I had a tough time deciding my view of Assange's leak. We all considered Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Penatagon Papers to be heroic. Ellsberg clearly did it for altruistic reasons at great personal risk. He surrendered himself for arrest.

In contrast Julian Assange appeared to be doing it seeking personal glory, his recent deification notwithstanding. When the threat of prosecution loomed Assange threatened to leak more secrets if the govt came after him. If he was holding material that should be held up to the light of public scrutiny why wouldn't he already have published it given his supposed overarching interest in revealing bad deeds? If the new material was not of that sort then why not let it remain secret? Personal interest seemed to be his sole motivating factor right from the beginning.

Much of what the intelligence agencies do is foul, often criminal. If only we had some reliable watchdog mechanism (Congress isn't adequate in that role). Unfortunately, in this world, secret intelligence services are a required part of the defense against forces trying to destroy the US or any nation. That's true whether or not you side with those forces. The key word here being secret.

Sometimes the situation is so bad that I find myself cheering for the brave people exposing the secrets. Instead I view Julian Assange as a self-serving egomaniac who revels in the unwarranted honor.

I may have a minority opinion.

I remember when Julian Assange first appeared on the scene and presented his theory that for a sufficiently large organization to engage in criminal activity, it must have the usual machinery of bureaucracy and therefore must have documents that provide an evidence trail of the criminal activity -- and that with the proper incentive people inside, whose conscience is bothered by the criminal activity, could be enticed to leak the documents. They wouldn't be rewarded with money, they would be rewarded with seeing the documents made public and having an impact on the wrongdoers.

At the time, I thought it was an interesting theory but didn't really think it was true. Julian Assange had published some leaks already at that point, but they were small and insignificant.

But within a few years, I changed my mind and decided it looked like he was right. By 2010, the leaked documents were getting quite serious, including US diplomats' leaked cables. There was massive press coverage all over the world.

I also came to think Julian Assange had made a huge miscalculation, too, because he was pissing off people in positions of power and authority. In my life, I've had to learn the hard way that it's super important to never do that, for example the reason I was kicked out of school was for disobedience, because I questioned authority too much, was labeled "disobedient" and a "troublemaker". So I have to go through life without a college degree and learning how much that matters and how much people care about it. It's not a stretch to say that there are essentially 2 classes of people in this country: those with a high school diploma and below, and those with a college degree and above. Anyway, the general principle I learned is: if people in positions of power and authority like you, then all kinds of good things happen: you get good grades, you get degrees, you get job referrals, interviews, offers, you get good performance reviews, promotions, bonuses, etc. If people in positions of power and authority don't like you, all that runs in reverse: you get kicked out of school, fired from jobs, evicted, banned from organizations, and you might end up homeless, or in prison. All depends on the subjective emotional state of people in positions of power and authority.

While Julian Assange's hypothesis that insiders with access to documents with evidence of criminal activity could be enticed to share them with the promise of anonymity and impact turned out to be true, it had the worst imaginable side effect: it pissed off very, very powerful people.

That's why in 2010, I predicted that by the end of the year, Julian Assange would be assassinated. During 2010, one of the few times I listened to Rush Limbaugh's show, I listened to Rush Limbaugh's show and every day he called for the assassination of Julian Assange. This went on for weeks. For weeks I would tune in again just to see if he would do it again, and he always did. Other conservative pundits also called for Julian Assange's assassination, though it's been years and I don't remember their names any more.

And the liberal side, while not openly calling for Julian Assange's assassination, did not defend him. They were more politely critical. So I figured, he had enemies who wanted him dead, and nobody, at least nobody in power and not on the fringes of society, coming to his defense. Liberal senators supported legislation to stop him. I don't remember who said what, but Julian Assange got no support from the Democratic Party (his only support was from the fringes of society), and remember, this is 2010, years before the DNC leaks that embarrassed Hillary Clinton.

It takes very little for people in positions of power and authority to want you dead -- super extremely little. When I read those police blotters that say things like, "Person A killed person B because they rented their truck and didn't pay them" or "Person A killed person B because of an argument over a stolen cell phone", I'm like, yup! People have a desire to kill each other over the tiniest things. Especially true of people in positions of power and authority who are sensitive to questioning of their authority. Anyway, with so many people in positions of power and authority expressing openly a desire for Julian Assange to be assassinated, I felt confident in predicting Julian Assange would be dead by the end of the year.

I was wrong. So, futurology 101: whenever you make a prediction and you're wrong, it proves there's something about how the real world works that you didn't understand. Because if you did understand, you wouldn't've made the prediction. You would've made a different prediction, or said you weren't confident in making any prediction.

So it turns out, the people in positions of power and authority decided to neutralized Julian Assange without killing him. They got him de-facto imprisoned in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years, then when there was a change of leadership in Ecuador and he was pushed out, grabbed him and put him in a British prison. As I understand it, he's already served his sentence for dodging the legal proceedings for his Swedish rape accusation, but is being held in prison anyway, awaiting extradition to the United States. That fact makes me wonder what crazy extradition treaties every country has with every other. Like, if I break Australian laws, even though I'm not an Australian citizen, have never lived in Australia, and have never established a business in Australia, could I be extradited to Australia and face charges in Australia, and serve time in an Australian prison?

It's an interesting puzzle. Maybe in most parts of the world, people in positions of power and authority simply kill people who piss them off, but it "civilized" countries, there are legal mechanisms to neutralize people without killing them. In Putin's Russia, well, we have just seen Alexei Navalny get killed. And Prigozhin before him. And all those "mysterious" oil executives deaths that happened around the outbreak of the "special military operation". In a dictatorship, you get in the dictator's way, you die. Simple as that, that's all there is to it. In countries with drug cartels, you piss off somebody high enough up in the drug cartel, you die. And so on. But here in the "civilized" West, you get neutralized by prison, or even just never-ending legal procedures and expenses? We even have a saying, "the process is the punishment." Maybe that's how it works? You have to assume that the US, with all its covert operations apparatus all over the world, could have gotten Julian Assange assassinated if it wanted to. It chose not to.

Anyway, at this point in time, as far as I can tell, everything Wikileaks has published has been true, which means Wikileaks is the most accurate journalism organization in the history of journalism, or at least that i've been able to see in my lifetime. Apparently Julian Assange devised techniques for verifying the truthfulness of documents. For example if he gets an email with multiple recipients, he can email those people and ask them whether they received the email with the timestamp he provides, and if those people come back and say yes, I received that email, then that confirms the authenticity of that email. Do enough of these types of confirmations and you can have high confidence the whole set of documents that have been leaked to you are authentic. If anything, Julian Assange has been criticized not for publishing anything false but for publishing too much -- for publishing unredacted documents that should have been redacted, or publishing documents that should not have been published at all, etc.

In a weird way, Wikileaks is hostage to its leakers. Wikileaks has no control over who comes to them with leaks. So Julian Assange and Wikileaks would take whatever leaks they got and run with them, regardless of who they embarrassed or who they offended. That seemed to just make enemies of everyone as people who supported Julian Assange when he embarrassed Republicans would turn on him when he embarrassed the Democrats, and vice-versa, for example. And I can't read minds so I can't say what Julian Assange's motivations were, other than what he himself has said publicly. His actions do seem consistent with the idea that he wanted to continue to motivate insiders to leak information by demonstrating he could take leaks public in a way that had "impact".

As long as we're on the subject, and I've rambled this long, though, I'll just tack on one more comment about the DNC leaks. At the time the media said it was done by the Russians, and I went online and searched and searched and searched for the evidence that it was the Russians. I expected to find documents with IP addresses located in Russia or something. Even if it were fake, somebody ought to be able to write down some IP addresses that route to Russia. I came up totally empty handed. I found nothing. Julian Assange himself said the leaks were not from Russia, in fact not from any state actor. I noticed that all of Wikileaks' other leaks were leaked by insiders, not by hacking operations. I decided since there was no evidence Russia was involved, all Wikileaks' prior leaks had come from insiders, and Julian Assange himself said the leaks did not come from any state actor, that I would believe the leaks came from an insider as the most probable source, at least until evidence came to light demonstrating Russia's involvement. That's never happened, so today I believe the DNC leaks most likely came from an insider, and Russia was not involved, but that puts me at odds with everyone around me, who all believe it was Russia's doing.

This has been one of the factors leading to my theory of news media that news media makes things "true" by repetition. If the media repeat over and over for years that the DNC leaks came from a Russian hack, then it becomes "true", in the sense that everyone believes it, just as a result of the repetition. No actual evidence ever needs to be presented -- the human brain is flawed in such a way that it counts the repetition itself as evidence. Well, I guess how media hacks our brains is a subject for a whole nother discussion so I'll stop here.

I guess now it's your all's turn to explain why I'm completely wrong.