Justice & Law Quote by Julian Assange

Assange’s line is less observation than indictment: secrecy isn’t framed as a neutral tool of statecraft, but as a telltale symptom of misconduct. The sentence is built to collapse a popular alibi - “national security” - into something cruder: concealment as damage control. By pairing “rule of law” with the almost schoolmasterly “good behavior,” he widens the charge beyond technical illegality to moral rot. Even when an agency stays within a lawyered-up interpretation of statutes, the behavior can still be indecent. That split is doing a lot of work.

The subtext is classic Assange: if you want to understand power, follow what it refuses to let you see. “Often” is the strategic hinge. It gives him plausibility deniability while still planting a presumption of guilt. He’s not claiming every secret is a crime; he’s saying the incentive structure of clandestine bureaucracies tilts toward secrecy precisely when accountability would bite. In other words, the darkness is not incidental to the mission; it is the condition that makes overreach survivable.

Context matters. Coming out of the post-9/11 expansion of surveillance and the WikiLeaks era of large-scale disclosures, Assange is speaking to a public trained to accept classified programs as the price of safety, then repeatedly shown those programs involved torture, warrantless spying, and collateral damage smoothed into euphemism. The rhetoric is deliberately blunt, almost prosecutorial, because his project depends on flipping the burden of proof: not “why did you leak,” but “what required hiding in the first place?”