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Julian Paul Assange: Criminal or Free Press Advocate?
When the word “Assange” is brought up in political discourse, things get controversial. This is because the debate on Julian Assange is extremely polarized, and people either praise him as a fearless journalist who exposed the wrongdoing of governments and militaries, or condemn him as a traitorous criminal who leaked secret documents and thus endangered the lives of countless innocents. What is the truth about Julian Paul Assange?
Part I – History and Context
Introduction
When the word “Assange” is brought up in political discourse, things get controversial. This is because the debate on Julian Assange is extremely polarized, and people either praise him as a fearless journalist who exposed the wrongdoing of governments and militaries, or condemn him as a traitorous criminal who leaked secret documents and thus endangered the lives of countless innocents. What is the truth about Julian Paul Assange?
Julian Assange’s legal troubles started in the early 2010s, shortly after the Afghanistan and Iraq wars leaks (Ross, 2020). Two Swedish women accused him of sexual assault, and as Stockholm tried to extradite him in 2012, Mr. Assange sought political asylum at Ecuador’s embassy in London (Ross, 2020). Then President Rafael Correa welcomed Assange’s request, and although this latter thus managed to avoid jail, he nonetheless spent the following seven years confined within the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy (Ross, 2020). In April 2019, newly elected President Lenin Moreno decided to expel the Australian asylee as he had allegedly violated “the conditions of his asylum” (Ross, 2020). British authorities had established a perimeter around the embassy since the very beginning of Assange’s asylum, so when he got expelled he was immediately arrested and charged with defying extradition to Sweden. British judges later dropped the charge but still kept him in jail as, in the meantime, the U.S. had now requested he be extradited (BBC News, 2021). In April 2022, a London court ruled that Washington’s request was legitimate and it ordered Assange’s extradition (John et al., 2022). Two months later, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the court’s ruling, thus completing the last “formal” step necessary to hand Mr. Assange over to the U.S. judiciary (John et al., 2022).
Who really is Assange? Is he a free press advocate or a criminal? Apparently simple questions like these cannot be answered unless many other questions are asked. What did Assange do? Did Assange’s actions constitute acts of civil disobedience or did he just commit a series of crimes? Were the means he adopted justified by the circumstances? Did Assange have no alternatives other than leaking all documents unredacted? Should Assange face criminal charges? Should the US incriminate and incarcerate him, would that set a preoccupying precedent for press freedom in the West? The next sections will provide answers to all of these questions.
Julian Assange’s Cypher-punk Ethics
In 2006, Julian Paul Assange founded WikiLeaks as “an online outlet for posting secret documents from anonymous leakers” (Welna, 2019). Behind Mr. Assange’s entrepreneurship lays his cypher-punk ethics. Anderson explains that “for the cypher-punks, censorship and surveillance were the twin evils of the computer age, but they viewed encryption as a means to circumvent both” (2020). Assange once declared: “What I opposed, and continue to oppose, is the use of secrecy by institutions to protect themselves against the truth of the evil they have done” (Anderson, 2020). Is he right? Are intelligence and state secrets inherently wrong? Should their use be banned? No, and the next paragraphs point out why.
In the past, we erroneously assumed wars could only be fought with weapons and ammo. Then, history taught us that strategy and information are assets that are just as important in the fight against an enemy. For this reason, academics started doing research on the field of strategic studies and governments established intelligence agencies, and the reasoning hereby offered is particularly concerned with these latter.
Indeed, most of the work done by intelligence services involves the gathering, handling, and analysis of sensitive information, namely data that has to be kept secret since potential wrongdoers could use it to undermine a state’s national security. In simpler words, intelligence services sometimes have to “keep secrets” to protect society from threats like foreign espionage and terrorism. Obviously, the power held by intelligence agencies can lead to abuses, just like any other type of power. Politicians are among the most powerful people on the planet, and some of them abuse of their powers, but that does not mean that all politicians are corrupt. The same applies to intelligence services, where abuses do sometimes occur, but that does not imply that intelligence and secrecy are always illegitimate. Going back to Assange, being a cypher-punk, he would disagree with all that has been stated so far. In Assange’s eyes, governments should not hide any information from the public, no matter what, no matter the context. Yet, regardless of how unrealistic, naïve, and potentially harmful this idea may be, this is the philosophy that inspired the activity of WikiLeaks.
A Brief Summary of the History of WikiLeaks
On April 5th, 2010, WikiLeaks hit the headlines worldwide by posting the classified recording of a U.S. helicopter attack occurred on July 12th, 2007, in New Baghdad (Froomkin, 2010). The video shows the crew of a U.S. Apache attack helicopter firing 30mm rounds on more than a dozen innocents, resulting in just as many casualties, including two Reuters journalists. The attack also left two children seriously injured. The footage is still easily accessible by anyone on the internet, and it is now known by the name WikiLeaks gave it, “Collateral Murder.”
A few months later, WikiLeaks and its Australian editor-in-chief once again found themselves at the center of the world stage after they had done something unprecedented: publish hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents. A full database of intelligence papers whose access was strictly limited to U.S. military officers and senior officials suddenly became available to anyone who simply had an internet connection. To be more precise, the first batch of leaked documents was released in July 2010, when WikiLeaks published 75,000 reports by the U.S. Department of Defense on the War in Afghanistan, which later became known as the “Afghan War Diaries” (Ross, 2020). WikiLeaks successively declared it had withheld an additional 15,000 reports for security reasons.
In October 2010, WikiLeaks stroke again and leaked the so-called “Iraq War Logs,” namely 400,000 classified reports on U.S. Army operations in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 (Ross, 2020). One month later, the U.S. government found out WikiLeaks had obtained 250,000 U.S. State Department cables which the website intended to publish (Ross, 2020). About half of them were classified, yet WikiLeaks nonetheless proceeded to release them.
Between 2011 and 2015, WikiLeaks did not stop, but its actions did not draw as much attention as they first did in 2010. Then, in July 2016, WikiLeaks made a feisty comeback to public debate by “post[ing] nearly 20,000 emails and 8,000 attachments from leaders of the Democratic National Committee” (Welna, 2019). In October of that same year, that is, just one month before the 2016 US presidential election, Assange’s website released “more than 2,000 hacked emails from the account of John Podesta, who at the time was campaign chairman for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton” (Welna, 2019).
Conclusion
To sum up, on one hand, Assange’s supporters believe WikiLeaks played a crucial role in unearthing uncomfortable truths regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as in denouncing the allegedly unfair process that led Hillary Clinton to become the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. On the other hand, Assange’s detractors claim WikiLeaks does more harm than good. They accuse the website of putting the lives of hundreds of innocent Afghan and Iraqi collaborators at risk and of having de-facto favored Trump’s victory by having misleadingly shed a bad light on the Democratic Party. How can one distinguish truth from false narratives? Find the answer in the second part of this article.