That article is enlightening - it changed my take on Assange from "guy who is really good at disseminating classified information" to "guy who is really good at executing a well articulated plan to reduce secrecy in government".

These few lines sum it up nicely:

Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about.

Yes, I found it very enlightening, and I developed a lot more respect for Assange's after reading it - even if I don't agree with him all the time.

He really isn't just randomly dumping documents - there is a very deliberate methodology to it.

There was a good discussion on that article on HN a few days ago.

This is probably the best piece I have read in a long long time.

No matter what one might think about Assange the person and his style, his systems thinking is brilliant.

That would be a great argument, if eliminating removable thumbdrives and media would in any way impede internal communications. No business communication is done on removable media in these places.

That would never be a good idea for a host of reasons (remember the lost laptop with personal info on it? other than leaking there are lots of reasons this is a bad idea)

This ban prevents the people who work in the government offices from bringing in music CDs and pictures on a thumb drive. Recall Pfc Manning was pretending to play Lady Gaga on a CD when he was burning all this stuff onto disk. That's it. There is no other reason to use removable stuff at work except to leak or bring in files like that.

I'm actually shocked this specific ban took so long. The contractor I work for banned CDs (burned or not) after the Sony rootkit incident, flash or floppy drives have been banned forever.

This assumes that every piece of information being passed back and forth is used to further a conspiracy. Much of it is mundane, albeit necessary.

Sure, it's what he wanted, but that's part of the problem here. The government, like they always do, overreacts to fix the problem, and now even basic security measures could be hampered.

That's not what it assumes at all. Actually, that's pretty much the opposite of what Assange explicitly states, that revealing mundane details has the positive effect of demonstrating how overused secrecy is as a tool of governance.

...or exactly what GOOG Brothers like: chrome isotopes finally get a whole new market. Something perhaps like the GRiD Compass 2.0

Or post-hoc rationalization. "Oh yes, that is what I intended all along"

The quoted article (http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/iq.org/conspiracie...) was written the same month as the launch of Wikileaks, that seems a fully appropriate time to have made his mission clear.

My mistake (and laziness). Mea culpa.