Julian Assange (Wikileaks) to speak at HOPE Conference in NYC in 2 weeks? | Hacker News Reader

Julian Assange (Wikileaks) to speak at HOPE Conference in NYC in 2 weeks?

thenexthope.org

4 pointswaivej9 comments

"Assange is scheduled to give The Next HOPE Saturday keynote on July 17 in New York City. To make things even more interesting, Lamo ["hacker" the April drone video was leaked to] has also been planning on appearing at the conference and may now wind up facing a hacker community who views his actions with, to put it mildly, disappointment."

Open articleView on HN

In the article (which is two weeks old, by the way), they say that he was scheduled to speak before all this started, but they're not encouraging him to attend given all that has happened since.

According to their radio show "Off The Hook" (July 1st - http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/11980), they might have something setup so he can still deliver the keynote.

Is he a journalist or is he an activist? He needs to pick one and stick with it.

Since Wikileaks is intrinsically both a journalist organization and an activist organization, I'm not sure what you expect Assange to do.

Are you criticizing how the Apache helicopter attack video was handled?

By being an activist, you are by definition bias to a certain cause. To me he is more of an activist then a journalist. He can call himself a journalist, but that doesn't make him so.

Does having a transparent political agenda disqualify somebody from being a journalist? Should Amy Goodman and Geraldo Rivera be stripped of their credentials?

And where does this "need" come from?

I thought there weren't going to be anymore HOPE conferences.

Yeah, me too. I really enjoyed listening to the recordings from "The Last Hope". http://www.thelasthope.org/talks.html

I think the hotel got "saved" by the economic downturn so they scheduled another one. (I think they talked about it on the radio show. http://www.2600.com/offthehook/)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com