Comment Maybe they're misinterpreting the results (Score 4, Interesting) 175
If you're asking someone to absorb difficult material (like Knuth or advanced physics) then you want to minimize other sources of 'disfluency'.
In theory, you'd think this would be the case. In practice, most people filing on April 15th are filing to get their money back, not send money in.
There are actually no incentives for governments to make it easier for taxpayers to get refunds. Taxpayers can create those incentives by reducing their withholdings to $0 so that they owe the government on April 15th rather than the other way around. Given California's problems, that seems like a pretty good idea anyway.
Where's the money in that?
Whereas there's always money in war profiteering and the latest thing, security profiteering.
(Until the money runs out...)
Assange and his staff are probably experiencing COINTELPRO style conspicuous surveillance and harassment campaigns (sometimes misleadingly called "organized stalking"). The agents would be going out of the way to let Assange's people know that they were being followed and surveilled, using techniques such as public messages that conveyed highly personal information from their lives. The highly personal and embarrasing information revealed in the conspicuous surveillance would be of such a nature that the target(s) would not want to talk about the details.
That would explain why they were being 'vague' and 'conspiratorial' in their explanations.
Optimism is the content of small men in high places. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack Up"