Wikileaks_Article

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian'currentPage=all http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/open-letter-next-edward-snowden The first article that I read opened up on a background note from one of the most important leaks that occurred in Wikileaks. It opened with the reporter being in Iceland talking to Assange along with Icelandic activists. The activists were discussing one of the first things leaked by Bradley Manning to Wikileaks, which was a video from an American apache helicopter in Iraq. The video was called “Collateral Damage and it was shot from the gun camera of an Attack helicopter that attacked unarmed civilians on an Iraqi street, including a van with children in it and two Reuters cameramen. That video was what really began to put Wikileaks into the international spotlight. One of the most intriguing parts of Wikileaks is their security, and the article does a good job at covering this. Wikileaks, through assange’s design, have created a system in which their website and the content posted, cannot be taken down. According to Assange, Wikileaks has over 20 servers all over the world that stores it’s content and hundreds of domain names in order to run mirror sites. These mirror sites are necessary so that if one domain that holds the data is hacked or taken down, then another can take over immediately to prevent censorship. Those measures were necessary because as Wikileaks began to leak more and more information about people and governments all over the world and not just the US government, they began to be threatened with litigation by numerous people. The article covers how groups ranging from a British bank that had an embarrassing memo published to Kenyan politicians who had their president exposed as a thief, threatened to sue Assange for whatever charge they could thing up. The article does a good job describing how Assange essentially tells them all to stick it. By doing this, he created a persona of someone who would not bow down to anyone, a transparency superhero per say. The article did a very good job in covering the experience of Assange during certain parts of his work such as when he and his team were preparing to present the collateral damage video. The writer describes how he and his team had to decrypt the file, after three months, they did it, and when they did, they all gathered around to watch the chilling video. The video consisted of static audio and pilots talking to each other and not hesitating to open up with their full auto cannon on civilians even without on the ground confirmation of who they were firing on. It seemed as if the pilots could not even see what was happening through their own camera but just decided that the because the Iraqi civilians were congregating together, they must be insurgents. The writer did a good job of describing this as part of his overall description of what Assange was fighting for. He was trying to show that Assange was fighting for greater accountability for actions like those and in that, the greater good. Assange wanted to use information transparency to keep this from happening ever again. The next article that I read was in the format of a letter but it was in reality a message about what Edward Snowden did and why he did it. The author appeals to future whistleblowers like Edward Snowden by reminding them of why Snowden leaked the documents in the first place. He leaked them because as he worked in the intelligence community with such intimate knowledge of how the surveillances programs worked he began to see what they were capable of. The author then continued to show how because of his understanding of PRISM and the other US surveillance programs, Snowden began to realize how wrong they were and the need to show the public how they were being spied on. The author does this as a way to inspire more and more people to blow the whistle on injustice that they can find in government. The author wants to inspire those future people into blowing the whistle by appealing to their moral side and pushing them to be courageous and to ignore the risks but to think about the greater good first, which is what he wants us to think Snowden thought as well. The article also discusses how blowing the whistle on injustice and government wrongdoings is not something that can be associated with one political group or another but something that all people can come around to. Whether they be liberal, conservative, libertarian, or something else, they should not think of their cause as one that is associated with their political beliefs but with the moral beliefs of the majority of others. Furthermore, the article discusses how Snowden managed to be David in the David versus Goliath and has been winning since. It talks about how even though there were hundreds of thousands of employees in the intelligence community, with billions upon billions of dollars backing them against him, that he still managed to succeed in his objective. It shows that he turned that enormity of the system against it and he used it to acquire massive amounts of documents that he eventually leaked. That turning of the system against it was part of the article’s goal of encouraging a future Snowden to come out of those hundreds of thousands and tell the world what else has been hidden. The article justifies this encouragement by pointing out that telling the people about what the government is doing involving their surveillance is necessary in order to allow the people to fight back against totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and a police state. It wants the future whistleblower to look at what they see and if they see anything that could lead to this, to tell people about it so that it could be stopped and to ensure other future whistleblower’s rights to do the same thing they had.