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Wikileakers Beware

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According to Kevin Poulsen at Wired, the reconstituted Wikileaks now requires its employees to sign a confidentiality agreement that includes a $20 million penalty for disclosing internal Wikileaks documents. Why? Not to protect anonymous sources or informants named in documents, but to protect Wikileaks’ commercial interests:

“You accept and agree that the information disclosed, or to be disclosed to you pursuant to this agreement is, by its nature, valuable proprietary commercial information,” the agreement reads, “the misuse or unauthorized disclosure of which would be likely to cause us considerable damage.”

The confidentiality agreement, revealed by the New Statesman, imposes a penalty of 12 million British pounds– nearly $20 million — on anyone responsible for a significant leak of the organization’s unpublished material. The figure is based on a “typical open-market valuation” of WikiLeaks’ collection, the agreement claims.

Interestingly, the agreement warns that any breach is likely to cause WikiLeaks to lose the “opportunity to sell the information to other news broadcasters and publishers.”

[I guess that this goes some way to answering my long-standing question about what Wikileaks is: looks like the answer is, Wikileaks is a commercial enterprise. It’s therefore fascinating that Assange also just won the Australian Peace Prize this week – “to an Australian citizen or resident, or to a group based in Australia, for outstanding contributions towards peace.” Previous winners since 2006 have included an anti-nuclear campaigner, a senator, a barrister and the director of a humanitarian organization. It looks like this will be the first time the award has been given out to a commercial entity.]

Meanwhile, for those of you following other aspects of the simmering war between Wikileaks and conventional power centers, Glenn Greenwald has excellent ongoing coverage both of the Wikileaks grand jury and its implications for whistle-blowing generally, and the wider efforts by other corporations to silence Assange. Also, digitaltrends reports on a response from the mainstream media: create competitor whistle-blowing sites. New and allegedly improved independent competitors have also appeared in recent months.

With all the organizational and tactical innovation on both sides as a response to the events of last year, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

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