Wikileaks 7X Silver

From: Julian Assange <julian[at]sunshinepress.org>
To: volunteers[at]lists.wikileaks.org
Cc: "Julian Assange." <julian[at]wikileaks.org>
Subject: [WL-Volunteers] two letters re wikileaks
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:00:36 +0000 (GMT)

Some notes as investigations editor. Please comment and proof,
and I may submit it as an editorial.

			  Two letters.

The first letter is an assult on censorship and a call to harmonize
the speech and press laws of nations by summing their freedoms
rather than subtracting them.

The second letter is a sceptical view of both traditional and
alternative media behavior and the Wikileaks experience in dealing
with both.

			      ----

			  First Letter

Censorship, like communism, seems like a reasonable enough idea to
begin with. While "from each according to his ability and to each
according to his need" sounds unarguable, the world has learned
that these words call forth a power elite to administer them with
coerisive force. Such elites are quick to define the needs of
themselves and their cronies as paramount. Similarly, "from each
mouth according to its ability and to each ear according to its
need" seems harmless enough, but history shows that censorship also
requires an anointed class to define 'need' and to make violence
against those who do not agree and continue talking. Such power is
quickly corrupted.

The first ingredient of a democracy is the people's right to know,
because without such understanding no human being can meaningfully
choose to support anything, let alone a political party.  Knowledge
is the driver of every political process, every constitution, every
law and every regulation. The communication of knowledge is without
analog. It is not a piece of furniture and it is not a man throwing
a ball. It is unique and demands its own place at the summit of
society. Since knowledge is the creator and regulator of all law,
it must be placed beyond law.

When speech is not free and knowledge of how society operates is
restricted, each man becomes an atom, unaware of his own destiny
and that of those around him.  That the world will change if there
is ever truly free speech is not something to be afraid of, rather
it is a cause for celebration.

Mankind has successfully adapted changes as monumental as electricity
and the engine. It can also adapt to a world where state sponsored
violence against the communications of consenting adults is not
only unlawful, but physically impossible. As knowledge flows across
nations it is time to sum the great freedoms of every nation and
not subtract them. It is time for the world as an international
collective of communicating peoples to arise and say 'here I am!'.

                              ----

	  		  Second letter.

Wikileaks has been a substantial success, yet with a couple of
exceptions, both mainstream and alternative media are paralyzed
unless we write press releases or aggressively "lobby" for pickup
of our material -- no matter how good the material is. Everything from
the main manual for Guantanamo Bay to sensitive reports on Kenyan
corruption can sit out in the open before 100,000 readers, including
many journalists, and there will be no re-reportage without additional
work from us.

Such is the demand to control the public that forums of influence
behave as fresh faced coquettes with too many suiters.  These
coquettes long ago stopped cooking their own food and now expect
everything to be done for them and lovingly presented on a silver
platter with a kiss.

When Wikileaks releases documents not in small embargo pools, but
immediately to the world, impact is very substantially reduced.
Making document supply unlimited while journalistic demand remains
fixed pushes perceived (but not actual) journalistic self-interest
beneath the threshold of story "profitability".  Wikileaks has
released substantial scoops recently without using an embargo pool
and all have been unreported.  Observe that the selection criteria
for what is reported is akin to what laws get passed, where voters
are replaced by high income readers and lobbyists are replaced by
more lobbyists.

Do you think books are popular because of what they say? Think
again, even the greatest work is franchise operation that bribes
everyone from the author to the book store into its promotion.

The seething internet is also not a solution, indeed, far from
it. While professional investigative journalists are losing their
jobs en-mass to press-releases, bloggers, syndication, email,
websites, language and cultural homogenization (the daily demand
for words is almost fixed, but supply has increased tremendously
so value per word has fallen), their analytical abilities have not
been replaced.

It is easier for Wikileaks to push material into the New York Times
or the Guardian than it is to generate original reportage in less
influential papers.  This is counter-intuitive, but lesser known
outlets only reprint press releases, opinion, or thieve stories,
while the Times and the Guardian just do it most of the time. The
blogosphere, with few exceptions, is no better and merely cuts and
pastes what is in the professional press and adds "I agree" together
with some flourish, such as reminding the reader how their pussy
cat predicted it all along.  The primary motivation of bloggers
appears to be an intense desire to demonstrate an in-group position
on the issue de jour. We can see this with great clarity at somewhere
like dailykos.org.  Bloggers have, despite all the rhetoric, little
or no interest in revealing a new truth before they know which way
the wind blows, even when it is thrust before them and all that is
required is some hours to make it look pretty.

A good example of this latter phenomena is the Wikileaks release
of a high level classified intelligence report on the battle of
Fallujah -- one of the most important events in the Iraq post war
environment.  We gave it to thousands, but it was our writers and
professional journalists at traditional media bodies who wrote about
it. Everyone else cut & pasted.

Western bloggers are not failing investigative journalism merely
because they don't have sources. Wikileaks throws freshly leaked
classified documents into their laps and says "go!".  They are
failing because they just don't give a damn. If they really gave a
damn about the truth they'd throw in their jobs as technicians,
librarians, waiters, teachers and bureaucrats and become journalists,
historians, intelligence analysts, cosmologists, activists,
anti-corruption analysts etc (and it is from these last groups that
all Wikileaks writers derive).

Some say this miserly response is about source credibility, but it
is the publications most respected for credibility that carry
Wikileaks material.

Any decent journalist can look at a complicated leaked document,
such as a manual for Guantanamo Bay, and say within minutes that
it is what it claims to be sans subtle modifications, call up the
designated authoring organization and ask 'Do you deny it? Will
you investigate the leak?" and find themselves with an interesting
story for every possible response, which is exactly what Reuters,
The New York Times and even Wikinews have done with Wikileaks sourced
material.

Real credibility, being a cousin of the truth, it is the call of
all but the game of the few. For most, the call to credibility is
merely an excuse to keep on cut & pasting press releases, fangless
opinion articles, and thieved material from other publications.
Apparently cut & paste and blather pushes out more words per second
than actually writing something useful.

The bulk of the media class does not seek real credibility.  What
it longs for is "blame-ability" which is something altogether
different. It is blame-ability that permits smiling while reprinting
egregious lies -- safe in the knowledge that the buck may be passed.
Whether it is to the mouth of Colin Powel or the pen of Judith
Miller is is blame-ability that ensures a ready supply of calumny
and catastrope without apology.
_______________________________________________
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Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:27:16 +0000 (GMT)
From: press-office[at]wikileaks.org
Subject: [WIKILEAKS] Fear in the Western fourth estate

WIKILEAKS EDITORIAL
Mon Nov 24 18:33:28 GMT 2008

Wikileaks often receives messages from Western journalists expressing
substantial levels of fear.

For instance, many Western news organizations, even when reporting
a document, self-censor links to it (but not other links).
Self-censoring organizations include Time/CNN, the News Statesman,
and the Guardian. The "4.0" estate is no better, the Wikimedia
Foundation, Digg and others have all pulled links after, or
before, legal threats.

Journalists working in the most of the developing world, who are
occasionally arrested for hard-hitting stories, find this pusillanimous
behavior incomprehensible.

States with highly disconnected power hierarchies, such as Russia
during the mid 1990s give us a clue to as to the difference in
perceptions between developing and Western journalists.

In transitional states, journalistic freedom and journalistic
persecution appear to stem from the same root cause; the inability
of power groups to defend themselves from journalists by using means
more sophisticated than arrest or murder.  Because the latter comes
at some cost to the persecutor they are rarely employed. In other
words all but a few "off limit" subjects can be reported freely and
these limits are not yet well understood, which is why some journalists
are murdered.

In the West, more sophisticated means are systemic and include
economic and patronage incentives and a defensive restructuring of
power group activities into complex financial webs which are resistant
to press exposure.

While it is easy to count journalistic arrests and murders, great
skepticism should be exercised in representing the lack of such
assaults as marker of a free or effective press. Precisely the
opposite conclusion may be true.

An example letter from a Western journalist:

> Hi,
>  
> While I do not see everything which you send me of value, I do 
> see much of what I've been sent as extremely significant material.  
> I regret to add that I have not opened much of what you have sent me, 
> concern over potential 'legal ramifications' being the reason.  In short, 
> I - like too many other journalists - have too often been effectively 
> intimidated into silence.
>  
> In the past I've endured death threats, being shot at, having the steering 
> unscrewed on my car, etc...and yet, I find myself compelled to avoid 
> documentation with a 'controversial' legal standing, regardless of the 
> legitimacy of those documents.  While I still break quite significant news, 
> I artificially limit myself to those sources which cannot engender 'legal 
> issues'.  
>  
> Am I a coward?  I think not, but I am well aware of the tools employed to 
> silence those with the courage to speak, and I cautiously avoid presenting 
> 'the bad guys' with a 'weak point' in the defenses I've built.  I am not 
> certain how Wikileaks has avoided the devastation such 'weak points' have 
> brought, but I am glad you have.  
>  
> Does the world need the ugly truths that lurk behind the sparklingly clean 
> and gleaming white facades that so often surround them - yes!  Without broad 
> public awareness of the harsh realities we face, how can we, as a society, 
> hope to address these issues?  Of course, those whom the ongoing ignorance 
> benefits wish to maintain it, and so the need for organizations such as yours.
>  
> What can be done to improve Wikileaks?  I imagine that you're working on a 
> great many things; but, perhaps paramount among these is the ongoing 
> establishment of the 'legitimacy' of Wikileaks as a source, a source which 
> can one day be utilized without raising legitimate concern over 'the 
> consequences'.
>  
> When I was a boy growing up in The States, there was a TV game show called 
> 'Truth or Consequences'.  Too often today I have seen a reality called 
> 'truth and consequences'.  The first was funny, but the second...
>  

Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:59:43 +0000 (GMT)
From: Wikileaks Press Office <press-office[at]wikileaks.org>
Subject: [WIKILEAKS] Wikileaks letter

The Sunshine Press (Wikileaks) is in a dire financial position.

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The reason that impartial, revelatory investigative journalism has
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Despite being universally recognized as being the most important
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