This is basically my takeaway, I think Snowden has a lot stronger of an argument frankly. Assange also editorialized his leaks to be damaging towards the US ra

This is basically my takeaway, I think Snowden has a lot stronger of an argument frankly. Assange also editorialized his leaks to be damaging towards the US rather than just leak them. IIRC this lead to conflict within the org. The CM video was awful, but as I understand it was a mistake made within the bounds of acceptable ROE? Similar to the recent drone strike mistake in Afghanistan. War sucks and these accidents are awful, but we live in an imperfect universe. These things don’t really say much in isolation. If anything the cables showed the US in a positive light (most on HN probably didn’t actually read them). I found the US’s media response to be stupid as it often is, rather than engage honestly on these issues. Over the years Wikileaks went from something that could have had a genuine media purpose to a way for intelligence agencies hostile to the US to leak hacked materials to the world with plausible deniability. It was no longer a neutral actor (and frankly the editorialization by Assange in the “CM” video wasn’t neutral either). He crossed the line with aiding the hack which gave legal recourse - this is the rule of law bit, we’ll see what happens. I do think the “sex crimes” stuff could have been Intel doing stupid shit (imo) but that’s just speculation on my part.