Smart warning, dumb prophet …

… Book Review: Cypherpunks | This Machine Kills Secrets - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The cypherpunks of the 1990s were prescient in the sense that the issues they were discussing—anonymity, privacy, censorship, the surveillance state—are still the fault lines running through policy debates about the Internet. But they couldn't have found a worse standard-bearer for their message than Mr. Assange. Many in the press who at first embraced him have found that they couldn't trust him, and his public image has slipped from charismatic rebel to something close to a farcical figure, as he ducked sexual-assault claims, suffered house arrest in an English stately home and finally took refuge in the embassy of a Latin American government with a dubious record on press freedom.