I've been trying to decide which sort of book the Wikileaks case is like. The story of Julian Assange himself, as brilliantly told in The New Yorker by Raffi Khatchadourian, with its protagonist's exotic name and his unearthly appearance (like a replicant version of Julian Sands); his itinerant education, self-taught to be a genius-level cryptographer; his helpers including an Icelandic MP dressed in a short black skirt and a 'black T shirt with skulls printed on it' and a Dutch 'activist, hacker and businessman' called Rop Gonggrijp; his 'end-point machines' maintained in an undisclosed location by 'exceptionally secretive engineers' with Wikileaks communications passing through a pipeline which 'is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network [whatever that is. SF], which sends Internet traffic through 'virtual tunnels' that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time Wikileaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents'; this is just pure Thomas Pynchon.
On the other hand, at least in this version, Assange's legal travails in Sweden are like the missing fourth Stieg Larsson novel.
And on a third hand, the part of the story where Sarah Palin and William Kristol call for Assange to be hunted down like a dog, isn't really a book at all. It's more like a straight-to-video movie starring someone like Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme.
And as I write, Assange is about to appear before a British court. What kind of book is that going to be?
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