It’s a dangerous moment for press freedom when governments — and some journalists — prioritise the privileges of the craft over fundamental human rights. Yet that’s where we seem to be with the arrest of Julian Assange for practicing journalism.
To prioritise the status of “journalist” over “journalism” is to get it precisely arse-about. Journalism is a practice. You become a journalist by practicing journalism — digging out and spreading fact-based news, in all its glorious diversity. The practice of journalism has an important job to do: to provide the public with the information they need to exercise their own civil rights.
For the authorities, it’s a con by states clamping down on freedom of speech: it’s not journalism, they say. It’s false news. It’s not licensed, not approved. Find any journalist detained around the world and you’ll find the detaining government — from Sisi’s Egypt to Suharto’s Indonesia — spruiking some variation or other of this “not a journalist” line.
For governments, it’s a win-win to say: “We love real journalists”. They can fake respect for press freedom while disempowering the solidarity of the global journalist community.
To constrain the rights of press freedom to the privileges of the profession of journalists weakens both. Rather, the rights that journalists assume are a professional expression of the rights of everyone. These are set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically in the right to freedom of expression which includes the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.
“Seek, receive and impart”: sounds like the terms of the Assange conspiracy charge.
The only reason it matters whether Assange is a journalist or not — or, rather, whether WikiLeaks is a publisher or not — is due to the vagaries of US law through the application of the 18th century constitution (barring laws “abridging the freedom of speech or of the press”) to 20th century corporate press structures, like The New York Times.
The US courts gave the US corporate media particular privileges. The dismissal of Assange as a source rather than a partner publisher (as NYT editor Bill Keller infamously did) has always felt like a protection of that 20th century privilege in the face of the fragmentation of 21st century media.
Declaration of conflict: I was one of the Walkley trustees who agreed to recognise WikiLeaks for its contribution to journalism back in 2011. There were two compelling reasons: it seemed odd to recognise the great journalism that others were doing off the back of the security cables cache without recognising WikiLeaks itself.
But more than that, WikiLeaks contributed something profound to journalism: a 21st century tool to get around the increasing state surveillance of journalists’ interactions with their sources. By putting an encrypted gap between source and media, the WikiLeaks model removed the opportunity for surveillance. It’s a model that has now been adopted by many investigative journalists and major media organisations.
Looking back, we can see that the cables drop did something else: it broke open the constraints on the scale of leaks. Since then, many of the major developments in journalism (such as the Panama Papers) have resulted from large-scale document drops — some old-style through the post, and some new-style through drop-boxes.
Still, it’s no secret that many journalists remain uncomfortable with Assange. His refusal to return to Sweden to answer questions about sexual assault has grown worse over time, even as his justification — fear of rendition to the US — has been shown to be justified.
Some are challenged by the ethical question as to whether accepting hacked (that is, stolen) documents (as distinct from internal leaks) is journalistically appropriate, particularly when the hacking was done by hostile Russian state actors and the resulting DNC files had limited news value. (WikiLeaks denies knowing that the DNC hack came from Russian agencies.)
Assange’s apparent enthusiasm for the election of Trump costs him allies, suggesting a political rather than journalistic motivation. But none of this alters the fundamental point of the current extradition charge: the US government is asking its court to criminalise the seeking and receiving of confidential information for the purposes of journalism. And that’s bad for everyone.
What do you make of the reception to Assange’s arrest? Send your thoughts to boss@crikey.com.au.
Thanks for a great article. Peter Greste’s piece in the SMH a couple of days ago was a shocker. Ellen Fanning was perseverating about it trying to verbal Greg Barns the other night on The Drum, even Barrie Cassidy was having a go on Insiders. What are they thinking?
Agreed Vasco, shocking performance from the ABC….Cassidy’s effort is particularly galling.
With so many dictatorships and authoritarian states in the world today why does the writer find it necessary to stretch back over two decades to quote “Suharto’s Indonesia?” What about China, Russia, even, sadly, India under the present government? Indonesia has made good progress to multi-party democracy since the end of Suharto’s rule. There seems to be a fixation amongk some journalists here with Indonesia as some kind of malign state.
Yes, you are right Rais. But remember there is a struggle going on in Indonesia between a more moderate local version of Islam and a much more extreme form supported mainly by Saudi funds flooding into the country. I personally believe/hope that the more moderate form will prevail. We here need a far better class of politicians to deal with this situation than what we currently have.
I’m Australian but also something of an “insider” in Indonesia. As an Aussie Muslim, in the early to mid 1970s I studied in an Indonesian seminary and have friends from that time and my many later visits all over the country. In Mecca in 1979 I met some of my old friends who were pursuing a higher degree there. They weren’t happy with the attitude of the Saudis. When I go to Indonesia I’m in and out of mosques a lot. I can say that a rebirth of piety isn’t the same as a Saudi takeover. Indonesians are very independent and even Indonesians of Arab descent aren’t inclined to follow the Saudi line. Speaking generally of course – there are always exceptions. In Australia I hear about this flood of Saudi money to Indonesia but even if it were true, and I haven’t seen much evidence of it, there’s now a flood of Indonesian money so the Saudis may be too late.
I sincerely hope you are right, Rais, and that the people who make such remarks as these are exaggerating:
“In Indonesia, Salafi ideology has penetrated urban and rural, civil servants and villagers,” said Din Wahid, a theologian at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “They see corruption all around them and say that it is only Shariah and restoring a caliphate that will be able to fix society.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/world/asia/indonesia-election-islam.html
Thanks for the reference Oldie. I haven’t had a chance yet to go into it extensively but I looked up a study done by Dr Din Wahid just quickly and he estimates that some 50 pesantrens (religious boarding schools) have been established influenced by Saudi thinking. That’s reassuring to me because 50 is a drop in the ocean of tens of thousands of such schools in Indonesia. The one I attended in the 1970s,I for example, now has many branches with tens of thousands of students. Village people generally in Indonesia, and in many other Muslim countries too, don’t welcome harsh doctrines. This may not be my final word on the topic, you’ve stimulated my interest to see if I can contact Dr Din and get a comment from him on the matter.
You can probably forgive mainstream journalists looking so askance at Assange’s assistance – inadvertent or otherwise – to the Trump campaign, given the likely material support for electing a candidate with a well-document hostility to press freedom (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/donald-trump-continues-to-call-the-media-fake-news/579670/).
That said, I strongly agree that principle needs to outweigh whatever disdain the 2016 US presidential election, Swedish sexual assault allegations or general all-pervasive narcissism may elicit toward the man himself.
It’s just I’ve just never read anything to convince me that the Cablegate release (unlike MSM reporting off the back of it) was anything akin to responsible reporting in the public interest rather than an indefensibly reckless data dump, given Wikileaks’ total lack of interest in potential exposure of and risk of harm to intelligence sources, etc.
Whether this justifies heavy-handed US espionage charges is another matter. Personally I would like to see the UK courts prioritise extradition to Sweden to have the sexual assault matters resolved. Claiming onward extradition to the US is more likely in Sweden than the UK doesn’t pass the sniff test.
I suggest you look up the Guardian editor, David Leigh, and the role he played in the Cablegate ‘dump’.
To quote one seemingly qualified, non-aligned tech head;
The executive summary
It makes no sense to blame WikiLeaks. As I will address below, the security practices could have been improved to prevent this from happening, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect WikiLeaks to plan for this scenario. By definition (by giving the cables to David Leigh, the Guardian editor responsible for disclosing the passphrase), WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange was trusting Leigh with everything. There are a million things Leigh could have done to break the security. He could have left the cables sitting unencrypted on a laptop connected to the Internet (and in fact, according to WikiLeaks, he did that too). He could have uploaded the cables to a public server if he’d been malicious. Assange had to trust that he wasn’t going to be malicious or stupid with the cables, by the definition of the operation. Divulging the password was just another possible malicious/stupid thing that Assange had to trust Leigh not to do, and he did it. In any other security model they could have used to transfer the cables, there are equally stupid things Leigh could have done to mess up. So I feel that it is unfair to blame WikiLeaks for not predicting Leigh’s stupidity.
Ignoring stupidity on the part of trusted parties, the system as described above was entirely secure. This is my main point: WikiLeaks made an encrypted file public. Guardian made the passphrase public. Either one of these is safe on its own, but if both are public, the system breaks. So clearly, one of the two parties is to blame. The clear cryptographic answer is: Guardian is to blame. When we use encryption, it is entirely expected and normal for the encrypted text to be visible to the public. If the encrypted text isn’t visible to the public, it can’t possibly be transmitted. You can’t run a secure system under the assumption that an encrypted file will not be seen by others. The entire point of cryptography is that we transmit the encrypted text “in the clear” (without further encryption). On the flipside, the entire point of cryptography is that we don’t divulge the encryption key. So WikiLeaks was in the right to make the encrypted file public (however that happened), assuming that the passphrase would be kept private. The Guardian was in the wrong to make the passphrase public, assuming that the encrypted file would be kept private. By definition, the encrypted file was public because it was available from a public server for at least a few hours.”
David,
Let’s keep the simple distiction clear.
Encryption achieves privacy, not security.
Files are encrypted on the assumption they will be accessed by parties the author does not want to read them. If the algorithm and the key are good enough and the attraction of the content is well concealed, encryption will achieve the objective that the file is read only by parties with the key.
Security in transmission is a wholly different subject. Its objective is to have a file received without alteration, accidental or deliberate and secondly to detect, upon receipt, any alteration.
WikiLeaks encrypted to files to keep the contents private. The question whether it was right to publish encrypted files does not arise. The act of encryption assumes the files will be accessed by parties not entitled to read them !
WikiLeaks apparently assumed Leigh at the Guardian would understand he may not share the key. WikiLeaks should have made the condition explicit. Leigh should have understood WikiLeaks’ privacy objective.
Not quite. Leigh understood Wikileaks privacy objective.
What he didn’t understand was the decryption key provided by ‘leaks hadn’t expired.
New Scientist, Sept 6th 2011.
In an interview with New Scientist, Assange said the leak publishing outfit’s usual editorial “harm minimisation” procedures had become irrelevant after other websites published the full text of the unredacted cables.
That full-text publication became possible when WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy was published in February. Written by two journalists at the newspaper The Guardian, based in London, the book revealed the decryption key for a computer file containing all the US state department cables leaked to WikiLeaks.
The Guardian team say they believed the key had expired – but it had not.
“That is not how file decryption works,” Assange says. “The only thing that was temporary was the website location the file was stored in. But the password is not used for the website – it is used for decrypting the file.
“We entrusted all 251,000 cables to The Guardian so they could read them and do their journalism on them,” he says. “Our security arrangement was perfect, assuming the password was not disclosed.” The Guardian‘s David Leigh was given a written copy of a lengthy encryption key – a passphrase – plus an additional word that he had to commit to memory for insertion at a set point within the phrase, adding security if the paper copy was lost.
Trickle of leaks
He later included these details in the book WikiLeaks, which he co-authored. So when the AES256-encrypted file was tracked down to BitTorrent sites – where WikiLeaks had supposedly placed it as a defence against denial-of-service attacks – the cables could be decrypted and began trickling onto rival leak sites like Cryptome.org.
The publication of the passphrase and additional secret word in The Guardian‘s book has horrified not only WikiLeaks but security engineers in general. Their view is perhaps best summed up by the influential BT infosecurity expert Bruce Schneier on his blog: “Memo to The Guardian: publishing encryption keys is almost always a bad idea.”
The reason? Even if the passphrase had expired – it hadn’t in this case – the way it is put together, alongside knowledge of the use of an additional word, gives an attacker very strong clues as to how an organisation habitually structures its keys, passwords or passphrases. “It describes our internal security mechanisms,” says Assange.
Three weeks ago, other leak sites realised that The Guardian‘s passphrase decrypted the BitTorrent file – and the unredacted US cables began appearing on non-WikiLeaks sites. “So we contacted the US state department, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and told them what was occurring,” says Assange – presumably so they could prepare any informants for possible trouble….”
Then 3 months later, in a BBC article titled; “Has release of Wikileaks documents cost lives?”
“After the release of an enormous haul of US defence department documents in August, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told the Washington Post: “We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the Wikileaks documents.”
After this latest release a Pentagon official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the material involved, told the McClatchy newspaper group that even three months later the US military still had no evidence that people had died or been harmed because of information gleaned from Wikileaks documents.
Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers which detailed government lies and cover-ups in the Vietnam War, is sceptical of whether the government really believes that lives are at stake.
He told the BBC’s World Today programme that US officials made that same argument every time there was a potentially embarrassing leak.
“The best justification they can find for secrecy is that lives are at stake. Actually, lives are at stake as a result of the silences and lies which a lot of these leaks reveal,” he said.
“The same charges were made against the Pentagon Papers and turned out to be quite invalid.”
OK, thanks David, I had not previously read that account of The Guardian’s idiocy in publishing the key.
And the loose use of “security” when he meant “privacy” extended to Assange (who certainly understands the distinction).
That’s a very interesting observation around the cryptography & how it works..
Julian Assange as far as I have read doesn’t need to go to Sweden to answer for the sexual assault accusations as they were answered just after he went to the Ecuadorian embassy seeking asylum, the 2 women who he was supposed to have assaulted had admitted that it was consensual..
It’s clear the US somehow tracked both the women down & paid them to ‘cry rape’,
It makes sense that US would use the rape charges so as to give them time to investigate the Wikileaks & put together a ‘case’..
I would suggest in regards to the rape allegations, they didn’t expect the Swedish authorities to do their own thorough investigations, and realise what was happening & that Julian was being set up & railroaded by these accusations, this I would suggest is why he was let go by the Swedish authorities who could probably find no compelling evidence to hold him, that’s probably where the US went wrong..
I would go on to suggest that the US is scrambling to find enough ”evidence” so that they will do everything in their power that they can put him away in a US jail for life.. The thing is Julian has some very powerful friends in the international legal field which will prove very interesting ..
Though the US wants to further blacken his name so any other citizens will be disinclined to be whistle blowers as Assange & any other ex military, CIA/FBI people will be able to see how the US deals with them..
The anti-journalist reaction of the current Trump dynasty is going to prove interesting in how it plays out in this case as from what I understand Assange isn’t technically an investigative journalist, though the repercussions for this type of operative is going to be made far more difficult if the US gets it’s way..
Just another way of keeping the people in check, so those like Trump (Murdoch) get richer & the poorer are left at their mercy.
What doesn’t ‘pass the sniff test’ is any suggestion that Sweden is less of a US lackey than the UK.
Search for “Sweden extraordinary rendition CIA” to see just how independent Sweden are.
Putin told Trump that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC files.
And, Craig Murray, a former UK diplomat, has told anyone who bothers to listen that he knows the person who downloaded the DNC files on to a portable device.
The only reason Murray hasn’t revealed the name is Assange implored him not to.
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes poeple like William Binney, a former tech director of the NSA, have also said the DNC files could not have been hacked from far away places, such as where Guccifer 2.0 operated.
and Putin is an honorable man
And, contrary to ‘popular OPINION’, Wikileaks has published 600,000 to 800,000 pages of leaks from inside the Russia state, most Kremlin related.
Whatever people might think of Putin, never, ever forget it was Russia that granted Snowden asylum.
Since granting him asylum, as Snowden himself has said, Russia have not once threatened to turf him out, even though he has continued to be critical – publicly, of how Russia goes about its business.
Just where are all these bastions of ‘free speech’, again?
As for just which countries stick phat with international law, I suggest you refamiliarise yourself with an incident that occurred in Austria, back in mid-2013.
Evo Morales, the elected leader of Bolivia, was returning home after visiting Russia.
Morales’ government aircraft was denied air space by the Frogs, Spaniards and Portugooses, and forced to land in Austria.
The Eurolackies wanted to search the plane. Why?
‘Signs of Snowden’.
The elected leader of a sovereign nation was detained for 14 friggin’ hours, so the Eurolackies could do the Yanks’ bidding.
As Pilger wrote, at the time;
Forcing down Evo Morales’s plane was an act of air piracy.
magine the aircraft of the president of France being forced down in Latin America on “suspicion” that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.
Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the “international community”, as the governments of the west call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.
The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane – denied airspace by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded to “inspect” his aircraft for the “fugitive” Edward Snowden – was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name…..
In Moscow, Morales had been asked about Snowden – who remains trapped in the city’s airport. “If there were a request [for political asylum],” he said, “of course, we would be willing to debate and consider the idea.” That was clearly enough provocation for the Godfather. “We have been in touch with a range of countries that had a chance of having Snowden land or travel through their country,” said a US state department official.
The French – having squealed about Washington spying on their every move, as revealed by Snowden – were first off the mark, followed by the Portuguese. The Spanish then did their bit by enforcing a flight ban of their airspace, giving the Godfather’s Viennese hirelings enough time to find out if Snowden was indeed invoking article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”….
So, spare me the cheap references associating Assange with Putin.
You want evil bastards? Look closer to home.
The media is transfixed by Assange’s perceived personality &, in many cases, seem unable to divorce it from the overriding principle of exposing criminal & unethical behaviour of governments. Since when did truth not take precedence in reporting/publishing…
The Swedish prosecutor dropped investigations re sexual assault claims but, now that Assange is more ‘available’, suddenly becomes interested once again. Does nobody else find this highly suspicious?
Hi! Zut…yes I do find the Swedish authorities renewed interest in the case rather puzzling…especially as one of the two ‘victims’ doesn’t want to be in it, and the time limit for this prosecution, under Swedish law, has expired!!
Maybe Sweden is just the back-up country…for the USA… if the UK decides not to extradite Assange.
“Since when did truth not take precedence in reporting/publishing…”
Agreed. It seems perception is greater than truth and in the end it’s all occult.
“Since when did truth not take precedence in reporting/publishing…”
Agreed. It seems that perception is greater than truth. It’s occult.