Max Raymond

You might read the headline and think why the hell I’ve chosen to write about this subject, especially when there’s so many things about the Afghanistan war logs I could also talk about. Well, for starters, everything that has been said about it has been said about it and I don’t feel like I can really add anything. It also beats blogging about the film Inception (hint: it’s amazing but I can’t blog about it because it would be hard to avoid spoilers).

So, here we are then discussing Julian Assange, the man who is the ‘editor-in-chief’ and founder of a website – Wikileaks – that has finally broken into the conscious of the mainstream after bubbling under it for so long. Assange’s background is as a computer hacker in his native Australia and he pleaded guilty to 24 charges in Australian court in the 90s. He was released on bond for good conduct after a fine of AD$2100. Now, he is at the heart of what is one of the biggest leaks of US military information ever and a champion for freedom of information. He’s a Web 2.0 activist with direct and blunt views about the media and politics.

Yet, he also seems like an awkward and complex character.

Don’t get me wrong, he strikes me as a very intelligent man but at the same time I can’t help but think that he can be quite cold at the best of times. In nearly all of the interviews that I’ve seen him give and at the press conference at the Frontline Club earlier today he comes across as a person who doesn’t try to be too much of a show-off, too much of a person who likes to make big claims and, quite frankly, too much of a person who is not as inspiring as you would expect someone of his position to be. For an activist, he is very restrained and he comes across as quite tense.

Even when he was on The Colbert Report earlier this year (sorry Brits/possibly rest of the world, I think this can only be seen by US people) concerning the footage that Wikileaks released of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike, despite the best attempts of Stephen Colbert to make him less tense, he still wasn’t completely comfortable. Sure, he got a couple of smirks and some genuine laughter out of him but Assange is a man who quite clearly doesn’t want to waste time nor does he want to play up to anyone and be all friendly-friendly. He goes on TV shows, conferences and whatever else he does to do one thing: get the facts out as directly and as clearly as possible.

It’ll be interesting if this news event, which has made him almost an internationally known individual overnight, changes his character or his attitude. Only time will tell.