The safety of conventional thermal nuclear reactors fueled by MOX is seriously compromised by two important considerations: difficulties in the fabrication and quality control of MOX fuel pellets and differences in the behavior of plutonium and uranium in the reactor.

….

……….

The NGO’s information relied on a study  conducted by Dr. Edwin S. Lyman in 1999 (“The Importance of MOX Fuel Quality Control in Boiling-Water Reactors” Dr. Edwin S. Lyman, Scientific Director, Nuclear Control Institute, Washington DC, December 14). The researcher analyzed the impact MOX had on nuclear accidents in Japan, and the organization concurred that:

If significant numbers of fuel failures occur early in the accident, fission products will be released and changes in fuel geometry may interfere with the flow of coolant through the core, ‘Increasing the risk that fuel heat-up will continue until the irreversible core melting and quantitative fission product release occur.’ (p. 37)

Specifically, MOX is extremely reactive and fuses much faster than enriched uranium. “It’s fusion point is much lower,” explained Lauri Myllyvirta, nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace International. Its role in the recent nuclear accident, however, is difficult to determine. Myllyvirta further elaborates:

The state of the fuel and the extent of the damage within reactor 3 remains unclear. Consequently, whether or not it was a factor in the accident remains an open question. But the use of MOX fuel has significantly reduced the safety of the situation – it makes the disaster more difficult for operators to manage while the level of radioactive fumes increases.

In Greenpeace’s crossfire is Areva, the main supplier for the power plant in Fukushima. They are subsidized by Melox, which holds 95% of the market shares for MOX. As shown in the export license issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (see below), Areva supplies the center with uranium-235. Yet since September 2010, it also supplies MOX.

Nathalie Bonnefoy, a representative from Melox’s communications department, said “The type of fuel used in the reactor is absolutely not involved in the problems at the Fukushima facility…In normal operations, MOX and enriched uranium have the same performance.” What about the use of MOX in the event of a disaster, such as reactor 3 in Fukushima? “At this stage there is no link.”

For Shaun Burnie, the author of the 2000 Greenpeace report, there is only a relative lack of connection. According to him:

MOX is the most dangerous substance on the planet – even more than uranium. The financial stakes around MOX supersede the knowledge of its effects on public health. Within 30 minutes of the earthquake, everyone who knew Fukushima’s business affairs could imagine what eventually happened – it was predictable.

As a side note to MOX’s nuclear complexity, Greenpeace also accused Belgonucleaire (which produces MOX) of having poor quality standards:

What the evidence shows is Belgonucleaire hasn’t produced sufficient assurance that MOX used in Fukushima was developed under the highest standards of quality, and eventually some sort of incident would bring this to the surface.

Falsification of quality control

Additionally, Since 2002 Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company), the power company that runs the plant in Fukushima, falsified the results of quality checks for some of its reactors. In the report two years earlier, Greenpeace suspected Belgonucleaire’s activities were fraudulent. At the time, there was a similar scandal involving British Nuclear Fuels Limited:

A scandal involving the falsification of quality control data by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) for MOX fuel delivered to Japan for use in another reactor…forced a delay in all MOX plans in Japan.

During the last 12 months, evidence has emerged that the problems that led to the falsification of MOX fuel quality control data at BNFL, may also have been experienced at Belgonucleaire (pg.8).

In a report from the US Department of Energy, the findings confirm the forgeries, stating “the documents concealed from government regulators (reported) knowledge about cracks in structures holding nuclear fuel in place in reactor cores at several Tepco power plants” (p. 8).

……….

This revelation resulted in the resignation of several executives at Tepco, along with the power plant in Fukushima being closed for one year. It further explains why the delivery of MOX to Fukushima was suspended between 1999 and 2010. When Greenpeace’s report was released, about 32 machines used for making MOX fuel where pending in delivery at Belgonucleaire. It was just last September that these shipments were sent – and reactor 3 has been using this fuel since October. Contacted by OWNI, a spokesperson for Areva confirmed its business with the power plant in Fukushima, indicating that “Reactor 3 was functioning with 30% MOX fuel.”

Instability at all levels

Reactor instability with the use of MOX, liability from manufacturing procedures and falsification of data – these points were already listed in public documents as early as 2000. Add to these various warnings the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) following the 2007 earthquake in Japan. This natural disaster affected the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant (also managed by Tepco), located 250 kilometers north of Tokyo. The IAEA made the following recommendation:

For all nuclear power plants: Diligence is required in the design, construction and operational phases of all plants to assure that seismic systems interaction issues are minimized…

For what it’s worth, the president of Areva Anne Lauvergeon stated last night on France 2[FR] that the multiple accidents at the power plant in Fukushima was not considered a “nuclear catastrophe.”

I think we’ll avoid a nuclear catastrophe. We are a bit between the two.

According to Greenpeace[FR], another shipment of MOX was being prepared for Japan. The “secret crossing” was initially fixed for the week of April 4, yet the order has not been permanently cancelled.

–

Investigated with Guillaume Dasquié.
Photo Credits: FlickR CC CmdrCord
Translation: Stefanie Chernow

[NDLR] OWNI.fr concourt aujourd’hui au festival South By SouthWest (SXSW), dans la catégorie “News Related Technologies” du SXSW Accelerator. L’occasion de mettre en avant quelques articles en anglais, proposés par les éditrices d’OWNI.eu Retrouvez ci-après une analyse de ce que fait OWNI, initialement publiée sur PBS Mediashift.

Most content sites in the U.S. have two ways of making money: charging for subscriptions or running advertising (or both). But a French site, OWNI.fr, has found an unusual business model for a site with no ads and no subscriptions — that’s also profitable. How do they do it? Their main business is doing web development and apps for media companies and institutions.

One big advantage for OWNI is its origins as a pure online business, with an entrepreneurial CEO Nicolas Voisin and a staff of web developers. The site was initially an aggregation of bloggers, with the parent company called 22Mars (March 22nd), set up to fight a controversial French copyright law known as HADOPI. While 22Mars was made up of web developers at launch in April 2009, they eventually revamped the site with more editorial direction and hired journalists in 2010 to work alongside the developers.

The result is a striking website, with an eye-catching design and various examples of data journalism and data visualization. In fact, when they set up an English-language site, OWNI.eu, its motto was “Digital Journalism.” The site won an Online Journalism Award at the ONA conference last year, and is a finalist in next week’s SXSW Accelerator competition for “news-related technologies.” Here’s a screen shot from one data visualization showing how many people have died immigrating to Europe from Africa:

All the American interest in the French site will grow exponentially when the site opens a U.S. subsidiary next month, somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spoke to the future CEO of that U.S. subsidiary, Adriano Farano, an Italian who had helped run Cafe Babel, a pan-European website. Here, he explains what the name OWNI means in French (largely a play on “UFO”):

Farano told me that the parent company, 22Mars, is about a third of the way to closing a Series C round of funding for about 1.5 million Euros, and that they will seek a first round of funding for OWNI.us. In France, the company grew from just 8 people a year ago to 37 today, with 15 full-time journalists. At the same time, Farano says the site traffic also boomed, going from 200,000 monthly unique visitors to 1.5 million uniques today.

I also spoke by phone to OWNI’s director of data journalism, Nicolas Kayser-Bril. The following is an edited transcript of our international phone conversation.

Q&A with Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Nicolas Kayser-Bril: It wasn’t planned to be a media company at all. It was started in April 2009, where there was a law called HADOPI being passed in the French parliament, that was dangerous for online freedom [and later was the basis for Loppsi 2]. Several bloggers got together to set up a platform [to fight the law]. And the company that was set up to run OWNI is called 22Mars, and we decided to host the platform so we had a blog network hosted on a WordPress platform. Step by step, the platform grew, and Nicolas Voisin, the CEO of 22Mars decided to take the experiment further and put one person full-time on maintaining and engaging the community.

We saw that this worked well so we put more resources and people into OWNI. So we decided to become a real media [outlet], a real website, still with this strong community of bloggers behind it. In the summer of 2010, we realized that OWNI had become a real media [outlet], ran stories, and really had a big impact in the traditional media sphere. We hadn’t really planned to become one. This changed the way the company was organized. At first we had been more of a showroom for what we’re doing, and today it’s more of a lab where journalists are free to innovate and do what they want.

With that experience, we continue to run our service company, selling website development and applications. We specialize in providing apps and social media platforms. Half of our sales today have to do with social media, and the other half has to do with data visualization, crowdsourcing apps, and running innovative journalistic products. We serve all kinds of institutions and NGOs that have a story to tell but don’t know how to to do it online. We build the tools for them to do so.

Kayser-Bril: We do some social media consulting, but most of the work is building social media websites tailor made [for clients]. For instance, with universities, they have unique problems as to how to communicate between teachers and students and the wider public. So we built the interface using WordPress to solve this problem. So we always build custom solutions with added value.

Kayser-Bril: Nicolas, our CEO, was an entrepreneur and got into the media in 2006 before the presidential election in France. He started doing a political show; he realized there was a big gap on how the public was informed about candidates’ platforms. So what he decided to do was interview them without time limits and spent hours with them, and then posted them on YouTube. It worked really well, so he thought there was a need to reinvent storytelling online. That’s what drove him.

The other core people at the company are mostly developers. I myself have a background in economics. I never studied journalism. Before OWNI, I was living in Berlin and working at a startup. Before that I was doing freelance work. I was doing online work for a presidential campaign in 2009, mostly web-related things. We didn’t hire a traditional journalist until February 2010. Now we have many seasoned journalists working for us.

Kayser-Bril: 22Mars is for-profit, and we did not spin off OWNI as a non-profit organization from an accounting perspective. The website does not have to make a profit in the sense that we don’t make money from the website. No subscriptions and no hidden advertisements. The value the website provides is in gaining expertise online that we can then share and sell to clients.

Kayser-Bril: Exactly. You could compare it to businesses in other industries. We might start selling online objects or other products in the coming months to have more high-margin products.

We will start selling e-books, which is a big driving force of 22Mars — we don’t sell content but we sell products, because everyone knows content is abundant. What’s missing is a way to properly browse through it and consume it. So we’ll be selling apps. Not apps for the iPhone or in the App Store. We always remain on the HTML side and JavaScript and stay compatible with all platforms. So they would run on the open web as well as on the iPhone and iPad.

We’re convinced that the apps you see on the iPhone and iPad and Android in the future will be merged into web apps because it makes more sense economically to develop something once instead of three or four times. We develop for all devices. We recently published what we call an augmented cartoon where you have more depth in text, and can follow links. We made it for the iPad; it was more of an iPad app than it worked on a computer. With HTML 5 you can really design an app and optimize it for the device you want.

Kayser-Bril explains how developers will work for OWNI for less money than at other companies because they have a chance to work on projects about society and politics:

Kayser-Bril: Not really, we’re not really involved in politics. What we do fight for is freedom online and offline, supporting the declaration of human rights. We could lead fights in defense of Internet freedoms (for example, against censorship, for Net neutrality, etc.). We’ll fight against all laws that restrict freedom of speech online. We don’t have any more political views beyond that. When you see the political views of people at OWNI, it ranges from leftist to libertarian so it would be impossible to have a single political line.

Kayser-Bril: WikiLeaks called us to do similar work that we are doing on a daily basis, which is building interfaces and web apps. Their problem is that they had masses of web documents but they were not comprehensible for a normal human being. So we came up with this app to browse through the Afghan War Logs. It illustrates how OWNI works, because when the Afghan War Logs came out, we realized we could build that just like for the Iraq War Logs.

It was a non-commercial relationship with WikiLeaks, and it made perfect sense because we learned a lot so we could sell crowdsourcing applications. From a business perspective it made a lot of sense.

Kayser-Bril explains how OWNI helps clients with unique open solutions, and that everyone’s become a media outlet now:

Kayser-Bril: Yes, many French ones. Our client list include France24, Radio France Internationale, Groupe Moniteur (professional magazines), Le Monde Diplomatique, Slate.fr, Le Soir (Brussels) and Zeit Online (Berlin). We’re in talks with many more, and we’ve worked as well for NGOs and public institutions (the municipality of Paris and the French presidency).

Kayser-Bril: About half and half. We are trying to reach the 60% mark of original content. If someone is more of an expert than we are, we just republish his or her article. Not just re-posting it, but fact-checking it, adding images — we really want to add value to cross-posted articles.

Kayser-Bril: Of course. Our whole business model is built on the Creative Commons license. On the content side, the more our articles are republished, the happier we are. We don’t have advertising, but we want our articles to be read. Please repost them. On the business side as well, we only use open technologies — HTML and JavaScript and no Flash. And that makes sense because our added value isn’t in the code or software that we build, but how we can answer our clients’ needs and provide them open solutions.

Kayser-Bril explains how OWNI’s new U.S. site won’t consider other media sites as competition but as partners:

Kayser-Bril: The WikiLeaks project didn’t turn out as well as it could have. One thing we did was rethink the way surveys are made. We worked with a pollster and realized that when a media [outlet] orders a survey, what you get in the paper is a page with two infographics and a pie chart. That’s not enough. We built an app that lets you browse through all the data the pollster gathered to really see in your area what men over 45 thought. What was really successful was we added the possibilitiy for you to take the survey while you were browsing the app.

That’s extremely interesting in terms of journalism, because you can see what your audience is like compared to the people who took the survey. It’s also interesting in terms of business because one big asset today is having a big database with qualified voters and such an app would be very valuable for many clients.

—

> This article was originally published on Mediashift

> Crédits Photo FlickR CC : Don Solo

This is what I said at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, March 12, 2011. It went well.

Many thanks to Lisa Williams for helping with the tech and the backchannel. You can find a live blog of my presentation here. Audio will be available later. When it is, I will link to it. Here’s the official description.

There’s an old rule among sportswriters: no cheering in the press box. In fact, a few weeks ago a young journalist lost his job at Sports Illustrated for just that reason: cheering at the conclusion of a thrilling race. Sportswriters could allow themselves to cheer occasionally without it affecting their work, but they don’t. And this rule gets handed down from older to younger members of the group.

So this is a little example of the psychology, not of individual journalists, but of the profession itself. We don’t often talk this way, but we could: “No cheering in the press box” is the superego at work. It’s a psychological thing within the sportswriter’s tribe. You learn to wear the mask if you want to join the club.

Six years ago I wrote an essay called Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. It was my most well read piece at the time. And it made the points you would expect: This distinction is eroding. This war is absurd. Get over it. Move on. There’s bigger work to be done.

But since then I’ve noticed that while the division–-bloggers as one type, journalists as another–-makes less and less sense, the conflict continues to surface. Why? Well, something must be happening under the surface that expresses itself through bloggers vs. journalists. But what is that subterranean thing? This is my real subject today.

And to preview my answer: disruptions caused by the Internet threaten to expose certain buried conflicts at the heart of modern journalism and a commercialized press. Raging at bloggers is a way to keep these demons at bay. It exports inner conflicts to figures outside the press. Also–and this is important–bloggers and journalists are each other’s ideal “other.”

In tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine, which went online Thursday, Bill Keller acts out a version of bloggers vs. journalists. He ridicules aggregators like the Huffington Post and pokes at media bloggers (including me, Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis) for producing derivative work that is parasitic on news producers.

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

Of course the Times does aggregation, too. When it reviews a book or play that’s… derivative. We could charge Keller with petty hypocrisy, but that’s not my point. This is my point: There’s something about bloggers vs. journalists that permits the display of a preferred (or idealized) self among people in the press whose work lives have been disrupted by the Internet. There’s an attraction there. Spitting at bloggers is closely related to gazing at your own reflection, and falling in love with it all over again.

This is from an editor’s column in an Australian newspaper:

The great thing about newspapers is that, love us or hate us, we’re the voice of the people. We represent the community, their views, their aspirations and their hopes. We champion North Queensland’s wins and we commiserate during our losses…

Bloggers, on the other hand, represent nothing. They whinge, carp and whine about our role in society, and yet they contribute nothing to it, other than satisfying their juvenile egos.

Editorial writers as the voice of the people? Are you quite sure, Mr. Editor? Well, compared to bloggers…. yeah, we’re sure!

And to go with this preferred or idealized self, a demonized other, the pajama-wearing, basement-dwelling blogger. Andrew Marr is the former political editor of the BBC. He says:

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people. OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk.

But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night. It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism.

Now there’s a clear risk in trying to do this at South by Southwest: to many people who have been paying attention, especially the digerati, bloggers v. journalists is almost the definition of a played-out theme. Aren’t we past all that by now? I know this is what some people will be thinking because I thought that way myself. Blogging is far more accepted today. Most journalists are bloggers themselves, so the distinction is getting weirder. Many newsrooms are trying to attract bloggers into local networks. Blogging itself has been overtaken by social media, some people think.

Did you catch that word, replace? For this subject, that’s like a blinking red light. Or better yet: an icon on your desktop. Click on the icon, and all the contents of bloggers vs. journalists are displayed. Ask bloggers why they blog and they might say: because big media sucks! But they will almost never say: I AM YOUR REPLACEMENT. This fantasy of replacement comes almost exclusively from the journalist’s side, typically connected to fears for a lost business model.

Frédéric Filloux is a former editor of Liberation in Paris. His view:

Today’s problem is not one media versus another, it’s the future of journalism — it’s finding the best possible way to finance the gathering and the processing of independent, reliable, and original information…. I don’t buy into the widespread delusion that legions of bloggers, compulsive twitterers or facebookers amount to a replacement for traditional journalism.

Keep clicking on the “replace” icon and other fears surface.

This is Connie Schultz, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which has had a number of run-ins with local bloggers.

As I write this, only half of the states in the U.S. now have even one full-time reporter in Washington, D.C. No amount of random blogging and gotcha videos can replace the journalism that keeps a government accountable to its people. If you’re a journalist, you already know that. If you’re the rest of America, chances are you have no idea.

Blogging cannot replace the watchdog journalism that keeps a government accountable to its people. Journalists know that, but somehow the American people don’t. Replacement-by-bloggers talk is displaced anger toward a public that doesn’t appreciate what journalists do, a public that would somehow permit the press to wither away without asking what would be lost.

Here’s John Kass, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune:

[Our] reporters work in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. They do not blog from mommy’s basement, cutting and pasting what others have reported, while putting it under a cute pen name on the Internet.

Instead, the Tribune’s reporters are out knocking on doors in violent neighborhoods late at night, looking for witnesses after murders. Or they stand in the morgue and talk to the families of the dead. Tribune reporters are not anonymous. They use their own names, put them at the top of their stories and are accountable for what they write.

Bloggers are anonymous creeps. Journalists put it all out there and risk their reputations. Kass isn’t instructing bloggers in what makes them suck. He’s speaking to readers of the Tribune-–and especially former subscribers–-who are safely asleep in the suburbs, while reporters investigate crimes and comfort the dead. You can almost feel his rage at the injustice of the Internet.

The Tribune, of course, is currently in bankruptcy. It’s also welcoming bloggers to the fold through it’s Chicago Now site, which is a local blogging platform. Julie DiCaro, blogger for Chicago Now, responded to John Kass this way:

Being derided by reporters at the Tribune for no apparent reason probably isn’t the best way to attract new bloggers to the Tribune’s network. And, if I’m being honest, grumbling about bloggers these days is tantamount to yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn. It makes you look really, really old.

It’s not only readers who need remedial instruction in the value-added by journalists. Advertisers, too, need to be schooled. This is from a pitch to would-be advertisers by the Los Angeles Times:

What kind of awards coverage are you looking for?

Choose one:

A.) Accurate, in depth stories reported by journalists with years of experience.

B.) Unconfirmed, incomplete rumors spread by bloggers with axes to grind.

Here, bloggers vs. journalists helps underlines the self-evident superiority of the professional model. Of course, if it were really self-evident, drawing the contrast would be unnecessary… right?

This is probably my favorite quote of the ones I’ve collected. It’s from the West Seattle Herald, in an editorial about its competitor, West Seattle blog. (Hat tip, Tracy Record.)

Professional journalists don’t waste your time.

Instead of 3000 words about a community council meeting that was “live blogged” with updates every seven minutes, wouldn’t you honestly prefer 300 words that tell you what happened and what was decided?

What I like about this one is that question, “wouldn’t you prefer?” You can hear the tone of puzzlement, the plea for reason. The old school news provider struggles to understand why anyone would choose those new goods, like live blogging, that the Internet makes possible.

So far, I have been discussing what professional journalists “get” by hanging on to bloggers vs. journalists. But bloggers get something, too. I do not want to neglect that. Listen to the teet, a 25 year-old female blogger and writer in Columbus, Ohio:

I think I have an unnatural obsession with and hatred for the editor of the Dispatch.

Everything he says makes me want the throw my computer monitor out the window. Regardless, I’ve left him on my Google Reader. I always flip to the front of the Insight section on Sundays. I secretly love the pain he causes me.

By raging at newspaper editors, bloggers manage to keep themselves on the “outside” of a system they are in fact a part of. Meaning: It’s one Internet, folks. The news system now incorporates the people formerly known as the audience. Twitter and Facebook are hugely powerful as distributors of news.

I’ve said that bloggers and journalists are each other’s ideal “other.” From the blogger’s side, the conflict with journalists helps preserve some of that ragged innocence (which is itself a kind of power) by falsely locating all the power in Big Media. Here’s another blogger in Columbus, talking about the same newspaper editor:

Note to Ben Marrison: If you want to pretend that you, as a professional journalist, are somehow better than political bloggers … because you are less biased and less lazy then you might consider actually NOT being both lazy and biased while writing online rants for the world to see.

Don’t you know that’s OUR job?

We can be lazy and biased. For we are young and irresponsible. You are supposed to be the grown-ups here. This keeps at bay a necessary thought: we all have to grow up… someday. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and now, because we have the Web, anyone can own one. The press is us. Not “them.” Is this not the very force that brings 10,000 people to South by Southwest Interactive?

I have always found it fascinating that both bloggers and journalists will use the word “traditional” in referring to the model of professional journalism that is taught in boot camp J-schools and practiced at, say, the Washington Post. That tradition is about 80 to 90 years old, at most. But our experiment with a free press is 250 years old. Whole chapters of it were discarded by American journalists when they tried to make themselves more scientific and objective in order to claim elevated status.

But these discarded parts of the tradition live on in the subconscious. And with blogging they have come roaring back. I make reference to this in the tag line to my blog, PressThink. The subtitle is: “Ghost of democracy in the media machine.”

Let’s visit one of those ghosts. Lincoln Steffens was the one of the original muckrakers. He exposed corruption in the machine politics of the big cities. This is from his 1902 book, The Shame of the Cities.

I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts. My purpose was [to] see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride. That was the journalism of it. I wanted to move and to convince.

The part that gets me is, “I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.” No journalist at the Washington Post would say that today. It is not permitted. It would mark the speaker as unfit for the tribe. Although the kind of journalism that Dana Priest and Bob Woodward practice is a direct descendant of Lincoln Steffens and the muckrakers, something dropped out between 1902 and 2002.

“I wanted to destroy the facts… I wanted to move and convince… ” This is what dropped out when journalism professionalized itself in the 1920s and 30s. The bloggers, in this sense, are “the return of the repressed.” They write like Lincoln Steffens.

On the surface: antagonists. Dig deeper and the bloggers look more like the ancestors of today’s journalists. They are closer to Tom Paine than Bob Woodward is. They bring back what was lost in the transformation of journalism into a profession and a business that, say, Warren Buffet could invest in.

Here’s another dispatch from the newsroom’s superego. It’s the Washington Post’s social media guidelines:

When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.

If you ask journalists why they chose their profession, they give a range of answers: to see the world, something new every day, I like to write. The most common answer is some variation on: to make the world a better place, to right wrongs and stick up for the little guy. Social justice, in other words. No one ever says, “I went into journalism because I have a passion for being… objective.” Or: “Detachment, that’s my thing. I’m kind of a detached guy, so I figured this would be a good field for me.”

And yet… When they get there, people who always wanted to be journalists and make the world a better place find that the professional codes in place often prevent this. It’s hard to fight for justice when you have to master “he said, she said” stories. Voice is something you learn to take out of your work if you want to succeed in the modern newsroom. You are supposed to sacrifice and learn to report the story without attitude or bias creeping in. And then, if you succeed in disciplining yourself, you might one day get a column and earn the right to crusade for justice, to move and convince.

This is a moral hierarchy, which bloggers disrupt. They jump right to voice, which appears to mock all the years of voicelessness that mainstream journalists had suffered through.

Last year a young reporter (and blogger) named Dave Weigel had to resign from the Washington Post after someone leaked some emails of his, in which he complained about people on the political right whom he also had to cover. After he was gone, some staffers at the Post dumped on Weigel anonymously. Here is what they said:

“The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.”

Without the proper amount of toilet-training. Freud wouldn’t even charge to interpret a quote like that. Which shows that bloggers vs. journalists doesn’t end when a blogger is hired at a big institutional player like the Washington Post. Instead the conflict is absorbed directly into the institution.

Journalists today are under stress. The stress has five sources. Bloggers put all five right into the face of professional journalism.

One: A collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes.

Two: New competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive technology, the Internet, does its thing.

Three: A shift in power. The tools of the modern media have been distributed to the people formerly known as the audience.

Four: A new pattern of information flow, in which “stuff” moves horizontally, peer to peer, as effectively as it moves vertically, from producer to consumer. Audience atomization overcome, I call it.

Five: The erosion of trust (which started a long time ago but accelerated after 2002) and the loss of authority.

A useful comparison would be to medical doctors: when patients can look up a drug on the Internet, research a course of treatment or connect with others who have the same condition, the authority of the doctor does not disappear. And it’s not that people don’t trust their doctors anymore. But the terms of authority have to change to allow for patients who have more information, more options, and more power to argue with their physicians.

In pro journalism, it is similar: the terms of authority have to change. The practice has to become more interactive. And this is happening under conditions of enormous stress.

The psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of The Moral Life of Children and other great works, wrote a book called The Call of Stories (which is another reason people go into journalism, to answer that call.) In the beginning of that book he reflects on his early training in psychiatry, at a mental hospital in Boston. He is told to make his rounds and classify his patients by the diseases they seem to be exhibiting, and note any changes in their condition.

After a few weeks of this, Coles is depressed. He’s doing the work, classifying and observing, but he cannot see how his patients are going to improve. So he goes to see his supervisor, a wiser and older doctor. Coles complains: I don’t get it. I am doing what they told me to do, but how are my patients going to get any better? The older doctor listens to him, and pauses. It’s as if he’s been waiting for the question. And this is what he says:

Our patients have been telling themselves a story about who they are and where they fit in the world. And for reasons we do not understand very well, their story has broken down. It no longer lets them live in the real world, so they wind up here.

Your job—your only job—is to listen to them, and then get them to see that they have to start telling themselves a better story. Or they won’t get out of here. If you can do that–any way you can do that–you are doing psychiatry. Coles got it. And this was the beginning of his career as a clinician.

I think this illuminates the situation with the professional press today. The story it has been telling itself has broken down. It no longer helps the journalist navigate the real world conditions under which journalism is done today. Somehow, journalists have to start telling themselves a better story about what they do and why it matters. And we have to help them. We interactive people.

For people in the press, bloggers vs. journalists is an elaborate way of staying the same, of refusing to change, while permitting into the picture some of the stressful changes I have mentioned. A shorter way to say this is: it’s fucking neurotic.

Thank you for your attention.

(Dedicated to James W. Carey, 1935-2006.)

>> This article was originally published on Pressthink.org

>> Photo FlickR CC by : RedJinn: Questions are not lonely without answers, Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

USSR, August 19 1991: While Mikhaïl Gorbatchev was on holiday in his datcha located in Crimea, Eight apparatchiks attempted to seize power over the state. Hostile to reforms, the “Gang of Eight” tried to prevent the Perestoika reforms and the loss of their satellite states. These eight orthodox Communists launched an attempted coup d’état by installing themselves as The State Committee of the State of Emergency. After Gobatchev returned he tried to restore order and save face, but it was clear that this episode would eventually lead to his downfall.

In this well documented event, there is an interesting historically episode which is often overlooked. During the two days of the coup the Russian media was shut down, and thus not covering Boris Yeltsin ranting on top of a tank for the crowd, nor the shock of the international community. All channels were blacked-out except for one; Usenet, which is the grandfather of chat-rooms and is capable or surviving without the Internet. For these precious 48 hours, a few dozen individuals contributed to this last means of communication with the outside world.

Information exchange with Helsinki

How did they manage to accomplish this feat? During the time, Relcom (Reliable Communications) was a small independent network which operated without state funding. It’s clients provided their own modems and paid a fee of 20,000 rubles for the service (similar to the current OpenLeaks project). Overall it connected 400 organizations in over 70 Soviet cities, using UNIX and Usenet to exchange information.

Usenet in 1991

In August 1990, Relcom partnered with EUnet, the ancestor of the Internet Service Providers. This small soviet project, rendered viable by Glasnost, was then accessible to the rest of the world. It connected to an office in Helsinkis, which exchanged information once per hour (a similar concept to the FDN project in Egypt). Ironically this initiative was made possible by the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, a prestigious Russian research program.

Thus the first cyber-activists were able to use this decentralized architecture and Usenet (developed in the USSR in 1982) to circumvent traditional censorship. The results resemble a more primal version of Twitter:

For those who are interested, Yeltsin’s declarations to overthrow Gorbatchev can be read on newsgroup Usenet talk.politics.soviet

<USENET> 11h45 – 3 divisions of the red army have rejoined the Yeltsin camp.
<Scofield> Information confirmed. Source: Radio City News, 15h GMT +3, Helskinki, Finland
<USENET> Posted on news-server@kremvax.hq.demos.su
<USENET> A man has been killed by the military in Riga, the night when Gorbatchev vacated Crimea
<USENET> An arrest warrent has been issued for Boris Yeltsin. It’s the first time. The source is NBC.
<Scofield>  Information service in Finland – sent at 16h: The EU convened for an emergency meeting on Friday. Mitterrand tried to call Gorbatchev several times.
<muts> 200,000 protesters in Leningrad. 400,000 in Chisinau (capital of Moldova)

“They forgot”

Nearly twenty years before the coining of the term “Twitter revolution,” when the web didn’t really exist and the concept of an Internet connection at home was still in its infancy, Usenet was paving the road for the technology we depend on today. Yet with the situation in Egypt, it is hard to ignore the similarities; some users were told not to post information on the current political situation to avoid congesting the network. Polina Antonova, who worked at Relcom at the time, wrote this during the USSR coup d’état:

Don’t worry, we’re OK, though frightened and angry. Moscow is full of tanks and military machines, I hate them. They try to close all mass media, they shutted up CNN an hour ago, Soviet TV transmits opera and old movies. But, thanks Heaven, they don’t consider RELCOM mass media or they simply forgot about it. Now we transmit information enough to put us in prison for the rest of our life :-)

This excerpt, written while the USSR was rapidly dissolving, attests that there is a historical reality to the web being used as a tool in political struggles.

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Photo credits: Relcom archives, Flickr CC iamtheo

Cliquer ici pour voir la vidéo.

Photo CC Flickr mindfieldz

Owni.eu is of course a young creature, launched in October, shortly before our sister site, Owni.fr, was awarded with an Online News Association prize for excellence in journalism. Despite its young age, Owni.eu has an ambitious aim: to be the first Europe-wide website focusing on digital culture, cyberactivism, journalism and politics. We feel our particular historical context is a fertile ground for the growth of an engaged pan-European civil society – but where that will take us, we are yet to find out. It’s one reason our name ‘Owni’ is play on the French word for UFO – ‘ovni’. From the depths of our flying saucer we tend to be animated by a techno-utopian spirit, and we are more often than not optimistic about such future.

Of course the protagonist throughout these pages is innovation, but most of all the way our society and its mindset is adapting to such developments. One of the main characters of 2010 is WikiLeaks and its push for a new era of open governments and transparency. Owni.eu hosted the best opinion pieces on the release of the Embassy Logs – known through Twitter as #cablegate – and we finally selected one for this year’s ebook: Jeff Jarvis’s ‘Big Brother’s little brother’.

‘Why the internet did not win the Nobel peace prize’ is a critical look at Wired’s campaign to award the internet with a prize usually collected by men and women who have sustained a life-long fight for social progress and civil rights. The ideology behind that campaign, our editorial team felt, was ignorant of a key facet of techno-utopia; as Kevin Kelly put it, humans are the sex organs of technology. Technology is neutral and humans should take responsibility and credit for whatever they do with it.

The missing manual for the future by Tish Shute is a long and thorough account of the main initiatives and ideas of 2010 and its driving forces – ‘the four cylinder engine of innovation’ – as told by one of the main technology publishers, O’Reilly.

In the spirit of cyberactivism we have included two pieces which take part in longstanding polemics on the subjects of censorship and discrimination, two themes you’ll be sure to find explored even further on our site in 2011.
‘Blacklisting and Sexting; parental control as a political tool’ surveys the ramifications of practices such as parental control, as opposed to a more long-term education on the risks and perils of the web.

Last but not least, ‘Why we need to reframe the women-in-tech debate’ is a popular and controversial article that first appeared on Mashable, which gave rise to a constructive debate on gender equality within the tech industry, a theme which we aim to expand within the European arena in the coming year.

There are those who think that in the digital age the newspaper industry can only survive by charging for its content and maximising their advertising footprint (read: Rupert Murdoch), and there are those who try to think beyond this assumption.

When it comes to digital strategy, the Guardian has so far shown to be the most forward thinking and experimental newspaper globally. Recently, it has introduced a plugin that allows Wordpress based blogs to post content directly from The Guardian website’s onto the blog.

The catch? Bloggers must publish the article in full without applying any modifications, and along with the content comes the newspaper’s advertisements. Whatever you may think, it’s a win-win situation: The Guardian doesn’t lose any profit and is actually able to monitise through the API, whilst publishers get free online news content from one of the world’s best newspapers.

It is certainly an interesting and timely move. Recently, Associated Press sent a legal threat to ColoradoPols.com – a blog covering politics in Colorado, USA - for having re-published its content without permission or remuneration. The case has caused shock in the media and in the blogging community.

This syndication tool is part of the newspaper’s Open Platform Program led by their very own Wizard of Oz, Matt McAlister, lead developer and main architect of The Guardian’s online strategy.

In an interview with GigaOm, Matt explained the rationale behind the Guardian’s online experiments:

At a time when newspapers like The Times of London and the Sunday Times are implementing paywalls [...] and other newspaper, such as the New York Times, are working on their own pay restrictions, The Guardian’s move toward creating an open platform is unusual. But despite the newspaper’s losses, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has said that an open strategy is the key to the newspaper’s future.

For more info, we heartily recommend “The Open Strategy: Or how I stopped worrying about my website and learned to love the Internet” by the aforementioned online whiz.

Despite the best journalistic efforts at being unbiased, in this case we can’t help but give a big thumbs up to this initiative.

Guardian 1 : Competitors 0.

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Credits Photo CC Flickr : Everydaylifemodern.

Initially published on OWNI july 15th 2010

OWNI decided to name this project #StateLogs.

Below is our narration of the events as they unfold, augmented by the work of OWNI’s developers and partners.

‬

We recommend to navigate through the full-screen version of our app

Retrouvez ici notre live-blogging en français.

All times given are CET (Paris), or GMT+1

We are now closing our live-blogging. You will find the most important elements on OWNIlive in the coming days (tagged “Wikileaks“).

Now, here are the points we will work on:

• Optimize and upgrade the application (géolocalization, timeline, implementation of the new cables)
• Analyze the documents already available and study the consequences of this leak
• Think of an adequate tool to study the forthcoming dumps

[3:00 p.m.] 100% of the documents released are available on the StateLogs app

At this time, 244 diplomatic telegrams were made public, either directly or by WikiLeaks media partners. All of these memos are now searchable and classifiable on statelogs.owni.fr

This represents 0.1% of the over 251,000 documents announced. All of them will be uploaded over the hours (and weeks!) on the application developed in partnership with Slate.fr and Lesoir.be. Our journalists, theirs, and all journalists wishing to work on these documents but also all citizens who wish to explore these rich documents can now do so.

Here’s the tag cloud generated by Opencalais with all the “leaks” of the diplomatic Cablegate.

[11:30 a.m.] Chavez calls for the resignation of Hillary Clinton

For the Venezuelan head of state, the United States has been “unmasked” and by the disclosure of diplomatic documents, and they must accept the consequences. Praising the “courage” of Wikileaks, Hugo Chavez called U.S. Secretary of State to “resign”, “the least she can do”, he said in a speech.

[12:00 p.m.] WikiLeaks’ next target? Banks

Andy Greenberg, a journalist for Forbes, publishes an exclusive interview of Julian Assange conducted on November 11 in London. We learn that half of the documents currently in possession of Wikileaks involve the private sector. It might contain exchanges between leaders of major U.S. banks. They “give an idea of how banks behave at the highest hierarchical level”, and could lead to reforms, according to WikiLeaks’ leader.

In this interview where the questions are often longer than the answers, Assange says his organization has a mass of documents too large to be transmitted in one dump. The choice was made to publish primarily the documents which “had the biggest impact,” which explains in part the focus on the U.S. Army. However, documents concerning the private sector “could bring down a bank or two …” and their publication is scheduled for early next year.

Besides, WikiLeaks appears to be in possession of documents about BP (but Assange says he wants to check their interest) and Russia (for which Assange evokes the pressures of the FSB, formerly KGB).

[7:30 p.m.] Hillary Clinton: “it is not a healthy debate”

In the first public statement since the release, Secretary of State states Hillary Clinton said the U.S “deeply regrets” the leak of diplomatic memos set up by Wikileaks, which is “not only an attack against the U.S., but the international community”, she added.

Hillary Clinton also affirmed Wikileaks has not harmed “partnerships and relathionships” established with other countries, which apparently say to  the U.S: “don’t worry, you don’t know what we tell about you.”

[3:45 p.m.] Did The Guardian give cables to The New York Times ?

In a note to readers, The New York Times explains why it has chosen to publish the diplomatic memos updated by Wikileaks. More surprising, the newspaper highlights the fact that the documents were provided “by a source who insisted on anonymity.”

Still according to journalism.co.uk, the U.S newspaper would not have obtained the cables directly from Wikileaks. The Guardian journalist David Leigh told Yahoo News blog the Cutline his newspaper had supplied a copy of the memos to the NYT. Journalism.co.uk implies the critical treatment The Times sometimes gave to Wikileaks could be behind this blackout.

[3:30 p.m.] 7.500 memos on media relations?

According to Journalism.co.uk, more than 7.500 Statelogs tagged “OPRC” or “PR and Correspondance” could concern media relations. A large part of them would come from the U.S embassy in Turkey. Only two of this class have been published so far: “one is a round-up of Turkish media reaction and the other a summary of media reaction to news issues in China, the US and Iran”, says the website.

[2:30 p.m.]“Will Neslie Nielsen stop WikiLeaks?”

On Telex, one of the French newspaper Le Monde’s blogs, a cartoonist named tOad pays tribute to the late Leslie Nielsen, star of the Naked Gun movies.

[1:40 p.m.] 3 years to release everything?

WikiLeaks affirms all memos will be published during the next months on its Cablegate website:

The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.

The Belgian newspaper Le Soir gives its estimation:

Considering the volume of documents announced, with the publication of 230 memos per day, it would take 1092 days, as to say 3 whole years to publish the whole logs…

[12.20 pm.] A second WikiLeaks? Daniel Domscheit-Berg is lauching his own whistleblower tool reveals Guillaume Grallet, tech journalist at Le Point. This new website, very much alike Wikileaks, is due mid-december says Grallet. Domscheit-Berg used to be Wikileaks spokesperson before Assange fired him at the beginning of october.

[11.45 am.] Daniel Ellsberg on the notion of secrecy

Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon papers, gave a long interview to the web-radio Antiwar.com about the question of ethics in matters of secrecy. He points out that the laws do not condemn the leak of classified information  and that a strong sense of morality is essential.

[11.10 am.]a review of the Statelogs available

As of now, here is a list of the memos available on Wikileaks website and the five other newsrooms :

• 220 memos on WikiLeaks dedicated website
• 27 documents on the Guardian
• 18 Statelogs on the New York Times
• 17 cables on El Pais
• Not a single document was published on Le Monde
• We are in the process of putting the 200 Wikileaks documents into the Statelogs application. We downloaded from a torrent all the files in a .txt format with all the data (memos, dates, country of origin and classification)

In the meantime our colleagues at Le Soir.be have scheduled a chat at 11am with their senior journalist Alain Lallemand : “Wikileaks, a damp squib?”

Check out the video as soon as it is online

[9:00 a.m.] Chinese propaganda strikes back. According to Thenextweb.com, which quotes the Al-Jazeera correspondant in China, the propaganda department has passed a simple recommendation to media outlets: don’t report about WikiLeaks.

[8.30 a.m.] Australia wants to sue Julian Assange

Julian Assange’s country is determined to sue the founder of Wikileaks in court if the evidence is sufficient or if it appears that he violated the law. In a press conference, Attorney General Robert McClelland offers a helping hand to Washington:

The United States will be the lead government in that respect, but certainly Australian agencies will assist and we will look at – of course, I’d ask the Australian Federal Police to look at the issue as to whether any Australian laws have been breached as a specific issue as well.

So, these are serious matters; and we have formed a whole-of-government taskforce to look at the issues.

Asked by journalists on the topic, McClelland refused to mention if Assange’s passport will be withdrawn, stating he was waiting for “instructions from the agencies”.

[23:59 pm] Our app is being filled

Our developpers keep inserting the first StateLogs in our application, and the process is meant to continue in the coming week. For now, 27 cables are available, waiting to be qualified and annotated.

[23:57 pm] What about open-data?

In a cryptic tweet, WikiLeaks announces further info regarding a new embargo for Monday :

Tomorrow we will provide information on how other media groups can apply to for embargo access to #cablegate info.

Shall we expect WikiLeaks monetizing each cable with interested media outlets?

[23:55 pm] Wikileaks has started publishing the cables

On cablegate.wikileaks.org, the organization has started the publication process of the Statelogs and announces that they will be made available in the forthcoming week.

• 15 365 cables are about Iraq
• Turkey is the first country-emitter with 7,918 cables
• US State Department emitted 8,017 cables
• 145,451 statelogs are about foreign policy

Iranian octopus. A large number of unveiled cables underline the mistrust of Arab leaders regarding Iranian power. The 5 newspapers contacted by WikiLeaks expose fear of mollahs’ regime, compared by Jordan diplomats with a “octopus stretching its tentacles” that have to be “cut”, a cable from april 2009 reports. The country’s nuclear desire worries Gulf region, which doubts of the US ability to find a common ground with Iranian authorities.

North Korea questioned. Published cables unveil a discussion between South Korean and American authorities regarding a possible collapse of the North Korean regime and a subsequent reunification of Korea. The discussion between diplomats brings up possible business arrangements with China in order to “salve” worries caused by this reunification.

[11:35 pm] Governments have to keep secrets, not journalists

In an op-ed for the Guardian, British columnist Simon Jenkins defends the approach taken by medias, explaining “governments have keep secrets, journalists have not”. In the same way, he refutes the idea that publishing the statelogs is dangerous, supporting that “Sarkozy’s vulgarity will not hurt us”.

[11:25 pm] Blackmail diplomacy

According to The New York Times, some cables reveal that American authorities wisely used their assets in order to empty Guantanamo jails. They offered the Slovenian authorities talks with president Obama for them taking one of the prisoners. They offered the same things to Kiribati representatives for “millions” dollars.

[9:42 p.m.] Did the US distribute ‘choice of words’ to foreign officials?

Charles Rivkin, US ambassador in France, explained his role of diplomat in an opinion piece in Le Monde newspaper, “Diplomacy and confidentiality” (in French) and worries about the leaks. His words are strangely similar to those of the US ambassador in Haiti. They both declared, in what looks a lot like copy/paste, that “of course, even strong alliances have their ups and down” and that “even solid relationships have their ups and down”.

[8:39 p.m.] US officials ordered to spy at UN headquarters
In July, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to spy at the UN, writes Der Spiegel.

The information to be collected included personal credit card information, frequent flyer customer numbers, as well as e-mail and telephone accounts. In many cases the State Department also required “biometric information,” “passwords” and “personal encryption keys.”

[8:15 p.m.] Chinese government masterminded operation Aurora
The cyberattack directed against Google and others in China in January, 2010, codenamed operation Aurora, was ordered by the Chinese politburo, says one leak.

[8:07 p.m.] The White House condemns the leak
Reuters reports that the White House condemned the leaks as a “reckless and dangerous action”, as was expected.

[7:28 p.m.] The posting of leaks is engaged

The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde have all posted their coverage of the memos.

Le Monde also confirms it’s working on memos concerning France.

We are currently working on making our application operational and implementing the data.

[7:06 p.m.] Iran and Turkish banks caught in the storm

According to senior British officials quoted by the Telegraph, the information disclosed by Wikileaks could endanger efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program. UK services could have infiltrated a hub in Qatar that would provide the equipment Tehran’s nuclear program. The publication of this information could seriously undermine the effort, according to the Telegraph.

Other information in the memos reveal the role of Turkish banks in financing Iranian terrorism and the compensation of North Korean experts responsible for the construction of nuclear facilities in Iran. Finally, according to the Telegraph, the information contained in the memos would highlight the role played by the services of the British embassy in Tehran in the events after the election, including efforts to “oust” Ahmadinejad.

[5:59 p.m.] Berlusconi and Putin have ’special relationship’

The Telegraph writes that the StateLogs will show that Russian president Putin and Italy’s Premier Berlusconi enjoyed a ’special relationship’. They have been friends for the past 5 years and spent numerous holidays together, says the Telegraph, in a way that worried the US.

[5:55 p.m.] Wikileaks confirms what OWNI revealed yesterday.

Wikileaks twitted that the documents were to be released tonight with Le Monde, El Pais, the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, thereby confirming what OWNI had revealed in this live-blogging.

[5:30 p.m.] Wikileaks.org under DDoS

Wikileaks’ servers, which have been on-and-off for the past days, are under a distributed denial of service attack, according to Wikileaks’ twitter account.

Guardian investigative editor David Leigh says on his Twitter account that the Guardian will publish the documents tonight “even if Wikileaks goes down”.

[4:53 p.m.] Poland is prepared. France? Not sure

The Polish administration said in a press release that they were prepared for the upcoming StateLogs release. Contacted by OWNI, the French Foreign Ministry remained vague, hinting at the fact that their state of readiness might not be as high as Poland’s.

[4:27 p.m.] Netanyahu first head of State to speak out

According to Israeli newspaper of record Ha’aretz, Prime Minister Netanyahu played down the risks for Israel, saying that his country “will not be at the center of international attention”. He added that he received no further briefing from the US besides the one received last week.

[4:05 p.m.] “Every issue covered” by StateLogs

In a press conference this afternoon, Julian Assange said that the upcoming StateLogs cover “everything, from assassinations in East Timor to the behaviour of some of the biggest United States private banks.” [UPDATE 6pm] Assange actually meant that Wikileaks had covered all these topics, not that they would be covered in the StateLogs.

[3:17 p.m.] Leaks revealed in Basel

Copies of tomorrow’s Der Spiegel have been sold in Basel, Switzerland. Contents are being exposed on Twitter by Symor Jenkins. Among what can be read in Der Spiegel:

• “Obama prefers to look East than West.”
• “Obama has no emotion towards Europe.”
• “The US sees the world as a confrontation between 2 superpowers. The EU plays a secondary role.”
• “Europe is not so important for the US.”
• From the cover, we read that Ahmadinejad “is Hitler”, Sarkozy is “an emperor without clothes”, Karzai is “driven by paranoia”.

Spiegel's cover

• From the inside articles, scanned by Symor Jenkins (page 1, page 2), we learn that the US have a snitch inside the German government, a member of the liberal FDP party. German chancellor Angela Merkel is described as “rarely creative and risk-averse”. Revelations about the German government go into so much details that Spiegel writes that

“The US is better informed about the secrets of German politics than German politicians themselves.”

[2:27 p.m.] Italy wants to open an investigation on WikiLeaks

According to Spanish daily ABC, which quotes the Corriere della Sera, the Minister of foreign affairs Franco Frattini wants the Italian court to open an investigation on WikiLeaks. Frattini believes the Statelogs are a crime that could seriously damage the international image of Italy. The documents could show damaging information on relations between Italy and Libya, the United States and Russia. Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin would be particularly targeted.

[1:24 p.m.] Post-2004 period

Several sources (including the Spiegel article posted yesterday and then withdrawn) tend to indicate that the vast majority of the documents concern a period beginning in 2004. The number of dispatches is increasing steadily over the years: 9005 mails are dated and the first two months of 2010. You can read the article in the German newspaper here.

[1:02 p.m.] The New York Times had briefed the White House. In an article entitled “WikiLeaks undresses U.S. diplomacy”, Alain Lallemand, our colleague from Lesoir.be with whom we collaborate on this issue, analyzes the implications of this new dump. He also analyzes the reasons why “The New York Times, partner of Wikileaks, has been briefed last Monday by the White House about the nature of documents that will flee.”

[12:06] StateLogs to expose corruption in Central Asia, Russia (Reuters)

News agency Reuters reveals that the upcoming StateLogs might contain sensitive information about corruption dealings in Russia, Afghanistan and Central Asian Republics. US officials reportedly said that the revelations are “major enough to cause serious embarrassment for foreign governments.”

[11:51] Wikileaks submissions dead? Alternatives exist

Wikileaks’ submission service has been down for several weeks, prompting other solutions to be created for would-be whistleblowers. One of these is German privacy service Privacy Box, which allows for messages to be delivered anonymously. To send us a message securely, use this URL:

https://privacybox.de/nkb.msg

[11:42] Official release date might be 22:30 CET

As OWNI informally told AFP yesterday evening, the official launch time might well be 22:30 CET (4:30pm EST), as hinted by the fact that Der Spiegel announces on its home page that the e-edition of the magazine will exceptionally be made available tonight.

[10:39] StateLogs to be “drip fed” over the week

The Telegraph states that the StateLogs will not be published in bulk tonight but will be “drip fed” over the course of the coming week, quoting sources from inside the British government.

[10:30] US refuses talks with Assange

AFP reports that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote to the Department of State on Friday to know who were the persons at risks in the 250,000 documents that might be published today.

US officials answered sternly that:

[They] will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained US government classified materials

[10:16] Mandela, Gaddafi, Mugabe in the leaks (Daily Mail)

According to the Daily Mail, the StateLogs mention former and current leaders of South Africa, Libya and Zimbabwe. The British newspaper hints at the fact that they are vividly criticized by the American Department of State.

[Sunday 10:09] Der Spiegel’s article has been found

German weekly and Wikileaks partner Der Spiegel published the details of the operation in an article yesterday, before taking it offline. The contents of the article have been found and can be read here (German). See here for an automatically translated version.

[21:30] Larry Sanfer shouts at WikiLeaks. Larry Sanfer, who was once a member of the core Wikipedia team, takes it out on Wikileaks (more in a second tweet)

Speaking as Wikipedia’s co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.–not just the government, but the people. What you’ve been doing to us is breathtakingly irresponsible & can’t be excused with pieties of free speech and openness.

[21:15] Is Obama threatened?

Toby Harnden, The Telegraph correspondent in Washington, wonders if StateLogs will “blow Obama’s nice guy image”. The journalist thinks the release could “seriously damage his foreign policy”, fearing “brutal assessments of Gordon Brown’s personality and cold-eyed judgements of David Cameron’s capabilities.”

[20:45] France criticized

According to The Daily Mail, France might be upset about the release. The tabloid reports a comment of a British official fearing “that mutual American and British contempt for the French would emerge”, tell the Daily Mail.

[20:40] Poland warned. According to Polska Agencja Prasowa, the Polish press agency, Poland would have been contacted by the Secretary of State.

[20:30] 85% approve the release. After asking its readers if Wikileaks “should publish sensitive U.S. diplomatic files”, Canadian TV website CBC gives the first results: 84,62% of votants (almots 50 000 votes) approve the release, against 11,54% of negative opinions (6 705 votes).

[20:15] Jeff Jarvis comment. The US journalist wonders “what if diplomacy had to happen in public?“, before he adds “we’ll soon find out.”

[20:00] A Guardian journalist talks. On Twitter, David Leigh, a Guardian journalist, states the imminence of the Statelogs publication:

The truth about the #wikileaks cables is going to come out in the #guardian soon.

[19:30] What is SIPRNET?

Mentioned in Der Spiegel, SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) allows the employees of US Department of State and Department of Defense to communicate potentially sensitive informations whith each other. This interconnected network protects the confidentiality of this communications until the “secret” level of classification. Global Security also tells that this network is used to convey “SECRET NOFORN” (Secret – Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals) documents.

Since its general implementation in the middle of the 90’s, SIPRNET has become the standard channel to share data.

[18:28] Former ambassadors warn of serious damages

Over at the BBC, John Bolton, the former US Ambassador to the UN, warns of serious consequences of such leaks. In the past, revelation of confidential diplomatic material caused huge problems that took decades to calm down. For him, diplomacy is about handling murky business and no alternative exist.

I’m afraid this is only about discrediting the US. And I’m afraid it’ll succeed.

[17:34] Less than 600 documents concern France

According to sources close to the project OWNI contacted, less than 600 documents are about France, or .2% of the total dump. Considering Der Spiegel’s map (below), this means that no European country accounts for more than .5% of the total and that the EU as a whole represents less than 5% of all documents. In other words, expect lots of revelations in the Mid-East and Asia.

[17:31] Clinton personally called China

According to reports by Hong-Kong-based television RTHK, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally called her Chinese counterpart. This is significant, since none of the other communications that have been reported involved the highest diplomatic figure in America. It might point at severe revelations about US-China relationships.

[16:52] Spiegel gives out the details

German weekly Der Spiegel, a previous Wikileaks partner, announces on its website the details of the upcoming leak (UPDATE 17:50 page is now down).

• 251,287 diplomatic cables will be released.
• 8,000 directives from the State department.
• Wikileaks partners are The New York Time, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Spiegel.
• 15,652 documents are classified ’secret’

Below is a snippet of the geographic distribution of the logs as seen on spiegel.de at 17:00

[16:25] No ‘top secret’ documents

Politico White House correspondent Mike Allen states on Twitter that:

There’s not a single TOP SECRET document in the wikileaks dump. All are classified at the SECRET level

Secret is the 4th higher gradation on the 5-point secrecy scale. It is defined as material that could “cause “grave damage” to national security if it were publicly available”.

[Saturday 08:25] UK government tries to intimidate newsrooms

Based on an antique piece of legistlation, the British government has sent several DA-Notices (short for Defence Advisory Notice) to newsrooms throughout the country. This is a non-binding procedure that advises editors to consult with the Ministry of Defence before publishing any information. On his blog, Guido Fawkes published the email sent to all media institutions:

May I ask you to seek my advice before publishing or broadcasting any information drawn from these latest Wikileaks’ disclosures which might be covered by the five standing DA Notices. In particular, would you carefully consider information that might be judged to fall within the terms of DA Notice 1 (UK Military Operations, Plans and Capabilities) and DA Notice 5 (UK Intelligence Services and Special Forces).

On his blog, Sky News editor Simon Bucks explains that DA-Notices have almost always been followed, at least by ways of compromise, where journalists make sure to obfuscate some elements.

[22:35] Documents might reveal murky US implications in Turkey

Even before the leaks are published, some media expose the content of some of them. London-based, Arabic-speaking daily al-Hayat talked of several documents involving Turkey. Quoted by the Jerusalem Post, the newspaper states that the Turkish government is unable to control its border with Iraq, letting arms trafficking develop. It also explains the role that Washington plays in the guerrilla led by terrorist group PKK, to which the US have been providing weapons since 1984.

To the East, documents might reveal how Washington sees Moscow officials, giving names. According to South-African website IOL, quoting the Russian daily Kommersant, some documents could show a state of affairs in terms much less diplomatic than usually heard. Discussions between US diplomats and Russian businesspeople could be among the documents.

[21:40] Department of State gets ready

The US Department of Sate has been calling out all governments so that they can get ready for “a worst-case scenario”, said P.J. Crowley, a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton. Several embassies already contacted the governments of the following countries:

- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Canada
- Denmark
- Norway
- Israel
- Russia
- Turkey
- Saudi Arabia
- UAE
- Finland
- Afghanistan

- And France

A spokesperson at the US embassy in Paris explained that the French government too has been contacted but refused to give out details:

The US embassy maintains daily contacts with the Elysee Palace, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Ministry. Many things have been said but I cannot disclose the content of these conversations, for now.

[Friday 21:07] Wikileaks’ website remains unstable

We revealed the information on Nov. 23rd, the organization’s website is unstable and remains so. Our Warlogs application was subject to the same hiccups, so that the host of both platforms, Bahnhof.se, might be to blame. In case of more problems, you can always check out the mirror site.

“Imminent leak”

On November 24, Wired’s Threat Level blog (famous for its uneasy relationship with Julian Assange) and Bloomberg cautiously announced an “imminent release of diplomatic memos”, based on an email sent by Elizabeth Levy, in charge of legislative affairs with the Department of State. She also quotes the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel as partners.

This new batch should be about the diplomatic cables analyst Bradley Manning might have forwarded to the WikiLeaks team, at the same time as the Collateral Murder video, in which an Apache helicopter opens fire on civilians in Iraq.

A known model

In January, WikiLeaks had already published a single memo concerning the rescue of the Icelandic banks. This lets us imagine the documents’ format:

Click here for a bigger version

Browse the Iraqi warlogs with our interface

Previous articles about Wikileaks

WikiLeaks expanded collaboration with media to ‘maximise exposure’ for Iraq War Logs sources

Hi, here’s Julian Assange

Iraq Warlogs: Interface the leaks

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Crédits photo: CC WikiLeaks