How the Wikileaks founder alienated his allies
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
It takes a certain type of personality (and a certain type of mania/insanity) to run against the odds/world like he did.. We should accept that if it comes with some rough edges, thats kinda the price for it.
Even if there are arguments over wether or not he is "a great man", it is clear that he has achieved great things, and sometimes the people who do also have great flaws..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/jaccuse-sweden-brit...
The reason? Their definition is much different than in any other country. He is not guilty of sexual assault by any sane definition.
The smear campaign against him has been eagerly joined by the same newspapers (notably the Guardian whose behavior has been disgraceful) that profited from publishing the leaks in the first place.
If Assange is put down, as the US government and certain allies wish, don't expect us to have someone else, whose personality you find more agreeable stepping into his place and doing the high-risk, low reward job of sticking their neck out on this stuff.
Isn't that exactly what the article was getting at? That the wikileaks movement has turned into a personality cult where it is forbidden to express any form of doubt about dear leader?
You call the job high risk, low reward. For someone that appears to exhibit strong narcissistic tendencies I would say the 'reward' has been anything but low.
The idea that it's a reward to be living under effective house arrest despite having no charges leveled against him because he faces the real threat of being handed over to the custody of a nation which has demonstrated its willingness to ignore laws and intern without trial for years on end its enemies, is facile.
However having read a number of articles from both sides regarding his alleged offences, I see no evidence of conspiracy. The fact that he is a celebrity cannot deter the Swedish authorities from pursuing the allegations against him.
The only reason people are debating the drone strike situation at the moment is because of leaks. Once you show that you can silence even the most high profile of leakers and their mechanisms for getting information out there, don't expect more to step up and do it.
I don't think we're better off with the world getting increasingly closed off and governments being able to better protect secrets.
Focusing on being offended by someone's personality rather than the core issue of exposing things done behind closed doors in the name of people who may not approve of those things were they aware of them, is an unfortunate tangent to go down.
The only reason you think he's at risk of being bundled into a jet is his high profile. If he'd used his technical abilities to create what many want wikileaks to be - a secure platform for whistleblowers to anonymously communicate with the press, then things would be decidedly different. He has chosen to focus everything around himself.
The only reason people are debating the drone strike situation at the moment is because of leaks.
I'm not sure why you think this. Most of the drone stories I've read are about the killing of civilians which would be reported without wikileaks.
I don't think we're better off with the world getting increasingly closed off and governments being able to better protect secrets.
I definitely agree.
Focusing on being offended by someone's personality rather than the core issue of exposing things done behind closed doors in the name of people who may not approve of those things were they aware of them, is an unfortunate tangent to go down.
But it's the focus on his personality and him in general which many are objecting to.
Other organizations exist and none of them get attention.
RE: Drone strikes http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-21333570
The reason it's in the news RIGHT NOW is due to the current story about leaked documents showing the US government secret legal case for targeting US citizens. So that's why I think that. Because it happens to be the case.
And my point has been that objecting to his personality is a trivial reason to undermine his work, and allowing the climate of hounding him into submission to successfully do so renders leaking a far more dangerous task and one that fewer people will engage in.
You neglected to mention that the document in question was obtained and published by NBC, not Wikileaks.
Says who? How is that theory anything more than part of the image he's made for himself?
The only reason people are debating the drone strike situation at the moment is because of leaks.
Even if I agreed with that (which I don't), you've neglected to explain how a Julian Assange figure is a requirement of leaking such information.
I don't think we're better off with the world getting increasingly closed off and governments being able to better protect secrets.
What I said was that we'd be better off without a Julian Assange like attention-seeker. If you cannot mentally separate his actions from the information, you're only confirming my point that he has created a media image about himself that greatly inflates his personal relevance.
Focusing on being offended by someone's personality...
Who cares about his personality? It's his actions I judge him on. I'm offended by his distortion of the content of the leaks ("Collateral Murder" is hardly the only example) and his choice to purposefully hold information back for a media-manipulating political purpose. If you want to blindly trust him (or anybody else) in spite of that, you're free too, but I don't think the world would be worse off without that.
Assange should have followed the philosophy of the cypherpunk mailing list he spent so much time on in the 1990s that was all about with protecting your identity, using cryptography, being anonymous and affecting change through technology.
Wikileaks used that methodology well for their whistleblowers but Assange did the opposite by being so public... and I'm not sure it was all for the best.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/This-Machine-Kills-Secrets-WikiLeakers...
There will always be leaders. Its a key part of how society work. TPB is no exception and the founders are very well known in the world. The interesting part through is that after all the problems, TPB turn into a complete anonymous organization where leader roles are now days gone from the public.
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1895vl/creator_o...
WikiLeaks should try to just distance themselves from him and try to continue the work of being a conduit for safely exposing corruption and lies.
But at some point the story became about Assange and not about the issues. It was at this point that I realized that he was part of the problem and not part of the solution. You don't fix the security state with hero worship and self-promotion. You just create a different set of problems.
True, but I think that is is often very strong/odd characters, who are willing to dedicate their life for "big" fights. Those causes need someone who is willing to go out, and promote the hell out of a leak. Otherwise it goes down as just another internet-only phenomenon.
If you are leaking information to a 3rd party, you want the information out there and create the biggest possible effect. Otherwise you could just post it on your blog. So far only Assange has shown repeatedly, that he can deliver this exposure - and to withstand the heat.
Case and point: Not a single relevant leak has reached my attention from all the split-up groups that aimed to do better than Wikileaks. The only acceptable alternative seems Cryptome who benefit for their long-time legacy.
At what point does one's narcissism become more than the cause?
"Case and point: Not a single relevant leak has reached my attention from all the split-up groups that aimed to do better than Wikileaks"
I don't think many of Assange's sincere critics wish for Wikileaks to collapse, they want him to step down from its operations.
The only thing protecting Assange from having been bundled into a jet and whisked off to Guantanamo by now is his rather high personal profile. It's not like his enemies don't have a track record here...
No, and that's not what was stated. What he was alleged to have done would be a wrong, as are many things Wikileaks covers. Does Wikileaks require Assange to do exactly what they're doing? They don't need such a figurehead.
"The only thing protecting Assange from having been bundled into a jet and whisked off to Guantanamo by now is his rather high personal profile. It's not like his enemies don't have a track record here..."
The second contradicts the first, there is nothing about his high profile that protects him from being whisked off. Those forces aren't particularly concerned about the media operating independently from the governmental interests.
The same media which profited from his leaks is the media whose portrait of him you're choosing to accept unless you know him personally. The arguments on here are pretty much exclusively about this alleged personality.
I really have no interest in "media" portrayal, and I certainly don't want to enable their continued "successes", as dim as they are, but I do take sexual assault charges and evasion seriously. The profile makes it easier for him to avoid them and find supporters to fund/house him, but I don't see how it would stop a government from whisking him off if they were able to.
Considering that story lede immediately tried to sway my opinion with a swath of negative adjectives, "Jemima Can" do without me reading her screed.