Wikileaks ist die erste staatenlose Nachrichtenorganisation

Jay Rosen schreibt anlässlich der Afghanistan-Protokolle über Wikileaks(via) und bezeichnet Wikileaks als die erste staatenlose Nachrichtenorganisation:

If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system.

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If you’re a whistle blower with explosive documents, to whom would you rather give them? A newspaper with a terrestrial address organized under the laws of a nation that could try to force the reporter you contacted to reveal your name, and that may or may not run the documents you’ve delivered to them online…. or Wikileaks, which has no address, answers no subpoenas and promises to run the full cache if they can be verified as real? (And they’re expert in encryption, too.)

(Hervorhebungen von mir)

Die Implikationen sind immens.

Lesenswert auch, wie im Grunde immer, die Analyse der Vorgänge im Nieman Journalism Lab:

The release of the Wikileaks stories yesterday was a classic case study of the new ecosystem of news diffusion. More complex than the usual stereotype of “journalists report, bloggers opine,” in the case the Wikileaks story we got to see a far more nuanced (and, I would say, far more real) series of news decisions unfold: from new fact-gatherers, to news organizations in a different position in the informational chain, all the way to the Twittersphere in which conversation about the story was occurring in real-time, back to the bloggers, the opinion makers, the partisans, the politicians, and the hacks. This is how news works in 2010; let’s try to map it.

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To understand the world of Wikileaks, and what it means for journalism, you have to understand the world of geeks, of hackers, and of techno-dissidents. Understanding reporting and reporters isn’t enough.