ABSTRACT
WikiLeaks serves as a neutral entity that will save the public and free the world through information. He predicted that corrupt political orders would fall as the threat of exposure forces the collapse of their conspiratorial communication networks. Early in his time as a public intellectual, Assange proclaimed transparency’s power in two distinct tones. During the first bloom of his celebrity, Assange would frequently portray WikiLeaks as a conventional, journalistic endeavour to make major public institutions, especially governments, more visible to the public. Liberals have never fully embraced Assange’s occasional claims that WikiLeaks served as an agent of liberal reform. The more tech-friendly elements of the transparency movement, which view information technology as the best means to correct the public bureaucratic tendency to hoard information, were at best ambivalent about WikiLeaks’s technological innovations. Mainstream transparency advocates have proven even more circumspect.
