SYDNEY: In the early 1980s when I was studying mass communications in Australia, our journalism lecturer told us that as journalists we will have to hold governments to account, and to do that sometimes we may need to depend on leaks from government officials. 'You should not hesitate to use that information, while ensuring that you do not disclose the source,' he instructed us, adding, 'if anyone asks you [for the source], tell them it fell off the back of a truck.'

What founder of WikiLeaks, Australian journalist Julian Assange did 20 years later was exactly that, and in the Internet age, instead of using some paper documents leaked by a government official, he used electronic documents leaked to him via computer by a US government intelligence analyst named Chelsea Manning.