The James Bond film franchise has still to substantially develop the role of the internet as one of its film plots. Apart from jet back packs and ejector seats in DB5s, the latest issues revolving Wikileaks would surely be a good concept in which the 007 scriptwriters can delve into. With his good looks and demeanour Julian Assange would surely fit the bill perfectly for a SPECTRE associate or its chief technology officer.
But I do not want to pass judgment on Mr. Assange and Wikileaks. I personally consider what they are doing as very interesting or intriguing as a minimum. Wikileaks is stretching our accepted legal notions of electronic journalism, freedom of the press and our 'right to know'. But at what cost?
Wikileaks has been compared to many things. From an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking to the first fully post-national organisation produced during the Internet age.
Some commentators have also claimed that Wikileaks is agnostic to law, or at least by laws created by nations as what matters to Wikileaks is a 'higher moral code' based on individual rights and the idea that governments should belong to the governed. For Wikileaks, transparency is more important than secrecy. There is no national secret, no national interest, there is just the citizen's right to know what governments are doing in the hope that this will lead governments to do less stupid things and technology can help achieve that goal.
The various legal postulations relating to journalism, protection of sources and freedom of the press is still very fragmented at an international level as these issues are normally governed by national laws. This situation has ensured that Wikileaks can effectively go forum shopping and choose the best jurisdictions within which they can operate legally. In fact, Wikileaks operates from more than just one country but the latest leak of US cables initiated on the 28th November has triggered a mass realisation that the internet knows no territorial boundaries.
Assange himself had claimed that some of the servers are hosted in Sweden specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site. He also stated that under the Swedish constitution, the law grants information providers total legal protection.
Obviously, the United States, the major target in the last megaleak, has taken a different position. Sarah Palin went as far as describing Wikileaks a terrorist organisation and stating that Assange is "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" and should be pursued with the same urgency as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The United States has initiated a criminal investigation to see whether this "attack on the international community" in order to see whether the US Espionage Act can be used to indict Assange.
But Assange, an Australian national and who has now been arrested in the UK facing extradition to Sweden on one count of rape, one of unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation allegedly committed in August 2010 , considers himself nothing more than a journalist. He believes that Wikileaks is purely publishing information just as any other newspaper does. In a recent interview with Forbes magazine, Assange claimed that there is a deliberate attempt to redefine what is being done through Wikileaks not as publishing or journalistic activities, which are protected in many countries, but as something which does not have protection like computer hacking and to therefore "split us off from the rest of the press and from these legal protections".
Recently, whilst pressure was mounting on Australia to do something about Assange, Australia's foreign minister Kevin Rudd said that it is the Americans who gave the 250,000 classified documents to Wikileaks are to blame and not Assange. He might be right on this.
Paypal, Mastercasrd, Visa, Amazon and Swisspost are just a few companies who have in the past days closed their doors to Wikileaks by blocking their accounts or hosting services which were provided. A whole cyberwar has ensued and again Anonymous are in the thick of it. Wikileaks has been attacked various times through Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and Anonymous have also joined the fray by initiating their own attacks on sites which have bowed down to 'political pressure' such as Mastercard and Visa websites. Days after the initial attacks against Wikileaks, its members have registered a number of mirror sites all across the globe in order to remain operative. Servers have also been relocated.
I still need to personally figure out whether Assange is a good guy or a bad one. The scale is still balanced so far. Whilst one can easily fall prey to the possibility that there is a hidden agenda behind Wikileaks, one cannot forget the principles of freedom of the press and how technology is completely turning inside out our accepted theories of information flows. One could argue that Assange is a terrorist whist someone else can say that he is ensuring that the powers that be should also be subject to public scrutiny and that Wikileaks is serving this social cause of helping people 'know'.
Recently, Assange claimed that intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law and "we deal with organisations that do not obey the rule of law. So laws don't matter".
What is clear is that no matter what laws spread around the world say or do not say about actions such as those of Wikileaks, laws will always be running after technology and I find it hard that Wikileaks will be stopped especially when, unlike our laws, technology knows no jurisdictional borders. In the meantime, we are eagerly awaiting the contents of the 137 cables tagged 'Malta' even though I hardly think we are in for a big treat. Well, I might be wrong and Comino might be a SPECTRE secret base.
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