Stewart Brand once said that “information wants to be free.” Most people leave the quotation just there, celebrating the fact that in a world made more natural, the stuff of knowledge, tax returns, and secrets would move unrestricted. But Brand’s statement on information did not stop there. Instead, he continued by adding “information also wants to be expensive” and he eventually admitted “this tension will not go away.”
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org knows and understands what Brand was talking about. His site has not only become world (in)famous, it is done so by dealing in information. It makes “free” what others believe is quite “expensive.” It makes public what was private, problematicizing privacy in the already slippery age of cloud computing and trust in computer networks. So much of what was once physically kept personal has bee electronically made ubiquitous, and in the process privacy itself as become as easy to sneak around as the familiar command “copy-paste.”
Julian Assange has become a sort of villain. He does not photograph well, looking at once sad, sickly, and sinister. His motives unclear, most Americans take his actions at face value: in releasing hundreds of thousands of secret American documents, Assange alienates a fundamental American right to … what is it actually that he’s done illegally?
Remember Watergate? That was this historical episode when an American president tried to conceal illegal actions with intimidation, money, and aspirations to American patriotism. Two journalists stuck to the case and in the process became American heroes, far more patriotic than the “patriots” who had tried to protect the president with lies and threats. These men would be played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in a film that made their dogged sense of “freeing information” into a sort of patriotic virtue. The implications of the film and the event itself were that there is nothing to fear about the truth if you are among the just and responsible. Nixon wasn’t.
I met Julian Assange in Austria, at a digital festival in an opera house overlooking the Danube. It was the fall of 2009, and he was in Austria to receive an award from the Ars Electronica Festival for his contributions to public discourse. Assange gave a speech in which he never smiled and never laughed, but talked instead about the need to give people around the world a safe way to share information that the world needed to know. He saw himself and his organization as more of a technology of protecting those who would share secrets than a political statement on secrets.
But his ideology was powerful and unmistakable. A former journalist, inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, Assange had begun WikiLeaks to protect the “deep throats” of today and tomorrow. He expressed a hope that the information that wanted to be free could be. And of couse, that it should be. He was prepared to go to all lengths for this conviction.
A year later, we now know that Assange has gone to all lengths for this conviction. He has been labeled a “terrorist,” has been criticized by world governments, has been implicated in several court cases, and most sadly, attacked by journalists and news organizations themselves. Assange’s dour disposition is nothing more than the frank understanding that despite the freedom he has given information, we refuse to be liberated by it.
Zachary McCune will not stand for the witch trial of a man who actually forces accountability in the golden age of the unaccountable.
[ Printed in this week's Newport Mercury ]