We need to talk about WikiLeaks

“There is no US election. There is power consolidation. Rigged primary,  rigged media and rigged ‘pied piper’ candidate drive consolidation.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like Donald Trump, in between getting booed for attacking Hillary Cinton at a Catholic fundraising dinner and announcing he’ll accept the election result if he wins. But no, that tweet comes from none other than the truth crusaders WikiLeaks, whose mission statement defends its actions by arguing: “Publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people.”

Though an ostensibly noble goal, WikiLeaks’ recent behaviour shows a tendency not to improve society, but to subvert the democratic principles on which our societies rely.

There is no US election. There is power consolidation. Rigged primary, rigged media and rigged ‘pied piper’ candidate drive consolidation.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 21, 2016

In the past twelve hours since tweeting that denunciation of the American democratic process, Wikileaks has released the fourteenth instalment of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked e-mails. Its current pinned tweet promotes a Reddit post detailing a conspiracy theory that purports to link Hillary Clinton to the accusations of paedophilia against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange himself (who is still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid being extradited to Sweden where he faces charges of rape and sexual assault), has had his internet cut this week, with Ecuador announcing it has concerns about him interfering with the US election.

WikiLeaks has always had a fraught relationship with the US. It was the release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of American diplomatic cables that skyrocketed the self-described “not-for-profit media organisation” into international headlines. Julian Assange’s argument for refusing to appear in a Swedish court to defend himself against the rape charges is that he fears being extradited to the US, where he says he could face being tried for treason and share the fate of whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. So it is unsurprising that the majority of WikiLeaks attention at the moment seems to be focussed on the US.

What is deeply worrying, however, is the efforts the WikiLeaks team is putting into derailing the presidential election. The assault agains the Democratic party has been relentless. Aside from the Clinton campaign, WikiLeaks published the hacked e-mails of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year (which led to DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz being forced to resign), and the organisation tweeted yesterday that it had “a suprise [sic] in store” for Democratic VP candidate Tim Kaine and interim DNC chair Donna Brazile. No such attacks have been made on the Republican party.

While WikiLeaks is an international organisation and Julian Assange himself is Australian, there is clear evidence that Russian hackers are behind the cyber-breaches suffered by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Given Moscow’s history of cyber espionage, it is not inconceivable that the Russian government is involved. Supporters of the (arguably admirable) WikiLeaks mission may try to deny it, but WikiLeaks is effectively helping foreign powers to sway the US election.

You don’t have to like Clinton, or the Democrats, or even America to realise that this is a truly terrifying prospect.