I wouldn't call his work on Wikileaks "groundbreaking", he was clearly only willing to leak documents his benefactors wanted him to.
I agree that whistleblowing shouldn't be punished like we usually do, and the attempts to imprison him were a farce, but I still think he's a piece of shit who ruined any journalistic credibility he had when he got in bed with Putin.
And whistleblowing is for a different case, it is when you work for an organization and see illegal or dangerous things, and choose loyalty to the law / public interest instead of the organization whom you work for.
Here it is different, it is an activist sponsored/supported by an enemy state actively seeking to create chaos in a foreign government.
Agreed, but I wonder if the west is stronger for it. If he had spread only lies and propaganda that the people ate up, maybe we’d only be stronger from the experience, but revealing actual problems in our system allows us to fix what otherwise lacked incentive to fix. Maybe.
It could be that these leaks actually improved the practices and government entities act nicer, due to the fear of getting caught.
Or, just worse:
It could have actually improved the information-protection practices, and serious crimes that would have "naturally" leaked to the press, are now even better guarded than before Wikileaks.
