Whether you are living in the picturesque city of Halifax or the worldly city of Toronto, you probably have had a glimpse at the proliferation of information coming from sources such as the WikiLeaks. This organization has leaked information on the most powerful governments on Earth and pushed for the transparency of world institutions and famous personalities. Is WikiLeaks and its parent websites replacing the role of traditional media and becoming the new democracy watchdog?
Closer to home, a few months ago QuébecLeaks was created to make available confidential documentation from Quebec's governments, institutions and influential personalities. Since then,
QuebecLeaks has published the contract for the city of Quebec's amphitheatre, a political debate which lead to the three Parti Québécois deputies resigning due in part to disagreements on how to tackle the issue within the party. This document was already public, though.
The Québec website has also leaked an entente between the newspaper La Presse and broadcaster Radio-Canada to join synergies in order to have a greater impact on the media environment it cover. Since the QuébecLeaks' creation in early 2011, there has only been two big documents leaked on the young website.
There is an important issue here that might explain the low level of participation to QuébecLeaks. How will leakers remain and retain their confidentiality? Should leakers be accountable and transparent, too? There has been scandal after scandal in Quebec politics over the past year and there is probably no shortage of leaks to publish on the website.
Yet, QuébecLeaks has not published a substantial amount of leaks as the famous WikiLeaks did in the last year. However, they suggest that this will help government, institutions and celebrities to be more transparent and accountable even though documents are not leaked. At the very least, they are alive and organized to do it if a leak is new and deemed necessary to put forward in the public.
The leaks seem to have never really been meant to replace journalism and traditional media. In his book WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, Micah L. Sifry argues that Wikileaks is a symptom indicating our struggle between older and closed systems with the new open culture of the Internet. QuébecLeaks has thus become another way to gather newsworthy information that ought to be open to the public.
QuébecLeaks is one of the new watchdogs of provincial democracy. Watchdogs are there to watch. If nothing is leaked, maybe it means that they are doing their job well. Maybe it also means that they have to work harder and not stay at the fence. The question of confidentiality of leakers still remain an important deterrent of participation. But was it not always the case even in traditional media? For example, the infamous Deep Throat collaboration that helped topple the Nixon administration in the mid-1970s was faced with a similar challenge. Deep Throat's identity was kept secret for decades.
Today, traditional news organizations and watchdogs are in the same basket: the Internet basket. This basket has no boundaries and it is our role to be proactive in it. The new and more traditional organizations face similar challenges as the new ones. Instead of fighting against one another, perhaps that we can join forces and find ways to create a safe environment for sources to speak up, whether it is through leaks or through the traditional news-gathering channel -- or a new hybrid of the two.
Follow Valerie Belair-Gagnon on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@valeriebgagnon
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Seems to me that the owners of QuebecLeaks read Julian Assange's bio and then dreamt of being some international fugitive, living out of backpacks, dodging interpol and hiding behind Tor accounts.
Do us all a favor, if you are going to stand up for something then do it. Don't be all smoke and no fire.
The following comment by QuebecLeaks spokesperson make me optimistic:
"However, we have a very thorough analysis process and most documents do not make it to the stage 3 of our analysis" I would be very interested to know what factors are used in the analysis and what kind of information survives the climb up the ladder to the refined atmosphere of Stage 3.
On the other hand, Luc's reference to receiving documents from Noam Chomsky is not a sanguine sign. I know that Mr. Chomsky is a famous public intellectual. But his animus against democracies such as his home country of the US and the Jewish national homeland, Israel, is so egregious that his critiques border on nihilism rather than bold and trenchant criticism.
I hope that Valerie's hopeful conclusion about synergies comes true; a 3 stage analysis is a welcome sign that it will.
We launched on March 9th, with just 1 public figure. A few days later, I lost my day job. At that time, we were around 15-20 in our team. The weeks after that, we received a lot of documents and support, including Noam Chomsky. We met with investors who were interested in investing in QuebecLeaks, we worked on business plans. We’re still looking for investments. I also started to give conferences.
On April 12th, I gave my kidney to a friend, which was a concern for QuébecLeaks since I was in bed for a few weeks. By the end of April, we started to look for partnerships. We’re still in the process of establishing partnerships. We also welcomed a lot more people in our team and we are now at around 40 members. Since then, we have received important documents that took time to process and we worked with traditional journalists behind the scenes.
We're in it for the long run, based on WikiLeaks' experience. Just like Valérie stated, we are trying to work harder to not stay on the fence. We see ourselves as both a tool for citizens seeking anonymity, but also as being a part of a larger social movement. We are doing our best to be part of that movement and start it with other organizations.
If anyone is interested in QuebecLeaks, send us an email at contact@quebecleaks.org.
Even though we have not yet published any important leaks, we have received hundreds of infos. However, we have a very thorough analysis process and most documents do not make it to the stage 3 of our analysis. As stated very often, we are not into the game of sensationalism, we intend to publish only what can really be verified… and we depend entirely on the participation of the citizens.
On the other hand, and I think that this is fairly important : most of the work we do is behind the scene. We have receive a lot of infos that we just decided to send to traditional journalists that would dig deeper. We also have realized that the news reality in Quebec/Canada (because we also want to support the rest of Canada), was very different then the news reality from WikiLeaks, which operates on a more higher level. The kind of infos QuebecLeaks's looking for is so personal, that usually it's only verbal. Which is why we have decided to, in the next few months, offer more services to citizens and go into the "tipline" part of information.
Through that same thought process, we have realized that it's one thing to reveal confidential information, it is also another thing to have access to information that is supposedly already "public". Lack of accessibility to public documents is the same thing as keeping public information confidential.
Quebec has unrivaled culture of self-delusion, hypocrisy and obfuscation which means the slow death of democracy.
Here organized crime reigns supreme - the whole Montreal area is in its claws and nobody dares to say it. Police hit on the poor and the homeless and leave the rich, criminal and corrupt alone.
The Montreal area has been a huge phony construction site for years, while garbage stays uncollected because money goes into private pockets with government approval.
The population takes part in this self-delusion. People say leave Montreal, as if Montreal were not a part of Quebec.
And so on.
Because the media is highly concentrated and nobody dares speak up.
So welcome Quebecleaks, if it can clear the situation...