Question: Critics are concerned that Birkenfeld's prison sentence will discourage other tax whistle-blowers from coming forward. Is that a valid concern? Why or why not?
WIKILEAKS: PRINCIPLED LEAKING?
Movies like Silkwood and The Insider have portrayed whistle-blowers as lone heroes working against corrupt organizations at great personal risk to their own well-being-secrecy is an absolute must until the story explodes in the media. But what if you took a different approach? What if there was a central site for any and all material that a concerned employee, civil servant, or military staffer could post with the promise of anonymity through encrypted software and the protection of national press secrecy laws? What would that do to the world of corporate and government secrecy? WikiLeaks has become the live experiment to answer all those questions. Though not the fi rst document-leaking Web site ("Cryptome" was started by John Young in 1996), WikiLeaks has become the most prominent as a result of its apparent willingness to post any information, classifi ed or otherwise, in the stated interest of public advocacy.
Cofounded by Australian Julian Assange in 2007, Wikileaks was conceived as a safe haven for whistleblowers to reveal their secrets to the world. Its first big story documented how former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi had diverted millions of dollars of state funds to overseas accounts, a leak that led to an upset in Kenya's presidential election. Since then there has been a constant stream of government, industry, and military reports published that have brought WikiLeaks and its cofounder both fame and notoriety, including takedown threats and a temporary ban in the United States. The site, which proudly states that it owes no allegiance to any government or group, went on to release Pentagon rules of engagement for troops in Iraq, operating manuals for the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, lists of U.S. munitions stores in Iraq (included banned chemical weapons), and a classifi ed operating manual for the U.S. military's guided bombs known as the joint direct attack munitions (JDAM).
Since the JDAM manual also included known weaknesses of the bomb system, military offi cials responded that WikiLeaks was acting irresponsibly in making such information public and putting the lives of American military personnel at risk. It is this willingness to post anything under an apparent hands-off editorial policy that has brought the most criticism of the site. Assange acknowledges that the community fact-checking and editing of posted documents that he envisioned with the "wiki" title of the domain (as in "wikipedia") has not materialized, but he is committed to supporting any and all postings, even if they include such questionable items as an early script for the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the tax bill for actor Wesley Snipes that included his Social Security number. On July 25, 2010, WikiLeaks released more than 75,000 classifi ed reports about the war in Afghanistan, allegedly provided by an Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning. Manning was already under suspicion for allegedly leaking a 38-minute video of a 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed 12 people, including a reporter and photographer from the news agency Reuters. Publication of the documents was coordinated with The New York Times, The Guardian in Britain, and Der Speigel in Germany to ensure maximum attention (and suitable fact-checking before publication). Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School described the event as, "The Exxon Valdez of intelligence leaks-it's crude and messy, with uncertain implications."
Even with a further 15,000 documents withheld by WikiLeaks in a "harm minimization process," military leadership personnel expressed concern about the revelation of names of Afghans who had helped U.S. forces, potentially endangering them. WikiLeaks clearly represents a new world of whistle-blowing with the potential for immediate broad distribution of potentially devastating material previously considered to be "top secret." However, there is a growing concern that the technology, while protecting the whistle-blowers, will not be suffi cient to stop a more disruptive agenda than simple document leaking. For example, Assange came under direct attack for releasing an edited 17-minute version of the Baghdad helicopter attack, entitled "Collateral Murder," without clarifying that the attack happened during clashes in a Baghdad neighborhood and that one of the men fi red on by the helicopter crew was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade. Critics cite this example as evidence not of whistle-blowing but "information vandalism." With a promise from Assange of "even more controversial documents in the pipeline," it remains to be seen whether the site will achieve its target of achieving transparency for the unethical behavior of governments and corporations around the world, or whether it will be dismissed for "attentioncraving subversion."