Compare him with Edward Snowden. Snowden has moderate opinions compared to Assange. With that, he is much more readable than Assange by general public, and so he is better shielded.
And both of them stood up to power and paid price for it.
It doesn't matter who they are and what kind of ice-cream flavor they like.
This kind of thinking is exactly what state propaganda pushes. Create smear campaign then shift the discourse to talking about the whistle blowers and not about the actual whistle blowing.
Notice how often 'Assange is rapist' and 'Snowden is a russian spy' narrative are almost all that ever comes up on media coverage. Or the talk about leaks is derailed by someone to those points.
But they are different characters. Assange is much more revolutionary at heart than Snowden (in the Cyberspace Manifesto sense). And it hurts him more, in my opinion, because the society is not ready (if it's ever gonna be).
On the other hand, Snowden's opinions are pretty moderate. He doesn't want a revolutionary society where all information wants to be free. He just wants a better oversight of secret services. So he's more relatable as a result.
My introduction to wikileaks was when it was first covered on slashdot, before any leaks with any relevancy to me. At that time the stated mission statement was to publish all of the leaked documents after authenticating them in an effort to subject secret actions of government to more scrutiny. And make those in government more cautions about what they'll do even with the cover of secrecy. It was created by people from the anglosphere, therefore the US was always going to be a large part of their focus. No matter how much more deserving of criticism other countries may be.
With that as a throughline (and even back then Assange had a bit of reputation as a wanker), I've never been _that_ surprised with the way the project has acted over the years. If my only exposure to Assange was the coverage whenever he made the news, I would find the whole thing impenetrable. It's one of the things that first made me start seeing how poorly thrown together news narratives really are.
He's shielded by russia. Were he in any other country he'd be in a US cell alone. Funny how one has to hide in Russia to preach encryption!
while biased, it's not in itself a lie
> naive to trust wikileaks is impartial.
Also irrelevant. Nobody should be imprisoned for being partial!