Written Task

Rationale.

In this written task I am going to develop an article related to the mass media topic, that my class and I have been studying, specifically about wikileaks.

Throughout this article the leak that I will aboard is called "Syria Files" it is about some e-mails of syrian and international authorities, all of this, while syria is under civil war, thats the main reason why I chose this topic, because it is super relevant what the authorities say to each other personally while war is going on in this country.

Now referring more to the article structure, it is a newspaper article, it doesn't really have many differences with a normal article but it includes features like headline, by line, introduction, body, quotes and a conclusion. I chose this format because it gives me the opportunity to write write a lot about my personal research of objective info, while also being able to put my thoughts in the conclusion, so I feel confortable with this type of text. I also think that the topic can perfectly be put into an article because of how relevant it is and because it is a big leak I could write it like a journalist, i find this really interesting to aboard.

In terms of the audience that this article is aiming is an audience that knows the context of Syria at the time this happened so they can really understand and link the leaked info with the current Syrian situation, my purpose with this article is to inform this audience with important and relevant personal leaked information about economy, interests, affairs, and even reactions from people that have read the e-mails.

Article (Newspaper Article)

   Syria Has been leaked


The 5th of july 2012 the technical team of wikileaks finished the researching and recompilation of important and private e-mails from authorities, political figures, ministers, and even companies from Syria, while it is under civil war, also other nations personalities would be involucrated in this.

All the e-mails date from august 2006 to march 2012, these include more than 680 important names from syria, all related to their interests and political affairs, and, more importantly this information could potentially become viral and everyone that understands the context around the world could have access to these e-mails via wikileaks, and in 2 months, according to wikileaks experts the information will start to be published in sites like Al Akhbar from lebanon, Al Masrry Al young, from Egypt, ARD from germany, Associated Press from The united states, L espresso from Italy, Owi from france and Publico.es from Sapin, they also expet other sites to start publishing the files as the time goes one and this topic makes more popular.

The violent internal conflict that Syria is having right now and the context in which this happened creates a lot of different opinions, for example, wikileaks founder Julian Assange said: "The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to to Syria`s opponents. It helps us not to merely criticize one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it" and Sarah Harrison ( WikiLeaks Journalist) said "The Sirya files shine a light on the inner workings of the syrian government and economy but they also reveal how the west and western companies say one thing and do another".

The technical team of wikileaks says tha the database is composed of 2.434.899 e-mails, 678.752 addresses and more than 1 million recipients, this amount of information plus the fact that some of these emails were infected with viruses, took wikileaks to build a system that allowed them to handle these types of massive information sources, to understand how much this information is the wikileaks post on internet says that we can found personal and intimate interest of senior the baath party to economic transfers of ministers to other nations and even financial and politic interests of big and dominant companies and a number of different languages including, 400.000 e-mails in arabic and more than 60.000 in Russian, the posts also compares the "size" of the info with the "cablegate" saying that the info is 8 times bigger in terms of number of documents and 100 times bigger in terms of data.

In Conclusion, we are in front of one of the most important leaks in the last 10 years, being able to have acces to full personal information about political figures is something that can really affect the government of any country in the world, but this specific case is special because of how fast people can get the information, with internet and because of the context in which it happened a civil war, that is the main reason of why this leak is important, also the massive amount of information that was leaked is impressive and because it has personal interests from both sides of the conflict it can change a to of thoughts, decisions and actions that could potentially be done by the people and companies involved in this conflict, it has already created opinions even from the wikileaks founder julian Assange, that says the material is embarrassing to Syria. It is also possibly to notice that because of the effort that wikileaks technical team has done so fat, for example the creation of a general purpose, multi language political data minig system to handle the massive amount of info, the information is super valuable and might be classify, this leak by wikileaks may have a next level purpose, in terms of directly affecting the syrian conflict by showing the classified information to each side of the war scenario parties, a war that seems to be very fraudulent since it started until nowadays.

Vicente González V.


Online References:

https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/