Thursday, December 16, 2010

The Thing About Julian

Do I think Julian Assange is a hero? No, not really. He strikes me as being overly self-righteous, with a chip on his shoulder. Do I think Julian Assange is a villain? No, not really. He's just a dude who knows some hackers and may or may not be one. It seems like everyone is forcing themselves into the box of either "he's a bad guy so whatever happens to him is OK," or "he's a hero so I have to take his side and agree with him about everything."

The fact is, he's neither. But nevertheless what's being done to him is simply beyond the pale. This is clearly a conspiracy right out of "The Net" (that old Sandra Bullock movie). And it's all about the timing.

Last time around, when WikiLeaks dumped their Afghanistan files, the media was caught off guard. All they could do was report it. But it's obvious now that someone, somewhere in some halls of power decided that the next time they'd respond to another WikiLeaks dump by instantly going after Assange from all directions. Consider:

PERSON 1: "OK, they've dropped another dump, this time a bunch of U.S. diplomatic cables."

PERSON 2: "Yeah, but it's mostly just high school girl diary stuff. The only interesting things in there have to do with a few bombings in Yemen, and the media doesn't seem to much care about that. They get better ratings reporting the high school girl diary stuff."

PERSON 1: "That doesn't matter. While the media is out there reporting the cables like they're TMZ going after Lindsay Lohan, we need to utterly destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, to send a message. First, find out whoever is hosting their site and force them to drop WikiLeaks from their customer base. Next, do the same to their domain registrar. Then go after PayPal and whatever credit card companies are taking payments for them. Either they all find an excuse to drop WikiLeaks or they get the "burn the witch" treatment next."

PERSON 2: "Done, done and done. That was surprisingly easy. Only took day or two."

PERSON 1: "We're not finished. Now we need to scour the planet and find anything we can get on this guy - unpaid parking tickets, whatever - in any country. He travels a lot, so that should be easy."

PERSON2: "OK... It looks like a couple of women in Sweden were complaining a few years ago that he sort of maybe didn't use condoms with them, or something. That's a misdemeanor called "sex by surprise." No jail time, but there is a fine. There was also initially a rape charge attached, but it was immediately dropped as soon as a prosecutor looked at the evidence: both women have gone on the record as having given full consent to have sex with him."

PERSON 1: "Doesn't matter, he's now officially a sex offender. Call the prosecutor in Sweden and have them put the rape charge back on, then force Interpol to upgrade the case to "Most Wanted Red Alert." While we're at it, call up any bank accounts he has and make them drop him too. While we're at it, have all the news networks stop referring to WikiLeaks sources as 'whistleblowers.' It sounds too positive."

PERSON 2: "Sweden and Interpol are both on board. There's an account in Switzerland, for his legal defense fund of all things. They were only too happy to find a loophole and comply immediately. And NBC and AP have now publicly promised that they'll never refer to WikiLeaks as 'whistleblowers' again."

PERSON 1: "OK then, it looks like all our problems will just go away now."

Listed all together like that, it sounds completely ludicrous that such a thing could happen. And yet, all of these events actually did take place in a matter of just a few days. They could not have been coincidence. It's just not possible. Somebody made some phone calls to create this situation.

To whoever orchestrated all this, what you should consider is - your communications with everyone involved in helping you to go after Assange is itself at risk of being eventually leaked. Doesn't that thought concern you at all? Because, I'm certain that I'm not the only one who's curious to find out who you are and why so many governments and companies are willing to bow to your command.

No, Assange is not a hero; I don't actually care about him. But the fact that so many governmental and corporate institutions are willing to instantly take orders from some unknown source is of extreme concern to me. I've never been much for conspiracy theories before now, but someone here has blatantly overplayed their hand. The sequence of events simply leaves no other reasonable interpretation.

I never checked out WikiLeaks before now. I'll be checking it regularly from now on, thanks to these attempts to destroy it.

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