Spare a Thought for Julian Assange Spending His Fifth Christmas Behind Bars
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You could have a fighter on the field vs a martyr in jail.
The freedom battle will be won on the field.
Yet, and Unlike snowden or arrange, Greenwald has not violated the veil of perceived inviolability of the national security caste in USA.
Which is why Snowden & Assange have more in common with each other vs Greenwald.
For the US natsec caste, laws and facts do not apply, the only thing that matters is the perceived status as above-the-law, and who is openly attacking such status
How does this relate to the topic?
I assure you as someone who was reading WikiLeaks from before the big ones, they were extensively methodological, working with journalists and actually contacting the government with notices of upcoming releases providing them the opportunity to request reasonable redactions. They were as good or better than the infosec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_vulnerability_disc... community.
Heck, even publishing your company’s trade secrets could get you imprisoned.
War crimes would always and forever be considered confidential information in the jurisdiction of the country that committed them, I bet. Well, better not reveal that the very moral US army is using dogs on prisoners in Guantanamo, or killing 10 civilians as "collateral damage" while bombing a single target mingling with them.
Maybe instead of crying how Assange broke the law, we can actually prosecute the people who did those atrocities and question how this is allowed to happen? Nah, let's put him in jail to rot, much like the Russians did with Navalny, an inconvenient politician, after they failed to poison him.
> Heck, even publishing your company’s trade secrets could get you imprisoned.
In civilized countries like Germany, for example, there are whistleblower laws that actually state you are liable if you DON'T report on your company's shady practices.
You should also realize that they he was detained on a made-up rape accusation, basically sending a message that whoever you are, whatever you do, they will find a way make you shut up if you are doing your job too well. Hence the toothless journalism in America.
1. What is a journalist? If you receive classified materials, filter out anything that might put lives in danger and release it (eg the Pentagon Papers) then that's journalism. If you provide material aid and instruction to someone to murder someone for information then that's no longer journalism, even though you may publish that information as a journalist.
The point is that journalism isn't an absolute defense. So where does Assange lie on this scale? This debatable because he provided material aid to Manning (allegedly).
2. Bias. This is more of a PR issue than a journalism issue because journalists and publications have bias but it's a question of degree and transparency. At some point you're lon longer a journalist,, you're an operative for a particular cause or political party. In 2016, for example, Assange timed the email release quite deliberately to hurt the HIlary campaign and also (allegedly) didn't publish information embarrassing to the Republican Party.
Importantly, this selective release of information and the deliberate timing of those releases for political or personal ends undermines Wikileaks' stated mission. It makes it easier to, for example, paint him as a Republican hack or a tool of Russian intelligence, whether that's true or not.
Also, at a certain point, what did you think was going to happen? Of course, the long arm of US law enforcement was going to smack you down.
Don't you think a lot of professional media outlets do that too? Be eager to publish negative stories about people they dislike, sit on or suppress negative stories about people they do like? Imagine it is late October next year, and the New York Times or Washington Post uncover a new scandal about one of the presidential candidates - if it is about the Republican (probably Trump), they'll be eager to publish it; if it is about the Democrat (probably Biden), they'll likely get stuck into debating whether they should, double-checking and triple-checking it, and by the time that's all done the election is over. Whereas, I'd expect the Wall Street Journal or Fox News to do the exact same thing, just the other way around.
Bias can take many forms. The choice of what you cover, the choice of what you don't cover, the language you use (eg passive vs active voice), not questioning certain sources (eg being a steganopgrapher for a particular spokesperson), the timing of a story and so on.
Wikileaks described itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". So choosing what to publish and when to publish it undermines that claim. What then distinguishes Julian Assange from Alex Jones?
So Assange as a journalist isn't doing anything fundamentally different from NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc
> Wikileaks described itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". So choosing what to publish and when to publish it undermines that claim.
I think Wikileaks was always going to exercise some discretion about what leaks it published. For example, suppose someone sent it a hospital's medical records database. I expect they would have looked at that and said "we aren't publishing this" - because it would have been a massive invasion of privacy of random private individuals with no public interest to justify it.
Just like "real journalists" - there is some responsibility to determine what should be published and what should not be. And, just like "real journalists", sometimes that responsibility gets clouded by political bias.
> What then distinguishes Julian Assange from Alex Jones?
Assange published real secret government documents. Alex Jones just completely made stuff up, e.g. "School shootings are faked by the government". That's a massive difference.
I think their bias is not entirely straightforward.
This is such insanity.
I used to have alternating wallpapers of him and Navalny to remind me that doing the right thing can ruin your life, but it's still the right thing to do.
from wikipedia:
> A March 2, 2015 New York Times article broke the story that the Benghazi panel had discovered that Clinton exclusively used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one throughout her time as Secretary of State, and that her aides took no action to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts as required by law.[42][43][44] At that point, Clinton announced that she had asked the State Department to release her emails.[45] Some in the media labeled the controversy "emailgate."[46][47][48]