IN THE SPOTLIGHT
400,000 documents relating to the war in Iraq; and finally, around that media conference in November, those diplomatic cables. At his next public appearance, at England’s City of Westminster Magistrate’s Court in early December, Assange cast a far less confident figure. Gone was his shock of long, white-blonde locks. Instead, the 39-year-old Australian wore close-cropped hair and a few days’ growth of stubble. His role as the public face of the WikiLeaks Foundation were clearly weighing heavily on him. It was a role Assange did not always want. “I originally tried hard for the organisation to have no face, because I wanted egos to play no part in our activities,” he told the Guardian before handing himself in to British authorities. “In the end, someone must be responsible to the public and only a leadership that is willing to be publicly courageous can genuinely suggest that sources take risks for the greater good. In that process, I have become the lightning rod”. And while Assange was taken into police custody, the WikiLeaks website was taken offline. Under mounting political pressure, Amazon.com abruptly stopped hosting WikiLeaks on its servers, saying – lamely – that the site had broken its terms and conditions. Visa, MasterCard and PayPal followed suit, barring users from making donations to WikiLeaks. This sparked an immediate – and angry – string of retaliatory attacks. A loosely affiliated group of hackers (or ‘hacktivists’) working under the collective name ‘Anonymous’ claimed “payback” by crashing the websites of Amazon, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and the Swedish government. And while this cyberwar raged, political pressure mounted. Writing on her Facebook page, former US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin branded Assange “an antiAmerican operative with blood on his hands”. “His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban,” she wrote. “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” While Palin’s outburst was an obvious political play (she admits still has eyes on
the American presidency), her parallels between WikiLeaks and al-Qaeda had more than a ring of truth to them...but not, perhaps, in the way she intended. Both organisations are looselystructured networks of highly-motivated operatives – and both would continue to exist with or without their figurehead leaders. ‘Anonymous’ is much the same: “Anonymous doesn’t exist,” spokesman Gregg Housh told America’s Christian Science Monitor. “If someone says they are Anonymous, they are. That means there is no centralised group. As a very ethereal, kind of amorphous, fluid thing, it exists. But in reality there is no one ‘Anonymous’ that you can be a part of.” Even with Assange under arrest, WikiLeaks continued to function – hopping from one temporary server to the next. While hoping to cut off the head and the body dies, the governments and forces opposed to WikiLeaks found it was more like the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology: cut off one head, and another nine grow back in its place. Diplomatic gossip? By its very nature, WikiLeaks cannot be a one-man show. The site is run by hundreds of volunteers and was founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. To kill WikiLeaks (or even copycat sites like OpenLeaks), you would have to fight a smoke monster with no tangible form, no set location and no fixed identity. It would be impossible. Yet a cursory glance at November’s batch of leaked US diplomatic cables quickly shows why so many international governments would love for that to happen. The secrets revealed range from amusing to embarrassing to potentially damaging. One cable paints the comical scene of French president, Nicolas Sarkozy chasing his son’s escaped pet rabbit around the room during a meeting with the US ambassador. Others quote various US diplomats describing Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, as “an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts”, Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, as “feckless, vain and ineffective”, and former Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, as a “mistake-prone control freak”.
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange leaves London’s High Court in December, 2010, after being granted bail. The court rejected an appeal against him being released even under stringent conditions. Assange was arrested on behalf of the Swedish authorities over allegations he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden. (Getty/Gallo Images)
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