What wikileaks means. By Bruce Sterling

Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best. All his friends think he’s nuts. I’m not too thrilled to see that happen. That’s not a great sign in a consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type. Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. They’re into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this chilly, eldritch guy.

2011-07-27: I guess with all the lulzsec of the world it was getting quiet around wikileaks.

2016-10-17: I had a lot of respect for Assange’s early work, but his climbing into bed with Putin is really in poor taste. Contrast that with Snowden, who on the surface seems even more in Putin’s pocket but hasn’t acted that way (yet?)

It turns out that this is what released the dead man’s switch: Ecuador cut off Julian Assange’s internet connection. I’m not even sure that American pressure was involved.

Were I Rafael Correa, I would be concerned that my long-term tenant was attempting to destabilize the regional hegemon in order to elect an anti-leftist, anti-Hispanic demagogue. He signed on for nonpartisan leaking which casts the US in the worst possible light internationally, freeing up space for Ecuador in international affairs. What he got was a specific campaign, directed by another foreign country entirely, dedicated to electing a leader whose interests are deeply, fundamentally opposed to his own.

This becomes even worse if (rather, when) Hillary wins: you then have an American president whom you appear to have attempted to keep out of office, and she is unlikely to look favorably on the fact that you were hosting a Russian-fronted attempt to sway the election.

And that doesn’t even get into Wikileaks’ response. In immediate response to having Ecuador cut his connection, Wikileaks tweeted out what appears to be an archive which threatens to blackmail his host. While it’s possible that the “Ecuador” file is about US-Ecuadoran relations, I substantially doubt that anyone in the US would be interested in that — just Ecuador.

Were I Assange, I would start looking for alternate accommodations now.

2018-06-17: Theodore Dalrymple

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say. The dissolution of the distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of totalitarianism. Opening and reading other people’s e-mails is not different in principle from opening and reading other people’s letters. In effect, WikiLeaks has assumed the role of censor to the world, a role that requires an astonishing moral grandiosity and arrogance to have assumed. Even if some evils are exposed by it, or some necessary truths aired, the end does not justify the means.

2019-01-06: Wikileaks also has a list of things you can’t say:

Either Julian Assange is the least self-aware person in the British Isles, or Wikileaks is playing some sort of weird joke on the press. The organization, whose entire reason for being is publishing documents whose authors don’t wish them to be published has bizarrely sent a list of 140 things reporters are not supposed to say about Assange (if this is a troll by Assange, you have to wonder if the 140 — Twitter’s original character limit — is somehow on purpose).

2022-11-23: The end has come

Although WikiLeaks long boasted that it released more than 10m documents in 10 years, at current, less than 3k documents remain accessible. The issues have become so apparent that supporters of the group are now voicing concerns across social media. Even organizations tied to WikiLeaks appear to be struggling. The website for Defend WikiLeaks, a group that raised funds for the legal defense of WikiLeaks’ imprisoned founder Julian Assange, has now been taken over by a Vietnamese sports blog. The website for the Courage Foundation, which similarly raised funds for whistleblowers and journalists including Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, was also taken over in the past week and transformed into a Japanese blog selling knockoff designer merchandise.