She sold out last year?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

She sold out last year?

3. If all goes according to plan, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will make a cameo this Sunday on “The Simpsons,” and soon after he will begin hosting a television show on a Russian state-owned network called RT. It is possible to see both necessity and farce in his involvement with these projects. Assange’s appearance on “The Simpsons,” if it provides a ratings boost to the show, will put money into the pocket of its broadcaster, Rupert Murdoch, whose paid commentators have called for unspecified commandos to execute Assange by hanging, or to “illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” And the Kremlin is hardly a bastion of government transparency. In the past decade, forty journalists have been murdered in Russia, and in a majority of those cases no one has been prosecuted. Assange once told me, approvingly, that the Swedish Internet service provider that had been hosting WikiLeaks was also maintaining a pro-Chechen separatist Web site that had been “taken down twice from diplomatic pressure from Russia,” and was still sustaining regular cyber attacks.

But these are strange and difficult times for WikiLeaks. The Web site once drew power and freedom from its untouchable, mote-sized budget, and now it insists that a financial “blockade” has crippled it to the point of near oblivion. Assange has spent more than four hundred days under house arrest, a number that is still rising, and his ability to develop WikiLeaks appears to be as constrained as his physical movement. Is now the time for a forty-year-old cyber activist to sell out?