WikiLeaks is famous for unsettling the lives of powerful people — diplomats, military leaders, politicians — with its disclosures of emails and cables and otherwise private communications. Little people can also be unsettled by these radical-transparency data dumps, according to an Aug. 23 Associated Press story by Raphael Satter and Maggie Michael, “Private lives are exposed as WikiLeaks spills its secrets.”
The reporters caught up with 23 people — mostly from Saudi Arabia — who were affected by the disclosures. They included two teenage rape victims and a Saudi woman who took on debt to support a sick relative and was outed. She called the episode a “disaster.” WikiLeaks, reported the AP, even published the “name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality can lead to social ostracism, a prison sentence or even death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.”
WikiLeaks wasn’t pleased, as reflected in its Twitter account:
No, WikiLeaks did not disclose "gays" to the Saudi govt. Data is from govt & not leaked by us. Story from 2015. Re-run now due to election.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 23, 2016
(That 2015 story, by Michael and Satter, featured the headline, “WikiLeaks exposes Saudi liquor runs, Clinton’s passport.”)
This week’s privacy piece carried this line about attempts to reach WikiLeaks: “Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn’t immediately answered Tuesday.”
Over Twitter, WikiLeaks itself took issue with that, writing to Satter, “You contacted our lawyers with your re-cycled allegations from 2015 that were not even worth a headline then, at 1am CET today.”
Now WikiLeaks is asking for the AP to turn its investigative resources from WikiLeaks to the AP itself. In a six-page letter, Melinda Taylor, a member of Assange’s legal team, rips the AP for allegedly ambushing WikiLeaks with the privacy piece. Satter, charges Taylor, didn’t contact WikiLeaks and instead contacted her late Monday night Central European Summer Time (CEST) in The Hague. He followed up with an email after midnight with some links and questions; Taylor professes to have been asleep at that time. Seven hours later, the AP hit “publish.” Taylor writes that the email address for Wikileaks (sunshinepress@this.is) didn’t receive any inquiries from Satter over the past two weeks.
The AP changed the language of its article to excise any mention that the “site” hadn’t answered questions. The new formulation reads like this: “Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for an interview over the past month have been unsuccessful and the ex-hacker did not reply to written questions.” Bolding inserted to highlight change.
Satter did request an interview directly with Assange, on Aug. 17, though Taylor contends that the emailed request contained no hint of the material behind the request. “It is thus clear that Mr. Satter provided WikiLeaks with no effective opportunity whatsoever to respond to claims, because no claims were put to WikiLeaks before publication.” Taylor ends her letter with a modest set of requests, including an investigation into Satter’s conduct, including his Twitter behavior, which appears to “reflect a personal animus against Mr. Assange”; that Satter be removed from the WikiLeaks beat until completion of the requested investigation; and that the AP publish WikiLeaks’ eventual response to the story.
In an email, AP spokesman Paul Colford blasts back:
WikiLeaks had nearly 14 months to answer The Associated Press’ questions about its publication of private data, including medical data, in the Saudi cables. AP reached out to WikiLeaks many times during that period.In the past six weeks alone, AP reached out to WikiLeaks 11 times to seek an interview with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange or WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson.When WikiLeaks finally replied to messages left by email, phone and text, it sent a largely irrelevant fact sheet and provided the number for one of its senior lawyers, Melinda Taylor, who during a half-hour phone call did not answer any questions and later did not stick to her promise to follow up on them.WikiLeaks says it has more than 100 staffers operating across nearly every time zone. The organization was given 10 hours to deal with specific allegations that were described to Ms. Taylor in detail during the call. More than 48 hours after the story’s publication, all of those questions remain unanswered.
Sounds as if there’ll be no internal investigation.
