How WikiLeaks Gags Its Own Staff

robbyyy writes "The New Statesman has just revealed the extent of the legal eccentricity and paranoia that exists at the WikiLeaks organization. The magazine published a leaked copy of the draconian and extraordinary legal gag which WikiLeaks imposes on its own staff. Clause 5 of the Confidentiality Agreement (PDF) imposes a penalty of £12,000,000 (approximately $20,000,000) on anyone who breaches this legal gag. Sounds like they don't trust their own staff."

Comments

I like it!

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I wonder how they like their documents being leaked. It would make my year if they sued over this.

Re:I like it!

[tnk1]

I'll agree with the "unable to satisfy all critics" part. If you're not pissing someone off, you're doing it wrong.

However, the criticism that they tend to get is actually rather important. It comes down to much larger questions of what happens when you have someone freely leaking information who are not even tangentially responsible to the greater community.

On one hand, there's no doubt that stuff gets hidden as classified for unacceptable reasons.

On the other hand, just because people haven't been hurt yet, doesn't mean it can't happen. Half the data that an intelligence analyst looks at would be considered to be mundane, boring, or even pointless by untrained and uninformed people. A detail that seems unimportant and not dangerous to you may actually be extremely important. Having that information thrown to a group of volunteer outsiders who have no responsibility to anyone but themselves means that there is a higher chance that adequate care will not be taken, or even *cannot* be taken with that data.

Don't get me wrong, I like seeing stuff like this, and I am not against seeing more leaks, but some of the criticism of what they have been doing is very spot on. The question is, can the leakers control themselves to a degree where the fact that people haven't been killed isn't just good luck, because that's what the low level of review of previously reviewed material has meant so far. As it stands, I imagine that some intelligence agencies are already quietly capitalizing on some of the things that came out in the diplomatic messages. You know that at least a few subjects of the candid reports are probably more than a little pissed at the US right now, and when world leaders get pissed, bad things happen.

Re:Wow

[CCarrot]

It's neither hypocritical nor ironic. They've never said that they would provide all the documents without redaction, in fact they've gone to great lengths to redact information that's not necessary and would be likely to reveal the sources.

Sounds like they want to be the only ones who determine when information is 'necessary'. Redaction to prevent source identification, that I can understand, but if one of their employees feels the redaction marker has been applied a bit too liberally? What recourse then...release it to Wikileaks? Oh, wait...