The WikiLeaks Bibliography exists because scholarship on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is, well, utterly horrendous. Indeed, the poor state of academic research on WikiLeaks is the reason I began researching WikiLeaks at all. I believed that this field needed an intervention, one that actually applied standards of empirical rigor and primary source analysis. Unfortunately, the academic work on WikiLeaks is so ubiquitously terrible that it will forever remain impossible to correct all the falsehoods and generally fallacious, disprovable arguments about WikiLeaks that have populated the pages of academic journals in the United States and around the world.
Yet it is useful to identify examples of particularly terrible scholarship on WikiLeaks and demonstrate not only why researchers should avoid taking those texts seriously but also to show why scholars should avoid conducting similarly flawed research.
Here, I will examine the flaws in Rianka Roy’s “Digital Dissent on WikiLeaks: Anonymous Whistleblowers in the Shadow of Julian Assange,” published in Glimpse 20 (2019): 125-133 (full text available here). I do not know Roy, nor have I read her other work. This commentary is not on her as a person, nor does it generalize about her scholarship as such. I simply argue that Roy’s argument in “Digital Dissent on WikiLeaks” reveals her obvious ignorance about Assange and WikiLeaks. I also argue that more than ignorance is at play, for Roy’s argument contains many contradictions, which appear only because she imposed her preconceived conclusions on the evidence rather than let the evidence lead her to a conclusion.
Importantly, my criticism of Roy’s article indicts not only her research on WikiLeaks but also the editors and peer reviewers at Glimpse and its parent organization Society for Phenomenology and Media. The paper was originally written for and presented at the 20th Annual International Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Media in 2018, the theme of which was “Global Media Literacy in the Digital Age.” As the conference call for papers explains, “Acceptance to an SPM conference is by a peer-review of the host committee,” and selected papers may be published in Glimpse. Additionally, editor Paul Majkut explains in the introduction to this volume of the journal that the essays “have been selected by a process of double-blind peer review.” Three reviewers narrowed the candidates for publication down to fifteen, and then those fifteen papers went through an additional review process. Roy’s paper, then, passed review for the conference and then again passed review to be published in the journal. Roy makes shoddy arguments about WikiLeaks, but her arguments were approved by other academics who share responsibility for allowing such insipid commentary to be published.
Every time an academic journal publishes abominable articles about WikiLeaks, the editors, the board, and the reviewers all ought to be embarrassed. Thus, my argument here is that, like the writing of Enrico Beltramini, Roy’s “Digital Dissent on WikiLeaks” stands as a representative case study on the unreliability of the current academic literature on WikiLeaks, a state of affairs that should alarm us all.
The first section identifies several red flags that any reader of scholarship on WikiLeaks ought to be vigilant against. The second section breaks down Roy’s primary argument and explains the scholarly contribution she seems to be attempted to make. Her three basic premises, however, do not withstand even cursory scrutiny. The third section tackles a few of Roy’s secondary “arguments” (I use the term loosely here), revealing them to be based on completely nonsensical assertions. In most places, links to online sources are provided, but a few academic sources are cited in the references at the end.
On Red Flags and Ideology: Spotting Bad Scholarship Even Before You Read It
Before one digs into Roy’s argument, the diligent reader can identify three red flags about the piece: its sourcing, its politics, and its academic-speak.
In the abstract, Roy states that the paper presents “a review of WikiLeaks,” but when we turn to the works cited list at the end of the article, we find that she fails to cite relevant primary sources written by Assange or other top personnel of WikiLeaks. To be sure, one citation is attributed to Assange, a November 2016 editorial explaining why WikiLeaks published emails from the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign during the US presidential election that year. (This piece was also published as “Why We Published What We Have on the US Elections” in Counterpunch.) However, this statement is cited only in the conclusions of Roy’s essay and establishes only the notion that WikiLeaks publishes intending to hold the powerful accountable, a point already established in the introduction through the citation of a secondary source. In other words, the sole citation to Assange’s own words does nothing to develop or advance the argument.
Roy also cites three statements from WikiLeaks’ website, which amount to brief “about us” passages from the organization. While Roy should be praised for doing the minimal work of visiting the website, this hardly constitutes academic research. Given that WikiLeaks has changed its “about” pages as it has evolved over the course of its history (see Fuchs 2011 and Lynch 2012 for examples), quoting such passages merely tell us how WikiLeaks conceives of its mission in that moment. This approach is lazy and hardly constitutes rigorous scholarship. Instead of using primary sources and history to contextualize WikiLeaks and its publications, Roy relies solely on secondary sources and presents fragments from WikiLeaks’ website as Universal Statements of what WikiLeaks is in its essence.
If the first red flag of the essay is its sourcing, the second red flag is its politics. A mere two paragraphs into the article, readers are subjected to Russiagate hysteria. “The subversive stance of the website initially aligned it with leftist ideology,” Roy says of WikiLeaks. “However, Donald Trump’s use of Hillary Clinton’s emails leaked on WikiLeaks proved the website to be a resource open to uses by any state, corporate, or individual entity.” This remark is the only direct mention of Russiagate and Trump in the essay (she will allude to this again in the conclusion), but Roy dutifully upholds her apparent obligation to parrot US security state propaganda. She positions the remark in the introduction to the essay so liberal readers will know her political position and so readers unaware will succumb to this rhetorical device.
So many problems here—where to begin? Like all Russiagate trashing of WikiLeaks, Roy’s comments are meant to suggest that WikiLeaks was part of some Trump-Putin conspiracy to undermine the 2016 US elections. More careful than over propagandists, Roy does not claim that Assange or WikiLeaks actively or knowingly “colluded” but says instead that Trump used WikiLeaks publications for his own purposes. On this view, we should shrug. So what? But Roy’s comment intends to do much more work, and it says more about her than it does about WikiLeaks. Roy says that WikiLeaks once appeared “aligned” with leftist politics, and she implies that this political orientation is a good thing. But WikiLeaks’ publication of Democratic Party emails shows, Roy laments, that WikiLeaks is a “resource open to uses” by actors of many political orientations.
The point here is important. Most Russiagate critics of WikiLeaks argue that WikiLeaks was once a mostly objective, impartial platform for whistleblowers but became partisan to right-wing causes during the 2016 election. Roy argues that WikiLeaks was left-wing but is now shown to be non-partisan in the context of the two major political parties in the US and beyond. Whether Roy is merely hedging on a deeper belief that WikiLeaks and Assange were or are Trump partisans is not clear. But her criticism contradicts the predominant Russiagate narrative. If she is correct, then mainstream Russiagate critics are wrong. But this substantive conflict is masked by the rhetorical purpose of bringing up Trump in the first place. In this context of her argument, there is no scholarly reason to bring up Trump and Russia. But by doing so, Roy simultaneously relies on and undermines Russiagate hysteria in a way that will go unnoticed by her readers, especially liberal US academics.
What’s more, Roy cites as evidence for the point an October 2016 article by Guardian Washington bureau chief David Smith. “How did WikiLeaks go from darling of the liberal left and scourge of American imperialism to apparent tool of Donald Trump’s divisive, incendiary presidential campaign?” asks Smith in the opening sentence. Ostensibly, the article is supposed to provide an answer, but the details of the piece are revealing. Smith quotes from “a former associate of Assange, who did not wish to be named,” who stated: “All the lefties were WikiLeaks softies. Now they are getting a different perspective. It’s obvious Julian Assange has lost his ability to be neutral.” This anonymous former associate is not clear: before 2016, was Assange a lefty or was he “neutral”? Was the “lefty” label Assange’s own adopted label, or was it imposed upon him and WikiLeaks because, at the time, their publications resonated with standard progressive politics in the west?
The puzzle of Assange’s political views is not and cannot be resolved by Roy because she doesn’t cite any of Assange’s original writings on the topic. The complete lack of primary source analysis hamstrings Roy’s entire analysis. It would be one thing if she cited some essays by Assange, demonstrating his political views, and then showed how his actions contradicted his expressed values. Instead, the contradiction is not between Assange’s statements and actions but between this nebulous “left-wing” political perspective and Assange’s publishing. Rather than pursuing a fascinating analysis of Assange’s theory of networked conspiracies in the context of the 2016 election, Roy’s argument—like the arguments of so many others—hinges on whether WikiLeaks behaves in a manner consistent with her ideology. This is not to say that Roy or anyone else cannot bring their values to bear in a criticism of WikiLeaks, but it is to say that we should not confuse her ideologically-motivated disappointment with WikiLeaks with some problem internal to Assange or WikiLeaks themselves.
Importantly, there are excellent commentaries on Assange’s politics that do use primary sources. In “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary,” political scientist Robert Manne, for instance, cites internal emails form WikiLeaks’ early years to show that Assange always wanted to avoid having WikiLeaks hitched to a left versus right political paradigm. To quote Manne—and Assange—at length:
It is obvious that by June 2007 several members of the Left had indeed gravitated to WikiLeaks. In Assange’s view, this group were thinking of publishing commentary on leaked documents in a way that allowed their political bias to show. He sent a different email to them: “OK, you guys need to keep the Progressive Commie Socialist agendas and rhetoric to yourselves or you’re going to go nowhere very, very fast. Now, now, don’t get your dander up: if I can pass by gross mis-characterizations of the existing world order as ‘capitalism’ or ‘white supremacy,’ you can stay calm and listen a minute.”
WikiLeaks was in danger, he argued, of being positioned either as a CIA front by John Young types or as a same-old left-wing outfit “preaching to the choir.” All partisanship would be lethal. WikiLeaks needed to keep itself open to whistleblowers of all stripes—even “conservative and religious types waking up to the fact that they’ve been taken for a ride.” “What you need to strive for is the same level of objectivity and analytical disinterest as the League of Women Voters. No, even higher. Else I’ll be so disheartened that I’ll lower myself to government contracting work.” This email is not only illuminating from the point of view of WikiLeaks’ grand strategy. It is also decisive as to his true political position. Assange might have been on the left of the spectrum by anarcho-capitalist cypherpunk standards but he was by no means a standard leftist. His politics were anti-establishment but genuinely beyond Left and Right.
Though Manne’s essay does not forever solve the question of Assange’s politics, it stands as an example of how quality analysis depends upon primary sources. Roy’s work completely lacks this virtue and, as a result, her arguments are superficial at best, deceptive at worst.
The third red flag—academic speak—also appears in the introduction to the essay. Roy cites Walter Benjamin’s famous 1940 piece titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin was an insightful critical theorist and, in my view, one of the few European philosophers of the twentieth-century still worth studying. Yet just as Roy deploys Russiagate as a rhetorical appeal to academic liberals, she uses Benjamin’s political theology to make her argument appear more sophisticated than it is. Roy argues that Assange is “a messianic figure: a vigilant warrior with an eschatological vision heralding the end of corruption.” She adds that “Assange is a chronicler who is both the redeemer and the vanquisher of the Antichrist and who saves men from becoming tools in the hands of the ruling classes.” Whether there is a grain of truth here is beside the point. Roy stated her intention to present readers with “a review of WikiLeaks,” and by the fourth paragraph, she is waxing theological on whistleblowing website.
Like Roy’s Russiagate comments, her mention of Benjamin comes up nowhere but the introduction of the essay, which suggests that it, too, is included for its purely rhetorical use, having nothing to do with the content of the argument itself. By demonstrating her “correct” political commitments and her erudition in the tradition of critical theory, Roy seems intent on distracting readers—most importantly all those peer reviewers who passed the essay—from the fact that she hadn’t really done any primary research Assange and WikiLeaks. (The pairing of Benjamin and Russiagate is problematic given that Benjamin’s entire philosophical project was designed to undermine the liberal politics that underpin Russiagate hysteria in the first place.)
The red flags apparently in Roy’s article represent the standard red flags of academic writing on WikiLeaks more generally. Most scholarship completely ignores relevant primary sources while resting the entire argument on the fact that WikiLeaks doesn’t affirm the author’s politics. The lackluster research and ideological trapping are then obfuscated by academic-speak and slights-of-hand in which the authors refer to texts that their colleagues will feel good about. In the process, familiarity triumphs over rigor and rubbish poses for research.
The Scholarly Intervention; or, What’s at Stake in the Argument?
Graduate students in the humanities are often taught to “sell” their research to editors and peer reviewers by establishing the stakes of their research contribution. The ideas is that if readers can understanding the importance of the research findings, they will be more likely to accept an article for publication. Insofar as academic publishing actually works this way, determining “importance” requires a series of value judgments, which betrays the idea that scholarly peer review is somehow objective or impartial. But this perspective can be helpful in assessing the value of scholarship on WikiLeaks, partly because it brings the implied, often (but not always) latent value judgments to the forefront and partly because it provides a heuristic for judging the novelty of the research.
Notwithstanding its red flags, Roy’s article does contain an argument and that argument is pitted against other scholarship, most centrally Pramod Nayar’s “WikiLeaks, the New Information Cultures, and Digital Parrhesia,” published in Economic and Political Weekly 25 (Dec. 2010): 27-30 (full text available here). Nayar argues that rather than think about free speech and its opponents in the digital age as individualistic phenomena, we should think about them as cultural or social phenomena. “To see Assange or Manning as individual heroes is to miss the point,” Nayar states. “Wikileaks cannot be identified just with an individual Julian Assange, even though he pops up as soon as one opens the website. Assange is a messenger, he is neither messiah nor the message. But, fortunately or unfortunately, he has become identified as the ‘face’ of WikiLeaks. However, to do this is to personalize-individualize what is really a cultural phenomenon.”
To make an arguments about what he calls “digital parrhesia,” Nayar draws upon Michel Foucault’s discussion of two ancient Greek concepts: the agora and parrhesia. Roughly stated, the agora is the public space where public discourse takes place. In modern times, we often talk about “town hall” meetings, and the agora is a similar concept. Likewise, parrhesia can be understood as free speech, with “free” meaning liberated from the established constraints of what is acceptable to believe. When someone speaks freely in the sense of parrhesia, they do not just say what is on their mind. They say what is on their mind in violation of widely-established custom. Though Nayan wanders into some academic-speak with this approach, it makes sense that he would use these ideas. After all, when he wrote his article, WikiLeaks was in the middle of publishing the Manning documents for the global public, sometimes without redactions. In other words, WikiLeaks was publishing information the public was not permitted to know in ways WikiLeaks was not permitted to disclose it.
Following Foucault, Nayan notes that parrhesia comes with a risk to the speaker, for to say what is not permitted by custom is to draw the ire of one’s contemporaries, especially those with power. Given the authoritarian reaction to WikiLeaks’ publication of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and State Department documents, it is quite reasonable to claim that WikiLeaks’ actions put it and Assange at great risk.
Roy’s essay stands as a direct counterargument to Nayan’s analysis. Though the article might have secondary purposes, its primary purpose is to debunk Nayan’s claims. “It is not possible, given the nature of global communications and the globalization of free speech, to think of a single truth-teller,” Nayan warns, “unless one were to, mistakenly, in my opinion, assign this status to Assange.” Yet this is exactly how Roy approaches the argument.
What is “at stake” in the debate, then, is how we ought to think about free public speech in the digital age. Do anonymous whistleblowers actually speak, or do their surrogates, like Assange, do all the speaking? Nayan defends the former view; Roy defends the latter view. The question is interesting, and I believe that some compelling argument can be made for the latter view, but Roy fails to make such an argument.
The first premise of Roy’s argument is that to speak freely in a public forum—that is, to perform parrhesia in the agora—the speaker must not be anonymous. In the context of WikiLeaks, she claims that Assange appropriates the speech of the whistleblowers who disclose documents for himself, becoming the sole speaker in the WikiLeaks system. “Assange is a surrogate parrhesiastes [truth-speaker] speaking on behalf of anonymous whistleblowers, yet he emerges as the primary representative of truth, so that his identity becomes a brand,” Roy argues. “Assange’s identity overshadows actual whistleblowers as he appropriates their voices and enforces organizational principles on them.”
The second premise of Roy’s argument is that whistleblower anonymity is not merely incidental to WikiLeaks’ encrypted whistleblowing system but that WikiLeaks is intentionally designed to impose restrictions on the freedom or free speech of whistleblowers. “Anonymity is not a condition of whistleblowing, but for whistleblowers on WikiLeaks it is,” Roy observes. “WikiLeaks does not give contributors the choice to reveal their identities even if they wish to. In the noble—and patronizing—act of keeping its contributors anonymous and safe from prosecution, WikiLeaks robs whistleblowers of their due recognition.”
The third premise of Roy’s argument is that Assange uses whistleblower anonymity to aggrandize himself, both socially and monetarily, at the expense of whistleblowers, those who truly deserve credit. “Assange’s assertion of his identity is founded upon the forced anonymity of whistleblowers,” Roy insists. “He takes the credit for assembling the information, while the actual whistleblowers have no choice to reveal their identities. It is disturbingly evident in the blog posts and articles published on WikiLeaks that Assange turns himself into a towering figure in the world of secrets without acknowledging the contribution of whistleblowers.”
“Assange’s claim that he protects whistleblowers,” Roy concludes at the end of the article, “is misleading. He simply casts the shadow of anonymity on them and basks in reflected glory.”
Roy’s argument is only as strong as her premises, so if we can show that they do not hold up—and they do not—then the argument collapses. Let’s take them in reverse order.
Premise three about Assange benefitting at the expense of anonymous whistleblowers is simply absurd. Assange has been the victim of egregious privacy violations, subjected to the equivalent of psychological torture, and even been considered for extraordinary rendition or assassination by the US government. Not only has the media ignored Assange’s persecution, they also helped draw the lines that got him into this situation and even allowed the treatment to happen despite knowing about it in real time. Likewise, we see what happens when WikiLeaks’s sources are discovered. Both times the US government imprisoned Chelsea Manning, critics stated that the conditions to which she was subjected were cruel and unusual if not torturous. As if this was not all bad enough, we could also list all the whistleblowers prosecuted under the Obama and Trump administrations alike. And all of this is only in the US!
The idea that Assange benefits by stealing prestige from whistleblowers cannot be maintained by any reasonable standard. If Assange were not the lightening rod for repressive regimes like the US government, then we would have dozes, perhaps hundreds, more whistleblowers being tortured, persecuted, imprisoned, and otherwise subjected to brutal treatment by state powers.
Premise two is almost absurd as premise three, and there are two relevant points. First, it is empirically false that WikiLeaks can actually prohibit whistleblowers from revealing their identities. WikiLeaks’ sources are often unknown to Assange and other WikiLeaks personnel, and they obviously have no legal, contractual obligation to remain anonymous. Manning revealed her identity in a chatroom, at the cost of a lengthy, brutal pre- and post-trial incarceration. Roy admits that Edward Snowden chose a venue other than WikiLeaks to blow the whistle (she claims “he spared himself the fate of oblivion and anonymity” where most people would say he took a principled stand at significant risk to his own well being). And as recorded in Andy Greenberg’s This Machine Kills Secrets and Philip Di Salvo’s Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in Journalism, WikiLeaks has inspired numerous other organizations with encrypted whistleblowing systems. Thus, WikiLeaks cannot prevent their own sources from disclosing their identities, nor can they prevent sources from going to alternative publishers, including anonymous whistleblowing websites. Assange has no such control over whistleblowers.
Second, premise two is problematic because it assumes that whistleblowers seek “due recognition” rather than protection. This point is of utmost importance, for protecting sources from government and corporate retaliation is one of the central principles of journalism ethics, and WikiLeaks is designed to do this better than any other outlet. Indeed, WikiLeaks has a better record of source protection than The Intercept and the New York Times. In this context, Roy is not only making absurd claims about Assange. She is also arguing, in essence, that WikiLeaks ought not protect it sources, a claim I doubt she would make in regard to traditional or corporate news media. Given these problems, premise two is, like premise three, untenable.
Finally, premise one—that speech is not truly free if it is anonymous—is the most interesting claim of the argument. In fact, it is basically the only one of any original scholarly merit. One possible line of argument would be to reject Nayan and Roy’s framing of the discussion and argue that whistleblowing is not best understood as an act of parrhesia. After all, when whistleblowers provide documentary evidence of wrongdoing, as Snowden and Manning did, their act of disclosing documents is not speech. They might provide justification for their actions, as Snowden sought to do with his original interview in the Guardian, but it is not clear that collecting documents and handing them to journalists using any kind of process, anonymous or not, is speech proper.
This line if reasoning is also quite consistent with what Assange says in When Google Met WikiLeaks, where he argues that WikiLeaks does not verify sources but rather they verify that documents are authentic. In Assange’s view, who disclosed the documents is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether the documents reveal government, corporate, or military wrongdoing. Interestingly, we can use Foucault against Roy’s use of Foucault. In the essay, “What is an Author?” Foucault asks: what does it matter who is speaking? In the context of WikiLeaks, what does it matter who submit the documents? If the documents are real and newsworthy, they should be published.
It is however more interesting to interrogate the idea that identification is required for speech to be considered free. Identification would have been important for the ancient Greeks because they would have been speaking in person in the agora. To commit an act of parrhesia in that context would have been to violate custom to the faces of those who enforce custom. But modern communication technologies have changed everything The printing press: when someone in the nineteenth century published an anonymous pamphlet, were they not speaking freely? The internet: when someone posts anonymously to Reddit or some other online forum, are they not speaking freely?
The anonymity afforded by modern communication technologies does not undermine the freedom inherent in parrhesia, but it does reduce the risk inherent in parrhesia. This is the key distinction. Parrhesia comes with risk for the speaker, and anonymity reducing that risk or, in the case of WikiLeaks, shifts the risk away from the speaker (whistleblower) to Assange (publisher). Given modern state power has significantly increased risk for dissenters who engage in parrhesia, anonymity re-balances the risk equation in speaking outside custom. This is why in When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange says that anonymous whistleblowing channels lower the “courage threshold.” If courage is about understanding and managing risk, as Assange argues, then the anonymity afforded by WikiLeaks enables rather than oppresses whistleblowers. Thus, WikiLeaks makes speech-as-whistleblowing more free, not less.
As we can see, then, there is an argument at the core of Roy’s paper, though it is not a very good argument. In response to Nayar’s analysis of digital parrhesia, Roy argues that Assange personally benefits at the expense of whistleblowers who are denied their freedom and their recognition. The evidence however suggests that this view is not only naive, it is patently false. Modern repressive regimes hunt down whistleblowers with a vengeance, and in building WikiLeaks, Assange discovered one way to protect whistleblowers from retaliation. In doing so, however, he put himself in harms way, and he now stands as the victim of more than a decade of persecution.
Roy argues that Assange uses WikiLeaks to abolish the individualism of whistleblowers while simultaneously buttressing his own individualism and lining his own pockets. But the premises supporting this argument collapse under any level scrutiny. What’s more, even Assange’s commentary on crediting whistleblowers disproves Roy’s unfounded claims.
In a December 2010 interview with Al Jazeera, Assange said: “It’s not that we go asking for material form the United States. Rather, it is people within the United States, good people, dissenters in the United States, come forward and they give us the material. We are source driven. We can only publish what people are giving us.” Asked if WikiLeaks ever pays its sources, Assange replies: “No. We have no philosophical objection to paying. Why should journalists and lawyers be the only ones to be compensated for their risks, when actually it is the source who is taking the greatest risk? It is simply that we are being overwhelmed with the amount of material that courageous whistleblowers are giving to us, so we are not at the stage where that extra incentive needs to be given. But we have no absolutely no philosophical objection to that.”
We get quite a different impression of Assange and WikiLeaks when we consult the primary sources, a picture difficult reconcile with Roy’s claims.
Hegemony, WikiLeaks, and the United States: What’s a Website to an Empire?
Having distilled the primary argument in Roy’s article and noted the serious issues with her premises, we can attend to the secondary argument in the article and comment on its own problems and contradictions. Roy claims that two things have made WikiLeaks popular, or “relatable to the masses,” as she puts it: first, its partnership with newspapers like El País, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and New York Times, and second, “the status of Assange as a hero persecuted for unmasking the state and its corporate allies.”
Tackling the first reason: WikiLeaks’ partnership with more traditional newspapers certainly helped Assange amplify the stories found in the Manning documents, but this partnership was a double-edged sword. After WikiLeaks has a falling out with The Guardian and New York Times, these papers decided to distance themselves from WikiLeaks and even to attack Assange personally. One relatively neutral interpretation is that differences in philosophical outlook caused the partnerships to collapse. For their own part, The Guardian and New York Times accused Assange of improprieties and blamed him for the partnership disintegrating. For Assange’s part, he argues that The Guardian and New York Times were content to throw him under the bus once they had what the needed from him (the documents) and that the papers were mostly concerned about being targeted by their respective governments. Regardless of how we understanding the falling out, the fact remains that Assange has been incarcerated for over a decade, with his physical and mental health deteriorating, while not one person from The Guardian or New York Times has been punished or even pursued by governments and intelligence agencies.
Roy also misinterprets the importance of WikiLeaks’ partnerships with the newspapers. While WikiLeaks may have gained some legitimacy with publics who hold more mainstream understandings of journalism, the majority of those who support Assange and WikiLeaks today come from publics who believe WikiLeaks to me more credible than mainstream news media. Indeed, for many, WikiLeaks’ credibility stems precisely from mainstream news media attacks on Assange and WikiLeaks. Against Roy’s curious claims, it would be more accurate to say that how publics perceive creditability determines how they interpret the WikiLeaks/NYT/Guardian conflict. Publics who trust traditional news media will trust WikiLeaks only insofar as WikiLeaks’ credibility is validated by outlets like The Guardian and New York Times. Publics who remain more skeptical of traditional news media trust WikiLeaks partly because traditional news media seem to hate Assange and therefore relentlessly attack him.
Tackling the second reason: if many view Assange as a persecuted hero, that’s because he has been persecuted for a decade. If governments and corporate news would have left him alone, he wouldn’t be persecuted. I have already documented the extensive evidence of Assange’s persecution above, but it is worth noting that—on the day I wrote and published this essay—Assange had been imprisoned in Belmarsh for 1,000 days just to serve serving a 350-day sentence for skipping bail in 2012. The UK government claims that Assange has to be held in prison (not jail, and not even regular prison, but an extremely brutal, high-security prison) during his extradition hearings. Assange published documents, and he is persecuted. US government and military officials committed and covered up war crimes, and not one person has been punished or held accountable.
WikiLeaks’ publications are no different than what traditional news media publish, a fact admitted by those media outlets themselves. Even the Guardian, a paper that seems to hate Assange, has opposed his persecution him over and over and over on the grounds that the US persecution of Assange threatens all journalism.
When the New York Times publishes a series of articles based on “the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties,” why is no one sent to prison? Some argue that it is because the Times reported on the documents without publishing the documents themselves. Counterexample: When the Washington Post publishes the “Afghanistan Papers,” with the full documents made public, why is no one is sent to prison? Some argue that it is because they redacted “sensitive” information. But WikiLeaks has, contrary to popular belief, made redactions on many of its publications, including the Iraq War Logs, the initially-published State Department cables, and the Vault 7 publications. But even if WikiLeaks had redacted nothing, certainly such trivial matter cannot be grounds for persecution or prosecution.
Well, Roy does not grapple with any of these complex questions. Instead, she deploys a one-two combo of ad hominem and red herring: Assange “faces charges of rape, not of parrhesia,” she claims. Importantly, Roy provides no citations and does not even discuss this matter beyond those seven words. She simply drops the word “rape” into the narrative and moves on, which demonstrates the utter lack of seriousness in her argument. Notwithstanding the fact that the US government is charging Assange with unapproved speech—seeking to indict him under one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and seventeen violations of the Espionage Act—Roy makes no attempt to untangle the complex history of the so-called “Sweden sex crimes” story. To do so would require actual research, the organization of evidence, and the construction of an argument. Instead, Roy ignores the complicated details already laid out by Jonathan Cook, Andrew Fowler, and even Assange himself. Again, Roy’s argument is less scholarly than it is lazy, relying instead on rhetoric and (most problematically) fallacies to do the work for her.
Astonishingly, Roy strings together all manner of nonsense to support her claim that Assange benefits from being persecuted rather than suffers from it. The financial blockade of WikiLeaks, trapping Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, and even Obama’s decision to commute Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence are all presented as evidence that Assange benefits from persecution.
This final item is mind-boggling. Roy notes that Assange offered to turn himself in to the US government if Obama granted Manning clemency. The US government did not grant her clemency. They prosecuted her, imprisoned her for seven years, and then commuted her sentence. Roy complains that Assange did not turn himself in when Manning’s sentence was commuted. But why would he? Assange turning himself in was not a condition of the commutation, and it would have gained nothing. Besides, clemency before trial and combination after seven years of imprisonment are not the same thing! Again, there is no analysis of primary sources, no evaluation of evidence based on reporting, and no citations outside one article from the Guardian. To be sure, it is possible that a fascinating analysis could be made of Assange’s supposed attempt to appropriate Manning’s suffering for his own benefit, but Roy fails to provide such an analysis. Instead, she makes unsupported assertions and moves on.
Ultimately, we come to what is perhaps the most absurd argument in Roy’s paper: the claim that WikiLeaks is no different than the power-hungry, bureaucratic controls machines that are corporations and authoritarian and imperial governments. On this point, it is worth quoting Roy at length. In the conclusion, she writes:
“By means of absolute control over its technical resources, WikiLeaks reclaims digital space from governments and corporations but does not entirely transfer the power to individual citizens whom it claims to represent. It constructs an alternative digital space, a territory of subversion, a borderless utopia of dissent in response to the dystopic surveillance of state and corporations. Nevertheless, it embodies the same principles of control, surveillance, and hegemony.”
Absolutely ludicrous. If WikiLeaks had been able to establish any kind of hegemony, Assange would not be suffering from ten years of incarceration. It is also unclear how WikiLeaks is able to surveil anything. Roy says that “WikiLeaks makes its contributors agents of surveillance,” but this statement equivocates on the power relations involved. Certainly no whistleblower has the same power of surveillance as the NSA, which can collect and read nearly every email sent all over the world, among other powers. Had Roy done any research, she would have found that the field of surveillance studies distinguishes between surveillance (watching from above) and sousveillance (watching from below) to account for the power difference in the actors’ positionality. It is not a stretch to apply the notion of sousveillance to WikiLeaks, for scholars have already done this (see Fuchs 2011; Andrejevic 2014; Mortesen 2014). Certainly it was too much for Roy to conduct any research on this point, and it was too much for her reviewers to demand it of her.
Regarding the claim that WikiLeaks imposes any kind of “control,” we can look at two issues. First, I have already shown that WikiLeaks is unable to control what whistleblowers do, debunking Roy’s asinine insistence to the contrary. Second, there is the contention that WikiLeaks seeks to impose total control over the information passed to it by whistleblowers. As evidence for this claim, Roy again turns to WikiLeaks’ partnership with newspapers like The Guardian and New York Times, citing the conflict between Assange and the papers as establishing WikiLeaks’ control mania.
First, there is the very fact of conflict, which is blamed entirely on Assange, all without evidence offered. Second, Roy says that the newspapers published reports on all 92,000 Afghanistan War Diary documents while WikiLeaks published only 76,911 documents. There are no words to describe how stupid this is. The Guardian and New York Times did not publish 92,000 documents, and WikiLeaks held back documents at the request of those papers!
Third, Roy notes that WikiLeaks published only a handful of State Department cables before journalists from the Guardian revealed the password to the encrypted file containing the entire set of cables in their book. Astonishingly, Roy gets this fact right. Appallingly, she uses this fact to criticize WikiLeaks. Any reasonable observer would see that the problem in this case is the ineptitude of the Guardian journalists, and any reasonable observer would note that WikiLeaks commonly and falsely blamed for publishing all the cables. But not Roy. Instead, she concludes that “The entire turn of events demonstrates that WikiLeaks seeks to maintain a monopoly on information capital with stipulations on what to publish, how much to publish, and when to publish their acquired material.” Wow.
Thus, we have the WikiLeaks Catch-22, a basic principle for those who hate Assange. In the standard narrative, WikiLeaks deserves blame for “dumping” the State Department cables online without regard for the safety of innocent people. In Roy’s narrative, the factual error is corrected but WikiLeaks still deserves blame for ostensibly desiring supreme control over their documents. The whole argument reveals that it does not matter what WikiLeaks does or does not do—those who hate WikiLeaks and Assange will blast them for anything they can, even it if means twisting facts, distorting truths, and outright lying.
I have noted a few ways in which Roy’s narrative diverges from the standard narratives about WikiLeaks, and yet she still ends up condemning Assange. I have no problem with commentators having various criticisms of WikiLeaks, but that is not what is going on here. Instead, Roy is simply finding a new way to attack WikiLeaks for Russiagate. Everything comes full circle! All of this talk about Assange “controlling” information is mere set up for one of Roy’s concluding remarks: “Indeed, the organization has given whistleblowers a platform to reveal disturbing secrets about state and corporate affairs, but it maintains its monopolistic hold on the method of dissemination of what it identifies as ‘public information.’”
As anyone familiar with WikiLeaks will know—and this point has already been made here—WikiLeaks does not verify sources but verifies the authenticity of documents. In fact, concern about the “sources” of WikiLeaks’ publications was almost nonexistent until after the 2016 election and the publication of the DNC and Clinton emails. US liberals demanded to know where WikiLeaks got the documents because the US government had claimed that hackers directed by the Russian government had stolen the emails and sent them to WikiLeaks, all in an effort to hurt Clinton’s campaign and help Trump get elected. As always, Assange stood by the principle “WikiLeaks does not reveal its sources,” they very principle Assange has used to protect every single whistleblower in WikiLeaks’ fifteen year history, including Manning, who confessed her actions in a chatroom. It was even reported that the Trump administration offered Assange a pardon if he agreed to reveal his sources and say that Russia was not the source of the DNC and Clinton emails, and Assange refused—to his own determinant.
This is not difficult, people. WikiLeaks accepted leaked documents and publishes them in full whenever possible. They often do not know who the source is, and that is by design. The source can remain anonymous—and therefore protected from backlash—and not even Assange can bargain with a source’s identify for his own benefit. WikiLeaks’ has a perfect record of publishing authentic documents and a perfect record of protecting the identity of it sources. It has also received more award for its journalism that any existing publisher in the world. It’s that simple.
Yet Roy exerts much effort to make WikiLeaks out to be no different—nay, more dangerous—than the greedy, exploitative corporations who control international economics, the violent, unaccountable militaries that slaughter subaltern humans en masse, and the cynical, manipulative politicians who coordinate to conceal such economic and military harm behind a facade of “democracy.” WikiLeaks did not kill a million Iraqis, as the Pentagon has done. WikiLeaks did not enable the Pentagon, as the New York Times has done. And WikiLeaks did not profit from war, as US corporations and political parties have done. And yet WikiLeaks is the object of Roy’s attacks. With all the real injustice in the world, one would think that a scholar like Roy would have better things to do than join the cacophony of vituperations hurled daily at Assange. But then again, what better way to secure tenure than by publishing articles condemning a victim of human rights abuses?
Conclusion
There are very interesting philosophical debates to be had about WikiLeaks, but they won’t be found in Roy’s essay. Instead, readers are presented with politically motivated rumors, fallacious claims, and easily debunked premises. She conducted almost no real research beyond reading Nayan’s article, and her response to Nayan is only superficial at best. Of course, Roy was encouraged to write and publish this awful article by the editors, reviewers, and conference organizers, who apparently lack the requisite qualifications to properly evaluate research on WikiLeaks. In the end, readers get only a thinly veiled Russiagate attack on WikiLeaks. Hardly the kind of work suited for academic publication.
In his introduction to this volume, Glimpse editor Majkut says that Roy’s essay is an example of “socio-econo-political” research in media studies, describing her article as “bring[ing] discussion of media literacy back to earth in [her] discussion of WikiLeaks and the significance of anonymous whistleblowers made possible by Julian Assange.” Back to earth. Significance of anonymous whistleblowers made possible by Julian Assange. Did he even read the article?
The supreme paradox of terrible scholarship is that it takes more work to disprove bullshit than it takes to write bullshit. This essay is, after all, longer than Roy’s article, and I did not even get a chance to address all the problems with it. The unfortunate state of scholarship on WikiLeaks should worry us all, for there is no established expertise on this topic. Roy’s work passed several rounds of peer review, but her peers are apparently just as ignorant about WikiLeaks as her article suggests that she is. Thankfully, as of this publication, Google Scholar indicates that no one has cited this article. Let’s keep it that way.
Bibliography
Andrejevic, Mark. WikiLeaks, Surveillance, and Transparency. International Journal of Communication, 8 (2014): 2619-2630.
Di Salvo, Philip. Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in Journalism: Encrypting Leaks. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Fuchs, Christian. “WikiLeaks: Power 2.0? Surveillance 2.0? Criticism 2.0? Alternative Media 2.0? A Political-Economic Analysis.” Global Media Journal: Australian Edition, 5.1 (2011). http://archive.fo/8s73J
Greenberg, Andy. This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information. New York: Dutton, 2012.
Lynch, Lisa. “‘That’s Not Leaking, It’s Pure Editorial’” Wikileaks, Scientific Journalism, and Journalistic Expertise.” Canadian Journal of Media Studies (2012): 40-69.
Mortensen, Mette. “Who is Surveilling Whom? Negotiations of Surveillance and Sousveillance in Relation to WikiLeaks’ Release of the Gun Camera Tape Collateral Murder.” Photographies, 7.1 (2014): 23-27.
“Scholarly” by cogdogblog is licensed under CC BY 2.0.