Wikileaks founder Julian Asange

The Daily Beast reports: “Anxious that Wikileaks may be on the verge of publishing a batch of secret State Department cables, investigators are desperately searching for founder Julian Assange. Philip Shenon reports. Plus, Daniel Ellsberg tells The Daily Beast: “Assange is in Some Danger.”

Wikileaks has turned out to be The Test Case when it comes to whether the world Wide Web trumps any single national government’s attempts to halt the flow of information.

Julian Assange’s case highlights the fact that while activism may have gone digital, people are still human and vulnerable, especially when consolidating this kind of content down to a single person. On the one hand, Assange may want to take the “publish or perish” axiom literally. Should he throw all these alleged documents online ASAP, his personal safety risk would likely drop as the U.S. government shifts into damage control mode. On the other hand, you can’t get much better hype than this type of Tom Clancy prose in a news article.

Should he publish (my bias: hell yes he should), it would immediatley illustrate the NSA’s ability to take a website down. Wikileaks servers may be listed as being in Sweden, but they are in fact in far more locations. Could the United Stated effectively block an internationally mirrored website from being accessed around the world? It would be interesting to find out.

Still, the fact that the U.S. with its vast intelligence aparatus is claiming to be looking for Julian is also interesting. Assange is not hiding in a cave somewhere in the Pakistani/Afghan border region, he travels around and maintians a speaking schedule it seems. A few weeks ago he was in the U.S. Likely, Australia’s stripping Julian of his passport may have been somewhat of a blow as, you know, you can track someone who gets it stamped.

Classified information has a shelf life, and there’s something rather un-wiki-like in the idea that it’s really just one guy deciding what goes up and what doesn’t. Another route would be to disperse the publication of content outside of Wikileaks’ domains. Doing so would drastically complicate the matter of taking them offline. Though it may not include the branding Wikileaks wants to go with it.

It was just a few months ago that WikiLeaks published classified video of a US military helicopter killing civilians, and it would never have been seen by as many people if scads of those who downloaded it hadn’t retransmitted the footage via social video sites. That event turned the U.S. defense department’s eyes to Julian.

That video is reported to have been originally leaked by a Pentagon analyst named Bradley Manning who may have provided Wikileaks with a further  260,000 classified documents following a period of awakening after being stationed in Iraq and seeing what the United States government was responsible for there.

AntiWar.com writes “Assange was still in Australia as of last week, when he failed to attend a New York conference on the advice of his lawyer. Where he is since then is anyone’s guess, but the military seems to be feverishly trying to find out.”

The Committee hopes that wherever he is, he’s finding ways to disseminate his collection of documents — those obtained from Manning and elsewhere — to a wider group of people to process and post from international locations under a variety of methods. The sooner these enter the echo chamber of the web, with its myriad redundancies and multiple forms of archiving and syndication tools, the better. So long as they remain in the hands of the few (or a few more than before, as the case may be) there’s a much greater chance that they disappear back into the vaults. That would be a real tragedy.