Has Wikileaks released classified material in the past?
Yes, under an evolving set of models. Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman has some interesting thoughts on the development of Wikileaks and its practices over the years, which will be explained in greater detail when the Berkman Center podcast is released later this week. In the meantime, here’s a capsule version. Wikileaks has moved through three phases since its founding in 2006. In its first phase, during which it released several substantial troves of documents related to Kenya, Wikileaks operated very much with a standard wiki model: the public readership could actively post and edit materials and had a say in the types of materials that were accepted and how such materials were vetted. The documents released in that first phase were more or less a straight dump to the Web: very little organized redacting occurred on the part of Wikileaks. Wikileaks’ second phase was exemplified with the release of the “Collateral Murder” video in April of 2010. The video was a highly curated, produced
