The act of assassination - the targeting of visible individuals, is the result of mental inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which o… - Julian Assange

This is not justice; never could this be justice, the verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience.

We all speak about the privacy of communication and the right to publish. That’s something that’s quite easy to understand — it has a long history — and, in fact, journalists love to talk about it because they’re protecting their own interests. But if we compare that value to the value of the privacy and freedom of economic interaction, actually every time the CIA sees an economic interaction they can see that it’s this party from this location to this party in this location, and they have a figure to the value and importance of the interaction. So isn’t the freedom, or privacy, of economic interactions actually more important than the freedom of speech, because economic interactions really underpin the whole structure of society?

Smears don't have much staying power on their own because they deviate from the foundations of reality (what actually happened). They require constant energy from our opponents to keep going. The truth has a habit of reasserting itself.