Wikileaks Rest in Peace
Cryptome | 29.12.2010 17:36 | Free Spaces | Other Press | World
The original Wikileaks initiative is dead, replaced by a bloated apparatus promising 260,000 cables at slower than a snail's pace. At the rate of 20 cables a day it will take 13,000 days to finish -- some 35 years.
The original merits of Wikileaks have been lost in its transformation into a publicity and fund-raising vehicle for Julian Assange as indicated in the redesign website which billboards him.
The original merits of Wikileaks have been lost in its transformation into a publicity and fund-raising vehicle for Julian Assange as indicated in the redesign website which billboards him.
Its once invaluable, steady stream of documents, packaged in its own, no-frills format, is now a tiny dribble of documents apparently regulated by a compact with a few main stream media which amplify the material well beyond its significance. Days go by when nothing new is offered except outpouring of manufactured news about Assange and a slew of trivial news and bombastic commentaries for and against the initiative.
Will Wikileaks once again deliver its original promise or stay imprisoned in bombshells so beloved by the main stream media?
What happened to the back-log of submissions to Wikileaks? Thousands a week coming in, Assange claimed, for which he said there is no staff to process. What staff is needed to process a 3-20 cables a day?
OpenLeaks is said to be preparing release of the backlog, but it too is moving very slowly, its opening first scheduled in December 2010, now April 2011. Perhaps it too is short of staff and financial resources but it has not publicly stated that.
Assange and Domscheit-Berg are working on books, Assange to raise funds for his legal defense, that of Domscheit-Berg not openly disclosed.
Books are fund-raisers and require sophisticated publicity campaigns, disclosure of intent, deals described, amounts to be paid, the usual teasers about the contents. Neither of the two books promise to release submitted materials, only to describe the operation of Wikileaks, insiders accounts, what else. These are customarily works of fiction, aided by ghostwriters, editors, publicists, book designers, galley proofreaders, copies to reviewers, speaking engagements, book tours, dinner parties. Salted with dramatic examples of what will be "revealed for the first time."
What will be surprising will be revelations about the 1 million files Assange claimed to have in December 2006, what has not been published, what was sold on the black market, who the secret big funders are behind the public little ones, where the money has really gone beyond the Wau Holland partial account.
The race is on between Julian and Daniel as to who will hit the hustings first with yet another bombshell of publicity. Nothing new should be expected in this formulaic exploitation of evanescent celebrity. The spring season of book publishing is April.
Meanwhile the original purpose of Wikileaks is dead in the water. Thousands of mirror carasses floating on the Internet sea, none offering new material except the wee drops of cables which at the current rate will take require the passive sites to last decades when they could be offering material Wikileaks does not.
Except a series of bombshell releases can be expected as the book selling and fund-raising accelerates.
Don't expert ordinary submissions to compete with this all too predictable corporate-style juggernaut.
Wikileaks was once an alternative to conventional sources of information, no longer. Read its media page for how to qualify for business-as-usual participation.
There will be those who continue to milk the promise of Wikileaks, arguing vehemently for its protection and continuation, but not acknowledging in its current configuration sheltered by main stream partners it is not a threat or threatened -- standard bloviation of the media to magnify its importance. The shift of focus to Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo indicates the Assange threat angle is withering and needs to be goosed with journalistic and lawyerly flim-flam so common to awaken readers and juries dozing with disinterest.
A monument to The Original Wikileaks could be placed in the Newseum, in Washington, DC, unveiled in synchrony with the two tell-all books aborning, continuing a valiant PR effort initiated at the DC National Press Club -- in spring season April 2010.
A lasting benefit of the death of Wikileaks is that other initiatives have learned from its experience to do better and not settle for the comfortable entombment of Wikileaks disembodied by Julian Assange on a country estate perfect for mourning.
Will Wikileaks once again deliver its original promise or stay imprisoned in bombshells so beloved by the main stream media?
What happened to the back-log of submissions to Wikileaks? Thousands a week coming in, Assange claimed, for which he said there is no staff to process. What staff is needed to process a 3-20 cables a day?
OpenLeaks is said to be preparing release of the backlog, but it too is moving very slowly, its opening first scheduled in December 2010, now April 2011. Perhaps it too is short of staff and financial resources but it has not publicly stated that.
Assange and Domscheit-Berg are working on books, Assange to raise funds for his legal defense, that of Domscheit-Berg not openly disclosed.
Books are fund-raisers and require sophisticated publicity campaigns, disclosure of intent, deals described, amounts to be paid, the usual teasers about the contents. Neither of the two books promise to release submitted materials, only to describe the operation of Wikileaks, insiders accounts, what else. These are customarily works of fiction, aided by ghostwriters, editors, publicists, book designers, galley proofreaders, copies to reviewers, speaking engagements, book tours, dinner parties. Salted with dramatic examples of what will be "revealed for the first time."
What will be surprising will be revelations about the 1 million files Assange claimed to have in December 2006, what has not been published, what was sold on the black market, who the secret big funders are behind the public little ones, where the money has really gone beyond the Wau Holland partial account.
The race is on between Julian and Daniel as to who will hit the hustings first with yet another bombshell of publicity. Nothing new should be expected in this formulaic exploitation of evanescent celebrity. The spring season of book publishing is April.
Meanwhile the original purpose of Wikileaks is dead in the water. Thousands of mirror carasses floating on the Internet sea, none offering new material except the wee drops of cables which at the current rate will take require the passive sites to last decades when they could be offering material Wikileaks does not.
Except a series of bombshell releases can be expected as the book selling and fund-raising accelerates.
Don't expert ordinary submissions to compete with this all too predictable corporate-style juggernaut.
Wikileaks was once an alternative to conventional sources of information, no longer. Read its media page for how to qualify for business-as-usual participation.
There will be those who continue to milk the promise of Wikileaks, arguing vehemently for its protection and continuation, but not acknowledging in its current configuration sheltered by main stream partners it is not a threat or threatened -- standard bloviation of the media to magnify its importance. The shift of focus to Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo indicates the Assange threat angle is withering and needs to be goosed with journalistic and lawyerly flim-flam so common to awaken readers and juries dozing with disinterest.
A monument to The Original Wikileaks could be placed in the Newseum, in Washington, DC, unveiled in synchrony with the two tell-all books aborning, continuing a valiant PR effort initiated at the DC National Press Club -- in spring season April 2010.
A lasting benefit of the death of Wikileaks is that other initiatives have learned from its experience to do better and not settle for the comfortable entombment of Wikileaks disembodied by Julian Assange on a country estate perfect for mourning.
Cryptome
Homepage:
http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-rip.htm
Comments
Hide the following 11 comments
Life after Death?
29.12.2010 18:45
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/21/wikileaks-cables-british-police-bangladesh-death-squad
Ashe
@ Ashe
29.12.2010 19:00
Despite the fact that there are so many cables unreported, the Guardian seems to have decided to have Christmas off.
In many ways Assange has become more of a story than the contents of the cables, which is why the corporate media are not the best vehicle for getting the story out.
wikileeches
What a strange post.
29.12.2010 20:43
anon
What a strange comment
29.12.2010 20:50
Did you read the article anon?
'At the (current) rate of 20 cables a day it will take 13,000 days to finish -- some 35 years.
I hope not to live that long.....
Mind you I could always find out the juicy bits in the book that Assange has got over $1m to write.
I certainly would not leak anything toWikileaks (TM) now, and nor do I think that the high level of gatekeeping involved in publishing the leaks in anyway qualifies them as 'Information heroes'.
nona
@nona
30.12.2010 02:22
Sorry, but this doesn't make sense. And if I replace "expert" with "expect", it's still nonsense - but of a different type.
So please don't tell people to read the article if it doesn't even make sense in the first place.
Krop
krop
30.12.2010 09:23
"Except a series of bombshell releases can be expected as the book selling and fund-raising accelerates.
Don't expect ordinary submissions to compete with this all too predictable corporate-style juggernaut"
Cryptome existed a decade before wikileaks as a site for leaks, and it continues to believe that its job is to provide a platform for 'open leaks', rather than a limited platform, in a 'business relationship' with the corporate media and with its 'top people' vying to get their books out first.
I'd say that cryptome and Indymedia have more in common than Indymedia and wikileaks do.
pork
Learn more of the facts before picking sides that don't exist
31.12.2010 09:02
Cryptome is John Young website, it doesn't believe anything, Young does. Okay, Deborah Natsios is credited with it too, but that's it, there are just two of them on it. Young does make it his job to leak stuff but that doesn't mean he thinks that it is solely his job like you seem to say.
Young was approached to front WikiLeaks because he has done such a good job on his own, and his criticisms should be listened to more carefully than any of the other recent criticism of Wikileaks, but it would be silly for anyone who isn't involved with either endeavor to pick sides.
"I'd say that cryptome and Indymedia have more in common than Indymedia and wikileaks do"
You say that, but you don't say why, or what criteria you are using. Since Indymedia is not a leaks website to any real degree it's like comparing Indymedia to a bus or a train. Like Indymedia, Wikileaks is a run by a large number of people and read by a large number of people, and that isn't true of Cryptome. Numbers in itself is a degree of bullet-proofing, but both Crytome and Indymedia are vunerable to legal 'take down' notices.
Wikileaks was the best place to submit the BNP list to. Links were posted here to blogs that were offline before most people read the article or comment, and Wikileaks was one the one stable place to find it. Everyone had back up copies of the list, and there are endless way today to spread information. I don't know if John Young would've even been interested in publishing that. Wikileaks was obviously the best of the three sites for the Iraq video and the Afghan leaks, and assuming that they got that information at the same time as the cables I think they did the anti-war movement a service by publishing those before the cables.
As for the cables, if Wikileaks was to release them all, directly and unredacted, then all their volunteers would be at greater risk than Assange is. There were US calls and attempts to charge them with terrorism for releasing the Afghan files with unredacted information identifying informants and guilty US and UK army groups. It seems legitimate to sieve the cables through mainstream media to isolate Wikileaks from the blowback - although they are still taking a severe battering from the state, and tellingly from corporations.
Things stated getting interesting at the start of 2010For anyone who reads these three websites and 'other press'. In January, Wikileaks published a diplomatic cable about Iceland, which Adrian Lamo (police informer and friend of Kevin Poulson of Wired Magazine) alleges was Bradley Mannings 'test document'. Whether that is true or not, the US at that point would have known that one of the three million users of their network was passing stuff on to Wikileaks, and they seemingly never restricted access to stop that.
In February Wikileaks published a US memo outlining it's attempts to target Wikileaks, and shelved it's previous leaks to publish only the new ones and to start fundraising heavily. At the same time, Crytome was downed by Microsoft lawyers over their government spying policy, the Microsoft removed the shutdown a few days after. Those two facts will be related, if only in that the US government and corporations were seemingly acting together against those sites and make them both seem dodgy. Poulson started downplaying Wikileaks on Wired, and his spoon-fed government PR pieces have been exposed, including by Glenn Greenwald in Salon. but not in the mainstream which accepts it as the narrative.
Danny
Key 'Insurance'
31.12.2010 09:57
Danny
Go away Assange
01.01.2011 08:54
Wankers
PISS OFF
Horace
Horray! Keep up the good work!
01.01.2011 12:28
Yes there is alot of work to do redacting.
-Although i think they'll end up data-dumping it, after Mannings trial.
Yes there is a massive backlog of documents, including fake ones, which are hard to confirm if they are genuine.
The upcoming OpenLeaks has the right idea.
-Not being the publisher, for it is a legal minefield.
-Not being media tarts, for its a very dangerous game.
Infact I think all anarchos should activly reject "rights&resonsiblities"!
nice!
ps. If wikileaks has anything on protests, IMC server sezure, etc, we want it!
pps. If Open Leaks wants to email indymedia docs we WILL happily publish relevant articles!
Nicola
No gurly sex available for ego monsters at Indymedia.uk
01.01.2011 20:03
Mr Assange