprising, given the kind of enmity that people like former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller clearly still have for Assange. Instead, the list of partners includes outlets like Al Akhbar in Lebanon, Bivol in Bulgaria and La Nación in Costa Rica. In the U.S., the organization said it is working with the McClatchy newspaper chain and with Rolling Stone magazine. Not exactly a who’s who of mainstream media sources, in other words.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has an interesting new non-media partner in Anonymous, the hacker collective that arose out of the anarchic online community 4chan and has a history of both releasing classified information (including internal documents from the Church of Scientology) and targeting corporations and governments with hack attacks. The two groups clearly share similar goals, and Anonymous has used its massive “denial of service” attacks to bring down websites run by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and others that cut off payments to WikiLeaks after it released classified documents.

Is the partnership with Anonymous a sign WikiLeaks is weakening?

But does moving away from media partners like the New York Times and partnering with a group like Anonymous mean WikiLeaks is gaining strength or losing it? While journalism professor Jay Rosen called the organization the first “stateless media entity,” much of the publicity it gained came through existing outlets like the NYT and the Guardian. Will McClatchy and Rolling Stone, or La Nación and Malaysia Today, serve the same purpose? And the partnership with Anonymous may make sense, but it almost feels like Anonymous is taking the lead role now, as WikiLeaks’ dominance continues to weaken.

Foreign Policy magazine columnist and author Evgeny Morozov has argued for some time that WikiLeaks is disintegrating, thanks in part to the legal issues around Assange (who is still fighting extradition over rape charges in Sweden) but also to what some former collaborators say is the WikiLeaks’ founder’s difficult personality and desire for power. And Anonymous may be on the rise now, but it suffers from different issues, including what appears to be a lack of any organized power structure. That may make it more flexible and difficult to target, but it could also arguably blunt its effectiveness.

Attempts to duplicate WikiLeaks’ success, meanwhile, haven’t really taken off. OpenLeaks, which was started by a former colleague of Assange’s who left the organization, has yet to have much obvious impact, and mainstream media attempts at setting up WikiLeaks-style platforms for leaks at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere also seem to have been largely ineffective. Could it be that WikiLeaks was a unique event produced by the chance combination of Assange and Manning? And if so, is the world better off without WikiLeaks, or did it serve a purpose that others should be trying to fill?

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In a New York Times piece on the weekend, media writer David Carr argues that WikiLeaks is dying — or at least on life support — for a number of reasons, including founder Julian Assange’s court case and a funding crisis that has caused the organization to put its leaking on hold. While the NYT piece makes it seem as though all of this is somehow a natural course of events and nothing to be upset about, the reality is that both Assange and WikiLeaks have been the targets of a sustained attack by the U.S. government and companies like PayPal and Visa. And if the New York Times is less than choked up about WikiLeaks’ demise, it’s because the organization is a competitor that was beating the Times at its own game.

As Carr notes in his piece, WikiLeaks has been under fire almost from the moment it first emerged on the scene last year with leaked information from the U.S. military — including videotaped evidence that civilians were killed during an air assault in Iraq. That was followed by the release of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, which were provided by a whistleblower inside the Army, intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who remains in detention. Ever since that event, WikiLeaks itself has been under attack from the U.S. government, and at the same time Julian Assange has also been the subject of bad press surrounding allegations of sexual assault against two women in Sweden.

WikiLeaks is not dying of natural causes

Assange is now likely to be extradited to Sweden to face those charges, after a British court ruled last week that he could be delivered to the authorities there, and there is still a risk that he could ultimately be extradited to the U.S., which is pursuing a case against him and WikiLeaks for espionage related to the leak of the diplomatic cables. And meanwhile, the entity has been forced to stop its operations because it has run out of money — thanks in large part to a financial blockade that includes PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, which have made it almost impossible for anyone who wants to support the organization to donate to it. As Carr puts it in his piece:

Although stateless and seemingly beyond the reach of the law and its enemies, WikiLeaks was, from the beginning, subject to a number of internal frailties and external vulnerabilities.

By frailties, Carr presumably means the personal quirks of WikiLeaks’ founder, who became the public face of the organization, something that other members of WikiLeaks — such as Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, an early supporter of the project who is one of the targets of the U.S. Justice Department’s espionage case — have criticized, but which undoubtedly got the organization a lot of publicity (both good and bad). And the “external vulnerabilities” must refer to being cut off by payment organizations and having its documents deleted from Amazon’s servers, despite the fact that WikiLeaks has not been charged with any illegal activity.

Although there have been some protests from groups like Anonymous criticizing the payment blockade against WikiLeaks and the U.S. government’s case against the organization, there has been little public outcry, despite the important principles at stake. And as programmer — and visiting scholar at NYU’s journalism school — Dave Winer notes in a post, there has been little or no support for WikiLeaks from traditional media such as the New York Times. In fact, the NYT and former executive editor Bill Keller have done as much to torpedo Assange and WikiLeaks as to support them, despite the fact that the organization is arguably a journalistic entity just like the New York Times itself.

WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity and deserves our protection

That journalistic nature, which led journalism professor Jay Rosen to call WikiLeaks “the first stateless news organization,” is likely a big part of the reason why the NYT and other newspapers have done so little to protest what is happening to the organization — which as Dan Gillmor points out is a restraint on freedom of speech co-ordinated by private companies pressured by the U.S. government, based on allegations that haven’t even made it to court. By becoming the default entity that anyone with secrets looked to for help, WikiLeaks represents a clear threat to the New York Times.

While both the NYT and the Wall Street Journal have set up their own “anonymous drop-box” programs in the hope of luring leakers away from WikiLeaks, there has been little uptake in those services — in part because the terms of use (at least in the case of the WSJ) make it clear that anyone involved will be turned over to the authorities if there is any request from the government. Twitter at least fought for the rights of its users when the Justice Department came with a court order compelling it to release information about people like hacker Jacob Appelbaum and Birgitta Jonsdottir.

As Winer points out, the phenomenon that WikiLeaks created is unlikely to go away even if the organization itself dies. Although alternatives such as OpenLeaks are still in their infancy, the tools exist to replicate what WikiLeaks did, and others will undoubtedly try. But what’s more important is that we have all (including the New York Times) failed to do what Jonsdottir has argued that we should do — namely, support WikiLeaks and its mission of bringing transparency to government despite any misgivings we might have about Assange, because the principles at stake are so important.

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Assange, speaking at a press conference in London on Monday, said a banking blockade had destroyed 95 percent of WikiLeaks’ revenues.

He added that the blockade posed an existential threat to WikiLeaks and if it was not lifted by the new year the organisation would be “simply not able to continue”.

The website, behind the publication of hundreds of thousands of controversial US embassy cables in late 2010 in partnership with newspapers including the Guardian and New York Times (NYSE: NYT), revealed that it was running on cash reserves after “an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade” by the Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union.

WikiLeaks said in a statement: “The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency.

“The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicised US finance companies continues regardless.”

Assange said donations to WikiLeaks were running at €100,000 ($138,560/£86,910) a month in 2010, but had dropped to a monthly figure of €6,000 ($8313.6/£5214.6) to €7,000 ($9699.2/£6083.7) this year.

This had cost the organisation a cumulative €40 ($55.42/£34.76)m to €50 ($69.28/£43.46)m, he claimed, assuming donations had stayed at their 2010 level without the financial blockade.

Assange said WikiLeaks was facing legal cases in Denmark, Iceland, the UK and Australia, as well as an existing action in the EU.

He is also fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden to answer allegations of sexual misconduct.

The Guardian, New York Times, El País, Der Spiegel and Le Monde worked with WikiLeaks in publishing carefully selected and redacted US embassy cables in December, but have since criticised the website’s decision to publish its full archive of 251,000 unredacted documents in early September.

This article originally appeared in The Guardian.

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While the U.S. government tries to determine whether what WikiLeaks and front-man Julian Assange have done qualifies as espionage, media theorists and critics alike continue to debate whether releasing those classified diplomatic cables qualifies as journalism. It’s more than just an academic question — if it is journalism in some sense, then Assange and WikiLeaks should be protected by the First Amendment and freedom of the press. The fact that no one can seem to agree on this question emphasizes just how deeply the media and journalism have been disrupted, to the point where we aren’t even sure what they are any more.

The debate flared up again on the Thursday just before Christmas, with a back-and-forth Twitter discussion involving a number of media critics and journalists, including MIT Technology Review editor and author Jason Pontin, New York University professor Jay Rosen, PhD student Aaron Bady, freelance writer and author Tim Carmody and several other occasional contributors. Pontin seems to have started the debate by saying — in a comment about a piece Bruce Sterling wrote on WikiLeaks and Assange — that the WikiLeaks founder was clearly a hacker, and therefore not a journalist.

Pontin’s point, which he elaborated on in subsequent tweets, seemed to be that because Assange’s primary intent is to destabilize a secretive state or government apparatus through technological means, then what he is doing isn’t journalism. Not everyone was buying this, however. Aaron Bady — who wrote a well-regarded post on Assange and WikiLeaks’ motives — asked why he couldn’t be a hacker and a journalist at the same time, and argued that perhaps society needs to have laws that protect the act of journalism, regardless of who practices it or what they call themselves.

Rosen, meanwhile, was adamant that WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity, period, and journalism prof and author Jeff Jarvis also echoed this point. Tim Carmody argued that the principle of freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment was designed to protect individuals who published pamphlets and handed them out in the street just as much as it was to protect large media entities, and Aaron Bady made a point that I have tried to make as well, which is that it’s difficult to criminalize what WikiLeaks has done without also making a criminal out of the New York Times.

This debate has been going on since before the diplomatic cables were released, ever since Julian Assange first made headlines with leaked video footage of American soliders firing on unarmed civilians in Iraq. At the time, Rosen — who runs an experimental journalism lab at NYU — called WikiLeaks “the first stateless news organization,” and described where he saw it fitting into a new ecosystem of news. Not everyone agreed, however: critics of this idea said that journalism had to have some civic function and/or had to involve journalists analyzing and sorting through the information.

Like Rosen and others, I’ve tried to argue that in the current era, media — a broad term that includes what we think of as journalism — has been dis-aggregated or atomized; in other words, split into its component parts, parts that include what WikiLeaks does. In some cases, these may be things that we didn’t even realize were separate parts of the process to begin with, because they have always been joined together. And in some cases they merge different parts that were previously separate, such as the distinction between a source and a publisher. WikiLeaks, for example, can be seen as both.

And while it is clearly not run by journalists — and to a great extent relies on journalists at the New York Times, The Guardian and other news outlets to do the heavy lifting in terms of analysis of the documents it holds and distributes — I think an argument can be made that WikiLeaks is at least an instrument of journalism. In other words, it is a part of the larger ecosystem of news media that has been developing with the advent of blogs, wikis, Twitter and all the other publishing tools we have now, which Twitter founder Ev Williams I think correctly argued are important ways of getting us closer to the truth.

Among those taking part in the Twitter debate on Thursday was Chris Anderson, a professor of media culture in New York who also writes for the Nieman Journalism Lab, and someone who has tried to clarify what journalism as an ecosystem really means and how we can distinguish between the different parts of this new process. In one post at the Nieman Lab blog, for example, he plotted the new pieces of this ecosystem on a graph with two axes: one going from “institutionalized” to “de-institutionalized” and the other going from “pure commentary” to “fact-gathering.” While WikiLeaks doesn’t appear on Anderson’s graph, it is clearly part of that process.

Regardless of what we think about Julian Assange or WikiLeaks — or any of the other WikiLeaks-style organizations that seem to be emerging — this is the new reality of media. It may be confusing, but we had better start getting used to it.

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As WikiLeaks continues to release classified diplomatic cables, and fights to remain online and solvent, it’s becoming increasingly clear what’s happening has less to do with WikiLeaks itself, and more to do with what seems to be a new form of media emerging: not a news or journalism entity specifically, but a kind of media middleman that exposes secret or undiscovered information, which can then become a source of news. Could WikiLeaks — and similar efforts it appears to be spawning — become a crucial new part of the digital media ecosystem?

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen WikiLeaks attacked by the U.S. government — now apparently considering espionage charges against leader Julian Assange for publishing the cables — and shut down by companies such as PayPal and Amazon (which seems to see no irony in selling a book including excerpts from WikiLeaks cables). Both of those companies have in turn come under attack by Anonymous, a rogue group of hackers who targeted their websites as part of what the group called Operation Payback, although the group appears to be moving away from denial-of-service attacks to less destructive attention-getting strategies.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has been making itself so distributed — by setting up over a thousand mirror sites through which it can publish documents automatically, as well as moving servers to several different hosts — that it seems almost unassailable, even if Assange is found guilty of something. The WikiLeaks founder has said that in addition to the mirror sites, BitTorrent archives of the cables have been provided to 10,000 sources who could continue to publish them even if WikiLeaks was somehow taken offline.

WikiLeaks' leader Julian Assange

It’s not just WikiLeaks any more: A new spin-off group called OpenLeaks, formed in part by a splinter faction from within WikiLeaks, says it’s launching a new service with much the same mandate as its predecessor — to make documents public whether governments and companies want them to be or not — although it plans to be just a distribution point rather than a publisher itself. Another group calling itself BrusselsLeaks is apparently also looking to create the kind of document clearinghouse that WikiLeaks has set up, but it will be focused on information about the European Union.

As political analyst Evgeny Morozov notes in a piece written for the New York Times, and in a summary of that piece on his blog at Foreign Policy magazine, WikiLeaks has come to serve as a kind of middleman for media outlets such as the NYT and The Guardian. Although these entities have investigative teams, they can’t possibly find everything, and there is so much more information out there to comb through. What agencies such as WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks could provide is a single source for such documents, as well as a way of publicizing that these secrets have been revealed, something that WikiLeaks has done very well.

Do newspapers and other media need WikiLeaks? Some would argue that the sources who went to Assange could just as easily have gone to the NYT or The Guardian directly. So why didn’t they? Possibly because they wanted the information to be spread more widely than just one media outlet, or were worried that one newspaper might not report on the cables properly if they were the only ones with that information. In a sense, as my former colleague Doug Saunders — the European bureau chief for Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail — has noted, WikiLeaks is not that different from the brown envelope that the leaker behind the Watergate scandal delivered documents in.

In this era of real-time publishing and the ubiquitous web, however, the power of that brown envelope has been amplified a thousandfold, and its reach is far broader than was ever possible before — and that changes the game entirely.

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The international cat-and-mouse game between WikiLeaks and various governments and corporations continues. In just the past few days, the site has been kicked off Amazon’s cloud-hosting platform and had its domain-name service cancelled by a second company — and even a data visualization project based on the WikiLeaks cables has been shut down. The news raises a number of questions, including: Does the world need a stateless, independent data haven to protect the kind of freedom of information that WikiLeaks represents?

Amazon removed WikiLeaks’ website from its EC2 cloud on Thursday, after Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) — the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — complained about U.S. companies helping to distribute what he called illegal documents. The web company released a statement late on Thursday saying it wasn’t pressured into removing the WikiLeaks data, but did so because the organization breached its terms of service, which require those uploading data to have the rights to publish that information, and to refrain from uploading data that could lead to personal injury (some have argued the cables could jeopardize human-rights workers and U.S. informants).

WikiLeaks moved its site back to another hosting provider — one which apparently uses a server farm deep within a Swedish mountain, similar to the fictional data warehouse in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon. Within hours of making that move, the organization’s website was again taken offline, this time by its DNS provider, EveryDNS.com. According to the company, WikiLeaks’ website was being besieged by hackers using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which risked affecting other customers. (WikiLeaks originally moved its site to Amazon’s servers for the same reason.) After moving its data to a server host in Switzerland, the site was back up again on Friday.

Although both Amazon and EasyDNS EveryDNS had what seemed to be valid reasons for removing support for WikiLeaks, both companies were undoubtedly also painfully aware of the mounting political pressure from the U.S. government — both from Senator Lieberman and others — to disassociate themselves from WikiLeaks or face potential legal action. While many critics accused Amazon of bowing to pressure and failing to uphold freedom of speech, the reality is that private companies are entitled to do whatever they wish in the interests of their business and shareholders (within certain limits), as Derrick pointed out in his recent post.

WikiLeaks' leader Julian Assange

So where does that leave WikiLeaks? Switzerland’s Pirate Party is hosting the site for now, but it could easily decide that it doesn’t want to risk the ire of the U.S., just as France apparently has. The organization has been working with Iceland to develop what it calls an “information haven,” which would be protected by new laws designed to shield whistleblowers, but it’s not clear where that effort stands, or how it has been affected by the latest political uproar. Some have wondered why WikiLeaks hasn’t already turned its data into BitTorrent files, which can be hosted in multiple locations and are therefore virtually impossible to remove.

More than anything, what WikiLeaks needs is a stable place to host its data — and potentially a separate DNS system — that isn’t susceptible to government interference or the kind of pressure Amazon came under for dealing with the site (although Assange said in a Q&A Friday at The Guardian that the most recent data has been distributed to 100,000 people in encrypted form). The pictures of the mountain bunker where WikiLeaks’ data is stored, and the comparisons to Cryptonomicon, reminded a number of observers of an early attempt to create such a data haven: The idea was to store servers in a former military platform in the North Sea known as Sealand — whose owner claims that it’s an independent country — but the effort never got off the ground.

With millions of servers in locations around the world, Google seems like a natural partner for WikiLeaks — and the company has refused in the past to remove controversial content from its sites, despite requests from the government, defending its actions based on the principle of freedom of speech. But even Google likely doesn’t want to take on Homeland Security and face potential prosecution. WikiLeaks may have to roam from hosting country to hosting country, like the 21st century equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the digital oceans forever.

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