The importance of the Yanukovych leaks project is exactly in diving deep into that which was kept secret (journalists were never allowed within a safe distance of the President's estate) and making it available. Currently, the Ukrainian government is moving ahead with extensive anti-corruption legislation, designed to address public concerns raised in the aftermath of these disclosures. And they won the Reporters Without Borders Award at The Bobs, the best of online activism awards. Earlier this summer, they organized a public event in the ex-President's compound dedicated to the connection between investigative journalism, digital activism, and leaks. There are 23,456 documents on the group's website.
So we wanted to get documents secured, and get them out in public to show that this is about transparency and accountability." The situation has turned out very well so far, but at the start we didn't have any idea whether everybody would be removed. In an interview with Mashable, one of the members of the team (the technologist who built the website onto which they uploaded content), explained that their "first priority was to get the information out. They did not leave the mansion for days, drying and scanning the documents-a scenario that raises the bar considerably on Zoe Barnes. A group of journalists and activists arrived at the site and thus began the project to save and make available the papers documenting Yanukovych's corrupt, violent regime. When Viktor Yanukovych-who was the President of Ukraine from 2010 and until he was ousted following violent mass demonstrations all over the country-fled to Russia in February 2014, hundreds of folders were spotted in the reservoir in the ex-President's estate. If the same document is scanned, uploaded, and then shared across a number of different hosts, it becomes much more difficult to suppress. Although certain services remain centralized and vulnerable to political manipulation, such as the DNS addressing system, and government monitoring of online behavior is commonplace, there is still political possibility in the aggregate, geographically dispersed nature of the internet. Scanning means turning the document into an image, one that is marked by glitches and bearing the traces of editorial choices on the part of the scanner. Scanning printed material for internet circulation has the potential to circumvent some of these issues. Documents are kept private printing presses shut down. And interfering with its further circulation is a time-honored method of keeping a population in check. It circulated on paper, as widely as newspapers or as little as classified documents.
What are the political possibilities of making information available? A thing that is scanned was already downloaded, in a sense.
But does the document dump generate meaningful analysis, or make it seem insignificant? Does the internet enable widespread distribution, or does it more commonly facilitate centralized access? And does the scanner make things transparent, or does it transform them? The contemporary political imaginary links the scanner with democracy, and so we should explore further the political possibilities, values, and limitations associated with the process of scanning documents to be uploaded to the internet. Scanning has become synonymous with transparency and access. The romanticized image of the scanner is based on the assumption that by scanning and uploading we make information available, and that that is somehow an invariably democratic act. And her ambition to upload information to the newspaper's site as soon as possible, to give the public the raw data before it can be filtered or analyzed, stands for her idealism.
HOUSE OF CARDS SLUGLINE EDITOR SERIES
Later in the season she moves on to work for a site called "Slugline," an early-Politico-like newswire, where "journalists post news directly from their phones." Her obsession with technology is used as a narrative device in the series to set her apart from her older, more conservative editors at the newspaper. The next day she shows up at the office of the newspaper where she works with a 3000-word text and the 300-page document scanned, prompting her editors that "We should get this online right away."īarnes's character is young and ambitious. She's drinking wine, taking notes on her laptop, and scanning on her small all-in-one desktop printer/scanner. There's a great scene in the first episode of House of Cards where the ambitious young journalist Zoe Barnes is sitting on the floor of her rented apartment's living room scanning the half-shredded documents of an education bill that was forwarded to her by her source/lover Frank Underwood, the Majority Whip.
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