Today the Anons announced "Operation: Leakspin". The ostensible goal of Leakspin is to build an anonymous, international army of citizen journalists doing whatever it takes to blast information in front of people's faces, especially those who wouldn't ordinarily look for it. Hence, the suggestion to use misleading taglines like "Justin Bieber", etc.
When the flyer (linked above) came to me I thought to share it with a friend who might have interest. She responded expressing the same puzzlement I was experiencing: "What's the point?" I mean, don't the big news media outlets have like entire staffs of people up to their ears in these cables, pouring through them to find the most startling revelations? She asserted what we need is a "movement", suggesting Leakspin might be a waste of time. I thought about it for a moment and concluded the following:
There can be no movement unless people start moving. Look, we have become far to reliant on the major media outlets. At the moment, we're primarily relying on Der Speigel and the UK Guardian to make sense of the cables, while the American media is too busy playing up the whole "International mystery man vs. terrorist" debate. Even this, of course, will drop from the headlines as soon as the notoriously short American attention span begins to attenuate.
Not this time. We have to be involved, people. Read the cables yourself. Make a personal investment and you might find that your interest in this street fight is longer-lived than than than the next "Breaking News". The people behind Wikileaks have risked more than any of us could ever imagine in order to give us the materials we need to be citizen journalists. Perhaps for the moment we may be unlikely to find some revelations that the big news outlets are apt to miss, but sooner or later the they're going to move on. Then we're on our own.
You don't have to read all of them, just give it a try. In the very least, you may learn something about the day-to-day workings of international diplomacy, not all of which are scandelous. In fact, sometimes it looks like government is even doing the right thing--a detail which even the Guardian and Der Spiegal can omit.
