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What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do With the Pentagon Papers Today?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: April 25th, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/business/media/19link.html
Before Wikileaks, or even the Internet, there were just plain leaks. Two weeks ago, Wikileaks.org released a classified video showing a United States Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad. The reaction was so swift and powerful an edited version has been viewed six million times on YouTube that the episode provoked many questions about how such material is now released and digested. Put another way: if someone today had the Pentagon Papers, or the modern equivalent, would he still go to the press, as Daniel Ellsberg did nearly 40 years ago and wait for the documents to be analyzed and published? Or would that person simply post them online immediately? Mr. Ellsberg knows his answer. I wouldnt have waited that long, he said in an interview last week. I would have gotten a scanner and put them on the Internet. Today, he says, there is something enticing about being independent not at the whim of publishers or government attempts to control release. The government wouldnt have been tempted to enjoin it, if I had put it all out at once, he said. We got this duel going between newspapers and the government.
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