WikiLeaks has been all over the world news headlines this past week after the Daily Beast reported that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning released 260,000 classified documents to the controversial journalism network. Wired.com has followed up on story with reports about Manning’s conscience and WikiLeaks’ intention to provide him with legal help.

In related news, the Guardian reported on Friday that the FBI is looking for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, in hopes of preventing him from publishing those documents. But WikiLeaks has not yet confirmed that they actually received 260,000 internal Army documents — maybe because the U.S. government seems so concerned about the situation. Manning also claimed to have leaked the 2007 Apache helicopter video that I discussed here in April.

Apparentely The New Yorker chose a really good time to publish a 10,000-word feature about Julian Assange. The story “No Secrets” by Raffi Khatchadourian was published on 6/7/10, the day before the news broke about Manning. I’m extremely interested in Assange and the WikiLeaks organization, but I was still surprised when I got sucked into this article. Assange is a fascinating character — the type of person who you don’t usually hear about because governments hate him so much. But he’ll likely be an important figure in the time ahead, so I wanted to present excerpts from the story in a convenient run-down.

On the hope for a new “scientific journalism” and their approach to the Apache helicopter footage:

If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.’ Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film ‘Permission to Engage,’ but ultimately decided on something more forceful: ‘Collateral Murder.’ He told Gonggrijp, ‘We want to knock out this “collateral damage” euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think “collateral murder.”’

On Assange’s upbringing and self-directed education:

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. ‘I didn’t want their spirits broken,’ she told me. …[Assange] took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. ‘I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,’ he recalled.

This bit shows a prominent aspect of WikiLeaks in its formative stage. Assange was arrested in 1991 for hacking with a group that went by the name “The International Subversives”:

‘Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,’ Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. ‘He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.’

On Assanges’ budding life philosophy and the need for an organization that would foster information leaks:

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by ‘patronage networks’—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled ‘Conspiracy as Governance,’ which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in ‘collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.’ He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

On realizing the shortcomings of traditional journalism and mass media:

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—’a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,’ as he once put it. …in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, ‘We are not the press.’ He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, ‘the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.’

On WikiLeaks’ main objectives:

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, ‘Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.’ He has argued that a ‘social movement’ to expose secrets could ‘bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.’

On justifying the potential for damage:

At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important.

Khatchadourian’s skeptical remarks about the long-term tenacity of WikiLeaks:

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

On objective and subjective approaches to journalism:

‘It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,’ [Assange] told me. But he also said, ‘To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.’

You can read the entire feature here.

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Anyways, NPR makes it really easy to embed the voting screen, so you can do it right here! It’s probably not a huge mystery what I voted for: The Rum Diary, Big Sur, Lord of the Flies, and Heart of Darkness. I didn’t feel like voting for 10, and I’m not much for reading on the beach…

UPDATE 7/29/09: The winners were announced today. What do I have to say about it? As Mr. Horse often stated on Ren & Stimpy, “Hmmmmm…no sir, I don’t like it.” This list has almost zero connection to beaches except Jaws and (barely squeezed in at the 100th spot) Treasure Island. Nor are they short books — as in, convenient to take to the beach. Who the flip would pack Anna Karenina, a 1,000-page book, in their beach tote? The unsurprising top ten includes the Harry Pooper series and Bridget Jones. Whoopee. I guess even NPR’s book-reading audience isn’t too far removed from the general book-reading population. You won’t find me on their beach though…

I can’t even believe we’ve had six issues! Technically the six-month mark will be December 23, but that’s not too important. Anyways, the past six months haven’t seen too many changes to the look and feel of the site. It’s been more a of a long process of fine tunings. Still, I have so many plans for the site and so many ideas for improvements, but no funding — or web developer friends willing to redesign the site. Just a few of my ideas: creating a fully interactive community with profiles, tags, recommended content, cross-categorization of articles, and more.

I think Supraterranean will do just fine the way it is, but “just fine” isn’t enough for me. Anyways, I should be back to blogging in a few days, once things are cleared up over at MusicEdge. Have you joined us on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter? If not, please do! Twitter is turning out to be an especially valuable resource for sending daily updates to followers.

Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17254185263&ref=ts

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Supraterraneancom/51508395623?ref=ts

MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/supraterranean

Twitter page: http://twitter.com/supraterranean

In related news, Amazon BookSurge is the first source I’ve seen for self-publishing books. They claim to help with editing, design, publication, and promotion for independent authors. Also, they’ll work with the publishers and book stores so that you (the author) don’t have to. It seems like a great idea, very much in line with the concepts behind Supraterranean.com. I say, let’s take it to the extreme. Remove the literary agents and publishers of creative writing. The industry is build on absurd notions of only publishing what can be sold in mass quantities. Writers and artists need a community to learn and grow. Progress is now more self-directed than ever before.

Speaking of Supraterranean, I just wrote a press release for the site and put it on as many web PR sites as I could. Here is an excerpt:

“The Internet has opened the power of publishing to all. Or at least, that’s the hope. The web brought about an unexpected amount of interaction, cooperation, and sharing that has bolstered creativity on many levels. But the publishing industry has remained particularly static, with traditional stop gates still in place. Supraterranean wants to change that, so that the Internet continues to foster personal expression and cultural progress.”

Please do us a favor and send a release link to friends and family!

Links:

PR.com
Free Press Release
Widespread PR
I-Newswire.com

(Sorry this post was so random…but sometimes randomness is fun.)