The Julian Assange case, beyond the babel of voices for and against him, is once again an attempt by powerful countries led by the United States of America to define and control the limits of information transparency. His immediate arrest is a farce. Legendary musician Roger Waters of ‘Pink Floyd’ fame called the images of Assange being carried away forcibly in a London Police van as “chilling”. It showed England as nothing better than a satellite state of the US, he said.
WikiLeaks founder Assange was charged by Sweden in 2012 for sexual offences including rape. The preliminary investigation did not throw up much and by 2017, most of the charges including rape had been dropped by Swedish prosecutors. Meanwhile, Sweden had issued a European Arrest Warrant, when Assange entered and hid in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in June 2012, claiming he had breached bail conditions. When Ecuador revoked his political asylum recently, the London cops entered and arrested Assange. So, the worst he faces under the UK law is up to 12 months jail for jumping bail.
What is far more serious is if Assange is deported to the US to face charges of treason. Assange was never worried about Sweden’s ‘rape’ charges; rather, he claimed, there was an international plot to have him shipped back to the US to face a trial that may result in a death penalty. Cloaked in secrecy, the US federal authorities have been preparing for Assange. The possible charges he may face now are computer intrusion and collaborating with Chelsea Manning for breaking security codes.
NEW WHISTLEBLOWERS
Julian Assange, a journalist, has been part of a new breed of ‘information insurgents’ like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who have used their hacker knowledge to expose government and corporate wrongdoing.
Among the big sensational exposes, where Manning and Assange possibly collaborated, was the release of a US military video of 2007 ‘Collateral Murder’, where a US helicopter gunship is seen mowing down 15-18 helpless Iranian civilians, including two Reuters correspondents. Among hundreds of other files, WikiLeaks in 2008 also brought to light probes into the brazen extrajudicial assassinations of political opponents of the Kenyan government.
But Assange exposures were not limited to some rogue banana republics. He came down heavily on the US military-corporate establishment and paid the price for it. It’s not without reason that the financial establishment tried to starve out WikiLeaks by 2010, by refusing transactions routed through MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, while dozens of German and Swiss banks froze Assange’s accounts.
Set up in 2006, WikiLeaks became the new word in journalism as it linked up a chain of small whistleblowers all over the globe to the giant expose machine operated by Assange. From military executions, cyber hacking and whistle-blowing moved to a wide spectrum of corporate exposes.
These ranged from a 2006 report on toxic waste dumping by commodities company Trafigura in Africa’s Ivory Coast because of which over 1,00,000 people may have lost their lives, to spilling of the beans on Barclays Bank where internal documents showed how the bank had planned its tax evasion.
THE CYBER FRONTIER
In an interview towards the end of 2010, Assange threatened to “take down” a major American bank and reveal an “ecosystem of corruption” with a cache of data from an executive’s hard drive. The expose never came, but was it coincidental that prosecutors in Sweden began investigations into ‘sexual assault’ charges against Assange soon after?
Assange and WikiLeaks faced their first shutdown when Swiss Bank Julius Baer obtained an injunction in 2008 from a California court permanently closing down the site. The shutdown became a rallying point with the American Union for Civil Liberties, American Society of News Editors and others supporting the right to transparency. The same court then, citing the First Amendment, overturned its order and upheld the right of WikiLeaks to publish hacked documents.
Those who stand with WikiLeaks today face a far graver challenge today. Curbs on press freedom are being accepted in the name of ‘national security’ and regimes around the world have institutionalised violence against news gatherers as the execution of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has proved.
The days of using copier machines to sneak out documents are past. If corporations are going to hide their wrongdoing under layers of cyber security, news hounds too have the right to break in and let people know. Assange must be set free, and WikiLeaks allowed to publish.
WikiLeaks’ sensational exposes
Among the big sensational exposes, where Manning and Assange possibly collaborated, was the release of a US military video of 2007 ‘Collateral Murder’, where a US helicopter gunship is seen mowing down 15-18 helpless Iranian civilians, including two Reuters correspondents. Among hundreds of other files, WikiLeaks in 2008 also brought to light probes into the brazen extrajudicial assassinations of political opponents of the Kenyan government