10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17288
The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden are among the most topical whistleblowing cases where journalists got involved to publish articles based on leaked information. On occasion of these major leaks, strategies of circulation restrictions were activated in order to stop the dissemination of the leaked material. In the Pentagon Papers case, The New York Times first published the material and received a restraining order to stop the publication (Diamond 1993); WikiLeaks was targeted with digital DDoS attacks aimed at putting it offline. In the case of Edward Snowden, The Guardian was instead forced to physically destroy hard drives where leaked documents were allegedly stored (Greenwald 2014a). This paper analyses the evolution of content circulation restriction strategies and their effectiveness in whistleblowing cases by means of the three aforementioned case studies, focusing on the material nature of the leaked documents. The analysis focuses on issues of digital materialization, content circulation and journalism, contributing to the debate on these topics in STS.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17288
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Philip Di Salvo
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
materiality
Strategies of Circulation Restriction in Whistleblowing. The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Snowden Cases
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
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Essays
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
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67-85
TS
Philip Di Salvo
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17288
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Strategies of Circulation Restriction in Whistleblowing. The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Snowden Cases
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                                                                               Essay
                                                                                      67




Strategies of Circulation Restriction in
Whistleblowing
The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Snowden Cases

Philip Di Salvo
Usi-Lugano (CH)



     Abstract: The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden are
     among the most topical whistleblowing cases where journalists got involved
     to publish articles based on leaked information. On occasion of these major
     leaks, strategies of circulation restrictions were activated in order to stop
     the dissemination of the leaked material. In the Pentagon Papers case, The
     New York Times first published the material and received a restraining order
     to stop the publication (Diamond 1993); WikiLeaks was targeted with digi-
     tal DDoS attacks aimed at putting it offline. In the case of Edward Snowden,
     The Guardian was instead forced to physically destroy hard drives where
     leaked documents were allegedly stored (Greenwald 2014a). This paper
     analyses the evolution of content circulation restriction strategies and their
     effectiveness in whistleblowing cases by means of the three aforementioned
     case studies, focusing on the material nature of the leaked documents. The
     analysis focuses on issues of digital materialization, content circulation and
     journalism, contributing to the debate on these topics in STS.

     Keywords: Whistleblowing; censorship; journalism; WikiLeaks; surveil-
     lance; materiality.

     Corresponding author: Philip Di Salvo, Università della Svizzera Italiana,
     Via G. Buffi 13, CH-6900 Lugano (Switzerland). Email: philip.di.salvo@usi.ch.




1. Introduction: Analog and Digital Whistleblowing and
Content Restriction Strategies

    Whistleblowing is a process of information circulation set to bypass
veils of secrecy in order to inspire change by using transparency and im-
pact on public opinion as strategies (Callahan and Dworkin 1994). The
history of journalism is full of topical whistleblowers who inspired im-
pactful scoops and publications, for instance the Watergate scandal
“Deep Throat” has been widely historicized, even in pop culture, as one
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
7 (1) pp. 67-85 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2016
68                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

of the most famous instances of whistleblowing (Schudson 1992). In more
recent times, different cases of whistleblowing in digital environments
have gained global attention, such as the WikiLeaks “Megaleaks” in 2010
or the NSA surveillance scandal in the summer of 2013. Whistleblowing
cases at different levels, not only those involving national interests or
high-ranking institutions, are among those instances where journalism can
act as evidence-supported effective watchdogs (Curran 2005) and as in-
dependent monitors of power (Strömbäck 2010, 185-187). They provide
a public service for accountability and act in a more adversarial way to-
wards those in power. As a form of dissent, whistleblowing may not be
welcome from organizations that suffer an information leak. This could
lead organizations to respond with strategies of information circulation
restrictions in order to maintain control and prevent information from
getting out. Retaliation against the whistleblower within the organizations
is common (Johnson 2003, 91-114), but when the press and governmental
or public bodies are involved, authorities may also engage in active cen-
sorship practices to stop the exchange of information from the whistle-
blower to the recipients or to prevent publication and circulation of the
leaked information. Frequently used tactics include evoking the need for
secrecy in matters of national security, legal actions and, in most extreme
cases, active censorship (Carpenter 1995, 7-10).
    This paper provides a comparison of content circulation restriction
strategies in the context of whistleblowing in both analog and digital
conditions, dealing with external whistleblowing cases involving journal-
ists and media as recipients of leaks. Analysis of the evolution of applied
circulation limitations strategies from an offline to an online context fo-
cuses on three different case studies: the Pentagon Papers (1971), Wik-
iLeaks (2010) and Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance
(2013). Thus, the paper is structured as follows: section 2 focuses on in-
formation circulation restriction strategies applied during the Pentagon
Papers case; section 3 deals with the different strategies deployed in the
digital context of WikiLeaks; and section 4 analyzes the technological
implications of the restrictions applied in the Snowden case. We will be
looking at whistleblowing cases mainly from one points of view: the con-
tent circulation restriction strategies put in action to stop the leaks. Par-
ticular attention will be given to how authorities tried to stop the diffu-
sion of information. The theoretical analysis is drawn on a discussion
from media materiality, crossed with philosophy of technology and jour-
nalism studies. The notion of whistleblowing has been common in com-
munication and journalism jargon since the early 70s, when the term
came to express a particular form of dissent in bureaucratic systems
(Johnson 2003) based on information circulation. Whistleblowing schol-
ars Marcia P. Miceli and Janet P. Near (1992, 15) have described the
practice as the “disclosure of illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices un-
der the control of their employers to persons of organizations that may be
able to effect action”. The definition clearly poses whistleblowing as an
Di Salvo                                                                  69
information exchange between an individual holding information and re-
cipients able to possibly make this information actionable in different
ways. In connection with journalism, whistleblowers represent a unique
resource in terms of information gathering and sourcing. Especially when
it comes to secretarial organizations or closed environments, insights
coming from insiders turned whistleblowers may work as leads or inspira-
tions for possible journalistic investigations or can provide evidence for
an investigative hypothesis. In contexts where excessive secrecy is applied
(Fenster 2014) or Freedom of Information (FOI) laws are absent or inad-
equate, whistleblowers are an indispensable resource for accessing data or
information for reporting. Where legal limitations are at stage, whistle-
blowers aid in circumventing legal limitations in situations warranted by
public interest and journalists provide a conduit to reach the public. Both
in offline and online instances, whistleblowers act as the vehicles of dis-
sent to a specific authority.
    In Hirschmann’s terms (1970), whistleblowing happens when individ-
uals facing wrongdoings are asked to decide among different response
strategies: Exit, Loyalty or Voice. By opting for Voice, whistleblowers de-
cide to operate “in opposition” – breaking a bond of loyalty in favor of
pressing ethical demands. Danah Boyd (2013) has defined whistleblowing
as a form of civil disobedience. This is particularly the case with “external
whistleblowing” (Kaptein 2011): cases where the recipient of complaints
and leaks are entities based outside of the involved organizations. Among
all of the major changes imposed by digitalization to the media environ-
ment, there is also the reconstruction of the environment architecture on
a “distributed structure”, mutated from the Internet network structure
(Arvidsson and Delfanti 2013, 76-77) and the dematerialization of com-
munication means in favour of its strong and growing digitalization. This
wider phenomenon also brought to a growing availability of digitalized
information. In 2007, over 300 exabytes of stored digital data existed
globally (Hilbert and Lopez 2011). As a vast majority of communication
exchanges moved online, content circulation restriction strategies also
turned to the web (Byfield 2011; Deibert 2009). This built up a growing
approach to censorship and content filtering that Rebecca MacKinnon
(2012, 31-50) effectively calls “Networked Authoritarianism”.
    The spectrum of censorship on the Internet interests both authoritari-
an regimes and democratic countries. Despite some utopian and deter-
ministic perspectives that view the Internet as an eminently libertarian
and emancipatory tool, the ubiquity of digital censorship is on the rise.
The Chinese case is a commonly analyzed example of Internet control
and censorship (Negro 2013), but instances are visible in other countries
as well. Additional instances include but are not limited to India
(MacKinnon 2012, 91-94), Turkey (Akgül and Kırlıdoğ 2015) and Russia
(Simon 2015, 54-62). A global perspective on the widespread control over
70                                                            Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

digital communications and publications is annually tracked in the “En-
emies of The Internet” report1 published by Reporters Without Borders
(2014). According to Zubair Nabi (2014), around 60 countries in the
world somehow actively censor the Internet.


2. Analog Restrictions: The Ellsberg Case and the Penta-
gon Papers

    When it comes to content circulation restrictions in the context of
whistleblowing and journalism, few cases are more representative than
the publication of the Pentagon Papers2 in 1971. The Papers, officially ti-
tled “History of United States Decision Making Process on Vietnam Poli-
cy, 1945-1967,” was a “7000-page top secret study of U.S. decision mak-
ing in Vietnam” (Ellsberg 2002, xi). They were released to the press by
Daniel Ellsberg, a former analyst for the U.S. intelligence community
turned whistleblower. The corpus of leaked classified documents outlined
an insider perspective on the Vietnam War. Since the Papers were classi-
fied, the U.S. authorities intervened to prevent the publication of the ma-
terial by the American Press. The New York Times published on June
13th 1971 and this was followed by an immediate reaction from the Nix-
on administration to obtain an order of prior restraint (Diamond 1993,
117-118) and they subsequently filed for an injunction on June 15th with
the federal district court in New York. The injunction was granted and
The New York Times received a temporary restraining order that com-
pletely stopped the publication of the newspaper for five days (Lewis
2012). The legal case eventually reached the Supreme Court, where the
government alleged that the publication of the material by The New York
Times was harmful to national security. However, the Supreme Court
ruled that the allegations were insufficient to give the restraint order legit-
imacy (Rudenstine 1998, 301-320).
    By underlining the power of the First Amendment, the Pentagon Pa-
pers case ended up strengthening the constitutional freedom of the press
in the United States (Diamond 1993, 118; Lewis 2012) and is now con-
sidered a milestone for press freedom. Retrospectively, the U.S. govern-
ment’s attempt to restrict and censor information with an order of prior
restraint on matters of national security was a direct attempt to legally
stop the publications pursued within the borders of democracy. It was a
circulation restriction strategy targeting the physical distribution of the
information and the medium, namely, the 1971 print editions of newspa-
pers featuring the material. The analog nature of the leak of the Pentagon


     Available here: http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/.
     1
     2
      The Pentagon Papers were fully declassified in 2011 and put online. They
are available here: http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/.
Di Salvo                                                                    71
Papers forced Ellsberg to rely on legacy media for the publication of the
revelations. At the time, legacy media was the only institution able to per-
form the gatekeeping function and provide the reach necessary for the in-
formation to become news (White 1950; Gans 1979).
    As argued by Joel Simon (2015, 13), the legal comprehensive censor-
ship against powerful institutions such as national newspapers implies a
hierarchical approach, intrinsic of the analog media environment in which
they were perpetuated. This hierarchical approach was also strengthened
by the climate of excessive secrecy within the Nixon administration dur-
ing the Vietnam War. This later culminated in the explosion of the Wa-
tergate scandal in 1972, which contributed to increasing the pressure over
Nixon until his resignation in 1974 (Carpenter 1995, 80-81). Thus, the
Pentagon Papers case falls under Christopher Woolmar’s (1990) defini-
tion of censorship: the information released is controlled through distri-
bution channels, rather than controlling the information itself. Moreover,
from the perspective of the authorities, restricting the reach of the leak by
blocking the publication of newspapers holding the documents was the
only available strategy to restrain the information circulation.
    This element is also tightly connected with the analog print nature of
the Pentagon Papers corpus. The Papers originally existed only in physi-
cal form and were shared exclusively within a very small and elite com-
munity, mainly staff members granted access to the offices where the Pa-
pers were stored. The Papers were available in only fifteen original dupli-
cates and Ellsberg had access to one of them (Gitelman 2011). The actual
act of whistleblowing was also influenced by the analog nature of the
print documents. Ellsberg himself explained (2002) the mechanic and
painful difficulties he and his colleague Anthony Russo had to face in
manually copying all the seven thousand pages of the books with a Xerox
914 machine. The physical and technological limitations of the copying
and carrying of the documents influenced the number of copies that Ells-
berg and Russo could create. In his memoir of the events, Ellsberg (2002,
372-375) recalls how crucial it was to have more than one single copy of
the corpus, in order to avoid possible seizures. When the injunction
reached The New York Times, it was the pressure of sharing the Papers
with another 15 newsrooms willing to publish, including The Washington
Post and the Boston Globe, that made injunctions useless and let the Pen-
tagon Papers reach the public. If only one newspaper would have been in
possession of a single copy of the Papers, an injunction against that par-
ticular publication would have caused a complete blackout against the
leak. When other newspapers started publishing, thanks to the other cop-
ies of the Papers available, it was literally impossible to stop all the publi-
cations at the same time.
    The backfire of a censorship attempt that leads to wider circulation of
content has been defined as the “Streisand Effect”, a notion accepted by
the academic community to define censorship attempts that end up being
counterproductive (Jansen and Martin 2015; Nabi 2014). The effect is
72                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

named after singer Barbra Streisand, who attempted to restrict circulation
of a picture of her home from a public website, which led to a much wid-
er viral circulation. Although this term was coined in the context of digi-
tal censorship, the Streisand Effect is also illustrated by the publication of
the Pentagon Papers and the backfire of the governments censorship at-
tempt. As noted by Jansen and Martin (2015), other instances of the
Streisand Effect have appeared in non-digital times and, according to
Evgeny Morozov (2011, 121), date back to Ancient Greek times. In the
next section, the focus will shift to content circulation restriction strate-
gies in a digital context, demonstrating how strategies in this context have
led to a similar backfire reaction on a much larger scale.
    When it comes to the Pentagon Papers case, it is possible to argue that
the fully material circulation restriction strategy put in action against the
first US newspapers publishing the material has been quite insufficient, as
other publications picked up the source material in order to get it out and
it would have been simply impossible to imagine a legal blockage against
all the involved media. As discussed earlier, this was possible mainly be-
cause of the existence of several copies of the original Papers. Otherwise,
with the eventual seizure of the content, the circulation of the leaked in-
formation would have been completely blocked. When it comes to the
practice of whistleblowing, instead, the analog nature of the Papers was
also the possible limitation to its own efficiency: to create copies of the
original content was technologically complicated and very difficult to
scale. In the next two sections we will dig into two digital cases, in order
to analyze whether digitalization reinforced whistleblowing practices and
the consequent circulation restriction strategies.


3. Digital Restrictions: The WikiLeaks Case

    WikiLeaks, launched in 2006, proposed a different approach to whis-
tleblowing, relying on the affordances of digital technologies. WikiLeaks
provided on its own website an encrypted dropbox where whistleblowers
could submit documents and tips in a safer and anonymous way. In the
first 10 years of operation, WikiLeaks has been publishing several leaks,
with a spike in terms of impact and interest in 2010. Thanks to a massive
leak of digital materials, provided by Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks had
access to more than 600’000 classified files coming from the US intelli-
gence and army archives. The publication of that information was done
working closely with some major news outlets, such as The New York
Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. With its own approach, WikiLeaks
has become one of the most powerful voices in the field of whistleblowing
in the digital era.
    In the previous section, we discussed how the Pentagon Papers leak
happened in an analog context where legacy media and newspapers were
strong gatekeepers of news. That situation and process underwent a
Di Salvo                                                                  73
complex and radical disruption with the rise of the web. As Axel Bruns
puts it (2005, 13): “digital media like the World Wide Web function ac-
cording to different models than print or even the electronic broadcasting
media, and as a result, gates kept by news organizations can now be by-
passed”. The result of this switch of power facilitated by digitalization
pushed the role of traditional media towards a new function of “gate-
watchers,” shaping a new networked relationship status between tradi-
tional media and new irregular news providers (Beckett 2012, 147-160).
Although gatekeeping has changed its status and role, it is definitely still
“alive and kicking” (Heinderyckx 2015); however, the power legacy me-
dia and newspapers have to shape the flow of news has diminished.
    Whistleblowers in the digital age profit from having more tools and
strategies than their analog counterparts. WikiLeaks, in particular, exem-
plifies the power of digital encryption tools in anonymizing and circulat-
ing the accomplishments of a whistleblowing act online (Bruns 2014).
WikiLeaks established a new “e-tactic” for whistleblowing in the digital
age. In the context of online activism, an e-tactic is defined as an oppor-
tunity to complete a given task - profiting from the web’s distinct af-
fordances, without the need for physical copresence (Earl and Kimport
2011, 7-8). WikiLeaks, thanks to its own online anonymous leak submis-
sion system, gave whistleblowers an easier and faster tool to leak infor-
mation by proving the opportunity to deliver vast amount of digital con-
tent in an easier and faster way. Major cases such as the “Afghan War
Logs”, the “Iraq War Logs” and “Cablegate”, resulted in 600,000 digital
files in total being leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning in 2010. The
material was published in cooperation with major international news out-
lets and illustrates how powerful the WikiLeaks e-tactic has been.
    Distributed Denials of Service (DDoS) are hacking attacks that are an
“increasingly common Internet phenomenon capable of silencing Inter-
net speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer” (Zuck-
erman et al. 2010). They are realized by harnessing a large number of re-
motely controlled computers and by address an overwhelming numbers
of requests to an Internet domain, until it goes offline (Zuckerman et al.
2010). WikiLeaks itself had to cope with content circulation restriction
strategies, mainly digital. As Rebecca MacKinnon recalls (2012, 82-83), in
2010 when WikiLeaks started publishing the Cablegate documents, a
corpus of more than 250 thousand U.S. diplomatic cables on a dedicated
site, the site domain was targeted with untracked DDoS attacks that put it
offline for some hours and made its content unavailable (Schonfeld 2010).
Similar attacks happened again in 2012 (Kerr 2012). DDoS attacks can be
used as content circulation restrictions to silence websites, as illustrated
with WikiLeaks. Their use has been documented in Russia, where news-
paper Novaya Gazeta was a censorship target (Zuckermann et al. 2010)
and also in Saudi Arabia and Belarus, among other instances (Morozov
2011, 108). But DDoS attacks are ambivalent strategies and, besides be-
ing possible tools of censorship, are being increasingly used as a hacktivist
74                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

e-tactic for protests (Earl and Kimport 2011, 7-8). As anthropologist Ga-
briella Coleman notes (2014, 136-142), use of DDoS extends a long tradi-
tion of disruptive activism by transferring analog tactics such as sit-ins or
occupations online. The hacker collective Anonymous brought DDoS to
a higher level of efficiency during its operations against WikiLeaks’ ad-
versaries, when companies involved in the banking blockade against Wik-
iLeaks saw their flagship websites targeted and put offline by DDoS at-
tacks although without suffering any damage or data losses.
    Beside DDoS, there are additional forms of digital circulation re-
striction strategies when it comes to whistleblowing: online filtering, for
instance, is one of the most common strategies. Online filtering involves
making websites unavailable to selected users or from selected locations,
both at the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)
and DNS (Domain Name System) level (Murdoch and Anderson 2008).
The practice is a daily routine under the Chinese Great Firewall (Powers
and Jablonski 2015, 168-172), in Bahrain (OpenNet Initiative 2005), Pa-
kistan (Nabi 2014) and also in countries such as Burma, Syria, Thailand
and Tunisia, among others (Deibert 2009). Filtering also plays a part
when it comes to restricting access to content originating from whistle-
blowing acts. Regarding WikiLeaks, federal workers in the United States
were unable to access the website on the Internet because of a ban im-
posed on the site domain on computers hosted in federal offices – includ-
ing the Library of Congress.
    Despite putting such strategies in place, leaked documents were nev-
ertheless easily accessible through major news outlets that collaborated
with WikiLeaks, such as The Guardian (MacAskill, 2010). At the same
time, the U.S. authorities pressured Internet Service Providers to prevent
access to WikiLeaks (Jansen and Martin 2015), with a public-private
partnership in censorship (Cannon 2013). These attempts sparked the
Streisand Effect, thereby causing a chain reaction with the formation of
“mirror sites” for WikiLeaks. The mirror sites were replications of the
contents of WikiLeaks, however they were hosted under different do-
mains worldwide. According to journalistic reports (Warrick and Pegora-
ro 2010), when WikiLeaks was under attack in 2010 the number of mir-
ror sites grew from 200 to more than 1000 in few days, making a com-
plete restriction against WikiLeaks almost impossible.
    The organizational nature of WikiLeaks is also based on the potential
of its own peculiar organizational structure, such as not having a news-
room, a national affiliation or an identifiable organization chart. The
technological structure of WikiLeaks followed the same pattern: spread
throughout different legislative contexts with servers located in several
different countries (Bruns 2014). This technological structure created
very complicated circumstances to restrict access to what WikiLeaks puts
online. The combination of the organizational and technical structure of
WikiLeaks, the support obtained through the proliferation of mirror sites
and the backlash of the DDoS attack perpetrated by Anonymous made
Di Salvo                                                                   75
content restriction strategies against WikiLeaks almost useless (Cannon
2013). When DDoS attacks against WikiLeaks peaked, there was an esca-
lation in launching mirror sites: 355 websites were available in December
2010 (Schroeder 2010). Nabi’s (2014) definition of the Streisand Effect
as “unintentional virality of any information, online or otherwise, as a
consequence of any attempt to censor, suppress and/or conceal it” is il-
lustrated through the backlash when authorities tried to silence Wik-
iLeaks and mirror sites appeared in hundreds. The power of WikiLeaks
stays definitely in the “networked” environment in which it operates and
the rise of the Networked Society had a lasting effect on whistleblowing
(Benkler 2011; McCurdy 2013).
    The near impossibility of silencing WikiLeaks is also due to the tech-
nological changes to the kinds of documents and information whistle-
blowers are able to carry and leak to external recipients. As Gina Neff
notes (2014), “the change of a medium, say from paper documents to dig-
ital documents, can have an enormous impact on how these roles play
out” and this applies to all the players involved in a whistleblowing act. If
we consider the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks as the embodiment of
two different phases in the evolution of external whistleblowing, differ-
ences emerge by analyzing the kinds of documents they were able to de-
liver to the press. The Pentagon Papers consisted of hard copies of a clas-
sified leaked report, whereas the WikiLeaks publications took place in a
highly digitalized environment where impressive quantities of classified
information is routinely stored in digital archives and networks. In the
time between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. federal government digitized 475
million pages of federal records (The White House 2011). Taking a closer
look at these numbers, it is possible to frame them within the wider phe-
nomenon of “datafication” (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013). This
concept involves in a constantly less-physical way every aspect of the con-
temporary age in which information is being shared among individuals
and institution, toward a massive and pervasive extension of digitalization
of information in form of digital files.
    In the shift from an offline to a data ecosystem, it is important to focus
on the nature of documents that whistleblowers can now access and leak.
In order to download the documents which were later leaked to Wik-
iLeaks, Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower behind the major WikiLeaks’
revelations, accessed a top secret network from her workstation in Iraq.
This involved searching through classified digital documents on five dif-
ferent archives, including the New Centric Diplomacy database (Zetter
2011). U.S. diplomatic cables, such as those included in the Cablegate
leak, are usually transferred in PDF form via email using a State Depart-
ment classified network called ClassNet. They are later stored in PST
form, the format used by Microsoft Outlook to compress and store data,
in order to be searchable. Manning downloaded a massive amount of files
from the SNAP computer and saved them on CD-RWs (Ambinder 2010).
For instance, the 250 thousand files that comprised the Cablegate corpus
76                                                            Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

was 1.6 GB in size. It could later be delivered by Julian Assange to The
Guardian using a USB flash device, as journalist David Leigh recalls
(2010).
    The details above fit perfectly in Floridi’s (2010) theorization of how
digitalization and “datafication” were able to completely change the con-
cepts of objects and processes. Following this path, growing digitalization
caused the loss of “physical connotation” of objects which, in digital
form, can easily be considered independent from their origin. In this
sense, in comparison to the original Pentagon Papers stored in the RAND
offices in Washington, it is intrinsically more difficult to individuate the
original copies of the diplomatic cables Manning was able to copy and
download. Following Floridi’s proposed framework (2010), digital ob-
jects are “typified in the sense that an instance of an object […] is as good
as its type”. In this sense, digital objects are perfectly clonable and all
copies are interchangeable with one another. Consequently, to create cop-
ies is considerably easier than it used to be in the offline environment in
which Daniel Ellsberg was operating. Is has been calculated that it would
take approximately 41.8 hours of straight printing at a rate of 100 pages a
minute to print out the entire Cablegate leak (McCurdy 2013). Chelsea
Manning’s leak to WikiLeaks, instead, was only one click away and de-
spite its vastness could be downloaded, copied and shared with relatively
low computing skills and agility (Zetter 2011).
    When discussing the nature of digital artifacts, it is also important to
consider their distributed nature (Kallinikos, Aaltonen, Marton 2010).
Digital artifacts are essentially “borderless” entities that cannot be identi-
fied within clear physical borders, in contrast to physical entities such as
books or paper documents. This distributed nature of digital artifacts
evolves into the substantial impossibility to control the spread of leaked
documents once they are extracted from archives and disseminated. This
is also at the core of the likelihood of the Streisand Effect in situations
where a circulation restriction strategy is applied to digital whistleblowing
cases in order to prevent the spread of information. This Effect is further
illustrated by WikiLeaks: despite the aforementioned attempts, Wiki-
Leaks has never been completely silenced and is still online and opera-
tional. Moreover, since the explosion of the WikiLeaks revelations, also
the scale of journalistic leaks has escalated. For instance, the Panama Pa-
pers, published in spring 2016, consisted of 2,6 TB of digital files (11,5 m
documents), a size which is almost twenty-six times bigger than the origi-
nal WikiLeaks Cablegate dataset (Obermaier et al. 2016). The growth in
terms of size of the leaks is interesting in at least two different directions.
First, it shows how affordances involved in digital storage and carrying of
files can really facilitate the practice of whistleblowing, particularly when
large amounts of documents are involved. Secondly, it shows also how,
despite the content circulation restriction strategies analyzed in this paper
and the attempts, both technological and political, to stop the spreading
Di Salvo                                                                   77
of leaks, the practice of whistleblowing in the digital era seems to get
more and more relevance in terms of effectiveness and scale.

4. Re-materialized Restriction: The Snowden Case

     In the summer of 2013, the disclosure of a vast amount of classified
information from the NSA and its own allied agencies by whistleblower
Edward Snowden sparked an unprecedented debate about digital free-
dom and rights and the role of journalism as a fourth estate. When it
comes to journalistic practices, the case represents one of the most pecu-
liar examples of whistleblowing in the digital era. Although not realized
through a whistleblowing platform such as WikiLeaks, it proved how
crucial encryption and digital security tools are in securing journalists’
online communication with their sources (Greenwald 2014a; Ziccardi
2015, 193-198; Schneier 2015, 143-145). The number of digital files that
Edward Snowden was able to download and hand over to journalists is
still unclear (Greenwald 2014b) but the revelations have had a global im-
pact. The reach has extended far beyond the newspapers that were first
given access to the leaked material (The Guardian in the UK and The
Washington Post in the US), amenable to different levels of media atten-
tion and engagement (Di Salvo and Negro 2015).
     Consequences for the publication of this sensitive classified material
have been harsh: Edward Snowden himself has been charged with differ-
ent felonies, including some under the U.S. 1917 Espionage Act. His
American passport was invalided and he is currently living in Russia,
where he was granted temporary asylum after having spent 4 months in
the international area of the Moscow airport seeking to reach South
America from Hong Kong. Journalists who worked on the analysis of the
original classified material were put under police investigation in the UK
(Gallagher 2015) and The Guardian’s David Miranda was detained at the
Heathrow airport for nine hours under anti-terrorism laws while allegedly
travelling with documents from the Snowden cache (McGrath Goodman
2015; Paterson 2014, 34).
     As with the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks cases, the Snowden case
also exemplifies the application of circulation restriction strategies against
news outlets covering the leak in order to prevent information distribu-
tion. One day after The Guardian published the first article related to the
PRISM NSA surveillance program, the Minister of Defence in London is-
sued confidential D-Notices to several media outlets asking not to publish
content related to the Snowden leak, in order to protect national security
interests (Halliday 2013). D-Notices are only advisory, different from the
injunctions against the U.S. press seen in the Pentagon Papers case, how-
ever they are nonetheless a legal form of circulation restriction.
     Digital censorship has been documented on other occasions on a
smaller scale. For instance, U.S. troops in the Middle East, South Asia
and Afghanistan can’t access The Guardian site, as it is blocked to prevent
78                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

access to the Snowden material and related journalistic analysis (Acker-
man 2013). Concerning the Snowden disclosures, the most evident and
emblematic case of content circulation restriction strategy was when UK
authorities and the GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA, asked The
Guardian to hand back classified digital documents obtained from Ed-
ward Snowden. The former editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger (2013) re-
calls that the formal requests followed other previous attempts to restrict
the publications, including the threat of a proper prior restraint against
the newspaper. In July 2013, tensions reached the top and in order to re-
sist governmental requests, The Guardian decided to destroy the digital
archives of Snowden leaked files in London, under the supervision and
instructions of two GCHQ agents (Borger 2013). Files were stored with
high-level digital security standards in encrypted and airgapped machines
in a secure room in the London newsroom under constant human surveil-
lance, as security researchers and hackers Al-Bassam and Tynan recall
(2015). As indicated by national security agents, The Guardian staffers
had to physically destroy computers and hard-drives where the docu-
ments were stored by using angle-grinders and revolving drills. A “degas-
seur” was also used, an appliance that destroys magnetic fields and erases
data from computer drives in order to eliminate any possible trace of the
leaked material (Harding 2014; McLaughlin 2015). Despite the digital na-
ture of the material and the fully digitalized environment where files were
processed and published, the circulation restriction strategy targeted the
physical support where documents were eventually stored. This strategy
was able to circumvent the limitations imposed by adopting digital-only
circulation restriction strategies, as seen in WikiLeaks case.
    The adoption of such an approach to content restriction may have dif-
ferent motives, including being another attempt of intimidation, as noted
by scholar Chris Paterson (2014, 35). If in the Pentagon Papers case the
destruction of the original print leaked document would have caused the
loss of the original material, in the case of digitalized files such as those
leaked by Snowden, copies of the original cache could have been created
and shared much more easily. In order to avoid the consequences of a
possible legal injunction, The Guardian proactively moved the files out-
side of UK legislation. This provided its New York headquarters and
journalist Glenn Greenwald (based in Brazil) with access, who was also in
possession of the files (Rusbridger 2013). Despite the intervention to de-
stroy the physical supports for the digital materials, the distributed nature
of the digital files (Kallinikos et al. 2010) once again played a major part
in dismantling the circulation restriction strategy. Hence, The Guardian
was able to keep publishing from its U.S. newsroom. Moreover, they also
provided ProPublica and The New York Times with access to the files in
order to broaden the publication spectrum of the Snowden cache with
more journalists and news outlets in the United States (Beaujon 2013).
    This case once again illustrates how content circulation restrictions in
whistleblowing cases can actually lead to a wider extension of the reach
Di Salvo                                                                   79
and yet another exemplification of the Streisand Effect in the journalism
context. When it comes to restrictions themselves, instead, the Snowden
case and the way authorities tried to block the work of The Guardian
bring in another interesting aspect of circulation restrictions in the digital
era. The physical destruction of the hard drives, including its own intrin-
sic symbolic nature, could be associated with the notion of “re-
materialization”, a trend that has been analyzed in different field of tech-
nology studies and consumer cultures as a trend when describing the still
persistent analog characterizations of the current digital environment. In
the context of this paper, it could be possible to extend this notion into
the analysis of physical content circulation restriction strategies within the
Snowden case seen as a way to prevent digital information to spread.
    Vincent Mosco (2014) and Tung-Hui Hu (2015) have focused on
cloud computing as a physical industry, contradicting the commonly ac-
cepted notion of the “cloud” as a completely ephemeral digital entity with
borderless connotation. Cloud computing companies, Mosco argues, rely
on extensive physical facilities and gigantic data centers in order to work,
an aspect which is commonly neglected in public and journalistic dis-
course. On a similar note, Evgeny Morozov referred as well to the fre-
quently neglected technological connotations of cloud storage (2013, 72-
75). Conversely, Paolo Magaudda (2011; 2012) analyzed how materiality
regained an important role for digital music consumption, namely with
the introduction of material objects such as the iPod. The hard disk and
the vinyl disc, even in times of strong digitalization, have gained a crucial
role in shaping consumption practices. As Magaudda (2012) puts it, re-
materialization brings together a complexity of phenomena, practices and
technologies, which are once again providing digital artifacts with a
strong emphasis on materiality. This happens because material objects
such as the destroyed The Guardian's hard disks and laptops3, pure phys-
ical entities, are re-gaining importance in the storage of media content,
even in a highly digitalized environment.
    Whistleblowing has encountered fundamental changes due to digitali-
zation and the intrinsic nature of digital artifacts that are more and more
frequently leaked by whistleblowers over the Internet. As digital security
researcher Bruce Schneier recalls (2015, 159-161): “technology is making
secrets harder to keep, and the nature of the Internet makes secrets much
harder to keep long-term. The push of a “send” button can deliver giga-
bytes across the Internet in a trice. A single thumb drive can hold more
data every year. Both governments and organizations need to assume that
their secrets are more likely to be exposed, and sooner, than ever before”.

    3
     In 2015, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosted an exhibition
named “All These Things Belongs to You”, where objects of public interest were
included in the museum collection. Among them was one of The Guardian’s
smashed computers (http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/smashed-snowden-
laptop-slated-for-london-museum-show).
80                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

When it comes to the restriction of circulation of digital content, despite
the basic impossibility to stop a digital leak, it comes as no surprise that
the attention of authorities remains focused on the physical supports that
contains the material. It is interesting to see how materiality arises again
when a leak needs to be stopped and all of the digital methods to prevent
the information from spreading have proved to be almost powerless.


5. Conclusion

     This paper provided a comparison of content circulation restriction
strategies in the context of whistleblowing in both analog and digital
conditions. The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and the Snowden cases are
examples of how whistleblowing acts have caused reactions from authori-
ties aiming to prevent leaks from reaching the public. As discussed, in the
case of the 1971 Pentagon Papers, the U.S. government acted with legal
prior restraints against the press in order to completely stop the publica-
tion of newspapers for some days. Content published online by Wik-
iLeaks capitalized on the networked and digital nature of Julian Assange’s
website and instead was restricted through digital censorship and filtering
tactics on several occasions. On the other side, during the publication of
the Snowden leak, restricting the circulation of the leaked content hap-
pened in a re-materialized way, through physical destruction of the hard
drives where digital documents were stored.
     Despite the vast digitalization reached over the course of time in the
cases analyzed, it is possible to see how content circulation restriction
strategies often still rely on materiality. This demonstrates that the need
for an approach focused on materiality still matters when it comes to
whistleblowing. Instances of circulation restrictions strategies in the con-
text of whistleblowing seem to confirm how specific trends of continuity
between the analog and digital contexts can be identified, rather than a
clear separation (Balbi and Magaudda 2014: 13-16). As discussed, re-
materialization is also strictly connected with the efficiency of the re-
striction strategies. Both analog and digitalized cases illustrated instances
of the Streisand Effect as a backfire to the censorship attempts. Further,
it is possible to argue that in the Snowden case, the physical connotation
of the restriction strategy put in place was meant to be a stronger level of
censorship to be applied to an otherwise uncontrollable leak. Its efficien-
cy, as discussed, remains disputable. This paper contributes to the analy-
sis of whistleblowing in the digital era and to the related content circula-
tion restriction strategies that could arise.
Di Salvo                                                                          81
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