This is just a poorly thought-out hit piece, right? > Yet, even back then, observers and media partners felt that Mr. Assange had more in mind than transparenc

This is just a poorly thought-out hit piece, right? > Yet, even back then, observers and media partners felt that Mr. Assange had more in mind than transparency, that there was an ideology behind his idea. Over time, that ideology has become increasingly apparent, through his regular public statements and his stint as a host for a Russian state-controlled TV network. One element of Assange-think has been clear from early on: There is no such thing as a legitimate secret. The public is entitled to share any knowledge governments hold. Only complete transparency can stop and prevent conspiracy. Therefore, editing information by the government — redacting sensitive material, for example — equals manipulating it. So, the hidden ideology behind mere 'transparency', lurking beneath the surface and which colors all of Assange's work at Wikileaks is... well apparently it's just more transparency. Frankly, he's right. Any knowledge governments hold which is not germane to some contemporary disaster or military action, diplomacy, etc., should be available to the public. I'm hard-pressed to think of any good excuse for keeping a thing secret for twenty years, a decade being about the maximum for e.g. military secrets, etc. > And it’s particularly bad, in Mr. Assange’s view, if those people represent Western democracy: In his simplistic reading, the West is hypocritical because it stands for civil liberties, and all secrets are antithetical to liberty. No wonder he got a show on Russian television — his viewpoint puts him nicely in line with Mr. Putin’s ideological agenda. Eh, his position on secrecy is much more nuanced than that, and I'd bet that even my take on what should be top secret and what should not is more radical than Julian Assange's (and less thought-out, heh). His belief, in a nutshell, is that institutions which mean to control the population share a culture of mistrust, which in turn elevates secrecy to a virtue. Such organizations actually can't operate if they are constantly in danger of having their secrets exposed, even if the risk is low and the real impact even in case of a leak is small. That's why Wikileaks exists - not because Julian Assange thinks that everything James Clapper knows, we should also know.