In any big data leak story, the “why?” and the “who?” tend to matter as well as the “what?” We need to remember the horrors of the Afghan war that sent Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks – and the disgust over unmonitored mass surveillance that made up Edward Snowden’s mind for him. In sum, the ideals of the whistleblower matter too, and so does the social purpose fulfilled (as when America, for example, cleaned up its act after Snowden).
What, then, about “Vault 7”, the 10,000 or so CIA documents revealed via WikiLeaks last week (many of them, in the nature of things, as yet unread)? What was the leaker so exercised about? TV sets secretly monitoring the front parlour, a kind of Gogglebox in reverse?
This may be a moment when anger at privacy lost finally ignites (Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian), or when public opinion shrugs benignly and thinks the security agencies are just doing their job. But inevitably we also need to know more about who leaked it, and why.
WikiLeaks vaults tossed into a political campaign by a foreign power clearly don’t pass muster (whoever the leaks are directed against). Simple document dumps – in Assange mark 2 mode – aren’t defensible either.
Perhaps the Vault 7 whistleblower had a particular outrage in mind? Perhaps he or she was just playing wrecker – or serving some covert master? And those, increasingly, are questions for the media to ask as well. What the blank’s going on here?