Two years ago, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was being widely hailed as a hero and a champion of free speech and freedom of the press.
WikiLeaks exposure of corruption on the part of Iceland’s biggest banks led to investigations and prosecutions. The same thing happened with the exposure of injustices and corruption on the part of oil magnates in Peru, the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, and a report of toxic waste dumping on the African coast.
Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.
In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010" by the British magazine New Statesman. In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".
In November he was leading in the poll for Time magazine's "Person of the Year, 2010"
Then WikiLeaks began releasing a massive trove of “secret” U.S. State department diplomatic cables, which seem to mostly consist of messages in which high ranking government officials say rude things about the leaders of other countries.
These messages seem to amount to a lot of grade-school gossip and name-calling.
Suddenly WikiLeaks is under attack from all sides.
The website is struggling to stay online just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.
The U.S. State Department has blocked all its employees from accessing the site and is warning all government employees not to read the cables, even at home.
Swedish authorities are seeking Assange for questioning related to allegations of sexual assault on two women.
Assange and his supporters have denied the accusations, calling them part of an elaborate plot to silence WikiLeaks. Since publication of the latest round of documents began last week, the pressure has mounted on Assange, who was being sought internationally on an Interpol warrant.
"These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States," said Assange.
In a warning to Sweden and to U.S. authorities, who are investigating whether Assange can be brought up on charges related to the release of classified documents, Assange said this weekend that he was prepared to retaliate if charged with a crime.
He said he may release the secret code with a 256-bit encryption key for a massive file quietly distributed this summer that contains thousands of un-redacted documents.
The focus of this whole affair oddly seems to be on killing the messenger and not dealing with the messages.
The reality is that of all the hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of pages that WikiLeaks has released in the last six months alone, only a tiny portion of the information is even remotely interesting, let alone legitimately secret.
That underscores the real problem. The secrecy that we’re talking about is just a little bit excessive on the margins.
What this means is that the United States government and all of its permanent national security institutions reflexively do virtually everything behind a shield of secrecy.
The presumption is that whatever the government does in our name is secret, when the presumption should be the opposite.
Too much innocuous information is simply marked and stamped secret.
If this information was so secret, if it is that important that someone not know they have been called fat, stupid, drunk, and egotistical by one of the leaders of the free world, why did the government do such poor job of protecting this supposedly vital information?
As for Assange, anyone who is hated by almost every government on the planet cant be all bad.