Om Wikileaks i International Journal of Communication
En omarbetad version av en artikel jag skrev om Wikileaks för två år sedan har precis publicerats i International Journal of Communication. Numret av tidskriften innehåller en “Special Section” om Wikileaks – en synnerligen intressant digital företeelse (vid sidan av dess märklige upphovsman) som det nu länge varit ganska så tyst om. Min egen artikel, “Himalaya of Data” inleds så här:
On January 17, 2007, the Wayback Machine’s software crawler captured wikileaks.org for the first time. The crawler’s act of harvesting and documenting the Web meta-stored a developing site for “untraceable mass document leaking”—all in the form of an “anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents,” to quote the archived representational image of the site (Wayback Machine, 2007, para. 6). The initial WikiLeaks captures, and there were additional sweeps stored during the following months, vividly illustrate how WikiLeaks gradually developed into a site of global attention. The WikiLeaks logo, with its blue-green hourglass, was, for example, graphically present from the start, and later headings at the right were “news,” “FAQ,” “support,” “press,” and “links”—the latter directing users to various network services for anonymous data publication as i2P.net or Tor. Interestingly, links to the initial press coverage on Wikileaks are kept—which is not always the case at Wayback Machine—and can still be accessed. Apparently, one of the first online articles to mention what the site was about stated: “a new internet initiative called WikiLeaks seeks to promote good government and democratization by enabling anonymous disclosure and publication of confidential government records” (Wayback Machine, 2007, para. 18).
International Journal of Communication har öppen access till alla artiklar – min text kan laddas ned här: int_journal_communication_snickars_wikileaks.