Julian Assange to be released from jail

[FlyingClayDisk]

I didn't read all the reports of his release, so someone fill me in here...

What was the reason for his avoiding setting foot on the U.S. mainland on his way to Saipan?  Was this part of the conditions for his release, or was it his own personal motivation?

From my personal prospective, Assange should have never been jailed (nor Snowden for that matter), but neither of them are lily white either.  The value of the information released in terms of government wrongdoing far outweighs the magnitude of the wrong they personally did in releasing the information, and I don't think this was ever a criteria for evaluation.  A person has to have some pretty twisted logic to make the assertion..."Yeah, the government illegally violated and trampled on MY rights, the rights of millions of Americans and foreign nationals, acted illegally both domestically and internationally, willingly participated in government and private corruption on a global scale, and even committed murder, on countless occasions too numerous to count, BUT...it was still technically illegal to tell me all of this.  Therefore Assange should go to jail."  This is especially true when the mentality (and people) behind all of this had no intention of addressing the issues which were exposed and instead only going after Assange for exposing them.  That's a real stretch to wrap my 'justice minded' head around.

The area where I have a problem(s) with Assange is in two main areas:

1. Wikileaks curation of the information released was reckless with respect to releasing personal information, especially of unrelated parties.  This was careless in the extreme and endangered a whole lot more people than the perpetrators of all of the illegal activities.  In fact, in many cases the released information actually endangered the victims more than the perpetrators of the acts against them.  This, in my opinion, is a pretty serious offense.
   
2. Additionally, it's one thing to obtain and release proof of nefarious and illegal activity in the spirit of "transparency".  But it's a whole other thing to attempt to 'steer' the narrative by selectively releasing pieces of information such that it works to shape public perception in line with a political agenda, regardless of what that agenda is.  Now, it would seem that much of the political damage was done to the democrats (and gawd knows how I feel about them and their crazy antics), so republicans were the majority benefactor in this regard, but this doesn't make it any less wrong.
   

The truly saddening thing in all of this is what led to the demise of Wikileaks ultimately.  Ultimately, Wikileaks faltered and failed largely due to financial reasons, and the sad part there is today's 2 minute long social attention span didn't warrant enough financial support before everyone found a new "shiny object" to look at as they stumble around looking at their precious cellular phones (instead of where they're walking).