“Courage is contagious” – Julian Assange
ONE OF THE PRIMARY FUNCTIONS OF MEDIA IS KEEPING GOVERNMENTS AND CORPORATIONS ACCOUNTABLE, PUBLISHING INFORMATION THAT HAS BEEN LABELLED ‘CLASSIFIED’ AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THE PUBLIC, WORKS TOWARDS THAT ACCOUNTABILITY.
VIDEO: ‘The Assange Story. WikiLeaks founder’s journey from whistleblowing hero to exile’ – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=630X89TbI74
Assange is a multi-award-winning journalist and founder of Wikileaks. Wikileaks is a platform that distributes leaked classified documents from unnamed sources, leakers and Whistleblowers. Assange’s most significant work, carried out through WikiLeaks, was with the heroic Whistleblower Chelsea Manning, with the publication of:
‘The Iraq and Afghan war logs and the US diplomatic cables in 2010 – https://wikileaks.org/-Leaks-.html and https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010.
The Diplomatic Papers in 2010 – https://wikileaks.org/plusd/?qproject[]=cg&q=
The Guantanamo files in 2011 – https://wikileaks.org/gitmo/
The Collateral Murder Apache video that Wikileaks released in 2010 was the prelude to worldwide fame – https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
These releases exposed war crimes, torture, coup plots and corruption by the US and its allies across the globe.
“EVERY TIME WE WITNESS AN INJUSTICE AND DO NOT ACT, WE TRAIN OUR CHARACTER TO BE PASSIVE IN ITS PRESENCE AND THEREBY EVENTUALLY LOSE ALL ABILITY TO DEFEND OURSELVES AND THOSE WE LOVE” – Julian Assange
What is WikiLeaks?
WikiLeaks is probably one of the most talked-about phenomena in news media around the world. It also proves to be the epitome of new kinds of interactive media as well as a challenge to traditional journalism. According to its own website, WikiLeaks is ‘a not-for-profit media organisation’ whose ‘goal is to bring important news and information to the public’.
Wikileaks provides ‘a high security anonymous drop box fortified by cutting-edge cryptographic information technologies’, i.e. an electronic drop-box with encryption that is ‘sophisticated and effectively unbreakable’. By using it, whistleblowers can pass on documents without anyone being able to ascertain where they came from and who leaked them.
https://wikileaks.org/-Leaks-.html
To sum Wikileaks up, it has political and ideological underpinnings, and is a watchdog organisation that collects and publishes information about those in positions of power. By keeping an eye on the powerful and publishing information about them, watchdogs such as Wikileaks are working towards limiting, and possibly even abolishing, such asymmetrical configurations of power.
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