Comment on the Julian Assange affair isn’t hard to come by.

Everyone has opinions, most of them firm if not actually furious. Here’s a few I found in a couple of minutes yesterday morning on another newspaper’s website.

“Mr Assange’s arrest is a disgrace...” “Julian Assange is a hero and should be hailed as such...” “The US is the bully on the block...” “Can you say witch hunt?” “What a sad commentary this affair is on both Britain and the US...” “The US taxpayer should thank Assange...”

Why are these interesting? Perhaps because they come not from the predictably anti-American readers of some predictable soft-left European publication, but from the United States. They were posted to the New York Times yesterday from Minneapolis, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York itself, and beyond. They are, I can assure you, typical of the first two dozen or so comments made on the granting of bail to the WikiLeaks co-ordinator.

Other Americans, the sort who despise the Times as the epitome of bleeding-heart east coast “mainstream media” liberalism, would probably shrug at such an outpouring. For them, the Assange business is an open and shut case of espionage and subversion deserving condign punishment, preferably by execution, and the sooner the better. That’s not the point.

We know, or think we know, that sort of American. On this side of the Atlantic we are treated continually to the posturing of Sarah Palin, the Tea Party puppet show, and the daily Fox News farrago. After the Bush years, “America” and “American” are common shorthand for witless conservatism, insularity, and a brutish foreign policy. Europe’s fond hopes for Barack Obama have been disappointed, meanwhile: the Republican right is back in the saddle.

So when we see the hunting of Assange we think we see something familiar: the same old America (and its lackeys) at work. We see, some of us, the enraged global security state bending laws and punishing the messenger. We see the US (and lackeys) against the rest.

It was never the whole story and it does not begin, as those readers of the New York Times show, to describe the WikiLeaks tale this weekend. True, the US Government, as the prime victim of the latest revelations, is doing its level best to find a law – any law – with which to indict and try Assange. True, the antics of British and Swedish prosecutors in opposing bail for the Australian in what is otherwise a routine case have carried the reek of complicity.

But the idea that America and American power are co-equal is a juvenile mistake, not least for supporters of the whistle-blower. It is as though they do not yet understand what Assange and his colleagues have wrought. Why should it be surprising to find ordinary American democrats outraged by secrecy, deceit and official vindictiveness?

What has WikiLeaks done, after all? First and foremost, it has globalised the conflict between citizen and state. The argument is no longer between a few Britons and those who operate the Official Secrets Act. It is no longer about a few Americans, in isolation, running up against the Department of Homeland Security. And there is, now, no going back.

Where governments are concerned, it transpires, ordinary people everywhere truly do have a great deal in common. Whether he knows it or not, Assange has sown the seeds of an international movement for democracy, even in the proud democracies. The demands are the same. The claim of rights is the same. That secret is out, finally.

It is patronising and dim, meanwhile, for a continent that freely elected Cameron, Sarkozy or Berlusconi to believe that Americans do not think for themselves, or treat their politicians to doses of scepticism. Here’s “Joe” in NYC, 9.34 am eastern time: “President Obama is a scoundrel for using the Justice Department and the CIA to try to shut (Assange) up before Bank of America secrets are revealed. Obama should take his Nobel Prize off his shelf in the White House...”

It’s a point of view. More importantly, it fits none of the usual European stereotypes where American opinion is concerned. More important still, I now know what Joe thinks, and Joe can, if desire and chance allow, find out what I think. Technology has forced cracks in the wall.

That Assange and friends have poured some terribly important State Department gossip through the crevices is, in one sense, neither here nor there. As uneasy governments everywhere have realised, this behaviour, if tolerated, could become unstoppable. Then what?

Not so long ago, only journalists with access to wire services and a few people prepared to pay for late and expensive imported newspapers had much of a clue about the world. Information was sketchy, even with the best efforts of the BBC, and tended to flow only when “matters of importance” – wars, disasters, elections – were at stake. Now only the actually apathetic have an excuse for ignorance, and even they can amend their ways with a few keystrokes. That’s hardly a revelation. But what does it mean?

The WikiLeaks exercise has rested on a central assumption, questionable only in part. Sitting on a quarter of a million documents, Assange and his cohorts have reached a single conclusion: this stuff matters, and it matters to everyone. Wading through some of the trivia, you may doubt it. But given the sheer ubiquity of American power and the ceaseless drive for globalisation, the reasoning holds.

In fact, you could argue that the internet and the WikiLeaks whistleblowers are simply catching up with geo-politics. The diplomatic cables reveal an international web of deep, intimate and generally secret connections. Where the behaviour of governments is concerned, the workers of the world – or whatever you choose to call them – are united, like it or not.

Can the phenomenon be halted? Washington, aided by its familiar friends, means to have a damned good try. Beijing has certainly demonstrated, meanwhile, that the state can still put a boot to the necks of on-line dissidents: Assange would be giving no speeches from the steps of a Chinese courtroom had he been picked up by Communist police.

But the very fact that these two capitals can nowadays be mentioned in the same paragraph and in the same context is revealing, I think. Things have changed, and changed utterly. There is power, state power, and there is people. Interposed, there is the web, the will to use it, and the belief that information matters, of and for itself.

So are we entitled to know everything? It is easy to say, as all his critics say, that Assange has not even attempted to answer the question. Then again, outraged governments around have not bothered to explain why they deny knowledge routinely. Too often, clearly, they do it because they can, not because they must.

As for Assange himself, my guess is that they mean to keep him snared within European legal processes until such time as American prosecutors can frame a charge, probably of conspiracy – that old, disreputable favourite – and demand extradition, probably from the Swedes.

Much good will it do them. The mirror is smashed and the pieces cannot be put back together. Just by turning their villain into a hero the keepers of secrets have already lost the battle.

© 2010 Herald & Times Group.