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Comment by hedgedoops2 | Hacker News Reader

The agenda was to promote radical transparency.

Check out 'Inside Wikileaks' by Daniel Ellsberg, a WL cofounder who had a falling out with Assange and founded his own radical transparency platform called OpenLeaks. Brigitta Jonsdottir used to work there too, an Icelandic green.

Wikileaks stated policy and concept used to be:

- Receive, in a way that keeps the leaker anonymous, any and all state secrets that are of public interest

- Publish them after checking authenticity

This constitutes an attack on secrecy as such, not on any particular country or entity.

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Yes, and my point is that that is a fringe agenda. There is broad public support for keeping some things secret.

That said, I think there is space to debate what the boundaries of that ought to be, and I think there are too many state secrets in the United States.

It's quite simple. The press is free and it is not responsible for national security, whatever that means today. It is responsible for getting the truth out. If secrets must be kept, it is the spies' responsibility to keep them, not the media's.

And WL is absolutely part of the media.

As for the 'reasonably general conception of the public interest' of wikileaks, I suppose it is 'to get all of the truth out'.

No one has an issue with WikiLeaks keeping some things secret. The issue is when they clearly support specific sides in political issues and strategically leak and manipulate information to support only that one side, while disparaging another. This isn't how a transparent, journalistic, "information wants to be free" organization operates. That's how an intelligence organization operates.

The concern is that Assange has turned WikiLeaks into his own personal intelligence agency to achieve his political goals. And these WikiLeaks-leaks from the past few years seem to confirm much of that concern. Assange constantly uses language in these DMs indicating intent to influence political situations to his favor, and the subtle and nuanced ways they can affect and control narratives.

I'm not really convinced Assange and WikiLeaks are puppets of the Russian government, but I do think Assange has let the power and prestige go to his head, and has now rejected any pretense of neutrality and humanitarianism. WikiLeaks is now Assange's personal machine to change global geopolitics in a direction he likes; nothing more. Who knows if that was his intent from the start or if it's a case of "die a hero or live along enough to see yourself become the villain". They should really change their name, either way.

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