Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case
I think the Assange&#x2F;wikileaks indictment is a misstep by the justice department&#x2F;current administration.<p>My understanding is that it&#x27;s far from clear how a case again Assange&#x2F;wikileaks would play out in court. Like the article mentions, the New York Times and others have published classified information repeatedly -- how can Assange be indicted but not the NYT?  Assange also isn&#x27;t an American citizen and he hasn&#x27;t leaked information himself, just published it.  I think there&#x27;s a good chance Assange would be acquitted.<p>I also think it&#x27;s a bizarre exagerration to argue that an attempted prosecution of Assage would result in &quot;broad new powers to put Trump’s media &#x27;enemies&#x27; in jail&quot;.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong -- I don&#x27;t much care for Assange.  It seems to me that there&#x27;s a lot of hot air coming from him and he appears to have quite an ego.  Also, though I understand there is disagreement about this, I think countries keep secrets for a reason and I consider it naive utopianism to expect everything to be brought into the open.  In an ideal world, sure, but the world is not ideal.<p>While I don&#x27;t think Assange&#x2F;wikileaks are necessarily &quot;siding with Russia,&quot; I do think that Russia has made use of wikileaks. Wikileaks is heavily promoted in Russian propaganda, and it seems <i>at least plausible</i> that Russia could obtain information and leak it through wikileaks.  This is a problem for wikileaks: if you&#x27;re all about freedom of information and you make public everything passed onto you, it&#x27;s totally possible for state actors -- the same state actors whose behavior you find reprehensible -- to use you as a tool to further their own interests.