“Never let the bastards grind you down,” Julian Assange told me after I published something that elicited the usual wrath of warmongering neocons. “Outlast.”

In that moment, I understood that if anyone could actually survive the insurmountable odds of being targeted as enemy number one by the most powerful people in the most powerful government on the planet, it was Julian. Always businesslike, laser-focused on the issues and fighting for a better, more peaceful world.

Before it became nearly impossible to communicate with him, we did so online, on a regular basis. It was always about work. As journalists, we’re constantly looking for historical context to fully flesh out any acute event, because nothing ever happens in a vacuum, or just out of the blue without any run-up. And that’s where WikiLeaks and its database of diplomatic cables, emails, and other raw data was a goldmine.

Virtually any event, from the Western-backed wars in Syria and Libya to Hillary Clinton’s victory over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries was more easily understood as the result of backdoor shenanigans laid out in exchanges between relevant parties and published in searchable WikiLeaks databases. And our media audience was wiser for it.

Julian’s vision of journalism as a science, driven by raw data, is ideal for transparency, and a nightmare for those who thrive in the shadows and depend on the average citizen not knowing about things to which they’d most likely object. When journalistic ambition runs up against state secrets, far too often subjected to abusive classification to hide wrongdoing, it sets public accountability efforts on a collision course with the government itself, with the journalist caught in the middle. Until WikiLeaks came along in the rise of the independent online publishing era of the mid-00s, government officials could at least pressure mainstream newspaper........

© RT.com