Paranoid, Anarchic... Is WikiLeaks Boss A Force For Good Or Chaos?
Just imagine that D-Day is only weeks away.
Months of secrecy and disinformation have succeeded in confusing the Germans about when or where the inevitable invasion will come.
Then an anarchist activist, insisting that in a democracy everyone has the right to know everything, publishes the secret plans for Operation Overlord.
Inconceivable then, but today that is precisely what WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, would do in a similar situation.
In the past, it has released documents relating to Swiss banks, the Church of Scientology, corruption in the Kenyan government, British climate change scientists and even a video taken by a U.S. Apache gunship as it machine-gunned civilians, including two journalists, in Iraq.
Assange - who describes himself as an 'information activist' - insists he is performing an important public duty.
And there is no doubt that WikiLeaks can help to expose dictators and keep democracies honest.
But as his fame and self belief grows, is Assange allowing his unreasoning hatred of authority to colour his approach to vitally important national security judgments?
He says that of the 90,000 documents released this week, WikiLeaks looked at only 2,000 of them.
If that's the case, then he couldn't possibly have known how much information which could endanger U.S. and British soldiers they contained.
Although Assange claims to be driven by the desire for freedom, his attitude - profoundly paranoid and politically anarchist - has more to do with his dysfunctional personal history than any political principle.
Born in Australia in 1971, to two peace activists who met at a demonstration against the Vietnam War, Assange had an unstable childhood.
He is variously reported as having been home schooled or having attended 35 different educational establishments, but there's no doubt that his mother, convinced that she was being stalked by a vengeful former lover, moved home constantly.
By the time Assange was 16, he had developed an obsession with computers.
He appears to have been part of an early group of hackers who named themselves International Subversives and broke into a series of U.S. computer networks including Nasa and the Department of Defence.
As a result, he was pursued by the Australian Federal Police.
Although the prosecution ended with a small fine, Assange had a breakdown and briefly checked himself into hospital. The lead investigator, Ken Day, said recently: 'I think he acted on the belief that everyone should know everything.'
At around this time Assange split up with his girlfriend, with whom he had a child, and then pursued a long and unsuccessful custody battle which further embittered him towards authority. By the end, his mother says, the strain had turned his hair from brown to white.
In the Nineties he founded Wiki-Leaks, a group whose organisation and technology owe more to the hi-tech security services it sees as its enemies than to the anarchist movement from which it springs.
It has no offices and no paid employees.
Key members - except for the increasingly high-profile Assange - are usually known by code letters. Anyone sending information to its website is directed to a computer in Sweden, then bounced to another internet server in Belgium, before the material is finally downloaded at other locations, a process designed to conceal the origin of the leaks from intelligence agencies.
All this computer expertise can also be used the other way round; the leaked U.S. military material was originally encrypted and had to be decoded over many months by Assange and other volunteer codebreakers.
Assange himself is convinced that he is under surveillance by U.S. spies, and won't travel to America for fear of arrest by the government.
He lives a bizarre peripatetic life, with no house and few belongings, moving in recent years between Tanzania, Belgium, Iceland, Sweden and many other countries, given lodging and help by like-minded activists.
His only luggage is a blue backpack containing mobile phones, computer hard drives and a large collection of socks.
But for all the otherworldliness of Assange and his disciples, he ruthlessly manipulates the conventional media that he claims to despise in order to obtain maximum publicity, carefully editing the video footage of the shooting by an American helicopter of Iraqi civilians to achieve maximum impact and choosing a title - Collateral Murder - which encouraged viewers to prejudge the material they saw.
His critics says he's motivated by a desire for personal publicity - he says his aim is 'maximum political impact'.
Assange's supporters invite comparison with the so-called Pentagon Papers in the early Seventies - exposing presidential double dealing on the Vietnam War - but those were published by the New York Times and the Washington Post only after careful consideration of the implications.
Assange, by contrast, makes no such ethical judgments.
Pressed on whether his actions risk harming the innocent - soldiers on active service for example - he says, in a scary echo of the kind of the language used by the military that he despises, that 'collateral damage' is inevitable, and concedes that WikiLeaks might end up with 'blood on our hands'.
Would we be so understanding about the activities of a man if he were exposing facts about a war that we all believed to be just - and not the moral and military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Also troubling is his essential hypocrisy.
Assange claims to believe in making available every piece of information about the military operations, to ensure that the powerful are accountable for their actions.
But he himself operates amid a cult of secrecy, with no accountability to anyone.
There is no doubt that the eccentric Assange has made himself a powerful force in the world today, but whether he is a force for good remains to be seen.
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Sources: CNN, Daily Mail, ITN News, RT News, Youtube, Google Maps
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