In Defense of Julian Assange

Smear 1: Assange is a hacker

It was, in all fairness, as a hacker that Julian Assange first made his name. He had always been fascinated by computers, and at the tail end of an unsettled, slightly bohemian childhood, he began to test the mainframes of various international organizations under the name “Mendax” (cribbed from Horace’s splendide mendax, “nobly lying”). In 1991, aged just 20, he was finally caught breaching the main terminal of a Canadian telecommunications company called Nortel, and arrested. Finding no malicious or mercenary intent, and making allowances for his disrupted upbringing, an Australian judge ordered him to pay reparations of $1,400, then released him on a good behavior bond. He has been convicted of no hacking offenses since.

Yet, people tend to think of Julian Assange not as a publisher or journalist, but as a hacker. WikiLeaks itself remains surrounded by suspicion, as though its staff were a cabal of cyber-terrorists – even though the website itself (unlike many major UK newspapers) has never actually been accused of hacking; it is, at its core, a news platform, begun in 2006, over 15 years after the young Assange had been accused of his last hacking-related crime.

This is the first thing people should bear in mind when pronouncing on the Assange case: whatever Julian Assange has been doing since 1991, he has been doing as a journalist. The secrecy that surrounds Wikileaks is necessary to prevent the site from being shut down and the identity of its sources revealed, not because hacking is integral to it. The deliberate attempt to blur these distinctions puts all other journalistic organizations at risk; it conflates those who report on leaks with those who perpetrate them, as if degrees of separation from wrongdoing were immaterial in the eyes of the law. And such a conflation, of course, serves those at the top. According to reports by Yahoo! News, intelligence officials are already busy lobbying the White House to introduce a new, murky, quasi-criminal category of “information brokers” to smear not just Assange and WikiLeaks, but other journalists who report on classified information, even if a third party has brought it into the public domain. The new category would effectively make it illegal for any journalist to publish classified information from any whistle-blower; it would, at a stroke, make the most distinguished investigative reporters we have unprintable. Julian Assange today, Glenn Greenwald and Lauren Poitras tomorrow.

Smear 2: Assange’s leaks were criminally negligent, and endangered people

The next great purported blot on Assange’s record came in 2010, when WikiLeaks published extensive war logs from the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Their contents amounted to the greatest journalistic scoop of the 21^st century, an insight into the grubby workings of the deep state to rival the Pentagon Papers: thousands of hushed-up civilian casualties, litanies of human rights abuses, and crowning it all, a video dubbed “Collateral Murder” which showed American soldiers mowing down 18 civilians, including two Reuters reporters, with a helicopter-mounted machine gun.

The establishment backlash was swift and well-coordinated. Assange’s exposé may have been damning, but that didn’t alter that fact that it was, to many, irresponsible; perhaps, so the canard went, information that appeared to be in the public interest could be used by local militias to cross-reference, identify, and ultimately punish informers. The Obama administration quickly set about propagating this narrative. Joe Biden, then vice president, even went so far as to use the T-word: “I would argue it is closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers. But, look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world. He’s made it more difficult for us to conduct our business with our allies and our friends.”

Yet despite the conjecture, and despite the number of powerful institutions with a vested interest in proving such fears well-founded, there has been little evidence of the leaks leading to any actual reprisals. At any rate, it’s not like WikiLeaks just dumped the information indiscriminately: according to reports by The Guardian, it held 15,000 Afghanistan files back because they contained information that might threaten people, and the rest, according to Assange himself, were only published after the US military refused to assist the vetting process in an attempt to tie up WikiLeaks staff with endless paperwork. In fact, since the Afghanistan leaks, moreover, WikiLeaks has proved anything but reckless in its approach to the issue of source-identification, and has collaborated with mainstream media organizations to vet the data it receives and publish it in a more targeted way.

Smear 3: Assange is a rapist

In 2010, Assange sustained his most indelible accusation. On 20 August, two Swedish women accused him of sexual assault: the first, later identified as Anna Ardin, described having consensual sex with Assange, during which the condom they were using broke in such a way that led her to believe Assange had tampered with it; the second, referred to in the press as “Miss W,” alleged that, having falling asleep after a consensual sexual encounter, she later woke up to find Assange penetrating her without a condom. Though Ardin’s story provides no explanation as to why she believes the condom was interfered with rather than simply breaking of its own accord – and despite the clumsy interventions of Assange supporters like British politician George Galloway, who tried to explain the event away as “bad manners” – Miss W’s claim in particular remains deeply troubling, and deserves to be taken seriously, whatever Assange’s politics. A closer look, however, reveals a far more complicated state of affairs than most of Assange’s detractors would have the world believe.

After questioning Assange, Swedish authorities briefly dropped the preliminary investigation and permitted Assange to return to the UK. Two months later, however, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant: Assange gave himself up to British authorities; then, after a series of hearings determined that he was to be extradited back to Sweden, he famously sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he was to remain for nearly seven years.

Among his critics, the narrative soon crystallized: Assange’s bail-skipping was incontrovertible evidence of his guilt, and proved the general malignity behind the WikiLeaks project. Yet important questions still remain unanswered, both by the Swedish authorities and the British Crown Prosecution Service. Why, for instance, did the CPS try so hard to convince the Swedish Director of Public Prosecution to continue the case when she tried to drop it for lack of evidence a second time in 2013? Why did Swedish prosecutors not review the international arrest warrant after it was condemned by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2016? Most importantly of all, why did the Swedish authorities refuse to pledge that they would not extradite Assange to the US if he returned to stand trial? Surely if the case were genuinely motivated by a desire to see justice done to Ardin and Miss W, then such a reassurance would be natural.

In any event, as UN special rapporteur Nils Melzer concluded after a lengthy investigation, Assange’s lawyers made over 30 offers to arrange for Assange to visit Sweden in exchange for a pledge that he would not be extradited to the United States. None of them were taken up. Not only had prosecutors “subjected [Assange] to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges being filed,” but they had actually changed one of the women’s statements without her involvement, in order to justify a more severe charge that would not be subject to the Swedish statute of limitations. The whole debacle amounted to an “abuse of judicial processes aimed at pushing a person into a position where he is unable to defend himself” – in other words, a smear campaign. For American authorities, the Swedish accusations really have engineered a win-win scenario: they ensure total character assassination if Assange refuses, and extradition if he complies. One day, of course, Assange ought to return to Sweden and, without threat of further extradition, face questioning over his alleged misconduct. But whether or not that happens is up to the Swedish (and American) authorities, not Assange.

Smear 4: Assange is a traitor

The first year of Assange’s confinement saw the US intelligence community racked by its most devastating leak yet. Edward Snowden, a contractor at the NSA, provided international journalists with around 10,000 documents proving that the United States government was monitoring its citizens’ private phone calls, emails, and even laptop webcams. Because of Snowden’s breach of official secrecy acts, legacy media was quick to brand him a traitor – and it wasn’t long before Assange began to be lumped in with him too, as part of a dark cabal of Western turncoats, determined to undermine the civilization to which they belonged.

Yet even if we sign up to this rather narrow ethics of allegiance, it is difficult to find Assange guilty. Unlike Snowden and Manning, Assange never signed official NDAs. He never worked for a US government organization. He had made no contract with the US authorities, and was under no obligation to respect official secrecy policies. In fact, the only way Assange could really be considered a traitor is if every individual in the world owes the CIA a primordial obligation of non-disclosure, US citizen or non-US citizen, at home or on foreign soil. No journalist should accept such an obligation.