I'm surprised, how Assange is at all relevant. Frankly, I have a growing suspicion, that he's a sham.
Does whistleblowing really need a gatekeeper?
Most of the leaks, the really ground breaking stuff, was done by other people more worthy of praise: Maning and Snowden. Assange is basically in the business of running a website and promoting himself, whilst antagonising people who actually support and believe him.
What bothers me the most, is how biased Wikileaks are. Sure, the U.S. does a lot of f'ed up stuff, but they are by far not the only players in the game.
I hear people say this all of the time, and it was the initial reaction of many people when I told them about the US Department of State Cables leak.
However, the first time I heard of Wikileaks was after the 2007 election in Kenya when there was a significant change in the vote, suddenly, due to documents leaked there [0]. There are plenty of other examples where the US government was not the one being "attacked" but that is an early example, if not the first, which brought Wikileaks to the world's attention.
Maybe the US only seems to be the main target because it is US citizens who are most empowered and/or motivated to leak those documents to Wikileaks in the first place.
And sure, Manning is worthy of praise, but the point of Wikileaks presenting the information was to keep Manning anonymous - it was his own confession to Lamo at Wired which got him in trouble in the end. I don't see what Snowden has to do with it - does he have any formal relationship with Wikileaks? Other than fighting alongside each other for a similar/the same cause, and speaking at events together etc. I don't know how that is relevant. Wikileaks has had value to the world and hopefully will have a further positive impact in the time to come.
I was personally interested if there are any leaks on Russia and China. Nothing really of note. But somehow those two countries don't strike me as somehow less likely to do creepy shit than U.S.
you need someone within those nations to leak information. then you need to get it into the relevant media. With most russian and chinese media being state controlled they are not going to run with these stories. If Western media run with them they will get little coverage in these countries and will be denoucned by russia/china as lies. Perhaps there are chinese and russian versions of wikileaks but we in the west dont know about them or the language barrier prevents the media easily picking up the stories.
That was the old wikileaks which I also supported. The new wikileaks, after they closed their leaks website, and when their team fractured internally, is a quite different thing.
The new wikileaks is not about leaks, it's about a particular agenda set by Assange.
Well then you clearly know very little about Assange or Wikileaks.
A. The majority of Wikileaks' leaks are not related to the U.S. at all. Wikileaks is hardly biased.
B. Assange is directly responsible for the creation of Wikileaks and indirectly responsible for dozens of spin-offs. Hundreds of major cases of whistelblowing probably never would have happened if it weren't for Assange. So yes, wistleblowing needs Assange.
C. Assange set himself up to be the scapegoat. He's sacrificing himself for a greater cause. Your analysis of his motives are insulting.
Seriously don't care about whether my analysis is insulting or not.
But you really think, that the whistleblowers were just held back, because they didn't have a website to post their stuff to?
Furthermore, if Assange wanted, he could easily spread the leaks anonymously and be quite persistent about it. That would actually preclude him or anyone else of being a martyr. Sounds like a win-win to me, unless, of course, you want either to stroke your ego or follow your own political agenda.
Not trying to be snarky, but why does it matter whether you find Assange detestable "as a person"? Your opinion on WikiLeaks (and surveillance, and whistleblowers, and illegal wars) is what's important. It would only matter if you found WikiLeaks ethically compromised because of something Assange did.
When people can't attack the topic they love attacking the characters behind it. Humans are much weaker than ideas and much easier targets for motivated (or paid) attackers. As we've seen with the attempts to discredit Snowden with his past as a college-dropout.
<sarcasm>Way not to go all passive aggressive there and not to ironically succumb to your own criticism.</sarcasm>
Let me help you off your high idealistic horse and say, that it could be the case, that people do not actually want to attack the topic, but care for it. It might be the case, that these people see Assange as a liability to actual whistleblowing and a useful idiot for more authoritarian players out there.
> As we've seen with the attempts to discredit Snowden with his past as a college-dropout.
I haven't heard that one, actually. It's probably the same anti-intellectual assholes who will praise e.g. Gates or Zuckerberg, et al, for dropping out of college to do some 'real work' too, rather than staying in the ivory tower or whatever.
Does whistleblowing really need a gatekeeper?
Most of the leaks, the really ground breaking stuff, was done by other people more worthy of praise: Maning and Snowden. Assange is basically in the business of running a website and promoting himself, whilst antagonising people who actually support and believe him.
What bothers me the most, is how biased Wikileaks are. Sure, the U.S. does a lot of f'ed up stuff, but they are by far not the only players in the game.