Thoughts On Assange And Wikileaks

When Wikileaks first came out, my first suppositional impression was "If somebody can leak the illegitimately classified or concealed wrongdoings of the world via this website, then somebody can also leak the legitimately classified goings-on of the world via this website."

Obviously that is exactly what happened.

When Julian Assange first started making news, my first suppositional reaction was "He might be an iconoclast who wants to expose the illegitimately classified or concealed wrongdoings of the world via this website — then God help him — but more likely he is an anarchist who just wants to stir shit — and then God damn him."

Obviously that is exactly what happened too.

This was generally obvious, but it really wasn't until Assange captured and released pretty much every greasy diplomatic cable of the last decade, essentially the entirety of the world's governments' private gossip about each other, that Assange really began to show his true colors.

(Christopher Hitchens said it best: "One of civilization's oldest and best ideas is that all countries establish tiny sovereign enclaves in each other's capitals and invest these precious enclaves of peaceful resolution with special sorts of immunity. That this necessarily includes a high degree of privacy goes without saying. Even a single violation of this ancient tradition may have undesirable unintended consequences, and we rightly regard a serious breach of it with horror.")

But, finally, it was when threatened with arrest... when Assange threatened to release all of the previously redacted documents in their unredacted states, putting lives and governments unquestionably at risk, that the rest of the world who were not already convinced of this man's perfidy could finally see.

It is an unfortunate fact, though, that Assange will never be prosecuted for being part of what is essentially a spy ring: First Ammendment rights are well established on the subject that receiving of and publishing of (as opposed to theft of) state secrets is not a crime. Add to that the fact that Assange would be standing at the defendants table with his co-publishers at The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel and you can see the impossibility a prosecution would be. Senator Joe Lieberman may be a bit of a dingbat, but his assertion that not only Assange but those newspapers as well might be guilty of violations of The Espionage Act, while inaccurate in the legal sense, is quite accurate in the logical sense.

In other words, the actions of Assange were indeed an infamy, but there is little under the law that can be done about it.