Assange and Aaronovitch: how much information is too much?

International man of mystery Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was at City University last night. He was taking part in a debate put on by Index on Censorship and the university’s department of journalism. The proposition: “Too much information? Security and censorship in the age of Wikileaks” was in fact a two-hander: Assange on one side and the Times columnist David Aaronovitch on the other, with broadcaster and Index’s chair Jonathan Dimbleby in the middle, ready with his crutches (a dodgy hip) if things got out of hand.

But the event was all about Assange, there to defend Wikileaks in general and in particular the leaking in the summer of thousands of documents detailing Nato’s action in Afghanistan. One student journalist in the audience wanted to know how Assange would feel if any Afghan citizens were killed as a result of something he published. Assange had already declined to go into details about how exactly the documents were checked to ensure no names of Afghans working with the Americans were left in the documents. He replied, for the umpteenth time that night, that the Pentagon had already made a statement last week to the effect that it had not been able to identify a single person who had been harmed as a result of the leaks. Although earlier, he had rather chillingly said: “I’m not scared to make mistakes or be blamed, or even accidentally cause harm in the cause of justice.”

Among the students and the world’s media in the packed lecture theatre, I recognised a few senior newspaper executives, although I only knew the names of two or three. They had been frowning and shaking their heads at this Australian upstart. He may have been dodging some of the questions—what about his internal staff discontent and leaks to Newsweek?—but at least he was willing to be questioned in the first place. And he couldn’t resist a dig: “The Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, none of them made any efforts to help us check the [leaked Afghanistan] documents.”

With his leather jacket and choppy, highlighted hair, Assange looked like the edgy one in a moderately successful indie band. David Aaronovitch, on the other hand, looked more like a slightly bemused, disappointed father—he had many reasoned arguments about the boundaries of privacy in an open democracy, but what he was really trying to say was: “OK, you’ve thrown all this stuff onto the net, you’ve stirred everyone up, you’ve got our attention, now show some responsibility.”

True to his adolescent spirit, Assange made comments like, “Privacy is a western luxury” and, in response to why he wasn’t applying the same demands of transparency to himself as he demanded of other organisations, “Transparency should be in proportion to power.”

At one point David A was forced to defend Rupert Murdoch against accusations from Assange that the Australian media mogul was set on world domination. But eventually the complexity of the debate seemed to get all too much for the Times columnist. “I’m so conflicted,” he wailed.