WikiLeaks Founder Research Articles

EDITORIAL: Gaza, genocide and media: Will journalism survive?

30th Anniversary Edition of Pacific Journalism Review: When editor Philip Cass and I, as founding editor, started planning for this 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review, we wanted a theme that would fit such an important milestone. At the time when we celebrated the second decade of the journal’s critical inquiry at Auckland University of Technology with a conference in 2014, our theme was ‘Political journalism in the Asia Pacific’, and our mood about the mediascape in the region was far more positive than it is today (Duffield, 2015). Three years later, we marked the 10th anniversary of the Pacific Media Centre, with a conference and a rather gloomier ‘Journalism under duress’ slogan. The PJR cover then featured a gruesome corpse at the height of Rodrigo Duterte’s callous and bloodthirsty ‘war on drugs’—and on media—in the Philippines. Three years later again the PMC itself had been closed in spite of its success. EDITORIAL NOTE: After the editorial of Pacific Journalism Review and the lead article in this edition (Vol 30, No 1&2) about the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were printed, the Australian journalist was set free and he arrived back in Australia after a plea bargain. The winner of his country’s Walkley Award for journalism excellence, Assange was freed by a US federal court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on 26 June 2024 after a plea bargain to plead guilty to one charge of violating the US Espionage Act and the judge sentenced him to 62 months, jail time already served in the UK on remand. His 14-year struggle for freedom was over, but his lawyers say they will press for a full US presidential pardon.

War on Palestine: How the fates of Gaza and Julian Assange are sealed together

Commentary: Were they being properly reported, two critically important court hearings in February 2024, in London and The Hague, would expose the US ‘rules-based order’ as a hollow sham. Both posed globe-spanning threats to our most basic freedoms. Neither received more than perfunctory coverage in Western establishment media such as the BBC. One was a week-long hearing by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over a United Nations General Assembly request for an advisory opinion over Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and the other was a last-ditch appeal of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange against efforts by the United States to extradite him so that he can be locked away for the rest of his life. EDITORIAL NOTE: After the editorial of Pacific Journalism Review and the lead article in this edition (Vol 30, No 1&2) about the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were printed, the Australian journalist was set free and he arrived back in Australia after a plea bargain. The winner of his country’s Walkley Award for journalism excellence, Assange was freed by a US federal court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on 26 June 2024 after a plea bargain to plead guilty to one charge of violating the US Espionage Act and the judge sentenced him to 62 months, jail time already served in the UK on remand. His 14-year struggle for freedom was over, but his lawyers say they will press for a full US presidential pardon.

War on Palestine: How the fates of Gaza and Julian Assange are sealed together

Commentary: Were they being properly reported, two critically important court hearings in February 2024, in London and The Hague, would expose the US ‘rules-based order’ as a hollow sham. Both posed globe-spanning threats to our most basic freedoms. Neither received more than perfunctory coverage in Western establishment media such as the BBC. One was a week-long hearing by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over a United Nations General Assembly request for an advisory opinion over Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and the other was a last-ditch appeal of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange against efforts by the United States to extradite him so that he can be locked away for the rest of his life. EDITORIAL NOTE: After the editorial of Pacific Journalism Review and the lead article in this edition (Vol 30, No 1&2) about the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were printed, the Australian journalist was set free and he arrived back in Australia after a plea bargain. The winner of his country’s Walkley Award for journalism excellence, Assange was freed by a US federal court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on 26 June 2024 after a plea bargain to plead guilty to one charge of violating the US Espionage Act and the judge sentenced him to 62 months, jail time already served in the UK on remand. His 14-year struggle for freedom was over, but his lawyers say they will press for a full US presidential pardon.

The Assange Case: Transnational Prosecution of Investigative Journalism

This paper highlights the need to reintroduce the political offence exception to extradition in cases of non-violent crime into UK domestic law and beyond. The article examines the recent developments in the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with an emphasis on the judicial outcomes in the extradition proceedings before UK courts in matters relevant to freedom of the press. The case makes for an interesting subject because it concerns both objectively a political crime as well as arguably political persecution. The question of extradition is being played out between two closely allied countries which converge in applying their secrecy laws in an increasingly expansive manner crucially encroaching upon standard practices of national security investigative journalism. The article concludes that an introduction of the public interest or affirmative defence and the testimony of purpose into secrecy laws are essential in democratic societies. It further concludes that the evisceration of a political offence exception to extradition in non-violent crimes is a regrettable trend that should be reversed. Said exception is the single most powerful tool in extradition regulation serving to prevent political persecution and it is essential for protecting national security investigative journalists from extradition in cases such as that of Assange.

Psychiatric and legal issues surrounding the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: The importance of considering the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.

Psychiatric and legal issues surrounding the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: The importance of considering the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.

When Life Imitates Art: Éric Rohmer’s Triple Agent (2004) As a Primer for Real-Life Politics

This article examines the striking parallel between plans that were discussed in the CIA in 2017 to kidnap and possibly murder Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and the abduction and murder eighty years earlier in Paris of the head of the White Russian army in exile by the NKVD. The latter, one of the most notorious episodes in the history of espionage and counterespionage in the French capital during the interwar years, was fictionalized by Éric Rohmer in his 2004 film Triple Agent. Fusing the actual events of those years—the Popular Front government in France, the Stalinist Terror in Russia, and the build-up to the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939—with a tragic personal story, Rohmer exposed the human dramas without which the rival intelligence services could not have been as effective as they were. The events of the 1930s are long past, and even the Cold War years of the 1960s and 1970s have receded into the distance. But as this article shows, and Éric Rohmer’s film reminds us, the cloak- and-dagger game of spies and counterspies has not changed that much, the technologies of contemporary intelligence warfare notwithstanding.

Espionage, the First Amendment, and the Case Against Julian Assange

In May 2019, a federal grand jury returned an eighteen-count criminal indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. 1 Charges include conspiring to obtain national defense information, obtai...

Assessing Correa’s free speech heritage: The Ecuadorian president’s record on free speech is reviewed as his term in offi ce comes to an end. He gave sanctuary to Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, in the country’s London embassy but brought in restrictive media laws at home

Assessing Correa’s free speech heritage: The Ecuadorian president’s record on free speech is reviewed as his term in offi ce comes to an end. He gave sanctuary to Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, in the country’s London embassy but brought in restrictive media laws at home

Introduction toJoGSSForum “Censorship in Security Studies”

> Do You Know That Newspeak is the Only Language in the World Whose Vocabulary Gets Smaller Every Year? Winston Did Know That, of Course. > > –George Orwell, 2013 (1949) The idea to organize a forum on censorship—the control of information and ideas circulated within a society through the suppression of words and images—emerged among the editorial team in summer 2015. In July, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, gave an interview to the German news magazine Der Spiegel in which he suggested that English-speaking IR scholars are reluctant to use material made public by WikiLeaks for their research (Assange 2015). This was picked up in blogs, and a sort of debate ensued among American commentators because, indeed, very few articles had been published in ISA journals using WikiLeaks sources (The Ben Norton Blog 2015). Why? On one side, Dan Drezner argued that academics are simply indifferent to WikiLeaks, because the material it contains is not very interesting (Dan Drezner 2012; 2015). Others disagreed and suggested that “the academy has been extremely cautious” and that self-censorship is at work, fanned by concern that the US government would take legal action against those who used WikiLeaks material (Gabriel 2015). Either way, positions of “indifference” and “caution” support each other or, at least, meet in the view that dealing with WikiLeaks is not a risk worth taking. However, evaluations regarding the usefulness, legality, and risk of engaging classified sources touch on fundamental questions IR scholars cannot escape: the relationship between academia, politics, and the state; the scope of academic freedom and the nature of “responsible scholarship”; and to what extent research can and should …

The links that bind: WikiLeaks, Twitter, and the Julian Assange case

ABSTRACTIn the decade since the founding of WikiLeaks, no non-leak-related issue has dominated coverage of the organization more than the August 2010 allegations made by two women in Stockholm against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This case has been addressed on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed on a consistent basis over the past 6 years. The tweets from WikiLeaks to millions of followers constitute a form of popular communication where a broad—albeit somewhat prefigured—audience is targeted using an open social media platform. With this audience in mind, I analyze the use of Twitter by WikiLeaks to address the 2010 rape allegations against Assange (and the subsequent follow-on events after those allegations), with a particular focus on two issues: (a) the framing by WikiLeaks of the allegations, Sweden, rape, and feminism; and (b) how the sources (links) used in those tweets to back up claims should be seen as part of the general framing process.

Feminist Killjoys and Women Scorned: An Analysis of News and Commentary on the Sexual Violence Allegations Against Julian Assange

This article examines digital media debate over sexual violence by analyzing news reports and reader comments on the rape allegations against WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Through analysis of the Guardian and New York Times, the article shows how this case became a flash-point for debate about feminist constructions of sexual violence. News reports amplified Assange’s defense that the allegations stemmed from feminist influence on Swedish law and would not be criminalized in England, provoking feminist and anti-feminist commentary. Thus, this article illuminates the salience of feminist constructions of sexual violence for digital news and points to broader social contestation over the meaning of rape fostered by digital media.

Rape is rape (except when it’s not)

This article contributes to a body of research in which media reports of violence against women are analysed for the ways they gloss precisely what it is that constitutes ‘violence against women’ in the event under report. To catch this glossingin flight, as it were, mediated reports of violence are conceptualised as recontextualisations; that is, reports that may differ in rhetorically consequential ways from those provided by victims of, or witnesses to, that violence. A mediated stylistic analysis of press reportage of the charges of rape made against Julian Assange, the founder ofWikiLeaks, in 2010, subsequently shows that and how Assange’s allegedly violent actions were recontextualised such that their status asviolentwas readably downgraded, mitigated or even deleted. The article ends by calling for more attention to be paid to the various techniques of recontextualisation via which reports of violence against women are presented in the media.

Toil and Trouble: On the Materiality of Time

This article explores the nature of temporality, entropy and negentropy, drawing contemporary fiction by Graham Swift and Fiona McGregor as well as the autobiography of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, to ask questions about history, time and life.

ECUADOR’S DECISION TO GRANT ASYLUM TO JULIAN ASSANGE : THE MANIFESTATION OF HUMAN SECURITY?

Ecuador’s decision to grant asylum to Julian Assange (Australian citizen) on August 16, 2012 has caused several impacts. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was arrested in Britain in connection with a Swedish investigation into accusations of sexual offenses. But United States Law enforcement official said that the fact that he was in custody did not affect their deliberations about whether he might be charged in this country in connection with publication of leaked government documents. Being disappointed with the decission, the British authorities sent a written notice to the Ecuador’s Embassy in London that they would assault the Embassy if Assange was not handed over. The letter has led to tense diplomatic relations between two countries. Facing the difficult situation, UNASUR (The Union of South America Nations) held a Foreign Ministers Meeting (FMM) after the President of Ecuador granted the asylum. The meeting produced an agreed document that support Ecuador’s decision and encourage all parties to have continous negotiation to find mutually acceptable solutions based on good neighbour principles.

Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and Transgressions of WikiLeaks

The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assange's assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.

From Advocates to Terrorists

IntroductionPolitical information, like much of what is comprehended as information, today, is often understood in a rather passive sense of being expressions that are consulted for understanding. This is a liberalist view that sees persons as choosers and consumers of information. In this article, we would like to go beyond this epistemology and discuss from an expressive viewpoint, namely, that of an agent's expressive actions in relation to the State. Our discussion will pass through the topics of ideology, States of exception and States of emergency, and the distinctions between morals and ethics, law and justice. Far from being passive or synonymous with facts, will be understood as expressions by agents, both institutional and personal. Our final discussion in this article will be in regard to the writings of the political theorist and activist Antonio Negri in the context of his imprisonment and trial on terror charges from 1979 to 1983 (the writings issue from 1983-the year in which his case actually began to be tried). Here, we will suggest the dissonance between States and social movements as expressive agents and forces. Here we will see the denial of the ethical by the moral, justice by legal right, and the denial of a more open future for a nation by classes that control a State.Today, these topics could not be more timely. Intellectual and Freedom of information form core value for the Western library tradition, but as I write this the Library of Congress, as well as all other United States government agencies, have been forbidden by the federal government to allow access to U.S. diplomatic dispatches or cables made public by an internet organization named Wikileaks. As I write this, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been under legal threat by the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, and several leading politicians in the U.S. have urged his arrest and trial for treason (despite his being an Australian citizen), with several other leading political and media figures also calling for his assassination as a terrorist. The Vice President of the United States, Joseph Biden, on December 19, 2010, referred to Assange on a popular Sunday news program as a hi- tech terrorist1 and the commercial media has largely continued this view of Assange, echoing the dominant government line. The accused leaker of this material, a U.S. Army private, Bradley Manning, has been held for over seven months at the time of this writing in harsh solitary confinement without trial or conviction. Further, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, on December 7, 2010, said that the U.S. Justice Department should extend the investigation of these leaks to the New York Times, which published reports based on the Wikileaks releases.2 While the press coverage of the contents of the leaks has been relatively sparse in the U.S. press, European and other world wide presses have been reporting on the contents since the time of the first release. For the most part, it would not be unfair to suggest that the U.S. media-including the New York Times-in contrast to main European newspapers, have largely focused on the personal and alleged sexual life of the founder of Wikileaks and Swedish criminal investigations related to the latter, rather than upon the contents of the cables. And as I am editing this article, the revelations of the cables have contributed to the overthrow of dictatorial governments in Tunisia and Egypt. The Hosni Mubarak government in Egypt unsuccessfully relied in large part upon the silencing of the Internet and mobile telecommunication media as a means of stopping popular revolt. Meanwhile a bill earlier introduced in the U.S. Senate will be reintroduced by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins in 2011, giving the executive branch authority, without judicial review, to control crucial parts of the Internet cyber- infrastructure in the case of a national cyberemergency. …

Wikileaks, Secrets, and Lies

SINGAPORE – The latest information dump from WikiLeaks offers fascinating insights into the workings of the US State Department that will keep foreign policy wonks and conspiracy theorists busy for months. Much of what has been reported is not “news” in the traditional sense, of course, but a series of embarrassing gaffes: truths that were never meant to be said aloud. Underlying these various, and often banal, tidbits of information – it should be no surprise that Americans found Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “vain,” or regarded Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as a “crazy old man” – is the larger question of whether governments should be able to keep secrets. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange argues that the answer is no, and that greater transparency “creates a better society for all people.” This raises the question of why governments keep secrets at all, and whether those reasons are justified. The task of keeping a state’s secrets frequently falls to its intelligence services, which tend to focus on the protection of three types of information. The first type is their own sources and methods, which need to be safeguarded if they are to remain effective when gathering data. When the