The Plot to Hack America

Assange again drew fire from U.S. officials after the release of approximately 250,000 diplomatic cables in November 2010. The White House called the release a “reckless and dangerous action.”¹³ Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to the leak as “an attack against the international community.”¹⁴ The international community and the American public were less sure of what to make of the one-time hacker who facilitated the mass leaks. The New York Times wrote, “The Russians seemed to take a special delight in tweaking Washington over its reaction to the leaks, suggesting that the Americans were being hypocritical.” Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticized the U.S. response. “You know, out in the countryside, we have a saying, ‘Someone else’s cow may moo, but yours should keep quiet,’” Putin said, using a Russian proverb The New York Times described as roughly equivalent to “the pot calling the kettle black.”¹⁵ Meanwhile, Assange won TIME’s reader’s choice for Person of the Year in 2010, but lost Person of the Year to Mark Zuckerberg.¹⁶

WikiLeaks worked with a number of media organizations during these leaks. As executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller wrote he “would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism” in an article in January 2011 detailing his dealings with Assange. Keller wrote, “We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda.”¹⁷ This was not the first time—and wouldn’t be the last time—the site’s founder would be accused of having an agenda. WikiLeaks sprang from Assange’s belief in scientific journalism, an idea he elaborated on in an interview with Raffi Khatchadourian, who was profiling Assange for The New Yorker: I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.¹⁸

Assange, however, over time he has strayed far away from the traditional journalistic principle of striving for objectivity, and instead has focused on the idea of justice. Khatchadourian writes, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.”¹⁹ Assange would later write in his 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks, “I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world, which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts. And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts.”²⁰

It is this very idea that has gotten WikiLeaks into hot water. The site and Assange have been criticized as openly having an agenda while claiming to be a journalistic enterprise. In his column for Slate, author Christopher Hitchens had critical words for the WikiLeaks founder: The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is “to end two wars,” one knows at once what he means by the “ending.” In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him.²¹

When WikiLeaks held off publication of the DNC emails until just before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks came under renewed criticism for having an agenda, for not being objective, and for straying from its original purpose: “It’s become something else,” John Wonderlich, executive director of the non-profit Sunlight Foundation, told TIME. “It’s not striving for objectivity. It’s more careless. When they publish information it appears to be in service of some specific goal, of retribution, at the expense of the individual.”²²