“You’ve changed, Wikileaks. You used to just be about the hacking!” That’s basically the message that hacker collective Anonymous delivered to WikiLeaks this week, as Anonymous sought to distance itself from Julian Assange’s website in a statement posted on its Twitter account. As The Guardian reports, Anonymous “described WikiLeaks as ‘the one man Julian Assange show’ after the website began asking users to pay for access to millions of leaked documents.” The group went on to decry Assange’s current celebrity status as antithetical to WikiLeaks’ original purpose.
“The idea behind WikiLeakswas to provide the public with information that would otherwise be kept secret by industries and governments,” the group said. “But this has been pushed more and more into the background, instead we only hear about Julian Assange, like he had dinner last night with Lady Gaga. That’s great for him but not much of our interest. We are more interested in transparent governments and bringing out documents and information they want to hide from the public.”