The last week has seen probably the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever. It’s being reported in fairly dramatic terms, with the New York Times and BBC talking about the internet getting jammed or slowed down.

So what’s actually going on? Here’s a rundown of some key points:

A what attack?

DDoS attacks, as the “distributed” part suggests, involve large numbers of computers bombarding a target system with traffic, with the idea being to stop that system from functioning. A bunch of South Korean banks and broadcasters got temporarily crippled by such an attack a week ago, for example.

Who got hit this time?

The intended target appears to be Spamhaus, a European organization that maintains a blacklist of ISPs that supposedly host “spam gangs” and refuse to stop serving them as customers. Spamhaus is pretty resilient, as its own network is distributed across many countries, but the attack was still enough to knock its site offline on March 18.

The reason was the attack’s sheer volume. At the time, it looked to be around 75Gbps of traffic — which is a lot — hammering Spamhaus’s servers. Cloudflare, the security firm that Spamhaus called for help, subsequently published a good explainer of what happened:

“The largest source of attack traffic against Spamhaus came from DNS reflection… [This method has] become the source of the largest Layer 3 DDoS attacks we see (sometimes well exceeding 100Gbps). Open DNS resolvers are quickly becoming the scourge of the Internet and the size of these attacks will only continue to rise until all providers make a concerted effort to close them…

“The basic technique of a DNS reflection attack is to send a request for a large DNS zone file with the source IP address spoofed to be the intended victim to a large number of open DNS resolvers. The resolvers then respond to the request, sending the large DNS zone answer to the intended victim. The attackers’ requests themselves are only a fraction of the size of the responses, meaning the attacker can effectively amplify their attack to many times the size of the bandwidth resources they themselves control.”

Whodunnit?

Spamhaus has no shortage of enemies, given its line of business. Spammers are a nasty lot, although there are in fact some serious arguments to be had around the weight carried by blacklists of this kind, and who controls them.

However, all eyes seem to be on CyberBunker, a Dutch host that prides itself on hosting anything except terrorist material and child pornography (Wikileaks was a client). Spamhaus lists CyberBunker (or CB3ROB, as it is also known) as the world’s number-one offender when it comes to hosting spam gangs, and around 18 months ago it blacklisted the host’s ISP, A2B Internet. A2B responded by reporting Spamhaus to the Dutch police as DoS offenders – if you want to delve deeper into that nasty dispute, here are accounts of what happened from CyberBunker, A2B and Spamhaus.

After this latest attack hit, the NYT got hold of one Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who claimed to represent the attackers. Kamphuis claimed CyberBunker was retaliating against Spamhaus in concert with Eastern European and Russian gangs, saying: “Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the internet… They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam.”

Spamhaus itself is reticent about naming CyberBunker as the culprit. I’ve approached CyberBunker for comment, and will add it in if and when I get it.

UPDATE: CyberBunker has replied with a statement that isn’t a denial of involvement in the attack. Also, I would assume the statement contains significant grammatical errors, otherwise CyberBunker is saying it has never been a recipient (rather than sender) of spam. According to spokesman Jordan Robson: “The only thing we would like to say is that we (including our clients) did not, and never have been, sent any spam. We have no further comment.”

What about this “slowing down the internet” stuff?

Remember that 75Gbps number? Well, that was then and this is now. The BBC quoted Spamhaus CEO Steve Linford on Wednesday as saying the attack had peaked at 300Gbps. That would make it the biggest DDoS in history – or at least the biggest publicly disclosed DDoS.

Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey, one of the UK’s premier computer security experts, told me that the attack “seems to be orders of magnitude larger than anything seen before”:

“In some places it’s been mounted, it has had some collateral damage, for example Netflix, although these are transient effects… The thing that got people talking is that it’s a DNS amplification attack. The point is, if you’re targeting something and [the target has] a 10Gbps switch, you only have to throw 11Gbps at it and you’ve pole-axed the system. If it is at 300Gbps, then potentially some of the main infrastructure is being affected, though I’m not sure how much it’s really affecting it.”

Woodward used the analogy of a highway. Such an attack could briefly take out the highway ramps, he said, but the “main backbone of it is unlikely to be affected for any length of time”.

The thing is, in terms of figuring out whether this attack really has slowed down chunks of the internet, there are other factors to consider. For example, in the last week we’ve also seen a yet another submarine cable cut off Egypt, slowing down internet access in that region. Together, these factors could have a cumulative impact.

“I don’t think there’s any immediate effect on the internet, but it is a wake-up call,” Woodward said. “If it was done really seriously in a wider attack, then it could affect [many users]. Trying to take down the whole internet is impractical, but you could start to decapitate sections of it.”

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Ito likened these groups and the challenges they pose to innoculating a young child against illness. If you protect him so stringently against germs to keep him from getting sick, you can bet he will get really sick at some point. But if you let him “eat dirt” and expose him to lots of things he’ll be a healthier child, Ito said during a BBC World Service event held at MIT and broadcast live on Thursday.

Anonymous and Wikileaks are like catching the flu–they hurt us but we learn to be "transparency robust" from them. #whys @joi—
MIT Media Lab (@medialab) March 14, 2013

The specter of groups like Anonymous lurking in the background may also encourage better behavior by people and organizations, Ito added.

These groups make us more “transparency robust” and that’s a good thing, he noted.  The thinking is: If you know someone might be poking around in your business, you’ll probably be better, more ethical, smarter about how you conduct that business in the first place.

This was a good, wide-ranging session with good insights on the maker movement and other topics. I’m sure it will be streamed later today.

Update at 3:45 p.m. PDT: Here’s the BBC stream of the event.

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Why? Because as Benkler points out, the charge for which Manning is being court-martialed could just as easily be applied to someone who leaks similar documents to virtually any media outlet, including the New York Times or the Washington Post. In other words, if the U.S. government has seen fit to go after Manning and WikiLeaks, what is to stop them from pursuing anyone who leaks documents, and any media entity that publishes them?

WikiLeaks is a media entity just like the Times

I’ve argued in the past that WikiLeaks is a media entity, and a fairly crucial one in this day and age, and Benkler clearly agrees. As the Harvard professor (who will likely be testifying at Manning’s trial) describes in his piece:

“Someone in Manning’s shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit — a journalistic ‘Little Engine that Could’ that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times.”

And we don’t have to hypothesize about whether the government would have gone after Manning for leaking documents directly to the New York Times instead of to WikiLeaks: as Benkler notes, the chief prosecutor in the case was asked that exact question by the judge in January and responded “Yes ma’am.” In other words, for the purposes of the government’s case against Manning, there is no appreciable difference between WikiLeaks and the Times, or any other traditional media outlet.

Benkler argues that the government’s behavior constitutes “a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena” — not just because it is trying to penalize a whistleblower, but because the state is arguing that Manning is guilty of “aiding the enemy,” a charge that could put him in prison for life. Benkler also notes that unlike the other charges against Manning, aiding the enemy is something even civilians can be found guilty of.

Isn’t the New York Times aiding the enemy too?

So if handing documents over to a media entity that subsequently publishes them qualifies as “aiding the enemy” in the eyes of the government, then giving them to the New York Times would fit that description just as well as giving them to WikiLeaks. And if providing classified documents to a publisher can qualify, then wouldn’t the entity that actually published them be guilty as well — regardless of whether it’s WikiLeaks or the Times?

The First Amendment would seem to protect the NYT in a case like this, and I’ve argued before that it should protect WikiLeaks as well — an argument that former Times‘ executive editor Bill Keller has said he agrees with. But the U.S. government continues to pursue WikiLeaks for its role in publicizing the documents that Manning leaked, and some U.S. legislators have mused aloud about whether espionage charges could be laid against other media entities like the New York Times as well.

Benkler’s warning shouldn’t be taken lightly: if Manning is guilty of aiding the enemy for simply leaking documents, then anyone who communicates with a newspaper could be guilty of something similar. And if the leaker is guilty, then the publisher could be as well — and that could cause a chilling effect on the media that would change the nature of public journalism forever.

/Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Nata-lia and Flickr user jphilipg

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This information came out during a statement that Manning read aloud in court, so most of the details couldn’t be immediately verified, but the former military intelligence agent said that he called the New York Times to offer them a story based on the documents he had, but his voicemail message was never returned. Manning said that he also spoke to someone at the Washington Post and described what he had, but no one ever followed up.

Manning said he talked to person at WaPo who he did not think took him seriously when he described war logs.

—
Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) February 28, 2013

According to some reports, Manning’s call went to the public editor’s voice mail at the Times, which could explain why no one in the newsroom contacted him — as anyone who has ever worked in a large newsroom knows, crank calls and vaguely conspiratorial reports from would-be tipsters come with the territory, and many don’t result in any action. The part of his story about speaking with someone at the Washington Post directly would seem a little more damning, but he apparently didn’t provide many details to the reporter he spoke to.

Looking forward to the column by the Times public editor criticizing a previous Times public editor for not returning Bradley Manning's call

—
Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) February 28, 2013

Even with all of those caveats, the incident still brings home how valuable it is to have something like WikiLeaks, an entity that Jay Rosen has called “the world’s first stateless news organization.” It’s not that the New York Times or the Washington Post failed to do their jobs as media outlets or journalistic investigators — it’s simply that there was an alternative available where Manning could take the documents that would ensure that they saw the light of day. In the pre-WikiLeaks days, he might never have found a way of publicizing them at all.

What if the NY Times had returned Bradley Manning's call? Would he be in jail now? gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/2013/02/mannin…

—
Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) February 28, 2013

As Jeff Jarvis noted on Twitter, Manning’s confession brings up an even more interesting question, namely: What would have happened if he had gotten through to someone at the Times and they wrote a story, without WikiLeaks ever being involved? Manning might still be on trial for his behavior, but it’s unlikely there would have been the same kind of U.S. government attack on the media entity that published the documents, since the Times is seen as protected in a way that WikiLeaks is not — although it arguably should be.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Rob Kints

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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.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Carolina Georgatou and Charlie Rose and jphilipg

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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.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user New Media Days

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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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In a post on Tuesday entitled “First they came for WikiLeaks, then the New York Times,” we wrote about how there is growing evidence that Congress and the Justice Department may be considering legal sanctions against traditional journalists who publish classified information — in other words, extending the kind of legal attacks they have been making on WikiLeaks to the traditional media such as the New York Times. In an emailed response to that post, former NYT executive editor Bill Keller said he strongly agrees that an attack on WikiLeaks’ right to publish such leaked documents is an implicit attack on the media as a whole, and that the mainstream media should protest any prosecution of the organization as a betrayal of the First Amendment.

In my post, I described how some members of a House Judiciary subcommittee seemed to be looking to experts for legal grounds under which they could charge journalists for publishing leaked classified information. The Department of Justice has also reportedly been warning reporters that if they publish such documents they could face prosecution — in the same way the DoJ is said to be pursuing a case against WikiLeaks and its controversial founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, (despite the fact that the government’s own researchers say using the act to go after journalists instead of leakers is a questionable strategy).

If WikiLeaks is under attack, journalism is under attack

My point was that if WikiLeaks, which I have argued before is a media entity — although one very different from the New York Times — is subject to that kind of prosecution for publishing classified information, then the NYT or any other traditional media outlet is in danger of being prosecuted as well. I also said that most mainstream media companies had been relatively silent on this point until now, but Keller noted in his email that he has repeatedly agreed that an attack on WikiLeaks is an implicit attack on media and journalism. As he put it:

I’ve said repeatedly, in print and in a variety of public forums, that 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.

Keller went on to say that despite the rumblings from Congress that I referred to in my post, the government so far hasn’t made an official move against either Julian Assange or WikiLeaks. If a prosecution under the Espionage Act did in fact occur, Keller said he hoped to see news organizations of all kinds and press-freedom advocacy groups “filing briefs and otherwise objecting.” The NYT’s former executive editor also admitted that the newspaper’s relationship with Assange had been fractious, but said that personal feelings about the WikiLeaks founder shouldn’t prevent media organizations from coming 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.

Even if it isn’t journalism, it deserves protection

In a follow-up email, Keller also noted that he had made similar statements about the necessity of defending Assange and WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents in a New York Times magazine piece excerpted from the introduction to “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy,” a book about the organization’s publication of thousands of diplomatic cables and the NYT’s role in that effort. In the piece, he said:

While I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated… criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country.

As I wrote at the time Keller’s excerpt was published, it seemed as though the former NYT editor was grudgingly coming to admit that what WikiLeaks did was close enough to being journalism that — even if it wasn’t journalism with a capital J, or published by professional journalists — it deserved the full protection of the First Amendment. That’s a message it would be nice to hear from more journalists of Keller’s calibre.

Post and thumbnail images via Charlie Rose and Flickr user jphilipg

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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.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Surian Soosay and jphilipg

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The group is a frat-style collective of developers, artists, journalists, photographers and videographers that work (and party) out of the same house, collaborate on projects, and share bills, as well as a hacker sensibility. About a hundred people work out of the space, according to two members of the group, journalist Felipe Jannuzzi and photographer Gabriela Barreto, and the group have created projects like the wikileaks-style Publica, and the Arte Fora do Museu, which is a Google Street View-based site for street art in Sao Paulo.

The collective is a place for like-minded and creative entrepreneurs to inspire each other, make connections and share office space. Check out my photos from the house on our visit this week:

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