'Whistleblowing is not a free-for-all'

Edward Lucas, a real journalist unlike Julian Assange, explains why 'whistleblowing' is not a free-for-all, risk free enterprise.

"Whistleblowing is not a free-for-all. Ethical guidelines govern leaking information you have promised to keep secret. You must exhaust other avenues first and ensure that innocent people are not damaged by your disclosures. Assange broke those rules."

Read Edward's full article via the link below to The Times.

  

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/julian-assange-does-not-deserve-our-sympathy-csdpjkb9f


Julian Assange does not deserve our sympathy

By Edward Lucas - The Times

I gladly broke Soviet Union’s laws but history will judge Wikileaks’ anti-western nihilism harshly


The man in an ill-fitting suit had finished questioning me. “You have broken the laws of the Soviet Union,” he explained grimly. “You are being deported. You will never be allowed to return.” I was escorted from the KGB headquarters to the railway station, and put on the next train out of the country.

I was no stranger to detention and other hassles in communist countries. But this time I was particularly relieved. In the 1950s those who tried to cross the Soviet border illegally risked being shot as spies. Until the mid-1980s, I could have expected at least a prison term. But it was 1990 and the evil empire had lost its nerve. Keeping me locked up would be too much hassle.

I worried about it all again much later, when I was applying for a US visa. Applicants have to declare if they have ever been arrested for anything. A truthful account of my past would, I suspected, complicate things, so I sought advice. “Leave all that out,” a friendly official said. “An arrest implies the rule of law — when a dictatorship detains you, that’s kidnapping.”


Julian Assange’s defenders take a similar approach to the American, British and Swedish legal systems that have now ensnared him. Wikileaks broke laws only to expose wrongdoing. Hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy in London was their hero’s only escape from a show trial. Since the Ecuadorean authorities lost patience with their eccentric guest, his supporters are fuming. A staffer (“journalist” would be putting it too strongly) at the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik decried the “violent arrest” of a “political prisoner”. The defector Edward Snowden tweeted from Moscow that the actions of the British “secret police” were a “dark moment for press freedom”.

People based in Russia clearly have plenty of benchmarks from which to make such judgments. Moreover plain-clothes (not “secret”) police are a normal feature of any criminal justice system. They necessarily use force (not “violence”) when people resist arrest, as Assange did. He was not a prisoner, let alone a political one. He chose to hide in the embassy rather than explain to prosecutors the behaviour that caused two Swedish women to complain of sexual assault.

Yet the bigger question is motivation. I broke the Kremlin’s laws by entering Lithuania, which had just declared the restoration of its independence under the noses of its Soviet occupiers. Bravura bluff by Lithuanian officials got me through the airport. The stunt was for them a way of attracting attention to their struggle for freedom, and for my newspaper a striking example of the way in which the Soviet empire was crumbling. On other occasions I was detained for covering events that the authorities wanted to hush up. Given the chance, I would do it all again. Like most journalists, my sympathies are instinctively with the underdog. Uncovering uncomfortable truths is our way of redressing life’s unfairness.

So I used to sympathise with Wikileaks. I liked the idea of a cyberspace refuge for whistleblowers wanting to expose corporate, or government, wrongdoing. Secrecy — of both the commercial and state varieties — is invoked far too often to cover things up, rather than to protect necessary confidentiality.

But the more I found out about Assange, the less I liked him or his organisation. At one meeting, he dismissed Afghans who had helped the international forces and the Afghan government as “collaborators”. The US, in short, is evil. Engage with it at your own risk. Wikileaks did expose some shocking misdeeds. But most of its revelations concerned mild (and legitimate) hypocrisy, not wrongdoing. The leaked US diplomatic cables, for example, showed US diplomats to be commendably insightful and expressive in private, belying their bland outward appearance.

@edwardlucas