Why I don't Trust Julian Assange | Hacker News Reader

Why I don't Trust Julian Assange

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65 pointscjoh38 comments

Assange is not that scared for his life. He appeared at the Centre for Investigative Journalism just last Friday[1].

I think George Brock said it best in his post entitled "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks agenda" where he wrote, "Assange’s style is an odd mixture of insight, nonsense and brass-neck salesmanship"[2] The fact that Wikileaks has an agenda and are out to sell information to the highest bidder does not speak well, IMO[3].

The Wau Holland Foundation has told reporters that Wikileaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth, however they have not produced any detailed reciepts for this[4]. As any chartiy should do- some are even required by law to do so.

On their twitter feed they call cryptome out for full primary sources, this is very hypocritical on their part[5]. Many of their problems did not start until Assange took the "helm", and many will not cease until he leaves.

[1] http://www.tcij.org/

[2] http://georgebrock.net/?p=853

[3] http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-ec...

[4] http://www.techeye.net/internet/wau-holland-foundation-sheds...

[5] http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17960055502

No, he's not scared, he's just very good at manipulating a certain segment of the media

Whatever the personal scruples of Julian Assange may be, I support the overall aims of Wikileaks to allow whistle blowers to post information in the public interest, exposing wrong doing, corruption, human rights violations or war crimes. In the past too many misdeeds have been hidden from public scrutiny and public accountability.

Putting yourself into the public arena as Assange has done must be very difficult, and take some degree of personal courage. I'm sure there must be many powerful people from regimes of ill repute who want to cut him down a few pegs, or disappear him entirely.

Assange's antics have turned me off to Wikileaks to the point where I will have trouble taking anything they publish at face value. He is doing a disservice to the transparency movement. It's pretty remarkable that someone can be both a paranoid recluse and shameless attention whore, but Assange pulls it off quite well. Wikileaks would be much better off with someone both low key and competent like Clay in charge.

He's paranoid for good reason, governments have a long history of killing whistleblowers. Just look at what happened to David Kelly.

Like his style or not, he's been fairly adept at generating press. Someone low key might not be capable of doing that.

The press wikileaks was getting before Assange emerged from behind the curtain was far better than it is now. They seemed poised to become the reuters/AP of primary source data. Now that seems almost impossible.

> the reuters/AP of ...

Unintentional irony? Both of those organizations' reputations have become quite tarnished. They are certainly not contemporary bastions of fair-handed transparency -- witness Reuters' photo manipulation and AP's quote-whoring.

I'm unfamiliar with those incidents. So sure.

I was of course using them as examples of a reference news service or the closest thing we have one in this age. Wikileaks was in a position to become such an institution. One that no one could ignore. That does not seem very likely anymore.

No organization is 100% perfect, but AP/Reuters is a far cry from wikileaks in terms of journalistic integrity. Did you read the New Yorker profile on Assange? He doesn't even claim to be objective. He talked about selecting audio for the "collateral murder" clips to maximize emotional impact.

You are completely missing the point. By becoming a bit of a public face he reduces the chance that he can be portrayed as a fugitive, etc. If there are dozens of articles about his antics, people have heard of him before they hear his name in an announcement that he was apprehended for terrorism.

That's a pretty thin pretext and it only covers a fraction of the behavior I'm referencing.

What behavior is most concerning to you that's not categorized under "publicity stunt"?

It was Wikileaks' publishing of the private pager messages in New York from the day of 9/11 that turned me off to them. (http://911.wikileaks.org)

Would Wikileaks also have published all my private email from that day had they obtained it? Can't say I'd be down with that.

For somebody who runs Wikileaks to be a little bit paranoid seems forgivable. In fact even without something like running it I am already so paranoid that I don't even dream of starting something like Wikileaks.

I am very much interested in freedom of information and anonymous outlets, but I don't think there is a reliable way to provide anonymity on the internet. So if you start something like Wikileaks, staying anonymous seems impossible.

Why I don't trust Clay Johnson: He thinks that US Army is an angel. He has ties with politicians. He is jealous of Julian Assange and it is easy for him to sit around his ass blame Assange for trying to be a Messiah while Assange has to travel constantly to protect the whistle blowers' identity and to keep organizations & governments honest.

I can't claim to know who Clay Johnson is, but I am really interested in his low contribution to Wikipedia article length ratio.

It's so easy to take the moral high ground when one has zero power. That briefly summarizes Clay's self-important diatribe. More to the point: who's Clay Johnson? That's right: nobody knows, and nobody cares.

He's in charge of the tech arm of the Sunlight Foundation, a pretty cool group working for increased transparency in government. They're behind projects like opencongress.org.

I'd say he's pretty well known among the "open source government" crowd.

He lost me when he admitted to having been involved in the Howard Dean campaign. He clearly has a very favorable view of governmental entities and aspires to be favored by those in power.

Because he worked on a political campaign?

No, that he's boasting about it as evidence of why he should be trusted over Assange.

Huh? His comment was critical of Howard Dean's campaign.

Here's what he said: "No organization like Wikileaks can survive a cult of personality, or one person’s delusions of grandeur. Trust me — I worked on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign."

He's not saying "Trust me, I worked on a political campaign." He's saying, with a bit of dark humor, "Trust me, I know what it's like to be involved in a cult of personality and watch it fail because of it."

I don't see how you could have possibly drawn those conclusions about Clay based only on this post, and I simply disagree with the idea that Assange has to grandstand in order to protect anyone's identity.

He's not grandstanding to protect peoples' identities, but to reduce the risk of his being disappeared by a government.

You go to war with the Wikileaks you have, not the Wikileaks you wish you had.

Exactly wrong. If we're going to discuss Wikileaks, we have to discuss the one that actually exists, not the idealized fiction we wish existed or hope develops over time.

Err. You say "exactly wrong" then agree with him. You've both made statements favoring the use of what actually exists.

You're implying that I endorse using Wikileaks. I kind of don't.

Why not ?

He is a security vendor, and that industry's biggest client is the U.S. government. Can't speak for him, but others in a similar position are usually muzzled.

Seriously? I'd like to think I wouldn't say something like that about someone I didn't know at all, 'mahmud.

For the record, and not that it should need to be said, but we do zero business with the US Government.

Sorry Thomas, I am a D.C-area native and surrounded by IT security people like the type I wrongfully characterized you as.

FWIW, I thought I was doing you a favor answering on your behalf, so you don't have to.

To be honest, if Assange is really stands by his own principles, he probably doesn't want you to take anyone's trustability for granted (including his).

Good point. He probably would not want US politicians to trust him or like him either.

...says some guy who works for the US Government.

[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_A._Johnson

None of the jobs listed is a US Government job. The Sunlight Foundation, which it seems he no longer is director of, is most certainly not a part of the US Government.

Ad hominem and factually incorrect. Good one.

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