I've followed with great interest Wired.com's coverage of the arrest of Private Bradley Manning, the young American soldier who allegedly leaked reams of classified US military material to Wikileaks.
I've also watched in disbelief as Wikileaks has lashed out at Wired.com journalist Kevin Poulsen, suggesting he somehow acted unethically in his reporting of the arrest.
In my mind all he did was scoop other outlets with the news of Manning's troubles. That's not unethical, that's just good journalism.
The Wikileaks Twitter account disagreed, suggesting there's a "special place in hell" for journalists like Poulsen and Adrian Lamo, the one-time greyhat hacker who turned Manning in.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is most likely the author of those infantile tweets.
Poulsen's reporting was excellent. My guess is Assange just didn't like the story. But instead of turning the other cheek, Wired.com has apparently fired back.
This piece by the Website's journalist Ryan Singel -- it would look bad if penned by Poulsen, after all -- breaks the news of Wikileaks apparently broken submission process.
While unquestionably newsworthy, the article reads like a classic attack piece, dripping with sarcasm. It's mocking.
In my view it is intended, clearly, to go beyond describing the broken submission process and portray Wikileaks as an unprofessional organisation undeserving of the "mostly-laudatory media portraying Wikileaks as a fearless, unstoppable outlet for documents that embarrass corporations and overbearing governments".
My guess is if Wikileaks is indeed sitting on 260,000 leaked diplomatic cables that describe, in painstaking detail, every example of skulduggery the US government has inflicted upon the Middle East in the last decade, a broken SSL cert is probably the last thing on its mind.
They might be more worried about, you know, the CIA death squads on their ass.
If Wired wants to hold the high ground in this little pissing contest it needs to be much more careful. The article makes no mention of the spat between Wired.com and Wikileaks and that's a big pile-o-fail, right there. That sort of thing needs to be disclosed to readers.
While we might expect this sort of behaviour from a pseudo-activist organisation like Wikileaks, we deserve better from a professional media organisation.
As for Wikileaks, keep 'dem docs coming.
We'll ignore your ridiculously biased contextualising of leaks if you keep giving us unedited source material.
You're not a professional news organisation that needs to be held to the same standard as Wired. Be as infantile as you want on Twitter.
(Wikileaks has denied the Wired story, saying its submission process is being upgraded to "deal with growth".)
Click here to listen to Risky.Biz's interview with former grey-hat hacker Adrian Lamo about his decision to turn in Manning.
What do you think? Comment below.
