First of all, if you would like to view the full WikiLeaks story, the hour long documentary “WikiRebels” is available in its entirety here. The documentary is very well done and provides a lot of the footage leaked by WikiLeaks, as well as interviews with many of the people involved. Also on the page is a forty-minute YouTube clip – originally leaked by WikiLeaks – of unedited military footage showing civilians being murdered in Baghdad.

WikiLeaks is an international, not-for-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and business whistleblowers. The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya. In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organizations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped. One of the most incriminating documents showed that around 15,000 civilian deaths had not been previously admitted by the US government, which brought the total civilian death count to 66,000 civilians. The Guardian provides a whole section of their website dedicated to the archived articles related to WikiLeaks as well as any current activity – you can access it here.

WikiLeaks is a prime example of how citizen journalism can bring otherwise completely unavailable information to the masses. But this also raises a big question: How can journalists deal with the massive explosion of primary source data made available on the Internet? Citizen journalists themselves need to understand and learn how to contextualize their outputs to make them effective, useable and legitimate. Many are also considering that journalists need to reevaluate their ethics for this age. Should this secretive information be released? If so, is it ok for technically unaccredited citizen journalists like WikiLeaks to be the ones releasing it and analyzing it?

Regardless, I believe that this sort of closed-book information should be out in the public and discussed. But we have to be careful with the way we respond and contextualize this information. Multiple sources of input must be considered and citizens should always be critical of raw data or primary sources.

Alec Leibsohn