Would the Real Julian Assange Please Stand Up

Free speech crusader or rapist. Why can't he be both?

In a particularly clear-headed column in the National Post, Chris Selley writes that anyone who believes Julian Assange’s arrest for sex crimes charges in Sweden is the result of an international conspiracy should ask themselves one question: “Would it be shocking if someone sociopathic and narcissistic enough to effectively hold hostage the lives of spies, informants, and pro-democracy advocates … behaved in a manner not in compliance with Sweden's strict sexual assault laws?” Selley says this doesn’t mean that the U.S. or other governments didn’t pressure Sweden in the case, nor does it mean that Assange is some kind of supervillain. “He can do the Lord's work by spilling all the evil governments' secrets and be a rapist,” he writes.

Meanwhile, two contrasting columns in the Sun papers point to the difficulty of defining what WikiLeaks is doing. Referring to the U.S. judge who famously wrote that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre,” L. Ian MacDonald asks, “What would Justice Holmes make of the WikiLeaks document dumps?" Despite MacDonald’s assertion to the contrary, The Mark Newsroom thinks Judge Holmes wouldn’t have much to say against WikiLeaks. Nobody is claiming that Assange is “shouting falsely” about anything; the documents he released are accurate. So authorities are stuck because Assange could potentially release damaging information, but there’s no legal basis to charge him with free speech violations.

There also appears to be no grounds for the argument made by by the Ottawa Sun’s Michael Harris, who writes “[t]he New York Times … was the Julian Assange of the Vietnam War era.” That paper’s reporting made public the Pentagon Papers, which implicated the U.S. government in mass deception. But if Assange is a journalist, he’s a very different breed than the New York Times. He’s threatened to release potentially deadly information if WikiLeaks is brought down, which goes against journalistic ethics on several levels.

If the WikiLeaks saga has taught us anything, it might be that we lack both the language and the laws to deal with secret-sharing in the internet age.