Spontaneously, a new journalistic order is emerging. The “networked fourth estate” described in a 2011 working paper by Yochai Benkler for the Harvard Law Review may represent the most promising solution for unchecked government aggression. Benkler notes this informal framework includes the creation of partnerships between traditional news media as exemplified by The Guardian, with hacktivists, bloggers, and “outlaws” such as Wikileaks and leakers like Snowden.

This network represents a new riff on an old theme. Leakers with valuable information have been around for ages, and have customarily gone to the courts or newspapers to blow whistles on government activities. When these institutions fail due to incompetence, intimidation or complicity with the state, this network can provide a vastly broader base of supporters, facilitating what some bloggers are calling an “open-source” government: a regime whose machinations are kept in check by transparency that is publicly enforced by a global network of watchdogs. Since these informal networks are more decentralized than older institutions and have innovative ways of dealing with government retaliation, their flexibility and resilience make them much more difficult to intimidate than traditional media and institutions.

According to Benkler, the outlook for this emergent informational order appears encouraging, and even has a certain technological inevitability: “One would assume that the networked components of the fourth estate will follow the same arc that Wikipedia has followed: from something that simply isn’t acknowledged, to a joke, to a threat, to an indispensable part of life.”