dagblog - Comments for "Charging Assange w/o breaking journalism & free speech"

When I first heard about

ocean-kat — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 07:35:03 +0000

In reply to It's a real problem in this

When I first heard about wikileaks I knew that wasn't going to end pretty either. He was calling for high school hackers to steal information and send it to him. I knew that would bring out the hackers for fame and glory without any sense or proportion. And I knew the freer nations would be most easily hacked. He claimed he would redact it as necessary. But information is power and power corrupts. I knew eventually he would use the information for personal goals.. It would take a saint to run wikileaks without causing harm and Assange is no saint.

I saw the general trend it would follow but I would never have predicted the details. Colluding with Russia to harm the US and Hillary to help Trump.

Even with Assange the

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 06:25:09 +0000

In reply to It's a real problem in this

Even with Assange the transparency wore off and became "who sent you?" Newspapers have biases we understand and factor in. Random bloggers have wide variance and unknown unknowns.

It's a real problem in this

artappraiser — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:01:01 +0000

In reply to Charging Assange w/o breaking journalism & free speech

It's a real problem in this day and age of "fake news". Used to be a Daniel Ellsberg would steal state secrets and then be protected for a while by being an anonymous source of a powerful member of "the fourth estate." Now the fourth estate can be any one with an internet connection, including Russians trying to bring down the west. Further complicating that whole thing is that the most powerful country in the world has a leader who has co-opted the whole "fake news" plaint, implying that most remaining members of what was once powerful "fourth estate" are the fake news and the partisans on his side furnish the real news.

I knew and dreaded instinctively that, when during the Bush years the new left blogosphere picked up and pushed the right's meme that the "MSM" was crap if not evil, and that citizen journalism would save the day and tell the truth, that it would not end pretty. I couldn't imagine the extent of the resulting anarchy, though.

Either you agree to have a government that's going to need to keep some things secret or you don't. Everyone can't leak everything....Assange's theory of transparency uber alles working is bullshit...you will always have Facebook's and Amazon's just filling in the gap (at least Bezos put money into shoring up having a professional fourth estate by supporting Washington Post, I'll give him that.)