Julian Assange and Wikileaks

There is a news story around at the moment that may have escaped your attention – it involves the publication of a few private cables sent by diplomats of the US of A

Julian Assange

This blog does not intend to go into the rights and wrongs of leaking confidential and potentially damaging state documents, although I am in favour of it, but rather the draconian and frankly scary response of America.

There are the usual hang ‘em high brigade that you get in any ‘national crisis’ – Congressman Mike Rogers being a prime example. Congressman Rogers says that execution would be an appropriate punishment for the soldier widely thought to helped leak classified military documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. 

 "I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here," explained Rogers. "He clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of U.S. soldiers or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offense, I don't know what is."

Ex Vice-Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin called for him to be hunted as an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands”, whilst Representative Peter T. King called the leaks “terrorism”.

More sinister is the attempts by the American government to ‘persuade’ various companies that having anything to do with Wikileaks may be harmful for their business.  It is thought that it was US political pressure that provoked Amazon to stop hosting Wikileaks, EveryDNS to break Wikileaks.org’s domain name, eBay/Paypal to stop facilitating financial transactions, Swiss Post to freeze a Wikileaks bank account (in perhaps the first instance in recorded history of a Swiss bank taking residency requirements seriously), and Mastercard and Visa to cease relations. 

The US Government may not have the powers to directly stop the confidential information reaching the public domain but they are doing everything within their power to disrupt and block Wikileaks. Meanwhile, the US Government is content to allow Visa and Mastercard to allow links on the Klu Klux Klan website enabling donations to be made.

Then we get to the very tricky detail of the international arrest warrant for the alleged rape of two Swedish women by the high profile head of Wikileaks, Julian Assange.  I would never support a man accused of such a terrible crime without knowing the facts more thoroughly and I can not comment on his guilt or innocence as I do not know enough about the incident. 

What is striking, of course, is the timing of the warrant.  Mr Assange has stated that he tried to speak to the police in Sweden when the accusation first surfaced but that they thought the evidence was not sufficient to proceed.  He then left Sweden with the knowledge of the police and came to England.  He was not in hiding and British police knew how to contact him. 

Assange's British lawyer says Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny is flouting international law and staging a "show trial" by keeping him in the dark, calling it "impossible for us to prepare a case if you don't know what the allegations or evidence are." It wasn’t until the leaked cables starting being published that an international arrest warrant was served. This could be a mere coincidence, I will let you draw your own conclusions from that.  What I do hope is the justice is done for the proper reasons rather than any political ones.

Luckily there are many people out there in the cyberworld who believe in the freedom of the internet. From the twitter campaigns aimed at spreading support for Wikileaks, encouraging donations and urging action against the aforementioned companies as well as posting links to the documents themselves, to the sites posting links to Wikileaks to countries who are willing to let them on their servers (Bolivia).  There are also many who are happy to take the law into their own hands and fight fire with fire – apparently Mastercard and Visa sites have been the subject of intense cyber attacks since they announced their decisions.

Beauty and the geek

To me, Wikileaks shows that powerful governments will do anything to keep the truth from the unwashed masses, but, in the digital age, they are fighting a losing battle – and I do believe this battle is part of a bigger war against the ever increasing power of big governments and, sometimes bigger, corporations. Thank goodness for the computer kids who never had girlfriends.

Viva la geek revolucion!