"Sir did you know that breaking the law in order to expose corruption and war crimes is illegal? How dare you try to undermine your own government for being shitty?"
There are some very nuanced details to the whole thing. A corrupt government has no legitimate right to enforce law- especially when that government is founded on principals for the people by the people. It’s legitimacy comes from its service to the people and the laws they have agreed upon, laws which also bind their government. So a government which breaks the laws it has been given to guide its operation and reach is a rogue- a government of force not laws. However- things are seldom binary. A simplified example is a police officer selling drugs. If it is part of an undercover operation and if you go telling the world, you could ruin an investigation of get someone killed. You lack the complete picture- but if they made the information public, the whole thing becomes pointless.
In short- there are laws to protect the privacy of individuals and to uphold the integrity of evidence and help prevent abuse. You aren’t supposed to be able to be searched any time anywhere. You aren’t supposed to have every aspect of your private life open for investigation by anyone who decides you might need “checking up on.” So when you say you stole information to uphold the law and protect the people, but to do so you walked all over that law and all it stands for, you have done the same thing. You aren’t upholding an ideal- you are merely deciding who the law applies to and who it should protect on your own. You have put yourself above the law and without oversight or being placed there by the people and trusted with that responsibility have appointed yourself in your own self righteousness as the gatekeeper of right and wrong for all. That can be a very dangerous thing and a very slippery slope. Who do you answer to? Who polices you of not the police and not the people?
You break and enter a house and discover the home owner is a murderer. You call the cops and they arrest you both. You whine about how, since you exposed the murderer, you are doing a service.
But how you did it was wrong
And someone had to look through all the bot illegal and not classified stuff that was just plain private. A private citizen. What if someone here stole your credit card info and bank and identifying information to try and catch you doing wrong? Does everyone here pay taxes on every online purchase or $1 bill they find on the street? So even if they found no wrong- would you feel very safe or good about a total stranger stealing your private and personal information that could hurt you if misused- but totally promising they would never misuse it and totally adhered to safe handling of your information- with no standards if anyone to police how secure or private they kept it? No way to know they would be honest and careful with it? It’s like a surgeon without a medical license. They may be the best doctor ever, or a nightmare.
Well, not really. A chick he had sex with in swissland found out she had an STD after and wanted him to get tested. That was it, no assault, it was consentual. The government elevated it to assault for some reason.
There are actually two girls. One accused him of tampering with the condom and ejaculating inside her after he was really pushy for sex in the first place. The other girl says they started having sex but she stopped him because they were unprotected. In the middle of the night, they had safe sex. The next morning, she woke up to him having unprotected sex with her and became angry.
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***These are allegations and the debate is whether he should face rape charges in Sweden based on them. The statute of limitations has passed for the first case but not the second. Here's the link: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/4/12/18306901/julian-assange-arrest-wikileaks-rape-sweden-embassy
How can anyone defend governments in this case? Not one thing he has released has been false and frankly anyone not supporting what he does is a bootlicker
Yeah, it would be like, so cool if he leaked the list of counter-terrorism spies we have across the globe... like omg why is the government keeping that classified!? Let's just like totally give China the blueprints for the F-35 while we're at it since we're such bff's.
Get the fuck out of here with that.
It's illegal in every country to spy on them, but every country has spies in other nations. So, if we are going to be the only country that obeys the law, we're going to be at a serious disadvantage both economically and also in security. But if you grant that we need to do what every country does but denies doing, don't we need to keep a lot of stuff secret, like,identities and even what we found out? In WWII, one of the biggest secrets was that we had the codes broken for both the Germans and Japanese. If that got out, they'd change the coding method.
Boot lickers? Others like funkmasterrex have done well covering the idea of the power of information so I’ll leave that alone. How about this though- The government at its core is supposed to be for the people. Those upset by these secrets are upset by the corruption of that idea- that individuals abused power to their own ends and for their own means outside the law and principals of the law, they put themselves above the people and said “this is for the good of everyone that we hide this...” So... how is he different? One man- at least those others were at least appointed through the public trust even if they abused it. This is a single man deciding that he knows what is best. That he will decide what the people should know. One man with his own agendas and goals.
The fact you happen to like what he did doesn’t excuse the same crime. If one person murders your mother and another murders that person- is the second murderer a hero or still a murderer? Using power and deceit and abuse of privilege outside the law is the crime he’s trying to hold others accountable for. So if he gets a pass under the fact that he was doing what he thought was right- how do we justify punishing others for doing what they think is right? Are abortion clinic bombers and ISIS bombers and those fighting gay or interracial marriage not just doing what they personally think is right too?
If we say that the law is the law unless we personally agree with the person breaking it- we have no law. We have no clear expectation of what actions will be punished and what actions will be forgiven by public opinion. We have mob justice and rule of whatever the moments passions are. So yes- there are fundamental flaws in our system that need fixed so there is a level of accountability and enough transparency to prevent people from easily hiding their misdeeds under a label of “classified,” but replacing one rogue who holds themselves above the law with another is just the same shit in a different wrapper.
To argue from your own side, the lesser of two evils is the path we must take.
But how you did it was wrong
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***These are allegations and the debate is whether he should face rape charges in Sweden based on them. The statute of limitations has passed for the first case but not the second. Here's the link: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/4/12/18306901/julian-assange-arrest-wikileaks-rape-sweden-embassy
Get the fuck out of here with that.
It's illegal in every country to spy on them, but every country has spies in other nations. So, if we are going to be the only country that obeys the law, we're going to be at a serious disadvantage both economically and also in security. But if you grant that we need to do what every country does but denies doing, don't we need to keep a lot of stuff secret, like,identities and even what we found out? In WWII, one of the biggest secrets was that we had the codes broken for both the Germans and Japanese. If that got out, they'd change the coding method.