Julian Assange Quotes
People love WikiLeaks when it is exposing corruption in their opponents. People oppose WikiLeaks when it is exposing corruption or dangerous behavior in themselves.
Assange, Julian. 10th Anniversary Press Conference. WikiLeaks, 4 Oct. 2016.
Sparta, an ancient Greek city-state, trained all its young men for war. One “test” was each youth was to sneak into the countryside and murder someone’s slave and not get caught. The murder was against the laws of the society, but if the young man was caught he was punished severely, not for murder or attempted murder, but for getting caught.
This quotation was ridiculed at the time. Virginia had very lax political ethical laws and regulations for politicians and in that year, both the Republican Governor and the Republican Attorney General had accepted large gifts from businessmen of the state which in other states would have been considered as bribes and be illegal. The rules in Virginia were so lax, that expensive gifts were given to members of politician’s family. In one case that year, a businessman paid for the Governor’s daughter’s expensive wedding. With both houses of the state legislature also in Republican hands, there was no oversight or investigations. It was only though the efforts of the press that the facts emerged. Howell did not say or do anything about the situation. Although in 2013 it was Republicans who were corrupt, the same lax rules had prevailed for years and when they were in power the Democrats made no effort to tighten the ethics laws and rules.
The executive order to which this statement referred was the then new President’s first—Executive Order 13489. It was enthusiastically received by the public, historians, researchers and the media. However at the end of Obama’s two administrations, the system was a little better than when George W. Bush, blocked much of the Freedom of Information Act from being implemented. However, the agencies who want to operate in secrecy without having to deal with public criticism, had developed even more sophisticated techniques of avoiding transparency and when they must disclose, they have developed techniques to delay the process, sometimes even for years, while they study whether the material should be disclosed. The president personally declassified a few CIA files from decades ago that the agency maintained should be secret, but he did nothing else systemic so solve the problem of declassifying and material and nothing to control the over classification which virtually everyone agrees is a major problem. More material is being classified than ever.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
