My opinion of Assange used to lean towards positive in the past. Whistleblowers are needed. Releasing the cables was a positive development overall (it's kind of ironic to see that some of people who hates Assange since then were also the staunch supporters of the Arab Spring, which was in a large part started by these leaks), as revealing troubling policy secrets that needed to see the light of day, just like with the Pentagon Papers. Of big difference the problem was the WikiLeaks failed, or didn't care, to make sure certain sensitive information about people in the field weren't made public, putting actual lives in danger. This particular approach bothered me.
Unfortunately, Assange choose to align himself with a particular side, and a particular power, thus losing all claims to be an honest whistleblower.
That’s pretty much how I feel. Still, he broke the law and that needs to be dealt with. If it were me, I would do the same thing but I would understand that if I got caught, I got caught.
It’s pretty much at the level of how Adam Smith or John Locke dealt with slavery. That is, people have the right to be free, people have the right to own things, and let people duke it out under these understandings. The principle here is that there were pretty serious crimes that came to light, and reasonably would not ever come to light but for him, but still that evidence was obtained illegally.
There is also that little issue with him eventually picking a selfish private and partial interest above the common good and the large amount of collateral damage he caused even when he was pursuing the common good. A part of me thought he was sticking it to the man but then he was lampooned by South Park as someone who tore holes in the social contract by making it impossible to keep things confidential. I know it’s for entertainment purposes but that was a good point Matt and Trey brought up. That made me believe he was more bad than good.
In general, I really do admire hackers. I’m just not really motivated to do very well in my profession right now. I’m OK but that’s about it. I can still make good money being “OK”. Then there is the part I hate about hackers. I hate having my bank’s fraud detection system make my card be declined even if I had thousands of dollars in the account and I’m trying to buy groceries or go on a date at a modestly priced restaurant or trying buy birthday presents on Amazon for my kid. Don’t get me started on the cross site scripting attacks that make me go to a spin the wheel for a free IPad. Let alone how I could’ve been searching for something very important to me at the time and now I have to close the browser and start over.
After this free association, I will say that Julian Assange has a lot of admirable traits and did a lot of great things but at the end of the day, he’s a felon and he belongs behind bars, at least for a while. Far-right posters might call me a hypocrite. Our friends on the far left and center right might call me unprincipled, but I think my position on the matter is a very reasonable younger, more educated midwestern sensibility.
