When Assange’s book When Google Met WikiLeaks came out in Sept 2014, I was chatting with someone who worked closely with him on it. I said I thought he’d given up any hope that he would ever be free again. I knew him from the cypherpunks list in the mid-’90s, so that hunch was based on nearly twenty years of paying pretty close attention to him. The person I was talking with thought that, on the contrary, Assange was optimistic, if not about his options then at least about his overall project. Whatever the case, Assange is genuinely brilliant, and there’s no doubt that he’s gamed out the consequences of his actions — or at least tried to. That’s not to say he knows what those consequences would be, or that his analyses are correct, let alone suggesting that he can control them. I don’t mean any of that. I just mean that there have always been weirdly pragmatic and egocentric aspects to his thinking — so when “Wikileaks” releases some new dump, you can be sure that Assange has considered what the implications might be for himself. The latest dumps — in particular, the DNC and the “Erdogan” dumps — make me think that, more than merely giving up, he’s now actively courting destruction and burning every bridge he can find. I can imagine a few other (or maybe additional) calculations regarding Russia, but that’s not really a subject for broadcasting on FB.