> Hacker spirit. Nowadays, the word “hacker” conjures up visions of Russian trolls, Julian Assange, and Angelina Jolie’s 90s pixie cut. But a nobler usage predates this. Hacker culture, in the original sense, grew out of places like MIT in the 60s, with its tradition of highbrow silliness and elaborate technical pranks.<p>Implying that Julian Assange's endeavours were not noble, or in some sense comparable to "Russian trolls", or in some sense antithetical to the "hacker culture" of yore, is heinous and ahistorical. I mean that specifically in the sense that I think history will show it to be false.<p>Not only that, it's also a gross misunderstanding of what Wikileaks was - a huge "hack", in the early MIT sense. A problem was observed, and a solution with genuine "hack value" was applied to it.<p>The facts illustrating this are already in the public domain, although I am of course aware that they're floating around in a sea of insinuations and fake scandals and half-truths and propaganda and bare lies.<p>Source: I followed Wikileaks and Julian Assange since around 2009. It naturally goes unmentioned in the majority of newspaper and documentary treatments of the subject, but Wikileaks is deeply rooted in the cypherpunk ethos of the early 90s, which itself is historically tied to the earlier MIT hacker culture.<p>Stallman, who this introduction goes on to cite as a bona fide representative of the early culture and an "open source gnuru" (<i>shudder</i>), is a vocal supporter of Assange, and has stated clearly his belief that Wikileaks has that hack value I mentioned above.<p>I recommend the book Cypherpunks to get a feel for the actual cultural and technical ethos surrounding Wikileaks, for anyone interested. For a rebuttal to the incredible amount of crappy reporting on the legal side, Nils Melzer's book on the Swedish case is good. There are plenty of good articles too (in the middle of a couple of orders of magnitude as many bad ones), but here's one that might be a good start for someone interested:<p><a href="https://theindicter.com/the-significance-of-wikileaks-as-invention-of-the-worlds-first-true-free-press/" rel="nofollow">https://theindicter.com/the-significance-of-wikileaks-as-inv...</a>