WikiLeaks: It's the media story that just grows and grows. Quite apart from the leaked cables themselves, which have dominated the global headlines for days, there's the irresistibly cryptic Julian Assange, his murky sex life in Sweden, and the decision of the British beak to bang him in the slammer.

As to the rights and wrongs of WikiLeaks, whether Mr Assange is a criminal, a traitor, a terrorist or a champion of global liberty, everyone will have his or her own view. Thousands of Drum readers signed on to an open letter asking that he be treated according to the law - a case that seems to me unarguable. And at least one of the claims that Assange makes in his op-ed piece in The Australian is unarguably true too:

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, the New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

(Ironically, he argues in the same piece that what distinguishes WikiLeaks is "scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on."

And yet that same morning, sensational lead stories in the Fairfax papers were based on cables leaked in the first instance to WikiLeaks, but which the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age apparently cannot make available at the click of a mouse. Most unscientific.

But I digress.

So far as I'm aware, no notable figure in America has been calling for the assassination of the editor of the New York Times. Julia Gillard has not called for the arrest of the editor of The Guardian - who was in Australia just two weeks ago to deliver the Andrew Olle Media Lecture, and came and went unmolested by the federal rozzers.

These 'legacy media' outlets presumably justify the publication of thousands of diplomatic cables on the grounds that there's an implicit public good to be served by almost any revelation, provided it poses no threat to life - and they claim to have "redacted" the cables sufficiently to obviate, to their own satisfaction at least, any such risk. No doubt they would concur with Assange's high-minded claim that his purpose is simply - "to reveal the truth".

Yet, of course, many of the cables published so far give us the same frisson that we get when someone at work writes a bitchy email to a colleague about the boss, then sends it to the whole office by mistake.

What the email says may or may not be true. What's exciting is to be able to read something we all-too-obviously weren't intended to read.

That's not to say that there aren't worthy and important stories in the cables - though more so perhaps among those that dealt with the Afghan and Iraq wars than with the present variegated bunch. But for the most part, the justification that the media usually relies on for publishing unauthorised disclosures - that they reveal corruption, or wrongdoing, or incompetence, or fraud, or lies - is lacking. What we're getting, mostly, is the work of diplomats simply doing a job they've been doing in much the same way for several hundred years.

Is it wrong that the US embassies in Moscow, or Rome, or Canberra, should be sending back to Washington frank, warts-and-all appraisals of the leaders of their host countries? Not at all. Is it wrong, or surprising, that those disclosures are classified 'NOFORN' - not for foreign eyes? Not in the least. But it's huge fun reading them, which, as the editors of all those august journals would admit if they were being honest with us, is why they're publishing them.

But Julian Assange has other motives. Though he's certainly no terrorist, and indeed seems to have committed no crime, it may be that his object is far more subversive than the mere revelation of embarrassing truths - at least, if a document purportedly written by him four years ago is to be believed.

Though it may have been posted widely in recent months - I've been away - I came across it in a blog called Zunguzungu, written by a denizen of Oakland California called Aaron Bady. A couple of weeks ago he put up a post called 'Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy'. His blog links to two documents by Julian Assange, titled 'State and Terrorist Conspiracies' and 'Conspiracy as Governance', written in November and December 2006 respectively. According to the UK Mail on Sunday's Jason Lewis, who quoted from the documents last August, they were written while Assange was at the University of Melbourne. I've not been able to verify their authenticity, other than by visiting the iq.org site myself and independently finding the second document here.

Anyway, if you're interested in Julian Assange, I urge you to read both the Brady essay, and the Assange document. But if you haven't time, let me summarise them as best I can.

Authoritarian states, argues Assange - and by that term he very clearly means democracies like the USA - are conspiracies, in the sense that they consist of a comparatively small number of people who 'conspire' to produce outcomes - economic, military, diplomatic - by sharing information, insights and plans which are not available to the people they are ruling and whose fortunes those outcomes will affect.

This is a bad thing.

Conspiracies need conspirators - some more important than others. But they also need the means to communicate secretly with each other, else there can be no conspiracy.

The computer age makes vast conspiracies possible - but it also makes them vulnerable. To quote from Assange's introduction:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline...

Or, as he puts it graphically elsewhere in 'Conspiracy and Governance':

When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment.

What becomes clear from Assange's essay - which strikes me as both profound and somewhat deranged - is that he knows exactly what he is doing, and why. He knows that a great many of the cables that WikiLeaks is now producing - and which are being so enthusiastically peddled by the mainstream media - are not in themselves evidence of what most of us would term wrongdoing. But to the extent that they are profoundly embarrassing, they will force the United States to change its communications system. The SIPRnet, which, inexplicably, allows a junior soldier in Iraq (and apparently some 3 million others) to access an ambassador's appraisal of a prime minister, or the State Department's concerns about Chinese weapons sales to Iran, will have to be changed; readership of documents restricted; security procedures tightened; secrets kept more secret. There will be a higher 'cognitive secrecy tax'.

Julian Assange apparently believes that there is a better, less secretive way - an "open, just" way - to run a government. Maybe he's right, though I can think of precious few examples around the world.

If that four-year-old essay is to be believed, he has, quite deliberately, taken on the world's greatest superpower - its greatest conspiracy, as he would see it - with the intention of slowing its communications lifeblood "until it falls, stupefied".

That's an end he's most unlikely to achieve, I would have thought. But I wonder if it's one that the New York Times, or The Guardian, or The Sydney Morning Herald, are aware of, and are party to? Do they really believe that diplomatic secrecy is an evil that needs to be combated? That democratic states are conspiracies against their own people?

No doubt they would argue that they don't, but that for them WikiLeaks is just another source. Their justification for printing many of these cables seems to me, in that case, to be just, well, that they're secret, and they're interesting because they're secret.

As for Assange, I wholeheartedly agree that he should be treated according to the law. But states whose legitimacy or sovereignty is challenged by idealists tend to find ways of using their own laws to defend themselves. Look what happened to that bloke who ended up on a cross outside Jerusalem.

Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch.