Well, I think that's certainly a reasonable argument. On the other hand, note that Cryptome has done largely the same thing for, what, well over 10 years now. But Young has kept a far lower profile, with the emphasis on the material, as opposed to generating a lot of publicity. Would Manning have sent his materials to Cryptome in the absence of Wikileaks? I don't think so. Call that bullshit but that's the way most people actually function. Sometimes, you need an obvious figure in order to garner sufficient attention. You could also argue that Assange isn't really in this for much other than his own glory, but I don't care much. Indeed, when the furor over Wikileaks dies down, one can easily see a flotilla of similar though truly anonymous sites operating. But Wikileaks will have been the site that brought such ideas into common thinking. -TD
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:49:37 +0000 From: case@sdf.lonestar.org To: camera_lumina@hotmail.com CC: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: Hooray for Wikileaks, boo for Assange
On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, Tyler Durden wrote:
John Young mourned the death of crypto and cypherpunks, but here we are precisely in a situation in which a government couldn't bomb or assassinate or otherwise throw some jackbooted tantrum or threat in order to get its' way.
It's cute too that, just like "rendition", Assange and Wikileaks operate in a nebulous amalgam of jurisdictions. Is it illegal for them to do what they did? In which country? OK, what about another country and its' mirror sites? And could they shut down the TOR networks and other means by which the info-dumps are received and transmitted? No, this cat is out of the bag. Hopefully Assange is smart enough to have established dead-man protocols, also.
Everything that wikileaks has accomplished could have been done completely anonymously, with the public never having heard the name Assange.
If you are optimizing for leaks, you don't put yourself out there.
The fact that we know his name shows that he is optimizing for something else. If the government really wanted to shut Assange up, they would give him a record deal or a starring role in a hollywood film.