To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.

The Pentagon assessed the danger WikiLeaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked “unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.” It concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.

WikiLeaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon report about itself on Monday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/us/18wiki.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

I’d like to show you an interview with Julian Assange, the spokesperson of Wikileaks, that I conducted for my small student’s blog (I study journalism). On the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a hacker event, I had the chance to talk with him, about the current economic and financial aspects of the website (at the moment it is shut down in order to generate money) and about the relationship of Wikileaks and mainstream media.

Stefan Mey - Leak-o-nomy: The Economy of Wikileaks

Some snippets from the interview:

How big is the core team of WikiLeaks?

There is probably five people that do it 24 hours a day. And then it’s 800 people who do it sometimes over a year. And in between there is a spectrum.

That sounds like the future of media to me.

My explanation was, that maybe they do it because they know that what you do is actually their job, but they don’t have the money to do it.

Maybe. The cost per word in investigative journalism is high. We make it a little bit cheaper for them. If you can bring these costs per word down you can get more words of investigative journalism and publish even in a company that wants to maximize profit. Because we do some of the expensive sourcing. And there is another really big cost, which is the threat of legal action. We take the most legally difficult part, which is not the story, but usually the backing documents. As a result there is less chance of legal action against the publisher. So we help them to bring their costs per word in investigative journalism down.

thoughts/reax?