Interesting post on the Daily Telegraph regarding the Wikileaks Afghanistan logs and the huge scoop granted to The Guardian, The New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel.

Will Heaven raises an interesting point regarding the impartial nature of Wikileaks, which says it is a website with no political agenda. He accuses Wikileaks of politicising the story by leaking to three liberal titles and being given an easy ride on social media networks.

“So I’m puzzled by today’s ‘Afghanistan war log’ story. It doesn’t strike me – or many of my colleagues – as politically neutral to feed such sensitive information to three Left-leaning newspapers: namely The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel. Even more puzzling that Wikileaks would choose, very deliberately, to contravene its own mission statement – that crowdsourcing and open data are paramount.

“By selecting three like-minded newspapers, Julian Assange has politicised the information. Wikileaks has effectively achieved the polar opposite of crowdsourcing, demonstrating precisely why selective disclosure is a far more subtle – and far more dangerous – method of operation,” Heaven writes.

He says it has been given an easy ride today on social networking sites and doesn’t think it should be after ditching principles.

“It should have been up to an online audience (of casual readers and experts) to decide its value, not the editors of three Left-wing newspapers. Sadly, those principles have been ditched.”

Of course, Heaven is a Telegraph journalist and would doubtless take issue with “left” leaning titles being given exclusive access, but he has a point. Wikileaks has certainly been selective. If you are crowdsourcing the news as Wikileaks does shouldn’t it be there for all?  I ask this as a Guardian reading lefty who doesn’t have an issue with where the material went.

The White House has, of course, criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks as you would expect.

“We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us.”

It is worth considering if the White House has a case here. What duty of care does a venture such as Wikileaks have to those that it leaks details about?

The White House has, of course, criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks as you would expect.

“We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us.”

It is worth considering if the White House has a case here. What duty of care does a venture such as Wikileaks have to those that it leaks details about?

It also struck me that despite some of the tragic details telling of the previously not known of civilians killed by coalition troops, which appears to be the main focus of what we have read so far, it is difficult to see how this changes things as the leaks didn’t strike me as hugely revelatory. Tragic yes, highly interesting for sure, though not eyes only national security revelatory, but what do I know?

People are tweeting that there could be a case for war crimes and maybe there is, but I that’s a question for others.

The data logs are mostly a story of stark statistics as they detail among many other things the 144 unreported incidents where coalition forces killed Afghan civilians.  Digging those statistics out clearly show how powerful a thing data journalism is becoming and the sheer power of creating stories out of stored data.

Data journalism makes sense of huge pools of information and is to all extents and purposes the modern equivalent of deep throat. It changes things, but as Roy Greenslade writes you still need journalists (and a few of them) to sift and anaylse and to put a spin on it.

The publication of these 90,000 plus files seals the reputation of Wikileaks and follows its publication in April of this year of a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad.

UPDATE — Bit more on this apparently it was previously reported that  Wikileaks is working on a plan that hasn’t yet come to fruition to make the Web leakier by enabling newspapers, human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed an “upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks” form onto their sites.

“We will take the burden of protecting the source and the legal risks associated with publishing the document,” said Julien Assange, an advisory board member at Wikileaks, in an interview at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.