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The New Yorker's George Packer calls him "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal." Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders." Meanwhile, he is the darling of left leaving believers everywhere, revered for democratizing the media. Whether his actions are to be encouraged or vilified, one thing’s for sure: Julian Assange and Wikileaks have had a huge impact. Charlotte Greenfield reports on the effects of the Wikileaks, from alleged security threats, to how the leaks might change politics.
Last year a political storm appeared on the horizon of journalism thanks to the work of three newspapers, one website, an unidentifiable number of hackers and leakers, and a man with eerily snow-white hair.
 
 
Julian Assange, the public face of Wikileaks, is not by any means the first to leak information that scandalised the world. Even the name of Wikileaks’ most recent initiative - ‘Cablegate’ – is a reference to one of the most famous leaks in history. In 1972 reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the White House’s cover-up of an attempted break in at the opposing Democratic Party’s headquarters. President Nixon was forced to resign and, as noted by the film Frost/Nixon, “his most lasting legacy is that today any political wrong doing is immediately given the suffix “-gate”.
 
 
The first Wikileak had a very different beginning. It all started with Kenya. In 2007 Wikileaks released a secret report detailing corruption by the former President, Arap Moi. The subsequent President, Mwai Kibaki, had commissioned the report in 2004 to gain leverage over Moi but the two were now working in coalition and the report became “the holy grail of Kenyan journalism” with no chance of its release. That is, until Julian Assange’s sources managed to provide Wikileaks with a copy which they handed on to The Guardian. The result, says Assange, “changed the result of the election.” “So your leak substantially changed the world,” prompted a sympathetic interviewer. Assange responded with a smirking nod.
 
 
This leak did change the world, very much so for the citizens of Kenya. However Assange conveniently fails to add that the result of that election was violence and ethnic purges throughout Kenya, leaving nearly 1000 dead. Political tension had existed in Kenya for years and the leak cannot be blamed for such a result. But it does demonstrate that even Assange, who pushes bolshily for transparency, must choose what to omit, what to leave unsaid or unleaked.
 
 
Over the following three years, Wikileaks continued leaking but began to shift its focus to encompass the West. This was consolidated with a vengeance in 2010, the year Wikileaks forced itself into the limelight on an exceptional scale. First came a US Defense Department video in April showing American soldiers in a Baghdad airstrike behaving more like teenagers behind a videoscreen than trained armed service members. The targets and victims of the attack turned out to be Reuters reporters and Julian Assange clams that civilians, including children, were among the fatalities.
 
 
Next Wikileaks turned its attention to Afghanistan. In July of last year, 92,000 documents, referred to as the Afghan War Diary, were released by Wikileaks to newspapers it regularly works alongside: The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. This was followed by nearly 400,000 more documents relating to the Iraq War. The Guardian said these war logs “show a conflict messy, confused and immediate…in some contrast with the tidied up and sanitized ‘public’ war” and the Pentagon called it the “largest leak in history.”
 
 
But the year of Wikileaks was not yet over yet. On November 28 came Cablegate. 251,287 diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world continue to be leaked in phases. The cables are confidential but not “top secret”, and a great portion of their content consists of candid and often disparaging observations by American diplomats about various world leaders, which can make for entertaining reading.
 
 
If you have an inclination to read about a certain leader’s dependence on his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse, or a day of minor panic at the US embassy in Wellington upon hearing that Marion Hobbes was apparently hosting a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 (apparently her nickname is “Boo Boo” Hobbes), there are many options for accessing this, and a lot more, content. Wikileaks posts all leaks on its own website as well as handing them over to the newspapers it collaborates with. Of course, the rest of the media soon latched on and the most interesting leaks are proliferated through the world’s news sites almost as soon as they are released, much to the vexation of Western democracies and African dictatorships alike.
 
 
There is not a great deal these governments can do about it. Not that they haven’t tried. The US administration has banned all federal government employees and contractors from accessing Wikileaks. Columbia University students were told by the US State Department that accessing Wikileaks would “call into question your ability to deal with confidential information” when applying for jobs. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the US Defense and Justice departments are “exploring options” for prosecuting Assange and others involved in Wikileaks.
 
 
I asked three legal experts to outline the legal position of Wikileaks and each replied, “it’s complicated”. Steven Price, a lecturer in media law at Victoria University, explains that “the issues are sprawling and potentially span the civil and criminal laws of a couple of hundred countries, as well as the international laws concerning which country’s laws apply in any particular situation”. Anyone trying to pursue criminal proceedings would first have to decide who to go after. The original sources are anonymous, even to Wikileaks staff, so they are effectively ruled out.
 
 
That leaves Wikileaks itself or the media that use the information. “They would then have to grapple with whatever legislative or constitutional protection for whistleblowers and freedom of speech applied”, says Price. The US government is reportedly considering prosecuting in line with espionage legislation, however “even US legal experts seem to disagree about how that gels with the First Amendment [the provision of the US constitution concerning freedom of speech]”. And even then “most of the key players are overseas”. Even if legal action were successful, the practical outcome would not do much to help Wikileaks’ adversaries. “Damages may not be very high, litigation expenses would be” and the irony is that “the lawsuit would draw more attention to the cables”. Of course there is always the convenient timing of the sexual assault charges facing Julian Assange in Sweden, but until Wikileaks leaks anything to the contrary, the safest assumption is that this is connected more to Assange’s personal activities than his political ones.
 
 
The ethical debate Wikileaks has prompted is as complicated as its legal status. There have been leaks before but Wikileaks differs on a “qualitative as well as quantitative scale”, according to Robert Patman, professor of International Relations at Otago University. The scale of the leaks is unprecedented, but so is the range and types of documents, which have “changed the parameters of what we as the public can access.”
 
 
The question is whether this information should be in the public domain. Julian Assange argues “there cannot be good governance without good information given to good people”. He is probably right, but what is good information and who are the “good” people to whom it should be given? Christian Caryl takes issue with this in his analysis of Wikileaks in the New York Review of Books. While “journalists should certainly strive to prevent abuses of the [government’s] culture of secrecy”, they can only do so “by exercising clarity in their own rights – about their motives, methods and intentions”. Assange, as the public face of Wikileaks, calls for openness but there has not been a coherent mission statement on the process of deciding what information to release and what he will keep to himself.            
 
 
Assange’s attitude, which can be both arrogant and elusive, can easily prompt criticism but his at times muddled vision and unclear agenda lose significance when looking at Wikileaks as a whole. “I agree that in an ideal world it would be nice if there were no selectivity in the release of documents”, says Patman. “But we have to compare it to a situation where no documents are released and I think it may serve as a deterrent to the governments who are maybe contemplating gross human rights abuses if they think some of the documents which are part of this process are going to be leaked”. So the aim in practice, whether or not Assange can or wants to articulate it, is not full transparency but greater accountability of governments.
 
 
The other major criticism is that Wikileaks has been too transparent in naming people whose safety may be put at risk as a result. Assange claims a “harm minimization” policy is utilised when documents are analysed as potential leaks. He denies “this sort of nonsense about lives being put in jeopardy”. However as Christian Caryl points out, “we may not hear about them if they do.” It is hard to know who is right. If Wikileaks has taught us anything, it is what we already suspected - that we cannot wholly rely on any information anymore, even that provided by Wikileaks itself. As Critic goes to print Assange has just announced he is appealing his extradition to Sweden and Wikileaks has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This is a space to watch.