That article is enlightening - it changed my take on Assange from "guy who is really good at disseminating classified information" to "guy who is really good at executing a well articulated plan to reduce secrecy in government".

These few lines sum it up nicely:

Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about.