place.
Each news organisation grappled with the ethical issues involved in such contacts – and in the overall decision to publish – in different ways. I was interested, a few days after the start of the Cablegate release, to receive an email from Max Frankel, who had overseen the defence of the
1. My view has almost always been that information which wants to get out will get out; our job is to receive it responsibly and to publish or not by our own unvarying news standards.
2. If the source or informant violates his oath of office or the law, we should leave it to the authorities to try to enforce their law or oath, without our collaboration. We reject collaboration or revelation of our sources for the larger reason that ALL our sources deserve to know that they are protected with us. It is, however, part of our obligation to reveal the biases and apparent purposes of the people who leak or otherwise disclose information.
3. If certain information seems to defy the standards proclaimed by the supreme court in the Pentagon papers case – ie that publication will cause direct, immediate and irreparable damage – we have an obligation to limit our publication appropriately. If in doubt, we should give appropriate authority a chance to persuade us that such direct and immediate danger exists. (See our 24-hour delay of discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba as described in my autobiography, or our delay in reporting planes lost in combat until the pilots can perhaps be rescued.)
4. For all other information, I have always believed that no one can reliably predict the consequences of publication. The Pentagon papers, contrary to Ellsberg’s wish, did not shorten the Vietnam war or stir significant additional protest. A given disclosure may embarrass government but improve a policy, or it may be a leak by the government itself and end up damaging policy. “Publish and be damned,” as Scotty Reston used to say; it sounds terrible but as a journalistic motto it has served our society well through history.
There have been many longer treatises on the ethics of journalism which have said less.
One of the lessons from the WikiLeaks project is that it has shown the possibilities of collaboration. It’s difficult to think of any comparable example of news organisations working together in the way the
The story is far from over. In the UK there was only muted criticism of the
It appears to have been another story in the US, where there was a more bitter and partisan argument, clouded by differing ideas of patriotism. It was astonishing to sit in London reading of reasonably mainstream American figures calling for the assassination of Assange for what he had unleashed. It was surprising to see the widespread reluctance among American journalists to support the general ideal and work of WikiLeaks. For some it simply boiled down to a reluctance to admit that Assange was a journalist.
Whether this attitude would change were Assange ever to be prosecuted is an interesting matter for speculation. In early 2011 there were signs of increasing frustration on the part of US government authorities in scouring the world for evidence to use against him, including the subpoena of Twitter accounts. But there was also, among cooler legal heads, an appreciation that it would be virtually impossible to prosecute Assange for the act of publication of the war logs or state department cables without also putting five editors in the dock. That would be the media case of the century.
And, of course, we have yet to hear an unmediated account from the man alleged to be the true source of the material, Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old US army private. Until then no complete story of the leak that changed the world can really be written. But this is a compelling first chapter in a story which, one suspects, is destined to run and run.
London, 1 February 2011
Alan Rusbridger is the editor of the
CHAPTER 1
The Hunt
Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, England
November 2010
“
JAMES BALL, WIKILEAKS
Glimpsed in the half-light of a London evening, the figure might just have passed for female. She emerged cautiously from a doorway and folded herself into a battered red car. There were a few companions – among them a grim-visaged man with Nordic features and a couple of nerdy youngsters. One appeared to have given the old woman her coat. The car weaved through the light Paddington traffic, heading north in the direction of Cambridge. As they proceeded up the M11 motorway the occupants peered back. There was no obvious sign of pursuit. Nonetheless, they periodically pulled off the road into a lay-by and waited – lights killed – in the gloom. Apparently undetected, the group headed eastward along the slow A143 road. By 10pm they had reached the flatlands of East Anglia, a sepia landscape where the occasional disused sugar factory hulked out of the blackness.
Fifteen miles inland, at the unremarkable village of Ellingham, they finally turned left. The car skidded on a driveway, and drove past an ancient dovecote before stopping in front of a grand Georgian manor house. The woman stepped from the car. There was something odd about her. She had a kind of hump! If a CIA agent or some other observer were hidden in the woodland along with the pheasants, they could have been forgiven for a moment of puzzlement.
Close up, however, it was obvious that this strange figure was Julian Assange, his platinum hair concealed by a wig. At more than 6ft tall, he was never going to be a very convincing female. “You can’t imagine how ridiculous it was,” WikiLeaks’ James Ball later said. “He’d stayed dressed up as an old woman for more than two hours.” Assange was swapping genders in a pantomime attempt to evade possible pursuers. With him were also his young aide, Sarah Harrison, and his deputy, the Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson. On that evening, this small team was the nucleus of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website Assange had launched four years earlier.
