Yes wikileaks has done very good things for the world. No, Assange is not the moral actor he claims to be.
I agree completely that the leak was very significant, but my preference (I think; not 100%) would be that Snowden hadn't leaked.
How does that work?
Lots of evil is done in the name of "trying to make the world better". Its not unreasonable for people to be more interested in what they see your actions as likely to produce (and what they see that you reasonably should have known that they were likely to produce) than what you intended them to produce.
(And that's even before getting into the fact that "better" is subjective and one person's better can easily be another person's dystopian nightmare.)
Musk is worrisome because after the innovation honeymoon is over, he could easily end up functioning as a closed-world promulgating autarch - just as Gates and Jobs did.
But Assange and Snowden? Their very popularity is founded on forcing open centralized amalgamations of power. They have localized power and surely an assortment of groupies etc, but these structures simply cannot scale to dominate a medium city, never mind the world.
So even if they are run-of-the-mill psychopaths playing their roles solely for self-advancement, the possible damage they can do is quite limited compared to say any unnamed multinational executive.
Capitalism created a Schelling point for getting useful public goods from self-interested parties. Compared to the prior most-lucrative path of government (likely via revolution), it raised the average amount of control for everyone while constraining the maximum control a winner could obtain. The general belief in free exchange of information advances this cooperation point to even smaller power structures, leaving the supernodes with even less privileged leverage over the rest of us.
Again, not against the former two, but I don't think that is an apt comparison whatsoever.
The quickest example comes to mind is how much of a douchey move this is from Assange:
http://gizmodo.com/wikileaks-just-published-tons-of-personal...
And how Snowden was a patriot for uncovering the omniscient warrantless wiretapping, but he also released the means and methods for how the NSA does literally their job in hacking foreign intelligence targets.
Publishing unredacted documents does help sell their authenticity to the general public but I think too often the harm is too great, especially to innocent parties.
But what if Wikileaks waited to be asked... Who do they give the docs to? Just courts, or interested civilians? If the former, how does that help citizens know what's going on, and if the later, what's the difference between just releasing it and selectively releasing it? This also requires people risk their freedom to request the full version.
And more critically, that means to prevent the publishing of full documents you simply need to kill the messenger.
Running Wikileaks the other way wouldn't be useful and still wouldn't appease the wrong-doers.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12864328/wikileaks-threat-r...
I too doubt that they have anything that significant for the election but I will give them the benefit of the doubt based on their prior important work. I also understand that they release information bit by bit. If it was released all at once, mass media would not have a chance to report on all of it.
Is there a specific case you're thinking of? For instance, with the DNC leaks, or with Chelsea Manning's leaks, I believe that the information relevant to the public interest would have been disclosed by any reputable major news outlet (NYT, WashPo, ...) that received it, so long as its authenticity could be verified.
I prefer that leakers go to traditional journalists (à la Snowden) rather than WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has a track record of creating collateral damage with its disclosures; for example, exposing SSNs and credit card numbers of people who happened to be donors to the DNC and who were otherwise uninvolved with the shenanigans going on. A responsible, ethical journalist would take care to exclude personal information that is tangential to the actual public interest.
What was the actual, observable impact of unabridged Wikileaks documents in court cases?
WikiLeaks is a media organisation so it will crave for attention as all media does. But please name one single case in which data released by WikiLeaks was bogus.
On the other hand I could bring up hundreds of cases where main stream media has released fake information.
So how exactly do you decide who has credibility and who does not?
Entirely off-topic, but I find it interesting and amusing that we can fairly squarely date ourselves with references like this. I grew up with a Lamborghini Countach picture on the wall by my bed. I suspect later generations of children (mostly boys, to be sure) had Diablos, Gallardos, Aventadors, etc, or some representative equivalent (Lamborghinis just make it easier with defined names for model types).
If you're curious, the dynamic you mention was already used in the movie "22 Jump Street" where the undercover, older guy has a Countach poster and the investigation target, the college age guy, had a Murcialago poster.
Didn't he already do this? And not just once, but many times. In fact his releases have been so controversial that he has the "privilege" to live in an embassy while hearing via media politicians (mostly Democrats) calling for his death or even "droning" him. (Hillary suggested that)
Could it be that you are just a Hillary supporter that is afraid he could release something damaging about her?
That seems to have more to do with his refusal to face the music on rape charges than his releases.
> while hearing via media politicians (mostly Democrats) calling for his death
For most of the time since WikiLeaks involvement in the publishing the Manning docs, the calls for his punishment, including by the most drastic means, have been bipartisan but stronger on the Republican side. The Republicans changed their tune after Assange participated in the release of the DNC hack recently, but its somewhat revisionist to pretend that history started just a few weeks ago.
Assange surely is a conspiracy theorist to hide in the embassy when politicians publicly call for his death and his main informant Manning was placed into 24/7 solitary confinement which could only be described as torture.
> the calls for his punishment, including by the most drastic means, have been bipartisan but stronger on the Republican side
Okay, then please name a Republican that has called for killing Assange.
Sara Palin called Assange an "anti-American operative with blood on his hands" who should "pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders".
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) called for Assange to be tried for espionage and for WikiLeaks to be designated, treated, and combatted as a terrorist organization.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) described Assange as a "high-tech terrorist"
Newt Gingrich declared that "Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. [...] And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism." and that "He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively."
Politicians calling for his death is just grandstanding. In fact, the possibility of the death penalty is probably the only thing that would keep Sweden from extraditing him.
The U.S. and the U.K. also have an extradition treaty, so the existence of a U.S.-Sweden extradition treaty doesn't really do much to enhance the plausibility of a double-extradition plot where Sweden extradites him from the U.K. on rape charges only as a ruse to get him into Sweden where he can be extradited to the U.S. on some other charges. (If the U.K. was a country that had no extradition treaty with the U.S. and was particularly resistant to U.S. extradition, then a double-extradition plot might be plausible.)
Now the U.S. and Ecuador also have a treaty but I don't read lawyer well enough, especially not old-timey lawyer, to know whether it would apply to anything Assange might be charged with. It does say it "shall not be applicable to crimes or offences of a political character" and I'm sure that's how Assange would characterize it (and I think that's at least partially why Ecuador has been housing him).
But the U.S. hasn't charged him with anything so there's nothing for Ecuador to extradite him for yet. In any case, the claim is a nice excuse to avoid jail in Sweden.
No, he isn't. Contrary to the ever-lasting myth, embassies have no extraterritorial status whatsoever. They are in and are a part of the host country.
But they have special protections under the Vienna Convention.
I don't know about his other leaks but there's evidence that he communicated with, arguably collaborated with and advised, Manning before Manning copied the classified material. If Manning just sent the material to Wikileaks, Assange would be in the clear (e.g. the Pentagon Papers, Trump's 1995 tax return info this week). Maybe it's not a solid enough case to be sure of a conviction, I doubt the U.S. would want to take a chance on it, but it's not like there's nothing there.
No one has suggested charging him with treason. He certainly can be guilty of espionage against the US without being a citizen.
(And his citizenship is irrelevant to whether he can exceed the protection of the 1st Amendment, since that applies whether or not he is a citizen with regard to government action such as prosecution for espionage.)
She declined to do it anywhere but Sweden if my memory serves.