Wikileaks and Its Global Impact: A Comprehensive Overview

It is easy to treat the Baghdad footage as a self-contained event. For the people involved it was the first move in a year that produced more primary material about two wars than any previous disclosure in history.

The sequence of 2010

All of it came from the same source. The video was the part people could watch; the rest was the part that changed what historians of those wars have to work with.

What the documents added

Mostly not scandals. Mostly texture, at a scale nobody had seen: routine field reports describing checkpoint shootings, detainee handling, civilian deaths logged and not investigated, and the daily administration of occupation.

The single most consequential finding was arithmetical. The Iraq field reports contained records of thousands of civilian deaths that had not appeared in any public count, which meant the official position that such figures were not tracked did not survive contact with the documents. Counting the dead covers what that did to the estimates.

How governments responded

Predictably, and in one direction. The response was overwhelmingly about stopping the next disclosure rather than about the contents of this one.

• Tighter controls on removable media and cross-network access.
• Insider-threat detection programmes across agencies.
• Monitoring of analyst behaviour on classified systems.
• A sharp increase in leak prosecutions in the following years.

What did not happen was any new routine for releasing material of public importance. The reform that most people assume followed did not.

How newsrooms responded

By learning a new craft. Several large newspapers worked in partnership on the later releases, which meant building teams that could review hundreds of thousands of documents, decide what could be published safely, and coordinate timing across countries.

They did not all agree about redaction and the arguments were bitter. But the capability created then is the reason every large leak since has been handled by people who know how, rather than by someone uploading a folder.

Beyond the United States

The cables in particular had effects far from Washington, because they contained frank American assessments of governments everywhere. Several countries saw genuine political consequences, and diplomats worldwide had to operate for years afterwards on the assumption that private assessments might not stay private.

Whether that was good is genuinely arguable. Diplomacy depends to some degree on candour in private, and the release made candour riskier everywhere, including in places where frank American reporting on a government's abuses was useful to the people living under it.

What was expected and did not happen

What the year did to the organisation

It broke it, slowly. WikiLeaks in early 2010 was a small, obscure outfit with a good technical idea. By the end of the year it was a household name being handled by governments as a security problem.

Payment processors cut it off, which removed most of its funding. Its media partnerships collapsed in arguments about redaction and control. Key staff left and several later became public critics. The founder spent the following decade either confined or in litigation.

So the organisation that demonstrated the model was in no condition to keep using it. That is part of why the tactics migrated into established newsrooms instead: the newsrooms had lawyers, revenue and institutional patience, and after 2010 they also had the tools.

What is actually left of the Wikileaks year

Three things, in descending order of durability.

An archive: those documents are still there and still used by researchers writing about the Iraq and Afghan wars. A set of practices: secure submission, large-scale document review, staged publication. And a changed expectation about what the public can see, which is the least tangible and probably the most important.

What is not left is a reformed system. The material that matters most is still held by the institutions it describes, still classified by default, still released at their discretion. The year 2010 was an interruption of that arrangement rather than a change to it. What it left in journalism is the clearest place to see the difference.