He's an anarchist who has left the streets, put on a nice, expensive, shiny suit and tie, and commenced to channeling his melodramatic emo-driven teenage angst drivel into a pay-per-use site that leaks classified information from governments around the world. The fact that he is blanketing himself in justification based on 'hating the bully', as he puts it, betrays the angsty, whiny, 'I hate my dad, the kids at school growing up were mean to me, and I am smart' swill that he propagates as 'justification' and motive for his illegal, immoral, and eminently dangerous actions. There's nothing wrong with a pretentious, faux-intellectual mod, but there's plenty of wrong in cleansing your actions in a self-righteous indignation borne of a malcontent attitude toward the entire world for your own inability to adjust to the world as it is... not as you want it. In short, he's a fantasy-drunk, fame-obsessed attention w.hore who, in his self-delusion, has destroyed much of the world's capacity for temporary diplomatic means to solve disputes and head off war. His angsty, melodramatic followers, equally culpable, equally incapable of realizing the consequences for their emotional, reflexive, visceral, and reactionary actions undermining the safety and security of billions of people, imagine themselves as 'The Joker' from 'The Dark Knight'. They think they're 'fighting the man'. They're only endangering themselves... all from the comfort of their couch while soldiers and civilians in places like Kunar Province, Afghanistan are put at risk for the childish actions of a self-aggrandizing Julian Assange. You've all been duped... Assange just wants you to think he's an intellectual. He's crying inside and he's desperate to be the hero in the fairy tale swooning anarchist girls are constructing in their heads.

Pity some people think that bashing Assange is now cool - typical 'shoot the messenger' syndrome. If this information is so sensitive and valuable (in fact, it for the most part, just confirms what cynics like me already suspect) then why not focus on preventing the leaks instead of panicking and making wild and comical claims of terrorism against Wikileaks?

I find Julian Assange to be a fascinating individual. I am just hanging out for the day when he writes his memoirs, and puts anything Hollywood can come up with to shame. This really is cloak and dagger smsf business, and I really hope he continues unimpeded on his escapades.

All bare bums and red faces. He can hardly be endangering world peace because there isn't any.

Blake Hounshell poses the question, "What is Julian Assange? and then studiously avoids any attempt to answer it other than throwing out a few cheap cliches that don't help us understand the remarkable phenomenon taking place before us.

Well, let's see, according to BH, Assange is "mysterious, flamboyant, and uncompromising", "has pretensions as an intellectual", is grandiose, but--a big concession--not a terrorist. This is the best you can come up with? Is this Foreign Policy or did I stumble into People Magazine online by mistake?

BH: "Journalists are in the business of contextualizing news stories, adding color, detail, and perspective to documents or events that in and of themselves don't tell the whole story."

Yeah, that's what I say to myself every time I open the NY Post, Paris Match, the Daily Mail, the News of the World, etc, etc. Come on, Blake, join us back on planet Earth. Whatever label we put on him, Assange has undeniably put more facts in front of the reading public than most "journalists" will do in a lifetime.

BH: "If it's true, as Bradley Manning seems to admit here, that all four batches of U.S. government leaks (the helicopter video, the Iraq and Afghanistan logs, and the cables) were carried out by the same person, then maybe WikiLeaks will turn out to be a flash in the pan."

Blake, couldn't you have done a little research before you started typing? Wikileaks has been around for several years. It's obviously true that the unusual confluence of events that led to the bombshells of the past few months is unlikely to be repeated, but that hardly makes Wikileaks a flash in the pan. Let's see what they produce on Bank of America.

Oh, and Assange also "vowed regime change". What an outrage! Who does this pompous bastard think he is, the US Government?

I suppose a vow of regime change is interesting--as is an organization that actively solicits breaking the law--but hardly counts as "a new phenomenon", as this article claims. Haven't there always been radical organizations? The only new phenomenon is that the organization in question has potential leverage against incumbent administrations and the means to acquire more.

Meanwhile, regimes such as China, Cuba, or Myanmar are continually contending with a variety of organizations that both suggest regime change as a goal and actively solicit breaking "the law". Granted, we may have no respect for such regimes' laws--being flagrant violations of liberal aspiration--but seeing it from their point of view, our predicament is little different.

As an American who certainly opposes the power excesses and personal rights strictures of the aforementioned countries, I find it a bit disheartening that we can't act with more maturity and self-confidence in the face of such an opposition. I, personally, find Assange's role a bit ambivalent--one moment playing as the bringer of transparency, another moment as the sanctimonious arbiter of morality, and sometimes just another Ameri-sceptic with distracting gossip to dispense. Regardless of what role he decides to play tomorrow, I think we should regard this as a call for both greater transparency in government--as we wish to see in others--and for less naivete about the ease of classified data transfer. A wake-up call (in both aspects) that we should be thankful for.

When that call has been heeded, perhaps we will all feel a bit more confident that such detractors will have little dirt (either obtainable or existing to be obtained) with which to get traction.

He's a techno-anarchist. And I'm not using anarchist in the pejorative. He wants regular people to know the inner workings of state and corporate power so they can change its nature. More mature than the anarchists of the 1800s, Wikileaks,has taken to using modern technology to expose whatever of these "inner workings" gets leaked to them. For that he is to be commended. He's not perfect, but he has brought great benefits to the general public.

The only tragedy is that he has so far taken on mainly American state power. Hopefully other states will have certain unflattering features exposed.

The future arrives--our 'Net.

We as individuals, our work or play, forever, altered.

Capitalism, Globalization, War, Peace.

Hopefully, for the better, meaning: less physical violence:
bombs, occupations, rockets.

And our 'Net is never, entirely, secure.

Too many, too much: free exchanges, digital innovations, users.

While, without ceasing, our Imaginations, 'Net grow exponentially !