Someone at Energy Bulletin finds a prefiguration of WikiLeaks in The Shockwave Rider, a 1975 scifi novel by John Brunner.

The hero, Nick Haflinger, is a runaway from Tarnover, a government program intended to find, educate and indoctrinate highly gifted children to further the interests of the state ... [At the end] Nick has another plan, and rather than running and hiding, he ... creates a new "worm" which is designed to destroy all secrecy. (Brunner invented the term "worm" for this program, as a self-replicating program that propagates across a computer network - the term "worm" was later adopted by computer researchers as the name for this type of program.)

The worm is eventually activated, and the details of all the government's dark secrets (clandestine genetic experimentation that produces crippled children, bribes and kickbacks from corporations, concealed crimes of high public officials) now become accessible from anywhere on the network ...

There are a few pages of text as well. From the little bit I could read, it seems that while the guilty are outraged and murderous, all the good people are thrilled with the revelations, and expect that good things will result.

"A couple of final points before someone asks me. First, is this an unforgivable invasion of privacy? Invasion of privacy it is; unforgivable ... Well, do you believe that justice shall not only be done but shall be seen to be done? The privacy my worm is designed to invade is that privacy under whose cover justice is not done and injustice is not seen. It doesn't care whether the poker [guy] who leeched his tax-free payoff spent it on seducing little girls; it cares only that he was rewarded for committing a crime and wasn't brought to book. It doesn't care if the shivver [guy] who bought that congressman was straight or gay; it cares only that a public servant took a bribe. It doesn't care if the judge who misdirected the jury was concerned to keep her lover's identity secret; it cares only that a person was jailed who should have been released.

Some bright person at Crooked Timber thought Tobermorey, a short story by Saki, also bore a faint resemblance to the loss of secrecy engendered by Assange and crew. Saki was the pen name of one HH Munro, writer of many witty and barbed short stories.

"And do you really ask us to believe," Sir Wilfrid was saying, "that you have discovered a means for instructing animals in the art of human speech, and that dear old Tobermory has proved your first successful pupil?"

Dear old Tobermorey is just about as arrogant towards, and soon becomes about as well-loved by his rich owners as Mr Assange is by our rich owners. Christopher Hitchens joins the chorus against Assange, though not against some transparency, and makes a similar criticism to the one Another Trope presented in comments.

Turn Yourself In, Julian Assange
The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda.

... though I find it easy to picture Assange as a cult leader indulging himself with acolytes, the sex charges against him don't appear to amount to rape and have a trumped-up feel to them. They also give him an excuse to recruit sympathy and stay out of sight instead of turning himself in.

And that, of course, prosecution or no prosecution, is what he really ought to do. ...

All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is "to end two wars," one knows at once what he means by the "ending." In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him.

Don't hold back, Mr Hitchens. But now Assange has surrendered himself for questioning. Initial reports of the charges against Assange may have sounded like much ado about hurt feelings, but Feministe takes them seriously, and says so do the Swedes:

... it sounds like the sex was consensual on the condition that a condom was used. It also sounds like in one case, condom use was negotiated for and Assange agreed to wear a condom but didn’t, and the woman didn’t realize it until after they had sex; in the second case, it sounds like the condom broke and the woman told Assange to stop, which he did not. This is of course speculation based on the bare-bones reported description of events, but it’s at least clear that “this is a case of a broken condom” isn’t close to the whole story. (It’s also worth pointing out that the charge is actually a quite minor one in Sweden, and the punishment is a $700 fine).

Withdrawal of consent should be grounds for a rape charge (and it is, in Sweden) — if you consent to having sex with someone and part of the way through you say to stop and the person you’re having sex with continues to have sex with you against your wishes, that’s rape. That may not sound entirely familiar to Americans, since the United States has relatively regressive rape laws ...

Kate Harding at Salon says the Swedes are also claiming that Assange used his weight to hold one woman down, and may have had sex with a sleeping woman. [Update: Some fellow on Democracy Now! Wednesday morning said the charges had been thrown out in Sweden.] All or none of this may be true, and talking to Democracy Now!, Glenn Greenwald sees nothing but political retribution in the media-fabricated "manhunt" for Assange.

And, of course, the real concern is — and it’s the concern that Assange and his lawyers have—is that what this really is is just a ploy to get him into custody in a country, which is Sweden, that is very subservient to the United States, that is willing to extradite him to the United States or turn him over with the slightest request. And any person who has followed the United States, quote-unquote, "justice system" over the last decade knows that there’s good reason to fear that, that anybody who’s accused of national security crimes, especially if they’re not an American citizen, is treated in violation of virtually every Western norm of justice, without almost any due process.

Greenwald goes on with a litany of very good points, many of which we are stardust mentions on her Death Knell of the Internet blog.

... whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they’ve never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. And yet, look at what has happened to them. They’ve been essentially removed from the internet, not just through a denial of service attacks that are very sophisticated, but through political pressure applied to numerous countries. Their funds have been frozen, including funds donated by people around the world for his—for Julian Assange’s defense fund and for WikiLeaks’s defense fund. They’ve had their access to all kinds of accounts cut off. Leading politicians and media figures have called for their assassination, their murder, to be labeled a terrorist organization. What’s really going on here is a war over control of the internet and whether or not the internet can actually serve what a lot of people hoped its ultimate purpose was, which was to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions. That’s what this really is about. It’s why you see Western government, totally lawlessly, waging what can only be described as a war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange outside the bounds of any constraints, because that’s what really is at stake here. If they want to prosecute them, they should go to court and do it through legal means. But this extralegal persecution ought to be very alarming to every citizen in every one of these countries, because it essentially is pure authoritarianism and is designed to prevent the internet from being used as its ultimate promise, which is providing a check on unconstrained political power.

Whatever you think of Assange, the WikiLeaks affair has had a way of bringing out the worst in almost everyone - much more like Saki than Scifi.

Update: Writing for the NY Times Opinionator, David Wright gets Assange as a revolutionary, but thinks his actions have the unwanted side effect of isolating us internationally:

Julian Assange: Neocon Tool?

An authoritarian regime, he says, oppresses people and keeps its plans secret from the oppressed. Transparency rips the veil off, exposing these plots. And radical transparency — like the WikiLeaks data dump — makes authoritarian regimes guarded in their future internal communications. This in turn impairs the regime’s functioning. As “more leaks induce fear and paranoia,” we see “system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power.” (In this respect, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald has noted, Assange is like Osama bin Laden: he wants his enemy to react to his provocations self-destructively.)
...
Assange is in this sense the anti-Bush, challenging secretive, centralized authority with a transparency that is highly decentralized.

Yet in one sense Assange is the anti-anti-Bush.

Bush was criticized for unilateralist tendencies, for failing to nurture good relations with other nations — and, in particular, for writing off suspect nations (see “axis of evil”) as barely worth talking to at all. Obama came into office vowing “engagement.” He would reach out to other nations, emphatically including those  with whom relations were most fraught, like Russia and Muslim nations, even including Iran.

How, Wright asks, do you engage other nations with a damaged diplomatic corps? But if the US under both Bush and Obama is engaging in the sort of arm-twisting we have seen at Copenhagen, does engagement really matter?