Wikileaks and the Politics of Knowledge

WikiLeaks and the Politics of Knowledge

Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore

The George Washington University

Very early draft paper. Please do not cite or circulate. The arguments put forward in this paper have not been properly tested, and come with no warranty, either express or implied, as to their correctness or general usefulness.

In late 2010, WikiLeaks, in collaboration with several more established news organizations, began to release information from a set of confidential US government cables to which it had gained access.1 WikiLeaks, which had already started to become a cause célèbre became enveloped in political furore. Vice-President Biden argued that

WikiLeaks was engaged in high-tech terrorism, while the US State Department sought to suggest, without explicitly saying so, that WikiLeaks itself had behaved illegally. Thomas

Friedman, in a remarkable column for the New York Times, suggested that WikiLeaks and China were the two major threats to US world hegemony. WikiLeaks swiftly found itself under attack, as Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and others refused to process payments, and as its domain name server refused to point towards its IP address.

1 See Benkler (2011) for a very helpful summary, which we rely on here. 1 This extraordinary reaction has led some scholars (e.g. Lovink and Riemens 2011,

Chadwick 2011) to identify WikiLeaks as a harbinger of a new order, in which states will find it far more difficult to control flows of information, hence changing the practices of international society. This interpretation is in partial accord with the initial aspirations of

WikiLeaks’ founders, who believed (see below) that increased availability of information would undermine tyranny and reshape global power relations. Yet this understanding leaves some puzzling questions unanswered. Why exactly did WikiLeaks forge alliances with more traditional media organizations? Why did states react so dyspeptically given the relatively mundane revelations of WikiLeaks’ actual content? Most of the revelations within the cables were unsurprising. Few people reasonably conversant with international politics were unaware e.g. that the US believed that there was widespread corruption in

Afghanistan, or that Arab states profoundly distrusted Iran.

In this short paper, we provide very tentative answers to these questions, as well advancing a number of questions for further research. We start from the proposition that the WikiLeaks story is not, as most would have it, a simple story about how information is becoming more free. It is instead a story about the transformation of the structures through which information – facts and plausible arguments about the relationship among facts-- becomes transformed into knowledge – facts and plausible arguments that are treated as dispositive by the relevant social actors.

Both rational choice scholars and constructivists are interested in knowledge, although they have somewhat different theories of what it involves. Rational choice scholars construct sophisticated arguments about common knowledge – that is information that is not only known to all actors, but where all actors know that all other

2 actors know this, as well as knowing that all actors know that all other actors know this and so on. Constructivists, in contrast, tend to think about knowledge as accepted ‘truths’ or 'social facts' which are legitimated by authorized individuals, institutions or professions. For example, when the World Bank takes up one set of statistics about poverty and not another, it is making a choice that will define what poverty “is” (and implicity what it is not), and these choices shape the actions of a wide variety of other international actors (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). For clarity’s sake, we refer to the kinds of knowledge produced through these processes as legitimated knowledge.

We do not test these accounts against each other in this paper. Instead, we argue that they each provide interesting insights into why WikiLeaks’ cable dump had the consequences that it did. This "binocular" perspective points the way towards a quite different analysis of WikiLeaks than those that are currently available. First – it suggests a plausible hypothesis (which we begin to evaluate, but do not really test in this version of the paper) for why WikiLeaks failed to get much attention for its earlier revelations prior to 2010 (discussed below). In the absence of external legitimation by appropriate authorities, the simple provision of information will not affect actors’ common knowledge. It can surely affect actors’ private beliefs (with interesting consequences, which we don’t propose to get into), but it will not become socially known. Hence, it was only when WikiLeaks joined forces with accepted legitimating authorities (major news organizations) that it was able to have a major international impact.

Second, the most interesting long term consequences of WikiLeaks depend less on its ability to make information available and more on the transformative effects it may

3 have on the legitimating structures through which information becomes knowledge. We can see how other online sources of information (e.g. Wikipedia) have gradually become more authoritative (in the sense that they are accepted as legitimate) over time. If

WikiLeaks type organizations change legitimating structures, so that e.g. it becomes easier to legitimate knowledge that is to the disadvantage of major states, it may have significant consequences for world politics.

Finally, the WikiLeaks case may tell us interesting things about the role of diplomatic hypocrisy in international society. Hypocrisy, of various forms, is endemic in international relations, and in particular in diplomacy. However, because its underlying mechanisms are hard to discern, it is hard to be sure what role it plays (a mere lubricant? a more fundamental means of reconciling states with clashing interests and beliefs?), or how robust it is to external disruption. WikiLeaks, by disrupting the ordinary practices of hypocrisy, may tell us interesting things about both.2

This paper provides only the beginnings of an account which would address these issues. The next section describes in greater detail the social processes through which information becomes knowledge. The following section describes the implications of these processes for WikiLeaks’ relationship with journalists, and how this relationship shaped WikiLeaks’ success or failure. The final section discusses the consequences of these processes for global knowledge production.

Turning Information into Knowledge

2 Saki’s short story, “Tobermory,” available at http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/l_tober.htm, applies a similar stress- test to the norms of Edwardian society. 4 As Barnett and Finnemore (2004) discuss at length, a key source of international organizations’ power is their ability to transform information into knowledge. Such organizations have extensive bureaucracies, which not only monitor behavior, but also may “create, define and map social reality” (30). By classifying information, they define problems, deciding what is an issue that requires addressing, and what is not, as well as their solutions. By fixing the meaning of categories, they help decide the boundaries for acceptable action. Finally, by making rules and norms, they inculcate values in target organizations, including states.

The power of media – which we take to include traditional newspapers, television broadcasters and other organizations that both enjoy legal protections and carry commensurate obligations in advanced industrial democracies as well as in other states – is different. Media organizations do not have the extensive bureaucracies that international organizations do. They typically rely on the expertise of others rather than in-house experts in order to reach conclusions on complex issues. Finally, they have no direct rule-making or norm setting powers.

Even so, they play a crucial legitimating role in international and domestic politics. Their decisions affect what is ‘news’ – the publicly known facts about e.g. the current state of domestic and international politics - and what is not. While they are not free-floating, they enjoy a substantial degree of leeway in deciding what to report as news, and what to pass over. In this paper we only begin to speculate about how their choices are legitimated (we suspect that there is a lot of literature on this, and are eager

5 for pointers). We confine ourselves, for the moment, to highlighting two things. First – that not all media are equally legitimate. News organizations that are perceived as publishing e.g. papers of record will accordingly have greater authority than those that e.g. are perceived as unreliable, or as systematically skewing the news to reflect one or another agenda. Perceptions of impartiality are a crucial source of legitimacy for US journalists in particular (although legitimating norms differ substantially from country to country). Second, and qualifying the first, although many journalistic organizations subscribe to norms of impartiality, their role is political. For example, national news organizations in the US and elsewhere can be, and have been prevailed upon not to report news stories that are perceived as against the national or international interest. When they do report such stories, they are likely to encounter vigorous pushback, and, in some cases, punishment.

Decisions about what is ‘news’ may have important general consequences. News that is not legitimated by the traditional media will be difficult for actors to use as public justification for their actions, unless this information has some alternative source of legitimation. Furthermore, when authoritative news organizations turn privately held information about e.g. actors’ beliefs into socially accepted common knowledge, it may oblige actors to respond in ways that they would prefer not to. For example, state actors may know perfectly well that the representatives of other states privately believe that they are corrupt, hold contempt for them &c, but it may be inconvenient for them to respond.

However, if this private information is transformed into news, it is no longer easy to ignore politely – it has changed from an inconvenient fact into a direct insult, which must be addressed if the state actors do not want to lose face. If international relations are

6 eased and made more felicitous by generalized hypocrisy, this hypocrisy relies on a certain degree of reticence on the part of both states and the media. Sometimes, states prevail upon the media not to report news which is known to all relevant parties, but which might constrain actors to behave in different ways if it were common knowledge.

For example, the US strongly pressed the New York Times not to publish a story on how

SWIFT, a Belgium-based processor of financial information, was providing data to US anti-terrorism efforts even though this was illegal under European law. European bank regulators already knew about SWIFT’s actions, but had decided to turn a blind eye, and not inform data protection authorities (Farrell and Newman, unpublished). This tacit arrangement was severely disrupted when the true facts became public.

This set of arguments carries many interesting implications; here, we single out two. First, and ceteris paribus, politically relevant information which is not legitimated by media organizations will be far less likely to become publicly salient than information which is. Second, that when information is so validated - even when it merely confirms generally well known information – it becomes knowledge, which has important consequences for actors’ behavior.

Gaining Attention: WikiLeaks’ Tortuous Relationship with Traditional Media

Organizations

WikiLeaks – by virtue of its failures as well as successes – provides a valuable test case for how difficult it is to turn information into knowledge without the help of

7 established legitimating actors. WikiLeaks’ foundational assumption was that information wanted to be free, and that all that was necessary to foment action was to provide a space where individuals could upload sensitive documents anonymously, and where others could then comment on and annotate these documents so as to highlight their informational content. The founding volunteers swiftly discovered that this was inadequate, and increasingly began to pursue media attention, and then alliances with traditional media in order to have a broader impact on public debate.

WikiLeaks’ initial plan was straightforward – to provide a website where people could upload documents anonymously and securely, so that they would be available for public debate. As described in one early email,

WL has developed and integrated technology to foment untraceable [sic], unstoppable mass document leaking and discussion. Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in china, russia and central eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact; this means our technology is fast and usable by non-technical people. We have received over a million documents of varying quality. We plan to numerically eclipse the content the english wikipedia with leaked documents. We believe that the increasing familiarity with wikipedia.org provides a comfortable transition to those who wish to leak documents and comment on leaked documents.3

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, had previously developed a sweeping political theory, under which encouraging leaks would ipso facto serve to destabilize authoritarian governments and organizations.4 By providing a sufficiently robust technological platform, and changing social attitudes, WikiLeaks hoped to “[foment] a world wide 3 WikiLeaks internal email, December 13, 2006, downloaded from http://web.archive.org/web/20100805002153/http://cryptome.org/WikiLeaks/ WikiLeaks-leak.htm. 4 http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf. 8 movement of mass leaking” that would lead to this happy outcome.5 This mass movement would take advantage of the advantages of the Internet, as a means of making information freely available. It hence would serve as an antidote to the traditional media.

You may point to a salicious [sic] main stream media, but that is not democratised revelation. We point instead to the internet as a whole, which although not yet a vehicle of universal free revelation, is very close to it. Look at the great bounty of positive political change pooring[sic] forth as a result. WikiLeaks reveals, but it is not primarily a tool of revelation. There are many avenues on the internet for revelation. What does not exist is a social movement to that makes acting ethically by leaking a virtue. What does not exist is a comfortable way for everyone to leak safely and easily. What does not exist is a way to turn raw leaks into into [sic] politically influential knowledge through the revolutionary mass collaborative analysis of wikipedia. Sufficient leaking will bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality -- including the US administration. Ellsberg calls for it. Everyone knows it. We're doing it.6

WikiLeaks would accelerate tendencies already present in the Internet’s support for the free and anonymous spread of information.

It's clear to me that as i2p, tor, anonnet and freenet evolves, other p2p programs become more anon and file-sharing web-sites become more popular the anon + can't get the cat in the bag part aspects of the internet will become fait acompli [sic]with its general [sic] in speed and sophistication. There will be real free speech… WL can advance the political/governance aspects of these developments by several years which will have all sorts of positive cascades, not the least of which is total annihilation of the current US regime and any other regime that holds its authority through mendacity alone 7

5 WikiLeaks internal email, December 16, 2006, downloaded from http://web.archive.org/web/20100805002153/http://cryptome.org/WikiLeaks/ WikiLeaks-leak.htm. 6 WikiLeaks internal email, December 29, 2006, downloaded from http://web.archive.org/web/20100805002153/http://cryptome.org/WikiLeaks/ WikiLeaks-leak.htm. 7 WikiLeaks internal email, January 2, 2007, downloaded from http://web.archive.org/web/20100805002153/http://cryptome.org/WikiLeaks/ WikiLeaks-leak.htm. 9 It didn’t work out this way. WikiLeaks enjoyed some initial successes – but they were not fueled by a nascent social movement. Although WikiLeaks public announcements suggested a large organization, with multitudes of volunteers, it relied in practice on the efforts of a very small group of people indeed.8 Indeed, WikiLeaks’ initial successes in attracting publicity were almost entirely the product of attention from mainstream media. A leaked report on corruption in Kenya created an international sensation, but only because it was picked up by more traditional media.9 As it became clear that no social movement was likely to materialize, Assange and WikiLeaks moved ever more explicitly towards an alternative strategy – building up relations with traditional media, which would then publish stories based on WikiLeaks material.

This too proved more difficult in practice than in theory. An early effort to build a relationship with a German newspaper collapsed, as the newspaper took the story without giving WikiLeaks proper credit.10 Efforts to auction emails between Hugo Chavez and his speechwriter were similarly unsuccessful.11 WikiLeaks did begin to establish a niche as

Leigh and Harding (2011) put it, a “publisher of last resort,” a website willing to publish materials that were too legally sensitive for media organizations to host on their own.

Thus, for example, it hosted materials on a Swiss bank, and on a notorious libel action in

London, where the plaintiff had obtained a preliminary injunction preventing UK media from even mentioning the fact that the action was taking place. Again, however, its role

8 Domscheit-Berg (2011). 9 Leigh and Harding (2011). 10 Domscheit-Berg (2011). 11 Leigh and Harding (2011). 10 was limited to that of providing information, which was then picked up on, and validated, by more traditional media, without itself playing a legitimating role.

Part of this was due to organizational and resource constraints. When WikiLeaks began to receive higher quality material, allegedly from Bradley Manning, it found itself hard put to process it and put it out. Enormous quantities of information were provided in a relatively unorganized fashion, making it difficult for a tiny volunteer-based organization to find the interesting material. Furthermore, doing the research to validate raw information or footage, as well as providing necessary background, was difficult and expensive. The “Collateral Murder” video, which showed a helicopter gunship firing on journalists and civilians as well as armed Iraqis (although the latter were edited out of the raw footage) absorbed “almost all of [WikiLeaks’] resources” to produce, research and release, leading to considerable tensions within the organization.12 When WikiLeaks began to release confidential US military documents obtained from the same source, it had enormous difficulty in vetting them for potentially personally harmful information, relying on the last-minute efforts of a small number of core members.13

Yet even apart from these technical problems, WikiLeaks had enormous difficulty in attracting attention to its materials. The reaction to the Collateral Murder video was highly disappointing to Assange and others within WikiLeaks. It led to a few news stories, and some discussion among bloggers, but had no sustained impact on international public debates. Producing material, even controversial and well-sourced material and making it available on the Internet appeared to be insufficient to create any

12 P.43, Beckett and Ball (2012). See also Domscheit-Berg (2011). 13 Domscheit-Berg (2011). 11 public outcry. What public controversy there was turned on WikiLeaks rather than the story it was trying to report.14 This in turn led Assange, and other key figures within

WikiLeaks to embrace a new strategy of direct cooperation with traditional media.15

As soon as it became clear that WikiLeaks was sitting on a treasure trove of information, it was approached by Nick Davies, a journalist at the UK newspaper the

Guardian, and a public critic of the “churnalism” that had come to characterize British newspapers. After a meeting with Assange in Brussels, the Guardian reached an accord to exploit the material together with WikiLeaks, with the Guardian suggesting that the

New York Times become involved too, to minimize the risks of retaliation by the US administration.

As the Guardian began to work with the material, it became clear that it required skills in short supply among traditional journalists. Traditional journalists have little experience e.g. in organizing information in searchable databases, or in mining these databases for the subtle relationships that can sometimes be the basis for a good story.

Nor are they usually adept in visualizing information and making it digestible for ordinary readers. Yet the major problem for Guardian and New York Times journalists and editors involved managing relationships with WikiLeaks which provided data to other news organizations without consultation, and had little familiarity with or respect for the norms of traditional media. In the initial document dump of logs from the Iraq war, it became clear that WikiLeaks had little interest in redacting information so as to protect e.g. civilians who had provided information to occupying forces. Davies perceived Assange as “basically a computer hacker” who came from a “simplistic 14 Leigh and Harding (2011). 15 Beckett and Ball (2012). 12 ideology ... that all information has to be published, that all information is good.”16

Although Assange later changed his mind on this, he proved to be a volatile partner in other respects, threatening to withdraw cooperation with the New York Times (which he felt had published a deliberate attack on him), and constantly introducing new deals with new media partners without consultation with old ones. Nor was it entirely clear whether

WikiLeaks should be treated as a traditional source, as a media organization in its own right, or as an activist group. Bill Keller, the New York Times’ editor, suggested later that the newspaper sought at all times to keep an “appropriate distance” from Assange, and viewed him as “a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda.”17 Assange himself seemed uncertain of his role – according to New

York Times journalist Eric Schmitt:

Julian Assange saw the four organizations in that room, that bunker in London, as journalistic collaborators. It depended on what day it was. On a certain day, Assange would say, ‘I’m a journalist today,’ and the second day, ‘I think I’m going to be a publisher today,’ and the third day, ‘I’m back to being an advocate’ [...] Even he was conflicted about the role he played [...] “18

Despite its profound internal tensions, the partnership worked. It provided

WikiLeaks with organizational capacities that it did not have itself, and, more importantly, with external legitimation for the information that it wanted to make available. However, this legitimacy came at a price. The editors of the major newspapers

16 P.112, Leigh and Harding (2011). 17 Keller (2011). 18 http://www.douglaslucas.com/blog/2012/03/08/law-and-media-seminar- wikileaks-wltex/. Check with Schmitt on accuracy of quote if we use it. 13 that WikiLeaks was collaborating with were sensitive to the political implications of the information being released. As Bill Keller describes it:

In practice, the tension between our obligation to inform and the government’s obligation to protect plays out in a set of rituals. As one of my predecessors, Max Frankel, wrote… : “For the vast majority of ‘secrets,’ there has developed between the government and the press (and Congress) a rather simple rule of thumb: The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and a right to know. Each side in this ‘game’ regularly ‘wins’ and ‘loses’ a round or two. Each fights with the weapons at its command. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality.”19

Although the New York Times published the material, it provided the US government with advance notice, and with the opportunity to comment on texts from the diplomatic cables, so that they might request e.g. the removal of particularly sensitive information.

For its part, the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, had serious qualms that publishing the diplomatic cables might substantially undermine the Obama administration’s ability to conduct foreign policy in the face of Republican opposition.20 While both editors ultimately decided that their responsibility was to publish much of the material, they explicitly thought of their role as a political one. While the New York Times did not see itself as a partisan newspaper, it was concerned with the potential impact of its revelations on US national interests. The Guardian, which came from a different national

19 Keller (2011). 20 Columbia University Journalism School (2011). In the intervening period, these qualms have been partly rendered moot by the complete release of the cables, thanks to a combination of errors by WikiLeaks and two Guardian journalists 14 tradition of newspapers, was less afraid of taking sides, but also sought to balance its political preferences with its obligation to report the news.

The consequences of the material’s release are still unfolding. It is clear that, contrary to some of the more excited predictions (Italy’s then foreign minister, Franco

Frattini described the release as “international diplomacy’s 9/11”), they have not been transformative. Their primary consequence has been to embarrass the US (as well as some of its interlocutors) by highlighting the gap between official rhetoric and private beliefs, rather than to produce major revelations. It is not surprising that Saudi Arabia is fearful of Iran’s nuclear program (to the extent that it has informally asked that the US attack Iran), but it is surely embarrassing to the Saudi Arabian government to have this known. The extent of ties between organized crime and government in Russia has been a topic of debate for years. Again, it is not surprising that US diplomats are convinced that these ties are ubiquitous, but the public revelation of these beliefs has considerably complicated relations between the US and Russia. The United Kingdom’s deception of its own subjects over the island of Diego Garcia caused a minor domestic scandal, but no more than that.

None of these revelations produced genuinely new information. What they did was to transform information about US beliefs and relationships which was known in the sense that other actors in international politics informally understood them, into information that was “known” in the sense that they were legitimated by the media, and treated as true. To use game theoretic terminology, this transformed widely held shared private information into common knowledge. Not only did “everyone” (for values of

15 “everyone” which include those well informed about international politics) know this information, but everyone now knew that everyone else knew this information and so on.

As John Geanokoplos has argued, the creation of common knowledge can allow actors to draw inferences that they would not be able to draw otherwise. By extending this argument, we may see how WikiLeaks substantially reduced the ability of the US to engage in hypocritical behavior. The US was not able to dissimulate nearly as easily about its true beliefs e.g. about corruption in Russia, and the dubious role of the ISI in

Pakistan. However, the consequences of revelation are not limited to the actor whose true beliefs have been revealed. Actors who receive information about others’ true beliefs in a publicly visible manner will have far greater difficulty in ignoring what others think of them. This has contributed to worsening relations with both Russia and Pakistan; not because these countries did not know previously what the US thought of them, but because they are no longer able to ignore the US’s beliefs as easily.

Not only is the US’s room for maneuver reduced vis-à-vis Russia and Pakistan, but Russia and Pakistan will find it more difficult to overlook the US’s true views, and not to treat them as insulting and demeaning. In short, hypocrisy is often a valuable lubricant for cooperative relations between states. Increased – and publicly shared – knowledge of actors’ true beliefs, limits the usefulness of hypocrisy and hence may make cooperation harder between states which might otherwise have been prepared to overlook each other’s true beliefs.

Limitations on hypocrisy may sometimes provide strategic advantage. For example, Richard Holbrooke appears to have used WikiLeaks cables about Pakistan as a

16 means of putting increased pressure on the Pakistani government (Keller 2011). A proper investigation will require real research and lots of conceptual spadework.

Conclusions

This short paper seeks to establish that the WikiLeaks case was less about changes in the availability of information, than changes in how information becomes socially accepted knowledge. To do this, it assesses the prima facie plausibility of two claims.

First – that without legitimation from more established authorities, WikiLeaks’ information dumps would have had little consequence in changing common knowledge.

Information which has not been legitimated in this way is far less likely to generate common knowledge. It is surely not impossible that it become common knowledge, since there are other possible mechanisms through which common knowledge can be created and affirmed, but it is harder. Initial evidence seems to support this, although not entirely unambiguously. It is clear that WikiLeaks’ original model – of creating and relying on a mass-movement to take information that had been uploaded to WikiLeaks, and to trawl through it for valuable nuggets that might reveal the true and malign workings of power, did not work. WikiLeaks failed to undermine conventional institutions, and almost certainly never had any chance of so doing. Furthermore, WikiLeaks relative success in publicizing stories appears to have been correlated with its success in making alliances with broader media.

17 This is far from definitive. There is likely some selection bias occurring

(WikiLeaks would find it easier to create alliances with the press for those stories that were more likely in any event to have mass appeal). Even so, the relative failure of the

“Collateral Murder” video (which would likely have had much greater impact had it been broken by a traditional media source), as compared to the wild success of WikiLeaks’ other leaks from the Manning corpus is suggestive. Alliances with media organizations appear to have provided WikiLeaks’ stories with substantial credibility, as well as other resources, at the expense of much closer relations with the US and UK government than

WikiLeaks would have liked.

It is possible that this may be changing, as WikiLeaks and other such organizations build up their own effective legitimacy. This will be discussed in the next version of the paper.

Second, WikiLeaks’ releases seem not to have provided information so much as they generated “known knowns” – they transformed facts that were widely understood into facts that were also publicly understood, known to be known publically and legitimated as common knowledge. Much more work is required to establish this – but the consequences seem to have stemmed less from the release of information that was previously secret, than the public confirmation of US beliefs about, and relations with, its partners and client states. WikiLeaks made hypocrisy more difficult, constraining both the US and other states in important ways, but also offering new opportunities to exert

US pressure on its allies, through the public provision of difficult-to-deny information about US diplomats’ actual beliefs. Being able to point to what the US ‘truly’ thought of

Pakistan allowed, e.g. US negotiators to play up the need for real institutional change.

18 This is only the beginnings of a real paper. Future versions will seek, at a minimum, to do the following.

(1) Establish more clearly, building on the existing literature, how it is that traditional media organizations legitimate information. There could be a variety of mechanisms at work. It could be that institutions play the key role here – not only the internal institutions of newspapers and media organizations, but also the public legitimacy that they are accorded by laws on the freedom of the press, shield laws for journalists etc. It could be that professional norms of journalism play a key role, by assuring readers that stories are written according to the relevant professional standards.

It could be that authority is in part a product of simple accretion of trust over time

(Wikipedia is neither accredited by external institutions, nor associated with standard professional norms, but has grown significantly in authority). Or it could be all three, or something else entirely.

(2) Provide an account, based on interviews etc that addresses the question of whether legitimating authorities are changing, whether new organizations, such as WikiLeaks, might themselves become legitimating organizations over time, what challenges are being posed to state-media relationships by any changes etc.

(3) Establish more precisely, through detailed case study, what existing forms of hypocrisy were, and the extent to which they have been challenged by WikiLeaks’ revelations. This would allow us to think more clearly about the role of hypocrisy, its supporting practises and social institutions etc.