The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  In sum, WikiLeaks matters. But what is it, how did it come to play such an important role, and what is its significance for political mobilization and news making?

  Leaking, Publishing, Producing, Mobilizing: WikiLeaks as a Hybrid Media Actor

  WikiLeaks sits within broader networks of affinity. It is steeped in the traditions of libertarian hacker culture and the free and open source software movement. It is influenced by the technologically enabled transnational leftist movements that were first established during the 1990s by environmentalists, feminists, anarchists, and human rights groups. For all the talk of WikiLeaks being a virtual online network, face-to-face interaction has always been an important aspect of its operation. The hacker-run Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) headquarters in Berlin have provided space for meetings of its activists (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 1, para. 17). The CCC’s annual Chaos Communication Congress and its numerous workshops and events provided a platform for Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and others to spread the word and solicit technological expertise and donations. The CCC has also been a key player in developing the structure through which WikiLeaks is funded. WikiLeaks is a nonprofit, but it operates according to a slightly unusual arrangement: its staff are not paid directly but are permitted to claim expenses for running the organization from the Wau-Holland-Stiftung, a German charity (Wau-Holland-Stiftung, 2011). This budget is organized under five headings: “infrastructure, campaigns, travel expenses, legal advice, and remunerations.” Infrastructure covers technology costs. Campaign costs include editorial work, verifying and anonymizing data, and media production associated with major leaks. Claims for costs associated with legal advice are restricted to the organization; individuals are not entitled to these funds. Remunerations to “only a few heads of project and activists” are “based on the remuneration scheme of Greenpeace” (Wau-Holland-Stiftung, 2011).

  Some of the weaknesses of WikiLeaks’ hybrid role as news maker, technology platform provider, and activist movement are illustrated by its constant financial worries. An e-mail sent to previous donors in 2009 mistakenly contained a list of addresses in the cc: field. It was reported to have contained only 58 names. Previous insider Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s book mentions a donor list of 106 people (Cryptome, 2011; Singel, 2009) but by August 2009 one of WikiLeaks’ several PayPal accounts contained only $35,000 (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 6, para. 4). Whether the number of donors was 58 or 106, one thing is clear: until the headline-making leaks of 2010, WikiLeaks struggled to attract significant financial support. Even the increase in donations during the big leaks of 2010 were insufficient to put it on a more permanent and sustainable footing.

  Various solutions to the funding problems were proposed. There were ongoing discussions about whether the organization should shift to a more permanent charitable model, a move resisted by Assange (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 10, para. 42). Wealthy individual donors were approached, including George Soros, the billionaire financier. In 2009, Domscheit-Berg and Assange submitted a proposal to a program funded by the Knight Foundation, a U.S.-based charitable body, to no avail. The publicity surrounding the 9/11 pager leaks of 2009 and a subsequent keynote appearance by Assange at the Chaos Communication Congress brought in around $200,000 in donations. This enabled Assange to pay some expenses to the core WikiLeaks team and it enabled the WikiLeaks network to renew some of its computer hardware (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 10, para. 31). The Collateral Murder film release of April 2010, which showed U.S. helicopter gunmen killing twelve people (including two Reuters journalists) in Baghdad provided an opportunity to raise donations in the form of rights payments from television stations eager to broadcast the video on their news bulletins (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 13, para. 21). Assange and Domscheit-Berg also offered exclusive interviews in return for donations: the Washington Post reported in November 2010 that WikiLeaks had offered the Wall Street Journal and CNN access to the embassy cables on the basis of a confidentiality agreement that would see WikiLeaks receive a payment of $100,000 if that agreement was broken (Farhi, 2010).

  The press and broadcast coverage of the momentous leaks of 2010 generated an increase in donations and by the end of the year WikiLeaks had received a total of €1.33 million, or about $1.85 million. A fraction over half of these donations were direct bank transfers; the rest were received in the form of 25,755 individual PayPal payments. The average PayPal donation was just $36. The April 2010 Collateral Murder film generated a monthly spike in PayPal donors: 6,359 payments contributed to a total of almost $242,000 that month alone. This was enough to enable Assange to start to build a more permanent structure for WikiLeaks, or something like it, complete with salaried positions for staff. November and December 2010 also saw significant sums raised through PayPal—$69,000 and $146,000 respectively—but these need to be set in context alongside bad months like May 2010 ($14,000) and September 2010 ($5,000) (Wau-Holland-Stiftung, 2011). As 2010 drew to a close and allegations of sexual misconduct were brought by the Swedish prosecutor against Assange and PayPal decided to freeze WikiLeaks’ account following pressure from the U.S. government, donations via bank transfer increased substantially. Despite the fact that Assange was forbidden by the Wau-Holland rules from accessing these funds for “individual-related legal advice or legal representation in court proceedings” (Wau-Holland-Stiftung, 2011) over $560,000 was raised through this mechanism in December 2010 alone. Assange’s personal projected legal costs were estimated at £400,000 in 2011 (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 18, para. 17). In a bid to cover these costs, in late December 2010 he negotiated a contract and deals with thirty-eight publishers around the world to produce his autobiography, and he handed the advance over to the legal team who were fighting the Swedish authorities’ attempts to extradite him. Assange’s book was published in late 2011 and he immediately disowned it and announced publicly that he had attempted to prevent its publication by withdrawing from his publishing contract (Assange, 2011). At the time of this writing (March 2017), the outcome of the legal appeal process against Assange’s extradition is still unknown.

  WikiLeaks’ financial base has therefore always been extremely precarious and even the increase in donations during 2010 was insufficient to put it on a more permanent and sustainable footing. But to what extent does the funding actually matter?

  Internet and mobile communication have been absolutely central to WikiLeaks’ routine operation and publishing strategy. Encrypted Jabber IRC chat rooms are key sites of daily decision making, encrypted e-mail provides links between the key organizers, and the website evolved over time into a secure network of servers installed by local volunteers in several countries (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 10, para. 10). Skype is used in preference to ordinary telephone lines (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 4, para. 11). Non-networked encrypted notebook computers are routinely used to transport leaked data. After long periods of rather chaotic instability, this system gradually acquired enough capacity to deal with large amounts of leaked data and the several million web hits per day that have become common during major releases. Web hosting was deliberately placed in the hands of PRQ, a company based in Sweden, where there is a relatively liberal free-speech tradition and a comparatively strong record of resisting internet censorship (Khatchadourian, 2010). Established by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two founders of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent directory, PRQ specializes in protecting the identity and security of its users.

  This infrastructure for leaking is buttressed by technologies that have evolved over the last decade, bolted together to provide anonymity for whistleblowers: SSL, secure FTP, FreeNet secure peer-to-peer networks, numerous prepaid mobile phone SIM cards, satellite pagers, CryptoPhone mobile devices, and Tor, the volunteer-driven secure network protocol (United States Army Counterintelligence Center, 2008). These technologies enshrine in code WikiLeaks’ founding credo: the identity of leakers, in all of its digital traces, is to remain entirely hidden, even from WikiLeaks staff (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 14, para.
16).

  Based upon multiple web servers scattered across a range of legal jurisdictions, as well as distributed peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, WikiLeaks’ publishing infrastructure also has built-in redundancy and can be quickly mobilized by volunteers to counter legal or hacking attacks on the main site (Arthur, 2010; Brian, 2010). The significance of this redundancy was first demonstrated in 2008 when the Julius Bär bank successfully persuaded a California court to order that the wikileaks.org domain should be removed from the domain name system (DNS). The servers hosting the documents remained online, however, and, in an early example of the growing interpenetration of WikiLeaks and the professional media, the New York Times and CBS News published the leak site’s IP address. This quickly circulated across social media sites and allowed the public to continue to access the site until the domain was reinstated ten days later. During the November 2010 embassy cables leak WikiLeaks’ main site was again removed from the DNS by its registration company, EveryDNS, on the grounds, the company said, that the massive distributed denial of service attacks aimed at bringing down the WikiLeaks site were affecting its other customers. A new Swiss mirror domain, wikileaks.ch soon appeared (Arthur, 2010). Within a couple of weeks, the total number of mirrors reached 1,885 (Brian, 2010). Impressive, but also partly irrelevant, for the cables had already been widely distributed via the peer-to-peer BitTorrent network. This publishing infrastructure has also made it easier to quickly release private correspondence and legal threats provoked by WikiLeaks’ data leaks. WikiLeaks soon developed an informal rule that it would always seek to publish the particularly aggressive responses to its leaks (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 17, para. 43). The belief that it is the duty of WikiLeaks to provoke the subject of a leak to file a lawsuit on the grounds that this will provide more publicity for the leak itself makes for a radically destabilizing approach, one not characteristic of traditional news media.

  WikiLeaks is, therefore, a sociotechnical system, whose affordances provide both structure and agency for its principle of anonymity. It rests upon a keen awareness of how the internet has changed the traditional dynamics of source-journalist relations during whistle-blowing. The internal infrastructure is suited to communication at a distance, among small groups, on highly specialized subjects, involving large amounts of digital data that must be quickly moved across international borders. And the desire to be “a neutral submission platform, pure technology” (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 17, para. 19) initially marked it out as radically different from a strong current in traditional investigative journalism, where knowing information about a source has been a key part of verifying a leak. A leaked U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center report of 2008 described this leaking and publishing infrastructure as displaying “a high level of technical capability and resourcefulness” (United States Army Counterintelligence Center, 2008).

  All this gives the impression of a slick and well-organized entity, but this is far from the truth. The principle of total anonymity through pure technology has been applied only selectively. For example, in May 2009 WikiLeaks volunteers actively solicited information by compiling a public wiki listing their “most wanted leaks” (WikiLeaks, 2009a). Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding report that Adrian Lamo (the hacker whom U.S. soldier Bradley Manning is alleged to have informed of his alleged role in leaking the embassy cables in 2010) claims that Assange “developed a relationship” with Manning and established encrypted FTP channels for him to upload materials (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 6, paras. 13–15). In other words, the total anonymity-pure technology principle has sometimes been dropped in the interests of the safe delivery of verifiable leaks. WikiLeaks has constantly mutated. It has shifted its mode of operation, selectively applied aspects of its self-created sociotechnical system, and even before the leaks of 2010 it sometimes behaved more like a team of traditional investigative journalists on the hunt for whistle-blowers.

  WikiLeaks has therefore been polymorphous, chaotic, often reliant upon the personal resources of its key protagonists, and sometimes slow to live up to its own ideals. Constantly beset by technical problems—it went offline completely for a month in the winter of 2009–2010 and its archive remained inaccessible for a further six months—the picture that emerges from the accounts of Assange and Domscheit-Berg is of small groups of volunteers lurching from crisis to crisis. Domscheit-Berg claims that during his involvement, which ended in the autumn of 2010, it was a network of “around eight hundred volunteer experts” but there was no effective way of integrating their efforts, particularly when it came to verifying leaks (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 17, para. 14, Ch. 21, para. 13).

  Minimal volunteer participation stems from an absence of governance mechanisms suitable for building trust in what are usually decentralized and fleeting online encounters. There is an essential contradiction at the heart of WikiLeaks: how is it possible for a distributed army of volunteers to safeguard secrets? Even the WikiLeaks name itself is partly misleading. The organization began as a traditional wiki and it developed an e-mail distribution list, but open online co-creation has seldom been a meaningful part of its operations due to the need for absolute secrecy and expert judgments on how to edit and distribute leaked materials. The e-mail list members have mostly been inactive (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 2, paras. 28–29).

  Yet it is equally important not to lose sight of some of the key strengths of this operation. WikiLeaks has exploited digital technologies’ capacity for enabling very small groups and even individuals to project substantial organizational power. In their external communication they have referred to personnel in the “tech department” or “legal services,” and according to Domscheit-Berg he and Assange established e-mail inboxes under pseudonyms to convey the impression that there was a bigger permanent staff (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 2, para. 24). Despite its patched-together and contingent nature, nothing approaching WikiLeaks’ infrastructure has existed in the world of mainstream media. This assemblage of secure hardware, encryption software, networks of interdependent sources, activists, and journalists is WikiLeaks. Sporadic bursts of volunteer activity and donations aside, this sociotechnical system is effectively what has enabled it to function as a global news-making entity without a central headquarters and staff. By 2010, WikiLeaks had a working policy of verifying leaks, a 350,000-strong e-mail list (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 2, para. 43), and it was able to draw upon the network resources of Anonymous, the online hacktivist network. Assange has occasionally been able to mobilize the volunteer labor of hundreds and sometimes thousands of others. For example, the 9/11 pager messages were mirrored across volunteers’ servers in 2009 and there was a large-scale distributed effort to redact information from the Afghan war logs via a web-based system that had been custom-built by WikiLeaks technical staff in 2010 (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 10, para. 16).

  WikiLeaks’ organizational structure is therefore best seen as an array of overlapping circles of constantly changing size, in the middle of which is Assange as “editor-in-chief,” surrounded by the “core team.” Daily operations are managed by a small number of key players. The most important members of the core team have been activists—a mix of anarchists, greens, and libertarian hackers interested in internet and information policy issues—but the personnel has quite frequently changed and has often included trained journalists. Assange is undoubtedly the most powerful individual, but his power is dependent upon assembling networks of expertise. The core team has changed in reaction to events, the task at hand, and the geographical context. During periods when leaks are being prepared the team has led a nomadic existence, shifting from city to city as the job demands it and tapping into pools of resources provided by sympathetic political activists and media workers on the ground in locations around Europe, Scandinavia, the United States, Africa, and Australia.

  WikiLeaks has global purview but it has plugged into existing national and local networks of expertise and activism; these are important resources in its ability to s
hift repertoires from activist group to government lobbyist to quasi-professional news organization. For example, in 2009 it operated as a technical advisor and lobbyist during a period when Germany’s parliament was considering a controversial new Access Impediment Law designed to filter online criminal content (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Ch. 8, paras. 1–32). The Iraq war documents release of 2010 was carried out with the assistance of the activist NGO Iraq Body Count. By the time of the embassy cables leak a couple of months later, Assange had, in addition to the deal brokered with newspapers, built further networks among London media. These included journalists from Al Jazeera, Channel 4 News, and staff at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University. Assange worked with the Bureau’s in-house production company to devise two television documentaries that were sold to Channel 4 and Al Jazeera (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 11, para. 16).