by Jared Cohen
Moreover, even if new organizations managed to build such platforms, it is highly unlikely that the world could support more than a handful at any given time. There are a few reasons for this. First, even the juiciest disclosures require a subsequent media cycle in order to have impact. If the landscape of secret-spilling websites became too decentralized, media outlets would find it difficult to keep track of these sites and their leaks, and to gauge their trustworthiness as sources. Second, leakers will naturally coalesce around organizations that they believe will generate maximum impact for their disclosures while providing them with the maximum amount of protection. These websites can compete for leakers, with promises of ever better publicity and anonymity, but it’s only logical that a potential whistle-blower would look for successful examples and follow the lead of other leakers before him. What source would risk his chance, even his life, on an untested group? And organizations that cannot consistently attract high-level leaks will lose attention and funding, slowly but surely atrophying in the process. Assange described this dynamic from his organization’s perspective as a positive one, providing a check on WikiLeaks as surely as it kept them in business. “Sources speak with their feet,” he said. “We’re disciplined by market forces.”
Regionality may determine the future of whistle-blowing websites more than anything else. Governments and corporations in the West are, for the most part, now wise to the risks that lackluster cybersecurity allows, and though their systems are by no means impenetrable, significant resources are being invested in both the public and the private sector to better protect records, user data and infrastructure. The same is not true for most developing countries, and we can expect that as these populations come online in the next decade, some will experience their own version of the WikiLeaks phenomenon: sources with access to newly digitized records and the incentive to leak sensitive materials to cause a political impact. The ensuing storms may be limited to a particular country or region, but they will nonetheless be disruptive and significant for the environments they touch. They may even catalyze a physical revolution or riot. We should also expect the deployment of similar tactics from government authorities to combat such sites (even if the organizations and their servers are based elsewhere): filtering, direct attacks, financial blockades and legal prosecution.
Eventually, though, the technology used by these platforms will be so sophisticated that they will be effectively unblockable. When WikiLeaks lost its principal website URL, WikiLeaks.org, due to a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and the pullout of its Internet service provider (which hosted the site) in 2010, its supporters immediately set up more than a thousand “mirror” sites (copies of the original site hosted at remote locations), with URLs like WikiLeaks.fi (in Finland), WikiLeaks.ca (in Canada) and WikiLeaks.info. (In a DDoS attack, a large number of compromised computer systems attack a single target, overloading the system with information requests and causing it to shut down, denying service to legitimate users.) Because WikiLeaks was designed as a distributed system—meaning its operations were distributed across many different computers, instead of concentrated in one centralized hub—shutting down the platform was much more difficult than it seemed to most laymen. Future whistle-blowing websites will surely move beyond mirror sites (copies of existing sites) and use new methods to replicate and obfuscate their operations to shield themselves from authorities. One way to accomplish this would be to create a storage system where fragments of files are copied and distributed in such a way that if one file directory is shut down, the files can be reassembled from those fragments. These platforms will develop new ways to ensure anonymous submission for potential leakers; WikiLeaks constantly updated its submission methods, warning users to avoid earlier cryptographic routes—among them SSL, or secure sockets layer, and hidden Tor service, using the highly encrypted Tor network—once they had determined that those were insufficiently secure.
And what of the individuals leading this charge? The Assanges of the world will still exist in the future, but their support bases will remain small. The more welcomed whistle-blowers of the future will be the ones who follow the example of people like Alexei Navalny, a Russian blogger and anticorruption activist, who enjoys much sympathy from many in the West. Disillusioned with Russia’s liberal opposition parties, Navalny, a real-estate lawyer, started his own blog dedicated to exposing corruption in major Russian companies, initially supplying the disclosures himself by taking small stakes in the businesses and invoking shareholder rights to force them to share information. He later crowd-sourced his approach, instructing supporters to try to do the same, with some success. Eventually, his blog grew into a full-blown secret-spilling platform, where visitors were encouraged to donate toward its operating costs via PayPal. Navalny’s profile grew as his collection of scoops swelled, most notably with a set of leaked documents that revealed the misuse of $4 billion at the state-owned oil pipeline company Transneft in 2010. By late 2011, Navalny’s public stature placed him at the center of preelection protests, and his nickname for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, the Party of Crooks and Thieves, had gone viral, adopted widely throughout the country.
Navalny’s approach, at least in the beginning of his new activism, was distinctive in that for all his zeal he had not turned the focus of his whistle-blowing operation toward Putin himself. His targets had largely been commercial, although given that the Russian public and private sector are not always easily distinguished, the information implicated some government officials as well. Moreover, despite the harassment he experienced—he had been arrested, imprisoned, spied on and investigated for embezzlement—he remained free for years. His critics may have called him a liar, a hypocrite or a CIA stooge, but Navalny remained in Russia (unlike so many other high-profile Kremlin opponents) and his blog was not censored.
Some think Navalny did not constitute much of a threat to the Kremlin; his name recognition among Russians remained quite low, though his supporters argue that such figures merely reflect low Internet penetration across the country and the success of state media censorship (Navalny was banned from appearing on state-run television). But a more interesting theory is that, for a time at least, Navalny found a way to toe the line as an anticorruption activist, knowing what to leak—and from whom—and what areas to avoid. Unlike prominent Putin critics, like the jailed billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Navalny seems to have found a way to challenge the Kremlin, while fighting corruption, without veering into overly sensitive areas that might place him in grave danger. (Short of a badly doctored photograph that appeared in a pro-Kremlin newspaper showing Navalny laughing with Berezovsky, there is little to suggest he has any ties to those critics.) His presence seemed to be tolerated by the Russian government until July 2012, when it deployed all available tools to discredit him, formally charging him with embezzlement in a case concerning a state-owned timber business in the Kirov region, where he had formerly worked as an advisor to the governor. The charges, carrying a maximum sentence of ten years in prison, reflected how much of a threat the resilient antigovernment protest movement had become. The world will continue to watch the trajectories of figures like Navalny to see whether his approach provides some measure of insulation from attack for digital activists.
There is also the frightening possibility that sites will emerge created by people who share the design and scale of these whistle-blower platforms but not their motivations. Rather than functioning as a clearinghouse for whistle-blowers, such platforms would serve as hosts to all manner of pilfered digital content—leaked active military operations, hacked bank accounts, stolen passwords and home addresses—without any particular agenda beyond anarchy. Operators of these sites would not be ideologues or political activists; they would be agents of chaos. Today, hackers and information criminals publish their ill-gotten gains fairly indiscriminately—the 150,000 Sony customer records released by the hacker group LulzSec in 20
11 were simply made downloadable as a file through a peer-to-peer file-sharing service—but in the future, if a centralized platform emerged that offered them WikiLeaks-level security and publicity, it would present a real problem. Redaction, verification and other precautionary measures taken by WikiLeaks and its media partners would surely not be performed on these unregulated sites (indeed, Assange told us he redacted only to reduce the international pressure that was financially strangling him and said he would have preferred no redactions), and lack of judgment around sensitive materials might well get people killed. Information criminals would almost certainly traffic in bulk leaks in order to cause maximum disruption. To some extent, leaking selectively reflects purpose while releasing material in bulk is effectively thumbing one’s nose at the entire system of secure information.
But context matters, too. How different would the reaction have been, from Western governments in particular, if WikiLeaks had published stolen classified documents from the regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran? If Bradley Manning, the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ materials about the United States government and military, had been a North Korean border guard or a defector from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, how differently would politicians and pundits in the United States have viewed him? Were a string of whistle-blowing websites dedicated to exposing abuses within those countries to appear, surely the tone of the Western political class would shift. Taking into account the precedent President Barack Obama set in his first term in office—a clear “zero tolerance” approach toward unauthorized leaks of classified information from U.S. officials—we would expect that future Western governments would ultimately adopt a dissonant posture toward digital disclosures, encouraging them abroad in adversarial countries, but prosecuting them ferociously at home.
The Reporting Crisis
Where we get our information and what sources we trust will have a profound impact on our future identities. What’s in store for the news in the Internet era is well-covered ground, and the battles we see today over monetization strategies and content syndication will continue to play out in the coming decade. But as technology lowers entry barriers in every industry, how will the media landscape as we know it today change?
It is manifestly clear that mainstream media outlets will increasingly find themselves a step behind in the reporting of news worldwide. These organizations simply cannot move quickly enough in a connected age, no matter how talented their reporters and stringers are, and how many sources they have. Instead, the world’s breaking news will continually come from platforms like Twitter: open networks that facilitate information-sharing instantly, widely and in accessible packages. If everyone in the world has a data-enabled phone or access to one—a not-so-distant reality—then the ability to “break news” will be left to luck and chance, as one unwitting civilian in Abbottabad, Pakistan, discovered after he unknowingly live-tweeted the covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden.4
Eventually, this lag time—before the mainstream media can get the story—will alter the nature of audiences’ loyalty, as readers and viewers seek more immediate methods of information delivery. Every future generation will be able to produce and consume more information than the previous one, and people will have little patience or use for media that cannot keep up. The loyalty that audiences retain will derive from the analysis and perspective these outlets offer, and, most critically, the trust they have in these institutions. These audiences will trust the credibility of the information, the accuracy of the analysis and the prioritization of news stories. In other words, some people will split their loyalty between new platforms for breaking news and established media organizations for the rest of the story.
News organizations will remain an important and integral part of society in a number of ways, but many outlets will not survive in their current form—and those that do survive will have adjusted their goals, methods and organizational structure to meet the changing demands of the new global public. As language barriers break down and cell towers rise, there will be no end to the number of new voices, potential sources, citizen journalists and amateur photographers looking to contribute. This is good: With so many news outlets scaling back their operations, particularly their international footprint, such outside contributors will be needed. The global audience benefits as well, through exposure to a greater range of issues and perspectives. The effect of having so many new actors involved, connected through a range of online platforms into the great, diffuse media system, is that major media outlets will report less and validate more.
Reporting duties will become more widely distributed than they are today, which will expand the scope of coverage but probably reduce the quality on a net level. The role of the mainstream media will primarily become one of an aggregator, custodian and verifier, a credibility filter that sifts through all of this data and highlights what is and is not worth reading, understanding and trusting. Particularly for the elite—the business leaders, policymakers and intellectuals who rely on established media—validation will be critical, as will the media’s ability to provide cogent analysis. In fact, the elite will probably rely more on established news organizations simply because of the massive swell of low-grade reporting and information in the system. Twitter can no more produce analysis than a monkey can type out a work of Shakespeare (although a heated Twitter exchange between two smart, credible people can come close); the strength of open, unregulated information-sharing platforms is their responsiveness, not their insight or depth.
Mainstream media outlets will have to find ways to integrate all of the new global voices they can now reach, a challenging but necessary task. Ideally, the business of journalism will become less extractive and more collaborative; in a story about rising tide levels in Bangkok, instead of just quoting a Thai river-cruise operator, the newspaper would link its article to the man’s own news platform or personal live stream. Of course, the chance for error increases in the inclusion of new, untrained voices—many respected journalists today believe that a full-bodied embrace of citizen journalism is detrimental to the field, and their concerns are not unwarranted.
Global connectivity will introduce entirely new contributors to the supply chain. One new subcategory to emerge will be a network of local technical encryption specialists, who deal exclusively in encryption keys. Their value for journalists would not be content or source related but instead would provide the necessary confidentiality mechanisms between parties. Dissidents in repressive countries—for example, today’s Belarus and Zimbabwe—will always be more willing to share their stories if they know they can do so safely and anonymously. Many people could potentially offer this technology, but local encryption specialists will be highly valued because trust is important. This is not too different from what we see throughout the Middle East today, where virtual private network (VPN) dealers roam busy marketplaces, along with other traders of illicit goods, to offer access to dissidents and rebellious youth to connect from their device to a secure network. Media organizations that cover international issues will rely on these scrappy young VPN and encryption dealers as they rely on foreign stringers to build their news coverage.
A new type of stringer will evolve as well. The conventional stringer today is an uncredited journalist whom newspapers pay to report, often from a foreign or unstable country. Stringers risk their lives to gain access to certain sources or visit dangerous places, taking these risks because professional reporters cannot or will not go there. An additional category of stringer may well emerge: men and women who deal exclusively in digital content and online sources. Instead of braving dangers on the ground, they’ll take advantage of rising global connectivity to find, engage and extract information from sources they know only online. They would connect journalists with sources, as stringers do today. Obviously, given the additional layer of distance and obfuscation the virtual world presents, media outlets would have to exercise even greater caution than they usually do with regard to embellishment, v
alidation of sources and ethics.
Imagine celebrities in the future starting their own news portal online about a particular ethnic conflict that they care deeply about. Perhaps they believe that the mainstream media isn’t doing enough to publicize it or that it has gotten the narrative wrong. They decide to cut out the traditional middlemen and deliver stories directly to the public; let’s call it Brangelina news. They hire their own people to work in the conflict zone, and they provide daily reports that their staff at home form into news articles to publish on their platform. Their overhead would be low, certainly lower than major news outlets, and they might not even need to compensate reporters and stringers, some of whom would work for free in exchange for the visibility. In short order, they become the ultimate source of information and news on the conflict because they both are highly visible and have built up enough credibility in their work that they can be taken seriously.
Mainstream media outlets will find such new serious competitors in the future—not just tweeters and amateur onsite observers—and that will complicate the media environment in this period. As we said, many will still favor and support the established news organizations, out of loyalty and trust in the institutions, and the serious work of journalism—the investigative reporting, the high-level interviews, the prescient contextualization of complicated events—will remain in the domain of the mainstream media. But for others, the diversification of content sources will represent a choice between a serious outlet and a “celebrity” outlet, and the seemingly insatiable appetite for tabloid-like content (in the United States, the U.K. and elsewhere) suggests that many consumers will probably choose the celebrity one. Visibility, not consistency or strength of content, will drive the popularity of such publishers.
