Over at the Legal Satyricon, Charles Platt is a little annoyed at Julian Assange over the whole Wikileaks business:
I’m getting an uneasy feeling when I watch Julian Assange using pretentious phrases such as “my philosophy” and “my work.” … It’s the same feeling I had when I saw the World Trade Center going down. A feeling that I am watching a golden opportunity for people in power to take away some of my freedoms.
That wasn’t exactly my first thought when I saw the towers fall, but I know what he means. This is going to be an excuse for some people in government. Oh, they’ll say they’re all for freedom of the press, they just want to make sure it’s used responsibly, not abused by people who aren’t legitimate members of the press.
Assange’s self-righteous crusade is sufficiently defiant, and is being done in such a pompous style, some kind of retaliation seems inevitable. Already the UN is on record as wanting to “harmonize” efforts to regulate the Internet, in response to Wikileaks. (See this news item.)
Oh God, the last thing we need is U.N. involvement. Those are the folks who put Lybia in charge of the Human Rights commission and recently decided not to concern themselves that some countries were executing people for being gay.
I am old enough to remember how publishers got rid of US laws regarding pornography. They fought a carefully executed, incremental campaign. Freedoms tend to be won this way, slowly but relentlessly, in small steps. Media whores who make grand gestures are not useful in this process. They just provide more fuel for backlash.
Look, I’m not a huge fan of Julian Assange, either. He comes across like a self-important jerk. But when you fight for free speech rights, you often fight for the free speech rights of self-important jerks–pornographers, gangsta rappers, foul-mouthed comedians, primadonna rock stars, racists, Fred Phelps. They’re the kinds of people that everybody wants to shut up. Nice people, the ones with accomplishments and values you admire, are a lot less likely to set some would-be censor on a clean-up crusade.
(There are, of course, exceptions. Even non-controversial people can run into campus political correctness or bizarre commercial speech laws.)
We enjoy freedoms online because resourceful groups such as ACLU and EFF fought and won test cases. How unfortunate it would be to see those freedoms squashed because of a prima-donna whose “philosophy” and “work” have been of negligible value so far. It’s important to remember that he is really just another content aggregator, and the material that he has revealed has not been of critical significance. Certainly not important enough to justify a battle that we are likely to lose.
The things WikiLeaks has revealed may not be “important enough to justify a battle that we are likely to lose” (although this is pretty awful), but that’s the sort of evaluation that would have been useful before they started dumping documents. Now that Assange has made his move, for better or worse, we’re in the battle, and we have to fight it or we certainly will lose.
(We all serve in our own way. Guys like Marc Randazza become First-Amendment lawyers, and guys like me just bitch about it to anyone who will listen.)
The other thing to remember is that this is how we want it to be. If we’re fighting the forces of government censorship over really important issues, then we’ve already let them get too far. It’s like defending a country against invasion: You want to stop the enemy at the borders, not in the heartland. We want the battles for free speech to occur at the fringes, and that means defending people like Julian Assange.
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