Wikipedia: "Manning told Lamo he was also responsible for the "Cablegate" leak of 251,287 State Department cables, written by 271 American embassies and consulates in 180 countries, dated December 1966 to February 2010."

He also said explicitly that he didn't read them. He gave them to professional journalists, yes. Somehow, regardless of the journalists' intent, these cables were all available on the internet for a period of time. Whatever you believe about Manning's motives or justifications, what I have written is the truth.

America is not unique in wanting its diplomatic traffic to and from its embassies to remain secret. EVERY country does that. And whatever you believe, it's a good bet that each of these 251,287 cables does not illuminate a crime.

Manning took a pledge to protect this information. Putting classified material into the hands of other people you kinda-sorta know and hope will do the right thing is not the same as protecting that information. He broke his pledge. He would be a whistleblower if he only exposed those things which he felt were actual crimes. Instead he chose to be a vandal.

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

Whatever else people may think of him, this puts him one step above Manning in my book.

Though it sounds from the Guardian interview as if he's conflating the attitudes he saw while in the military, the activities he saw while at the CIA abroad, and NSA programs. These are different things surely. If he was unhappy with the way the CIA operates in Switzerland, then he should have exposed those things, rather than NSA programs. He sites no example of actually having witnessed the detrimental effects of these NSA programs (which you'd think must be pretty plentiful given the size of them.)

In the same sense as Manning, what he's done really falls under the category of 'vindictive divulgence'.

Or, if Assange is really trying to say "Google: just like the Nazis" with his leaning on the word 'banal' here, you know, I really hope most rational people can discern a difference. Is that really an argument he wants to make?

Nazis: initiating a world war that killed millions. Pursued a horrific genocide of their own minorities.
Google: dorky glasses.

Let me cap my argument by reminding that Assange's whole enterprise (Wikileaks) depends absolutely on the kinds of technology produced by Google and similar companies. Before the internet, Julian Assange would be some guy somewhere Xeroxing small runs of a paranoid zine. It's very likely that without Google and its peers, no one would know about Julian Assange or Wikileaks.

Yes, I got that, but what does it have to do with anything else in the piece? It's like quoting Star Wars in an article about (some other) war. Here's Websters:

banal: lacking originality, freshness, or novelty : trite

and here's Assange:

"The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now — only cooler. “Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth."

His complaint is not that the Google technology of tomorrow will not be original or "fresh". But this is a minor quibble. I stand by my earlier assessment. Even though the book very well may be in some ways, as he writes, "But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances" (though that's doubtful - why go to the trouble of publishing a book when a position paper would suffice?) His own absolutist position of presuming the worst motives always for American anything, and his precarious position holed up in an Ecuadorian embassy somewhere avoiding probable life incarceration, makes him an unreliable book reviewer.

Listen to this (Assange) : "In the book the authors happily take up the white geek’s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire. " You know, that's pretty patronizing and dismissive of all these groups, just for starters. Those are real people with real needs, dignity, culture, volition, goals etc of their own - not props. Beyond that, can he describe what acceptable behavior for a technology corporation would be, within his own moral framework? I don't believe he has actually worked that out. Without his having included that in his scathing review of Google's ambitions, we have no real point of comparison, and he has no real argument. I don't believe "white guys should stay home, and not even attempt to interact with anyone else" is valid or reasonable. If Google's technology stopped at the border, you would bet there would be a huge outcry about that as well.

NO, sorry, you should RTFA. He's quite a lot more, and a lot different from that. Just for starters;

"The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. "

It's an interesting read. Wish I had read the book myself first. Assange's knee-jerk reaction is to presume the worst, and hidden, motives for anything related to American interests and motives. In this way he's like Chomsky, and the problem with this is, he's liable to be right at least every so often (e.g. broken clocks being right twice a day). That is annoying. But it makes every individual argument less convincing as there's no evidence it's actually a nuanced or considered position.

Also, I don't believe the word 'banal' means what he thinks it does.

Henry Ford knew that for his business to succeed, his workers would have to become his customers, so he made sure they were paid decent wages. When Tesla's line workers can afford to buy a Tesla automobile, then Elon Musk will have succeeded.

I heard the first automobile was kind of slow.

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/the-gun-report-may-17-2013/

Etc.

Oh, hey, look, I found another one;

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/weekend-gun-report-may-17-19-2013/

nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/the-gun-report-may-21-2013/#more-3086

Let me just plug the original of the genre; FUTURE SHOCK by Alvin Toffler. And then, after you've read the ePub for that on your smartphone, please consider picking up THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER by John Brunner, a book that was way ahead of its time, then, and is still relevant (and a great read) today.

Bill Nye is still around. He is all over the Planetary Society, for instance, and does a lot of science advocacy through them.

Carl Sagan was the fucking Man. But I for one am glad to have both Bill Nye (on DVDs) and Neil Degrasse Tyson (sp?) around.

It's treason to plot the violent overthow of your own government.

"But not if you succeed."

Listen to you. Probably lived your whole life in the United States. Never been drafted. Never gone to war. Never been oppressed in any significant way. Never really known hardship or poverty. I'm not trying to make light of your life experience, which honestly I don't have any idea about. But there's lots of people on this thread specifically who seem happy to talk fliply about treason or anarchy or revolution. You know what, everyone has a beef with the Federal government but for the vast vast majority, their life here is very fortunate indeed compared to most of the rest of the world. That so many people from so many other places have come here to make their best effort at a better life is evidence that life in America is pretty good. Talking smack about the overthrow of the government seems entirely disconnected to actual reality, and it shouldn't be tolerated.

"I'm sure you've done something that someone would disagree with. Would you like to run like a fugitive?"

You know, I've done lots of things that people disagree with, but for the real biggies, I usually wait a while and and talk it out with some reasonable people before I take the plunge. That Defense Distributed has been so entirely dogged about doing this as soon as possible, without ever really considering the consequences, with such obvious callous disregard for the outcomes for anyone other than themselves, qualifies them for our contempt.

“You can print a lethal device. It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”(Cody Wilson) Well, DEFCAD could have shown that WITHOUT scattering cad files all over the internet. For starters, every policeman in America now has to treat every toy gun and chunk of plastic as a possible lethal weapon, and that wasn't true a week ago. The likelihood of people getting shot by cops just increased, for no good reason. Second up, the entire gazillion dollar security theater at airports now has to be reworked. Oh, that won't be inconvenient for anyone (or costly to the whole rest of the world) that every piece of plastic carried onto a plane will have to be inspected. And someday, sooner or later, someone is going to be shot dead with a DEFCAD design that slipped through security somewhere.

Never mind the train wreck this is going to be for the actual maker community - some of the nicest and most well-meaning people I've met. Now suddenly they and their entire enterprise are suspect.

Does Mr. Cody Wilson care at all? Oh, ha ha, why would he? Information wants to be free! He's not responsible for anything. He's just raising the issue.

He should have waited then until he had a more convincingly functional weapon. The issue with the ITAR restrictions is not that it's going to prevent the distribution of this gun, as people have already said on this forum. It's that its going to prevent DEFCAD from openly refining its design and distributing designs for all the improved weapons.