From Marcus Ranum: Fellow Travelers

So I recently made three posts about my disappointment in Wikileaks and it’s fans. I am still angry about how they have been acting over this most recent presidential election. As Marcus Ranum noted, what I’m experiencing is the realization that Wikileaks was never an organization for good, but a vanity project by Julian Assange to boost his own ego; and that it was Assange and another hacker, Adrian Lamo, who threw Chelsea Manning under the bus.

Marcus wrote an incredible post about all this, drawing from his own first-hand experience with such hackers. I’ll quote the bit about what happened to Chelsea Manning here. But please, go and read the entire thing. It’s a long read, yes, but it’s very good, and deserves your full attention.

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Clinton Did Not Want to Assassinate Assange (Warning: Infuriating Twitter Convo and Rant)

This post is basically going to be a long Twitter conversation between myself and an asshole, along with interjections from me here. Please note that I cuss a lot here… also, this is not as long as it looks, because it’s basically a whole lot of tweets. So keep that in mind. You’ll move through it faster than you think…

Basic intro… I’ve got three posts now about WikiLeaks and their bullshit. Of course some people are angry at me for that…

*record scratch*

What? Hold up… *runs off to Snopes*

Oh… oh I see where that comes from… oh okay…

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Is WikiLeaks Being Run by 13-Year-Olds? Or Just Their Task Force Account?

The worst thing about all this is that I feel like I’m being forced to join a whole bunch of conservatives and people on Twitter blocked by the Block Bot to do this criticism, and it makes me feel dirty.

To sum up… a while back, as you may recall, WikiLeaks got in some trouble for doxxing people’s private lives. More recently (as of yesterday), WikiLeaks got angry because Obama’s administration decided to anonymously share some of the CIA’s report linking senior Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, to the DNC email server hack.

You know, I remember a time when WikiLeaks was praised. Even those of us who always wanted Assange to face a court of law for the rape accusations leveled against him pretty much liked what WikiLeaks was doing. Maybe that’s because they became a thing during the Bush II Administration, and as a result, were leaking things that really hurt that administration. But it’s not like President Obama’s administration wasn’t hurt by leaking, both from WikiLeaks and from Edward Snowden. And I support all of that despite largely being a very big fan of President Obama (I cannot express in words how badly I’m going to miss him and the entire family; I have major issues with his foreign policy, but he was a great president, as far as I’m concerned).

But either I’ve been blind to what WikiLeaks really is up until now, or they just decided that now was the time to show their true colors… either that, or a 13-year-old is running their @WLTaskForce account…

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What the Hell, Wikileaks?!?

I should start off by saying that I am a fan of whistleblowers. Hidden corruption, be it in major corporations or governments, deserves to be seen by the public, so that changes can be forced through. So it should go without saying that I consider many whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, Andrew Maguire, Blake Percival, Vijay Pandhare, Antoine Deltour, Edward Snowden, Ben Strickland, and many others to be heroes.

I have also always believed, and maintained, that whistleblowing should be a protected act worldwide. When exposing corruption, whistleblowers should be given immunity from prosecution and protection from retaliation. So, in the past, I’ve admired sites like Wikileaks for trying to do just that. Protection provided by such sites is, of course, extremely limited, which is why whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden often end up in prison or in exile.

Wikileaks has often proved to be a fascinating site. Filled with a treasure trove of interesting, and sometimes important, information, it’s a site that has remained controversial throughout its existence. Not only can you find the corruption that Chelsea Manning exposed, but you can also find quite a bit that the Church of Scientology would rather the average person didn’t know about their beliefs and their operations.

But Wikileaks apparently no longer cares what it leaks, so long as it does leak…

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