I am speaking of course of the website “WikiLeaks.” The site that published handbooks from Guantánamo Bay, evidence of tax scandal by a swiss bank, Scientology handbooks, and hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraq war logs, along with hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, and much, much more, which you can read at your leisure here: http://www.wikileaks.org/ It has provoked heated debates over national security versus freedom of speech; its director called both a hero by some and a terrorist by others. And yet, I’ve found that so many people still don’t know about it—or if they do, they know very little.
This whole issue weighs very heavily on my mind as few things ever have. I want to share with as many people as I can my reflections from my research in as objective a way as possible—because I think it is extremely relevant—but I admit that from the first I heard about the leaks I was inclined to sympathize with the website, so I’d like to clarify
My Bias:
I attended a private christian school before high school and took my first current events class there. It was very conservative, and we were trained to look for the bias in every news article, be it liberal or conservative; it fueled me with that self-righteous “holy fire” used so often to characterize the Republican party, till I realized that not only was every website biased, but I could read about the same incident through ten different articles from ten different respected websites ranging all across the political spectrum and I still wouldn’t know what actually happened.
The mainstream media was just too slippery, and I was tired of doing the work of journalists just to extract from the work of journalists. If I couldn’t get the information I needed to make an informed decision and live my life at the same time, then I wasn’t interested in politics.
So when I heard that a nationally, politically independent website had published raw material that challenged the authority of governments and corporations the world over, I was over the moon. But, in the spirit of making an informed decision, I decided to examine the website and its founder from a variety of angles before I took a stance. Hence
My Research:
I started off watching video after video of press interviews with and about Julian Assange, who founded the site and is now its “editor-in-chief”. Watch: Julian Assange, Why the World Needs WikiLeaks (Note: Video in link is dated and was filmed prior to release of war logs)
I read WikiLeaks articles, including a few of the Afghan war logs that revealed some suspicious interrogation procedures (ohmyGOSH if you could see how much data there is on the site!!!) and read summaries of the material on the website of the U.K.’s paper, The Guardian.
I read WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era by James Ball—who worked for WikiLeaks—and Charlie Beckett, (a very dry read, if neutral, though I don’t think I learned anything from it that I didn’t know already)
WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry (which provides some interesting insight into how the transparency movement has flourished—or suffered—under the U.S. government, and is clearly pro-transparency, but unafraid to be less than flattering about Julian Assange)
WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by Guardian journalists who collaborated with Assange, and
Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website by Assange’s former “right-hand man” Daniel Domscheit-Berg.
With all this under my belt, I finally feel like I have a sure enough grasp of the topic to share my findings and subsequent views. Again, I will try to be objective, and be clear when I’m expressing my own opinions, though being human I admit to and apologize for any subjective coloring that may occur.
Overview of WikiLeaks and its Philosophies
WikiLeaks is an independent organization that allows whistleblowers to submit incriminating material for review and, possibly, eventual publication on its website, with the promise to protect completely the anonymity of its sources. (It has no affiliations with Wikipedia and is not the only whistleblower website in existence, though it has by far the highest profile.) The material—it might be a scan of an official report or an e-mail transcript—after being reviewed, is then uploaded to the site alongside a brief summary to provide context for readers. The idea is to hide the source, expose the organization, and chronicle the original material for public speculation.
This last part is often referred to as “scientific journalism” by Assange—“Everything we do is like science: it is checkable. Independently checkable, because the information which has informed our conclusions is there. Just like scientific papers, which are based on experimental data, must make their experimental data available to other scientists and to the public if they want their papers to be published. So it’s our philosophy that raw source material must be made available so that conclusions can be checkable.”
Then there is of course the glaringly obvious, if less-talked-about, question: How can WikiLeaks verify information if it doesn’t even know the names of its sources? When Stephen Colbert asked Assange, “What’s to keep you from just creating something, leaking it, and then putting it up on your site?” Assange replied, “Nothing, except people might complain a bit.” (Funnily enough, Colbert’s is arguably among the best-conducted interviews of Assange that I’ve seen, considering how short it is: www.colbernation.com) A former WikiLeaks volunteer recalled how “authenticity checks” he often claimed to have made were really just google searches and technological checks to see if documents had been altered in any way.
On the other hand, the New York Times and the Guardian have both certified such major leaks as the war logs and cables to be authentic, and the Guardian also vouches for a number of other stories run through the site—many newspapers in Europe, in fact, have published information based on what they’ve found on WikiLeaks.
Volunteers of WikiLeaks have also described a form of “opportunistic” verification: Often, when an organization has discovered its doings have been leaked, they e-mail WikiLeaks asking for the name of the source or for the deletion of the leaked information. In such cases WikiLeaks responds, diplomatically, by asking for the organization to specify the document and provide proof of copyright. When the organization e-mails this proof, it is immediately uploaded to the site as a certificate of authenticity.
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WikiLeaks justifies the leaking of classified documents thus: If those who handle the documents themselves view anything in their organization as so unethical that they feel they must ask WikiLeaks to expose it, then the information will be in and of itself worth publishing. Assange has spoken often of a “harm minimization” policy intended to restrict the publication of material that could cause damage (though former colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg said he never heard of this policy till Assange mentioned it to the media). In one interview when he was asked about his regard for National Security, Assange replied bluntly that there was no interest in protecting National Security, only in protecting lives.
But it’s not all about a mindless push towards total transparency, either. “Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has. The more power one has, the greater the dangers generated by that power, and the more need for transparency. Conversely, the weaker one is, the more danger there is in being transparent.”
The underlying principle is very simple: Knowledge is power. Empower people with information and let them work out what’s best for themselves, by themselves. When asked if he was an activist, Assange replied that the term was almost like a “dirty word” because it implied that WikiLeaks had an agenda to “save the whales” or something, when in reality the freedom of information is in and of itself the cause: The point of the site is to provide full coverage of issues so that people can decide for themselves whether it is in their interest to vote one way or another, not to steer them in a particular direction.
When asked if the summaries attached to the documents on the website indicated a shift towards more pronounced bias by WikiLeaks, Assange replied,
“No, there hasn’t been a change, whatsoever. . . although of course it was our hope that, initially, because we had vastly more material than we could possibly go through, that if we just put it out there, people would summarize it themselves.
“That, very interestingly, didn’t happen. Quite an extraordinary thing . . . Our initial idea was that, ‘Look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they’re working on. Surely if you give them a fresh, classified document about the atrocities in Perugia that the rest of the world has not seen before . . . surely all those people who are busy working on articles about history, and mathematics, and so on—and all those bloggers that are busy pontificating about the abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries and other human rights disasters, who are complaining that they can only respond to the New York Times because they don’t have sources of their own—surely those people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something.’
“No! It’s all bull—! It’s all bull—! In fact, people write about things, in general, if that’s not part of their career, because they want to display their values to their peers who are already in the same group. Actually people don’t [care] about the material, that’s the reality. So, very early on, we understood from experiences like this that we would have to at least give summaries of the material we were releasing—at least summaries, to get people to pick it up, to get journalists to pick it up, to get them to dig deeper. And if we didn’t have a summary to put the thing in context, it would just fall into the gutter and never be seen again.
“. . . But, unlike other organizations, we always release the full source material.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBENlJfZ-f8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBENlJfZ-f8
The Controversial Issues of WikiLeaks: Fact and Fiction
Now, finally, we get to the big question:
How can anyone condone the release of documents that could put the lives of operatives in the Middle East at risk? Don’t they know the stuff is classified for a reason?
I can’t tell you how many people have used this as grounds to accuse Assange of terrorism. (Though, curiously enough, less was said against the New York Times or Guardian, which published their stories about the material around the same time in collaboration with WikiLeaks.) You may notice, though, something interesting that connects their statements—
“Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism.”—Newt Gingrich
“[Assange]’s an anti-american operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identities of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”—Sarah Palin
“The guy who runs the website is a sleaze-ball named Julian Assange who is bent on damaging America. . . There’s no question that leaking documents harms the country, even if most of it is predictable, like Saudi Arabia wanting the USA to bomb Iran”—Bill O’Reilly
“This guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of other parts of the world.”—Joe Biden
“He clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of US soldiers, or those cooperating. If that’s not a capital offense, I don’t know what is.”—Mike Rogers
Do you see the common element? I’ll give you a hint—count the number of examples given concerning deaths that resulted from the leaks.
. . . That’s right. Zero. According to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding, both Guardian journalists, “All these anxieties about the fate of informants remained purely theoretical. By the end of the year in which WikiLeaks published its huge dump of information, no concrete evidence whatever had surfaced that any informant had suffered actual reprisals.” July 31, 2013, Courthouse News Service published an article by Adam Klasfeld that stated “Three years of journalistic scrutiny into the effects of the leaks could not uncover a case of an intelligence source who was killed or injured because of the disclosures.” http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/31/59869.htm
In fact, even though it was incredibly difficult, what with the sheer mass of information to go through, WikiLeaks, The Guardian, and The Times did their best to redact the names of individuals who might come to harm due to the exposure. They did miss a few, but a very few. What’s more, Assange actually wrote the following letter to the US ambassador in London before publication:
26 November 2010
“Dear Ambassador Susman, I refer to recent public statements by United States Government officials expressing concern about the possible publication by WikiLeaks and other media organisations of information allegedly derived from United States Government records. I understand that the United States Government has recently devoted substantial resources to examination of these records over many months.
“Subject to the general objective of ensuring maximum disclosure of information in the public interest, WikiLeaks would be grateful for the United States Government to privately nominate any specific instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information would put individual persons at significant risk of harm that has not already been addressed.
“WikiLeaks will respect the confidentiality of advice provided by the United States Government and is prepared to consider any such submissions made without delay.
“Yours sincerely,
Julian Assange”
Legal Advisor Harold Koh responded, saying the U.S. government would under no circumstances negotiate with him. Assange replied, “Either there is a risk or there is not. You have chosen to respond in a manner which leads me to conclude that the risks are entirely fanciful and that you are instead concerned only to suppress evidence of human rights abuses and other criminal behavior.” The communication ended there.
On the flip side, Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, points out that no injunction was filed against WikiLeaks, however strongly the leaks were condemned. “On the contrary, in our discussions before the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of our conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defense and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press-bashing . . . Though the release of these documents was certainly painfully embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or the national interest.”
Other Misconceptions:
It is often assumed that WikiLeaks “stole” classified documents (as implied by Bill O’Reilly in the quote above, despite the fact that the files were sent to the website, not stolen) and that Julian Assange is somehow a traitor. He can’t exactly have committed treason to the United States, seeing as how he’s Australian, and WikiLeaks exists without international rooting and is thus subject to no specific laws. Though the private who allegedly leaked the files did take an oath that made his actions unlawful, Julian Assange was never under any such restrictions.
(The media also assumes that the cables were released in a haphazard “mass dump”. Not true. They were released in several phases.)
US Government’s Response
It’s crazy how emotional people get about this. WikiLeaks once posted to its Youtube channel an amalgamation of all the death threats Assange received after the log/cable leak was announced. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-DIZvcK6Rc
Hillary Clinton, in January of 2010 said in a speech on internet freedom, “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable . . . The Internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. And that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. Freedom of expression is first among them.” . . . and then a few months and a few hundred thousand leaked documents later she declared, “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.” Valid points, though she was probably more concerned with the leak about her orders to ambassadors to spy on U.N. officials.
Micah Sifry points out in WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency how two principle stances were taken regarding WikiLeaks’ publications: “Sometimes, what WikiLeaks has done is portrayed as worse than what Al Qaeda has done. And other times, we are told that the so-called revelations are actually pretty hum-drum. Nothing to see here; move along please.” Very, very few people actually addressed the issues presented in the data. Issues like the U.S. military turning a blind eye to Iraqi interrogation methods, (link) cutting corners by downplaying casualties due to friendly fire (link) or even outright lying about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of journalists in Baghdad. (link)
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In November of 2010, WikiLeaks was attacked—not by the government, but by th3j35t3r (“The Jester”), a hacktivist vigilante—and responded by moving to Amazon’s servers. Under alleged pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, however, Amazon kicked WikiLeaks out under the pretense that it had violated its terms of service. Then, presumably under similar pressure, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Western Union, and Bank of America stopped providing services to WikiLeaks as part of a “financial blockade”. (MasterCard has since withdrawn from the blockade.) This has not stopped donations getting to WikiLeaks, though it has slowed them down considerably. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOuJ6aVywoI
Anonymous (a collective of hacktivists who became firm supporters of WikiLeaks after it exposed the practices of the church of Scientology) stepped up by delivering distribution-denial-of-service attacks to the offending sites. And WikiLeaks, having retreated to thousands of mirror sites, remains strong and has undergone no major assaults since.
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange was born July 3, 1971, in Queensland, Australia (accounts vary, but I’m pretty sure he was born in Australia sometime in the early seventies). He is self-described as WikiLeaks’ “founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest.”
He is also, as of Oct. 2013, currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London facing accusations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. But more on that later.
He’s a fascinating character, to say the least. Filmed in countless interviews and conferences, he is obviously not a natural speaker and lacks the poise and articulation of many prominent political figures; he makes speeches in a halting mumble perhaps made worse by his slight Australian drawl. But as long as you don’t space out in the middle of his talk, you’ll notice something else that sets him apart from politicians: He actually has something to say.
He may be longwinded but he’s clearly intelligent, and he takes no pains to avoid offending people as he develops his arguments. It’s refreshing, to say the least, and his brazen no-nonsense approach attracts plenty of supporters. Moreover, as dry a speaker as he can be, he possesses something of an unorthodox charisma highlighted by flashes of offbeat, mischievous humor. His OKCupid profile from 2006 (in which he used the name “Harry Harrison”) begins: “WARNING: Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I’m not the droid you’re looking for.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/julian-assanges-ok-cupid-profile
Assange has repeatedly claimed to have attended 37 different schools during his childhood (though he was only enrolled in 12). While his mother, Christine Assange, was married to Brett Assange (Julian Assange would not meet his biological father, John Shipton, till he was 25) the family moved around a lot with the theater business; later, after Brett and Christine divorced, she became involved with a member of a child-beating cult run by yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne. When she tried to leave in 1982 with Julian and his younger half-brother, they wound up on the run from her abusive ex for the next five years.
When Assange was a teenager he got his first computer and became “Mendax” (from splendide mendax, or “deceitful with glory”) the most prominent in a group of Melbourne hackers who made a point of sneaking into government systems (such as MILNET) with the purpose of observing only, altering nothing unless it became necessary to cover their tracks. When his activities caught up to him and police tracked him and the other hackers down, Assange’s wife left him, and he was hospitalized with depression. He was 20 years old at the time.
In the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange is reported to have followed his childhood pattern of moving from place to place in quick succession—claiming in one interview that he rarely stayed still for more than six weeks. With no permanent residence and all his belongings in a backpack, he usually found a place to stay with friends, friends-of-friends, and acquaintances made throughout this nomadic lifestyle. According to Guardian journalists Leigh and Harding, “Something about the wandering Assange made a succession of people he encountered want to look after him and protect him.”
In fact, many have commented on how likable Assange can be. Daniel Domscheit-Berg recalled in his book Inside WikiLeaks, that “Julian could be very polite when he wanted to. For example, he frequently accompanied my visitors—even when he didn’t know them—out the door, into the lobby, and onto the street. It was as if he wanted to make sure that they were safe.” He went on to say, “Women, in particular, liked to help Julian. They bought all sorts of things for him: clothes, rechargers, cell phones, coffee, flights, chocolate, new luggage, woolen socks.”
When Assange was put on trial in 1996 for his look-see hacking (for which he was only fined $2,100 since there was no evidence of damage done) he apparently brought flowers for one of the prosecuting attorneys and was told by his defense lawyer Paul Galbally, “She doesn’t want to date you, Julian. She wants to put you in jail.” When put up at the house of Gavin McFayden in 2010 during the WikiLeaks/Guardian collaboration leading up to the war logs’ release, Leigh and Harding say “he swiftly charmed the McFayden household, borrowed poetry books from the shelves, and patiently explained the Big Bang, complete with mathematical formulae, to some wide-eyed visiting children.”
. . . Unfortunately, though, the characterization doesn’t end there. According to the journalists, when Leigh expressed concern at the dinner table that the information in the logs could compromise the safety of U.S. informants in the middle east, Assange said, “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them.”
Assange did later redact most of the names, of course, but it wasn’t the last time he revealed a less than savory side to his personality. There’s a common theme, expressed over and over again, by people who’ve known him: “Julian Assange is not an easy person to work with.”(Sifry) Several of his closest colleagues defected from WikiLeaks in 2010, the most prominent of these Daniel Domscheit-Berg, once joint-spokesperson and partner in WikiLeaks, who writes,
“We used to be best friends, Julian and I . . . Today, I’m not sure whether he even knows the concept . . . Sometimes I hate him so much that I’m afraid I’d resort to physical violence if our paths ever crossed again. Then I think that he needs my help.” (Inside WikiLeaks)
Domscheit-Berg was suspended some time before the cables were released. A month later, he quit. Below is an excerpt from the chat leading to the suspension—Domscheit-Berg had gone online to ask Assange about the procedures for releasing the Iraq war logs, to which Assange responded by accusing him of leaking stories of internal dissension within WikiLeaks to the press; Domscheit-Berg denied this and asked him again about the war logs; when Assange continued to ask about the leak, Domscheit-Berg told him he needed to address problems within the organization. (Typos left in conversation.)
Daniel: i am not a dog you can contain the way you want to j
Julian: i am investigation a serious security breach. Are you refusing to answer?
Daniel: i am investigating a serious breach in trust. are you refusing to answer?
Julian: No you are not. I initiated this conversation. Answer the question please.
Daniel: I initiated it. if you look above. twice already. i want to know what agreements are in respect to iraq
Julian: That is a procedural issue. Don’t play games with me.
Daniel: stop shooting at messengers
Julian: I’ve had it.
Daniel: likewise, and that doesnt go just for me
Julian: If you do not answer the question, you will be removed.
Daniel: you are not anyones king or god and you’re not even fulfilling your role as a leader right now. a leader communicates and cultivates trust in himself. you are doing the exact opposite. you behave like some kind of emporer or slave trader
Julian: You are suspended for one month, effective immediately.
Daniel: haha. right. because of what? and who even says that? you? another adhoc decision?
Julian: If you wish to appeal, you will be heard on Tuesday.
Daniel: BAHAHAHA. maybe everyone was right, and you really have gone mental j. you should get some help.
Julian: You will be heard by a panel of peers. You are suspend for disloyalty, insubordination and destabalization in a time of crisis.
Later, Herbert Snorrason, another WikiLeaks volunteer, questioned the suspension. Assange wrote him, “If you have a problem with me, — off.”
Daniel Domscheit-Berg
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| Julian Assange (left) and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (right) at the Chaos Communication Congress in 2009 (link) |
A lot of speculation falls around the outset of Assange and Domscheit-Berg’s falling out; having heard both sides of the story, I admit that I tend to side with the latter. When he left WikiLeaks, Domscheit-Berg wrote the book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website with Tina Kopp, in which he details the inner workings of the organization and his opinions about what was good and bad about it. It’s a good read and I highly recommend it to anyone who’s at all interested in the topic, but not until they’ve heard Assange’s side as well.
Assange calls the book toxic. He says it’s defamatory and designed to bring down his website. But Domscheit-Berg only points out the necessity of WikiLeaks being as transparent as the organizations it attacks; the only thing defamatory about it is his portrayal of its founder, who he complains became more and more needy of media attention and less and less able to take internal criticism. It is hard for me personally to read the book without feeling that Domscheit-Berg is genuinely grieved about how things ended between them and that he did what he could to prevent it: though he makes bold criticisms of the australian and many of the decisions he made as a leader, he also portrays him in a very human, even pitying light. His assessment of Assange is best summed up in a paragraph from Chapter Five:
“On the one hand, I found Julian unbearable and, on the other, unbelievably special and lovable. I had the feeling that something must have gone very wrong in his life. He could have been a great person, and I was proud to have a friend who had such fire in his belly, who was so utterly committed to ideas and principles and changing the world for the better. Someone who just got up and did things without concern for what other people said. In certain respects I tried to copy this attitude. But he also had a dark side, and this increasingly gained the upper hand in the months to come.”
Since Cablegate, there is no evidence to suggest that the two ever spoke again.
Rape Charges
In 2010, between the publishing of the Afghanistan and Iraq logs, Julian Assange was accused of sexual misconduct regarding two women with whom he had shared consensual encounters, and this would quickly escalate in the media to the assumption that he had been charged with rape.
I don’t really want to get into the details, because it’s not the sort of thing I want people to read in my blog and because I don’t think it’s important to the story of WikiLeaks. The main thing is that all parties concerned agree that Assange did not rape anyone, that the relations were consensual. (And I think he probably, genuinely didn’t think he was behaving inappropriately, but that he also has a pretty broad idea of what “appropriate” behavior looks like.)
Fox News, which has no love of WikiLeaks, submitted a timeline by Glenn Beck leading up to the accusations, which is very convincing of Assange’s innocence (link); the Guardian’s book goes into unnerving detail concerning the incidents that also confirms this; and Daniel Domscheit-Berg has made it very clear that he has no reason to suspect Assange would have actually raped anyone.
That being said, if Assange had to wind up seeking asylum to avoid criminal behavior, it’s not all that surprising that it was over his relations with women.
“Whenever we attended conferences, he would scope out the scene,” writes Domscheit-Berg. “Julian liked women, that’s crystal clear. But there was no one woman with whom he was preoccupied—he liked the idea of women in general.” According to Leigh and Harding, “During his time in London, Assange did often seem to have a restlessly predatory attitude towards women. . . . Once . . . a group of hungry reporters, with Assange and a number of his legal team, were debating plans to go out and eat. ‘Shall we take the lawyers with us?’ a journalist asked. Assange leered at Robinson [his own lawyer] and said, ‘Let’s just take the pretty one.’” (A snippet of this attitude can be seen roughly three and a half minutes into the following clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b417KUYuIxw )
He actually wound up squaring off with one reporter for hitting on the man’s girlfriend while they were all eating together with a group. After the incident, Swedish journalist Donald Böstrom warned him to be more careful, that “he would not be the first great man to be brought down by a woman in a short skirt.”
Later Assange would try to say that the organization had been warned against “dirty tricks” and that the accusations were the first of these, implying that the whole thing was a scandal cooked up by the U.S. to smear his name. But then he renounced the idea as improbable and said that his lawyer had been misquoted.
Now, Assange did not avoid arrest, he went willingly to a police station in London after the accusations were made and was provided bail by dozens of devoted supporters, leading to his house arrest in U.K. manor “Ellingham Hall”, which continued for about a year. He sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face further hearings there, claiming fears that he will be subsequently extradited to the United States, tried under the Espionage Act, and possibly even executed.
Domscheit-Berg says there’s no reason Assange shouldn’t return to Sweden to get things straightened out and that “if he doesn’t, it would be a clear abuse of power—the sort of abuse WikiLeaks tries to prevent where other people are concerned . . . Sweden is not known for its hanging judges, its susceptibility to American influence, or a judicial system that lacks transparency.” Though, to be fair to Assange, his lawyers have been refused both a promise not to extradite him to the USA and any attempt to conduct investigations in the embassy where he’s staying.
Conclusions
Do I think the United States Government doesn’t need secrets to ensure national security? No. Do I think the United States Government should have unassailable control over its secrets? No.
Do I think Julian Assange is a terrorist? Absolutely not. Do I think the power of WikiLeaks could be seriously abused? Definitely. So far, though, I see no reason to believe it has done worse than embarrass the powerful and call them to account for what they’ve done.
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I see this as an imperfect system but a necessary one: If governments as powerful—and supposedly as moral—as our own can conduct their affairs before an ignorant people, of course they will see opportunities for manipulating that ignorance, and of course they will become corrupt. The very nature of secrecy is such that no one can argue when it stops being used for security and becomes a tool for covering things up. I think it’s incredibly important to have nationally independent websites like WikiLeaks that can keep both governments and corporations in fear of being exposed should someone within the group take issue with their activities.
That doesn’t mean a “whistleblower” can’t ever leak information that won’t do more harm than good, or that a whistleblower site can’t ever endanger lives by publishing, but in such cases, if the harm can be proven, then steps may be taken to bring the site’s owners to justice, but not before.
I think it would be a disgrace to American values if we allowed our government to gets its hands on Assange for the purpose of trying him under the Espionage act. I think it would be a blow to the freedom of speech and undermine the original spirit of the freedom of the press. The first American newspapers were printed to inform people of events that papers loyal to the king refused to publish: How is that any different from what WikiLeaks does? Better still, how can we call it Anti-American?
Now, do I think that WikiLeaks is the ideal model for a transparency website? Not necessarily. I do think that, for all his faults, the site and the movement would not have gained half the notoriety if Julian Assange had not been such a ruthless and visible figure. But his cult status is anything but constructive, and WikiLeaks should adhere to the same levels of openness and integrity they demand from other organizations. I don’t like the fact that Julian Assange maintains such a high level of control over volunteers and resources, as both of which must be limited in order to maintain that control. The number of leaks that will of course come in while WikiLeaks remains the most infamous leaker site require that someone decide which stories make the page and which “fall into the gutter,” to quote Assange, and the only way to preserve some semblance of objectivity in determining what makes something “newsworthy” is to distribute the decision-making power to more people.
One thing I would like to see more of is “scientific journalism”. The idea of releasing source material with context rather than mere interpretations of that material is a concept so simple I don’t know why it isn’t used more. Perhaps there’s a legitimate reason and I’m just too stupid to see it. But as it seems to me now, it’s the only honest way of informing the public, and it’s the main reason I keep coming back to the site.
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What really, truly frustrates me is the fact that people don’t know about this. I think, if there is a possibility of an objective, independent news source, people should take advantage of it and support its endeavors. Instead, so many simply have a vague idea about how the leaks probably put people in danger. And for all the data on the site, relatively little has been said about what was actually in those logs. I understand that not everyone is interested in politics and that the sheer mass of information leaked makes for incredibly overwhelming research. But if there are any people who quit paying attention to the news only because they didn’t trust mainstream media (like me), need some extra convincing that the freedom of information is necessary to balance the power in a democracy, or just want to know more about WikiLeaks and actually disagree with my assessments entirely, this post is for them.
