Charlie Savage at the New York Times covers proceedings in the court-martial of PFC Bradley Manning at Ft. Meade, on the day the defense rested its case. The final witness for the defense was Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who authored this widely-cited paper on WikiLeaks. Benkler testified that the organization served a legitimate journalistic role when Manning leaked it some 700,000 or more secret government files.
[D]espite the criticism WikiLeaks has endured, Mr. Benkler said the model it had developed was likely to endure.
“WikiLeaks may fail in the future because of all these events, but the model of some form of decentralized leaking, that is secure technologically and allows for collaboration among different media in different countries, that’s going to survive, and somebody else will build it,” he said. “But WikiLeaks played that critical role of that particular critical component of what muckraking and investigative journalism has always done.”
Read: "Soldier’s Lawyers Rest Case With a Defense of WikiLeaks’ Journalistic Role." [nytimes.com]
I was at the trial yesterday, also, and posted this roundup here at Boing Boing.
