Daniel Assange: I Never Thought WikiLeaks Would Succeed... I Think He's Been Doing An Excellent Job

[Hissyspit]

Well, looky here. Seems the mainstream media, mostly in the U.S., of course, misrepresented Daniel Assange's comments about his father. Who'd a thunk it? The younger Assange apparently doesn't think his father is a rapist and is not all "estranged" from him. This intern at Crikey, apparently, actually, to took the time to get the whole story.

Friday, 17 September 2010
Daniel Assange: I never thought WikiLeaks would succeed

by Crikey intern Nick Johns-Wickberg

When Daniel Assange was 16, his father Julian asked him to be a part of WikiLeaks, the controversial group of internet freedom fighters that was then in its infancy. Sceptical of the project’s likelihood of success, and not on the best of terms with his father, Daniel said no. “I never thought he was going to succeed,” the younger Assange says, four-and-a-half years later. “It was a ridiculous concept, that he was going to actually leak government documents to the entire world.”


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Daniel believes that previous reports of him being “estranged” from his father have sensationalised the issue, and have also misrepresented him in other ways. The most blatant of these was an August 27 article by the New York Post, entitled “My Wiki dad’s just awful with the ladies”. The article was based around a tongue-in-cheek comment that Daniel posted on a friend’s Facebook page, which said “that man does have a way of making a lot of female enemies”. “Somehow from this they gathered that I was making some comment on his capacity to interact with women over the entirety of his life, which I think was a bit of a ridiculous jump,” Daniel says.

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As much as Daniel would like the Australian government to step up and offer Assange a greater level of consular assistance, he realises that, in the circumstances, this is not likely. In fact, given the nature of WikiLeaks’ activities, Daniel is grateful that his father is still alive. “I am very surprised that the governments haven’t actually done what some of the journalists have been recommending, which is to just assassinate him.”

Regardless of what now happens in Assange’s personal life, Daniel thinks that his work should be remembered as groundbreaking and for the greater good. “I think he’s been doing an excellent job,” Daniel says. “His actions as a personal individual and his actions in a grand political sense are completely disconnected things, and they should be considered in that sense.”

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