Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding

Julian Assange is a product of the computer age. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, who topped Time's 2010 Person of the Year list, ahead of Mr. Assange, the Wikileaks' mogul offers threat and challenge. We have been presented with a live, constantly updated thriller, by a media class convulsed with the delight at the appearance of a story that won't conclude. There are the old tales of pride, power, ambition and idealism, but they are being played out in new spaces.

AN ENEMY OF US FOREIGN POLICY?

This book has been written in a spirit of managed wonder. The Guardian, which, along with El País, The New York Times, Le Monde and Der Spiegel, was given the responsibility of sifting through the US diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks, is enjoying its central place in this saga. The writers of this hurriedly published book do not attempt to disguise their excitement at being involved in such a scope. We have her no more than an extended, if superficial, run-through of events known to anyone who has paid close attention to this story. Leigh and Harding describe Wikileaks' transformation, from "chaotic insurgency" to "a more structured organisation." They offer a Freudian reading of Assange's character, linking his chameleon-like and anti-authoritarian manner to an unstable and peripatetic childhood. They suggest that Assange, who has championed himself as an enemy of US foreign policy in interviews, may have "unwittingly helped restore American influence in a place where it had lost credibility."

DIPLOMATIC CABLES

The role of the diplomatic cables in the current unrest in the Middle East is open to debate, but it is clear that Assange's philosophy, that openness itself is sufficient as a challenge to vested interest, has a weakness of both logic and purpose. People who acknowledge that openness has limitations might recall the Open Government episode of Yes, Minister. 

Eventually, openness extends itself, get a little too close to home, and, all of a sudden, privacy and secrecy grow in appeal. Assange has himself been the victim of leaks, and is reported to have been unamused by this.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

However, if information is to be free, then surely all information must be free, however damaging, whomsoever it hurts, and whatever its consequences. If that is not accepted, then it must be the case that the likes of Assange see some information as being more free than others, in which case the spectre of control once more rears its devilish head. Perhaps Wikileaks, and all its various imitators, including Anonymous, are not, in fact, disdainful of power at all; perhaps they do not seek to undermine authority and instead wish to replace it with their own variant, which, of course, they will have no option but to describe as liberation.

Publication details:
Guardian Books
£9.99
ISBN 9780852652398
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Garan Holcombe

8th April 2011