Four today

1. Historian D.J. Waldie dismisses Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf's I-Heart-New York critique of Los  Angeles County, saying to view the county as a tangled web of corrupt and confused jurisdictions is a simplistic misunderstanding of the region's history.

2. You know you're getting old when ... The new AP political editor is four years younger than you are. Romenesko

3. Speaking of AP, the business staff doesn't have much good to say about the AP business editor. Romenesko

4. As you might have heard, a group calling itself Lulzsec hacked the PBS website to show its displeasure at the Frontline report on Wikileaks. Boing Boing

NYT editor opens up about relationship with WikiLeaks*

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has written a long piece talking about how his paper came into possession of the WikiLeaks cables and battlefield dispatches, and its relationship with WikiLeaks's quirky, genius founder, Julian Assange. The story is here.

*Update: I should have noted that Keller's article is an introduction to a 2000-page e-book the NYT will publish Monday on the WikiLeaks affair. The first two chapters are profiles of Assange and the alleged source of the WikiLeaks material, Pfc. Bradley Manning. The rest appears to be a compilation of past stories, along with links to the cables that served as the basis for reporting. The book will sell for $5.99.

FBI targets Anonymous over WikiLeaks attacks

The FBI has seized a computer at a Texas business that's suspected of being used in a massive denial of service attack on PayPal and other sites that "suspended or froze WikiLeaks's accounts," the Smoking Gun reports.

From the story:

The FBI investigation began earlier this month after PayPal officials contacted agents and “reported that an Internet activist group using the names ‘4chan’ and “Anonymous” appeared to be organizing a distributed denial of service (“DDoS”) attack against the company,” according to an FBI affidavit excerpted here.

The PayPal assault was part of “Operation Payback,” an organized effort to attack firms that suspended or froze WikiLeaks’s accounts in the wake of the group’s publication of thousands of sensitive Department of State cables. As noted by the FBI, other targets of this “Anonymous” effort included Visa, Mastercard, Sarah Palin’s web site, and the Swedish prosecutor pursuing sex assault charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder.

(found via Neon Tommy)

Four in the morning

1. Tribune Co. announces a modest profit-sharing plan with employees and better employee outreach. Romenesko

2. There are some leaks WikeLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot abide. Cutline

3. US population grows slowly, Census data show. California's population grew 10 percent, but for the first time in the state's history, it will not add another House seat. LAT

4. The FCC is poised to adopt net neutrality standards that no one seems to like. WaPo

The Assange conundrum

The U.S. Department of Justice is tangled in knots - that's a good thing, and let's hope it stays that way.

Frustrated at the release of thousands of diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks, an impotent federal government desperately wants to punish Julian Assange and teach a scary lesson to all other would-be whistle blowers and leakers of sensitive information. The problems are the First Amendment and the fact that what Assange did, from all that's been reported, falls outside definitions of criminal behavior. Indeed, to criminalize Assange's actions would be to criminalize investigative journalism, which has a glorious tradition of convincing unhappy insiders to leak secret, sensitive and confidential information for publication.

The arguments that WikiLeaks has no editorial oversight or Assange has a non-journalistic agenda are interesting in the context of what makes good journalism, but have no bearing on the legality of what WikiLeaks did - the press doesn't have to be good to be free.

That said, it is undoubtedly true that professional journalists enjoy extra protection from prosecution because they can point to their editorial standards and oversight. Courts do not operate outside the realm of public pressure and politics. Indeed, prosecutors would be much more abusive of journalists if news institutions didn't have the resources to hire good lawyers to push back, or didn't have the leverage to convince legislators to pass shield laws, or a soap box to call out the abuse. But the WikiLeaks situation will demand the courts deal with fundamental questions about press freedom.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon has summarized what some media observers are saying about the potential for a government case against Assange, including the questionable treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is suspected of being the source of the cable leaks and others.

Wikileaks blocked by Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has blocked access to Wikileaks from its computers, Talking Points Memo reports. The U.S. government, miffed over CableGate, has put pressure on a number of private companies to chase Wikileaks off their servers, forcing the site to retreat to Switzerland.

The Wikileaks leak

Has the Wikileaks, an online source of confidential documents, changed the nature of news by releasing 92,000 pages of secret U.S. military logs about the war in Afganistan to the New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian? Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic explores the question and pulls this from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen:

Rosen calls WikiLeaks the first "stateless news organization" in an excellent post on this episode."In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it," Rosen writes. "But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new."