08 December 2010

Julian Assange Facepalm

Julian Assange, is, without a doubt, the most inept manager in history:
The arrest without bail of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday has left the organization in a state of uncertainty, despite transition plans laid out prior to his surrender to British police, according to one dispirited WikiLeaks activist who spoke to Threat Level on condition of anonymity.
Assange left Icelandic television journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson in charge of the group in his absence, the activist said. But now the embattled organization’s secrecy and compartmentalization are apparently hindering its operations.
Specifically, midlevel WikiLeaks staffers have been mostly cut off from communicating with hundreds of volunteers whose contact information was stored in Assange’s private online-messaging accounts, and never shared with others.
You people are familiar with the concept of transparency, right?

Update:  Julian, let me help you out.  Here's some advice on organizational communication, written in 2006:
Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy. If all conspirators are assassinated or all the links between them are destroyed, then a conspiracy no longer exists.

3 comments:

Deskibel said...

I was preparing a blog post in which I was arguing that Assange was a decoy, a bit like the tail of a slow worm.

Seems like I credited them with more intelligence than they deserve...

Vigilante said...

When did it become open season on the whistle-blowers? When did it become open season on the messenger? Maybe a little collateral damage will seep out from the secret chambers of statecraft (That's a misnomer isn't it?) What passes for Anglo-American statecraft is actually endless & boundless war! I say break down the doors, open all the file cabinets, throw hard disks into the street. Nothing should be spared in the task of embarrassing the military industrial complex to death. To death, I say.

Chris Cox said...

Nothing about this surprises me in the slightest. Assange (although I support him broadly) has shown time and again he's a showman obsessed by his own personal credit for everything going on.

Right now if I were senior at Wikileaks I'd be cutting Assange off like a diseased limb and moving forward.

I wonder if Assange is the only person with the encryption key to the rest of the cables...