WikiLeaks Dictator: Julian Assange

Throughout the many controversies, Julian Assange has remained callous and unsympathetic to the people whose lives he ruined and even endangered through reports released on his whistleblower site, WikiLeaks. And, after going through the media circus, he has become corrupted with power.

Julian Assange himself responded to these allegations that he has hurt and perhaps even endangered the lives of others, saying...

"There is, as far as we can tell, no incident of that. So it is a speculative charge. Of course, we are treating any possible revelation of the names of innocents seriously. That is why we held back 15,000 of these documents, to review that…”

However, there were some documents that were not reviewed before they were released, and the people whose names released in those documents may have been unfairly exposed. For example, in a telephone interview from a New York Times article on Julian Assange’s leaks on the Afghan Conflict, a Taliban spokesman said...

“The Taliban had formed a nine-member “commission” to seek out the people who are spying and had about 1800 people on their wanted list and were comparing that to the articles that WikiLeaks had provided.”

Although there is currently no proof that there was any incident from the release of these articles on WikiLeaks, it is only a matter of time before an incident due to this release of classified information does occur. There is a reason that the names of spies were deemed classified – to protect their identities. The Taliban spokesman followed up and said after the names are compared to the list “our Taliban court will decide about such people,” showing that these people will face consequences that stem from the release of the documents.

In a response to the release of the Afghan documents, Governor Sarah Palin said...

"Past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?... Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist.’ He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands."

Palin’s harsh critique of Assange’s actions, website, and comparison of him to an editor of an al-Qaeda magazine may be extreme, but her words embody a very common sentiment – that Assange’s actions are detrimental to the safety of many Americans and American allies. By advertising classified documents such as the Afghan document, Julian Assange has proven that he believes what he puts up is in by means harmful to American society. He even goes one step further to claim that his actions are beneficial, and that they aid his goal to revolutionize other countries, as stated by the WikiLeaks site:

“We are of assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and institutions. We aim for maximum political impact.”

The WikiLeaks site claims to aim for maximum political impact; in other words, its goal is to create controversy and instill seeds of dissension and disagreement within a country in order to cause political change. However, there is a broad range of consequences that can be called a “political impact.” It can range from something as small as exposing a government official engaging in a white collar crime to revolutionizing an entire country and changing its entire political arena.

One important question to ask: is it even possible for a website publishing secret government reports and reports of institutions committing unlawful acts to revolutionize an entire country?

WikiLeaks has published countless secret U.S. Documents, yet the U.S. government is stable and not undergoing any type of revolution. However there are reports that some cables released by WikiLeaks incited revolts in Tunisia. Therefore, information released by WikiLeaks does have the ability to destabilize governments in some cases, especially when the governments were already shaky. For the majority of countries, however, there have been no such large scale revolutions caused by information released by WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange has briefly mentioned in a 60 min interview that WikiLeaks is not a source; it is a site that gains its information from donators who want the world to know about the crimes that a government is committing. According to Assange, WikiLeaks is simply a site that gains some potentially secret documents and publishes them. It is only with the aid of the press that the site is able to give the government a slap on the wrist, and keep it responsible for any underhanded dealings. In fact, Assange views WikiLeaks as a necessity for the well-being of citizens around the world – pulling aside the curtain to give citizens a better understanding of behind-the-scenes government activities.

This idea that Julian Assange aims to give people a better understanding of some of the underhanded activities that governments and institutions engage in has given him a lot of fame and popularity. One supporter Ron Paul, a GOP representative from Texas, argues in his favor, saying...

“If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the internet? ... Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?"

Ron Paul is insinuating that the government is flawed and that it is resorting to attacking and taking down WikiLeaks to try to maintain its grip on power.

Assange’s popularity and his stated mission also make it precarious for large institutions to criticize him. The Australian Federal Government even made a point of retracting its comments that stated that Julian Assange had committed a crime and they withdrew all grounds for taking away his Australian passport. In fact the Australian government has been supportive of his actions thus far.

However, although Julian Assange is highly popular and often praised around the world for his mission to expose government corruption, he is deeply flawed. The fame that WikiLeaks brought to him has turned him into a person who is now corrupt from the power he has gained. In fact, this is shown in his treatment of the people working under him. He even threatened to throw out Herbert Snorrason, his associate, because “he did not like his tone.” Continuing to show that fame had changed him, Assange also later said that...

“I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest.”

Snorrason responded to the N.Y. times saying “he is not in his right mind” This emphasizes that the power to threaten governments through releasing delicate information has corrupted Assange, and made him feel extremely important.

According to Smari McCarthy, an Icelandic volunteer interviewed by the New York Times, the WikiLeaks site has already had a couple dozen of volunteers leave due to the recent turmoil. He himself has decided to distance himself from WikiLeaks. In response to this story, Assange declared that no “important” volunteers quit, showing his arrogance and lack of respect and appreciation for those volunteers beneath him. He even recently suspended Daniel Domscheit-Berg who was until recently the WikiLeaks spokesman under the name of Daniel Schmitt according to the New York Times. In fact there was a group of people that left WikiLeaks and along with Daniel Domscheit-Berg formed a new group called OpenLeaks.

OpenLeaks is a new whistleblower site that instead of having people submit information and allowing the site to publish it, it allows whistleblowers to choose where their information goes. The reasoning behind this method is so that it frees OpenLeaks from the political battles that WikiLeaks is undergoing. It saves the time and money of having to deal with all the political chaos and also helps whistleblowers to share information that is beneficial to people to see if a government is committing an unlawful act. OpenLeaks intends to be...

“…the messenger between the whistleblower and the organization the whistleblower is trying to cooperate with.”

(Here is a video that describes how OpenLeaks works)

OpenLeaks also said...

“If you preach transparency to everyone else you have to be transparent yourself,” and also that “We believe that we cannot, with integrity, promote transparency everywhere else if we are not so ourselves.”

By making these statements they are indirectly insinuating that WikiLeaks, is hypocritical because hardly anything is really known about how it operates. If WikiLeaks is also participating in unacceptable operations who are they to try and make public government action behind curtains. They themselves are not transparent and according to OpenLeaks in order to be able to preach transparency the organization must also be transparent.

WikiLeaks arose from leaking secret documents about governments committing acts that would be deemed immoral and corrupt. The goal of WikiLeaks was to show people governments actions or in other words to make them transparent. By doing so WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange has gained an immense amount of power because of the information they hold. This along with the publicity has propelled Assange into a dictatorial mindset in the way that he treats his fellow co-workers and in the grandiose manner in which he describes his role in WikiLeaks. Little is also known about the inner workings of WikiLeaks leaving the questionability of their credibility to display secret information of others, when they themselves are not willing to share information about themselves. Combined with the dictatorial mindset of Assange and the hypocrisy in what they preach they are no different than the governments and institutions which they try to tarnish; corrupt.