WikiLeaks first popped up in the Australian press in January 2007.
It had released its first document the month before. These earliest Australian news reports were either neutral or welcoming.
''It may get a lot safer to leak sensitive documents about unethical behaviour by governments or organisations if a new online service goes ahead,'' noted the Australian Financial Review.
The Sydney Morning Herald told readers WikiLeaks' ''primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet Bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East''. There was a local connection, too: ''Australians are among the volunteers behind the site''.
In retrospect that is a very ominous last sentence.
In 2012 there must be no informed person on the planet who doesn't have strong views about the character and activities of the Australian Julian Assange.
The sad thing is that character and those activities have completely undermined WikiLeaks mission.
To read the early, matter-of-fact news reports is to recall a time when WikiLeaks had promise. What could be more appealing than a permanent, resilient, secure institution to expose the raw workings of the world's most powerful bodies?
It was not to be.
Five years later it is clear nothing has been more damaging to WikiLeaks than Julian Assange's personal soap opera. Not the US government's attempt to choke the stream of donations, not the political reaction to the release of diplomatic cables, not the hosts who have periodically shut the site down.
There was a time when WikiLeaks was widely admired. Even senior Bush administration officials described it as a ''force for good''. The diplomatic cables alienated the Washington establishment, but we shouldn't imagine WikiLeaks was isolated as it is today: the site had many supporters and many admirers.
Yet by 2012, WikiLeaks is just the Julian Assange show. His personal struggles have destroyed WikiLeaks' moral integrity. Now having a view on leaking documents anonymously comes bundled with a lot of other views: for instance, the severity or otherwise of Swedish rape laws.
Assange's journey to the Ecuadorian embassy is not his only public debacle.
Remember the saga over his autobiography? The contract went sour and his publisher released an edited draft in September last year. WikiLeaks released a furious statement describing this as a ''breach of confidence'', probably the least self-aware claim in modern history.
Remember the long promised Bank of America leak? It was a dud. Assange claimed to have the power to ''take down a bank or two''. This seemed briefly plausible. Mere rumours of the leak saw the share price drop 3 per cent in trading. But during 2011, Assange stopped talking about the future release. In private, he began talking it down. WikiLeaks eventually decided the whole Bank of America leak had been destroyed by a rogue employee.
Remember Julia Gillard's Q&A special? In a video question, Assange told the Prime Minister he had ''intelligence [the] government has been exchanging information with foreign powers about Australian citizens working for WikiLeaks''. In his view, the Australian people should consider charging her with ''treason''. The media debated whether it was impolite for Q&A to ambush the Prime Minister like that. But what about his claims? They, too, were just big talk.
Organisations can get over boisterous founders. WikiLeaks has not.
The latest editorial on the WikiLeaks site promises ''never before released details about Julian Assange and the operations of WikiLeaks'' and exclusive details of his complaint he made to the British communications regulator about a documentary which aired nearly a year ago.
Assange's smartest defenders say we need to separate the specifics of the sexual assault claims from the worry he could be extradited from Sweden to the United States on espionage charges. Someone ought to inform WikiLeaks of this distinction. In June the organisation was promoting a book titled A Brief History of Swedish Sex. The subtitle was even more damning: How the Nation that Gave Us Free Love Redefined Rape and Declared War on Julian Assange.
The WikiLeaks Twitter account claims the Swedish media are ''racist'' towards Australians. Another post idiotically asked ''why do people hate Sweden?'' and linked to this inane site. That isn't the most absurd post though: the account has compared Assange's exile in the Ecuadorian embassy with the violent assault of the US embassy in Libya.
These are just the official statements. His most diehard supporters have suggested much, much worse.
I argued on the Drum in 2010 that WikiLeaks had a bad habit of editorialising its leaks. When it released the video of a Baghdad helicopter strike in April that year, Assange produced a highly edited version called ''Collateral Murder''. He preceded it with a George Orwell quote and carefully altered the soundtrack to reduce sympathy with the American soldiers.
This sort of editorialising was directly in conflict with its purported mission to practice ''scientific journalism''. It made WikiLeaks and Assange the focus, instead of what they were leaking.
Two years later, even the promise of scientific journalism is a distant memory.
All WikiLeaks' energy has gone into its founder. If there is to be a future of whistleblowing it will be found elsewhere, far away from the Julian Assange carnival.
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