1) Relatively high freedom 2) Variety in values/opinions (often due to freedom) 3) Secrets to be leaked
1 ensures the leaker's ability to leak, 2 ensures there is a leaker to leak, and 3 ensures there is something to be leaked.
Assange outlined his goals [1] a while ago in regards to exposing secrets, and I think Wikileaks is staying in line with those rather well. It essentially states that they'll leak whatever they receive, and try to enforce a kind of 'secrecy tax' on governments/parties/organizations that refuse to be transparent via forcing them into less effective means of communication and overall less use of technology.
The fallout of these disclosures potentially contributed to a building coup attempt in Turkey by forces loyal to the US (which the US tacitly supported) that burst just a week after the disclosures.
Wikileaks does not only publish "against" America. When it does, it's closer to home for the Americans and we hear more news coverage about it. In any case, wouldn't it okay that there are outlets that produce true news focused on negative aspects of the United States, keeping it accountable? That seems like a positive thing to me - though I don't think Wikileaks is "it".
On 24 November 2015, Turkish F-16 combat aircraft shot down a Russian Su-24 during an airspace dispute close to the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident as "a stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists" and further stated that "today's tragic events will have significant consequences including for relations between Russia and Turkey".
7 months later, on 19 July 2016 WikiLeaks released the AKP Emails. AKP is the ruling party of Turkey and political force behind president Recep Erdoğan.
Wikileaks has stated repeatedly that it is not a hacking organization, it distributes items given to them by others.
It's clear what is happening here. Russia is doing an excellent job of manipulating the rhetoric surrounding its ties with Trump. If the CIA is to look like a foolhardy and scary institution to the American public, Trump can say stuff like "Obama wiretapped me", and it degrades the legitimacy of all CIA input on Trump-Russia ties.
They do have a category on Russia, though: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia
IIRC, they don't have any staff fluent in Russian, though, and they pointed to other whistle-blowing operations as more able to operate there.
Russia doesn't need to collude with them, nor does any other party. They just need to leak to them. If you read what Assange wrote about how wikileaks works to raise the cost of conspiracies, you'll see that it actually doesn't matter who is using them, only whether or not the material is true.
Russia and Turkey at the point of the disclosures were in a rapprochement: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2016-07-20/ru...
The result of the disclosures was a weakening of that warming relationship, with Turkey pivoting again in its foreign policy - at least for some short time.
What else has Wikileaks reported on?
The Italian "Hacking Team" - https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/
Saudi Arabian Embassy Cables - https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables
Pirate Bay Court Documents - https://wikileaks.org/gottfrid-docs
Cables from the Assad administration in Syria - https://search.wikileaks.org/syria-files/
Documents from inside Scientology - https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Scientology
Swiss Banking Tax Offshore Scandals - https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Bank_Julius_Baer
His point isn't very compelling for the following reason: instead of taking my argument ("Wikileaks publishes on far more than the US") he took an anecdote decorating my argument ("for example Turkey") and tried to argue the anecdote (poorly).
I'll give him an upvote. Not because I think his argument is really good. But because he contributes to the conversation.
I thought the conclusion was that that coup attempt was more or less theater by Erdogan. Organized with his approval and prior knowledge, destined to fail, and used to enact martial law.
Erdogan's subsequent power grab was/is also very real.
(They aren't mutually exclusive.)
The social media rumor that you're referring to has been widely discredited.
Do we think that, though? We've heard a LOT about Russia's cyber capability lately and the consensus seems to be that they employ groups of criminal kids who are by and large given free reign and occasionally called upon to look at targets of interest. We also know that the US's military spending (known budget) is something like 6x Russia's military spending, and we can imagine that intelligence spending is a similar multiple higher.
I should also make the point that the DNC/Hillary stuff is not a foregone conclusion that it was Russian. These leaks cast new light on the DNI's Grizzly Steppe paper where the NSA gave a 50/50 level of confidence that Russia was involved (but CIA and FBI said that it was greater than 50%). This leak includes information about a project called "UMBRAGE" which is a CIA project to catalog and strategically make use of hacking tools of other countries for certain projects in order to point the finger.
We do know that GCHQ has capabilities that are similar in some ways to CIA/NSA, but is it a foregone conclusion that all world powers have cyber programs this extensive? I don't think that it is.
This is often misleading. Russia and China might spend less but their dollar goes further.
Payroll for 5,000 hackers is within the reach of many world governments I'd think.
No big deal.
The Feds probably spend $700M just on Office 365.
Why would the CIA hack the DNC though? It certainly wasn't a smart strategic decision for the Democratic administration. Why would they hack the DNC and not the RNC?
That said, there definitely is a disproportionate amount of info on America v ROW.
However, it seems like Wikileaks, while claiming to be a neutral source that "just wants to make powerful people accountable", they only seem to be releasing damaging information about systems in place in the US.
I think the issue here is that many (most?) of us assume that all global powers have this capability, yet a Wikileaks is trying to paint the US as the scary one, and so people are questioning their motives. Is what the US is doing morally wrong on a few levels? Undoubtedly. Can the US afford to stop doing these things when some arguably less moral actors are going to continue regardless? That is up for debate.
Assange to me seems irrationally anti-America. Has the US done many reprehensible things now and in the past? Absolutely. But that is true for every powerful nation ever. And if you're looking at America's competition, you'd need to be blind to think that Russia is somehow more benevolent than the US.