>> Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify a

>> Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about. This seems to have a baseline assumption of competence that I don't think is warranted. There's shockingly little relationship between privacy intentions and privacy actions. Presumably "let's attack Sanders for being Jewish" isn't something the DNC wanted to see on the front page of a newspaper, no matter how clumsy they were about protecting it. More broadly, what you describe in the other two paragraphs is exactly what Assange has been pulling for. Elsewhere, he's talked about raising the difficulty of secret dealings until powerful organizations have the choice of being ethical or inefficient. If transparent dealings are enough easier than opaque ones, opaque and anti-public-interest dealings should become rarer. There are a bunch of criticisms here, some of which are quite reasonable. Assange nominally respects personal privacy while opposing institutional privacy, but revealing institutional behavior after the fact almost always compromises some personal information. And anti-public-interest is not 1-to-1 with opaque; plenty of groups do incredibly harmful things based on deniability or sheer boringness instead of secrecy. Even so, I think things like "showing the DNC was in Clinton's pocket" are exactly in Assange's wheelhouse. If the DNC was neutral (as their bylaws required), there would have been no problem. If it had been an open pro-Clinton PAC it would have been non-notable. As is, he's hopefully raised the difficulty of screwing the public as a nominally-neutral organization.