To judge from the response we had from countries without the
benefit of a free press, there was a considerable thirst for the
information in the cables – a hunger for knowledge which
contrasted with the occasional knowing yawns from metropolitan
sophisticates who insisted that the cables told us nothing new.
data journalism may not seem amazing and new; for now it is. The
world has changed and it is data that has changed it.” Davies,
too, was dismayed by the difficulty of persuading Assange to
make redactions. “At first, he simply didn’t get it, that it’s
not OK to publish stuff that will get people killed,” Davies
said. “The problem is he’s basically a computer hacker. He comes
from a simplistic ideology, or at that stage he did, that all
information has to be published, that all information is good.”