Last week, publisher WikiLeaks released the latest batch of documents in its Vault 7 series. Those few reporters and readers not captivated by the open hostility of US President Donald Trump found, again, within the set of hitherto closed files, the true and current record of warfare. As the President scours what remains of his mind for new names to call Kim Jong-un, the Central Intelligence Agency continues its systematic work of developing electronic weapons to point at the people.

Private companies, private individuals, essential state services and all entities reliant on the internet become more vulnerable to attack by the agency’s arsenal. Even if you’re the sort who has been, to date, fairly comfortable with the appointment of the USA as World Sheriff, you may not feel so easy knowing that any organisation, no matter its provenance, has the capacity to turn all parts of the planet into a battlefield — one over which that obscene tweeting President currently has ultimate command.

As individuals have discovered, and as documents made available by WikiLeaks continue to attest, the great threat of so-called “cyberwarfare” is not that someone at the NSA can now giggle through their tea-break at that picture I took of my junk. It is not that your “smart” phone or TV is a convenience that now comes at the cost of unguarded human intimacy.

The threat posed by organisations, including the CIA and National Security Agency, extends far beyond a cherished thing like privacy and directly into, for example, nuclear enrichment facilities. This is an arms race, the terms of which are set and currently won by the US hegemon. To think of it not as asymmetric Cold War but a sensible set of protocols with amusing sci-fi titles dreamt up by lovable nerds is to permit our scrutiny of true power to disappear as absolutely as the departing Tardis.

The private citizen, of course, is under no obligation to grasp the totality of this emerging arsenal, or even concede its existence. The active reader or true reporter, however has a duty to recognise Vault 7 as a source for significant and broad debate, and all verified documents published by WikiLeaks as credible, not “hostile”.

Since March 2017, the latest WikiLeaks project has offered the record of an ongoing war. Traditional media organisations have not demonstrated great curiosity for this matter, and the last time they had broad interest in WikiLeaks was with the sensational Collateral Murder video. Press focus on WikiLeaks, no matter how outsized and troubling its leaks, has closed in on one (mal)function of the organisation. The dumb shit that its founder tweets or mumbles between posting links to the certified documents of ongoing horror.

Revelations about the nature of power unfold on WikiLeaks regularly. There is just one revelation, however, that regularly gains broad attention, and that, told over and again, is that Julian Assange is a sexist creep.

Yes. It does seem likely, as you will read elsewhere in Crikey today, that Assange’s grasp of feminist principles is about as steady as mine on the mechanism of DKIM verification. Had I an audience with Assange, I would attempt to make a deal: let me write the criticism of neoliberal feminism, and you keep to your accounts of digital certification and/or the disappearance of democracy as we know it. The man has posted links to some wildly “unverified” propagandist rot regarding the Magical Biological Differences Between Men and Women, and has, deservedly, received critique.

It is not that Assange does not deserve the ire of feminists. It is more that he has not earned it. Like the man I presume to be his friend, John Pilger, his area of expertise does not extend to gender theory. To critique, and this is done so frequently, Assange on this matter is akin to critiquing a toddler for not yet having attained full control of his central nervous system.

To listen to Pilger the matter of women — and I recommend this practice only to intellectual masochists — is to receive musty and recycled Christian ideals. He appears to believe, as does Assange, that the “pure” political function of women, ergo feminism, is to oppose war. He also appears to believe that feminism, ergo women, was once itself a pure and undifferentiated political movement that arose only to cry against the futility of killing. It was corrupted, you see, by the neoliberal age in which women became as hungry as men for power, quit having babies and thereby compromised what, we must presume, is our “natural” human will.

It is true that Assange has lately shown himself to be an unscholarly, unverified baby about the matter of my sex. He has offered the Silicon Valley author of a deluded crapifesto, which contains no reliable reference to support its central claim that “chicks can’t code”, a job at WikiLeaks. In doing so, he supported not only scientifically unsupported claims about “brain sex”, but, by extension — and I found this very odd — the “right” of Google to select those employees who would most effectively help the company to profit. Heavens, Julian. Here I was thinking that you sought not to encourage the tech monolith, but to undermine its primacy. And, here you are, encouraging its productivity, albeit based on your assumption, that hardly comes with its own digital signature, that the true and inevitable role of ladies is never to take up arms in a struggle, but to sit at home, reproduce and, if barren, perhaps form an auxiliary to assist coding warriors like yourself.

I can excuse sexism of the type no more than I can sloppy “state of nature” fundamentalism. No more than I can excuse Assange’s recent, and unintended, project of encouraging tech giants to do bigger and better business by not indulging in the “identity politics” he has recently, perhaps via Pilger, learned to limply loathe.  I truly have no interest, not being a Girl Who Codes and not caring about the fortunes of Google and its brethren, in arguing about how to organise Silicon Valley more justly. I believe Silicon Valley, as I believe the CIA, to be fundamentally unjust.

I also believe that Vault 7 is valuable. I am resentful that many of my peers do not recognise this value. I am surprised, and a little peeved, that Assange has offered them further opportunity for their ignorance.