(by Dennis Tyhacz)

Julian Assange, the polarizing leader behind WikiLeaks, has managed to establish himself as a global news crusader in just four years.

Whether you consider Assange to be a hero for continually leaking classified information and exposing injustices, or merely a villain who should be behind bars, certain important outcomes of the WikiLeaks crusade can’t be denied.

His organization has already forced governments around the globe to re-examine how they process their classified information, and WikiLeaks may soon  pave the way for a “new standard” in online news gathering in the future.

At the end of the day, all news – print, television, internet, is derived from information. The general public isn’t privy to all of the information out there, and it’s up to journalists and members of the media to sift through and report it.  The WikiLeaks phenomenon has raised important questions about the divulging of such information, which (despite what his detractors might say), Julian Assange deserves some credit for.  What justifies a person (or group) having classified information? Who should have access to this information?  Why hasn’t the mainstream media reported on any of this information previously? What are the actual consequences of various classified information “leaking” – if any at all?  Lastly, a big question that Washington and several politicians might want to ask themselves is:  What proof is there that WikiLeaks has done any harm to the general public by releasing this information?

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won the Amnesty Award in the UK back in 2009 for an article on police murders in Kenya, and they won plenty of recognition globally for releasing sensitive information on a number of international affairs. They leaked information on a Peru oil scandal in 2008, a nuclear accident in Iran, a toxic dumping in Africa detailed in a document called The Minton Report. The list goes on and on.   It wasn’t until WikiLeaks released a video called “Collateral Damage” in April 2010, that the general US public and the US mainstream media turned their heads around and started inquiring as to what this organization was all about.

Since then, some powerful GOP critics in the United States have declared they want Julian Assange hunted down, even assassinated.   The increased public and private government scrutiny this past year has come at no small cost to WikiLeaks.  It’s been constantly walking a tightrope of business issues that threaten it’s very existence. There’s been thousands of server attacks by unknown parties, PayPal and Amazon have dropped their online support, and then there’s the personal safety issue.   Assange has also received hundreds of death threats, not only to him directly, but to his lawyers and his children.   Most recently, adding even more mystery to the already bizarre mix of events, rape charges have come to light by a prosecutor in Sweden concerning a girl’s claims that Assange assaulted her in August .   Whether Assange will be forced to step down as WikiLeaks’ public face due to this controversy, or continue acting as the chairman and fight the charges, remains to be seen.

Another major accomplishment by WikiLeaks is that it has presented information that’s uncut, un-scripted, un-edited, directly from anonymous sources. The front-line information isn’t sanitized to suit an entertainment format for the viewer.   Whether the news content is good, bad or even downright ugly, the ability to receive such news is the backbone of democracy as we know it. (Thomas Jefferson took this concept even a step further, when he famously commented: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”)

Surprisingly, despite the loudest members of the GOP in the US condemning WikiLeaks, Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul has come forward in support of Julian Assange, saying “In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.”   It’s a shame the rest of Assange’s conservative critics in Washington can’t hear Paul’s reasoning through the ruckus.

What’s at stake with the WikiLeaks phenomenon is not only First Amendment/Freedom of the Press issues, but international internet freedom most of the world takes for granted.   Will the Obama administration grant Julian Assange and WikiLeaks the ability to operate under the international guidelines of journalist protections?   Or will it continually attempt to publically strip away these protections under a false pretense of police-state-style-censorship that calls into question the very basis and laws of our democracy? The US public and the world wants to know, and until then we can only count on, and hope for more WikiLeaks.   With over 504 backup WikiLeaks sites currently online to safeguard against server attacks, it’s safe to say the tide of WikiLeaks have only just begun to rise.