This is from a review of “Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Biography,” by Bradley Winterton at The Taipei Times.

“But the view of this reviewer is that Assange has little to worry about. The book reads not only well but in many places magnificently. If you want a version of the WikiLeaks saga from the horse’s mouth, and in addition a defense of press freedom in the tradition of John Wilkes, Tom Paine and Daniel Ellsberg, this is undoubtedly it.

As WikiLeaks is built on a belief in unfettered access to information, one expects as much of the truth as can be fitted into 250 pages from Assange. (The last 100 pages or so consist largely of extracts from the leaks themselves, generally less sensational than one might have expected.) There’s one fact of local interest close to the start — the name Assange, taken from the author’s stepfather, derives from the Chinese Ah Sang, the stepfather’s ancestor several generations back, who was “a Taiwanese pirate.”

Comment:

Two things to note.  Daniel Ellsberg (of “Pentagon Papers” fame) is considered limited hang-out by many thoughtful people, like Doug Valentine.

Interesting coincidence that Assange’s pen name derives from the Chinese Ah Sang (Taiwanese pirate) and that Wikileaks has recently been funded almost soley by Swedish micropay site Flatr, launched by the Swedish digital distributor Pirate Bay, which has been involved in copyright violations.

So, Julian, descendant and friend of pirates, fights the big pirates (national governments) with the methods of small pirates (hackers), in the process, allying himself with even bigger pirates (the cartel of pirate financiers like Soros).