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Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate

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Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Yochai Benkler, A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Citation Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate, 46 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 311 (2011). Published Version http://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Benkler.pdf Accessed January 9, 2017 9:34:07 AM EST Citable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10900863 This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASH Terms of Use repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP (Article begins on next page) \\jciprod01\productn\H\HLC\46-2\HLC209.txt unknown Seq: 1 6-JUN-11 13:54 A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate Yochai Benkler* [I]t is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck- rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil. There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.1 Wikileaks was born a century after President Theodore Roosevelt deliv- ered the speech that gave muckraking journalism its name, and both hailed investigative journalism and called upon it to be undertaken responsibly. In 2010, four years after its first document release, Wikileaks became the center of an international storm surrounding the role of the individual in the networked public sphere. It forces us to ask how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet. The freedom that the Internet provides to networked individuals and cooperative associa- tions to speak their minds and organize around their causes has been deployed over the past decade to develop new, networked models of the fourth estate. These models circumvent the social and organizational frameworks of traditional media, which played a large role in framing the balance between freedom and responsibility of the press. At the same time, the Wikileaks episode forces us to confront the fact that the members of the networked fourth estate turn out to be both more susceptible to new forms of attack than those of the old, and to possess different sources of resilience in the face of these attacks. In particular, commercial owners of the critical * Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Univer- sity. I am grateful to Bruce Ackerman, Marvin Ammori, Jack Balkin, David Barron, Fernando Bermejo, David Isenberg, Susan Landau, Micah Sifry, Jonathan Zittrain, and Ethan Zuckerman for comments and criticisms. 1 Theodore Roosevelt, Address of President Roosevelt at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Office Building of the House of Representatives: The Man with the Muck-Rake (Apr. 14, 1906), available at VOICES OF DEMOCRACY, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/theodore- roosevelt-the-man-with-the-muck-rake-speech-text. \\jciprod01\productn\H\HLC\46-2\HLC209.txt unknown Seq: 2 6-JUN-11 13:54 312 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review [Vol. 46 infrastructures of the networked environment can deny service to controver- sial speakers, and some appear to be willing to do so at a mere whiff of public controversy. The United States government, in turn, can use this vul- nerability to bring to bear new kinds of pressure on undesired disclosures in extralegal partnership with these private infrastructure providers. The year of Wikileaks began with the release of a video taken by a U.S. attack helicopter, showing what sounded like a trigger-happy crew killing civilians alongside their intended targets. It continued with two large-scale document releases from Iraq and Afghanistan, about which Defense Secre- tary Robert Gates wrote to the Senate, representing that “the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compro- mised by this disclosure.”2 The year ended with the very careful release of a few hundred (as of this writing, it has risen to over 1900) cables from U.S. embassies in cooperation with five traditional media organizations. At the time of the embassy cable release, about two-thirds of news reports incor- rectly reported that Wikileaks had simply dumped over 250,000 classified cables onto the Net.3 In fact, Wikileaks made that large number of cables available only privately, to the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El Pa´ıs , and later to other media organizations. These orga- nizations put their own teams to work to sift through the cables and selected only a few, often in redacted form, to publish. Wikileaks then published almost solely those cables selected by these traditional organizations, and only in the redacted form released by those organizations.4 Of this release, Secretary Gates stated: “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.”5 Despite the steadily more cautious and responsible practices Wikileaks came to adopt over the course of the year, and despite the apparent absence 2 Adam Levine, Gates: Leaked Documents Don’t Reveal Key Intel, But Risks Remain, CNN (Oct. 16, 2010, 8:25 AM), http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-16/us/wikileaks.assessment_1_ julian-assange-wikileaks-documents. 3 See media analysis infra, text accompanying notes 108–124. R 4 See detailed description and sourcing infra, notes 53–55. R 5 U.S. Dep’t of Defense, News Transcript, DOD News Briefing with Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen from the Pentagon (Nov. 30, 2010), available at http://www.defense.gov/ Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=4728. Gates said at a Pentagon press briefing on the day of the release: Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think -- I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments -- some gov- ernments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispen- sable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign pol- icy? I think fairly modest. Id. \\jciprod01\productn\H\HLC\46-2\HLC209.txt unknown Seq: 3 6-JUN-11 13:54 2011] A Free Irresponsible Press 313 of evidence of harm, the steady flow of confidential materials through an organization that was not part of the familiar “responsible press” was met by increasing levels of angry vitriol from the Administration, politicians, and media commentators. By the end of the year, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden responded to the quite limited and careful release of the embassy cables by stating that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “more like a high- tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers,”6 leading to predictable calls for his assassination—on the model of targeted killings of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan—by Fox News commentators and likely Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin.7 The New York Times’ flagship opinion author, Thomas Friedman, declared Wikileaks one of the two major threats to a peaceful world under U.S. leadership, parallel to the threat of an ascen- dant China.8 The rhetorical framing of Wikileaks in the socio-political frame of global threat and terrorism, in turn, facilitated and interacted with a range of responses that would have been inconceivable in the more factually appro- priate frame of reference, such as what counts as responsible journalism, or how we understand the costs and benefits of the demise of more traditional models of journalistic self-regulation in the age of the networked public sphere. On the legal front, the Department of Justice responded to public calls from Senator Dianne Feinstein and others and began to explore prose- cution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. The military held (and continues to hold as of this writing) the suspected source of the leak in soli- tary confinement for over eight months, while the leading Republican presi- dential candidate at that time, Mike Huckabee, called for his execution.9 The sociopolitical framing makes more comprehensible the vigilante responses in other subsystems of the information environment.
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