Today in Disgusting People

Julian Assange.

I've been holding this a couple of days, because the latest news on this front has me totally outraged. CBS News has a good report:

WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill, The Associated Press has found.

In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.

Jim Burroway leads off his post on this with the following:

WikiLeaks has always bragged that it was on a mission to expose government secrets in the quest for open government. It’s [sic] own operations and agendas aren’t nearly so transparent, especially with its recent cooperation with Russian hackers to influence the U.S. presidential elections in favor of Donald Trump. Now Wikileaks is releasing private medical and other files affecting ordinary citizens which have nothing to do with government secrecy[.]

Their record is pretty awful:

“We have a harm minimization policy,” the Australian told an audience in Oxford, England in July of 2010. “There are legitimate secrets. Your records with your doctor, that’s a legitimate secret.”

Assange initially leaned on cooperating journalists, who flagged sensitive material to WikiLeaks which then held them back for closer scrutiny. But Assange was impatient with the process, describing it as time-consuming and expensive.

“We can’t sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line-by-line, to redact,” he told London’s Frontline Club the month after his talk in Oxford. “We have to take the best road that we can.”

Assange’s attitude has hardened since. A brief experiment with automatic redactions was aborted. The journalist-led redactions were abandoned too after Assange’s relationship with the London press corps turned toxic. By 2013 WikiLeaks had written off the redaction efforts as a wrong move.

Withholding any data at all “legitimizes the false propaganda of ‘information is dangerous,’” the group argued on Twitter.

How about "Some information is nobody's damned business"?

Five years in the Ecuadoran embassy in London doesn't seem to have done Assange's mental state any good. It's obvious that his judgment is impaired.

And tonight he's due to be interviewed by Megyn Kelly. I wonder how far the powers that be will let her go -- I'd love to know more about his relationship with the Russians, considering that he's promising an "October Surprise" for our election. (I was looking for a link for that bit, but Google is showing almost all the stories originating on wingnut sites. We'll see.)