Julian Assange: Angel and/or Demon?

Judging New Media’s Robin Hood and the currency of information.

NTUSU Tribune

Opinions - February 2010

Julian Assange is hailed as the man behind ‘Wikileaks’. While everyone has heard of the organisation headed by Assange, few may know that it started in 2006 and has won many awards including the Economist’s New Media Award in 2008 and Amnesty International’s UK Media Award in 2009.

We still haven’t completely figured out whether Robin Hood was a hero or a thief. That makes judging Julian Assange a little bit difficult. So does the TIME magazine reader’s choice ‘Person of the Year 2010’ metaphorically accessorize with horns and a tail or wings and a halo?

Officially ‘Wikileaks’ proclaims itself to be a platform for “the revealing of suppressed & censored injustices”. This year though, it appears that Assange decided he was bored and needed a good laugh. So he released cables that revealed less information about injustices unbeknownst to us and more information that embarrassed governments.

The ideals of complete freedom of information and transparent governance sound very good on paper. Anybody championing these two causes would likely be seen as a hero. But these are ideals that look much better on paper than in reality.

There is a documentary entitled “We Live in Public” that tells the story of a dot-com kid named “Josh Harris”. He builds a community called “Quiet” where people live in a society that is entirely public. Every move an inhabitant makes is filmed; there is absolutely no privacy. The result – chaos and barbarism. I think that the claim that diplomacy needs a certain amount of privacy to function effectively holds some water. If we can’t do without a little bit of privacy, why do we expect the people who govern us to? Deciding what the public needs to know is tricky. But do we really need to know everything? Do we even really care enough to want to know everything? And if we don’t trust the government to decide what we ought to know, why should we trust Julian Assange and a less-than-transparent ‘Wikileaks’ operation?

The Book of Proverbs says that Knowledge is power. If you think about it, that makes complete sense. Corporations make money from knowledge they have and we do not. Governments can govern and stay in power by knowing what we don’t. Similarly, Julian Assange has power over governments worldwide by virtue of information that he has that can threaten the government’s power and trigger public scandals of magnanimous proportions. You have to wonder whether it is the power that fuels ‘Wikileaks’ rather than the ideals of free information.

Human beings and quantum particles have one common characteristic – they both behave differently in the presence of an observer. With ‘Wikileaks’ playing big brother in the diplomatic process, international relations could be fundamentally impacted. When nuclear power and world economies are at stake Wikileaks could lead to disastrous outcomes with just one errant disclosure. That makes the ‘Wikileaks’ proposition highly risky, a risk it may not be worth.

I cannot pretend to know the intentions of Julian Assange. Given Wikileaks’s not-really-moral means and suspect ends I would venture to say that Assange is at the very least a fallen angel if not a devil in disguise.