A Leaky Series of Tubes

When Wikileaks made its international debut in 2006, no one had heard of Julian Assange, and the world cared even less about what the site was leaking: documents detailing fraud in the Kenyan elections system and the Icelandic banking system.

Five years later, Wikileaks is a spectacle, a media circus, and Assange plays ringleader to a world-wide audience obsessed with leaks. But, it isn’t only the public that’s watching.

Citizen journalists and activists everywhere have jumped onto the Wikileaks bandwagon, and while some vehemently disagree with Assange’s methods, his site and its wider reason for existing have left a new generation of muckrakers with mouths agape at the possibilities.

Just months after the leak of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department memos by the now-infamous site, a herd of spin-off sites have launched, all with the same end goals: transparency, watchdoggery, and those other mainstays of historical journalism.

But it wasn’t Assange who prompted this new form of reporting; arguably, he was only the first to take advantage of it. It was the Internet itself. The web of connectivity has grown to mind-blowing proportions in the past three (or so) years and has made it easy for people to talk to other people, people to talk to their governments, governments to spy on their people, and in return, the possibility of people to spy on their governments.

As newspapers repeatedly whined about their impending doom (if I see one more article about the death of print, I will puke), while refusing to see the endless possibilities of the Internet, they missed an opportunity to really do what they’re meant to do. They should be objectively reporting the news of the day and keeping tabs on the powers that be. Instead, over the past few years, the print and television media has become obsessed with tabloid journalism, assuming their readers and viewers really care about celebrity gossip and other such nonsense.

While traditional media networks were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, trying to figure out how to utilize Twitter in the newsroom, the Internet was evolving around them, and individuals – citizen journalists – began to stand up and do the job their mainstream media wasn’t: watching the government.

Assange and his rag-tag group of rebel hackers and former reporters took to the tubes and the rest, as they say, is history. Wikileaks shone a bright light on the United States government’s actions overseas, obviously. But, more importantly, the existence of Wikileaks put the ineptitude of the media in the spotlight, prompting the question, “Why didn’t the U.S. media get this story?”

Well, that’s a good question, and no one really knows the answer. The funny thing is, they still haven’t gotten it.

Instead, a myriad of Wikileaks-esque sites have popped up the world over, including a spin-off called OpenLeaks, founded by former Wikileaks staffers.  The new site will partner with media organizations to share any leaks it may acquire.

Forbes.com blogger Andy Greenberg spoke with Daniel Domscheit-Berg, founder of OpenLeaks, who said, “To constrain the power of the site, we’re splitting submission from the publication part. We won’t publish any documents ourselves. The whole field is diversified… We want to be a neutral conduit.”

In addition, it isn’t just hackers and journalists leaking anymore.

Anonymous, the amorphous blob of Internet-dwelling activists has even begun their own leaking system. In the past month, Anonymous has been disseminating emails from HB Gary, a security firm hired by the FBI to gather information on Anonymous members, as well as various emails and documents from a former Bank of America employee that will allegedly detail wide-spread mortgage fraud.

Al Jazeera (naturally) is the first of the television media to set up a leaking system. In Jan. 2011, the satellite channel/international news website launched its Transparency Unit, which “aims to mobilize its audience – both in the Arab world and further afield – to submit all forms of content… We believe that this initiative will allow Al Jazeera’s supporters to shine light on notable and newsworthy government and corporate activities which might otherwise go unreported.”

The first leak from Al Jazeera is a batch of over 1,600 documents, The Palestine Papers, detailing the inner-workings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The Christian Science Monitor’s Ali Abuminah says, the Palestine Papers show the U.S. “is completely out of touch with the grim realities it has helped create in the region and unprepared to deal with the consequences,” among other surprising revelations.

The New York Times, clinging to the coattails of the changing media landscape, has suggested that they, too, might soon be hosting their own digital anonymous drop boxes for concerned citizens to leak incriminating documents into. Executive Editor Bill Keller told Yahoo News in January that after Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit launched, they too were “looking at something along those lines.”

Europe has also quickly caught on, with BrusslesLeaks, which is set to launch soon, and FrenchLeaks, which has already begun posting.

The Internet has spoken, and the message is clear: people want information. We’re hungry for it, and it was only a matter of time until we gave up waiting for the mainstream media to give it to us. We haven’t yet seen what all this leaking will do, but it’s optimistic.

In a word torn apart by corruption, wars, and a historical inability to get along diplomatically, it might just be Internet-based and distributed leaks that bring people together to stand up and demand what the media hasn’t been delivering: accountability.

What do you think of all this leaking? Is it helpful or hurtful? Tell me in the comments!