The life and times of Julian Assange, one of the founders of WikiLeaks, is so fantastical and filled with paranoia that it should be made into a movie; oh wait it has. The movie titled ‘Underground: the Julian Assange Story’ is a feature length biopic about the early years of Assange. I believe the movie will show him as a gifted youth with a passion for the truth and a desire to unmask the secrecy and lies in the corridors of power.
While this is not far from the truth the more pertinent question that has been raised about Assange is whether or not he is a journalist or just a source? Does the existence of WikiLeaks and the track record of Assange releasing secret and sometimes damming documents to the public make him a journalist? Assange calls himself the Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks. However, there are many voices that believe he is more of a high-tech source in the digital era rather than a true Journalist.
It is interesting to note that Assange came to prominence or infamy, depending on how you perceive it, in the mid 1990s. Julian and fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian telecom company. This was one of many activities of the Cypherpunks group of which Julian was a member.
The attack on Nortel was not malicious and in my mind shows two things: Julian is very intelligent and he has a clear disrespect of authority. This incident would bring Assange to the attention of only a handful of people in Australia. However, in 2007 when WikiLeaks, the website set up for dissemination of confidential information, released the Guantanamo Bay operating procedures the world sat up and took notice. In 2010 the release of the ‘Collateral Murder’ and later the ‘Afghanistan War Logs’ was instrumental in stirring up a hornets’ nest in the United States of America. And when the USA is upset the World takes notice.
Thus the saga began: Assange was accused of being a terrorist, a woman in Sweden accused him of rape, and he decided to seek political asylum and to avoid extradition by entering the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK. All this after he received the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize and divided opinion in the Journalism community as to his status as a bonafide Hack or a hacker with an agenda.
There are so many holes in the Assange story and dubious claims that it is hard to consider Julian having any integrity and the big issue with releasing sensitive information: Duty of Care. Duty of care is a core component of being a good journalist. As David Conley states Assange isn’t a journalist by practice, education or training. He is a convicted hacker who uses WikiLeaks to publish all information even information that is harmful and jeopardises the life of Afghan informants and soldiers. If Assange were a journalist he would need to have a duty of care as a hacker he does not.
Among all the dissenting voices weighing in on the debate Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, does not believe that WikiLeaks is journalism but data dissemination. I agree with this sentiment and I also believe that Assange is a revolutionary in some ways such as providing a platform for encrypted dissemination of documents. Assange needs to take the time to read the sources and present the information in an unbiased tone of voice while protecting the lives of the innocent. Only then will Assange go from being an ‘Australian diva with his secrets’ to a true leader of the revolution of journalism in the digital age.
i-Write.com.au 