> he needs some medical help.

I don't think there is any for what he might have. Specifically, I was struck reading the article and your list how perfectly this dude matches Cleckley's _Mask of Sanity_ profiles of psychopaths - no long-term plan, continuous lying and deception of others without any remorse, confabulated explanations, impulse-driven actions, big risks taken for trivial gains, grandiosity, self-inflicted financial problems... The problem being that for personality disorders, there are no cures or treatments (and for psychopathy there's some troubling results that attempts to treat it just made them more dangerous).

> The fact that Assange let this guy into his inner circle doesn't give one a lot of confidence in WikiLeaks.

If it's psychopathy, well, I would note that they are famous for fooling even people who have read detailed accounts of their personal history. Cleckley is not the only person writing on the topic who notes personal astonishment at how they were manipulated by a patient even after having read the patient's file. If forewarned is not forearmed, I cannot blame Assange or the other Wikileakers too much.

Thank you for a sensible dose of reality in this.

This is a maybe-sensible dose of speculation. Be very skeptical of such speculative diagnoses.

I'd trust gwern's speculation.

http://www.gwern.net/

   The content here varies from philosophy to poetry to programming to prosaic FAQ. It is everything I felt worth writing for the past few years that didn’t fit somewhere like Wikipedia or was already written - "…I realised that I wanted to read about them what I myself knew. More than this - what only I knew. Deprived of this possibility, I decided to write about them. Hence this book."2 I never expected to write so much, but I discovered that once I had a hammer, nails were everywhere, and that supply creates its own demand3. I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week; to a surprising extent, this has been true. (I have added ~130 documents to this repository over the past 3 years.)

http://www.gwern.net/About

More specifically than that:

You can find the Cleckley book in question online in various places like http://libgen.info/view.php?id=23550 ; even if you aren't that interested in psychopathy per se or judging how well the OP person fits Cleckley's characteristics, it's still a fascinating & worthwhile read, I think (my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/373031205 ).

The reference for my claim about treatment being inefficacious: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/2006-harris.pdf “Treatment of psychopathy: A review of empirical findings” Harris & Rice 2006

And you can find quotes on other topics from the academic literature in http://lesswrong.com/lw/fzy/notes_on_psychopathy/

The fact that Assange let this guy into his inner circle doesn't give one a lot of confidence in WikiLeaks.

Yes, this is the obvious conclusion here. Assange is a dishonest megalomaniac. Snowden is a high school dropout. And Manning is a troubled gay. The leaks be damned.

The leakers have put themselves in positions of enormous power and responsibility. They are deciding which documents the public gets to see. There are potential positive benefits to this but there are also significant risks (for instance, the release of the diplomatic cables and US military logs which included the names of people who talked to American officials could easily put those people at risk). Given the positions of power that Assange, Snowden, Manning, et. al. are putting themselves in, I think that it is completely reasonable to ask questions about their character as it directly relates to whether we trust them to decide what the public gets to know.

I don't understand what you mean by 'whether we trust them to decide what the public gets to know.' That's a question we're supposed to be asking the governments who have withheld this information, not the whistle blowers. Shifting the focus of these leaks to whether or not the whistle blowers should be hung or not is a great way to deflect focus from the actual things that were leaked. You'd think that a threat to the 4th amendment would register higher on people's radar, but the human interest piece is compelling.

Whether the information should have been leaked or not is an interesting question, but ultimately a 'what if' scenario. The important question is what we do with this information. Or, if you're the government, how to get the people to not care.

> the release of the diplomatic cables and US military logs which included the names of people who talked to American officials could easily put those people at risk.

That speculated risk is one which no one has been able to connect to a single actually death or injury. Its not like government PR would not love to bring proof of the dangers of leaks.

The reason why no actually body has been found, is that the included names was mistakes made by the people in the field who mistakably put some in the low security reports. Normally, such names are only added to high level security reports, which mean that the number of names in the low level reports where quite few/limited, and possible already evacuated long before the reports were made public.

High level security reports was sorted out by Wikileaks/leaker before publishing.

I am fairly certain that he was being sarcastic.

Take out the to decide what the public gets to know and your statement makes a lot more sense.

You missed off "and rapist".

Exactly. Although there are some great people who work with/at/for the organization, Assange's character, from my point of view, is damaging their reputation a little. He should step back (not quit but get out of the limelight) and let someone else be the "front" for the organization. Kristinn Hrafnsson would be a good choice IMO.

But they have handled the Snowden case well it seems and that gives me some confidence.

>>>But they have handled the Snowden case well it seems and that gives me some confidence.

I have to give them credit for that. Assange didn't jump in and hog the limelight and for the most part, WikiLeaks has stayed quiet and reserved during this whole ordeal.

They acted incredibly professional throughout.

hogging limelight gets difficult from "exile" in one room in the Ecuadorian embassy.

However I do think an earlier poster was right - a change of personnel at the top of wikileaks might be their best chance of staying the course

Which begs the question: how familiar are you with Assange? Aside from reading articles that try to characterize him, have you read any of his writings or listened to his talks? Have you met him? What basis are you using to judge his character?

I personally am under the impression that he has given much more thought to his policies for releasing information and organizing Wikileaks than you give him credit for.

I think that's a hard thing for someone to do.. ego or no.

The guy just looks like a sociopathic wanna-be hacker.

Siðblindur aumingi.

That, and he's a dead ringer for the original Augustus Gloop.