If a suspended employee was shopping around "the location of the encrypted file, paired with the password’s whereabouts" and in "two weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors and middlemen would have all the cables", wouldn't you just move the files and change the password?
He then goes on to say "Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her [Lisa Sheilds] as a back channel." However, he never mentions who Lisa Sheilds is, just that was Schmidts 'partner'.
I had to research it, but apparently she works for the "Council on Foreign Relations" http://www.cfr.org/staff/b5862 They do a horrible job explaining what they do. But I find it odd that Assange would have left out this details. Sheilds is a conduit to Clinton as well as Schmidts partner. This is an important detail.
"While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch." Assange blames Google, but he was naive enough to take a meeting, not knowing who the people setting up or attending were? I find this doubtful.
"The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy." Which direction is this statement going? The state is influencing the political agenda's of corporations? or vice versa. Was it any other way, and is this a problem as Assange seems to assume it is?
Google and the Council on Foreign Affairs put together a conference to 'workshop technological solutions to the problem of “violent extremism.”' This sounds like a good thing to me, but Assange condescendingly and rhetorically asks "What could go wrong?", ok, I'll bite. What went wrong? Unfortunately, he never answers.
"Google Ideas is bigger, but it follows the same game plan. Glance down the speaker lists of its annual invite-only get-togethers, such as “Crisis in a Connected World” in October 2013. Social network theorists and activists give the event a veneer of authenticity, but in truth it boasts a toxic piñata of attendees: U.S. officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists and foreign-policy tech vultures... " Invite-only ? Really? Is this surprising for such a gathering? If so, what are the activists doing with the foreign-policy tech vultures? Who's calling them vultures?
"I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by ... U.S. foreign-policy types". He again here is assuming that Schmidts agenda and that of US Foreign Policy are not aligned.
If this article didn't have Julian Assange posted all over it, I almost think it would be more credible. What I've never understood about those who praise Assange (not WikiLeaks as an idea, but the way Assange runs it) is that he's as bad as many of the actions of people reported in the leaks. He has his own political agenda, and is given a huge volume of classified information by a third party, and he then decides what of these classified information gets published and what doesn't. What makes him the deciding factor in all of this? If you think you're doing good publishing information that others think is classified, than publish the information. Don't pick through it, see what you think will make headlines or embarrass people you don't like, and publish only that which you feel is fit to press.