Assange is no Solzhenitsyn, or Liu

If there is one thing in this world that I don't want, it is to have all my telephone conversations recorded and transcribed and divulged by WikiLeaks to the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, the Washington Post and the Winnipeg Free Press, all of which could then publish in excruciating detail every embarrassing word that has been exchanged in my private and professional life.

It is not because there are any particularly juicy details available. In fact, I can see the headlines now: "FP editorial writer boring, WikiLeaks shows;" "Oleson's wife yawns on phone; children don't return calls," and other news to that effect. There's no news there, no journalism, but it is the kind of thing that WikiLeaks, in its massive dumping of classified United States government documents on the media, has mostly produced. There is the occasional nugget of news, but there is an awful lot of panning that has to be done by the real journalists before all the sand is sorted out.

If there is one lesson that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taught the rest of the world, aside from the fact that Swedish laws against rape are extraordinarily complicated, it is that if you want your life to stay private in these modern techno-times, you either have to stay way ahead of the curve or way behind it. Either use technology so primitive that nobody bothers to monitor it anymore, such as Canada Post or phones with dials and cranks on them, or so advanced that no one can keep up with it, but unless you are TechnoKid, there's not much chance of doing that. The newest communications gear you can buy is probably already outdated when you get it.

Diplomats used to be confident their diplomatic cables would remain confidential, and they were usually right in their assurance. That was in the days when confidential information was exchanged by post or by wire -- even in those primitive days, the telephone was considered risky. Occasionally, the odd dispatch would go astray and wind up in a brown paper envelope on some journalist's desk, the victim of a disgruntled clerk or a civil servant with a particularly buzzing bee in her bonnet, but most confidence was kept unless it suited a government's purpose to break it.

There can be no confidence in confidential any more. Now, because of Assange's splurting out of secret cables, there is a huge cyber-war going on, with governments attacking his Internet launching sites and his supporters attacking the Internet sites of organizations they think are co-operating with the enemy.

The only losers are we users.

It is the media at work, say Assange's brainless backers, it is freedom of expression. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. "Media" and "freedom of expression" are words and terms that once meant something real and definable and important. They meant things worth suffering and even dying for. You can look at the works of the martyrs themselves for proof of that. Former Soviet dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn endured years of torture and suffering in the Gulag Archipelago because they asked for the right to speak and write what they believed. In Canada, we don't always lock up our dissidents, but journalists Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant spent thousands of dollars defending their right to criticize in public and in print some aspects of Muslim behaviour.

More immediately, the Nobel Peace Prize was handed out this week to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Mr. Liu was not in attendance, and neither were the Chinese government and 18 other regimes that hang on to the Beijing dictatorship because they value technology and trade more than they value freedom of the press and freedom of expression.

Mr. Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence in China for publicly asking that China accept and acknowledge the right of the Chinese people to speak and vote freely. His prize was placed in his empty chair beside the podium in a gesture that speaks louder about "media" and "freedom of expression" than WikiLeaks' turning on the tap of diplomatic confidential cables can ever do.

Assange's spewing of information is uninformed and largely pointless. He is making mischief rather than creating or directing policy. WikiLeaks is not media in the sense that it is an information provider and filter, what we usually consider a medium of communication to be. It is just a gutter pipe through which some items of value may flow and be found, put in context and reported by real journalists. The rest is just garbage drowning us all in useless facts.

The fink-link might as well release my recorded telephone conversations (I admit in advance to swearing on the phone, but only at subscribers). It would be just as useful journalism.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 11, 2010 A20