In a guest post for the Online Journalism Blog, Natalie Leal reports on Day 2 of the Logan Symposium on secrecy, surveillance and censorship. You can find a post about Day 1 here.
The surprise of the Logan Symposium‘s second day was the appearance of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked those documents in 1971. “Secrets are not kept so much by technical means but by people,” he said. Continue reading
Illustration by Leonard Leslie Brooke, from Wikimedia Commons
Cross-posted from XCity Magazine
The future of journalism, according to The Guardian’s ‘3 Little Pigs’ film, is “open journalism”. Users are becoming part of every element of news production. The newsroom no longer has walls.
If that is going to happen then journalists need to huff, and puff, and blow down three particular houses of our own: our preconceptions around the sources that we use online; around why people contribute to the news process; and about how we protect our sources. Continue reading
Computerworld reports on plans by Wikileaks to allow “newspapers, human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed an “upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks” form onto their Web sites”.
“We will take the burden of protecting the source and the legal risks associated with publishing the document,” said Julien Assange, an advisory board member at Wikileaks, in an interview at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
It’s a first class idea that addresses two major problems with investigative journalism: the risk of legal costs in pursuing investigations; and the need to build relationships between potential whistleblowers and Wikileaks’ technology.
In a nutshell, it’s a networked solution that piggybacks on the trust, relationships and audience built by publishers, NGOs and bloggers, and distributes the technology of Wikileaks so that users aren’t expected to come to them.
Online Journalism Blog 