How I Was Accused of Fascism for Writing About WikiLeaks

In Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, David Golumbia presents an unhinged attack on nearly every branch of contemporary digital activism. Because I write about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, I was fortunate enough to be swept up in Golumbia’s attacks. Here, I present a short response to Golumbia, demonstrating that either (1) he did […]

Glenn Greenwald, David Golumbia, and USAID: What WikiLeaks Really Said

On the February 10, 2025 episode System Update (Episode 402 of the podcast), Glenn Greenwald discussed WikiLeaks’ recent tweet about a recent book titled Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. This book, written by the late English professor David Golumbia and published by the University of Minnesota Press in November 2024, contains vicious attacks […]

Review of Risk (2017, Produced by Laura Poitras)

In 2010, WikiLeaks shocked the world when it began publishing US military reports and diplomatic cables, which were leaked to the organization by Army Private Chelsea Manning. Amid these publications, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras went to London to film the work of WikiLeaks’ founding editor Julian Assange and his colleagues as they navigated the backlash […]

Reading Julian Assange in His Own Words

Though Julian Assange is one of the most discussed individuals of the last decade, journalists and academics rarely make direct reference to his own statements—especially in the United States. Most of the time, those who comment on WikiLeaks feel entitled to impute ideas and behaviors to Assange, rhetorically transforming him from who he is into […]

The New York Times is Still Lying, Julian Assange is Still Dying

In January 2021, a United Kingdom court rejected the United States’ request to have Julian Assange extradited across the Atlantic. The judge stated that, while the US charges against Assange were legitimate, she feared that the harsh conditions of the US prison system would drive Assange to suicide. This decision was based on mounting evidence […]

How Not to Conduct Academic Research on WikiLeaks: A Case Study

The WikiLeaks Bibliography exists because scholarship on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is, well, utterly horrendous. Indeed, the poor state of academic research on WikiLeaks is the reason I began researching WikiLeaks at all. I believed that this field needed an intervention, one that actually applied standards of empirical rigor and primary source analysis. Unfortunately, the […]

Prolegomena to Any Future Historiography of the Cypherpunk Movement

Preface On March 2, 2020, the journal Internet Histories published to its online first section the essay “Against technocratic authoritarianism: A short intellectual history of the cypherpunk movement” by Enrico Beltramini. The essay later appeared in Internet Histories Vol. 5, No. 2 (2021). This article was perhaps the first academic attempt at analyzing the history […]

How the New York Times is Obfuscating Its Role in the Persecution of Julian Assange by Pointing Fingers at The Intercept

On Sunday, the New York Times published a report by its media columnist, Ben Smith, supposedly shedding new light on The Intercept’s failures to protect Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency employee who is now serving time in federal prison for leaking a document to The Intercept in 2017. The article is about neither […]