[Pahalial]

Several people have already pointed out the tenuous situation between Kevin Poulsen and Wikileaks, so I won't retread old ground; that said, Poulsen is really just summarizing a piece from someone else in the new statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/05/...

I for one have never heard of The New Statesman before, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. Of particular interest to me was this (linkless) passing jibe: "but on the other hand they make routine legal threats, especially against the Guardian" - the only results I could find about this were also from the New Statesman, and actually seemed rather to pertain to a claimed case of libel about Assange. Not any actual legal action, mind, just a twitter update from @wikileaks. And no indication of a routine about it, just the one hit - very clearly not what was being implied by the paragraph in the original article.

So I for one will be taking this "The New Statesman" with as much of a grain of salt as I was ready to do to the Kevin Poulsen piece.

Edit for links:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/02/...

http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/statuses/32867678527950848

[eli]

Are you trying to wink-wink-nudge-nudge suggest that this document has been fabricated and the story is false? Otherwise I'm really not sure what Kevin Polsen's backstory has to do with anything.

Here's the citation for Assange threatening to sue The Guardian last year for basically trying to releasing Iraq war documents earlier than he had wanted: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guar... I'm not sure why you had trouble finding it; lots of hits on google for "wikileaks threatened guardian." He has indeed made threats to sue the paper on several occasions.

And the New Statesman is a left-leaning "real magazine" in the UK that been around for decades, for whatever that's worth.

[Pahalial]

I was not at all suggesting the story was false; rather that Poulsen was further "interpreting" the story based on a prior "interpretation" by the New Statesman. [honest edit: I suppose this is a weak sentence. I really did not mean to imply any actual falsehood, rather two levels of the kind of linkbaity shift one finds all too often in online news.]

That said, it seems my Google-fu is weak; I did not turn up that link nor any kind of repeat-threatening of the Guardian. Thank you for the link. Frankly, I think that both the Wired article and the New Statesman piece could have benefited tremendously (newcomer credibility-wise) from including it.

Having now read the Vanity Fair piece, I'll retract my prior criticism of the New Statesman article. If anything, given that I've given Wikileaks a lot of my attention over the last several months, I'm not sure how this escaped my attention, but it puts a lot of things in a different light. I for one certainly thought the relationship between WL and its chosen newspapers was a lot more rosy.

[eli]

Fair enough. Reading it again, the Wired post is pretty breathless. But I think the document speaks for itself.

You might also enjoy this New Yorker profile of Assange: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_... It's from a year ago, so it's pre-Cablegate.