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The Guardian's Complicated Relationship With Julian Assange
Sonny Yatsen writes "Vanity Fair has published an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the unlikely and tumultuous working relationship between WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and The Guardian as the Iraq War Logs were being published. The piece highlights the differences and conflicts between the Guardian's journalistic standards and WikiLeaks' transparency. Particularly interesting is the revelation that Julian Assange threatened to sue The Guardian if they publish a portion of Iraq War Logs leaked to them by a disgruntled WikiLeaks volunteer, claiming 'he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.'"
is being spread through Cryptome. The rumor that he is an informant for the Austrlian Federal Police does seem to be backed up by the story about him receiving warnings from Austrlian intelligence about dirty tricks.
This is something worth looking into. Whether or not there is any truth to it or not, it's worth looking into for that reason but also to determine whether or not it is a smear campaign or global conspiracy to break Assange.
http://wlcentral.org/node/839
The Guardian do not have clean hands in this matter.
Oh where, oh where, oh where is Shangri-la? Give me a break. They have breast pads for leaking. I listened to Julian the other night on Democracy Now, but he did not sound like God. But then again, I do not believe in fairy tales. He sounded like a man that developed a product that he knows how to sell.
Transparency isn't a product
No, it's a commodity. To be bought and sold like everything else.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I mean, even if he thought so, what are the chances that he actually said.
Smells of bullshit to me.
Do you see what's going on here?
The Character assassination plot on Assange was a major success. He's been in jail not so long, and the story is slowly going cold. Nobody is discussing it so eagerly anymore. Also, Julian's public image went down. Regardless of whether what The Guardian is saying is true or not, 30 days ago virtually nobody on /. would have bought the Guardian's story. Or we would've at least questioned it, not taking it as fact.
Julian is in jail. Nobody believes in him anymore. Wikileaks is dead, and nobody even noticed. The CIA pulled yet another successful operation on its own people and the world, and the press took care of cleaning up after them. And nobody gives a fuck.
I see very few people here that understand this. As usual, we are a minority, but when even in /., when everybody here is a minority, you can only see a minority of the minority display any kind of reasoning skills, you can tell something's fucked up.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
According to Wired, back in 2008 Wikileaks had a plan to sell exclusivity to certain documents to the highest bidder. These documents were embargoed, which meant eventually they'd be fully released, but until then the lucky winner would be able to report on them without competition.
Which does make me wonder about the "financial interest" angle mentioned in the Vanity Fair piece... are any of these media outlets paying for access to the current set of leaked documents?
Julian tried for 4 years to do the maximum transparency thing. 4 years. For free, without making a buck. Interest of the people in the medias ? null. A bunch of geeks knew it existed but that was not enough to attract the leaks of the world. Then he got interested in how journalists manage to make money and get people interested. He played their game and isntead of going 100% transparent, he chose the "10% more transparent than anyone else" and it worked wonders.
Yes, he lost the geeks by doing that but he got mainstream, he got published in 5 major newspaper almost daily with that scheme while he never managed to get any press before that. I think it is pretty clear the the ideal approach just doesn't work. Ultimately we need to go in that direction, but by taking smaller steps, Assange manages to have a political weight. kudos for him. The fact that people calling themselves journalists are afraid of a lawsuit about publishing a leak is just hilarous. The fact that the threat comes from wikileaks adds irony to hilarity. It just shows how low journalism has fallen these days.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.