Assange’s war on secrecy’s terror

No other individual has hijacked the global news agenda as dramatically and comprehensively.

No other individual in the history of journalism has hijacked the global news agenda as dramatically and as comprehensively as WikiLeaks’ Julian P Assange. The publication of only a few hundred of the 250,000 or so classified US diplomatic cables held by him have dominated world news headlines for over two weeks now.

For the next few months at least, he can choose when and how to command global journalism. Not a bad position for a journalist to be in, despite its attendant risks.

In the process, he has earned several labels for himself, from the god of modern journalism to an anarchist. But Assange’s war goes much further than a mere quest for being the greatest journalist the world has ever known.

In a live Q & A with one of his allied newspapers, The Guardian, on December 3, Assange said his decision to use Amazon.com as one of the servers for his website was a calculated one. I quote him from The Guardian: "Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases."

That seems to be his real battle. He is testing the limits of free speech and freedom of information — two of the key pillars on which stand the citadels of western liberalism. And so far, the free world’s response has been anything but robust.

Interpol has issued a red notice for Assange, seeking information on his whereabouts from all of its 188 member countries for alleged sexual crimes in Sweden which he denies. Sex on the run and leaked diplomatic cables may be two totally different subjects, but few seem willing to believe that the red notice isn’t the obvious connection.

In Washington, super expensive legal heads have already spent hundreds of hours on finding ways of getting around the First Amendment. Chances are that they will end up hoping that charges of sexual misconduct stick. But whichever way it pans out, it promises to be a fascinating battle that will change the way we look at our world.

That indeed seems to be the magnitude of the change that this former hacker from Australia is promising us. Just as 9/11 brought down the international order so painstakingly established after the Second World War, triggering immoral wars and medieval occupations, Assange’s WikiLeaks is threatening to redefine the paradigm of our freedoms. 9/11 gave us the doctrine of pre-emptive strike, a doctrine that has since eaten steadily into the concept of rule of law and human dignity across the world. It took a lot to put this doctrine in place, from sexed up intelligence to new war terminology such as unlawful combatants to an evil war fought through satellite-controlled pilotless aerial weapons.

Many argued that the war was, in fact, trampling the very freedoms it was claiming to defend. Britain’s decision to go for an out of court settlement with some of its citizens who became victims of this war without rules is evidence for this argument. Much more must lie buried in the kind of documents that Assange is aiming to make public.

One doesn’t yet know what Assange’s war will force the free world into doing. But it will be fascinating to watch some of the best legal and political brains across the Atlantic hack their way through every known law, convention and custom regulating the freedoms of information and speech as they hunt for a man who, for America, seems to have become a much more evolved, sophisticated and dangerous version of Osama bin Laden.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 5^th, 2010.