Assange's slipshod standards

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This was published 13 years ago

Assange's slipshod standards

By Shaun Carney

WikiLeaks says it champions enlightenment, but the cult surrounding its founder peddles paranoid conspiracies.

Thanks to modern digital information technology, the whole world has a tiger by the tail and in all likelihood will never be able to let go. The WikiLeaks revelations published in a handful of Western newspapers, including The Age, in recent weeks, have already changed international diplomatic practices, the internal communications systems of the US government, the news media's conception of their mission and their ethical boundaries, and broader notions of privacy in the wired age.

At its best, WikiLeaks should be able to establish itself as a continuing force for greater accountability between and within governments, and in public life generally. But not if it degenerates into being a vehicle for the aggrandisement and deification of its founder, Julian Assange, who has dubbed himself editor-in-chief.

Since Assange became the subject of a formal police investigation over possible sex charges in Sweden four months ago, the conspiracy theories and paranoia that have grown around his plight have become an article of faith among many of his supporters.

Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

This assumption that dark forces were at work to frame the WikiLeaks leader has been actively fostered by Assange himself. Within hours of the news being broken on August 21 that complaints from two women had been passed to a Swedish prosecutor, Assange was instructing his followers to see it as part of a campaign against him - and them.

At the weekend, The Guardian, one of the papers that has been given exclusive access to a trove of US State Department documents, ran a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the Swedish investigation. It was written by Nick Davies, the journalist who had played an important role in connecting WikiLeaks with his newspaper.

Davies reports that the information from the women was leaked to the Swedish newspaper Expressen quickly after it was referred by police to the prosecutor. ''By Saturday morning, August 21, journalists were asking Assange for a reaction. At 9.15am, he tweeted: 'We were warned to expect ''dirty tricks''. Now we have the first one.' The following day, he tweeted: 'Reminder: US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks as far back as 2008.'

''The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet asked if he had had sex with his two accusers. He said: 'Their identities have been made anonymous so even I have no idea who they are. We have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us.' ''

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Assange's declaration that he had ''no idea'' about the identities of the women appears to have been, at best, disingenuous. According to Davies's report, the women, who say they had unprotected sex with Assange, had been asking him to take an STD test and he had been fobbing them off.

But that's not the point. Here we have the WikiLeaks leader, the champion of transparency and accountability, applying one standard to governments and a different one to himself. When WikiLeaks is the vehicle for the leaking of thousands of unredacted documents, its motives are pure and the world will be a better place. When police information about him is leaked to a newspaper, it's automatically part of a malicious global conspiracy to destroy him and his web operation.

This is why it is important to distinguish between the work of WikiLeaks, and the trials and tribulations of its founder. If anything can bring WikiLeaks down, it is not the efforts of the US government or the corporations that have cut off the organisation, it is the paranoid cult that has developed around Assange. At his urging, millions of people around the world have already concluded that no investigation, no prosecution could ever be genuinely launched against Assange.

Whatever accusations are laid against him, it will always be a fit-up, a conspiracy. The CIA or the US State Department or someone has, apparently, effortlessly infiltrated the Swedish judicial and political system. Therefore, Assange should make every effort not to return to Sweden to talk to the authorities because that country's institutions are corrupt and it is merely an American puppet.

The inevitable corollary of this is that Assange, whose mission at WikiLeaks is purportedly to keep every government accountable and answerable to the law by revealing their hidden truths, is himself effectively beyond the reach of any law. Meanwhile, some of Assange's supporters in the hacker community, from which he emerged in the 1990s, have set out to hound, humiliate and defame the two women by exposing their personal details - history, phone numbers, addresses - on the web. His legal team has taken to referring to the events as a ''honeytrap'' outside the court.

Is this the free speech that WikiLeaks is dedicated to foster - an avalanche of bullying against those who find themselves crossing or doubting Julian Assange?

WikiLeaks dominates the media environment for the moment but nothing in the digital world remains static. The site will have to adapt and grow. How much longer can it act as a trafficker in other people's secrets before its starts doing its own digging? Assange is proud that WikiLeaks's technology is designed to ensure that it never knows the identity of those who send it material.

That leaves it prone to abuse and humiliation, and renders his grand ''editor-in-chief'' title as a sort of honorific. The first order of business should be to dismantle the Assange cult and shed the natural tendency towards paranoid conspiracies. Surely the purpose of WikiLeaks is to spread enlightenment, not to bury civilisation in join-the-dots subscription to rumour that places its founder above other mortals.

Shaun Carney is Age associate editor.

Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

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