Can it get any worse for Wikileaks?

As the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange begins his second and final day of a hearing over allegations of rape and sexual assault, you begin to wonder if it will ever end.

You don't know if you should pity the guy after going through one scandal after another, or wonder if he's finally got his comeuppance. It may be quite an inevitable outcome that a person who chooses to go against such forces as the US air force, will not easily come out on top. After thousands of classified documents were published on the Wikileaks website the federal government warned millions of its employees to refrain from reading them, as they still remained classified. This may be a hard task to dodge as they had been published in newspapers such as The Guardian and New York Times. Even families of employees who access the website from a home computer may be subject to prosecution for espionage. Obviously, someone’s got something to hide hear.

When trying to establish what Wikileaks was actually about I found this quote from their website explaining. 'Wikileaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists. We publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices.'

When leaks were posted on live internet it seemed newspapers didn't know how to handle a story of its kind. Many were more fascinated by how Wikileaks had managed to pull off this hi-tech hack rather than what was actually discovered. The most recent leak was 251,287 United States embassy cables. The documents showed an insight into the US governments foreign activities, which until this day have been highly confidential.

The invasion of privacy did cause Assange immediate (and possibly the wrong sort of) fame. After all, maybe Wikileaks may not have been such a big success if it was not such a scandal. Even bad publicity is still publicity. Its hard to define whether he is a man we can be grateful too for providing us with information we may never have even known, or just another shady criminal.