The Glenn Greenwalds of the world like to say how terrible all this is, because Assange is a “journalist.” He’s not. He specialized in publishing illegally obtained materials. Snowden’s leaks were quite revelatory, although a good bit of what NSA did had become public already through other channels. However, Chelsea Manning’s leaks included a great deal of diplomatic traffic, which arguably served no one’s interests by being made public. Finally, the leak of Podesta’s emails just before the 2016 election may have tilted the results in Trump’s favor, although a large part of the content was actually not in any way newsworthy. It is also notable that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian hackers. Assange functioned as a Russian tool, leaking the information they wanted leaked without revealing the source.
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