I like this opening:
"One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. Itâ(TM)s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents."

So. You believe nothing is knowable? Saves time.
Waitaminut. Lookie here! https://firstlook.org/theinter...
News today from Glenn Greenwald says that there are well organized covert groups whose purpose is to disrupt and neutralize online forums and discredit people. You don't think they'd show up on Slashdot, do you?

OOPS. Forgot! He was never accused.

Bingo. Most attractive young guys I ever knew.

As L. Ron Hubbard commanded his secret nerd commando assholes, find their crimes, especially sex crimes, the dirtier the better. Publicize it though side channels and bring it up at every opportunity. Smear, smear, and keep on smearing. Pamphlet the neighbors, call the schools, alarm the parents, burn the bastard through anonymous innuendo until he's ready to commit suicide. Well, just the first sentence was his. The rest his Boy Bands did on their own, and still do.

Fourth amendment against search and seizure. Mass surveillance and use of such data to undermine opposition. Murder. Conspiracy to commit murder. War crimes. Accessories to murder. Use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians. Throw in the ninth amendment while we are at it. Abuse of secrecy declarations to conceal crimes and persecutions. And the panels are useless - they are carefully loaded with shills. Amazing that one actually broke free and declared illegality.

Not the government. The intel community. They are a separate thing. They are beyond government - elected officials come and go, but the network of ops and analysts and right-wing nutjob policy makers at the CIA and a dozen other agencies are secret, safe, and damned near unkillable. And they know what every is saying, who they are with, and and where they have been. They are freaking gods of vengeance and manipulation, should they choose to come and get you. Assange has royally pissed them off - and GOT AWAY WITH IT. They are not going to let him live a life outside of a torture cell. They will never surrender.

Any one who believes any story about Assange that smears him is a damned fool. The full hatred and might of the US intel community is focused on that man. Believe nothing. Especially from the Telegraph, for Christ's sake.

Name. One. Person. Who. Was. Extradited. For. Accusation. Of. Sex. Without. A. Condom.

Just.

One.

Attack the man, not the facts, to neutralize the facts.

"Probably because like here, the people who support him make a ton of noise about how he is just a saint who has been vilified by a vengeful US government..."

Straw man. No one is a saint. No one said he is a saint. And he has been vilified, tracked, and set up by an
EXTREMELY vengeful US intelligence community - which is much different - and separate from - the US government. Governments come and go, but our real masters live behind the scenes and pull perception management stunts like this.

How many men, how much money, did they spend to track down every physical movement, every call, every text, every phone call he made? And interview every woman they could find that slept with him until they found two (sleeping with him at the same time) who would say "boo"? And further, one of those dropped the matter with disgust once she found the US was using her to get Assange.

No one ever did. And every one of you, at some time in your life, acted the fool in front of a woman. So, we will not be surprised when you are accused of crimes.

Which is more than what Assange faces, because he is accused of nothing.

He has been accused of nothing. He has been charged with nothing. A friendly right-wing judge helped the US publicize allegations made by two women - one of whom has bowed out in disgust and wants nothing more to do with the US's little Paula Jones games.

Amazing. They must have tracked his every movement, interviewed every woman he ever talked to, to find two woman who would allege he had sex without a condom - which is only a crime in that country. And one of them walked away. Wonder what they have on the other woman - or how much she's been paid.

They smeared him, and set him up for an extradition snatch when he was to come in for "questioning".

And they have a lot of perception management sock puppets in this thread.

No. he is not accused of rape. He has been accused of nothing.

And the stories about his womanizing? Almost every guy posting at Slashdot. Perception management is everything.

Philip Wylie, the author of Gladiator, the novel of the first superhero that predated and probably inspired Siegel and Schuster's Superman, wrote a number of admonitory books during his lifetime. In high school, I read one of his last, "The End of The Dream" (1972). In it he cast a future history which ended with the world, hungry for energy, drilling into Antarctica's ice cap to uncover the coal buried deep under the ground. The fossil-fuel mad world, which he nailed, BTW, capped the seams and burned the coal in situ within the ground to generate electricity. Plausible.

The novel ended with the underground fires joining up and expanding, burning out of control. The smoke slowly built up, moving north like the wrath of an unstoppable god of hell, until the earth died under the cloud.
It was the end of a long litany of excellent *science* fiction. He extrapolated future actions of humans acting under the Law of General Stupidity, in which business always triumphs the hippies because, you know, they are hippies. You can call it the reaction of least energy expended, or simply conservative thinking - Everything Is Awesome.

When I head of fracking - it snuck up on me - Philip Wylie's sad voice came back to my memory, singing that same old song of mankind's monkey stupid snarling resistance to change, especially when there are trillions of dollars to be made digging up those ancient forests underground and setting them on fire. It didn't have to be. But it will be. America has no left, no intelligent people in power. We have businessmen. And businessmen don't do science. They do money and power. And Americans like things the way they are: the 1950's eternally reenacted, a never-changing world of cars and new houses and more and more and more... what is coming next is as predictable as those black clouds of Hell coming up from the Antarctic in Wylie's last warning. We will change the world. And it will be another business opportunity: mass relocation, new housing, new agriculture, potable water as precious as gold, cleaning up toxins, disposable houses, so so many ways to make money off overpopulation and the utter bovine imbecility of the human race.

40% failed grammar school, more like.