President Trump did not grant him a pardon. A British judge did not uphold the substantial grounds for his appeal against extradition, but denied it on the grounds that he could not be prevented from taking his own life in a United States prison. In the high security prison where he is now held, he is not allowed access to a computer. These bare facts obscure the significance of the questions raised for the kind of society we wish to create.
A recent and stimulating book brings the focus into a broadview. Comprising a series of contributions by his supporters, A Secret Australia reflects on Assange’s contribution to journalism and public life. It sets it against the need for and the threats to ensuring an informed citizenry on which democracy rests. As the contributors to A Secret Australia show, and particularly Assange himself in the text of his conversation with Scott Ludlam, Assange had an unrivalled practical knowledge of internet technology, saw early its contrasting possibilities to enlarge or to limit personal freedom before the state, and set out passionately to use it to keep citizens informed about what governments and corporations were doing in their name.
Wikileaks was an elegant means to that end. It allowed citizens to assess the match between what governments knew and were doing and what they publicly claimed to know and were actually doing. To this end it provided new possibilities for journalism. Instead of relying on leaks from politicians and civil servants, they could have access to huge dumps of documents provided by people appalled by the corrupt or mendacious behaviour of governments and corporations. The sources of the documents, too, and the journalists who used them, could be protected by the use of encrypted drop boxes.
The leaks meant that journalists’ interpretation could be supported or tested against documentary evidence and a secure documentary archive maintained. The international reach of the internet encouraged journalists and researchers around the world to cooperate in searching and interpreting the significance of documents, especially those dealings with international relationships or the behaviour of large corporations.
The great achievement of Julian Assange and of Wikileaks has been to place freedom of speech in a large and serious context. This contrasts with the jejeune and narrow framework of popular debate that asserts the right of individuals to say what they wish, while setting that right in a partisan view of public life. In practice freedom of speech is commonly appealed to in order to defend the freedom of the enemies of one’s own enemies to say whatever they want. Truth is subordinated to interests.
A serious discussion of freedom of speech must move beyond it as an individual right to see speech as communication. It will then consider all the relationships, personal and public, involved in communication. It presupposes that people share a common commitment to truth. Freedom of speech flows from that deeper human responsibility and freedom to seek truth. Because it is relational, freedom of speech is also limited by other aspects of relationships and particularly by the consequences that speech has for human beings and their flourishing. Like commerce, speech has a social license. St Augustine, restored to fashion by Joe Biden’s inaugural address, characteristically summed up a complex argument in a throw-away line: the only reason we speak is to make one another better. Speech is for the pursuit of truth, small t and big T, on which the betterment of persons and societies rests. The paradox of the right to seek truth, of course, is that it entails the right to be wrong.
Seen from this perspective, Wikileaks recognises that for a society to be healthy citizens must not only be free to advocate for their version of the large truth about society but must have access to the small truths about its working. In practice that freedom has been fiercely contested by individuals, businesses, churches and governments which try to control what citizens can hear about many of their actions and deliberations. Wikileaks recognised that in contemporary society, so powerfully interconnected by technology, both the capacity to inform citizens about the concealed deeds of their rulers and the ability of states and corporations to prevent this access have grown.
'The tension involved in all communication between the desire and need to speak freely and the effect that speech can have on others remains unresolved. But it needs to be resolved by a shared respect for the search for truth and not by the imposition of brute power to impede that search.'
Access can be curtailed by controlling the story that is heard. The employees and resources in the media departments of governments, their military branches and of corporations far outnumber those in the independent media. They can shape public discourse. Furthermore, the dependence of media and of academic institutions on governments and corporations limits their courage in communicating truths that are uncomfortable to their patrons.
Governments can also limit access by penalising the unlicensed release of information. Australia is just one of many nations in which the restrictions placed on the release of information, the surveillance of citizens, the penalties for leaking information about government behaviour and the range of information protected have grown exponentially in the name of national security. In this respect the distinction between the Free World and its totalitarian rivals is only — though significantly — relative.
The insight of Julian Assange into the threat posed for society by an interconnected world is acute. The tension involved in all communication between the desire and need to speak freely and the effect that speech can have on others remains unresolved. But it needs to be resolved by a shared respect for the search for truth and not by the imposition of brute power to impede that search.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: Julian Assange appears at Westminster Magistrates Court (Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)