Who owns leaked information?

There is an interesting debate going on regarding the Edward Snowden leaks: who should control leaked information? When is information of such obvious public importance is available, should it be made broadly available in its raw form, along the Wiki Leaks model, or should it be given to trusted journalists to write about, as Snowden did? Is the leaked information a public resource, or a private asset to be exploited for profit?

Mark Ames on Pando questioned what he saw as the "privatization" of the Snowden leaks when billionaire eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar set up a new media venture, and hired Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, thereby, according to Ames, effectively obtaining control of the Snowden documents.

Glenn Greenwald has posted a lengthy response that raises a number of important points.

While both the Pando post and Greenwald's response raise issues about the motives of those who control information, an additional issue for me is the ability of those controlling the information to know what is and isn't relevant, and to connect the dots. Where documents are given to trusted journalists, even a person with the purest of motives must review huge amounts of data to determine what is worthy of release and reporting. They will come across hundreds, perhaps thousands, of names, events, places, and programs. The good ones will try to consult experts to research what they see, but the job can be overwhelming. Any person who thinks they can read such a huge trove of information about the secretive world of international surveillance and understand all the nuance, all the connections, all the unspoken, between the lines meaning is either naive or arrogant. But they are undoubtedly wrong.

When I was litigating large cases, I'd often have thousands of documents to review. I'd read them, and then read them again, and again. I'd go over them with my clients, with experts, with other lawyers. Each time, I'd learn some new fact, that would lead to another line of inquiry. A name would mean nothing to me, until someone pointed out "oh, that person is married to X, who is the CEO of Y". I would never have known that. It's simply not possible for one person or a few people to fully investigate everything in every document. It's often not even possible to know who to ask.

These considerations lead, perhaps, to the solution of crowd sourcing. The broad release of raw documents allows anyone interested to read them, making connections using their own background knowledge. It may well be that there is no one person in the world who can see the whole picture - some have some information, others have other information, and the true picture doesn't appear until all the puzzle pieces are assembled. But Greenwald gives several reasons why an unfiltered document dump may be unwise, and possibly dangerous, and those reasons cannot be easily dismissed.

The job Greenwald has taken on is an enormous one, and important. From what I know of Greenwald, I respect his integrity, his ability, and his courage. In general, I think I've been happy with the way Greenwald has handled the Snowden leaks. But I can't know for sure, and that makes me uneasy. I don't know what he hasn't reported on. I don't know why he has chosen not to report on those things. Is it because he's determined that the information is too sensitive? Is it because it would implicate someone who he is friends with? Is it because he's holding it back for a book deal? Is it because he doesn't know enough of the background to understand its significance? Even when everyone is acting in good faith, with all due diligence, there are doubtless important things that are missed. And what happens the next time, when leaked documents are made available to someone whose ability and ethics may be wanting?

With sensitive subjects like the NSA, we cannot rely on other traditional institutions to protect our interests. Government officials will not tell us what they are doing - indeed, they will sometimes actively lie even to their own legislators. Freedom of Information requests will be denied. Courts issue secret orders in closed sessions. Without leaks, we would remain ignorant of what is done by our governments, in our name. So the leak, and the whistleblower, have become essential to the functioning of democracy.

Ultimately, we are left to trust and hope that those with the leaked information will be capable and willing to determine what's important and report on it. But with information as vital to civil rights and democracy as the Snowden leaks, is trust and hope enough?