Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-“to-destroy-this-invisible-government”

by RickHull • 16 years ago

179 105 16 years ago

zunguzungu.wordpress.com

CWuestefeld3• 16 years ago

tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I've copied out what I think are the key bits, the following is all quoted:

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy ...

the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make "leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the Collateral Murder video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ...

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone.

... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people," and it was true, then too, that "To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship."

sudont• 16 years ago

It's a good strategy, as long as the US doesn't become as autocratic as the Nazis or Viet Cong (correct?). Then, plugging leaks becomes hanging their corpses as a warning.

Peaceful protests only work against peaceful regimes.

ryoshu• 16 years ago

There have already been calls from prominent US politicians to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Predator drone strikes are how the US deals with terrorists.

DanielBMarkham3• 16 years ago

I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time to skim it.

But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) have paid tens of billions of dollars, had multiple elections, politically demonstrated and pleaded to Congressmen, to have a State Department that Assange doesn't feel should keep secrets, so he dumps the embassy cables?

If a single actor can take it on himself to do all of that, then why am I wasting my time choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be? Seems like I should just take it on myself -- after careful analysis of course -- that Assange is a danger to my representative form of government and I should go shoot him (I mean this completely rhetorically, by the way. I in no way support violence against anybody)

The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will.

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract.

I just can't see how this plays out very well.

gvb• 16 years ago

Yes. See also comment 32 by "Incomitatus":

2. Assange believes that what he calls ‘conspiracy’ is bad, that authority is bad. He regards these things as inherently ‘unjust’. He may not say it, or maybe the analyst who wrote this piece didn’t feel the need to draw it out, but his position logically requires him to regard the State as inherently unjust and evil. If he doesn’t, it can only be because he misapprehends the fundamental nature of the State. In short, Assange is an Anarchist, whether he realises it or not, and his agenda can be countered by every argument ever made for the value of the State as an institution.

chaostheory4• 16 years ago

"Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed."

The question is "does our government listen to its people anymore, regardless of elections"?

The bank bailouts were opposed by the majority of the population crossing party lines. I wouldn't be surprised if the new TSA procedures are equally as hated. I can go on about other subjects such as FISA, ACTA, torture, Iraq & Afghanistan occupation.

Are we now living in a more subtle version of Singapore or China?

randallsquared• 16 years ago

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed.

They mostly continue due to the apathy of the governed, I'd say. The 40-something percent of voters who vote for the loser in various elections are explicitly registering their dissent from being governed by the people they didn't vote for. I'd say that those people certainly are wasting their time 'choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be', and from the steadily heightening vitriol in day-to-day politics, I think that's becoming clearer and clearer to everyday voters in the US.

This, too, seems to be due in part to the fragmentation of sources from which people get political news; the genteel framing of debating with fellow citizens is breaking down with access to more varied and less controlled information.

Detrus• 16 years ago

You can make up your own bullshit or choose from the variety of available flavors.

Big businesses act without consent of the governed as the norm, breaking the social contract. Assange is just new to the party so he gets a disproportionate amount of attention.

So pick your flavor.

kbatten• 16 years ago

Money already speaks volumes in elections so I would rather have a human being actually show they can have an effect beyond that. Not to sound like a paranoid, but how can the government follow the consent of the governed when those in power do not live like those they govern?

andreyf2• 16 years ago

You're responding to a summary of a summary of Assanage's essay with a rhetorical (did you mean hypothetical?) suggestion of killing him? I don't think this is the kind of writing I expect on Hacker News...

eof2• 16 years ago

>The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will.

Well it goes both ways. The government is constantly imposing its will on me in ways I resent. Assange also feels this way and notices that the ability of the government to impose its will rests on conspiracy.

Your 'argument' is impenetrable because whether or not the organization is inherently just (and shouldn't be messed with) or unjust (and should be messed with) you are fully invested in your paradigm and seem unwilling to give it up regardless.

From the standpoint that the US govt is all democracy and stars and stripes, of course Assange is 'bad.' But that doesn't appear to be the reality of the situation.

CWuestefeld3• 16 years ago

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed.

OK, it's a tired point, but maybe relevant here: the USA is not a democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic, a few bits of which are managed democratically.

Just as the myth about Columbus being smart enough to ignore the popular notion that the world is flat, the bold experiment that is America was not Democracy: that's been around for thousands of years, since the Greeks at least. Heck, pirate ships were governed democratically.

No, the bold new idea embodied in America was that of a limited constitutional republic. Our contract with the government is now thoroughly broken, because it no longer views itself as being one of limited, enumerated powers.

As you say elsewhere regarding Jefferson and the Declaration, we have an obligation to show that the contract has already been violated. But as far as I can see, this is obvious enough to be a mere formality.

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

> Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed

Can people consent to things they don't know about? Isn't transparency a pre-requesite for the kind of democracy you describe?

DanI-S• 16 years ago

If a single actor can disrupt the system that much by releasing some information casually available to some 3m US military personnel, the system is broken.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

"If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract."

Who you gonna blame? The one who gave you the illusion or the one who took it away?

... wait, don't answer that...

grandalf• 16 years ago

I'd argue that the American people don't actually have any say over the organizations that keep secrets... they've taken on a life of their own.

Evidence? That much of the information revealed about Iraq/Afghanistan was suppressed for propaganda reasons -- the government didn't want the American people to know that the taliban has certain weapons, that the simple good/evil story is complicated by ISI involvement, that the US knowingly handed detainees over to the Iraqi regime for very likely torture, etc.

Any voter who supported the pretense of the war would surely want to know the truth about how the war is going before deciding whether to continue supporting it! The propaganda agencies suppressed certain info in order to tell a particular story back home.

The truth can work in favor of the war or against it. There were some aspects that worked in favor of it, but in my opinion the reason Wikileaks is a good thing is b/c it helps deprive our leaders of the ability to deceive us.

JulianMorrison• 16 years ago

> my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state

You think being lied to is a good thing?

Assange's trick forces governments to pick one of: being called to account, stifling themselves with secrecy, or not being evil. Where evil is roughly defined as: doing things you would rather the voting public didn't know. You seem to be ignoring that third choice, but Assange is not. That's his aim.

uuilly• 16 years ago

I wonder if he would have any objection to posting internal Wikileaks emails and documents. In the name of transparency I'd like to see the behind the scenes thought process for posting the cables.

thisrod• 16 years ago

Assange claims that Wikileaks would publish his own emails, if anyone submitted them. Presumably none of his correspondents have done so yet.

lmkg• 16 years ago

It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it.

How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole.

[1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.

CWuestefeld3• 16 years ago

That's a really interesting question. Can it be that the perceived "neo-con" or "Liberal" machines are really emergent behavior based solely (or predominantly) on independent, opportunistic agents?

I don't know the answer to that, but it's interesting to ponder.

_delirium• 16 years ago

That's one thing I think is worth rescuing from classical Marxism (ignoring the political prescriptions that the Marxists added on top). The "historical materialist" view that history is largely emergent behavior of structural elements like economic relations, not the result of either "great men" or conscious conspiracies, or some preordained macro-scale order, is still pretty relevant imo.

(It's actually out of favor in contemporary Marxist thought, oddly enough, which has gone more in the direction of analyzing the role of culture, hegemony, etc., following Gramsci. Perhaps some non-Marxists will have to revive the historical-materialist approach. Jared Diamond's work is sort of in that direction.)

eof2• 16 years ago

I really just disagree with all of that. Assange did not appear to me to be making any assumption about political power being monolithic. He is only talking about conspiracies as things in general having power, and notes that large parts of the US government act in conspirational ways..

Further, I don't think you can really have any model of current regime which absolutely could not function if it could not communicate secretly.

The sum of every secret conversation that the conspirator would not want the world to know about because it would breed opposition is the net capacity of the organization to act in unjust ways. If it cannot communicate internally in secret, it simply cannot act in unjust ways for any length of time.

cavilling_elite• 16 years ago

The question I have (and I will start the linked pdf tonight) is if unjust systems are nonlinearly hit vs. just systems in the event of a leak. What happens if the new communication or propaganda tools start a copy cat organization to "leak" their own agenda.

It might work both ways: complete openness and complete falseness.

T_S_• 16 years ago

Not sure if this is what you meant, but real transparency requires verification. If leaks are commonplace then "plants" will be too. All sorts of meta-games to play as well.

jdp232• 16 years ago

it's a great question. my intuition is yes at the first level: control of information is a key technique for many powerful unjust systems. it's a good point though that the same kind of power could also make unjust systems better at "false flag" attacks. certainly food for thought.

lhnz• 16 years ago

That would take a lot of organization. Also, what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies?

paulgerhardt• 16 years ago

As a side note, can we go easy on the appeals to emotion in headlines on Hacker News?

Yes, this article is good; yes, some robots are incredible; as far as titles go though, it's a distasteful use of rhetoric.

RickHull2• 16 years ago

For what it's worth, I completely agree with your sentiment, and I felt a pang of regret when I reviewed my submission later. If I could rewrite the title now, I would call it "In-depth, insightful" rather than "Excellent".

TGJ• 16 years ago

Even those are just opinionated adjectives designed to get noticed and voted.

alexqgb4• 16 years ago

Since when is 'excellent' an emotion?

joshes• 16 years ago

> These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

A long quote, yes, but I could not think of a way to shorten it without severely hindering its meaning.

This is a perfectly articulated description of how I initially felt about cable release. Wikileaks (and necessarily, at this point, Assange) is not trying to reveal a huge scandal, to embarrass or to destroy connections. If one or more of those things happen then so be it. The goal is to reveal, to expose the standard type and content of information that is traded like currency amongst the few who govern the very many.

The leak is an attempt at provoking forced honesty; if Wikileaks exposes a vast amount of cables enough times, the veil and shroud of secrecy that governments use as a personal cloak will continue to shrink and shrivel until it is non-functional. And voila! Now governments can no longer act in complete isolation from its people and governments such as that of the United States, which promise to be of and for the people, are forced to live up to that promise, out in the open. If you force the government into that situation harshly and fully enough, eventually it has no choice but to act that way. And finally it can be held accountable for its actions, positive or negative.

In short, the goal with all of these leaks is first and foremost to poke and prod through the secrecy and conspiracy until there is a large enough hole for the public to be able to view what its own government is doing on its behalf. Whether or not you feel that this is morally or ethically correct is up to you; this is just my take on the rationale.

gasull• 16 years ago

Any political system with secrecy evolves into authoritarianism. Why shouldn't it? Secrecy ensures politicians/bureaucrats won't be accountable.

When did we start thinking that we can have democracy and freedom without accountability?

It isn't about conspiracy theories. It's just common sense that some people will abuse their power if they can't be held accountable.

billybob• 16 years ago

Agreed, mostly. But without SOME secrecy, a government can't function.

Imagine if the US became 100% transparent. You could listen to the president's phone calls, watch military strategy in real time, etc. Unless the government's enemies (its proper ones - criminals, opposing armies, etc) were likewise transparent, which they wouldn't be, Uncle Sam would basically be doomed to be beaten by them. Like if only one poker player had to show his cards in a game - he'd lose.

Just saying there are limits to the good that transparency can do.

yoyar• 16 years ago

Assange is poking at the illusion of democracy and it makes people damn uncomfortable as far as I can see. I think most people know that they are ruled by rulers and that the idea of the state as benefactor is dead, but to admit it is another thing for most. They will fight very hard to retain the comfort of the illusion. And the state will act to retain it also, by any means necessary.

smokeyj• 16 years ago

As a citizen I like to remain ignorant to the dealings done on my behalf. I think it's sinful for Julian, or anyone else to seek information that isn't blessed by the State - and anyone seeking knowledge that is not sanctified by my Representatives is unacceptable. Now I'm going to stick my head in the sand because I hate learning about facts.

dkarl6• 16 years ago

Replace "citizen" with "president" and you've stated actual U.S. policy (as represented in movies and novels, anyway.) The Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated on their way to work recently -- if we (the U.S.) killed them, Obama will never know about it. If, on the other hand, some other country did it without our help, the CIA might share that information with him.

dkarl6• 16 years ago

With respect to the potential for popular opposition to government policy, I think he drastically overestimates the impact of exposure and drastically underestimates a "conspiracy"'s need for secrecy. Perhaps if he paid more attention to domestic U.S. politics, he would see that the standard response to revelations like this is boredom and disinterest. Did Abu Ghraib morally discredit the Iraq war with U.S. voters? No, the ones who still supported the war found it easy to shrug off an isolated incident caused by bad apples. Did it shock any Iraq War supporters to discover that the guys who pushed the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 had already been looking for ways to sell another war against Saddam Hussein for almost a decade before to 9/11, and that their motivations had nothing to do with terrorism? No, people who had listened to the arguments and made up their minds to support the war did not care about the motivations of the obscure policy wonks advising politicians in Washington.

Anyone expecting the public to be shocked and outraged by a revelation ought to temper their hopes by reminding themselves how much publicly available information they find extremely shocking, and how different the typical voter's response to that information is.

v21• 16 years ago

He's not aiming to change the behaviour of the people, he's aiming to change the behaviour of the policy wonks. He's aiming to make them either more open, and therefore far less exclusive. Or he's aiming to have their communications be much more difficult to achieve.

Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents.

This is a very different motivation than journalists have.

dkarl6• 16 years ago

I think the state would rather keep their communications secret, but in the event that they cannot, they will continue business as usual rather than change what they talk about. Really, what is the effect of transparency? So what if Russia knows we don't consider them a democratic country, so what if Iran knows that the Arab states want to see Iran isolated and neutralized? These are open secrets. Like a sex tape of a man having sex with his wife, they're embarrassing not because they're news but because they're supposed to be kept private. Nobody is surprised that a man has sex with his wife, and nobody is surprised that the Arab states are adversaries of Iran.

If secrecy becomes impossible, as Assange desires, will Arab states stop calling for the U.S. to be aggressive with Iran? Will the United States start believing in Russian democracy? Will American policy wonks stop openly discussing with each other what reasons might persuade the public to support policies that they support for other, less popular reasons?

Well, if every human being on earth suddenly had X-ray vision, would people stop having sex for fear of their neighbors seeing? Of course not. Life goes on.

CamperBob• 16 years ago

Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents.

I'm not sure that even matters. If you look back at the great conspiracies of history, they haven't been "hidden" by the conspirators at all. Could Wikileaks have stopped Hitler, who actually published a book explaining his views and telegraphing his intentions? So did Lenin and Mao, and the future slaves of their totalitarian states did nothing but nod their assent. The signatories to the PNAC all but told us to expect a "new Pearl Harbor," but, heck, that's just tinfoil-hat territory, there.

I'm pessimistic about the benefits of Wikileaks' activities simply because history has shown, again and again, that nobody cares about conspiracies except the conspirators. The free flow of information might effect positive change eventually, but it'll have to wait until next Tuesday night, after American Idol.

anthuswilliams2• 16 years ago

But as he points out, the objective of WikiLeaks is not to foster popular opposition, as Assange believes that occurs naturally. If public outcry was his intention, he probably wouldn't have bothered with banal diplomatic cables. He is of the opinion that consistent leaks heightens intra-government paranoia. As each conspirator becomes more fearful of information being leaked, s/he shares it less, thus depriving the conspiratorial machine of the information it needs to survive. I'm not sure I agree with him (this will require some thought), but I think your analysis might be off.

dkarl6• 16 years ago

Why would people be paranoid about unsurprising information being revealed? The leaks are embarrassing because privacy is expected. He wants to make people paranoid by destroying their expectation of privacy, but if the expectation of privacy is destroyed, then there is no reason for people to become paranoid, because the expectation of privacy was the basis of the embarrassment in the first place.

If he thinks he is accomplishing something by this large-scale indiscriminate leaking of banalities, I fear he will not focus on acquiring and revealing information whose publication could have a real impact.

nl2• 16 years ago

I think you missed what his plan is.

He's not leaking this to cause outrage - he's leaking it to make the US government lock down its information sharing to the point where it cannot functionally pursue its policies.

I'm not sure it will work, but it's a original and intriguing plan.

dkarl6• 16 years ago

A little late for me to comment, but why, exactly, would they lock down information sharing if not out of fear of a popular reaction? Nothing revealed so far has been any worse than embarrassing. One commenter compared the revealed diplomatic cables to things one would say to one's wife about one's mother-in-law, but which one would not say to one's mother-in-law directly. They aren't even any state secrets yet, just a bunch of "Oooh, did you see what he said about them?"

We found out Hosni Mubarak hates Hamas. Did Hamas not know that? Suppose they didn't... now what just changed? Are they going to get their feelings hurt? The only way this will change the relationship is if one side or the other is pressured by a popular reaction to that information being aired publicly.

Our ambassador to Libya passed on a rumor that Qaddafi is sleeping with his nurse, oooh, juicy. Or check out this, which of all the things I've read isn't just a "tee hee" and actually resembles a real scandal:

In what is widely being seen as a dangerous blurring of the line between traditional diplomacy and intelligence work, the State Department has asked its diplomats to obtain "credit card and frequent-flier numbers, work schedules and other personal information of foreign dignitaries," according to the New York Times' reporting on multiple cables dating back to 2008.

Gasp... blurring the line between diplomats and spies! Of course, for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, the most common cover for intelligence agents has been diplomacy, so this isn't exactly news. Embassies are nests of spies, yes, I have read a couple of John Le Carre novels.

The amount of non-news surrounding this "event" is just stunning. Just a whole lot of we-knew-that-already.

So by what mechanism will this pressure anyone to lock down information sharing?

Maro• 16 years ago

I have not followed all the previous Wikileaks, but I definitely disagree with this latest one.

I don't see what purpose is served by releasing internals memos about what some diplomat located in Germany thinks about certain German politicians.

There's nothing evil in having a negative opinion about German politicians and communicating it to your boss. The People certainly don't need to know such micro level details. OTOH it does harm your diplomatic relations.

This is kinda like somebody hacking your Gmail account and releasing all your work emails to your startup's investors, because, after all, they're your investors, they deserve to know what's going on?

danielschonfeld• 16 years ago

If anyone is interested here is the full PDF that is quoted throughout this article dubbed "State and Terrorist Conspiracies":

http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

I'd say it's a mistake to either reduce Wikileaks to Assange or reduce the leak-dynamic to Wikileaks. Technology has made leaking very easy. Someone is going to do it.

There are many justifications you could come up with, someone will use one of them.

Leaking, for example, seems inherently easier than file sharing and that hasn't stopped for a while now.

ENOTTY• 16 years ago

I'm interpreting this article to say Assange's goal is to decrease the effectiveness of the conspiracy (eg, US government function) by killing off information flows within the conspiracy.

If that is so, then I really fear a world with Assange as the head of Wikileaks.

One of the major reasons why the government failed to prevent the 9/11 plot was because nobody had all the information in one place so that they could connect the dots. The 9/11 Commission recommended that different parts of the government increase the amount of information they share with each other. (Indeed, the State Department posting certain cables onto SIPRNET that was the source of this leak was part of the response to that recommendation.)

If Assange's actions induce a return to the world of stovepiping, then the future might not be so rosy.

Then I guess my only question is why does he want a world like this? Will society be better off in this kind of world?

gfodor• 16 years ago

Someone in another thread put it best: when did I vote for Julian Assange? Who is he accountable to? Where are his secrets?

gcb• 16 years ago

funny how for years all that [USA being an authoritarian conspiracy] was even promoted as the "correct" action in sci action movies.

how many times the hero agrees not to disclose some alien invasion or something as to not create mass panic and help the government act in the dark and so saves the day?

known• 16 years ago

As Michael Caine said in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_%28film%29

"Some people would enjoy seeing the world burn"

Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)

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