How Julian Assange Is Destroying WikiLeaks

[Blue_Tires]

Hamburg, Germany — LAST week a United Nations panel ruled that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who has been living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, had been arbitrarily detained, and called for his immediate release. Though Mr. Assange says he will remain in the embassy, the ruling was hailed by his legions of supporters, who saw it as a rare instance of justice for a man they believe has been persecuted for exposing government secrets.

There’s no doubt that WikiLeaks, which Mr. Assange founded in 2006, has been a boon for global civil liberties. The problem is that the project is inseparable from the man. Mr. Assange has made little secret about his skepticism toward Western democracy and his willingness to work with autocratic governments like Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. His personal politics undermines WikiLeaks’ neutrality — and the noble cause for which WikiLeaks used to stand. What we need is a WikiLeaks without the founder of WikiLeaks.

The idea behind WikiLeaks is simple, and ingenious: an online drop box that provides maximum security for whistle-blowers in the digital age. Anyone determined to disclose corporate or government misbehavior — from tax fraud to war crimes — can be sure that the heavily protected WikiLeaks’s submission system ensures their emails and uploads cannot be traced.

The idea to unmask lies and reveal illegitimate secrets has worked well. Whistle-blowers submitted material that proved corruption of the former Kenyan president, tax-avoidance strategies employed by big European banks, and indiscriminate killings of civilians by an American attack helicopter in Iraq. News outlets, including The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times, helped Mr. Assange spread the scoops.

Yet, even back then, observers and media partners felt that Mr. Assange had more in mind than transparency, that there was an ideology behind his idea. Over time, that ideology has become increasingly apparent, through his regular public statements and his stint as a host for a Russian state-controlled TV network...

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/opinion/how-julian-assange-is-destroying-wikileaks.html?_r=0


Been pointing this stuff out for a long time now...

[snot]

1. The author is badly misinformed.

Assange has never stated that governments should have no secrets, just that they too often have too many and for the wrong reasons.

The statement attributed to Jonathan Franzen was made in a work of fiction. It cannot reasonably be inferred that anything in that work represents Franzen's personal opinion (any more than Shakespeare can be said to have agreed with Lady Macbeth that her husband should murder his king).

Assange and/or Wikileaks made the full cache of leaked US State Dept. cables public only after The Guardian irresponsibly published the password to the cache. At that point, there was no point in continuing to work with outlets like the Guardian to publish only carefully vetted information from the cache, as Wikileaks had done up until that point –– if all the bad guys in the world had access to the full cache, it seemed better to go ahead and give access to everyone else.

I won't bother reading anything by Mr. Bittner again, unless with the expectation of feeling obliged to discredit it.

Peace out.

[Blue_Tires]

3. Sure, chief...

Now explain away the Moscow ties and his longtime one-sided anti-Americanism, which is so extreme Assange tried to get in bed with Assad...

Take as much time as you need...

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. Haven't you noticed ? Most of the world and a large part

of the US, who don't believe their own leaders are pro-US, and that's why they are pro-Russia, now. They would prefer to be governed by Putin. They don't like your country invading countries in the M.E. and standing by while civilian Christian populations get blamed and killed for it. That's just a long story, short.

I've always thought outsourcing was a brilliant idea, provided it was confined to the jobs of our own politicians. But it won't happen will it ? But we can dream. Would you deny us that little scrap of comfort, in our hour of desolation ?

[elljay]

2. This is the problem

inherent to whistleblowing. When there is a person(s) filtering the documents to determine what to disclose, we become subject to that person's beliefs. Snowden is a prime example - many of the documents he stole and published were extremely valuable to those of us who value civil liberty. Others were unnecessarily damaging to our country and, perhaps endangered good people working for our country. Unless and until there is a better system for determining what is appropriate to release, we will of necessity be at the mercy of individuals and their agendas.

[EdwardBernays]

5. The problem

with Americans critiquing Assange is that they are largely ignorant of what their own country has gotten up to for decades.

Anything that looks like it may harm the delusional bubble most Americans live in is seen as a threat, and even worse any one that dares choose sides against America - no matter the reality of Americans actions - are enemies.

Right now, the US is committing war crimes in Yemen. Any sane person should reject this and side with the victims, and in fact if leaking information about the US in Yemen saved many thousands of lives, that should be considered heroic. But the US would hunt you down and lock you up, and depending on the President might just throw you in a hole somewhere and torture you.

And that is closer to reality for civilians of so many nations, for so many years, that trying to play the "it's hurting America" card sound more like, "it's helping victims of America" in nations around the world.

So, should there be secrets? Of course. Should the American government be trusted at all? No.

And therein lies the rub.