Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange is in the headline again having been accused in Sweden of rape and molestation.

The transparency group’s initial reaction to the accusations was that they were ‘dirty tactics’ being used to discredit Julian and Wikileaks as a whole. See Wikileaks’ twitter channel. And now the charges have been abruptly dropped, raising further questions about the source of these accusations.

The strange circumstances surrounding the appearance and dismissal of the rape charges against Assange certainly gives strength to hacker turned journalist-activist’s belief that the authorities are out to get him.

But stepping away from the conspiracy theories, which are as easy to invet as they are difficult to prove, there is an irony that Julian was in Sweden to get a publishing certificate from the Swedish authorities to allow Wikileaks to take advantage of the country’s stringent whistleblowing laws, and he’s now been attacked by the country’s equally stringent sexual crime laws.

In 1998 Sweden introduced its Violence Against Women Act, heralded as many as a positive step in addressing the difficulties around prosecuting rape and sexual crimes, and Sweden has led the way in the debate on how to combate prostitution, passing a law in 1999 that criminalised the buying of sex rather than the selling- Denmark and Norway have since followed suit and other European countries are considering it.

Whether this is an attempt by ‘officials’ to discredit Wikileaks, an unfortunate mistake by Julian or complete fiction, the accusations’ timing, moments after the Pentagon have started chuntering about pressing criminal charges against Julian and Wikileaks for the War Log leak, and the circumstances are interesting.

Whatever’s going on, this certainly doesn’t help Wikileaks.

For an organisation that likes to present itself through a veil of mystery and intrigue as a secretive source of classified information for the world’s lazy and complacent media, Wikileaks does spend a lot of its time as the subject, not only the source, of the headlines.

Wikileaks, or more to the point its founder Julian Assange, is once again monopolizing headlines after the whistleblowing website released 92,000 classified military documents on Sunday. The leaks comes hand in hand with a series published by the New York Times, The Guardian and Das Spiegel, who were granted an advanced preview of the documents, titled the War Logs.

Wikileaks teamed up with three of the most respected titles in the Western media to reach the widest audience possible with their mass leak, or hemorrhage, as the BBC’s Mark Mardell described the release, because experience has taught them that just dumping content into the public domain doesn’t produce the reaction that Assange and his shadowy team aspire to.

This raises some important questions in relation to Wikileaks’ desired outcome from their leaks. The Pentagon branded the whistleblowing website as “irresponsible” for leaking the secret military files, claiming that the leak put both NATO forces and Afghani informants in danger, but I think that motive, rather than responsibility, or the lack of, is the key question that needs to be discussed.

I have met and extensively interviewed both Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt, another key player in Wikileaks who appears to have ducked out of the media limelight in recent months, for an article I wrote for Wired (UK) magazine last year, titled Exposed: Wikileaks’ Secrets. I have also spoken to most members of Wikileaks’ so-called ‘Advisory Board’. Both men are highly intelligent individuals with expert computer skills who have dedicated their lives, with an almost religious fervour, to promoting transparency in governments and corporations around the world.

Their commitment is one that is hard to argue with. Transparency is key to a functioning society and a healthy democracy needs groups bent on holding powerful individuals accountable. But Julian has the utmost conviction that he is right to be doing what he’s doing. And his zealous conviction, always presented in a mass of anecdotal florid rhetoric, need to be questioned. Regardless of what the subject may be, I am always concerned by people who are so convinced of their ‘rightness’ that they have an inability to debate all sides of the argument.

Andrew Exum may be towing the party line when he asserted this week in the New York Times that the mass less of documents to the press adds nothing to the debate that is already fraught with “hard moral choices and [a] dearth of good policy options” but he has a point when he points out that Assange is “muddying the waters between journalism and activism”.

Assange is an activist, with the technological knowledge, experience and ability to have a huge impact with his work. But he describes himself as a journalist and talks about editorial standards. Journalism and activism are two very different things. I am not going to talk about objectivity here, because I am personally of the belief that objectivity is the false beacon in journalism (sometimes there is a ‘baddie’ and a ‘goodie’). But activism means you have a mission. A desire to change things. And that motive in Wikileaks’ work has not been examined.

Wikileaks’ technological expertise gives it huge power, and like the powerful corporations and governments that the transparency group want to shake down, Wikileaks need to submit themselves to the same standard. Or be required to by the media and public.

When I met Julian he frequently voiced frustration with the media’ fascination with who Wikileaks is. “It’s not who, its what”, he would say. But like every subject that makes the news cycle, Wikileaks needs to be exposed to the maxim of journalism: who, what, where and why.

Late last year, WikiLeaks began lobbying the Icelandic parliament to consider a series of bills, which if passed would transform Iceland into a journalistic haven.

The new laws would be modeled on the kind of shady tax laws that tax havens offer the rich. Under the WikiLeaks’ proposal, Iceland would offer sources and journalists a strong package of legal protections thereby establishing itself as a sanctuary for free speech.

Wikileaks’ proposed laws are based on a pick-a-mix approach to the freedom of speech laws around the world: “So we could just say we’re taking the source protection laws from Sweden … the First Amendment from the United States, (and) Belgium’s protection laws for journalists,” said WikiLeaks’ Daniel Schmitt at the Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) that took place last week in Berlin.

If Iceland passes Wikileaks’ laws they will be setting a precedent for press freedom in a time of tumultuous debates about the rights of bloggers and the role of the internet in journalism. They will also further legitimise WikiLeaks’ position within that debate, and guarantee them a prominent place within the future of journalists.

My article was recently published in Wired magazine (UK). It’s on the newsstands across the UK or you can see at
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/10/start/exposed-wikileaks%27-secrets.aspx