Julian Assange and human rights of us all

Julian Assange, c 2006
Source: Wikipedia

So it happened - the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, has been officially arrested.

He has been effectively imprisoned since 2012, for over 6 years, as he was avoiding arrest and prosecution on a variety of charges by hiding in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. The charges ranged from a sexual assault charge in Sweden to espionage/electronic hacking charges in the US. The sexual assault charge including a set of allegations that had kept changing and for which evidence was scant to non-existent. They eventually petered out and the Swedish police eventually dropped them altogether and annulled the arrest warrant resulting from it. Not sure what to make of this but this scenario seems to follow the same pattern many frame-up scenarios followed, including baseless rape allegations on the basis of which a number of Black men had been lynched in the US in the days of Jim Crow.

The hacking/espionage line of prosecution centers around the leak provided by Chelsea Manning, a transgender American soldier who worked as an intelligence analyst and who leaked the information about excessive use of force - essentially, war crimes - committed by the US occupation troops in Iraq. That created a massive backlash to the war effort and also demonstrated the power of a global information exchange powered by the Internet.

It is understandable that the US authorities at the time were unhappy with Assange and sought to penalize him. It is understandable that this push still persists - even though the DNC leaks published by WikiLeaks to a large degree had propelled Donald Trump to Presidency. And while Hillary Clinton is unironically calling for Assange's prosecution the fact that he is being prosecuted for obtaining, allegedly illegally, US government classified documents while she is not being prosecuted for exposing, due to utter incompetence at best, the bulk of the State Department's sensitive documents to the whole world through essentially unprotected illegal personal email server, indicates clearly that Assange's prosecution is selective, arbitrary and capricious.

Regardless of the above, what is this truly about? Is it about justice, war, crime, corruption? Absolutely. But here is the most important message those behind the prosecution campaign against Assange most likely mean to send: if you are a citizen investigator obtaining original evidence of state crimes you are not safe, no matter where you go and no matter how well know you are. And that is why if you are in favor of human rights, of which freedom of expression is a pinnacle, you have an obligation to oppose this - regardless of your view of Assange as a person or of immediate effects of any of the WikiLeaks exposures. For the state that gets to keep all its secrets, even those which are evidence of crime, has little in the way of going fully dictatorial.

On the technical side, we need to go distributed and develop the capability to better protect people who find themselves in the same position as Manning and Assange in the future. The technology, best I can tell, is indeed moving in that direction. But for now the world's eyes are on Assange - and it needs to stay this way for this is one of the key events playing out, with truly global, and long-lasting, implications.

Sources

Assange's arrest was designed to make sure he didn't press a mysterious panic button he said would bring dire consequences for Ecuador
Alexandra Ma, Business Insider, 13 April 2019

Julian Assange (Wiki)

Chelsea Manning (Wiki)

WikiLeaks

Florida House Issues Apology for 1949 Lynchings and Wrongful Convictions
Death Penalty Information Center

Hillary Clinton: 'Julian Assange must answer for what he has done' – video
The Guardian, 12 April 2019

The Truth About Hillary Clinton's Email Controversy (YouTube)
Stefan Molyneux, 3 February 2016