Mal Fletcher considers issues of regulation, repression, activism and anarchy

Mal Fletcher

There is doubtless an important and wide-ranging debate to be had about the relationship between governance and transparency in the age of almost ubiquitous digital media.

Liberal democracies, for example, while preaching transparency struggle more than ever in the digital age to balance public accountability with diplomatic discretion.

Diplomacy, so long practiced behind closed doors, now depends upon digital communications technologies. Yet these are the very tools which make it susceptible to intense outside scrutiny, not all of which is desirable and some of which may even be potentially dangerous.

While members of government have become as reliant as the rest of us on hi-tech gadgetry, the ubiquity of digital tools and their propensity for being hacked represents a threat to the ability of government institutions to keep secrets. In the world of realpolitik, keeping secrets is an important part of diplomacy and security - and not all secrets are bad secrets.

However, such a debate, whenever it takes place, must not be allowed to centre around the interests only of specific individuals.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, the part of the internet that makes it useful to we mere mortals as opposed to tech boffins, tweeted from the stage at the opening of London's Olympics: 'This is for everyone'. He referred to the Games, of course, but this was also a nod also to the medium he popularized.

The internet is for and about everyone.

This, it appears, may not have occurred to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and self-proclaimed activist for internet freedoms. He seems perfectly happy to have debates about internet freedoms centre around himself and his somewhat erratic behaviour.

In the process, he poses a potential threat, at least where some governments are concerned, to the very medium he uses to promote his brand of reform.

When the Messenger Hurts the Medium

Listening on Sunday to Mr Assange's speech from a low-level balcony at the Ecuadorean embassy here in London, I was immediately struck by two things.

First, by how readily he conflates the interests of WikiLeaks with his own. In his mind, it seems, the group he leads is synonymous with himself; his interests are the group's interests.

Then, in his rush to denounce any challenge to his own essential nobility and the self-evident rightness of his cause, he misrepresented the cause of his present troubles. He apparently sincerely believes that they provide evidence of a vast conspiracy to silence his lone, reformist voice.

His short speech featured demands that the USA abandon its persecution of WikiLeaks and the "whistleblowers" who have fed the group documents for publication.