WikiLeaks' International Man of Mystery

AcidAUS writes "The founder of WikiLeaks lives a secret life in the shadow of those who blow the whistle. Here's a detailed profile of the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, by Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald."

Comments

Re:Looks like the discrediting is well begun

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Jayzuz. PR firms feed the journalists with pre-researched, pre-angled cases. The journalist checks a few of the facts, rewrites the prose a bit/writes the prose. And the desk approves. Everybody does this: Government, big tobacco, Toyota, UNICEF. Everybody. There's no need to control the media when the productivity expectations of the journalists ensures they are toothless and more than happy to regurgitate your propaganda.

Re:Looks like the discrediting is well begun

[chrb]

Now, set the founder up for more publicity, implicitly encouraging violence upon him.

Assange brings publicity on himself. He is the media friendly face of Wikileaks. He won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award and he has been a guest speaker at various international conferences. He chose to be interviewed on Al Jazeera, which is watched by 50-100 million households. I'm not suggesting that he actively seeks publicity for himself, but he does choose to seek it on behalf of Wikileaks, in order to further the Wikileaks mission.

It's a chilling effect on anyone who might be initially inclined to provide information to Wikileaks under their cover of anonymity.

Assange chose not to be anonymous so the analogy does not apply. Read his Wikipedia biography for more information. There is no evidence that this will have any effect on anonymous leakers. The people opposed to Wikileaks have various options at this point:

• Undermine and discredit Wikileaks by publically unmask some of the anonymous leakers
• Ignore Wikileaks, and accept that leaking happens.
• Use Wikileaks by leaking "friendly" info, info that makes opponents look bad, etc.
• Discredit Wikileaks by leaking info that is subsequently shown to be false.
• Push for the legislation and political will to punish Wikileaks as a criminal organisation that undermines national security.

Re:Looks like the discrediting is well begun

[LWATCDR]

But they did and do present the data in a biased way.
Look at the prologue they added to the video. Just what does a picture of the dead reporters son holding his fathers picture have to do with truth?
That is a classic case of "what about the kids" that gets so often bashed on Slashdot when it is convenient.
For the most part what I have seen of Wikileaks they are the Nation Enquirer of the internet. They present the data in the most inflammatory way possible and it is often incorrect, incomplete, and biased.
They do not just present the data but comment on and embellish.

I am not for taking them down but my goodness they need to clean up their act. Between releasing all sorts of personal data they got from the 9/11 pager traffic to the prologue and added commentary they added the the Apache video just released they show that they don't care anymore about being unbiased or responsible than Fox news does.