WikiLeaks, the international non-profit organization headed by Julian Assange, has been called “as important as the Freedom Of Information Act” by Time Magazine. By its own description, it is an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking. Set up in 2006 as a document archive and disclosure site, it shot to prominence within the first couple of years, as it began disclosing classified diplomatic communication that exposed international governmental improprieties. Its ownership is ascribed to unidentified dissidents, scholars, and journalists, among others, but Julian Assange has been the public face of WikiLeaks from its inception.
In spite of being the focus of intense scrutiny and harassment by global governments and governmental agencies, Assange is seen by human rights activists as some sort of patron saint of international whistle blowing. He went on to be named Time magazine’s Readers’ Choice Person of the Year for 2010. The large scale disclosure of classified US diplomatic cables at the end of August 2011 with unedited names of US and Australian sources and officials has resulted in widespread criticism and condemnation from all over the world, including his country of origin, Australia.
This 40-year-old internet activist is no stranger to legal trouble. Assange was acknowledged as one of Australia’s foremost ethical hackers while he was still a teenager. He was prosecuted for hacking into protected networks as a young man. He is presently under house detention in England pending the English court’s decision to extradite him to Sweden for questioning in a sexual assault case. A grand jury has been set up in the United States to deliberate on the modalities for prosecuting him, while the sources of leaked documents have been detained in custody pending trial.
He has been on the wrong side of Australian establishment in the past too, and it was only the outrage of the Australian public against the governmental condemnation that got him out of trouble. Late in August this year, thousands of classified documents were leaked on the internet by WikiLeaks without the identity of those named in them being edited out. This included names of 23 Australian citizens on no-fly and terrorism-watch lists with alleged links to militant agencies, along with the name of an officer of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO). None of these people named have been officially charged with any crime in the past.
While the Australian government has stopped short of proposing legal action against Julian Assange, they are forthright about the fact that they see this as a violation of the rights of Australian citizens. Australian law decrees that it is illegal to publish the name of an ASIO officer. With last year’s public outcry against their stance on the actions of the WikiLeaks founder still fresh in their memory, the Attorney General’s office declined to prosecute Assange on the grounds that he does not operate out of Australia.
While governments decry WikiLeaks as nothing more than a lowly form of espionage and blackmail, the fact remains that the disclosures made through it have revealed human rights violations and governmental wrongdoing in many instances. His erstwhile media partners who helped publish the earlier disclosures have been quick to distance themselves from the recent leaks.
Some of them have gone so far as to publish harsh criticisms of the man who they were praising till a week back. Though Assange claims that no action of WikiLeaks has ever endangered lives of people, the recent unedited leaked documents are definitely a serious breach of privacy and rights of common people. Much of the legal actions against the website and its founder have been claimed to be political vendetta for embarrassing those in power, but this recent action might lead to significant loss of public support for WikiLeaks.
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