Next step for Wikileaks: Crowdsourcing classified data

Computerworld - WASHINGTON - The release on Sunday by Wikileaks of more than 90,000 documents about military operations in Afghanistan may just be the start of problems for the U.S. government.

The online publication of the documents, which offer an inside -- and potentially embarrassing -- look at the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009, represent a failure by the U.S. to control its classified data from insider threat. And it throws open to the whole world a chance to crowdsource the information the documents contain.

With that in mind, Wikileaks' Editor-In-Chief Julian Assange on Monday urged intrepid researchers to cull the documents for information that the group -- and three publications given access to them -- have yet to uncover. Assange said that Excel, one of the formats in which the material was released, might be the best way to sort through it.

During a news conference that was webcast, he even guided would-be researchers, saying they could use a search term such as "children" to parse the data for casualty reports.

When mining the documents for information, it's important search for something "quite broad...," he said. "Don't tell the data what your prejudices are, but rather let the data tell you what it is."

Now that the secret data has been made public, Assange said he expects academics, students and computer programmers to "come in and do a better job than we have with this presentation."

The release of the documents drew a sharp response from James Jones, President Obama's National Security Advisor. In a statement, Jones said that the U.S. "strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security."

Assange defended the release for the unfiltered picture it provides of the horrors of war. "The real story of this material is that it's war - it's one damn thing after another," he said.

At one point today, Wikileaks had 23,000 concurrent users downloading the trove of documents. At times, the main site appeared inaccessible, but a separate site set up by Wikileaks, the Afghan War Diary, appeared to be a doing a little better at keeping up with demand.

For the U.S and its information security policy, the document leaking "is quite a big deal, because it illustrates the extraordinary asymmetric power that a leaker can have -- especially when aided by an outfit like Wikileaks," said Steven Aftergood, who heads up the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

A number of scenarios could emerge from the leak, said Aftergood. Government officials might decide that the documents are of "no great threat to national security" and that agencies should be less inclined to mark a document secret. Or the leak could lead to "growing impatience" over the government's broad classification restrictions.