Since its inception in 2006, Wikileaks has been a vitally important news organisation.
As founder Julian Assange fights for his life and freedom, Al Jazeera English interviewed me about his case:
“It’s an invaluable resource that remains utterly essential to understand how power works, not just US power, but global power,” Antony Loewenstein, an independent Australian journalist and author, said of the Wikileaks archive.
“I always quote and detail [Wikileaks’s] work on a range of issues from the drug war, to Israel/Palestine, to the US war on terror, to Afghanistan,” Loewenstein said, noting that Wikileaks also published materials on Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“It’s just an incredible historical resource,” he said.
Loewenstein’s most recent book, the Palestine Laboratory, explores Israel’s role in spreading mass surveillance around the world, another issue Loewenstein notes, that Assange often spoke about.
“One thing that Julian has often said, and he’s correct, is that the internet is on the one hand an incredibly powerful information tool… but it’s also the biggest mass surveillance tool ever designed in history,” said Loewenstein.
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For Loewenstein, pursuing Assange would set “an incredibly dangerous precedent at a time where in so many countries freedom of the press is under attack”.
“This is not by any means a defence of Biden, I’ve been critical of him for 20 years, but a second Trump term would be a real acceleration of that authoritarian turn, including against the press and journalists and freedom of information,” Loewenstein added.
Read the whole article: ‘Bring Julian home’: the Australian campaign to free Assange | Julian Assange News | Al Jazeera