But it will surely come as a dash of cold water to the more effusive strands of 1990s
cyberlibertarianism, which held, as Barlow put it, that the Internet was beyond the jurisdiction of national governments, those "weary giants of flesh and steel." (6) Some of those cyberlibertarians dreamed of a worldwide revolution driven by technology that would just kind of, well, happen, without a lot of troublesome preliminaries or complications.
In a moment when investigative journalism is recognizably in crisis, WikiLeaks has emerged as something of a strange bedfellow to a beleaguered industry, one that holds itself up as a champion of principles many journalists hold dear--freedom of information and the sanctity of the source--yet embeds these principles in a framework of
cyberlibertarianism that is frequently at odds with the institutional ethics of journalists and editors.