"It's going to be a testing time for honesty over hypocrisy and the rule of law now that Julian Assange is detained in custody awaiting extradition proceedings to Sweden with a possible rival bid lodged by the US, where prosecutors are scratching their heads for some way of being able to charge him for the damage they say he's done.
Whatever excesses WikiLeaks may have committed, the US government must not follow authoritarian regimes like China or Iran in the covert use of cyber-attacks to curb its activities. Freedom of speech is never an unqualified right, but if the US wants to act it should do so openly via the law.
The US has never been an easy place to keep too much secret for long – remember how the Reagan administration's illegal sale of weapons to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras was exposed? – which is why the 9/11 conspiracy theorists have been wasting their time. So whatever has been going on will probably surface in due course. Fortunately the Obama administration has been pretty level-headed so far, leaving the "hang 'em high" nonsense to the Republican right, plus Joe Lieberman. In any case, whatever Assange did, he didn't do it on US soil, so they will have a problem with any extradition proceedings which look overtly political.
Are officials who shared their thoughts with US diplomats in repressive societies now being hunted down? Unlike the fate of Julian Assange, that is one thing we are unlikely ever to learn. Will the glorious freedoms the internet both provides and enhances be better entrenched or weakened as a result?
That we will discover. What we know already is that the internet is like the proverbially priceless Ming vase being carried across a slippery floor."
For the complete report: WikiLeaks and Assange arrest a testing time for rule of law | Michael White | Politics | guardian.co.uk
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