Julian Assange: His Impact on Mass Communication and his Ability to Change the World – Info Gadgets

“The only way to keep a secret is to never have one.”

Julian Assange — a computer programmer, a journalist, and an activist.

Born on July 3, 1971 in Australia, Assange did not have a “normal” childhood, but rather an unconventional one. Throughout his young years, he never stayed at one place for too long; he moved thirty-seven times and had never attended school because of that. Instead, he studied with his mother at home and by mail. He was an avid reader, and curious about everything that was happening around him. According to Michael Ray from Encyclopedia Britannica, as a teenager, Assange was interested in programming and lived a mobile life, as he and his mother were always on the run from an abusive ex-boyfriend. Assange never stopped learning, however, and the age of sixteen he learned to hack into computer networks; he later joined a group of hackers, known as International Subversives. Four years later, his illegal activities landed him into trouble with the Australian federal authorities who arrested him, but later let him go after paying monetary damages. As he became an adult, he retained his habit of hacking, and in 2006 he entered the international stage after publishing his website WikiLeaks, a non-profit which publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media provided by anonymous sources.

Today, Julian Assange is known for possessing a library of more than ten million documents and having published classified documents and cables about the Iraq Apache helicopter attack, operating procedures at Guantanamo Bay, controversial documents about the Church of Scientology, leaked documents from corporations like Sony, U.S. diplomatic cables, hacked DNC election emails, and thousands of other notable releases that expose illegal activities and unethical practices from governments, private entities and other institutions. Those releases have sparked public outrage, raised concerns and questions about privacy, accountability and transparency, and they have led to retaliatory actions from all affected sides.

Even though Assange’s name makes the headlines every so often, there is not much discussion about his real impact in our world today. Julian Assange did not just create a platform that whistleblowers like himself could use to expose wrongdoing and bring secrets to the public eye — he achieved more than that: He contributed and had a significant impact to the evolution of mass communication in several ways. (1) Assange innovated upon and exploited the news-making process, establishing partnerships with news organizations and shifting the roles of the journalist in the age of information. (2) He gained the ability to shape and re-shape global events, governments, corporations, and the public opinion through a strategic communication process based on leaks. (3) He sparked the flame on public debate about the transparency of information and contributed to an energized movement advocating for government openness, while also pushing many to seek secrecy away from the possibility of being exposed to the public. (4) His alignment with journalism raised questions whether journalists would be prosecuted for handling leaked information of similar kind. (5) And, because of the impact of his organization, more organizations that resembled WikiLeaks came into the spotlight — even news networks — with the goal of advancing the ideals that he first established.

Before diving into the world of Julian Assange and his tremendous impact in the area of mass communication, it is worth noting that we cannot talk about him without mentioning, in detail, WikiLeaks. For WikiLeaks was, and still is, Assange’s creation and the platform that enabled him to act. In the 2016 documentary, Risk, by Laura Poitras, he says it best himself: “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, its philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest.”

The documentary was filmed over a period of six years. During that period, Laura Poitras was able to gain unrestricted and unprecedented access to WikiLeaks, Assange, and his inner circle. The film is among many that feature Assange, but in it, he describes his motives and underlying ideology that help us analyze and better understand this enigmatic figure and as well as the root of his actions. In the film, Assange stated that it had been his long-term belief that “what advances us a civilization is the entirety of our understanding,” and what human institutions are actually like. He supports that we are severely lacking in the information from big, secretive organizations “that have such a role in shaping how we all live.” When asked to clarify he said that such institutions are as powerful as the CIA to News Corp. Assange believed that these very institutions that we come to rely on and trust hide the truth from us, and, in many cases, shape our truths. During the end of the film, he says, “the element that causes the world to globalize and produces the changes that we see, including the bad ones, [he] was an expert in.” He says that if we see the global problems that we have a civilization, and if we actually examine them and understand them, then acting locally is “completely inconsequential” relative to what we understand. To him, the only way to act and make the world the way we want it to be, and to remove the qualities that we do not like, is to act globally. But what qualities did Assange want to remove from the world to make it a better place? According to the WikiLeaks Manifesto, which was written by Assange in 2006, his main goal was to “shift regime behavior and create open governments.”Assange saw the injustice that was taking place, from local governments to national ones, and he knew that a culture of secrecy existed which favored those in power. He was, and still is, presumably, against authoritarian regimes, and he made it his goal to “open” them to the world. In a few words, he believed in the idea of knowledge is power, and that transparency is required to have an open, just, and free society.

And that is when WikiLeaks came into play. Launched in late 2006, it was intended to be an online platform that resembled Wikipedia, with the goal of uploading leaked documents in a secure and untraceable way, with the aim of “exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.” Apart from Wikipedia, another inspiration was the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times, according to a special report by The Economist. During its first three years of operation, Wikileaks had published leaked documents about corruption in Kenya, the Church of Scientology, and a Peruvian oil scandal. However, Assange’s organization truly enjoyed international recognition when in 2010 it left behind its wiki-style approach. He realized that even though the information was readily available to the public, he needed to find a way to communicate it to them not in the form of raw data, but in a contextualized format. And this is when the organization shifted to a new, editorializing tone.

Assange wanted to provide WikiLeaks and the leaked documents with more exposure, so he partnered with several mainstream news organizations. According to Alison Powell from the London School of Economics, Assange convinced the Guardian newspaper — as well as the New York Times, and DerSpiegel — to work with them on publishing seventy-five thousand documents relating to the war in Afghanistan and redacting additional, leaked diplomatic cables. The partnerships soon expanded beyond Assange’s goals, “and they began to attract significant attention to the leaks.” This period signaled the beginning of a new era for investigative journalism, and the beginning of the exploitation of the news-making process in the age of the internet.

Powell states that when journalists “expose” secrets as part of their job, they often do it when certain interests are served and where profit can be made. The partnership with WikiLeaks changed that, and the role of the journalist began to shift. Now, journalists are not only collecting breaking news or use their “trusted sources” to access secret information — WikiLeaks eliminated the need for this dangerous practice. Instead, their work is to “validate and contextualize raw data that has come from another source.” Kaj Larsen from CNN says that “it is the kind of access that veteran journalists once spent their careers cultivating.” Additionally, The Economist states that as funding for such reporting by the “traditional [mainstream] media has been cut, they are filling the gap using new methods like this. In this way, WikiLeaks has “exploited the network of news production and transformed it.” Yet, Journalists do something that Assange alone or his team could never do: they compile and present these data in a readable, story-like format. So, maintaining this partnership was of immense importance for Assange, because this kind of exploitation — to serve his goals — was his tactical weapon for change.

This partnership with major news organizations gave Assange the ability to shape and reshape global events, as well as expose governments and wrongdoing around the world. Kaj Larsen writes that “WikiLeaks has been credited as a force for political change, from Egypt’s revolution to the battle of resources in the Arctic.” Additionally, the classified State Department cables that were released in 2010 “provided some of the spark that fueled the Tunisian revolution.” Because of that, chain reactions of different events were created and reached Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. More recently, the effects of leaks and other revelations were also seen in the United States when Wikileaks published DNC election emails that proved how Clinton’s campaign conspired to defeat and drive out of the race Bernie Sanders, a Democratic rival during the primaries. This revelation sparked national outrage. As Assange once said, “[WikiLeaks is] a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.” People were reacting; governments and private entities were forced to respond. Assange’s plan was working; this kind of transformation is exactly what he wanted.
 
At this point, Assange had made many friends, but even more enemies. He sparked the flame on public debate about the transparency of information, contributing to the creation of a strong movement that made sure leaked information remains in the public domain, while also being confronted with a contrasting idea of secrecy for those who would do anything to avoid having their secrets leaked or remain in public view. Assange was under attack — and WikiLeaks too. The U.S. government tried to initiate attacks towards WikiLeaks with the goal of censuring the website; commercial organizations were also attacking, trying to shut down WikiLeaks by blocking internet traffic to the site; Amazon, according to Alison Powell, withdrew its server support and data hosting services; banks and other financial services also refused to provide their services, leaving the organization without an ability to raise money by its supporters, thus bringing Wikileaks closer to the verge of collapse and censure. It is worth noting that the attacks did not come from a central authority; they were decentralized and provoked a chain reaction by different actors, each with their own interests in censuring the site.

To Assange’s rescue, however, another decentralized retaliatory action came into play — concerned citizens and internet hacktivists came together to defend WikiLeaks and to protect the free internet, as they felt that censuring WikiLeaks would establish a dangerous precedent that will hurt information freedom and discourage leakers from exposing wrongdoing. Hacktivists retreated by attacking corporate and government websites with DDoS (Denial of Service) attacks, which temporarily shuts down websites and causes system outages. Also, at Assange’s request, “thousands of individuals set up mirror sites of all the wikileaks.org content, defeating the purpose of cutting off access to the site, Powell writes. These individuals acted in solidarity of their shared values and mobilized themselves quickly and effectively. Because of them, WikiLeaks is still standing.

To counter these attacks, and establish a more secure environment for WikiLeaks, Assange called the organization a journalistic one, and he named himself its editor-in-chief. Aligning himself with journalism, however, raised questions and concerns whether journalists would be prosecuted for handling leaked information of similar kind. In a pre-WikiLeaks era, publishing leaks would not be a major concern for journalists, having the backing of a Supreme Court ruling which states that “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.” However, in the fight against the organization and its leaks, the government has been claiming that Assange and WikiLeaks are not involved in journalism; instead, they are political actors.

C. W. Anderson, a media policy fellow at the New America Foundation and assistant professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), says that WikiLeaks is, indeed, practicing journalism:

WikiLeaks, for the purpose of law and public policy, is a journalistic organization. In order to have a functional legal system that privileges the kind of transparency and information we need as a democracy, you have to make the argument that WikiLeaks is journalism and Julian Assange is a journalist.

If we were to say that Assange is not involved in journalism, it would create a situation where many other news agencies would not be considered journalistic organizations, including the New York Times and the Guardian. After 2010, when WikiLeaks adopted an editorializing style, sharp contrasts had become less clear, thus making it harder to “draw a line that excludes WikiLeaks and includes the New York Times.” The Obama administration actively tried to prosecute Assange, but “concluded that there was no way to do so without either also prosecuting other newspapers which published the same documents.” The Trump administration has, also, showed an interest in prosecuting Assange, but they are cautious to do so for the same reasons mentioned above.

Today, WikiLeaks has successfully blurred the lines of journalism, activism, and political influence, making it difficult for organizations of the same type to be censured and prosecuted — for better or worse. Because of these developments, a number of non-profits and other mainstream news networks have followed WikiLeaks’s footsteps, and they have established services that leakers and whistleblowers can use to expose wrongdoing, unethical practices, and illegal activities, while reporters’ role, as described earlier, is to make sense of such information, contextualize it, and present it to the public by breaking the news.

Assange, as of today, remains stranded in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has lived for six years, after requesting and being granted political asylum. Presently, he cannot leave the embassy because the British authorities will immediately arrest him for a failure to appear in court in 2012. There are also reasons to believe that if arrested, he will be extradited to the U.S. where he will face trial — and will also make him eligible for the death penalty — according to Reuters.
 
Has Julian Assange broken the law? Yes. Has he been a controversial figure with many flaws and has committed many mistakes? Yes. Assange was not perfect by any means — when he exploited the media, he often threatened them that he would take his leaks elsewhere if they did not conform to his demands. He pushed away many of his WikiLeaks staffers and allies because of his inability to listen to their points of view, and many argue that because of that he has landed himself in his current situation. But, to truly understand his impact, I had to isolate those negative patterns and focus on the big picture. Julian Assange has, indeed, changed the world and, more specifically, the world of mass communication. Through his organization and help from his supporters, he was able to exploit the news-making process and spread his influence on the public, giving him the ability to shape global events, spark revolutions, open governments, create a movement for transparency, advocate for the protection of investigative journalism, and giving place for the uprising of more organizations like WikiLeaks that seek to build upon the very principles and precedents that Assange established.