Julian Assange has been arrested, at a police station in London, “on behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape,” according to the British authorities. He was in court earlier today, and said that he will fight extradition. He’s due back before the judge on December 14th. WikiLeaks, the group he founded, said via Twitter:

Today’s actions against our editor-in-chief Julian Assange won’t affect our operations: we will release more cables tonight as normal.

What is “normal” when it comes to WikiLeaks? It is easy to lose track. For that matter, what is normal when it comes to the legal and institutional response to the WikiLeaks release of American diplomatic cables? (They have a quarter of a million; less than a per cent of them have been released so far.) Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia, speaking of the pursuit of Assange generally, said that “the foundation stone is an illegal act”—meaning the loss of classified documents. In other words, someone somewhere has done something that is illegal. But it is worth sorting out which allegedly criminal act, committed by who, we are angry about, and why. One likes particular arrests to be for particular things.

Beyond Assange and his own legal situation, there is something disturbing going on: Joe Lieberman hounding private companies (before any legal actions has been taken); the way the site was repeatedly taken down; calls by politicians and journalists to kill the leakers or have them treated as enemy combatants (what does that mean? Guantánamo?); the Swiss bank account frozen (the Swiss say Assange had a false address on his form; but our ambassador there has also said some heavy-handed things to them); Visa and MasterCard stopping all transactions related to WikiLeaks. One could say that this is part of the bargain WikiLeaks signed up for—what did they think would happen? But, if it is permissible to use these measures against the site, why couldn’t they be used against any media organization that published classified information? Why WikiLeaks and not the Times, Guardian, or Der Spiegel (or The New Yorker)? If it’s because they and we are more respectable—what does that even mean? Any talk of creative uses of the 1917 Espionage Act, as by Senator Dianne Feinstein, should make one wary. (Glenn Greenwald has been following the legal side of the story.) Not that that much due process seems to have been involved in efforts to shut the site down. Does it just take the Administration saying something is illegal for it to be illegal?

This is not to dismiss the sex charges, by any stretch or measure. It is very sensible to resist mixing up strong personalities with the work their organizations do. The amount I value WikiLeaks’ work (quite a bit) is not a factor in what I may come to think, when all is said and done, about the credibility of two women in Sweden—they are separate issues. Assange has denied the charges, and the story is, to say the least, complicated. But I’ll confess that I bristle (perhaps reflexively) when people talk about “real” as opposed to supposedly non-real rape. One’s politics, film-making abilities, or the sports team one plays for should not be a factor in deciding if one is innocent of sex-crime charges. Or in deciding that one is guilty: If the Swedish prosecution is distorted by politics or American pressure, that is very bad, too. But Assange doesn’t get a pass just for being Assange.

The Times, in its piece on the arrest, noted that

Justice Department prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to indict Mr. Assange since July, when WikiLeaks made public documents on the war in Afghanistan. But while it is clearly illegal for a government official with a security clearance to give a classified document to WikiLeaks, it is far from clear that it is illegal for the organization to make it public.

“Struggling to find a way to indict” is not the situation in which the government is at its best. What legal theory might the prosecutors come up with? And who else might it be deployed against? One lesson is that if the government, when it is stressed, can find a tool that it is theoretically allowed to use, it will use it, and keep it in its repertoire. That is why how one feels about Julian Assange really isn’t the issue here. (Josh Marshall has a reality-check post at TPM, asking whether Assange hasn’t obscured the putative real central figure, Bradley Manning.) How one feels about journalism, and the free flow of information, very much is.

And in that sense there is another, fascinating angle to all this: It is very hard for governments, even with the aid of domain-name firms and Swiss banks, to actually keep anything quiet. There are hundreds of mirror sites echoing the WikiLeaks page, which is itself hopping from address to address as if from one stone in a river to another. WikiLeaks, according to the Guardian, has also distributed encrypted files to thousands of people that can be unlocked with a key code Assange and his lawyers have.

Apart from whether it is free-speech respecting or constitutional for various authorities to throw everything they’ve got at WikiLeaks, is it even smart? My colleague Raffi Khatchadourian has written about the way WikiLeaks has evolved, and how it had begun, slowly and imperfectly, to bring its practices in line with those of a traditional media organization. What about schooling them in that process? (From a certain perspective, this might be called coöpting them.) Whether it was a ploy or not, WikiLeaks did reach out to the State Department before these latest releases. And for all the talk of a data dump, most of the cables haven’t been released, and many of the ones that have been have been redacted. Will that change?

Read more of our WikiLeaks coverage.

Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire