Stefania Maurizi, John Goetz and Andy Muller-Maghun
What happened in these 10 years, as our communities saw courageous hackers and journalists sharing skills and joining forces to expose the lies, corruption and war crimes of the World... and are now witnessing a mass-campaign of intimidation of journalists, publishers and whistleblowers? What did we lose on the way? What is at stake?
10 years ago, major WikiLeaks releases revolutionized the way investigative journalism was being done through the biggest cooperation of big and small news outlets wordwide. An unprecedented alliance of ethical hackers and courageous journalists introduced to the general public techniques such as anonymization of sources, secure communications, un-censorable publication, data-mining and data-based journalism, around the publication of "Collateral Murder", "Cablegate", the Iraq and Afghanistan "War Logs". Since then, the Obama administration initiated an unprecedented war on journalism, using the 1917 espionage act against whistleblowers and publishers more times than it has ever been used before. Trump continued this repressive effort and next week, on Jan 4th 2021, a verdict is due in Assange's US extradition case, where he faces 175 years in Colorado's super-max prison. This open discussion, in the form of a cross-interview, will bring together investigative journalists who partnered with WikiLeaks in 2010 and have followed closely the Assange and WikiLeaks story since. They have covered Assange's extradition hearing and gave their expert witness testimonies in court. They will discuss hackers and journalists' common history, the current state of things and, hopefully, perspectives for the future.