In Activism and Journalism, If You're Ineffective They Ignore You, When You Become Effective They Stalk and Harass You, Failing That They Threaten You
8 hours ago by Jennie Kermode:
"Whichever side of the Atlantic you were on, the early revelations about Wikileaks were so high profile, so dramatic and multifarious, that one might easily get the impression that it was a seasoned professional organisation. In fact, to the extent that it was organised at all, it was a collection of wildly ambitious young people, few of them over 30 – and looking back now, they can see how naïve they were. “When you get into a fight with the Pentagon, it’s only going to end one way,” says Sigurdur Thordarson."
18 hours ago by Jonathan Romney:
13 hours ago in Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal:
Several posts ago we spoke of "the Wikileaks effect". Then, someone in our IRC network said this was also "the Snowden effect" - with context being somewhat overlapping. By the way, the above articles are from the past 24 hours alone. Assange has become more politically active again.
More than 12 years ago Edward Snowden travelled to Hong Kong (Assange's girlfriend at the time later protected him from arrest by the US) with secrets that helped reveal the US Government breaking the law on a vast, international scale. He gave secure access to this data, leaving British journalists with storage devices they can use to do years-long reporting (at the end an oligarch, Pierre Omidyar, bought those people and scuttled the effort). Quoting the New York Times about Pierre Omidyar's assault on investigative journalism: (there's a limited paywall)
The documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras said in an open letter published on Thursday that she had been fired by First Look Media for publicly criticizing how the company reacted to its failure to protect the identity of an anonymous source who is now in prison.The source, Reality Winner, was working as a linguist for the National Security Agency when she provided top secret government documents to The Intercept, an investigative website owned by First Look Media that was founded by Ms. Poitras and the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill.
[...]
“Instead of conducting an honest, independent and transparent assessment with meaningful consequences, First Look Media fired me for speaking out, exposing the gulf between the organization’s purported values and its practice,” she wrote.
[...]
Mr. Greenwald left The Intercept in October, claiming an article he had written on Joseph R. Biden and his son Hunter had been censored by his editors, an accusation the publication denied.
People like Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill got conned by Omidyar, perhaps alluded by the promise of money and work/job security. Nowadays both are increasingly obscure; Omidyar ruined the professional career of both men. The same happened to James Risen from the New York Times.
Assange actually founded Wikileaks around the same time we founded this site (only a few weeks or months apart) and he was hailed as a hero (by the West) as long as he scrutinised "enemies" of the West or exposed corruption outside the US. Then he became "inconvenient" to both political parties that govern the US on behalf of oligarchs. All of a sudden they told us he was evil, that he had raped women, and that he was a traitor that needed to be killed.
The more effective Wikileaks became, the more its rivals (who control the major media, e.g. Amazon's Bezos) painted it as evil and dangerous. Amazon's AWS deplatformed Wikileaks - a move unprecedented at the time. They basically could not control Wikileaks and didn't anticipate what it would publish next, e.g. Amazon Atlas, one of the very last leaks from Wikileaks (published around the same time Assange got kidnapped inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London).
Efforts to deny people access to much-needed information continues and will continue as long as we're governed by evil people who have plenty to hide, buy/bribe the major media (to police the narrative), and run elaborate Ponzi schemes to plunder us all.
In my case, I got defamed by a law firm many times and a court was lied to by this firm many times. These people seem to assume they're above the law or that they themselves are the law. █