Ramona Koval: A London court is considering whether Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, should be extradited to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations, allegations he denies.

Lawyers for the 39-year-old Australian have told the court that their client would be denied justice if he is extradited and tried for rape in Sweden. They also fear he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay and face the death penalty if he is then extradited from Sweden to the US on charges of illegally obtaining secret US diplomatic cables.

Julian Assange gained international notoriety last November when his whistle-blowing website released hundreds of thousands of sensitive and secret cables to the world's most respected newspapers.

On Friday in a pre-recorded video message of a public forum in Melbourne, Julian Assange described Wikileaks as a generational challenge. Here's an excerpt of that address:

Julian Assange: For the internet generation this is our challenge and this is our time. We support a cause that is no more radical a proposition than that the citizenry has a right to scrutinise the state. The state has asserted its authority by surveilling, monitoring and regimenting all of us, all the while hiding behind cloaks of security and opaqueness. Surely it was only a matter of time before citizens pushed back and we asserted our rights. With your help and support we will make our way through this storm.

We have been deeply moved by the concern that Australians have shown for us. There has been outrageous and illegal calls to have me and my staff killed, clear cases of incitement to violence, yet the Australian government has condoned this behaviour by its diplomatic silence. Julia Gillard should be taking active steps to bring me home and to protect our people. She should be contacting the US embassy and demanding that it back off.

Ramona Koval: Julian Assange in a pre-recorded message at a Liberty Victoria forum in Melbourne last Friday.

One member of the Norwegian Parliament has already nominated Wikileaks for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, although the Sydney Peace Foundation has already announced it's honouring Julian Assange with a gold medal. Yet despite the accolades there's no doubt that whistle-blowing has taken a somewhat negative turn.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who had a falling out with Julian Assange, says the bad press is because whistleblowers don't have control over the secrets they want to spill. So he's announced Open Leaks, a new online platform that will allow sources to choose who they want to submit documents to anonymously. Its aim, he says, is to make whistle-blowing safer and more widespread through transparency and decentralisation.

So are we in the midst of a revolution in journalism? And what are the implications for journalists in the wake of Wikileaks and now Open Leaks?

Australian author, journalist and filmmaker, John Pilger is a vocal supporter of Wikileaks and of Julian Assange. You might remember last year he was one of several high profile people who offered a surety to secure bail for him.

John Pilger is in our Sydney studio and joins me now. Welcome to The Book Show John.

John Pilger: Good morning Ramona.

Ramona Koval: This extradition hearing in London is about allegations of sexual assault, but Assange also faces possible indictment for treason by a US grand jury. There are those in the US administration who believe that he should be charged with espionage, that he is not in fact a journalist, that the dissemination of raw classified data isn't reporting and he is more of a source than a journalist and therefore in the US he wouldn't be protected under the Constitution's First Amendment. That seems to be the tactic. So is Julian Assange in your view a journalist or a source?

John Pilger: He is a journalist, he is both a journalist and a source, he is as much a journalist as I am, and I've been a source as well, so he's as much a source as I am. What he isn't is an American, so how can he be a traitor? And how can he be charged with espionage? There is a grotesque absurdity about what's going on in the United States because the only thing that they've been able to dig up is a First World War piece of legislation called the Espionage Act which was used against conscientious objectors I think, dissenters during the First World War, and in fact only ever secured one or two convictions long ago.

They've since been trying to invent a law, a sort of conspiracy law to charge Julian Assange with if they can get their hands on him. In fact he's done absolutely nothing in terms of Wikileaks that has contravened any law in the United States. I asked the assistant secretary of defence, Bryan Whitman, in the Pentagon last year did he believe in whistle-blowing, and he said, 'Absolutely, we have a constitutional amendment that protects whistleblowers.' Well, then why are you pursuing Julian Assange? Ah, that's different. What he was saying was in fact he didn't like the sound that the whistle had made, that's all. It's shooting the messenger all over again and as journalists who do our jobs we recognise that, or we should anyway.

Ramona Koval: Christopher Hitchens, in an article for Slate, says that Julian Assange is neither a journalist nor a source, instead he has described him as 'an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda'. And there is a view held by many in the US administration saying he's put lives and US security at risk. Do you think that that holds water?

John Pilger: We can always dig up quotations from mutants like Hitchens and others to shout abuse at people, that's very easy. He is none of those things. In fact what Wikileaks has done is what journalists should have done a long time ago, that's our job. Wikileaks represents disclosure, it represents calling to account power in democratic societies. Thomas Jefferson said that free flow of information was the currency of democracy. That should be written on the foreheads of every journalist. Wikileaks has done a job of both journalism and whistle-blowing, and again it is the message they don't like, so shoot the messenger.

Ramona Koval: The new way of releasing information does raise questions about the definition of what a news organisation is now in what is now a complex internet world. You were a war correspondent in Vietnam, a foreign correspondent, you've gathered news in a traditional way. How is Wikileaks changing reportage?

John Pilger: I think it's using the technology. Ramona, the great scoops, if you like, have very seldom come from journalists themselves, they've almost always come from within systems, they've been provided by whistleblowers. It's an honourable tradition that goes right back to Thomas Paine and there have been many heroic examples of whistleblowers since, combining with journalists, or both. And what we have now is the technology. You can provide Wikileaks with information without your source being tracked, and I've had a close look at this, how various information goes through different encrypting, different computers and so on, it is almost impossible to trace the source. So what has changed is that the source is protected.

We have in the United States this terrible situation of Private Bradley Manning who is alleged to have been the source for some of the Wikileaks disclosures there, 'alleged' I say. And it's not that he was found out, if he is that person, because of the technology, he happened to mention apparently to somebody else that he was the source. But that could change. The technology has provided us with this way of going around the gatekeepers, of disclosing, giving the people the information to which they have a right.

When you think of what Wikileaks has told us over the last year...in Australia alone, about how our politics have worked and who goes and sees the American embassy and whether the Minister of Foreign Affairs is suggesting the United States might like to attack China and all those things that are terribly important for us to know about if we are to make reasoned decisions within a democracy. I found that, as a journalist who has toiled away to try and find out what the powerful are up to most of my life, I found it thrilling.

Ramona Koval: Woodward and Bernstein of course broke the Watergate story, but clearly the days of meeting your secret source in a car park are well and truly over. We've seen this offshoot of Wikileaks with the soon-to-be launched Open Leaks. There are also reports that the New York Times itself is considering developing a system which will let anonymous leakers submit confidential files directly to the newspaper. So it looks like we are likely to see more big stories break, aren't we, if sources can more readily send documentation direct to news organisations?

John Pilger: About time. Because I don't think news organisations have really been in the business of breaking big stories. I think in many respects they've been in the business of suppressing big stories. You mentioned the New York Times, its editor Mr Keller said the other day in New York in a discussion that they weren't going to really release any more of the Wikileaks cables to which they had access.

Ramona Koval: Why, what was the reason?

John Pilger: Well, because they feel basically that's enough, and the ones that this great paragon of free journalism already had, they immediately went to the White House with and said, 'Please, which ones can we release?' We live with so many myths in journalism, one of the myths is that we have an entirely free press, free from pressures and is only interested in informing the public of everything that's going on. That's simply not true. And what has upset many journalists is that Wikileaks has exposed that. It has really opened up to show that the disclosures that are so important to those of us in a democracy to know about really ought to have come from those news organisations that you're referring to. It's given us journalists, I think, a very long pause for thought.

Ramona Koval: The New York Times and the London Guardian, which are two of the newspapers which Julian Assange chose to send his cables two, also Der Spiegel and El Pais... both say that they've had difficulties working with Julian Assange, there has been remarkable responses...I think the New York Times called him a source actually. He in turn has criticised both newspapers for their coverage of his personal life. It is fascinating to look at the portrayal of his character and where that sits in his story. And I saw this morning this long interview that you have on your website with Julian Assange who is very clear-headed and very logical and doesn't seem to be the kind of person who is being portrayed by these newspapers. Where does character sit in this story?

John Pilger: If you're embarrassed by what somebody does, then what do you do? You play the man, used to be the expression, and it really has been the most demeaning spectacle to watch these two newspapers, especially the New York Times, abuse and attack Assange personally and try to present him as other than the person he is, the source he is, the journalist he is, and the partner he has been. It's been a rather...for me watching this and reading this sort of rather childish abuse of Julian Assange, bearing no likeness, I must say, to the person that I know...

Ramona Koval: And who is the person you know?

John Pilger: Well, he's a very analytical person. I think what was most interesting to me was that when he started Wikileaks in 2006...he's rather idealistic. It was bringing a moral dimension to it. 'Justice is the goal, transparency is the method' was the slogan of Wikileaks. And I think in that clip you used in the beginning he said that rather well. He sounded to me like all those old-fashioned journalists I admire and looked up to long ago, that you scratch around trying to find these days as they disappear into the corporate world of media. I think that kind of idealism, if you like (and it sounds utopian to call it idealism), that kind of moral sense that journalism is about humanity and about justice and about calling power to account has become exotic.

We've become so used to this corporatising media, a media that has fixed boundaries that is so influenced by commercial considerations, that has been so dumbed down, that the idea that we should be doing a basic job of journalism and finding out what the hell those who try to run our lives are up to...that's gone out the window, and that's what Wikileaks has done, and he's upset people. Even those rather pompous people who run the New York Times, not a very good newspaper at the best of times, but now he's embarrassed them by really providing them with the raw material which they then take to authority to get the okay to publish.

Ramona Koval: So how is what Wikileaks is doing any different to what Daniel Ellsberg did in 1971 when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times which detailed America's political and military involvement in Vietnam? I mean, besides the fact that Wikileaks has a reach that the New York Times could only dream of in 1971, what is the difference? You could remember I guess how Daniel Ellsberg was demonised at the time too.

John Pilger: Well, I don't think there is a difference, and that's why Daniel Ellsberg is so supportive of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. The difference is in the means. Ellsberg had to spend night after night with his kids photocopying this stuff, piles and piles of it, to get it out. Now you simply...you need a computer and a mouse and that's it. Well, it's not it of course because what you need is the will to want to get this information out to the wider public, you need this courage to be able to do it. No, there isn't any difference between them in principle. I've known a number of whistle-blowers over the years, and I've also had experience when I've come up with something that is rare and unusual and causes a great deal of embarrassment, and I've noted on a number of occasions the sort of attacks that happen before the congratulations. The attacks come first.

Ramona Koval: So what has Wikileaks changed in terms of the war in Afghanistan, because critics of the Pentagon Papers and the Daniel Ellsberg event say that the central failure of that leak and the reporting of it was that it didn't change very much and the war in Vietnam continued for another four years.

John Pilger: Well, I think it contributed certainly, that's true, and I don't think anyone who comes up with information can say that 'hallelujah, here is the truth, here's the disclosure, this will now end'. It doesn't work like that. Information is on one side and enormous power is on the other and ruthless power. Those that conduct wars, those who invade countries and commit troops to rapacious adventures in other people's countries are not going to be rolled over by information just like that. But it's a drip effect. If not a drip, I think Wikileaks has turned the tap on, and it's what then power will not do.

I'm convinced that because of rising public awareness (and this is before Wikileaks) about the lies told that led up to the invasion of Iraq, the lies told about Afghanistan, I'm convinced that the reason there hasn't been an attack on Iran is because of that. I can't prove it, but that's my sense, that that understanding, that awareness, that information has made great power draw back. You know, the Pentagon has spent, according to the AP I read recently, over $4 billion dollars basically on propaganda. Why do they do that, why do governments invest so much in spinning, so many resources in trying to set us off down a particular path, tell lies to us in effect? Because they fear us.

Ramona Koval: John Pilger, we're going to have to stop now, but thank you so much for speaking to us today on The Book Show.

John Pilger: You're welcome.

Ramona Koval: Australian author, journalist and filmmaker John Pilger. And if you'd like to have your say about Julian Assange and Wikileaks you can, just go to our website, click on the story and post your comment.