My greatest congratulations go out to the England cricket team for winning the second test in Australia. It is a huge achievement, and I couldn’t stop grinning yesterday. However, today I want to write about more weighty, if no more important, issues.

I have been thinking about Wikkileaks, among other things. For a while, I couldn’t decide what to think, which is why I haven’t blogged on the subject earlier. I could see the point of those who claim that releasing certain information to the public could be dangerous. But then I asked myself: what is the public? Why should some people be privy to information and others not? Go we not all have a right to know what is going on in our world, and what our governments are doing? Why should some information be hidden from us? Thus I see what Julian Assange is doing as a huge public service: it is clear that we are being kept in the dark on issues which we, the public, have a right to know about. His arrest, on whatever trumped up charge, is a clear act of censorship and a sign that our governments want to hide things from us.

The Americans want to extradite him, apparently, but as far as I can tell he has committed no crime. The only crime committed was by the man who stole the documents fro the army – putting them on the web was not a criminal offence, so to seek to punish Assange for doing so amounts to no more than an act of repression. Therefore this all boils down to an issue of the freedom of speech and the right to tell others things we think they have a right to know. Assange clearly thought we have a right to know what the governments of the world were up to, so for such governments to want to silence him – even going as far as calling for his execution as some have done – is an act of despotism. Indeed, it is the first link in a chain which would bind us all irrevocably. I would therefore urge to care about our liberties to speak out on this subject.