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.

Everyone should be joining Michael Rosenblum’s venomous attack of 60 Minutes’ latest self-congratulatory funfair.

Media budget cuts are effecting the coverage of foreign news. But then in walks CBS and blows a huge sum on producing a flaccid piece about Afghanistan. This comes out at the same time as the whistleblowing website, Wikileaks is begging for financial support so that they can continue exposing the truth around the world.

The big new corporations need to get their priorities straight and should be reminded of the huge responsibility they have on their shoulders as they inform huge audiences about the realities of the world we live in.

No of us should accept this kind of propagandistic, congratulatory drivel. We should all be up in arms about it.

60 Minutes is a Pile of Crap by Michael Rosenblum on February 1, 2010 – 6:33 am

CBS News ‘correspondent’ Lara Logan posing as a reporter…

A few days ago we ran a clip from Newswipe, a BBC parody of ‘news programs’.

It was funny.

But last night 60 Minutes ran a segment on the war in Afghanistan that was more parody than Newswipe.

Alas, it was far from funny.

The segment, the first on the show, was entitled The Quiet Professionals, and it was a profile of the highly trained green beret units in Afghanistan by ‘correspondent’ Lara Logan.

In the end, it didn’t say a whole lot about the Green Berets or Afghanistan but it said reams about the death of journalism on 60 Minutes.

Apparently, the 60 Minutes crew spent 2 months in Afghanistan filming this 7 minute report. From what they have aired, most of that time was spent getting Ms. Logan made up. There are long, languid shots of her in cover-girl pose – extreme close up – as she awaits answers to hard hitting questions like ‘that must be very hard’.

Tough stuff.

We are informed that many of the Green Berets are undercover, so CBS News ‘disguised’ them with Rayban sun glasses.

Great disguise!!

Most of the piece was just a pure softball love fest about how great a job the awesome Green Berets were doing, even if none of it was working. Still, they have beards and wear sun glasses and walk are all in great shape – let’s see them lift some weights! Yes! Sexy stuff and sexy Ms. Logan.

Then, at the end of the story, seemingly by accident – some real action (as opposed to the training exercises we have been watching). A ‘mysterious’ van approaches our hero Green Beret – the guy with the sexy beard and raybans – and our hero opens up on them! From a distance (you never know in Afghanistan). Two ‘warning shots’.

The van, it turns out, is filled with Afghan civilians. What a surprise.

But wait!! Our cool hero Green Beret in the raybans shot!!! two of the civilians in the back of the van!

Two kids!

And they are bleeding all over the van.

One is shot in the leg. The other has been shot in the chest.

Jesus Christ allmighty. You moron!

You absolute idiot!!

A chopper comes in to medivac the two wounded kids to medical care.

Now this is really a story. One that Ms. Logan and her crew have come upon entirely by accident, but what a story.

Do you wanna know why the Taliban are so popular in Afghanistan? It’s because we send thousands of idiots like this guy to parade all over their country killing their children at random and then going ‘oops!’

Does Ms. Logan pick up on this?

Not at all. The story line remains the same. Our hero sexy Green Beret is still our hero! Bad things happen sometimes but he’s still doing his dangerous job. (Dangerous to the locals!!)

More languid shots of Ms. Logan hair blowing in the wind. Make up looking good.

I was personally so astonished at this piece that I went to the 60 Minutes website and posted the very first comment. I said there what I said above.

Remarkably, 10 minutes after I posted my comment, I returned to the 60 Minutes site to see that it had been removed.

Astonishing.

I then tweeted the whole experience and an unnamed producer from 60 Minutes responded that Lara Logan indeed was a mindless piece of fluff. That he used to write every word that came out of her mouth, and that she had gotten hired, much to everyone’s ’shock’ at CBS News following a ‘dinner’ (his quotes) with Dan Rather.

You know, the media takes a lot of the responsibility for the debacle in Iraq because they simply refused to report.

60 Minutes is doing the same thing in Afghanistan now.

And it’s not like the truth is not out there.

It is.

Raul Gallegos, a Videojournalist for the Associate Press has been in Afghanistan for years, reporting the real story.

He is a far better journalist than Ms. Logan will ever be, he costs a whole lot less than the 60 Minutes crew does, and for two months, he gets a whole lot better product.

Here’s a small example of his work:

Compare this to the pure crap that 60 Minutes puts on the air – not to mention the propaganda feel of their ‘reporting’ and you will see why American journalism is in such serious trouble.

Lara, you looked great!

Google’s decision to pull out of China has provoked a mixed reaction across Twitter, the Blogoshere and in the mainstream media.

Some people are heralding Google’s decision as a brave response to China’s systematic censorship of the internet. Others, are applauding Google for finally sticking to their “Don’t be Evil” moto. The rest are saying that Google’s sudden about turn in their attitude towards China’s censorship policy has nothing to do with anyone’s, least of all Google’s, ethical conscience over China’s suppression of free speech, but that the decision is the result of hackers attacking google.

According to Wikileaks, the gossip inside Google is that is Chinese government hackers were found to be infiltrating Google’s source code repository. (The gmail attacks that a number of mainstream media outlets have comments on, are an old issue, says Wikileaks.) And that this was the real motivation behind Google’s pull out.

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.

A lack of funding has forced the controversial whistleblowing website Wikileaks off the web.

When I met a couple of members of the Wikileaks team when I was writing an article about them for Wired, they spoke about the difficulty of keeping up with the huge work load associated with processing all the content they receive for the site, and snuggling up to potential funders.

It seems that this conflict has caught up with them. The lasted tweet from the group read: “WikiLeaks will remain down to concentrate on fundraising until Mon Jan 11. We have $50k, We need $200k, min for the year.”

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