Julian Assange: World's Most Wanted Man
Nick Carraway“True intellectual heritage can't be bound up in intellectual property.'' - Julian Assange, Editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.org
With the most recent diplomatic cable leaks from WikiLeaks.org, Julian Assange might be the world's most wanted man. The controversial website founder's biography reads like the legend of a twentieth century Robin Hood who steals information from the rich and powerful only to give it away free and mostly unedited to the poor.
Born in Australia in 1971, Assange schooled himself in math and physics, and then went on to the University of Melbourne but dropped out because of his ethical problems over the amount of top students being solicited to work on US defense research projects. After pleading guilty to 24 hacking charges at the age of 21, Assange's curiosity for secure information solidified and the seeds of extreme intellectual freedom germinated. An explorer on the 1990s waves of digital information, he founded one of Australia's first ISPs, co-wrote a book on hacking, invented an encryption system, authored free software, and registered the domain name leaks.org. This latter seedling of Assange's fertile brain wouldn't see light until 2006 with the founding of WikiLeaks.org.
Created by a group of political dissidents, academics, journalists, and tech experts, the WikiLeaks website allows whistle-blowers to post original versions of sensitive, often highly classified files to a server which makes the source untraceable. Since 2007, the list of news stories generated by Assange's site has grown increasingly impressive, including video footage of a US military helicopter shooting civilians in Baghdad, evidence of governmental corruption in Kenya, training manuals from Guantanamo and the Church of Scientology, reports of oil traders dumping toxic waste of the Ivory Coast, climate-gate emails, and thousands of internal documents from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although his work for WikiLeaks is volunteer, there's been no shortage of compensation in the form of international recognition for Assange and his influence on “new media.” But the awards, public speaking engagements, and television appearances have all been cut short by the latest leak, a cache of international cables from the US State Department exposing many of the world's diplomatic secrets. In the aftermath, which is still playing out, Assange is facing an active criminal investigation and being labeled a terrorist by some in the US Congress.
Could this most recent leak be the end of Julian Assange's status of information pioneer and mark his transition to spy and saboteur, even in the eyes of journalists?
Aside from the debate over national security and a government's right to privacy, the persistence of Julian Assange's and WikiLeaks' ability to break huge amounts of classified information raises questions on the real purpose of our media. Assange himself brings up the issue of media effectiveness in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald wondering, “How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined?”
In light of all the continued leaks, one has to consider the basic premise of that question. In a post-9/11 age, where fear and secrecy are becoming more and more part of the norm, why aren't our media outlets doing more to mine the vast quantities of data and expose the harmful, secret operations of our government, especially when each leak seems to paints an ever more critical picture of how our leaders operate? Isn't one role of the press to ensure governmental accountability? Before spouting off rehashed sound bytes about national security interests and the importance of diplomatic trust, think about all the world-changing stories in investigative journalism and the accompanying reforms, from Dachau to McCarthyism to Watergate.
Perhaps the criticisms on Julian Assange in the media recently have less to do with the information his site has leaked, and more to do with the threat of his new media vehicle. As Salon.com's Greenwald points out, the New York Times and others are smearing Assange simply because he is an enemy of the Pentagon, which has become the lazy, modern journalist's most trusted source for information on military exploits.
Whether WikiLeaks' unfiltered approach to journalism is right or wrong, Assange should not be the object of attack just because his site encourages whistle-blowing, especially not attacks from mainstream media who purportedly share that goal. If Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder want to prosecute him for violating the Espionage Act, that's one thing. But when an old media dinosaur like the NYTimes joins in the frenzy, we consumers of information must start to question what forces drive the American media agenda and at what point fear of extinction trumps the original purpose of our once-proud free press.
Reader Comments (11)
I have been fascinated this week with the publicity of this man and wikileaks, yet I have known the name for some time. I hope you get a chance to read this link as an addition to the superb links above:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/346104
I do believe strongly that wikileaks makes our journalism seem porous and slanted with very little motivation to reveal the truth. The reason is that newspapers see themselves as entertainment. And that is the reason why newsprint media and papers are dying, not the so called new media. If they stayed true to their original intent, or perhaps the idealism in my mind of journalism, then no one could replace or mistake their purpose for truth. But they chose ratings and fluff pieces following TV news and such and the competition is way better at distracting us from the world.
No matter what happens to wikileaks, Assange is a hero because he has opened all of us to the amount of truth and lies that the media is not reporting. He is cavalier and brash but his work is challenging lines so much that Addams' old Sedition Act seems likely to be revisited.
Openness in a democracy is a must to fully involve the electorate and security can not come from keeping the American people ignorant of the information that is necessary for a informed voter decision. It has never been more real for me that we are at a great new edge of defining information, boundries, and government as right now. It is fascinating and precarious time to be thinking and living in the world.
Finally, It will be cool when Time make Assange its Person of the Year for doing something then should have done if they had the courage.
The Pentagon Papers were facts submitted to a candid world that deserved to know why and how the United States mired its armed forces in Vietnam. I suppose the hope afterwards was that news services would hold officials accountable for telling the truth, always.
Many news outlets would like to pretend that they work without regard for the prestige of power. In the meantime, American tax dollars go to support wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the goals of which are constantly caught in subterfuge. The justice process in Gitmo is suspiciously slow. While some may view the weaknesses in US policy brought to light by Wikileaks as a threat to our soldiers abroad, I do feel that if that is true in any way, it is the failed foreign policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations that are to blame, not Wikileaks. There is nothing to fear from the truth, but we should all fear the possibility that no one will care about the truths that will come to light.
Assange is a hero. But that's not what's on my mind.
The mainstream media is a sick and (hopefully) dying joke, fetid and corpselike, bloated and ready to burst with the pustulant lies that issue incessantly from their rotting newspaper skin, reflecting mendacity from television screens like the corneas of dead eyes reflect the wan glow of overcast gloom as night descends...
They parrot the lies of the politicians, and they provide a "false-dichotomy." The whole "Left" vs. "Right" debate is largely a sham. The "News" media rarely covers anything of actual relevance. They create fake controversies and fixate on highly charged emotional issues (like gay marriage) that really only affect a small percentage of the population, while things that affect us ALL (like the free trade agreement CAFTA) go unreported...
Is it a conspiracy? Depends on how you define "Conspiracy." There's nothing secret about it. Do a little bit of research and you'll find that pretty much all media in our country is owned by three multinational corporations: Disney, Time Warner, and News Corp. I forget the name of the law, but Bush Jr. repealed a law and allowed greater consolidation of new media. I made a huge deal about it at the time. No one (other than me) seemed to care. I feel like Casandra... snakes whispered the future into her ears... but no one would listen.
Here's the future of the "News" media in America: anyone ever heard of "Pravda?" It was THE newspaper in Communist Russia. It was pure propaganda. That's what we're going to have here. The only difference is that at least the Russians KNEW they were being lied to. Most Americans, by contrast think that Fox or MSNBC or CNN represent actual "news." HA!
The "News" is nothing more than an appendage of 3 multinational corporations who share similar interests. These multinational corporations contribute heavily to politicians and (thanx to a recent supreme court decision) can now outright BUY politicians via unlimited campaign contributions (politicians should be forced to have corporate logos tattooed on their foreheads).
In short we're screwed... as it creates a vicious feedback loop that appears unstoppable. Let me leave you with a Bill Hicks quote:
I’ll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. “I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.” “I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.” “Hey, wait a minute, there’s one guy holding out both puppets!” “Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here’s Love Connection. Watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you f***ing morons."
- William Melvin Hicks (RIP, 1961-1994)
PS. Forgot to say what we can do to correct the problem. The only thing to do is to break the up the monopolistic stranglehold of the 3 multinational corporations. But A) do we have the power (with an increasingly globalist society where national sovereignty a distant memory that's given way to the rights of corporate "persons"), and B) do we have the political will. Obama is a corporate lackey. Congress was bought and sold a long time ago, and it's only getting worse (thanx supreme court!).
Our only hope is to preserve "Net Neutrality" and pray to god or Allah or whatever that things like Wikileaks not only continue, but GROW, expand... become a grassroots movement of computer hackers and whistle-blowers. That's the only thing that will save us. News papers are dead. TV is propaganda. This is unlikely to change. Therefore, we must rely on the only thing left that has not been fully corrupted by the fetid taint of Ahriman's greed: The Internet. But the internet will soon be dead as well (at least in terms of HOPE) when they finally repeal "Net Neutrality"...
Homeland Security will kill Net Neutrality -- the common ground shrinks Shaman -- but if the internet goes, we will create a new form of democracy and voice
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/297081-1
"Wikileaks, Public Policy, and Journalism" video on C-SPAN. I haven't watched it yet; it's in my queue.
I watched the C-SPAN video I posted above. The segments I would point out are these...
Around 32 min, Karen DeYoung talks about the responsibility of journalism of placing information within an intelligible context. Excellent point, imho.
From about 45 min until the end, there is discourse on the subjectivity inherent in what is tagged as top secret, and the additional subjectivity within the media of what is news worthy, the two together leading to inherent imperfections in the delivery and reporting of information and news, etc.
I tend to agree with all this.
I am not a conspiracy theorist on this or anything for that matter. Conspiracy theories require a level of coordination between relatively large organizations that I don't believe is possible. In short, it gives people far more credit than I am willing to give them. The truth with something of this magnitude (the delivery/reporting of information and news on a national scale) is inevitably messy.
More importantly, I believe that the financial woes of mainstream media have led to a "selling out" of sorts, of a need to be more entertaining in the name of money. I imagine it must've been a tough decision, but I also believe it was a decision to continue operation or cease to exist. It is unsurprising to me that they chose to continue operation at the cost of their journalistic ideals, I imagine in the hopes that they perhaps could turn it around in the future. This is unfortunate, but it is not sinister as I see it. It just is.
What has led to these financial woes and compromises? In a word, the internet. The internet we all love so much has created a culture of people who expect news to be free. News organizations cannot operate on that model. Well...perhaps they can, they just compromise their integrity and become entertainment outlets. So there is a sense in which we the public contribute to this problem. In a big way, actually.
So is Assange a hero because he delivers all this information...for free? In a way that requires virtually nothing of us, apart from entering a URL in a browser? We have to decide what good journalism is worth to us, and we must be willing to pay for it. If not, then we are the problem as much as anything else. I see the news organizations simply doing what they must to survive.
Of course that begs another point that this strategy for the news organizations is apparently working. They are staying in business. This would not be happening without the cooperation and complicity of other organizations: advertising, distribution networks, and the American public at large. There is much to consider here and the "messiness" only expands.
Now, speaking more personally, I have all but stopped watching any form of news on television because it is just so blatantly sensationalist and poor. I do read a lot however, and I try to choose good publications. I believe there are many good publications that deliver quality news and from which it is still very possible to be well-informed.
I suspect however that most people are not willing to put in the extra time required to do all this reading -- not those on this site certainly, but other people :). When people talk about the poor quality of news, I find they are often, if not always, talking about television news. Television news is just so easy to bash. But we want our television news to be high-quality because television is easy, and something for which we do not have to pay extra -- most of us already pay for cable, and not so much for the news. So again, are we not complicit in this situation if not the primary reason for it?
Pay for quality news where you find it. Encourage everyone else to do this. And we will see things change slowly for the better.
That's my sermon for the week. :)
Good points, Finkster.
I would usually be inclined to agree with your view on conspiracy theories as being unbelievable because they require too much coordination, but I think the wikileaks incident does expose some of the major media outlets as being willing to conceal information. Yes, sensitive info needs to be placed in context, but how is it that the New York Times and other major papers didn't cover the stories until after wikileaks posted the raw information on the internet? Wouldn't they as competitive media companies want the exposure and the traffic to their websites? It seems like they are content to be as reserved on sensitive government material as the government wants them to, until a rogue like Assange forces them to cover things they otherwise would've kept quiet. Does this hint at a government back conspiracy theory to keep journalist silent on potentially damaging information? Possibly, as some of the US government's illegal/unethical activity was exposed in the diplomatic cables and the Hilary Clinton's of the world would naturally want to keep their more sinister tactics from public view. But you're probably right in saying that gives people too much credit. The Times and other outlets probably just focus on the sensational, simplistic stories they know people will read, instead of putting in the work to filter through massive amounts of mostly irrelevant information in order to find a few ugly truths about our government that most are willing to ignore. It's lazy journalism coupled with a money-driven need to provide infotainment.
But another argument in favor of the information conspiracy is the large number of media outlets that run the same story each day over and over. Instead of giving us access to more news stories, the 24 hour news cycle seems only to encourage the media to beat the same few stories to death. I know this is probably not directly coordinated, but it does show a tacit agreement among news outlets to stay within certain boundaries. How many times is the same story on drudge report, cable news, am talk radio, npr, yahoo news, etc? The only ones breaking from the mainstream stories are bloggers, twitter and a few small local journalists, because who else can afford to?
Your comments above support my believe that we need a new model to bring journalism/media back to its natural responsibility as a check and balance against corruption in our largest institutions. But it's almost like mainstream media outlets are only willing to do exposes if the story will be entertaining otherwise they run innocuous stories because they have to sell out to corporate and government demands in order to remain in business. I think that's why I admire Assange. He has not sold out, even if he has been a little too destructive or irresponsible in the manner in which he released the information.
As for myself as a consumer of information and participant in the dialogue, I hope that the Lunch Break will continue to be a haven for honest debate about important issues and attract intelligent, open minded people who want to be informed more than they are subject to special interests or a profit motive. Thanks for the ideas
When people stopped buying the paper and magazines, the media outlets had to oblige the advertisers and government subsidies for their survival. I still think when the online markets are "pay" model, the real writing and journalism will come back stronger than ever. The internet has given a voice to many more people and that will strengthen the eyes and ears of a news stream. In conclusion, the internet has helped break down the all powerful monopolies in some degree, but it has weakened their mission because of a lack of direct funding.
I agree that the uniformity of the news outlets in what they deliver from day-to-day is suspect. I'm not sure how best to explain it. It could be the result of agreements and information sharing between the news outlets - not a conspiracy in the sense they are serving political or ideological ends, but just agreements that arose out of a business need to fill a 24-hour pipeline of news. And without any government involvement. This is plausible to me because it would involve only the news organizations, and the mechanisms for it are established, in the form of AP and Reuters which can serve as a pool of stories to draw from. I'm not pointing the finger at AP and Reuters; I'm just saying they help make this idea plausible.
I believe that the rise of 24-hour news networks has harmed the business also. I can see how filling that time could lead to all manner of compromises and problems. But even this, as with all the issues I see, stems from money-oriented "business" concerns, not political or ideological motives. And a "money" problem to me is encouraging because that is a problem we can fix.
I also agree that we need a new model for news delivery. No question about it. The news outlets must be able to fund good journalists, potential undercover investigations, defense lawyers in publishing sensitive material, and so on. Journalists must be able to investigate and write stories with full faith and confidence that their publisher will back them in the face of lawsuits and potential criminal charges. In this regard, I believe the news outlets privately love Wikileaks. Assange is offloading many of the risks from their shoulders. I got that sense watching the guy from the NYT in the C-SPAN video I linked above. On its own, this still does not explain why Assange has to publish everything on a public web site -- but I digress.
To James's points, I agree that the internet has done some good. It's not all bad. It is breaking down the major news superpowers and it is forcing a needed transformation of the industry, one I hope ultimately solves our current problems. And it is inevitable in my mind that any such transformation will be ugly while it is occurring and full of uncertainty in its outcomes. We may simply be in the midst of that ugliness right now. While we should not have simple blind faith that we will come out the other end having solved all our problems, we should also not be so cynical to preclude that it can happen. I think the clearest action we can take as consumers is to be prepared to pay for our news in some way. And we can elect leaders who hold liberty, democracy, and limited government as ideals - although I believe this is the lesser of the issues at hand. Money is the overarching problem.
Too much to address all... However,
I think it's "natural" (or at least not surprising) that since 3 multinational corporations: Disney, Time-Warner, and News Corp control virtually ALL conventional "mainstream media", that they would share similar interests and goals, and since their activities are very similar, it makes more sense economically to cooperate rather than to go after one another on a truly significant scale. They'll pretend to fight with one another, but this is dull and sullen shadow play enacted by corpse evangelists who wear the grotesque and dysmorphic masks of "pundits"...
I know the name might seem blasphemous to you guys, but you seriously need to read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent." There's a lot I disagree with him on. However, his assessment of the media is worth considering, and he diagnosed the problem 20 friggin' years ago (first printing was in 1988). He documents everything to the point of seeming to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, but his (terribly dry writing) is well-referenced, and provides compelling arguments. Plus, I would point out that it's generally a good idea to expose one's self to ideas that might at first seem contrary, if for no other purpose than expansion of one's mind.
Although I think many of you assume, due to some of my postings (especially the older posts), that I am a "liberal," that would be an inaccurate assessment. I am first and foremost a LIBERTARIAN. I always have been, ever since 1996 when I voted Libertarian for the first time I was legally allowed to vote. However, I know that pure Libertarian economic policies will not work. They simply won't. We'd be in the age of Robber Baron's again. We're halfway there already...
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I merely wanted to share Ron Paul's latest clip on what's going on with Assange. Again, I apologize if this has already been posted in a different, yet related thread. I know that some of you share my enthusiasm for Ron Paul. I supported him in 2008 (although I regretfully caved in and voted for Obama the deceiver). I went to hear Paul speak, donated (modestly) to his campaign, and still regularly receive emails from his supporters. I'm not an automaton though. I disagree with Paul on certain things, but I really admire his courage to speak the truth as he sees it, and not be frightened into submission by the pressure to consent tacitly to the collective cultural lies that are routinely propagated by the serpentine media outlets as they wind in circuitous patterns around the throat of the nation, trying to strangle truth, before it is uttered, in their scaly, cold-blooded, dispassionate deathgrip...
Here's the clip:
http://www.ronpaul.com/2010-12-15/u-s-governments-lies-killed-thousands-of-people-wikileakss-truth-killed-nobody/
BTW, notice how the imbecilic CNN "news"caster starts out the interview by attempting a "guilt by association", logically fallacious argument. It's classic stupidity, endemic in the media, and emblematic of a dead press, vacant airwaves, and vacuous transmissions of puerile lies unfit for the mind of a child engaged in the most crass and craven sophistry. The "news" does not provide discourse. It provides fear, the facsimile of meaning, the illusion of dissent (as hyperbolic invective is directed at actual dissenters), nihilism disguised as substance, and serves to spew forth a general malaise designed to keep us fearful, not daring to look beyond the curtain of blackest midnight obfuscation that they themselves have served to propagate...
PS. I notice that some of you guys are dismissing "conspiracy theories." I myself am undecided on whether or not to believe certain theories. I know for a FACT that some of them are real, such as the CIA's complicity in the global drug trade. This is PROVABLE. Others seem more far fetched.
BTW, has anyone ever looked into the "Bilderberg Group" or the "Trilateral Commission"? If you know nothing about them, I'd suggest you look em up.