Assange is not that scared for his life. He appeared at the Centre for Investigative Journalism just last Friday[1].
I think George Brock said it best in his post entitled "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks agenda" where he wrote, "Assange’s style is an odd mixture of insight, nonsense and brass-neck salesmanship"[2] The fact that Wikileaks has an agenda and are out to sell information to the highest bidder does not speak well, IMO[3].
The Wau Holland Foundation has told reporters that Wikileaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth, however they have not produced any detailed reciepts for this[4]. As any chartiy should do- some are even required by law to do so.
On their twitter feed they call cryptome out for full primary sources, this is very hypocritical on their part[5]. Many of their problems did not start until Assange took the "helm", and many will not cease until he leaves.
Whatever the personal scruples of Julian Assange may be, I support the overall aims of Wikileaks to allow whistle blowers to post information in the public interest, exposing wrong doing, corruption, human rights violations or war crimes. In the past too many misdeeds have been hidden from public scrutiny and public accountability.
Putting yourself into the public arena as Assange has done must be very difficult, and take some degree of personal courage. I'm sure there must be many powerful people from regimes of ill repute who want to cut him down a few pegs, or disappear him entirely.
Assange's antics have turned me off to Wikileaks to the point where I will have trouble taking anything they publish at face value. He is doing a disservice to the transparency movement. It's pretty remarkable that someone can be both a paranoid recluse and shameless attention whore, but Assange pulls it off quite well. Wikileaks would be much better off with someone both low key and competent like Clay in charge.
The press wikileaks was getting before Assange emerged from behind the curtain was far better than it is now. They seemed poised to become the reuters/AP of primary source data. Now that seems almost impossible.
Unintentional irony? Both of those organizations' reputations have become quite tarnished. They are certainly not contemporary bastions of fair-handed transparency -- witness Reuters' photo manipulation and AP's quote-whoring.
No organization is 100% perfect, but AP/Reuters is a far cry from wikileaks in terms of journalistic integrity. Did you read the New Yorker profile on Assange? He doesn't even claim to be objective. He talked about selecting audio for the "collateral murder" clips to maximize emotional impact.
I was of course using them as examples of a reference news service or the closest thing we have one in this age. Wikileaks was in a position to become such an institution. One that no one could ignore. That does not seem very likely anymore.
You are completely missing the point. By becoming a bit of a public face he reduces the chance that he can be portrayed as a fugitive, etc. If there are dozens of articles about his antics, people have heard of him before they hear his name in an announcement that he was apprehended for terrorism.
For somebody who runs Wikileaks to be a little bit paranoid seems forgivable. In fact even without something like running it I am already so paranoid that I don't even dream of starting something like Wikileaks.
I am very much interested in freedom of information and anonymous outlets, but I don't think there is a reliable way to provide anonymity on the internet. So if you start something like Wikileaks, staying anonymous seems impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Exactly wrong. If we're going to discuss Wikileaks, we have to discuss the one that actually exists, not the idealized fiction we wish existed or hope develops over time.
He is a security vendor, and that industry's biggest client is the U.S. government. Can't speak for him, but others in a similar position are usually muzzled.
To be honest, if Assange is really stands by his own principles, he probably doesn't want you to take anyone's trustability for granted (including his).
None of the jobs listed is a US Government job. The Sunlight Foundation, which it seems he no longer is director of, is most certainly not a part of the US Government.
I think George Brock said it best in his post entitled "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks agenda" where he wrote, "Assange’s style is an odd mixture of insight, nonsense and brass-neck salesmanship"[2] The fact that Wikileaks has an agenda and are out to sell information to the highest bidder does not speak well, IMO[3].
The Wau Holland Foundation has told reporters that Wikileaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth, however they have not produced any detailed reciepts for this[4]. As any chartiy should do- some are even required by law to do so.
On their twitter feed they call cryptome out for full primary sources, this is very hypocritical on their part[5]. Many of their problems did not start until Assange took the "helm", and many will not cease until he leaves.
[1] http://www.tcij.org/
[2] http://georgebrock.net/?p=853
[3] http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-ec...
[4] http://www.techeye.net/internet/wau-holland-foundation-sheds...
[5] http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17960055502