[German Translation / Deutsche Übersetzung]

The blog WL Central is covering topics which are overlooked by the traditional media. Amongst others, they evaluate the recently leaked diplomatic cables and inspire everyone with their twitter-account @wlfind to take part in that process. I talked to Icon, a writer of the site. Her recent articles on the political cover-up regarding the CIA-prison in Poland brought new details to light.

What is WLCentral?
We are a collective of bloggers who publish on Wikileaks related news, human rights, and censorship. I am one of the writers.

How are you financed? Are you part of Wikileaks?
We are not related to Wikileaks, though sometimes people confuse us with them. I don’t accept donations, but other writers do, and so does WLCentral.

Your articles were cited by news agencies and other media organizations.
Yes, this happened twice, both times it was the Polish CIA case.

How could you attract their attention?
Mainly over Twitter. The article was advertized over the WL Central Twitter account, and then retweeted by those who thought it was interesting. It then spread, then someone at Wikileaks picked it up, and tweeted it, and then PAP (Polish Press Agency) reported.

So Twitter had the most influence in this process?
Twitter is definitely a very powerful tool. Once a message is retweeted by someone with a lot of followers, or someone with authority, it is more likely to spread. In my particular case, this was mainly Wikileaks, and some journalists or NGO staff who were well regarded in the field.

Why aren’t newspapers the first to break these stories?
Sometimes it seems to me that they don’t know about the online resources. It is not that difficult. You go to www.cablegatesearch.net and type in “CIA prison”, and then you chose the cables from the area you are familiar with. That is all. It really shouldn’t be some blogger breaking this story. The resources are out there, and the press are free to use them.

Is this going to change?
To be honest, I believe bloggers will be the driving force, and Twitter users. There is a larger number of us going through cables and tweeting the results. It takes a while to recognize the patters, and to familiarize yourself with the style, so that
you are able to find some interesting keywords, and stories. At present, it is mainly journalists from smaller, regional news outlets who seem to be receptive to cablegate coverage. The main stream press is far more lethargic, and waits for the story to be advertized or promoted by others first.

What did the coverage of the Polish case look like?
There was some coverage in a number of high profile international (i.e non-Polish) publications earlier on, but in recent months many news outlets slept through this. A prosecutor plans to file charges, is then replaced, then his files end up in the press, and it becomes public he wanted to press charges, and then the newspaper gets sued, and the EU intervenes. This is a story. And yet some bloggers had to raise merry hell on Twitter until this made it to wire reports. This is not how it is supposed to work.

You also wrote about the dispute between Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Julian Assange.
Yes, I did. It certainly wasn’t my favourite topic; but since almost the entire press coverage was in German I thought it would be useful to provide English translations of the relevant passages. And I also discovered one or two interesting factoids, for instance that the Guardian is a business associate of Freitag, one of the Openleaks media partners.

The German press writes a lot about Wikileaks. But not so much about Bradley Manning. How is the situation in the English press?
Well, all I know is what I can read in the papers. There is support, which is good, but it is often presented in an anti Wikileaks context. This should not be the case. These two topics should be handled separately.

Wikileaks holds The Guardian responsible for the leak of the whole 250.000 cables. They even want to press charges.
I think it was irresponsible to publish the password. But I am not a lawyer, and I don’t know whether this is an offense.

Was is it a wise decision to publish the whole cache of cables?
At the beginning, I was against the publication. But now, in hindsight, I believe it was the right decision. The coverage in Spiegel, Heise and Freitag was appalling – there were just too many clues in their reports. And once the Spiegel article was also circulating in an inoffical English translation, I decided to go ahead and cover the story, even though that meant that I was facilitating the discovery of the entire archive. All those who could harm sources would have already had a copy. Usually, I oppose the publication of personal data, but here I believe it was for the better to go ahead. Having said that, I didn’t reveal what I believed to be the password, and the potential location of the file. We had guessed that, but decided to keep this under wraps.

The cables are unedited. Do you think certain people could be in danger?
I don’t know. I hope not. This should not have happened.

You write under an alias.
My real life identity is completely irrelevant to my work at WL Central. Our readers should judge me by my publications; all my sources are freely available on the internet, and everybody is invited to check them.

What is your motivation for writing?
I am a very stubborn person. Often, I see things in foreign language publications which are underreported elsewhere, and I want to get the message out. And then I write. For instance, the Polish CIA case is extremely important, and there was silence in the non-Polish press about it. This annoyed me, and I decided to provide some source material for those interested.
It was a great relief to see this case in the main stream media, and I believe that this is an extremely important topic. I am appalled that so many European government were complicit in extrajudicial rendition. This is the main point I would like to stress. This was not supported by the population, but by some corrupt polititians who made their country available to something that violated their constitution.