demagogue on 12/4/2019 at 05:58
I'll crosspost what I posted about this elsewhere.
Quote:
I got the idea Assange's day finally came because he was smearing poo on the walls inside the embassy, and probably that he was starting to go full Howard Hughes judging by his appearance, and somebody in the embassy made a command decision, probably after repeated warnings that went unheeded, that he'd overstayed his welcome and the embassy invited the police in to get him.
More broadly speaking, as a public law lawyer I'm interested in transparency and accountability. I've done FOIA work before (Freedom of Information Act, the law that requires the gov't to release certain info and there's a whole process about it), and have always felt the more info released the better. But I also feel like there needs to be rules where if something is abused, the person can be punished. That's the problem with Wikileaks. It's not accountable like gov't actors are, there's no mechanism to make them accountable or answerable for their decisions, and Assange's case has always struck me as what impunity does to people, where he started getting cocky and rampantly abusing his power and using Wikileaks for blatant propaganda. If you're going to have it at all, it needs to be independent, professional, and its officers need to be accountable for what they're doing. They weren't. So this is an important step in that direction.
Edit: Re: the issue of treatment of whisleblowers, my general position is responsible whistleblowing should not be punished, and there should be explicit rules to allow it and protect whistleblowers. I don't believe Assange was a responsible whistleblower and predict he'd be punished even under the more protective rules I'm thinking about, but that's for a trial & jury to conclude and not my personal opinion.
The cases I work on involve blatant abusive punishments of whistleblowers, where gov't employees expose real corruption and abuses on the inside and get hit with defamation or "violating state secrecy" charges. I'm more sympathetic with Chelsey Manning and Ed Snowden's cases (more so if they'd exposed more publicly vital information that could not have been released otherwise and needed to be; but I need to look into their cases in detail to be more specific) than Assange, whom I think cared more about making a propaganda machine for explicit political purposes and didn't care about protecting the public or the actual issues he was releasing info on at all.
I have a simple litmus test: does the person leaking the information care about the issue that they're releasing info on? If they care, they'd and say something about that issue. And if they don't really care, than how can I trust them to do what's best for the public, since ex hypothesi they don't care about the public at all.
Also, related to that, I'd question the charge "now we hear nothing of what's going on behind the curtain". There is tons of information about what's happening behind the curtain ... books, and books, and books, and books of it, millions of pages of information. A lot of information leaking was already out there buried in or could be derived from books and reports if you knew where to look. And when people care about the issue, they learn where to look. And then they can understand what information is still being hidden and work to get it out, like the people we work with in countries like Myanmar or Cambodia. To me, it's important that leaking information be combined with people that care about the issue enough to be responsible about it and do it in the public interest. And I distrust people that don't care or have ulterior motives in leaking information as just as potentially harmful to the public as the gov't workers they want to take down.
jkcerda on 12/4/2019 at 06:13
Not all heroes. Wear capes
Renzatic on 12/4/2019 at 08:21
Looks like the conservatives are making another martyr out of someone they hated before 2016.
...and to be fair, who the liberals once celebrated.
Everything's ass backwards now.
Quote Posted by icemann
A sign of things to come. And now we hear nothing of what's going on behind the curtain. Which is better?
You've seen what's been going on these last couple of years, right? Our governments are leaking secrets like a sieve. You don't need a self stylized freedom superhero like Assange anymore. Just wait for some random federal grunt or middle management schlub to start nursing a grudge, and you'll have reams of interoffice secrets splayed out all over the internet before the week is out.
Renzatic on 12/4/2019 at 08:26
By the way, I give it three posts before Tony arrives, and starts making shit up to talk down to us about.
Nameless Voice on 12/4/2019 at 08:37
I don't know what I think about that guy.
Leaking buried secrets is commendable, but later interfering in the election, and in favour of a white supremacist, is certainly not.
Either way, I think extradition to the USA should never be allowed under any circumstances, for anyone. They have a terrible track record of human rights for prisoners at the best of times.
icemann on 12/4/2019 at 13:54
From memory (and correct me if I'm wrong here) but didn't Wikileaks also publish stuff about other countries, like that the Australian government had put secret eavesdropping equipment in rooms when dealing with Indonesia. I definitely recall something along those lines, and of the shit storm that it created. And they published stuff about what countries really thought of each other. Again correct me if I'm wrong. Going completely by memory.