Wikileaks was going after any and all state actors, including Russia and Iran, nobody wants their dirty laundry aired.

What did Wikileaks have on Russia? I've never heard of anything particularly juicy, and well, I'd go look it up, but... /looks at article

Nothing much. Being based in Western Europe and being run primarily by English speakers meant very few Russian leaks would get sent to Wikileaks.

How did this become the narrative? Wikileaks was started by the Russian secret service, so of course they wouldn't leak their own stuff. Assange was a useful idiot to them.

... Source? My version is the easily verifiable truth, which is why it is the narrative.

Bold statement.

"The Democratic National Committee emails, provided to WikiLeaks ahead of the 2016 election by Russian state entities posing as rogue hackers, are similarly missing."

Although the CIA would appreciate that and it's part of their smear campaign against Wikileaks, I don't think a leak website should wait with publishing dirt on country X until it has collected dirt on all other countries in the world. That would make no sense.

They were doing the opposite, releasing some documents and holding onto others for their own strategic reasons. It was always super shady, compounded by the fact that much of it was driven by one man’s ego.

Whether they held on to documents for strategic reasons, as you claim without presenting any evidence, doesn't concern me at all and it shouldn't concern you. What matters is whether the published documents were genuine leaks, and for all that we know they were. That's why Wikileaks was prosecuted and is being destroyed.

Imagine you leak some important classified information to Wikileaks and they don't publish it. You'll just send it somewhere else. There are hundreds of journals and thousands of journalists to whom you can alternatively send the information. It's frankly speaking stupid to claim that not publishing a leak "for strategic reasons" could somehow be harmful. It is also worth mentioning that journalists do that very often for a vast number of reasons such as national security, their own security, protecting contacts, protecting sources, fear of legal repercussions, political agenda of the editor in chief, etc. There is nothing special about Wikileaks in that regards.

What was special about Wikileaks was their policy of publishing everything with only minor redaction and, most importantly, without asking the befriended intelligence community for the green light first. That's what normal news outlets tend to do, unless they have a very high level story like Watergate.

Come on, we all know about the dead mans switch. Or does that not count for some reason? With regard to your last paragraph - they had no published standards about how they treat the data they are entrusted with, and no governing body to ensure transparency, and that led to the shit show they became. I didn't and don't trust WL org any more than I do any government you can point me to.

If millions of people die in a war in Russia, the government doesn’t feel anything, because they are not the ones going to war. If their own people turn against them, they feel it.

But, at least in Russia, they don't and they won't because that's not how power transfers work in this country.

Alexei Navalny was the last person attempting to change this, but he failed.

Also Russia has its own social media, search engine etc., so some information simply doesn't reach the common Russian.

Over here in eastern Europe as far back as in the 00s there was the concept of "Russian internet"(Runet) - it wasn't technically sealed off from the rest of the world, but was more a small, independent world in and of itself that exchanged information mostly internally, in Russian.

Navalny is a nationalist, Russia is multi ethnic country and it's always been clear that he wouldn't gain any power there even if Putin is removed and he is released. Navalny team is also falsely presenting themselves as friendly to Ukraine while trying to get their government to give better equipment to Russian soldiers so that they can kill more Ukrainians.

Roskomnadzor tries to control RUnet (Russian language websites) even in some former Soviet States.

Cause there leaked documents were/are on it as well. At some non-ideologic point the interests of all state actors meet. The might makes right mentality of a seasoned bureaucrat is the same everywhere. Which is why the narrative of Wikileaks being funded as a psy OP does not hold up. Such a "attack" would only host one type of document and its journalists wouldn't "attack" all governments equally.

But hey, if i betrayed the fourth pillar of democracy and suffered from cognitive dissonance therefore, this not being supported by the "evils" behind it, would be woven into some nice story too.

> Like if you were Russia or Iran right now, paying a bit of money to keep wikileaks' servers running would seem like money well invested.

Who do you think paid for those servers in the past, lol. Seems that the GRU has defunded the project, though - they must have other higher priority projects.

Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU#Unit_74455

The link you shared doesn't appear to mention anything about funding or defunding anything. It seems to be more about coordinated dissemination of documents. I don't feel like I'm any closer to knowing who does or doesn't fund on going operations of WikiLeaks.

It would be really easy to figure such things out if intelligence agencies published all their activity, but shockingly this is not the world that we live in.

I don't think it's about funding. WikiLeaks likely has enough money from BTC donations a long time ago.

The know-how is in Assange's mind, and he's in prison.

It's amazing the amount of crazy stuff people trick themselves into beleiving due to their hatred of Trump. Wikileaks works for Russia? This wikileaks?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11893886

Most people think Assange was turned by Russian state intelligence after 2013/2014. The "reporting" on Russia vanished after.