Julian Assange Will Leave Embassy 'Soon'

What Has Julian Assange's WikiLeaks Achieved?

Updated: 1:22pm UK, Monday 18 August 2014

By Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent

Four years ago, WikiLeaks was the future of whistleblowing and perhaps even journalism - a new era in transparency and accountability.

The Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, supplied by Chelsea Manning and published by WikiLeaks, dominated the news.

US Vice President Joe Biden called the website's founder Julian Assange "a terrorist".

Even before Mr Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, WikiLeaks had grown quiet, though, offering fewer agenda-setting scoops and, instead, more esoteric revelations.

'Trade in Services Agreement - Financial Services Annex', anyone?

It still aimed for large-scale leaks, but it disappointed.

Last year, it released 1.7 million diplomatic and intelligence papers. From the 1970s.

WikiLeaks' Twitter feed - thought to be run by Mr Assange - also became unhinged.

It ranted when The Guardian chose Malala Yousafzai as its person of the year to suit the newspaper's "pro-war" agenda.

It also said that the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi were justified by UK's police presence outside the Ecuadorian embassy. 

In the meantime, another whistleblower has found more notoriety - and had more impact - than Mr Assange ever did.

Edward Snowden may also be holed up under the protection of a foreign government, but he continues to shape the news agenda.

Like Mr Assange, he also worked with mainstream media organisations like The Guardian and the New York Times. 

If WikiLeaks was about "exploiting the scale, reach and immunity afforded by the network of the internet", as Charlie Beckett has written, Mr Snowden went either one step forwards or backwards.

Backwards, because he worked with newspapers, just like an old-fashioned whistleblower.

Forwards, because thanks to his technical prowess, he was able to make off with millions of documents - information on the network scale - and, thanks to a pretty savvy manipulation of modern communications tools, he continues to influence events remotely.

Essentially, he played the same role as Chelsea Manning, but has managed to control the story a lot better.

Mr Snowden didn't need WikiLeaks to help with any of that, which must aggrieve Mr Assange. 

Even if Mr Assange does leave the embassy, it probably won't mean the rejuvenation of WikiLeaks. The story has moved on and it hasn't.

But its influence is still considerable.

Every news organisation now has their own take on WikiLeaks' dead drop boxes for electronic documents.

And the power of gathering vast troves of information, then using sophisticated search and tagging techniques to comb them, has become part of journalism. 

While Mr Assange spent two years watching box sets of The Twilight Zone and The West Wing, others have been getting on with WikiLeaks' stated aim: "To bring important news and information to the public."

And they've been using the techniques pioneered by WikiLeaks to do it.

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