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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Keep in mind that during the US Presidential Election of 2016 Assange had already spent 3~ years living in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. Add in how the United states wanted him extradited to serve potentially life in prison and was probably using all sorts of surveilance and information gathering methods against him and wikileaks to prevent and mitigate any future leaks.
Now when you're facing an opponent known for its power to assasinate world leaders and powerful political figures, power to spy, hack and survey even their close allies for years, influence other goverments and politicians through blackmail, extortion and economic means you're bound to get a bit stressed and go a bit paranoid. When it comes to Russia the oppinions towards them where a lot more favorable in 2010-2022 as most of Europe wanted to keep access to affordable oil and gas. Meanwhile Anti-imperialist sentiment against US was probably at it's alltime high with the War in Afghanistan and Libya.
Wikileaks was never really a beacon of free speech its always been more of a platform where people can leak information about goverments and other powerful individuals or organizations doing bunch of shady or downright evil stuff behind our back. These often offer rare glimpse behind the scenes allowing us to be little less blind when voting during whathever election comes next.
When WikiLeaks first came about it's original goal was aimed at leaking information about authoritarian governments, primarily China and some countries in the Middle East. It was pretty big news at the time because assange had wrangled together a team of some pretty high profile Journalist and privacy tech people.
However, most of those people were never really involved in the organization, and were mainly utilized as a marketing scheme. The rest slowly left the organization as works in their fields within WikiLeaks stagnated, or left over security and leadership concerns.
Imo Assange has always been a duplicitous attention seeker. However, if that were illegal, pretty much everyone involved in media would be thrown in a cell. I think his biggest failures that should tarnish his public image is his handling of the leaks. Him rushing to release information against the advise of his security experts, information that hadn't been properly vetted to protect the whistle blowers from prosecution.
Multiple people have had their lives ruined because he didn't take the time and effort to protect his sources. And not because they didn't have the ability to, or lacked the proper protocols, but because Julian didn't care so long as his name got air time.