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Comment by blueberry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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."

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