Want to Know Julian Assange’s Endgame? He Told You a Decade Ago

They are also as you said control the media which means you control the narrative, wikileaks would have 0 impact if the media would not have picked their leaks up and run with them, the amount of people who access that site and read the information directly is negligible.

Also since the regiems not only control the media but also the medium e.g. the internet good luck at breaking through, if it's truly a walled garden state there is very little you can actually do, and with the right amount of force and preemptive control over the narrative even a full external media blitz won't really help you.

There is a difference between transparency and abuse, wikileaks is walking a very thin line, and it has passed it several times by refusing the curate information which does not score them any points. Assange's crusade against clinton does also not sit well with many people even if they mostly agree with his ideology, his latest interview on Real Time with Bill Maher about a month ago did not score him many points when he confronted Bill about his donations to the the democratic party.

Imagine there's a that would weakly benefit 95% of society, but negatively impact 5%, but the net tradeoff is positive.

It's already somewhat difficult to pass these sorts of agreements, because if that 5% is an organized interest group with broad public sympathy, they will blast the media with negative media coverage.

Now imagine that a negative provision for that group was being considered while the agreement hadn't even been finalized. Then everyone only sees the downside for that group, without seeing that the final agreement is generally positive.

Public negotiations will effectively magnify the veto power of small interest groups, making agreements much more difficult to pass.

Note that this also applies to laws in general, since they're often a negotiating between parties or within parties. Do you think it would be beneficial if every private communication between legislators was made public?

The problem is that secrecy doesn't purely serve 'petty graft', but also allows politicians to actually make deals and get things done.

The thesis that 'raising the cost of secrecy' is always a good thing is unproven. Plus, Assange et al are less a neutral information source, but rather an active participant in politics with their own, hidden motivations.

Over the last 30 years, we've repeatedly seen the reform of politics in the US aimed at eliminating graft and taking power away from politicians and putting it in the hands of voters. Over the same period of time, politics here as gotten more and more dysfunctional.

Relevant: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-amer...

I submit that voters are often unable to effectively make compromises and form voting blocs with others. It used to fall to politicians to negotiate behind closed doors to hash out a deal. In Assange's secret-less world, that won't be possible.

He's been in the media for 40 years without anyone calling him racist and he's been around supermodels without anyone calling him a sexual predator or anything like that. But all of a sudden they find he is all of that and even worse.

And on the other hand, how much negative stuff is reported about Hillary? There certainly is lots of material with all that WikiLeaks has put out. Almost zero, she is instead praised like a Soviet leader. She's a wonderful human being and politician that somehow made $250 million while in office.

This election has simply made it harder to deny that Wikileaks operates as a front for Russian intelligence, but the evidence was there years ago.