Why WikiLeaks Won’t Make It From Here to There

Whether you agree or disagree with what WikiLeaks is up to these days, from an organizational perspective the group has a whiff of failure about it. Strangely enough, the champion of decentralized leaks to expose the world’s secrets seems too centralized around one person—Julian Assange—to be a lasting player once Assange is out of the picture.

WikiLeaks has explained where it’s trying to go:

Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.

So how is Assange undermining this purpose? For an organization as controversial and dangerous as WikiLeaks to really last, its long-term aspirations can’t be dependent on a single person. Yet if you believe the New York Times (de facto WikiLeaks ally), Assange’s behavior makes it all about him. He’s the face of the organization, the guy who says he likes crushing the bastards, who lives undercover and constantly under threat of arrest or worse. And a thorough look at Assange's essays makes it pretty clear that the WikiLeaks founder has his own agenda, one that extends much farther than just exposing important secrets. He wants to make it impossible for governments or pieces of governments (Assange calls these conspiracies) to function by providing a constant torrent of leaks that prevent them from doing anything in secrecy.

It is pretty hard to build a lasting organization with inconsistent sets of goals—one for the organization and a different one that applies to the founder. It’s especially crazy to try to build an organization in a danger zone based on the egotism and indispensable role of one person. Why? Big-time inconsistency makes it almost impossible to build up another generation of senior leaders—those sharing the same vision—who are capable of stepping in if the founder disappears or is simply unavailable.

If the New York Times’ John Burns is to be believed, there have been a whole bunch of former WikiLeaks supporters and volunteers who have given up because they find Assange to be increasingly radical, too authoritarian, and too unstable in his behavior. (Assange responded to Burns by calling the questions about him “cretinous,” “facile” and reminiscent of kindergarten.)

Under Assange, WikiLeaks seems to be jabbing its finger in the eye of anyone it can expose through secret information. Voila, instant enemies! And while its information infrastructure is apparently strong and decentralized, the organization itself isn’t.