I share many common misgivings about the way WikiLeaks' has conducted itself. But as far as I can tell, that Mr Assange and his colleagues aspire to some sort of crazy post-national crypto-utopia is a pernicious canard. Rather, the silver couch-surfer's political philosophy appears some sort of mundane, mainstream democratic liberalism. He thinks that the legitimate exercise of state power requires what liberal political theorists call "public justification". What is so startling about the reception to WikiLeaks' latest release of documents is that it has revealed that boring old liberal theories of political legitimacy strike a lot of people as too dangerous to even contemplate. 

I think old Immanuel Kant was perhaps a bit too sunny when he said this:

A maxim which I cannot divulge without defeating my own purpose must be kept secret if it is to succeed; and, if I cannot publicly avow it without inevitably exciting universal opposition to my project, the necessary and universal opposition which can be forseen a priori is due only to the injustice with which the maxim threatens everyone.

I doubt even self-evidently unjust policies (or strategems or maxims or wars) ever excite anything near "universal oppostion". But Mr Kant is right, as is Mr Assange, that ongoing injustice tends to require secrecy. He is right, as is Mr Assange, that injustice made public is thereby at least somewhat threatened. And he is therefore right, as is Mr Assange, that policies (or strategems or maxims or wars) that survive the test of thoroughgoing publicity are least likely unjust. Liberalism was once a radical, revolutionary philosophy, but it has become hard to believe it. What is most intriguing about the WikiLeaks saga is not the pathology of hacker culture as envisioned by Mr Sterling's fecund imagination, but the possibility that Julian Assange and his confederates have made dull liberal principles seem once again sexily subversive by exposing power's reactionary panic when a few people with a practical bent actually bother to take them seriously.