Hopes & Fears: Recapping Wikileaks
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"If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature." And if Julian Assange's soundbite-worthy maxim rings true, then his brainchild WikiLeaks is a masterpiece of form. Since its 2006 inception in Iceland by a ragtag multinational team of hackers and dissidents, the rogue media organization and its charismatic founder/spokesperson have attracted a remarkable degree of controversy, as well as praise. Founded as a means by which whistleblowers could anonymously submit content exposing corruption and injustice, WikiLeaks has published and contextualized millions of documents, including national intelligence agency reports and internal communications of global corporations and banks. With the release of the notorious “Collateral Murder” video in 2010, WikiLeaks erupted into the mainstream media, admired by free-press advocates and condemned by the United States government and other global powers. That year would prove to be a watershed for the organization and its leader; while WikiLeaks scored a succession of high-impact releases, Assange’s megalomaniacal tendencies and apparent aversion to harm-reduction methods resulted in conflicts both professional and personal.
Now, just in time for a blockbuster 2015 summer - and coinciding with Assange’s three-year anniversary of confinement under asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy - WikiLeaks has followed a period of relative inactivity with multiple epic releases containing troves of global import. In just the past two months, WikiLeaks has published chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a secretly-negotiated regulatory and investment agreement; a complete draft of the similarly-opaque Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) - an accomplishment humbly referred to by WikiLeaks as a “modern journalistic holy grail”; “Espionnage Élysée,” a collection of documents pertaining to the surveillance of three consecutive French administrations by the United States; and “The Saudi Cables,” hundreds of thousands of internal communications from the Saudi Foreign Ministry. While the impact of these latest releases has yet to be determined, a dramatic return to the global spotlight provides an opportune time for reflecting on the exposés of WikiLeaks - the shocking, the revelatory, and the mundane.
-Read more: http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/214899-recapping-wikileaks-the-bold-and-frivolous-moves-of-a-radical-organization ...thoughts?
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