If Assange did what was alleged, then that's awful and horrible and abusive and those women are victims. However the entirety of the reporting around this is wildly biased and dishonest and clearly manufactured to get him extradited, which worked.
Did they? Just a few 2-3 years ago there was a documentary in Sweden and one of the women was interviewed extensivley.
> Our next rally for Julian Assange is Saturday, March 4 at 11:30 to 12:30pm. We will gather at Park St. Station on the Boston Common to speak out for Assange and gather signatures on our petition to our senators. (See how the media failed Julian Assange at Harper's Magazine.)
In my opinion, one of the best ways of identifying an authoritarian is to ask them their opinions on Snowden or Assange.
In your "opinion", what fraction of the documents that Edward Snowden stole were directly related to spying on American citizens?
If you truly support democracy, then you accept that even the authoritarians should be given a voice, and you just pray they're not in the majority. That's very different than the "with us or against us" paradigm that's popular among authoritarians.
And a popular tool among the so called "democracies".
These are complex situations. If you’re basing your binary judgement of an even-more complex political spectrum (it isn’t really a spectrum) on these cases, your model is mis-tuned. I’m sure, for example, Putin would find both exemplary figures. That doesn’t make him a Solon.
As far as Assange goes I think he is a liar.
The primary piece of evidence I use to support this is that he claims that his media firm, Sunshine Press was a non-profit when its documents of incorporation list it as a private limited company.
https://www.facebook.com/WikiLeaks.SunshinePress
>Official Facebook Page-- The Sunshine Press (Wikileaks), is an international non-profit organization
(That's all I've got as its website is dead now)
Incorporation document: https://www.scribd.com/doc/47601520/SUNSHINE-PRESS-PRODUCTIO...
Definition of EHF: https://island.is/en/limited-liability-companies
A second piece of evidence is that the original release of Collateral Murder was edited to remove the armed men accompanying the journalists who were killed and the unedited version was only released after public outcry. The presence of armed men escorting the journalists may have been used to justify the attack, which occurred just a couple hundred meters from an active firefight, so the context was deleted in the initial release.
A third piece of evidence is that Assange lied to John Young, a highly-respected member of the "leaking" community to get him to register the original Wikileaks domain waaaay back in the day and then the Wikileaks community turned on John when he dared speak out.
https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm
Finally, a fourth piece of evidence is that they used Wau Holland (Chaos Computer Club) as an initial fundraising arm to funnel money to Sunshine Press, and Wau Holland promised an audit of the substantial sums of money being directed to Sunshine Press, but they only ended up publishing three bare-bones "transparency reports" after millions had been spent and their tax-free status had been revoked for funding a for-profit enterprise. Once it became impossible to funnel donations tax-free to the for-profit business through Wau Holland donations slowed, communications stopped, and the association between the two ended. Please note that none of the banking shenanigans going on at the time impacted Wau Holland.
https://wauland.de/en/projects/enduring-freedom-of-informati...
Does any of the above make me an authoritarian?
Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist. Many people believe wikileaks is a net good but despise Assange. Assange failed wikileaks, the media did not fail Assange.
Would you like to actually call out anything in Collateral Murder that you think wasn't exposing the truth?
I'm old enough to remember Collateral Murder. I'm old enough to remember it's video footage. Of members of the US military murdering people, and laughing about it. You can't dismiss that as "just a narrative", it's also the truth, and it's a fucked up truth that the public deserves to know about.
Also, there's literally no difference in the way they did "narrative building" with Collateral Murder than , say, the NYT does in covering war crimes in Ukraine. I mean to be honest it's a bit hard to understand why you would even highlight the narrative building by the exposing party, when the actual events involved a cover up of war crimes from the Pentagon and an insane amount of damage control and PR. It just doesn't register for me, it's like saying you lost confidence in the NYT for covering war crimes in a way that highlighted that war crimes are actually... bad.
You can't transparently publish information and have an opinion.
That was very very far from being "their original releases". wikileaks used to be a real "wiki of leaks". it was quite glorious, a real goldmine for journalists to work through
That's not Wikileaks fault, maybe we should hold those in power accountable regardless of how we feel about their stances on other issues.
Which party were the Collateral Murder footages meant to benefit? (Is "partisan" the right word here?)
> Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist
This is 100% true, though. Trying to say it isn't without any substance doesn't really help your case at all.
When you start operating like that, you lose any and all credibility and protection you might have some sort of journalistic organisation. At best, WL can be described as activists, at worst as useful idiots.
My pet theory is that the true effect of "cancel culture" isn't really on rich/popular people. But the public cancelling means on an individual level social groups eventually become homogeneous in their views.
The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values.
The outcome is that entities which don't take sides are the real victims of cancel culture. Why is does CNN always come to the same conclusions and cover the same things? Why does Fox? It's because if they stray they are goners.
WikiLeaks was truly neutral dumping all info it got. That was in no one's interest other than the diminishing open minded groups.
By far the biggest piece is that WikiLeaks’ relevance has declined over the past several years. When Assange was first summoned to appear in Sweden I think there was an enormous spotlight on him. This might not have saved him from being convicted for the crime he was accused of, but it might have been enough to dissuade the Obama administration from seeking to extradite him. That administration had already expressed concern about the impact a prosecution might have on journalistic freedom, and (at the time) extraditing him on arrival in Sweden would have made both governments look like that were colluding to use a sexual assault accusation as a pretext for political retribution. I’m not saying they wouldn’t have done it: I am saying it would had massive repercussions for the US administration, Sweden, etc.
Instead of facing the charges head on, Assange chose to lock himself in his own prison. Years went by and the public’s interest in him waned. A new administration came to power that had no specific concerns about the press, and saw Assange as nothing more than a criminal. Finally, he decided to intervene in politics in a way that many saw as an intentional effort to affect the election, which damaged the case that he was simply a publisher. Ultimately I think you’re right that this damaged his sympathy with the people who would have been the most vigorous defenders, but the thing is: outside of those people he seems to have no base of support at all anymore.
> The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values.
That’s essentially human society.
We organize ourselves in races, countries, cultures, religions, sports teams, etc.
We are constantly excluding others and trying to belong to certain groups.
The issue is when it becomes extreme and a group decides that all other groups should be exterminated.
Not exactly a good comparison, the only similarity is the reaction of the US press.
Make of it what you will but it's apparently an undisputed fact.
This is often repeated anti-WL propaganda that isn't true. There is a vast amount of effort that goes into censoring leaks and it's by far the most time consuming part of the process. They spend literally months on it. Just because they chose not to censor something that you would have preferred for them to censor doesn't mean a tremendous amount of time and thought didn't go into that decision.
> The fact that the RNC had been hacked but emails not released helped in this perception...
This is also not true. Why would WL refuse to publish something if the source could go to literally thousands of other journalists? It wouldn't serve them at all to refuse.
That's got nothing to do with political views. And the charges against him are still perfectly legal. An "authoritarian" system would go about this completely differently.
> “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.”
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
I don't know if they are evil but I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.
Assange has a 100% truthful track record in matters of Wikileaks and was extremely explicit that the source of the Hillary leaks was not Russian in origin. This is more propaganda that people keep spreading and is exhausting. It's also exhausting that the narrative continues to be about Assange instead of Hillary for actually doing illegal and fucked up things.
The 'Russian collusion case' has been thoroughly discredited so why do you bring it up here, other than to muddle the issue?
If you want to have a clear case of meddling with presidential elections I'd point at the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funding of the Steele dossier. Should that be brought up here as well? The 'dossier' was also discredited but it was used in the same way the data from Wikileaks was used to target Clinton. The difference here was that the data on Clinton was true while the 'Steele dossier' was fictitious.
The article addresses this belief and fairly well debunks it's origins.
Outraged the Clinton campaign swiftly ascribed the leaks to Vladimir Putin's intelligence apparatus as part of an operation to secure Trump's victory. The accusation was fueled by forensic analysis from the DNC's cybersecurity consultants, from CrowdStrike, detailing the potential links between the leaks and the Russian government.
Testifying under oath in a closed-door session before the committee in 2017, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer Shawn Henry admitted that he had no “concrete evidence” that the Russians had stolen the emails, or indeed that anyone had hacked the DNC’s system.
This crucial interview remained locked away until 2020. The press did little to acknowledge it; the testimony failed to attract even a passing mention in the New York Times, the Guardian, or any other mainstream outlet that had previously charted the Russian hacking story.
Something I personally observed (after 2006 and before 2020) is that we had 4 cybersecurity companies that frequently served as mouthpieces for US NatSec agencies - Mandiant, Fireeye, Crowdstrike and Cylance. They'd be called in to assist in some cybersecurity event and would unfailing parrot that agency's FUD, without ever providing any meaningful evidence. During these same events, non-gov cybersecurity experts were commonly casting doubts on US Gov's official narrative.
The above event seems like Crowdstrike acting is it's usual capacity as a Gov-adjacent mouthpiece - that is until the House committee compelled the CSO to supply evidence of Crowdstrike's parroted claim.
Otherwise, it seems like you're saying "they're bad [via an unsupported claim like 'selectively truthful'] because they hurt my $politicalside"
I'm not a Trump supporter by any means, but the truth is the truth. If we only care about the truth when it favors us, I don't see how we're better than liars.
Is that a purely partisan view or do you know of some true information they had and refused to publish?
I suspect what happened is simply that the Clinton campaign had no use for Wikileaks because most of the media was working with them, so only Trump supporters sent info to Wikileaks.
Those boring leaks probably came from the inside.
they do and they inarguably are. there is not any evidence at all that they have received reputable and material information and declined to report on it
The minute he published Collateral Murder, a video maximizing publicity on a fatal error in America's war effort, that was it for Assange and Wikileaks.
In his later years his work became similar to that of breitbart, James okeef, and tucker Carlson. Regardless of what one thinks of those, There’s no question that their publications and intentions are extremely slanted.
No surprise most of the country dislikes him
> “We do have some information about the Republican campaign,”
And then they never actually released it.
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...
https://michaelwest.com.au/documents-show-no-sign-albanese-g...
Please prove me wrong and show me these signs.
Albo's no different to the last 6 who had the job.
Most of the negative consequences in his life stem from him running from this accusation, and from the rape charges in Sweden. He'd like to frame it in a different light, understandably...
"Everyone made fun of him" is a large overstatement. He didn't want to face any of the three or four justice systems he was dealing with (Uk, Sweden, US and Australia) so he opted to go into Asylum in that embassy. He could have been convicted (or acquitted) of those charges and gotten pardoned by now.
Oh come the heck on, it’s a standard British Category A prison. Any comparison to Gitmo are prima facie ludicrous and makes the rest of the article suspect
"Between 2001 and 2002, Belmarsh Prison was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under the provisions of the Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, leading it to be called the "British version of Guantanamo Bay"."
Yes, a deliberate smear campaign exists, but also these are institutions with complex histories. You cannot simply call anyone critical of them "gullible".
Ignore Assange's character, make him an anonymous person instead and think "is the process X person has gone through for Y actions reasonable/legal/supportable?"
Should whistleblowers be supported or vilified?
Are they? What's the "evil" you're accusing them of? If you're going to accuse people of things, don't be vague.
What evil things, specifically?
So, who do you think it should be instead? (genuine question)
It's the same page from the same playbook...repeat X enough times - regardless of accuracy - and perception becomes reality.
Nearly every major news organization practices this, shamelessly. It's a biz model based on eye-ball not journalism standards. It's a biz model that protects the few and the expense of properly informing the many.
Similarly the recent Twitter revelations on Hamilton68 showed that the Russian bots on manipulating social media was more or less BS.
Who know what really happened, but what may have happened was that the hacking was blamed on Russia instead of say China, or [insert foreign adversary] because the FBI panicked when trump was elected after using the Steele dossier to spy on his campaign and needed a narrative to justify their actions.
Or it could have been leaked by someone who liked Bernie, or by some other naive fantasist with a pipe dream that the Democratic Party could hypothetically one day run a fair primary again.
People are encouraged by the media to simply forget about the subjects of these leaks, and focus on the leaker. That's a tactic.
This is just not true. The Senate Intelligence Committee had multiple sources of information to conclude with little doubt that it was Russia and that Putin personally authorized the operation. They cited an investigation which found data had been exfiltrated to US based servers known to have been leased in connection with the GRU.
And I get it, people that would typically frequent hn including myself want to see the specifics of that investigation and how that connection was made to the GRU. Obviously that would involve revealing intelligence sources, which isn’t going to happen. So yeah, of course you can choose to believe that everyone is lying about everything and that the Republican led committee chose to pass up an opportunity to embarrass and discredit the DCCC and DNC by telling the truth, but that seems a bit unlikely to me.
Despite the harm that I believe they had a hand in doing to the US electoral process in 2016, I’d still accept that their contributions have been net positive over their history. It’s just a shame to expose war crimes then go out of your way to help elect a guy who gleefully pardons war criminals.
I don't know why you would talk like this. This is just a big lie wrapped in a sarcastic and condescending tone substituting for evidence. What you believe is not interesting to people, they care why you believe it because you may have an argument they haven't thought of.
The only thing that you're explaining to us is that you accept every anti-Assange argument proffered by the Democratic Party, and that the fact that the release was damaging is enough information to "confirm" for you that they are all true. If the release weren't damaging, there'd be no reason to talk about it, therefore you're citing the reasons you're having a discussion of Assange's guilt as evidence of Assange's guilt. It's weaker than circumstantial, even; you've simply decided that the DNC emails were released optimally for mysterious Russian interests, and are making a secular intelligent design argument.
I can't be read as anything but a public statement that you'll accept any charge against anyone accused of damaging your party, and over the subject of the safety of a journalist exposing government corruption no less. The scariest part of the whole thing is that the DNC emails exposed corruption. We should be celebrating their release because they exposed as true what was only suspected before. The Democratic Party fired people over it. But the current zeitgeist is about suppressing information from enemies and boosting information from friends, and Assange is a designated enemy. If the Democratic Party weren't so horrifically undemocratic internally, it would be celebrating the exposure of corruption in its own ranks, but instead it mourns the financial losses of the insiders who missed out on a H. Clinton presidency.
I will never get over Democrats supporting Trump in his prosecution of Assange because they decided that Assange supported Trump. Convincing people to support Trump prosecuting a journalist in order to avenge H. Clinton's loss to Trump is a real knot of a thought process to be twisted into.
Did you miss this part where I gave a reason for why I don’t believe it?
As far the rest of your personal diatribe—maybe consider for a second the possibility that you might not be able to reliably deduce the subtleties of person’s politics by reading between the lines of a single comment on hn? Jeez, get over yourself.
Assange is not charged only for doing journalism, such as revealing secret information. Assange is also charged for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and conspiring to do so.
Journalists rightfully defend Assange only in the the first type of charges, but not in the second type. He should go to US and face charges. Assange stopped being journalist at some point and started actively participating in crimes not covered by journalist ethics.
But if you read all the detailed reporting from Wired (and others) at the time, including interviews with the rat (Adrian Lamo, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/leak/ , https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lamo/) who made up that claim to save his own butt, it's clear that that charge is false as well. Assange never commited computer intrusion himself and he also never encouraged others to do so. That was a lie the FBI forced Lamo into during the case against Manning.
