If true, this suggests that previous articles about assange being 'practically free to go', and 'just staying in the embassy for attention' were misinformed.
> If true, this suggests that previous articles about assange being 'practically free to go', and 'just staying in the embassy for attention' were misinformed.
But those were always false even considering only the overt facts, and without the US issuing an extradition request (which there is still no indication it has, though there is an administrative error that seems to indicate that there is a sealed indictment); depending on the point in his flight from criminal process you examine, he was always either going to face the Swedish extradition request and/or the British bail jumping charges once he wasn't shielded from British authorities.
The Swedish government has dropped their charges, so they no longer apply.
They haven't completely dropped the charges. They've dropped the investigation, canceled the arrest warrant and aren't seeking extradition. But if he visits Sweden before the statute of limitations runs out then he can technically still be brought in for questioning and the investigation can be re-opened.
It is a legitimately confusing bit of partisan allegiance shifting in my estimate. Because Hillary lost and Trump has been acting like an incredibly obvious puppet even by his standards of 'gets along fine with despots while hating and being hated by every other democratically elected ally'. Given the allegations of Hillary Clinton 'joking' about drone striking him assuming a grudge is reasonable.
Really I have the feeling that they have gotten played like a goddamn fiddle by the intelligence agencies - after they faced the right turning against them for believing what their lying eyes were telling them about Trump's blatant Putin connections. So they are trying to save their behind after they were the brunt of rightful left-wing grudges over things like the Iraq intelligence, spying on activists, and spying on everyone pissing off the general public that doesn't drink the red white and blue "we need to destroy our freedoms to save them" koolaid.
I'm personally of a liberal of a 'free market but intervene when it works better and highly value civil rights' view who believes that the sheer dark history of the intelligence agencies makes the moderate option be to purge every last organization and make sure they never work in anything peripherally related again.
Strip away all labels and contexts and you would probably agree that an agency of torturers who trains dictators, overthrows democracies for short term petty economic interests at great suffering, invented depravities like 'rape dogs', and 'rectal feeding', practices torture despite knowing it doesn't work and more means that they deserve far worse.
I've been living in Cambodia for a while earlier this year, and seeing the fucking mess they made of the place there... yeah... I'd believe anything of them
Currently, the alt-right does not see him as a Russian agent, because Russia doesn't meddle in elections and stuff. That's just crazy talk propaganda. They are dangerous with some nuclear stuff so we have to build more nukes. But they are good in Syria and we need to either step away completely from that shit-show or give them a hand and fight on their side. It's complicated.
The left-leaning have Assange see him as a tool of right-wing US politics which are 100% bought by Russian oligarchs, or maybe the US politics bought the Russian oligarchs. It's unclear.
Questions?
Whatever you do, do not cross the streams. Gotta keep both (can never have more than 2 sides in a debate! that's we call it bi-partisan! have you heard of tri-partisan?! Is that some kind of cheese?! lol) sides hot and angry. Don't mind the man behind the curtain.
You claim to lay out both sides and then characterise the alt-right case as 'complicated' and therefore full of nuance, but the left-leaning side as 'unclear' and therefore nonsensical?
You're just like Mitch McConnell calling for bipartisanship and fairplay after years of crap. Completely disingenuous.
if you can read in any flattering from me on either red or blue, I don't know what to say.
And I'm poking fun of the whole "calling for bipartisanship" for ignoring that there might be more than two parts to any one issue, and then you compare me to (red team) Mitch McConnell!
Handing over the microphone to you, my comedy act can't match this. How's that knee?
yeah, I'm seeing opportunity here... who wants a Bubble Buddy?... someone from a diagrammatically opposite bubble from you, so you can see how the other half think
> But if "all a man is, is what others say of him," then by watching the news, Assange is just a Russian agent.
One of the most interesting aspect of the assange story is how the news industry celebrated assange in the early part of the 2010s and then started to demonize him in the past few years. It was all so sudden as if someone flipped a switch and everyone got on the same message.
It's also interesting how sexual assault accusations were used to take down assange just like it was used for kavanaugh.
Assange and Wikileaks have been demonised because they decided to release information in such a way as to deliberately influence an election.
The DNC/Podesta leaks were timed specifically to cause maximum negative effect to Clinton and the Democrats.
Then there's the lack of curation in some of the leaks. A lot of personal data that shouldn't be public by any means (e.g. medical information, sexual identity) has been leaked by Wikileaks. There is a limit to what information should be open and available to the public.
I also can't help but feel like they've stopped being transparency campaigners and whistleblowers, and now do it for the social media spectacle and publicity. Just look at how they released Vault 7, with their viral cryptic posts before the release. Wikileaks feels more like a media agency than a group of transparency crusaders these days.
> The DNC/Podesta leaks were timed specifically to cause maximum negative effect to Clinton and the Democrats.
What's wrong with this? Assange didn't steal this information, he just published it. That's the freedom of speech.
Also, US wants to prosecute Assange not because of leak of personal information, but rather because of political reasons. Only because he is against the wars that US started in the Middle East.
Exactly as you state (though maybe not intend). Those cheering him on didn't care about the reasons, lack of curation, content choice, etc since they were ok with who was maligned. Once those cheering him disagreed with who was hurt, it starts to "feel" different and concerns about reason, lack of curation, and content choice magically become important.
>Assange and Wikileaks have been demonised because they decided to release information in such a way as to deliberately influence an election
Wikileaks has always been anti-US, when they finally manage to deliver a good punch they’re suddenly a bad actor?
> also can't help but feel like they've stopped being transparency campaigners and whistleblowers, and now do it for the social media spectacle and publicity. Just look at how they released Vault 7, with their viral cryptic posts before the release. Wikileaks feels more like a media agency than a group of transparency crusaders
Publicity brings more leaks. They’re simply doing a good job.
If that's the real reason, then it must also be asked if there was any special influence by Assanage on the timing or if a service created by them was merely used as a conduit.
If the best a state level actor can do to "bring down" a person, they'd most likely manage something more untoward than "had consensual sex with someone, but questionable consent over the use of a condom".
I think that more points to a narcissistic type, than a conspiracy on a state bent on character assassination.=
Why would you be surprised by ineptitude, or willingness to conspire, here, anyways? You should read about the Gulf of Tonkin, Iran Contra, watch the documentary 1971(1), McCarthyism, the FBI's dealings with MLK, or read about Gary Webb. It's not surprising.
The FBI apparently sent agents to other countries trying to frame Assange. Iceland told them to fuck off: www.katoikos.eu/interview/icelandic-minister-who-refused-cooperation-with-the-fbi-ogmundur-jonasson-in-an-interview.html
You would be doing me a grave injustice to think I am an apologist for the US government, in either colored administration (blue or red), to think that I am blind to their misdeeds, such as the "original" 9/11, the day Pinochet was installed.
And well, as someone who grew up in Australia, that article is full of nothings:
- while 'rape' is used repeatedly, no-one, including either the woman involved, nor the prosecutor has ever claimed that rape or non-consensual sex occurred, only that there was a "disagreement about the use of condoms".
- In the statement Mr Assange says he has been subjected to "six years of unlawful, politicised detention without charge" - well, yes. He does say that. Others say he has subjected _himself_ to detention and exile.
- these are all claims of Assange, who hasn't released any of the text messages, just said "he has [some, but not all] of them
So when you say "Many also claim", the more accurate statement is "Assange claims".
No, you're just misinformed, ignorant, or being disingenuous. There is a large community whom claim this, and I even linked you to the PM of Iceland claiming that he has been conspired agaist. His story is very much contested and debated. Many claim one of the rape victims in fact claimed to have been coerced and subsequently recanted(1).
I think his case will be closely studied for years.
And it is how propaganda works. There is no coordination between the 5 or 6 or however many media outlets but it seems as if there is turn almost based on how quickly he went from a martir to Russian puppet in just a year or less.
Same thing kind of happened to Greenwald though to a lesser degree.
You say this like the perception of him is entirely manufactured and divorced from any reality. Assange's image changed abruptly in 2016 because that is the year he went from politically agnostic public interest leaks to actively trying to influence an election and backing a candidate who considers the free press an "enemy of the people". It doesn't take a conspiratorial cabal to explain how Assange ruined his own image.
That some believe pre-2016 leaks were not political shows more about their bias than Wikileaks's motives. That motive matters now and didn't then shows similar bias.
Exactly what bias are you alluding to here? It certainly isn't the usual partisan hackery, as that would imply Democrats would hate pre-2016 wikileaks for damaging their president, and continue hating it post 2016 for helping the other guy. It would also imply Republican's would have liked wikileaks pre and post 2016. Instead what we see is a huge about face on both sides. I'm not being flippant here, I legit do not know what you are talking about.
Its really amazing that you would try to defend free press in a discussion about Assange. Locking up Assange is an attack on free press. Trump calling CNN liars actually isn't. Obama calling Fox liars wouldn't be either.
The consensus is that Greenwald isn't a Russian agent. He's just stupid. His reporting has consistently had large and obvious errors at least since he was writing for Common Dreams.
Shep Smith and the news anchors at CNN at least do a reasonable job of reporting the news correctly (which Greenwald can't), though none of those does strong investigative journalism.
Seriously? The first time most people heard of Greenwald was his PRISM reporting, which was so wrong that when I thought about how many separate errors he had to combine to come up with that one article alone, I was in awe that he was able to sneak that by an editor.
Technically free to leave the embassy, so it's not a false statement. But would definitely be arrested and extradited if he did, so it's not quite a fair statement either.
Who has ever denied that he'd be arrested? To say that he'd definitely be extradited is speculation.
It's still not at all clear that he will be prosecuted by the US, so I can't see anything particularly silly about someone predicting in 2013 -- before the Russian links were widely known -- that Assange would not be prosecuted by the US.
The New American does not appear to be a serious publication. No doubt you can find people on the internet who've said silly things on all kinds of topics.
Yes, but the UN effectively say he's being detained, which I tend to agree with. It's like me standing there with a gun to your head saying if you take one more step, I'll shoot. Technically, you're "free to leave at any time," but that's not really the effective reality.
> February 2016 - A UN panel rules that Mr Assange has been "arbitrarily detained" by UK and Swedish authorities since 2010
I don't quite get what the argument is supposed to be. Possibly that the charges should be dropped because so much time has passed.
Because there is just no logical reason why an accused should have the option of getting all charges dropped because somehow being prosecuted for them violates his rights?
The analogy with shooting someone is obviously different, in that shooting someone tends to be a violation of their rights. Arresting them when they skipped bail is not quite the same as a bullet to the head.
The danish rape charge, which would have probably been resolved with a few months of probation or some mandatory training.
Somehow, Assange managed to turn that prospect into the self-inflicted and unlimited golden cage that is the Ecuadorian Embassy. Guy's a true genius...
If you've been paying attention to #metoo, Kavanaugh and all that, this type of thing is done to discredit. No matter what Assange would do afterwards, every story would start: Assange, who agreed to probation for a rape charge, ...
If a WP headline from 2013 saying "Julian Assange unlikely to face U.S. charges over publishing classified documents" is the limits of that argument, then I think it's fair to say that is much weaker then any claim that "he is practically free to go". In addition, maybe he was free to go in 2013, but a lot has happened since then which may have led to more charges being possible.
I don't see it as primarily an increase of propaganda. A lot of people seem to find their stories credible and worth referencing, so they certainly seem to have found a niche where whatever they are providing is what their audience wants.
If they can capture that audience and reinforce their beliefs, that is I suppose more effective than really trying to change how people think.
There is rarely outright falsehood, but lots of misdirection and omission, and a ton of fluffy echo chamber pieces.
There are some good articles but I personally would not rely upon the paper's content as accurate unless all of the facts and assertions were independently verified elsewhere.
There are many. I should really document my findings in some sort of analysis. I've pointed this out to some friends who have payed closer attention and now agree with me after observing it for the last year or so themselves and comparing articles on the same topic between the WaPo and other sources.
I personally am strongly anti-Trump but also broadly dislike both major parties, so citing a WaPo article that is unfair to Trump sounds to many people like I must be a rabid Trump supporter. But in reality I'm just someone who wants journalism to be journalism and focus on facts and strives to do analysis that would be respected by people on all sides of an issue politically.
The decline in quality and shift to partisan and sloppy reporting is the most dire consequence of the Trump era. It's impacted the big newspapers the most. I think part of it is that they feel responsible for getting him elected, but part of it is that their new way of thinking about their KPIs rewards them for writing anti-Trump clickbait.
So they are at once reinforcing Trump's ability to control the news cycle and make whatever story he wants front page news, while writing coverage in a way that loses the trust and respect of anyone whose goal of reading news is non-partisan or even partisan from the other major party perspective. Sadly this allows Trump and orgs like Fox to be viewed by some as the only form of true news. It's really horrible.
No political party or news org benefits from any common ground or shared truth, they all benefit from loyal fans who pay them a monthly subscription fee for content that is mostly entertainment. This is the Fox News model, but it's now been adopted by the WaPo and NYT in their own way. They still do produce some very solid journalism, but it took the NYT several years to write the story on Trump's inherited wealth (which was excellent) while in the meantime it published a LOT of garbage stories every day that fanned the partisan flames and generated revenue while providing zero journalistic value.
Objective journalism died with the subscription-based business model. Instead of optimizing for long-term reader trust, media has to get maximum eyeballs.
This has always been a problem (TV news was making the shift long before print media) but it's only gotten worse. It became impossible to ignore in 2016, but it was building before that.
I hear that the WSJ is still fairly reliable (if you ignore the opinion columns), and FT as well. But I can't confirm, because I'm part of the problem and I don't pay for news either.
What's so strange is the way that humans want their news to be less true for some emotional reason.
I really love Eliezer Yudkowsky's concept of least convenient possible worlds as a heuristic for evaluating the sorts of truth claims made or implied by politicians (and often echoed by journalists).
We are drawn to belief systems that make hard decisions easy, but what if some of the assumptions we take for granted are less clear cut. So the exercise is to imagine the least convenient world, one in which a key idea or conviction we lean on for other aspects of our belief system is completely incorrect.
In my view we should not expect journalistic work to strengthen existing convictions but to challenge them and add empathy and nuance to our views of the world.
> What's so strange is the way that humans want their news to be less true for some emotional reason.
Likely for the same reason that they don't actually care about the cost-effectiveness (or even statistical effectiveness) of their medical treatments. Their stated goal, learning about what's going on in the world, is not the same as their actual hidden goal.
Hypothesizing here, but a few possible reasons why people might not care that much about finding the truth in the news:
* They are more interested in having the news support their preconceptions about the world -- which are in turn based on whatever benefits them most -- so they can then use the media as "evidence" in persuasion, arguments, and other political conversations
* They believe that having "their" news channels dominate the public sphere will lead others to passively accept their tribe's opinions, which then has benefits for them
* They are eager to reinforce their own beliefs, choices, and biases so they can avoid the painful and expensive process of reassessing their beliefs and reconfiguring their life around those new beliefs
Again, this is all conjecture, but it is moderately supported by the anger that people hold toward news outlets that cater to the opposition.
> In my view we should not expect journalistic work to strengthen existing convictions but to challenge them and add empathy and nuance to our views of the world.
We should, and those of us who think about these things will. But sadly most of us won't. The incentives aren't there, and they likely won't be there until it's too late. Thus the endless cycles of conflict throughout history.
Nonsense. The Washington Post remains one of the best publications in the US. I certainly trust it more than Russian propaganda outlets such as Wikileaks.
The documents were true, the story built around them ("Hillary emails"/"Pizzagate"/"Seth Rich") was false and designed to undermine the Clinton candidacy.
I don't think anyone has ever seriously claimed anything else.
It is interesting that in Russia people who criticise Putin and expose corruption are often called American agents who are paid by US Department of State (Department of State is an incarnation of evil for propaganda) to weaken our country.
That is the stock lie for everybody - and it is a lie even when it is the truth ironically enough - a logical fallacy to be more precise.
The KGB was trying to sponsor the Civil Rights movement to weaken the US. What I mean by it being a lie even when it is true is that the statement implies that the movement is fabricated or unworthy by their support. It is a distraction.
In reality the merit of groups exist completely independent of who sponsors it and even giving money is no guarantee of control. Even if the KGB gave millions to Martin Luther King that wouldn't make fighting segregation the wrong thing to do suddenly any more than accepting Soviet funding of a smallpox vaccination means that eradicating smallpox is suddenly wrong.
It is especially bad since it is used to discredit /the movement/ itself as opposed to any actor being questionable. Martin Luther King cheating on his wife didn't make the civil rights movement wrong.
Without any opinion the merits of this case in particular, which seems like a total mess all around and I haven't been following, on the topic more generally I found "Demystifying International Extradition" [1] last year to be an interesting summary of the process. It introduced me to concepts that don't really tend to come up in local law. Amongst other pertinent aspects is that while the US generally wants to avoid binding its own hands it can do so if another nation demands it when it comes to the penalties it will seek. Lots of countries (I think including England?) will not extradite if the death penalty is on the table, but the US can apparently legally assure that it won't seek it (for capital crimes).
Lot of political considerations and such in high profile cases I guess when it comes to agreements between nation-states. Everyone can be prickly about their prerogatives and who gets justice and what it means for relations and public opinion and so on. Nothing guaranteed about it.
Ironically, the UK doesn't allow extraordinary rendition, and it was a big deal to even let those planes refuel or use UK airspace, but Sweden historically has allowed it.
It was made a big deal in Sweden how ridiculous any fears were that Assange could be extradited from Sweden to the US if he would go to Sweden for hearings.
it's still "ridiculous" insofar as an extradition from Sweden would not just involve Sweden <-> US relations but US <-> UK relations (so two relations instead of just one). This isn't rocket science, there are more moving parts to the "get him from Sweden" from the simpler "Get him from the UK" plan.
Regarding how the debate went in Sweden, it was raised that Assange could be snatched up en route from UK to Sweden. This notion was dismissed even more summarily, like some spy movie fantasy.
(This would not happen unless the UK would be OK with it, of course. The UK, unless they have some exceptional reason, does exactly what the US says. If the law has wiggle room, they'll look the other way. I am sure also something could be arranged so Sweden and the UK could save face for each other in their relationship.
Even if the US black bagged someone, as long as they didn't do it on UK soil, why should the brits just not shrug and say "ah, those naughty Americans, can't keep up with them all the time eh?" wink, wink, nudge nudge)
Edit:
Regarding the charges themselves against Assange - I have no doubt Assange is a bit of a douche. I would not be surprised at all if he violated Swedish law. It's still quite suspicious that even though most similar investigations are closed, even with better evidence, this case was opened anew, by Marianne Ny. Of course the handling of this case was political.
An extradition from Sweden would involve both Sweden and the UK government, which is likely to co-operate. Extraditing him from the UK would involve both the government and the courts, which are a less certain thing. I mean, it's still a bit of a conspiracy theory, but it could've made the US's life easier.
This has come up between the US and Canada. When the US seeks extradition for a capital crime, Canada nearly always asks for assurances that the US will not seek the death penalty.
Insisting on no death penalty is required by all countries that have banned the death penalty on human rights grounds, not just the UK but all of Europe and much of the world.
Mexico is the same way, they won’t extradite if the country is seeking for the death penalty. I wonder if there was a negotiation around that with El Chapo
There was. He is not facing the death penalty. Solitary confinement in a Supermax facility for life is arguably worse though. 23 hours a day alone in a room with no windows for the rest of your life.
Americans (and I sadly speak for all 300mm+ of us) no longer give a flying fuck about illegal wars or mass murder.
There is no peace movement, there won’t be ever again. Citizens will ignore the wars and entertain them selves by rage posting about either the red or blue team
> There is no peace movement, there won’t be ever again.
There's no draft, nobody feels any personal danger so they don't care - the peace movement of the 1960s was a direct result of young white men fearing the draft, deciding that made them an oppressed group, and looking to the recently successful black civil rights battles as inspiration to start marching and occupying places.
Now, they just fear brown people in their neighborhoods, bombings by people who dress funny and write in squiggles, and international pedophile rings - things that, if anything, threaten them even less than wars they will never see. Some of them fear that wars and mass imprisonment will end, because they're employed in the industries that supply those things.
People don't want wars, but they feel powerless to change things. And these feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness are perpetuated among society and create a self-defeating attitude.
our leaders have gotten smart and now make sure the general public doesn’t directly feel the pain of war. bush 43 told folks to go shopping. wars are fought in the abstract for most americans.
I care a lot about the genocide and illegal wars :( I've written online under my real name and fake names, I've done deep original research, some of it gets fairly decent traction.
I think we all actually are legitimately powerless to stop the war machine and the majority of Americans who actually support it... so the rest of us are lost to apathy.
Hey, if Assange/Snowden had ever believed they were powerless, we wouldn't be talking about them. Same goes for countless other figures throughout history.
It's up to us who believe something else to convince more people and achieve critical mass, which will make the difference.
As I understand, Assange is not an US citizen. How can they prosecute him?
Wikipedia page [1] says:
> Opinions of Assange at this time [2010] were divided. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described his activities as "illegal," but the police said that he had broken no Australian law. United States Vice President Joe Biden and others called him a "terrorist". Some called for his assassination or execution.
That's ridiculous. American soldiers killing civilians are "good guys", and Assange is a terrorist?
There are more egregious cases. Kim Dotcom has never been to the US, yet is somehow facing extradition to the US. None of these cases are about justice, it's more like bullying.
Although El chapo is a criminal, it should not be up to the US to judge him. The drug trade is an american problem, it doesn't really matter if people from other countries are smuggling in drugs.
Also, El chapo might have operatives inside the US.
It should be whatever country El Chapo is building his drug trade in, who should take care of him. And if the country is corrupt, the US cannot be everywhere to help everybody.
Agreed. Law enforcement cooperating across borders is fine, but extradition is a whole new level.
Of course, it isn't completely black and white. If it's alleged you killed someone in one country, and then flee across the border, should you be extradited? Given enough evidence, yes, that sounds just.
So how about if somebody mails a bomb to an address in another country, is it just to extradite them? It's hopefully illegal in most countries, so why not try them in the country in which they were when they committed the crime, in this case building the bomb?
Cyber-crime also seems clear cut, but there's equally grey scenarios, like hacking utilities to cause harm. But for copyright infringement it's hard to see how it's just, even it it was on a commercial level.
Citizenship isn't usually relevant to prosecution, unless it's for something like treason. The US prosecutes foreigners for hacking crimes committed outside of the country as well.
This is bad. Because other countries might take the same approach. What if China, Iran or Russia will start prosecuting US citizens for posts on the Internet that are against their laws? Like critisizing Communist Party? I don't see the difference between US prosecuting Assange and China prosecuting those who, being infinitely malignant, publish illegal, misleading information about Communist Party or Tiananmen square events thus bringing the authority and good name of the Government into contempt.
> Because other countries might take the same approach
They do.
> What if China, Iran or Russia will start prosecuting US citizens for posts on the Internet that are against their laws?
They...do. Well, not necessarily posts on the internet specifically, but...
And, in some cases, not just the “appear before a court with counsel to answer charges with some simulation of due process” way of addressing crimes against their laws. Consider, e.g., the fatwa against the author, editors, and publishers of The Satanic Verses, whose targets were neither Iranian citizens nor operating in Iran.
That's my understanding too. But USA authorities have a history of trying to expand their reach as much as possible and there are several interpretations that they could resort to.
As an example, they could say that Assange was an accomplice of Manning, that was convicted of a crime commited in the USA.
Remember when Evo Morales' plane was stopped and searched in Spain (sigh) to catch Snowden? And that's a head of state violation! Or the CIA flights, etc. You can complain as much as you want but that's a fait accompli situation.
Maybe it was downvoted in error, sometimes it happens and it's better not to think too much about it.
Sometimes the problem is that the downvoter thinks that I'm implying something that didn't cross my mind. Most times I prefer to keep the downvote better than explaining everything to the boredom point :)
By doing this the US is coming to the aid of the many dictators and despots whose crimes Assange has helped reveal.
Also, by ignoring the crimes revealed by the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, the US makes it very clear that war-making cronies rule both parties and would never hold each other accountable for anything.
To be clear, the war logs revealed that the US classified information solely because it revealed that the official narrative about why we were involved in those wars was false. Regardless of what one thinks about Assange, it's pretty hard to argue that the crimes revealed by the war logs aren't highly worrisome.
Regardless of how one feels about Assange, it's hard to deny that WL was the most successful attempt by any journalist to unmask the widespread US war crimes that we've seen in many decades.
My statement above may be too strong... so be it, but surely a court should have been able to decide the fate of the propagandists who misused their power to classify information from the American people. Instead the war criminals just attacked Assange and everyone else including most journalists do as they are asked and turned on a fellow journalist who was willing to sacrifice his freedom for the cause of truth.
While some of the things that were exposed were certainly illegal and should be handled as such, it's hard to feel any empathy for a guy who is essentially a Russian asset. If you think of him as an extension of Russian military intelligence conducting propaganda wars against its adversaries then it becomes a lot easier to understand why prosecuting him is a genuinely good thing. Russia airing the dirty laundry of others is good for Russia. Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not defending the dirty laundry I'm just saying that the intent behind the messenger in this situation is not at all altruistic.
It might be accurate to model his operations in two phases. The first, when he was exposing secrets on his own. The second, when (it seems) Russia used him as a deniable way to launder secrets they had stolen into the American press. Exactly when one phase begins and the other ends, whether he knew it was happening at the time, and whether he committed any crimes against the United States during the second phase is murky. Maybe he really should be in trouble for things he did in his second phase; his first phase doesn't mean he didn't commit several crimes later.
(this same argument works for Snowden. There are some who argue- without much evidence- that he was always a Russian asset, because he ended up there; but his eventual landing in Russia doesn't retroactively prove he was a Russian agent all along)
I agree with you somewhat. It seems that he initially wanted to buck the system and expose secrets for the purpose of exposing secrets and anarchy. It's possible this was a fantastic cover and he's always worked at someone's behest. Agreed completely with your 2nd phase.
I don't think it works for Snowden. I actually believe he was ardently an American patriot who wanted to expose what he thought were illegalities and essentially corruption but didn't think he's survive or get a fair trial here (both of which are unfortunately very possible). I don't think he ended up in Russia at his choosing. I believe he had an original destination in mind (correct me if I'm wrong) but wasn't able to get there before his visa/passport was revoked? Something like that.
He absolutely didn't end up in Russia of his own choosing. He planned to stay in Hong Kong, and he leaked a list of hacked Chinese targets in an attempt to gain the PRC's favor, but they kicked him out as soon as he had nothing more of interest, just as you would expect.
Yup, I'm agreeing with you there- I don't think Snowden ever intended to end up exiled in Russia. He might be beholden to the Russians now- for his physical safety- he's very likely more blameless in that than Assange might be, I haven't seen actual evidence that he wanted to end up in Russia.
Whereas Assange might have (depending on the facts) happily taken help from the Russian state in the name of sowing chaos. Assange has no particular ties to the US, and might have found a way to square it with whatever his morals are. Or he found an encrypted archive in his email and he just published it, provenance unknown.
Let's recall the time that Wikileaks promoted unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the Panama Papers which contained loads of damaging information about Putin (along with plenty of well-known westerners), in a blatant attempt to redirect the spotlight off of Russian corruption. The official Wikileaks twitter account essentially providing the outline for a propaganda piece on RT within hours.
>Russia used him as a deniable way to launder secrets they had stolen into the American press.
I have never seen proof of this accusation? Can you link me to it? Not the accusation, but proof?
What is it: was he "used" like you said, or mislead, or intentionally aiding Russia?
To be fair the DWS scandal is a real problem, a big deal, and a threat to our democracy... and nobody was seriously punished for that. DWS is hardly the pariah that Assange is. And this happened during your second phase.
The entire Guccifer narrative is the most speculative and least substantiated aspect of the entire drama. That doesn't mean it's false, however.
But one might wonder why anyone cares about it or gives it any consideration, when there are so many far stronger data points.
The Guccifer narrative supports (weakly) the idea of a link between Russia and the emails.
So in order for this to matter you have to believe that Russia matters when considering WL.
And in order to believe that you must believe that WL's journalism does not stand on its own and that the motives of those who leaked information are what matter.
But WL is designed to be immune to the ill effects of specific political motives for releasing data. I'll point out some of the many ways:
- WL tries to verify that it is being given authentic documents. Revelations that documents WL publishes were inauthentic would sink WL nearly instantly. So authenticity absolutely must be the #1 consideration.
- For any leak there is an entity whose data was leaked. If a leaker doctored information before sending it to WL, the leaker could easily be discredited by a public release by the entity of an authentic version, revealing what had been doctored, which would reveal motives.
- WL insists upon full, unredacted documents. Most of the leaked information has been mostly irrelevant. You could spend days reading WL releases without encountering anything juicy. Why? Because the full documents provide evidence that no aspect of the document has been withheld to create a false impression. This results in a lot of boring stuff -- most of the HRC emails were bulk mail sent to the addresses in question -- but lets the legitimately interesting data stand in proper relief without suspicion.
- When possible, WL goes to great lengths to validate/authenticate data. WL created a tool to allow site visitors to easily validate the DKIM/DomainKeys signatures validating that the emails were unmodified. If salacious or newsworthy information had come from an email that failed DKIM/DomainKeys verification, WL's approach would make that obvious even to those who do not understand how content signatures work.
- WL can be weaponized by anyone against anyone. There was a US Army report identifying this characteristic early on. Falsifying the identity of leakers would of course be a valuable tactic to use when weaponizing. WL is useful because of the aforementioned characteristics and in spite of being able to be weaponized in this way. It's not novel that a government could submit intel obtained by its intelligence agency to WL to cause a political consequence in another nation. Of course this could happen. It can even be done by domestic parties like Chelsea Manning. It's a question of whether the information leaked is beneficial by providing important transparency or revealing outright fraud/crimes.
I have to wonder when people oppose Assange due to indignation about Russia or Manning if the underlying reason is actually that they don't view the war logs or the emails to have been useful investigative journalism.
> The Guccifer narrative supports (weakly) the idea of a link between Russia and the emails.
Gufficer is literally a person or group of persons in Russian GRU (military intelligence). It's about as direct a link as you can get and the American government came out and said this.
in order to believe that you must believe that WL's journalism does not stand on its own
That doesn't really follow.
Wikileaks has a very strong agenda. If you read Assange's book "When Google met WikiLeaks"[1] it's pretty clear what it is.
It's possible to believe that the leaks are real docs, but that Wikileaks timed their release to maximize their effect on the US election, and that matters a lot.
I have to wonder when people oppose Assange due to indignation about Russia or Manning if the underlying reason is actually that they don't view the war logs or the emails to have been useful investigative journalism.
I think much of the war logs was dangerously unreadacted, but broadly was good. I think Assange was very happy to release emails because it both suited his philosophy ("no secrets") and his agenda. I also believe Assange was corrupted by the idea that he would be able to escape his cage in the embassy through some combination of helping Trump and Russian support.
(To preempt: I'm not complaining, I have lots of imaginary HN points)
The voting on this is amazing. It's gone from +3 to -2 to 0 and back up and down a few times in just a couple of hours.
It'd be really, really interesting to see the patterns of what else voters are voting for.
I don't think this comment is particularly controversial (it's a direct response, doesn't attempt to interprete the evidence, made it clear the evdidence depends on your starting point etc etc). Notably the only reply at this point at least partially agrees with this post (I think?)
I guess being part of a controversial topic leads to spill-over in voting. I suspect it's particularly pronounced in this case, because Assange's actions have made him vilified by different sides of politics at different times, and so there is always something to hate on?
I find it really fascinating, and I'd love to be able to dig into the data to see what exactly is going on.
Supporting Assange or expressing skepticism about the Russia narrative on HN is a good way to get shadow banned, but it depends a lot in which mod gets involved.
Ah ok. Well, I'm sure I won't be bothered doing that. (And to write fake comments I don't believe in doesn't seem....ethical somehow.) Also, I suspect your "Supporting Assange" and "expressing skepticism about the Russia narrative" are massive euphemisms. Maybe you could give links to the comments you're referring to?
I don't recommend wasting the time to do it. I have already done the experiment twice and the way it works is that some topics/stories on HN are under careful scrutiny for unwanted ideas.
I'm not talking about prejudice or other backward ideas, but simply ideas that challenge the dominant world view that I'd describe as Silicon Valley Establishment Democratic Party Loyalist.
There was a point during the 2016 campaign when Sam and others involved in YC decided to become openly and unabashedly partisan. Notably, not in an idea driven way but in a way that is power oriented.
This emboldened those with partisan aims in the HN discussion to reach out to mods to help them rid the community of people critical of the establishment Democratic Party and its sacred cows.
Ok thanks for responding. Do you have evidence for what you said? Like links to comments or....well, I don't know what. I suppose there isn't any proof, or you would've mentioned it by now.
I don't want to link to the comments because the comments themselves aren't the evidence. After participating in a few threads where I politely argued some ideas that were unwanted, my account was shadow banned. I didn't realize it for a while actually.
Discovering that the mods read my comments and somehow thought the account needed to be banned was pretty insulting to me. I really appreciate HN and the broader YC community and so being singled out that way for making polite and respectful arguments was (I think) really rude and inappropriate on the part of the mods.
When I emailed the mods to discuss, the excuse was that there was a "flame war". In my opinion, respectful discussion is productive even if both parties talk past each other a bit for a while until something closer to a consensus is achieved.
We are at an important time in the history of the US and I think it is profoundly irresponsible of the HN mods to try to ban any sort of political discussion from HN.
Over the years I've learned a great deal from HN, most of it technical but occasionally have gotten some valuable political insights as well. Also, occasionally reading a political interpretation from someone whose technical views I respect can be really mind expanding.
Even if one accepts the premise (that there was active collusion inside the DNC that cost Sanders the election, binding popular primary elections have only been a thing since 1972. It’s quite a stretch to call the supposed failure of that system a threat to democracy.
Would it follow that in countries that didn't have elections at all in 1972, the corruption of their current elections could hardly be a threat to democracy?
There's literal proof throughout this post. In fact, I posted some too.
There are definitely levels of threats to American democracy. If DWS refers to Wasserman-Schultz then it pales in comparison to an enemy foreign state's military intelligence corrupting the American government.
See you keep saying you can convince me, but still wont show me the proot that will.
Do you really believe the Iraq Warlogs revealing death, torture, war crimes, and lying is somehow worse than literally subverting American democracy in a presidential primary?
Now, I don't want to defend Assange's every single motive, but the DWS scandal was pure corruption, while for whatever bad Assange has done that you keep promising to show me, he has clearly shown bravery in doing some good along the way.
And by the way, revealing war crimes is not anti-American. Liberty and justice are American principles. There will always be corruption and always a need to reveal it.
> Do you really believe the Iraq Warlogs revealing death, torture, war crimes, and lying is somehow worse than literally subverting American democracy in a presidential primary?
It's interesting... you're asking me if I really believe something that I didn't ever say and implying I did. I actually compared the Wasserman-Schultz situation (which I think is incredibly overblown) to a sovereign foreign government's military intelligence corrupting the American government. And yes, when comparing those two things, the latter is far more worse.
The only comments you're leaving on my comments are calling me out and attacking me... I've cited multiple things in this post and each time they seem to be ignored or blown off.
By "DWS scandal" do you mean the Debbie Wasserman Schultz issues[1]? I've read about that reasonable extensively, and they don't seem a huge deal to me at all. I mean it's good she resigned, but to me it looks more like a "perception of bias is as bad as bias itself" thing.
She probably did some things that benefited Clinton in the primary, but these don't seem that big a deal in the scheme of things.
The Wikipedia link I posted seems a reasonable summary. Which of them exactly is this big threat to democracy? For example, I thought the "removal of Sanders access to database" was a big deal until it became apparent that Sanders staffers had accessed private Clinton campaign information and it was restored in less than 24 hours[2].
I see that the western obsession with Russia continues unabated.
This issue has absolutely nothing to do with Russia, and the suggestion that Assange is a Russian asset is unsubstantiated (just like all the other "Russia did it" claims). [1] [2].
Russians are nowadays even blamed for MP's speeding tickets [3]
Russia airing the dirty laundry through a side channel is MUCH more benevolent than the other things (like blackmailing our world leaders) they could do with this.
I don't think all of Wikileaks' revelations are from Russia, but even if they all are - and Russia had selfish motivations - it was a benevolent act toward the world. Truth is power, and revealing the truth to the powerless is never an evil act.
Exactly. As I put it in another comment, if someone leaked information that led to Jerry Sandusky being stopped several years sooner, would it matter if the leaker was affiliated with a rival football program?
Because of how WL releases full, minimally redacted documents, there is really no reason to worry about the details. Failures of journalistic integrity happen because of strategic omissions or intentional misdirection. WL essentially can't do that because it releases the source material in essentially raw form.
DKIM DomainKey Identified Mail, obviously diplomatic communications must prevent spoofing (!), so those mails are signed anyway, ensuring provenance of the emails
Thanks for the link. Aside from provenance, can it be proven that the contents of the leaked emails is valid and untampered with? Like one would use hashes for file verification.
I have to admit I have no clue as to what is the format of "leaked emails".
Yes, DKIM/DomainKeys is a hash of the content and some of the message headers of an email, which is added as an additional header.
A public key for the domain name owner is used to verify the hash was generated (and thus the email sent) by the owner of the domain.
Email systems can thus quickly/easily check the validity of the hash when receiving inbound messages and flag or discard messages which lack the header or which fail the test.
signatures are evaluated over the hash of the contents protecting integrity, the associated public key proves the provenance...
I do remember some of the diplomatic mails being scrubbed of identifying information of individuals (say names). This would have a low entropy, so it would seem easy to download the archives from WL, take an email with a singlle censored name, then bruteforce over alphabetic characters, and verify the hash signature. Unless WL has taken the precaution to censor at least x unpredictable bits (i.e. a single character in a name or word does NOT equate to 8 bits) where x is an infeasible bruteforce depth, in theory it should be possible to recover redactions by WL.
Edit: I may be conflating the scrubbing of names with the Snowden leaks, but I believe WL has also scrubbed some individual's nammes...
The question is whether WL has passively (or worse, actively) allowed its position as a conduit of information to be leveraged by malevolent actors to shape (or distort) the truth?
Obviously leaks that reveal actual wrongdoing are an unalloyed good. When the leaks that merely provide voyeuristic windows into the routine business of institutions (e.g. the diplomatic cables), the social value of the visibility becomes less clear. When leaks of that sort dominate, and consistently target American and western interests we have to question the motives and the integrity of the conduit.
Truth is power, yes, but is that power being granted to you, or used over you?
Some may believe it is in the public interest to hide US aggression to protect ourselves from repercussions. I think it is necessary to expose US aggression to public light to minimize its use altogether. If you can't justify an action to the public, perhaps you should not be spending taxpayer dollars to do it clandestinely.
Selectively publishing primary source documents definitely _can_ be a distortion of truth. To take the most salient example: It seems reasonable that the internal sausage-making most political parties is similar - there are power dynamics, personal (and possibly institutional) preferences, etc. If WL were to receive leaks internal communication from two opposing parties, and only publish one while allowing the opposing side to maintain it's facade, that would clearly be a distortion of truth, right?
I'm not insinuating that WL was actually presented with that decision in 2016, but it seems clear their acknowledged selectivity in publication is capable of distorting the true state of affairs.
If both parties are withholding the truth from the public, revealing accurate documents is removing the distortion of truth (at least for one party).
If WL had information about another party and chose not to release, it's not a distortion: the distortion already existed. But it would arguably be unethical to not act to end the distortion, if WL was capable of doing so.
If by American and Western interests, you mean the values western society is built on, the answer should be pretty simple: national security is no excuse for secret courts, secret prosecutions and secret rulings. It's also to be expected that this society is going to provide more opportunities for leaks in the first place, as opposed to more totalitarian societies. Not that there isn't sufficient grounds for arguing that distinction has already blurred for the most relevant purposes.
It's also to be expected that WL's every move is scrutinized. But anti-WL action went much, much further, including a complete financial boycott from above. That was years before any allegations of Russian meddling ever entered the picture. The US has openly targeted them for years, but if they hold any grudge about this in return in the form of not pulling punches and maximizing publication impact, it is supposed to reflect badly on them? That seems more than a little unbalanced.
The skepticism only goes one way. WL has a perfect track record in accuracy. Their own story however is regularly misrepresented and misstated. Plus, never forget that it was a Guardian journalist who was dumb enough to leak the crucial password to the full diplomatic archive, in the same book where they admitted to being too dumb to Google how to open a 7zip file. Such their missteps from the traditional press are casually excused in a game of closing ranks that reminds one more of cops than renegades. So much for the enlightened and free press: they needed a bunch of crypto nerds to show them how it is done, after the tech industry stole their collective lunches, and they handed over control of their platforms and income to hordes of shady surveillance capitalists.
The traditional press' warmongering and American mythologizing is also a naked fact. So much that they even held off on the Trump bashing for a while, when he was banging that drum, calling it "presidential".
So who is really using power over whom? Who is using truth for whuch cause, and who is publishing self serving fluff pieces instead? Why should we worry about WL, when the American fish is clearly rotting from the head down, and those who are supposed to stop that are incapable of doing so?
Wikileaks is the most effective journalistic organization on the planet and the political entertainment 'news' shows hate them for being so much smaller yet so much more effective.
I fully expect you to publically release all your emails. Even if you don’t do anything illegally. Truth is power, after all even if nothing illegal was done.
If I ever am employed in a position where my salary is funded by taxpayer money, I will do whatever I can to make all of my correspondence and documents public ASAP.
I don't think it's true that truth is always power and that revealing truth is always benevolent. You can skew people's opinions quite severely by selectively telling them things, especially when they are true, and particularly when done anonymously. You do not have to lie to be dishonest.
There is a difference between individuals and governments. Public servants like politicians choose to enter the public space willingly, and must be held accountable and responsible. The only safe way for a government to hold power is via transparancy and auditability. Of course those to whom we relinquish the power of life and death should be held to a different standard of lower privacy. Having the government secretly spying on private citizens is such a disgusting and dangerous reversal of how it should be, and your comparison is completely off base.
I agree with politicians choosing to enter the public space and that they should be held accountable.
Spying on private citizens is wrong but has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make, which is - despite the fact govt should be held accountable, that does not mean they aren't entitled to private communication.
The public doesn't need to know every letter they wrote during their political career and their communications certainly don't have to be accessible by anyone wholesale, which is in fact exactly what WL is trying to achieve. Lower privacy != no privacy.
WL completely ignores the concepts of confidentiality, security clearances, NDAs at all levels of government, from your standard office clerk all the way up to the president and everything in between. There's no way that can be justified.
If they found that I was involved in a scandal, and gave that information to the New York Times, and they fact checked and published it, would be ridiculous for me to try go after NYT.
My own opinion on this is going to vary a lot depending on what the papers say when unsealed.
If the US is explicitly going after him for his role in disseminating classified information provided to him by whistle-blowers, I'll be disappointed, a little outraged, and unfortunately not completely surprised, since the US has jailed journalists before.
If the US is claiming he is a foreign agent acting against the US, and is willing and able to prove that in a court of law, without any reference to his role as a journalist accepting information from US whistle-blowers, I'll be pleased, a little surprised, and a bit suspicious that it's really about the whistle-blowing.
But this argument is defending the dirty laundry with an ad hominem attack. The fact being that he will no longer be able to air any government's dirty laundry from the prison and this kind of argument says it's for the better.
Huh? I said I wasn't defending the dirty laundry and that there's definitely some illegal stuff in there that should be prosecuted.
The fact that he won't be able to air any government's dirty laundry is for the better. I can guarantee Russia will continue to air other country's dirty laundry with impunity in the future, with or without Assange.
So, you think there should be punishment for airing other countries dirty laundry? Should e.g. the US punish the turks for airing the Saudi's dirty business? I think that s not a defensible position
In a world spies I could easily believe an asset would publish either minor/mostly harmless but still secret info and/or info of a party within their country or for rival factions within their country.
I just wouldn't even speculate on that unless there was a compelling reason to make such an assumption and also a way of confirming the theory.
Why would you believe that he was a Russian asset? Is there any indication that he would not publish information critical of Putin if it was sent to him?
Even if he is partial to putin, his work benefits the world by pushing others to do the same. I 'd rather live in a world where governments compete to expose each other's secret than one in which they conspire to hide as many as possible from their people. That's medieval
Medieval? It's what every country has been doing forever. Every spy agency on earth does this and has done this since their inception. It's practically their MO.
> Every spy agency on earth does this and has done this since their inception.
They don't expose the information. They keep it and use it for themselves.
Even if Assange is a Russian agent, I'd rather have him exposing things that go on than not. If he refuses to publish dirt on Russia, the leaker can go to someone else.
By making an example of him, you're just giving governments of the world more control. I can't see how you can defend this position.
The world is not always a zero sum game, it progresses approximately monotonically forward at the edges, ever so slightly but significantly. Believing that no change ever happens is a medieval worldview.
That's not quite an example - it's an unnamed source, and Assage defends himself by saying that it was unverifiable (which we can neither confirm nor deny).
There are multiple posters doing this throughout this post. Finding some way to discredit any evidence after they've asked for evidence and then were presented with it.
Wikileaks has stated explicitly they are not focused on Russia, mostly due to a poorer understanding of the language and culture:
> Most of WikiLeaks’ biggest revelations concern the US military-industrial complex….Why aren’t human rights abuses producing the same effects in regimes like China or Russia, and what can be done to democratise information in those countries?
> In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum…..In Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian….WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organisation with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and president Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources….The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English.
It is clear that Assange is both libertarian and anti-globalist. His attitude towards 2016 elections is predictable and consistent with his world view.
I don’t think we can infer anything about Assange’s political views from the 2016 election. He strongly opposed both candidates but running Wikileaks in a principled way is obviously more important to him than who wins an election in the US.
In which way? Libertarians aren't necessarily globalists. They are just indifferent towards the concept. But if the globalists weave in too much influence, it would definitely been seen from an libertrain's perspective, a threat to their liberty.
I don't think there are many self-claimed libertarians actually voice for open-borders. It is just an extension of interpretation out of the theorists. Limited government doesn't mean a complete denial of necessary national governance. It can be easily argued that void of such governance isn't in the interests of those libertarian ideals.
Not all libertarians are the same. I tend towards libertarianism, but also believe in enforced borders and legal entry. Likewise I believe free trade means everyone plays on equal terms. If, say China, is going to impose a 30% tariff on US goods, I think a reciprocal tariff is warranted. Libertarianism is not outright anarchy, it is about limited government.
This is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Obviously a platform like Wikileaks can be "weaponized" by any party against another party.
I think it's a question of what is the most relevant aspect of the leak overall, not who leaked it or why. For instance, suppose someone had leaked detailed information about the misconduct of Jerry Sandusky several years before it became widely known. Would it matter if the leaker had been affiliated with a rival football program?
What I think is so ingenious about Wikileaks is that by releasing the full documents and data sets, it is very easy to take the leaked information simply at face value without worrying about what may have been selectively leaked and why.
In the case of the HRC emails, there were a few concerning themes regarding campaign finance and the Foundation, but those items could easily have been diffused if HRC had owned up to it and offered to have various experts dig deeper into the financials to show that nothing unusual was going on. For some reason the campaign chose a strategy of claiming the emails were fake, which was soon revealed as a lie by the DKIM/DomainKeys signatures on the emails themselves.
So unfortunately in the case of the HRC emails, the campaign chose a bad strategy and then got caught in a lie, all of which was much more consequential than the few bits of information that were potentially worthy of a deeper dive.
Also, one has to believe that WL would not have published damning information about Trump if it had been available. There is no evidence to support that claim either.
My take all along has been that all that is required for WL to be a force of good is for there to be no selective releasing or editorially driven redaction, and for there to be no evidence that WL sat on important information to suppress it. Neither of these have been the case.
WL did maximize the PR value of the HRC/Podesta emails, but I view that as being (especially in hindsight) more of a fundraising/bootstrapping decision than an editorial one. There wasn't anything "smoking gun"-like in the latter emails, they were all apparently released at random to much fanfare.
So anyway, I think the point is in the laundry itself, and that intent matters much less than it would with more narrowly focused leaks, such as those that traditional journalists typically use/abuse.
Do we know that Wikileaks has always released full documents and data sets, or do we just take their website at face value that he's truly never been selective on what to publish?
Anyone who wishes to discredit Wikileaks has a strong incentive to release documents which could cast doubt on the authenticity of a Wikileaks release, and in turn the organization as a whole.
Many people wish to discredit Wikileaks.
So far no one has provided evidence that Wikileaks has ever doctored, edited or manufactured anything in their releases.
I think that indicates something, but it's certainly not conclusive.
Unfortunately, most public debate about intelligence organizations must be rooted in speculation, as we don't have reliable information about their activities.
I think he is too dumb to realize he was used as a Russian asset. The attention whoring he is known for blinded him.
While dumb, I don't think he has specifically kept secrets about Trump. His actions show a definite agenda. Act two, he just doesn't realize that it is someone else's agenda.
If the New York Times gets an anonymous tip from a Russian spy (which is fact checked and found to be true), would you consider the New York Times as a Russian asset?
Where is the line? When is transmitting factual information to the public journalism and when is it not?
If they then release it without reporting on context, taking the Russian source's politically-motivated narrative at face value? Absolutely. Same as if they're acting as a politician's assets if they do likewise with an anonymous political source, only with the added twist of international politics.
I don't think this holds up. Who leaks information to a journalist and doesn't have some kind of motive for doing so?
Wikileaks actually changes the game on malicious leaks because it won't publish the typical "a high ranking source who wishes not to be named claims that ___" rubbish. Instead, it forces the source to provide the full context of the leak in the form of complete documents.
Think about how much mischief a high ranking official could cause by leaking selective or misleading tidbits to reporters... FWIW it happens all the time for obviously political reasons.
For typical journalists, the relationship with those high ranking sources is a major form of career capital, and so the journalist must accept whatever tidbits are offered, and is incentivized to present them as requested by the source.
In the normal press, leaks are used as propaganda by government officials all the time and journalists play along happily, not caring that they are often spreading propaganda in the form of off the record comments.
WL operates at an entirely different level and demands that sources not engage in mischief and supply the source material in its entirety so that the material can be judged on its own merits.
Leakers always have motivations. That's why reporters need to not take their leaks at face value, and do reporting to expand on the information they receive.
How can presenting a subjective and potentially-biased interpretation of a primary source be better journalism than presenting the primary source itself?
Because the primary sources are often (as in the case of deliberate leaks that we're talking about here) subjective and definitely/intentionally biased. The journalist's job is to provide context and interpretation that are as objective as possible, even though absolute objectivity is impossible.
I don't understand how a primary source can be biased. It is factual evidence in and of itself. Wikileaks' leaks have little to no editorialization (Usually there is a 'summary' in front of the db).
Have you read the content of wikileaks' leaks? Their twitter account is a partisan mess, but their actual leaks are some of the most solid journalism of our era.
In his case it may have started out that way, but eventually devolved after he wasn't getting the attention anymore. He became irrelevant but still wanted the same fame. He might have shined some light on things, then he became a douchebag because of that fame. But honestly he probably was always a douchebag.
Has literally any evidence of this been presented other than the extremely specious "a Russian station picked up distribution rights to his show after he had made the episodes"?
The indictment referenced in your first link literally doesn't mention WikiLeaks or Assange. It's pure speculation.
Pompeo is a liar, and Clapper was to. Check out all of Clapper's statements he'd make before being nearly immediately contradicted during the whole Snowden thing. After paying attention to statements from national security heads for decades, they are just straight up lying an alarming amount of the time.
Again, what actual evidence? You literally just posted purely speculative link that wasn't backed up at all by the document it purports to be it's source.
And do I need to track down the lies CIA directors have told congress for you, or Pompeo specifically?
But it's much more unlikely that he'd be an actual Russian intelligence employee since they're usually Russian I think.
The more simple answer is that he's just being run by them through money, blackmail, extortion, or some other leverage. Why employ someone when you can just get them to do what you want with simple threats?
I’m sorry, but this sounds really crazy. Why would Russian intelligence need to “run” Assange through some kind of leverage? What exactly makes you think this?
His hatred towards the US goes back a very long time and has certainly only grown stronger given how he’s been treated.
Oh, please. Let this ridiculous conspiracy theory die already. There is absolutely no evidence that Seth Rich was anything more than a mid-level DNC employee who was the tragic victim of a robbery gone wrong.
Whataboutism is when an argument is presented with a counterargument of hypocrisy, ie literally what the person replying to me was doing. The argument was "the US leaders are protecting themselves by extraditing Assange, who uncovered their crimes", and the reply was "but Assange is a Russian asset, so he's not so great either". Asset or not, the crimes were still committed, and the people who committed them are still guilty.
No, that's not at all what that person was doing. They acknowledged the war crimes and then also said he's a criminal that should be dealt with. It would've been whataboutism if he had said that the war crimes don't matter because of XYZ.
> The argument was "the US leaders are protecting themselves by extraditing Assange, who uncovered their crimes"
No...they are not protecting themselves. Their crimes have already been exposed. They are prosecuting someone for something that was criminal.
> who uncovered their crimes", and the reply was "but Assange is a Russian asset, so he's not so great either". Asset or not, the crimes were still committed, and the people who committed them are still guilty.
Ok, and how does that bear on the issue of Assange's extradition? Your response was the whataboutism that Assange shouldn't be extradited because the US committed war crimes.
Pardon my ignorance, but just so I understand, when you said “Does that excuse the war crimes that were committed?” Which war crimes were you referring to?
If I understand the thread correctly, you also seem to be committing textbook gaslighting[0]. If I am misinterpreting the thread, please correct me.
Jeez, what's with the Wikipedia links all the time? People drive by, throw a term around, and leave. How am I committing gaslighting? Am I rearranging the furniture in your house while you're away or something?
I should not have said that second part. To break it down, can you please explain to me which war crimes you are referring to, and how they are related to the beginning of this thread?
Please review carefully the chain of comments, because it seems there could be some misunderstanding there: consumer451 was answering to darawk, not to you. Maybe instead of "to textbook whataboutism" was meant to be "with textbook whataboutism"?
Otherwise this thread is total nonsense to me. No surprise either...
This is a fair and logical argument. However, in this context, I would still like to know the what the grand parent was referring to when they mentioned “war crimes.”
Btw, personal opinion: I am completely biased against Assange given his lack of openess against everyone but the Democratic Party. I used to think he was one of my heroes, now I think that he is just someone trying to save his own skin. His actions and reading his AMA’s on Reddit really changed my opinion regarding the idea that he might be an unbiased arbiter of truth. Assange is no Snowden.
I believe the hero-worship of such persons is not useful. But they have changed the landscape and raised the bar for transparency from governments worldwide, which is undeniably a good thing.
How is being a Russian asset a crime? Even if he released only documents provided by the Russians and ignored other ones (which is debatable), how is that bad as long as said documents are not forged?
Has nothing to do with whether he’s American. An Australian living in, I don’t know, the UK or Sweden, but on the payroll of the government of Russia, has to declare that fact to the government of the country in which he resides. Otherwise he can be considered a spy. And no, “being on the payroll” is not limited to being an official employee of or even receiving payment from Russia. Depends on the laws of the host country but in most places it implies simply “working at the direction of” or “receiving compensation from”, including non-monetary compensation. Like, say, hacked emails that you can use to promote your organization.
Look, I am a US civil servant. When I travel internationally I have to use a special passport. It’s maroon instead of the usual blue, and it has a stamp in it that states that I am a representative of the US government and am on official business.
And this is exactly why. When I present it at a border crossing, that is an official legal declaration to the country I am visiting that I am a declared agent of a foreign government. If I attemp merely to enter the country using my personal passport I am committing an arrestable offence.
Which is why Trump should want to keep him far away from American soil. Only Assange knows all about the Russian email hacks which could be bad for Trump.
People will upvote this comment and complain about the system being broken then turn around and ridicule anyone who votes third party or claims large media companies are corrupt.
The only way towards a better elections system without violent overthrow/succession is voting in representatives who don't align with the current two-party system.
whatever happened to don't shoot the messenger anyway? I could understand if stuff was faked for political purposes but as far as I know everything wikileaks has ever put out is verified as true. It amazes me how people would rather live in ignorance, or have been brainwashed to want to live like that
I hope and pray that some smart lawyers come to his defense in both in England, Ecuador, and the USA. I hope that "we" are collectively smart enough to support him (and Snowden). He is probably not a Russian agent... all of that talk is a distraction (especially with Mueller).. if Russia left him out to dry then they would seriously curtail their intelligence operations... after all memes and fake news are far more effective.
If he is a Russian agent, the Prisoners Dilemma applies: Will Trump pardon or will Russia declare? Russia has more to lose here. Maybe there is a way out for Russia and the US but I doubt it. This is actually an interesting case.. a 3 party prisoners dilemma.. any ideas?
One of my biggest regrets is not supporting Aaron.. at the time it would not have been much but maybe collectively and everyone together. Maybe we were too late to recognize that he was ahead of his time... and maybe we still are.
Why so? He has shown himself over time to be someone who has constantly reneged on his responsibilities, made obtuse efforts to be "understanding" when he has no standing ("offering" to be interviewed via video from the embassy - who else gets to decide how, when, where and if they are interviewed on criminal charges?), and shown himself to be entirely partisan in his motives when it comes down to it.
Why should "we" be "collectively supporting him", precisely?
Contrived and controlled releases to influence a narrative in a particular desired direction.
Being given a trove of documents categorized as misdeeds by both sides of government and largely sitting on those by one side, and releasing those that adversely impact the other. Partisan.
>Being given a trove of documents categorized as misdeeds by both sides of government and largely sitting on those by one side, and releasing those that adversely impact the other
That seems like a fine reason to call someone partisan, but doesn't sound like anything Assange has been shown to have done.
Besides, the press is often partisan. That doesn't mean we should abandon a free press.
1. Wikileaks has declined to publish leaks critical of Putin and Russian in the past
2. Wikileaks inexplicably denigrated the release of the Panama papers, which contained lots of damning information about several Russian oligarchs and key Putin allies, despite the fact that it seems like something they would be supportive of
3. Assange had his own show on Russian state-sponsored television
It is entirely possible that Wikileaks was duped by the Russian government. But there is lots of circumstantial evidence that makes the idea seem suspect.
What a silly point on which to turn your concerns about government misconduct, especially when it involves the 1st amendment.
> Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning
First of all, that never happened. You are drastically exaggerating the relief offered by the government.
The government tortured this person for years and then, even after offering this (in the great scheme of things, small) gesture of commuting her sentence, it still kept her locked up for an absurd amount of time, ostensibly for administrative reasons.
It was too little too late for me, and too little too late for Assange. If the government wanted to take the deal he offered, it had the opportunity to immediately pardon Manning and call Assange out on it. Then we'd know if he was bluffing.
Right, but anyone breaking the law in order to do good is aware that they're breaking the law, they just determined that that's the best thing to do in the circumstances.
A law that makes it illegal to reveal someone else/ some other organisation breaking the law first is not a law we should allow in our legal and political system if we have even a shred of dignity and self-respect left.
1. WL disclosed information to US population.
2. WL is accused of being "Non-state Hostile Intelligence Service".
3. Hostile intelligence services work for enemies.
4. US population is the enemy.
Wikileaks believed at the time that Clinton was ready to send a drone to get rid of Assange. Between due process and a drone attack, I take due process any day.
That's an obviously absurd belief given he's in an embassy. The USA has done a lot of insane shit but that would be a ridiculous line to cross to eliminate a single "criminal."
When the WL backend for collateral murder was hosted at bahnhof in Sweden, moving it to .CH was among other reasons done because of certainly the US, and specifically & allegedly homeland security having launched a DDOS attack so strong it could have kicked Sweden offline.
When US agents started their smearing campaign against Assange in Sweden, they accidentally added smear to wikipedia that did not happen yet.
In Brussels, WL volunteers where threatened by US agents with silenced pistols in a parking lot.
Various so called "influencers", mostly academics and activistic people where payed to spread the false US narrative regarding everything related to Assange.
Indeed it is. Let me quote Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, /again/. "Can't we just drone this guy".
Context: Being confronted with Assange his existence by her staff.
I can't quote it but i can tell you my two independant sources namely Birgitta Jonsdottir ( former Icelandic MP, and one of the people who noticed it ) and Amelia Andersdotter ( former Swedish member of the european parliament, and my ex partner ). Both are highly accessible so you can get your first hand confirmation yourself.
US/NATO bombed the Chinese embassy [0] in former Yoguslavia so nothing is out of the question. Though this is UK. But still it shows embassies are not outside of US target zone.
Yeah but that was a "mistake". Just as it was a "mistake" when NATO thought that the embassy was used as Serbia's military comm center. China stopped complaining after shown what NATO had on them.
They also believed that the British military had "sealed off several London blocks, aiming rifles at British civilians, had police confiscating cameras, 'which in any case wouldn't work because they were deploying technology to interfere with digital cameras while they raided the Embassy'."
Pretty absurd. That said, the Saudi government just straight up murdered a journalist in one of their embassies, the whole world knows it and politically it appears things are still business as usual...
The house of Saud just crafted their latest excuse about the hit squad being "rogue agents" and they're going to execute some faithful servants to prove their point. That is plenty good enough for Trump to dismiss the issue. American's don't care about mass Iraqi civilian deaths. Journalists are the enemy. A single "fake news" writer won't matter.
The State Dept under Clinton played fast and loose with it's own procedures and regulations and I have a friend who died in the Benghazi attack if you want to fight with me on this point.
More than 5% of the Section 702 wiretaps conducted under the last President's administration were performed illegally by their own admission.
False flag operations are part of our history and three-letter agencies have a history of being Wild and Crazy Kids.
Assange gets an extraordinary amount of political attention for even a public figure. It's perhaps an unreasonable conclusion for them to make but it's not _too unreasonable_.
Well, yes. The ever-increasing, horrible drone campaigns conducted from the Obama years onward as a tool of destabilization are one thing, but that doesn't make it reasonable to expect that they'd use them to assassinate high profile political agitators in first world countries or that they actually have the ability to do such a thing. The contexts are totally different, however the narrative IS in keeping with the typical far right behavior of cultivating the image of a victim terrorized by an all-powerful shadow cabal
Yes. There's a difference between drone programs 'crossing the line' say, in a hunt for known terrorists, they blow up a building that has civilians next door our just outside ... and arbitrary targeting of 'annoyances of the state'.
There are actually quite scant false flag operations in US history, and many of them weren't even false flag so much as 'purposefully misrepresented'.
And besides - there would be no 'false flag' with any kind of attempt to kill Assange.
The notion that Clinton (or any agency) would go after Assange with drones and hellfire missiles is well into crazyland territory. Not even the crazy among them are thinking it, it doesn't make sense really on any level I think.
> There are actually quite scant false flag operations in US history, and many of them weren't even false flag so much as 'purposefully misrepresented'.
What's the difference between "purposefully misrepresented" and a false flag?
I am honestly not sure -- I thought the concept of a false flag was a purposeful misrepresentation of an event.
A false flag is an intentional action that creates false justification for something.
A misrepresentation is just that.
So - if the US sent in CIA agents and planted WMD's in Iraq, and then had the UN inspectors show up and 'find' them - that would be a false flag.
Otherwise, say the inspectors find some WMD but it's only a small account, and then the government says "Look WMDs, therefore war!" - that's another scenario. The 2003 war was not based on false flag, more along the lines of misrepresentation of information.
Sometimes it can be shady, as I believe the gulf of Tonkin was a sketchy one. There was an incident between US and Vietnamese ships, but later, during a second encounter, the US knew it was unlikely there were Vietnamese ships (just misleading radar signature) but used it anyways as justification for escalation.
But consider that this is just populism anyhow - the 'good' reasons for conflict, are often at odds with the 'populist' reasons for war. WW2 being possibly a good example: it might have been much better for everyone were the Americans to be involved much earlier ... but the public was not down with it until Pearl Harbour.
Consider for a moment if there was no attack on Pearl Harbour. Consider if the Germans did not have to pull resources from the Russian front to fight in Italy, Africa and then France ... my gosh man that would re-shape world history.
As for Assange, I don't believe his leaks represent quite the malicious acting by the US that some believe, although maybe they are important, moreover, I understand that he has very serious character flaws - this from his relationships with his own allies at the Guardian and Spiegel etc. and his recent involvement with the Russians.
So... Because Clinton was "in charge" when the unfortunate events in Benghazi occurred, you think she would've authorized a drone strike in London? That's well past the point of crazy conspiracy theory territory.
Yes. None of that (even if you buy into all of it) adds up to "Clinton would literally order a drone strike on Julian Assange", let alone if he happened to be in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at the time.
Truepundit.com is a site with no named reporters but somehow still manages to get "scoops" from unnamed sources in the State Department, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and the FBI. Yet these scoops are never confirmed by other sources and many of them are proved false, like these:
* November 4, 2016: BREAKING: Comey Mandates All FBI Agents Report to D.C. Offices; Prep for Raids, Possible Arrests in Clinton Probes
Two instances of getting it wrong doesn't negate the entire news organization. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There isn't any news organization that hasn't ever got an article wrong.
Real news organizations have actual reporters and have built up a reputation for getting things right. They have earned trust over years. They do get things wrong, but they issue corrections.
Truepundit.com is not a news organization. It popped up in 2016 and was dedicated to publishing "articles" attacking Democrats. It makes no pretense to being an objective news source. None of its "scoops" were ever confirmed by a real news source.
The article "Comey Mandates All FBI Agents Report to D.C. Offices; Prep for Raids, Possible Arrests in Clinton Probes" was published days before the 2016 presidential election.
It was not a mistake. It was a deliberate, politically-motivated hoax.
You've apparently forgotten all about that whole Osama Bin Laden thing. You know, the person who Clinton sent a team to kill even though he was never charged with any crime. There's even a video of Clinton watching his illegal assassination.
2. That's not an assassination mission. OBL was more valuable alive than dead.
3. Islamibad isn't London and the UK isn't Pakistan. Hard power solutions are for countries that can't control their own airspace and can't/won't be able to capture the person of interest with their own legal/security apparatus. Name one drone strike outside the middle East.
4. You are comparing the most notorious terrorist in world history to a journalistic nuisance. The US would have to be retarded to pursue Assange to the same severity as they pursued OBL.
There was no compulsion to comply since the charges were filed ( under seal ) in New York state and there was no extradition agreement with Afghanistan.
Despite that the Taliban had been in negotiation since 1998 and repeatedly offered to hand Bin Laden over to a third country.
SCR1267 did not authorise military action.
Everything you have written is true, yet misleading.
Very interesting. Because she was in the room that meant she sent the team to kill Bin Laden?
By your logic and the parent poster's logic ~13 people aside from the President and the laptops and coffee cups were also just as responsible for sending the team to kill him.
Are you really questioning the idea that the Secretary of State had a hand in approving a CIA-led assassination mission when there's literally pictures of her watching it go down?
You seem to be arguing incredibly uncharitably. I simply said the military planned it and based on the article I posted, I am 100% accurate. It doesn't take away from the military planning that the CIA also had a hand in planning it. I also never said the military led it, the thing you are arguing I did.
You edited your comment to change what you said. You originally did not say that she had a 'hand in approving'. Why would you change it to make it seem like you were talking about something else that you didn't originally say?
There is absolutely no evidence of this, either that Clinton was "ready to send a drone" or that Wikileaks actually believed she was. Taking at face value the statements of the organization regarding this would be extremely naive.
> Between due process and a drone attack, I take due process any day.
I'd take the drone strike. The end result is, with almost 100% certainty, going to be the same. At least with the drone attack, you don't have to waste away in prison until you die. It's all but certain he would be convicted.
Close but not quite. The exact ( back then ) secretary of state's expression was "Can't we just drone that guy". The context of this quote being dialog with her staff who had a hard time convincing her that it's a bad idea.
Because it’s become politicized? Well, tech has become incredibly politicized in the last few years. And Assange and WikiLeaks are both political and have played politics.
What someone's motivation is (in relation to the still unsubstantiated allegation that Assange is a "Russian asset" trying advance Russian foreign policy objectives) should be completely irrelevant to the legality of an action.
Is publishing leaked documents protected under the First Amendment?
Is publishing "propaganda" protected under the First Amendment?
I would say the answer to both of these questions is yes.
All these questions his attorneys can try to answer during the trial. That he was /is a Russian asset, I think we pretty much know. Maybe he needed a bear hug in light of everyone behind against him...or maybe Russia had dirt on the country he wanted to hurt?
I see this claim a lot, yet no evidence to substantiate it. What evidence do you have that he is/was a Russian asset?
And what does it matter if it's a Russian asset doing the leaking, instead of a selfless journalist? Is the leaking illegal or not? This "Russian asset" angle seems like ad hominem to make people acquiesce to violating freedom of speech.
CIA Director: 'It's time to call out Wikileaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.'
It's normal for us not to have any direct evidence, but to see the results of their behavior. CIA on the other hand might have recordings, communication etc. They have been digging for years.
We also know, via leaked Snowden documents, that the intelligence community has been looking for ways to discredit Wikileaks for about a decade. The CIA is not a trustworthy source, if they have proof it needs to be presented.
An organization dedicated to publishing leaked documented can be "abetted" by any number of intelligence agencies by the nature of its function. That doesn't make it an asset of any intelligence agency.
I never thought it would happen. He always seemed to stay a few steps ahead and he has plenty of of supporters and many countries that are hostile the US were willing to grant him asylum. I'm not sure how this would work. He would have to be kidnapped or given up.
Assange is simply not an honest broker which is his one job. Even if you think the Chelsea Manning leak was valuable, what exactly was Assange's value add?
The leaker was not protected. She was caught and prosecuted. The data was not protected. WikiLeaks was hacked and leaked all the raw data. The content was not shared in an objective way. Assange editorialized the content with his own opinions (ie Collateral Murder). His only contribution was to raise money to pay for hosting.
There's a reason why Ed Snowden didn't give his leaks to Assange.
If this sort of assessment is the case against Assange (in terms of his character as a journalist), then I think he has a very strong case.
> The leaker was not protected. She was caught and prosecuted.
You're talking as if Assange or WikiLeaks disclosed the source.
Are you suggesting that a journalist has a responsibility to protect a source unto the ends of the earth, even when that source openly and flatly confides in an (in retrospect, untrustworthy) friend that she has leaked what she knows to be classified material?
How exactly was Wikileaks supposed to respond? By somehow tracking down Adrian Lamo and ensuring that he didn't report her? I'm just astonished at this part of your indictment.
> The data was not protected. WikiLeaks was hacked and leaked all the raw data.
"Hacked?"
WikiLeaks published the entire cache of documents - and I celebrate them for it. I have personally read over 600 pages (probably a thousand at this point) and I have yet to encounter one of them that I, as a United States citizen, believe was rightly withheld from my view by my government.
WikiLeaks took care to redact some proper nouns from these documents, but provided unredacted versions to some journalists, along with painstaking, easy-to-follow instructions about preserving them. Nevertheless, a (much more ostensible respectable) journalist at The Guardian posted the passphrase and the files were leaked.
In what universe is this a failing of WikiLeaks OpsSec? "Hacked"? What can you possibly be talking about?
The only security compromise about which I'm aware on the part of WikiLeaks was a problem with their web frontend which briefly allowed a group to change it to a juvenile message. No documents were involved.
> The content was not shared in an objective way. Assange editorialized the content with his own opinions (ie Collateral Murder).
...so? What's wrong with that?
Let's keep things in perspective here: a person flying in a helicopter intentionally fired an explosive missile at a person standing on the ground. I know we're all pretty numb to this happening at this point, but I think it's still pretty shocking when you think about it.
Maybe he did think that he was firing on someone carrying an RPG. So? It's still a crazy act, carried out during an illegal war. Calling it "Collateral Murder" doesn't turn me off in the slightest.
> There's a reason why Ed Snowden didn't give his leaks to Assange.
I appreciate the way that Ed Snowden conducted himself. He took a different approach and one that is welcome.
I also think that Ed Snowden's criticisms of WikiLeaks are substantially more honest than yours. Can you explain why you've characterized these things in such a strange way?
>Let's keep things in perspective here: a person flying in a helicopter intentionally fired an explosive missile at a person standing on the ground. I know we're all pretty numb to this happening at this point, but I think it's still pretty shocking when you think about it.
Maybe he did think that he was firing on someone carrying an RPG. So? It's still a crazy act, carried out during an illegal war. Calling it "Collateral Murder" doesn't turn me off in the slightest.
Fine, a camera can look like an RPG from a distance. But maybe they should be looking a bit closer if everything is looking like an RPG.
For me, the most shocking part was when they opened fire on the van with an(other) unarmed civilian that made the mistake of stopping to help the injured people.
Then even more shocking when they later discovered the two children who were in the now-destroyed van. Just a man and his children driving in a van. Now murdered for the crime of trying to help a fellow human being.
Just a shocking lack of regard for human life. If that's how they operate - and it seems to be - they are nothing but war criminals.
What kind of monster would want to protect that kind of behavior from public scrutiny?
Lamo gained Manning's trust by pointing to his donation to WikiLeaks that he himself leaked to WikiLeaks when WikiLeaks did an open CC on all previous donors in an email blast.
And the unredacted cables become public record because the encrypted cables intended for journalists only, ended up on bittorrent. The Guardian should not have published the key, but they did so believing that they had the only copy of the encrypted data and WikiLeaks had destroyed their copy rather than leaving it available on a public URL for an extended period.
The video of the rocket attack would have easily stood on it's own without Assange inserting his agenda.
None of that is necessarily inexcusable crimes, but they are critical mistakes related to the one thing WikiLeaks is supposed to be good for. Give Manning 99% of the credit for exposing the story.
Wasn't Manning caught by bragging about leaking? It wasn't Wikileaks' fault that Manning chose to discard any potential anonymity by being recklessly boastful.
Nonsense. Support for Assange in UK is very strong. Check any recent opinion polls. The same across Europe. Even in US he still has supporters though the propaganda machine has been mercilessly portraying hims as some dastardly Russian spy. Not everybody has bought that.
How do they plan to get him out of the embassy without violating the Vienna Convention? He's been amazingly... immature and disruptive... in the embassy, but has there ever in history been a case of a refugee being remanded to their oppressor because of how annoying they are? To be fair, Assange seems to be really annoying.
I can't read the article. Does it mention what charges might apply?
If he conspired with the hackers, I can see where criminal charges might come in. If he merely published documents afterwards, I'm not sure what they could charge him with.
Let's leave all the war criminals from Iraq so we have repeats in Libya and Syria. Let's forgot about the bankers and fraud. Let's not do anything about the NSA and liars like Clapper. Let's instead get Assange. This makes a lot of sense, but only if you are a pretend democracy.
That should read the US regime is preparing to 'persecute' Julian Assange and should be a reality check for anyone remotely concerned about democracy, free press and dissent.
Who are these people who are 'familiar with the matter'? Look at the people 'familiar with the matter' regarding the apple/et al spy chip story. How can we, as consumers of news, ever know if there is any kind of truth from these anonymous sources, or if they are just trying to nudge either public perception, or key players(wikileaks, ecuador, etc) in a certain way?
I just bough a Quanta LGA2011 board off ebay. In the BIOS PXE settings were IP's that belong to Amazon.
So I have to wonder if Amazon even used SuperMicro hardware.
I know with great certainty that they used Quanta as a board manufacturer.
So who planted this story is my question. Who would stand the most at bringing down SuperMicro.
I would rule out the Chinese because they were made to look bad.
So who else in the US manufactures motherboards and would benefit from SuperMicro's demise.
Did the same people also drive SuperMicro stock down to a point of it being delisted?
I hated seeing a "Designed in the USA" motherboard manufacturer dragged through the mud.
I have used their affordable dual CPU motherboards dating back to BX chipset.
Ultra-reliable and feature packed.
I even made some negative Supermicro comments at the time.
Amazing how easily even intelligent people can be brainwashed.
The problem with the story is that all of the accusations are technically feasible.
We know TAO does this from Edward Snowdens wonderful truthfulness.
So we all wanted to have an Ahh-Ha moment. Too bad we were duped.
There is a real, if small, chance that there could be a general election in the UK soon and potentially a more favourable labour government. If I were Assange I would do whatever I could to hang in there at least long enough to rule that possibility out.
In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a bad thing. A trial would force the government to finally show us proof that Wikileaks was working for the Russians and they conspired criminally to hack US networks.
Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world, and you should be absolutely certain that any "trial" Assange gets will be a kangaroo court where he is convicted on "secret" evidence that we won't be able to independently view or scrutinize due to "national security concerns". What's worse is people will point to Assange's conviction in this show trial as proof of all of evidence-free accusations the spy agencies and US government have been hurling around for the last 2+ years.
I agree, I'm surprised you're being downvoted for this opinion. Kangaroo courts happen and even when the person facing the verdict is high profile. It shows how power with the agenda of whomever is what crafts law. Logic is the thing rational people cling to and logic is not part of foundation making justice in prosecutions. The wild thing to me is how much hate assange has gathered recently online. People seem to prefer writing just throw him in jail than take the undecided stance. Makes me think things are getting worse if you're on the not happy side with how things are run.
Its being downvoted for the same reason that Assange is so hated. Unfortunately most Americans are incredibly susceptible to propaganda. Its why 90% of Americans continued to believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 even years after the invasion of Iraq. Even for those few Americans with the capacity to be skeptical and think critically, its much easier to accept "conventional wisdom" and adopt the official narrative than to consider the possibility that our government regularly disseminates lies and propaganda. Groupthink is not only real, it is perhaps the dominant driving force in society.
"...Vice President Joe Biden said on NBC’s Meet the Press that “we’re sending a message” to Putin and “it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact.” When asked if the American public would know a message was sent, Biden replied, “Hope not.”
This statement has haunted me since I first watched Biden's interview in 2016. What are Biden's plans to avenge Clinton's lost campaign? I've always thought it has something to do with Assange, but aside from discretely murdering Assange, I can't think of anything the US could do to avenge Hilary's loss that the public wouldn't know about. Clinton asked why we couldn't just drone Assange. Maybe they'll make his death look like an accident or a health issue?
My understanding is that the original leaks were likely to be difficult to win a case over. His actions during the 2016 election campaign maybe a different story though. It's unclear exactly what he is alleged to have done.
One possible explanation could be that his contributions were casual and not very important. However, one of his commits was over 500 hundred lines of code, and consisted of a patch that affected the very internal parts of PostgreSQL. Why was a casual contributor making large commits and merging patches in PostgreSQL? If he had gained the right to make such bold commits, he probably had to be close to the core members of the project. But if he was close to the core, why did he do only six commits and disappeared afterwards? Moreover, there is no trace about his activities in any other mailing list or repository. Why was his activity so silent even though it was a large rewrite of one of the main parts of PostgreSQL?
This is easy to explain actually.
First, these commits were all in 1996. Of the developers that were there in 1996, only Bruce Momjian is still active. Note that almost all of the other commits nearby are made by Marc Fournier, who is currently playing no role in the project, other than hosting some stuff. He certainly does not follow the pgsql-hackers mailing list; he might well not have seen the discussion mentioning Julian. I can easily understand that Bruce no longer remembers a very casual developer 14 years ago -- he must have been looking after his recently born kids by then.
Second, these commits are all in the psql code, which is a small piece of the whole core code -- only the interactive terminal application, not the backend server.
Third, one of the commits (the one you link to) mentions Jolly incorporating some code prior to it. This must refer to Jolly Chen, one of the founders of Postgres95, the project that spawned PostgreSQL from Berkeley's POSTGRES. So it seems likely that Jolly and Julian had communicated during the Postgres95 time, before PostgreSQL's time, and this might have given him commit privileges in the early CVS PostgreSQL repository, and helped him produce a patch without much discussion in the mailing lists. Note that he says Jolly had integrated "part" of his patch previously; he already had this code sitting in his computer.
Fourth, the reason this is not publicly recorded is because PostgreSQL mailing list archives start later than that -- the archives (http://archives.postgresql.... ) start in Jan 1997. The older discussion probably happened in pg95-dev@ki.net for which there doesn't seem to be any public record.
It's just a minor rewrite of parts of the commandline client. Mostly made verbose by by renaming structs members / moving members around. 22+ years ago.
> but perhaps you operate on a different plane of excellence.
I work on PG close to full-time. So I sure hope I've many more contributions than that ;)
OK, well that's great that you contribute to/work on postgres, I have a lot of respect for that project and in general for low-level work like that rather than the product-level nonsense that I work on. But I still think you shouldn't publicly belittle any open source contributions, let alone ones on a project with such high standards for acceptance, and relatively high intellectual barrier to entry, as postgres.
"just a minor rewrite of parts of the commandline client. Mostly made verbose by by renaming structs members / moving members around."
People...really find learning programming hard. Many, many people, even if they try, won't manage to have the intellectual discipline to learn C to the level that you're disparaging. I'm pretty sure that you and I both agree that we shouldn't refer to someone else's hard work in that way.
I found it very interesting that Assange had made real contributions to postgres. I had thought he was a "hacker" in the sense of popular journalism (i.e. fuck knows that they mean but not a serious open source contributor). I don't know why you're criticizing the person who posted that interesting link.
People don't like to hear things that challenge their worldview. I have accepted this reality and don't let it get to me. I have accepted the burning of e-points i.e. "karma" as a sacrifice akin to standing by the side of the road warning others driving that the bridge is out ahead. They don't need to trust me, they only need to proceed with caution and ask questions themselves.
And yet the United States still sends troops to the middle East again and again and again.
The greatest threat to an American life is a drunk driver. If the United States actually had priorities aligned with statistical reality, the billions poured into the war on {{concept}} would have been redirected to drunk driving decades ago. Also, smoking would be illegal.
Regarding wars in the middle east. US foreign policy is at the mercy of the revolving door of the military industrial complex, spearheaded by Israeli dual citizens and Zionist sympathizers (many Christians) which represent Americans in Congress. Many accuse of Israel of having a "Greater Israel" project which is identical in nature to the German Nazi "Lebensraum" in its geopolitical and racial objectives.
AIPAC to Deploy Hundreds of Lobbyists to Push for Syria Action
Pro-Israel lobby says 250 activists will meet with their senators and representatives in Washington in a bid to win support Congressional support for military action in Syria.
US Jewish lobby challenged by 'pro-peace' rival
The most powerful Jewish lobby in America is facing an unprecedented threat from a rival pro-peace pressure group that is vying for the ear of President Barack Obama.
Expanding on their notorious 2006 article in the London Review of Books, the authors increase the megatonnage of their explosive claims about the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby on the U.S. government. Mearsheimer and Walt, political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively, survey a wide coalition of pro-Israel groups and individuals, including American Jewish organizations and political donors, Christian fundamentalists, neo-con officials in the executive branch, media pundits who smear critics of Israel as anti-Semites and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which they characterize as having an almost unchallenged hold on Congress. This lobby, they contend, has pressured the U.S. government into Middle East policies that are strategically and morally unjustifiable: lavish financial subsidies for Israel despite its occupation of Palestinian territories; needless American confrontations with Israel's foes Syria and Iran; uncritical support of Israel's 2006 bombing of Lebanon, which violated the laws of war; and the Iraq war, which almost certainly would not have occurred had [the Israel lobby] been absent. The authors disavow conspiracy mongering, noting that the lobby's activities constitute legitimate, if misguided, interest-group politics, as American as apple pie. Considering the authors' academic credentials and the careful reasoning and meticulous documentation with which they support their claims, the book is bound to rekindle the controversy.
Again sarcasm as a way to convey a legitimate point is downvoted on HN so I'll translate: I would be surprised if he was prosecuted harshly given his important role in the election of the current president of the US.
(Edit: to be clear, I personally dislike seeing all these jokes about russian agents re: the 2016 election. There was clearly meddling but its beginning to bother me that a vocal strain of vocal American liberals seem to believe that the main reason why trump is president is because someone broke some rules. People like Assange aren't pawns of some dark and evil power: they are themselves bad actors and should be treated as such.)
"Assange behaved as an instrument of the Kremlin operation which, in an excruciatingly close election, may have made just enough of a difference to secure Trump’s victory."
...
"Mueller’s investigators have recently questioned at least five witnesses about Assange’s role in the 2016 campaign."
> that the main reason why trump is president is because someone broke some rules.
The evidence shows this pretty clearly. Also, "broke some rules" is a pretty silly way to describe the literal murders that have taken place re: Russia and the election. It's also an obviously biased way to describe the incredible scale and power of electoral propaganda along with bribes and hacked voting systems.
In related news, you will find constant streams of articles demonstrating the epic quantities of failures of voting systems across the country. You will also find lots of news articles about voters being eliminated from the voting rolls, in mysterious ways.
Which acts are done by the Republican people in charge of the voting systems? Which acts were done by Russians who hacked in? I don't know. None of us do, yet.
But you're here making up ridiculous claims and using logical fallacies to try to insert false 'facts' into your question. You twist my words and ask non-sensical questions. Why?
Russia hacked our voting systems. That is not up for dispute, that is a long-established fact.
That's totally fair and, not to be dismissive, I don't think it's productive to try to have this conversation here. I just want to say I'm not trying to defend or downplay what WikiLeaks got up to under Assange's oversight. I'm simply saying that while his interests may have lined up with Putin/Russian oligarchs he is himself an ideologue and a bad actor who comes from a community of the same and he should be treated as such.
Why is he a bad actor? Why should he be treated differently from other whistleblowers. AFAIK his leaks have had many good outcomes. I think there was a case or two where sensitive information could've been vetted better but to me he definitely looks like a net positive.
Have you watched the documentary "citizen four" about snowden? The way that they went about these releases are worlds apart and each man has his own clear agenda. Snowdens behavior set a good precedent for future leaking. For example, he was careful to do diligence to make sure no one agents would be harmed. This is important because much of the legal case against this sort of action claims (wrongly) that leaking is somehow treasonous no matter what because it endangers IC field agents.
All of this said, broadly, the world Assange wants to build is bad and the world Snowden wants to build is good. This matters and is part of why I call Assange a bad actor: it's not the act of releasing sensitive data its what he intended to do with it. (And to be clear, i'm no fan of Clinton.)
I'd also like to point out that, while I really value this community I dislike this tendency. Not agreeing with such comments is fine, but this isn't a personal attack so I don't understand why this style of conversation is treated this way. Sarcasm and sly humor are actually good and should be encouraged so long as it is relevant and not meant to hurt non-public figures. Overall this behavior comes off to me as understanding what is being conveyed but using the style of delivery as an excuse not to engage.
> they are themselves bad actors and should be treated as such
How is leaking some provably true secrets about a political party to the public bad in any way in a democracy?
There are responsible and irresponsible ways to dump this kind of info. Both result in the public learning what it is entitled to know. (All such secrets are bad of course and should be brought to light.) For instance, Assange has failed to scrub irrelevant personally identifying information from releases in the past which have resulted in uninvolved non-public civilians getting doxxed. All this does is allow oppressive regimes like the current US government more evidence to make the act of leaking even harder. Assange is bad for freedom of information in the current social order because he’s a very convenient story for people who want secrets to remain secrets.
Setting aside whether I think it's likely Assange is a Russian agent, it wouldn't surprise me to see an agent of a nation thrown under the bus for political reasons or to support a narrative. For an example, see Valerie Plame.
Fun fact, as I was looking this up to make sure I had the right people and names, wikipedia helpfully informed me that "The scandal led to a criminal investigation; no one was charged for the leak itself. Scooter Libby was convicted of lying to investigators. His prison sentence was ultimately commuted by President Bush, and he was pardoned by President Trump in 2018." More fuel for the conspiracy minded, I guess. ;)
I don't think Freedom of the Press is dead. WikiLeaks isn't a news organization, especially when they released campaign emails during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. They have been to be a known tool for the Russian government, even going as far as creating a show for Julian Assange on the state-backed RT TV Network.
Yes, they are a news organization. Covering the election is what a news organization should do, and it's hard to argue the Clinton emails weren't newsworthy.
>They have been to be a known tool for the Russian government, even going as far as creating a show for Julian Assange on the state-backed RT TV Network
This is untrue. There is nothing suggesting that Wikileaks has knowingly coordinated with Russia. And that TV show was indepently produced by Assange, with RT buying some ofthe distribution rights.
If they are a news organization, they do a terrible job of reporting the news. They are a black box repository for leaked data. They were once a great resource for info hackers and leakers to push their data, like back in 2008/2009. But that was before news organizations started using their own secure drop servers for sources. Once WikiLeaks sources started to not go to them, they started to look for other benefactors and sources. They found it in the Russian Government.
Again, nothing suggesting they are knowingly working with the Russians.
Wikileaks quality has surely dropped. They are still the press, and any prosecution by the US will be over things like the Manning links, a direct attack on the freedom of the press.
OK, there is evidence that Assange sold the broadcast rights of a show to a Russian controlled news organization. Do you think that Jesse Ventura should also be prosecuted?
I don't think Assange should be prosecuted for appearing on Russian state TV. (Does anyone?)
While it may be technically true to say that he "sold the rights" to Russia Today, that's arguably a little misleading, as the show first aired on RT, and RT had exclusive initial rights to it.
>I don't think Assange should be prosecuted for appearing on Russian state TV. (Does anyone?
People use his television show to claim he's a paid operative of Russia. The same narrative can be made of Ventura, and any reason Assange should be prosecuted but not Ventura seems sketchy.
>While it may be technically true to say that he "sold the rights" to Russia Today, that's arguably a little misleading, as the show first aired on RT, and RT had exclusive initial rights to it.
They bought the initial rights in several languages, not exclusive, but he did not make the show for RT. That's a fairly clear distinction.
No-one is suggesting that Assange should be prosecuted for making a TV show, so I don't see what you're getting at with the Ventura comparison.
What you can't do is claim that it's somehow normal for someone who claims to be anti-authoritarian to appear on Russian state TV and take Kremlin money. The TV show is one of many examples of unusually close connections between Assange and the Russian state:
>What you can't do is claim that it's somehow normal for someone who claims to be anti-authoritarian to appear on Russian state TV and take Kremlin money.
First, this also describes Ventura.
Second, claiming to be anti-authoritarian while accepting help from a clearly authoritarian Kremlin describes the US in WWII.
None of those connections suggest he's coordinating with Russia, just that their interests sometimes align. I'm sure he'd take US money and appear on PBS too if given the opportunity.
I don't really know anything about Jesse Ventura, and still don't understand why you keep bringing him up. If he's done everything that Assange has done, then I don't like him either.
> I'm sure he'd take US money and appear on PBS too if given the opportunity.
Ah, the Captain Renault defense. (Sure, I collaborate with the Nazis, but I'd just as soon collaborate with the other side if they were winning!)
Ventura has a show that is on RT. You quoted my statement
>Again, nothing suggesting they are knowingly working with the Russians
And replied with a link to Assanges' show. I'll admit, "working" is too vague of a word to use, all my other posts use "collaborate," as selling the show to RT could be called "working with." However, if that contact is the damning evidence that you claim it is, the same evidence is available linking Ventura (and Larry King) to the Kremlin. Why aren't you calling for them to receive the same treatment?
>Ah, the Captain Renault defense. . (Sure, I collaborate with the Nazis, but I'd just as soon collaborate with the other side if they were winning!)
Still no evidence of collaboration has been shown. And nothing like that scenario, I'm sure he'd have gladly had his show run on both channels at the same time. More people would see his views and he'd make more money for his work.
The Vox article you linked has three sections about the "links." The first's conclusion starts
>This isn’t a direct link between Assange and the Kremlin,
The second is the TV show, and the third is just ridiculous. Russia is the place where it is most difficult for the US to access Snowden, basically the same for the bodyguards, and one tweet showing both Assange and Russia are antisemitic? They even follow it by saying
>Again, none of these even hint that Assange is a Russian agent. What they do show, when put together, is that Assange doesn’t see Russia as an enemy or a target.
Which seems fairly obvious. He's not a Russian agent, he just views the country that has passed a law calling him a "non-state hostile intelligence service" to be a bigger enemy.
The ones that caused the DNC chair to step down, showing that the DNC had subverted it's own internal processes regarding impartiality during the primary process.
The ones where it was revealed the Clinton campaign was running the DNC and Sanders never stood a chance. Whether your support that or not I don't think anyone disputes that this was revealed by Wikileaks
Plenty of people dispute this narrative, myself included. The DNC never took any action against the Sanders campaign, despite some disgruntled emails by some DNC staffers venting about Sanders.
I don't really know about that, there are many accounts such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf5ZkGKk9SM that claim otherwise, though I do not know how reliable these are.
As usual, context is critical. By the end of the primary, DWS was a lightning rod of controversy. Hillary recognized DWS was an obstacle to the Bernie wing rallying behind her and so she made a deal with DWS to get her to step down without a fight. She wasn't "forced" out due to wrongdoing, it was purely a political move to put the primary fights to rest and look towards defeating Trump. Had DWS stayed and defended herself, that would have severely weakened party unity. In such cases, truth takes a back seat to reconciliation.
Brazile's case is trickier. Taking everything she says at face value (which is a mistake), the main thing she demonstrated was that Hillary's campaign saved the DNC from bankruptcy before the primary by assuming its debt. Hillary (reasonably) put some controls on the DNC's finances in response to the mismanagement. Brazile had no evidence, nor did she claim that Hillary or anyone directed the DNC to act against Bernie. Besides, with the unfiltered look into the DNCs emails and Hillary's campaign's emails, you would expect to see mountains of evidence of Hillary manipulating the DNC against Bernie. But there was no such evidence whatsoever.
The other issue is the fundraising agreement that combined DNC-raised money with Hillary campaign money. But the fundraising agreement was standard and Bernie's campaign had the opportunity to sign the same fundraising agreement but declined.
> As usual, context is critical. By the end of the primary, DWS was a lightning rod of controversy. Hillary recognized DWS was an obstacle to the Bernie wing rallying behind her and so she made a deal with DWS to get her to step down without a fight. She wasn't "forced" out due to wrongdoing, it was purely a political move to put the primary fights to rest and look towards defeating Trump. Had DWS stayed and defended herself, that would have severely weakened party unity. In such cases, truth takes a back seat to reconciliation.
If DWS stepping down was a purely optics move, then why was she then immediately added as a campaign chair to the Clinton campaign, in probably what was the worst possible optics given the situation.
> Brazile's case is trickier. Taking everything she says at face value (which is a mistake)
"Let's just start off delegitimizing what she had to say, not because I have any evidence to contrary. I just don't like what she said."
> the main thing she demonstrated was that Hillary's campaign saved the DNC from bankruptcy before the primary by assuming its debt. Hillary (reasonably) put some controls on the DNC's finances in response to the mismanagement. Brazile had no evidence, nor did she claim that Hillary or anyone directed the DNC to act against Bernie. Besides, with the unfiltered look into the DNCs emails and Hillary's campaign's emails, you would expect to see mountains of evidence of Hillary manipulating the DNC against Bernie. But there was no such evidence whatsoever.
> The other issue is the fundraising agreement that combined DNC-raised money with Hillary campaign money. But the fundraising agreement was standard and Bernie's campaign had the opportunity to sign the same fundraising agreement but declined.
You fundamentally misunderstood the scandal it seems. What Brazile revealed was the full extent of the issues with the Hillary Victory Fund, and why that happened. These aren't two different issues.
The way the HVF worked was as a way to subvert maximum donor limits. You as a donor can normally only donate $2,700 to a campaign. Instead the HVF allowed you to donate simultaneously to each of the 50 state's individual DNC parties, who then immediately donate that money to the national DNC, who then immediately donated that money to the Clinton campaign. Yes the same deal was available to the Sanders campaign, in that they were also essientially allowed to donate ~$100 to the Clinton campaign for every dollar they raised. Yes, the setup was that all VF money was to make it's way to the Clinton campaign. I wonder why they didn't take that wonderful offer.
Nothing about that was standard.
This setup of giving VF money during the primary had never previously happened, was against internal bylaws, and is the main reason why we lost the house so bad. She had been pilfering funding for down ticket races in order to fund the primary campaign.
>If DWS stepping down was a purely optics move, then why was she then immediately added as a campaign chair to the Clinton campaign
It was a part of the deal to get DWS to resign. Hillary created a token position for DWS. It's like you don't understand politics at all.
>Yes the same deal was available to the Sanders campaign, in that they were also essientially allowed to donate ~$100 to the Clinton campaign for every dollar they raised. Yes, the setup was that all VF money was to make it's way to the Clinton campaign. I wonder why they didn't take that wonderful offer.
Yeah, that's bullshit. I'm gonna need some real sources for this one.
I don't believe they are a news organization, but they are something very similar that should be protected with the same freedoms. Their contributions during 2016 were highly biased but they released information that wasn't false, while it isn't wrong to call them partisan they still provided a valuable service.
If they had received the emails, discovered they were forged and then released them anyways, then I think there'd be a different story. News outlets need to provide true information, they can be opinionated if they are open about it but blatantly lying (i.e. National Enquirer) is the only thing I think is objectionable.
It specifically mentions that 12 russians conspired "with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury" to "stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 US election".
You don't have to be a genius to infer that one of those "persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury" is Assange.
>Can we agree that an indictment is much more than "nothing" and indicate a strong belief on the part of prosecution that they have a winnable case?
Sure. Wikileaks still is not mentioned as the prosecution does not feel they have a winnable case against the organization, and these indictments do not show Wikileaks knowingly coordinated with Russia.
If they are "Organization 1," which yeah they almost certainly are, they are called that as they are not even being accused of a crime. Everything in the indictments could be true and you still haven't shown that Wikileaks knowingly coordinated with the Russia.
Where is the suggestion that Wikileaks knew what the source was and coordinated anyway? The indictments suggests that the source was Russian, nothing points to knowing coordination.
I know that's Assange's line, but that's basically just how all TV is made. Nobody would claim Saturday Night Live isn't an NBC show because it's actually produced by Broadway Video.
RT's logo has a producer's credit in his show's credits. It's an RT show.
Wikileaks isn't a news organization. They don't do reporting. They are a publisher, which still has first amendment protections.
No, it is not. It may have been preffered if some of the less relevant emails were not shared, it's also unclear who should make the call of what is "relevant" and either way their release was news.
All governments use the media, that does not mean the media should not be free. Even journalists from Russia Today should not be imprisoned for what they write, for example.
By selectively prosecuting non-violent speech, a state denies freedom to all journalists, because it asserts itself as the ultimate censor of what is acceptable to publish and what not. You get a massive dilemma: are the other, non-imprisoned journalists, the "real" journalists or are they simply afraid to say the truth because truth lands you in prison?
Why would a "credible" news organization have released them?
They weren't released to show evidence of any particular wrongdoing, nor did they show any illegal activity. They were simply dumped in order to fuel the fire of the impression of wrongdoing, and in hopes that some smoking gun or salacious material could be found to use against her politically.
And yet, those are still legitimate actions for media. As a general rule, if Fox News can do it, so can Wikileaks - and it was precisely traditional media that made the dump politically damaging as opposed to Wikileaks itself, which is an obscure web repository the wast majority of the public will never access.
The purpose of the DNC, as with the RNC, is to choose a candidate they feel is most likely to win. I don't believe choosing Obama over Clinton would have been any less political than choosing Clinton over Obama, or Clinton over Bernie. I don't believe that political calculus or meddling or special privileges granted to high-ranking party officials is actually atypical for either party.
Of course, Wikileaks never released any data dumps from the Republicans, so we can't really know, I guess. Maybe the Republican Party is just a paragon of virtue and their opsec is perfect.
I think we should talk more about it though. People can make a difference. Even if we can't keep this train from derailing, maybe we can slow it down a bit before impact.
And before they choose, they're supposed to determine who is more likely to win. And they admitted they didn't do that fairly as they were being run by Clinton campaign.
News organizations wouldn't drop all the emails at once. Previous enormous leaks have been handled by ICIJ members with great care, going for years of investigations, careful verifications, and publishing only pertinent stories.
DNC misconduct etc. would have been reported by traditional organizations. I think people wonder why it was good that Wikileaks released Podesta's iCloud password, his risotto recipe, doctors appointments of random staffers, and so forth.
For the same reason that if you found yourself with access to someone's diary that you thought might be guilty of wrongdoing, you might convince yourself to look through it possibly with a lawyer friend and report on if anything illegal went on, but you might shy away from publishing the whole thing online "just in case".
One option at least pays lip service to legal and ethical considerations.
A news organization has a responsibility to present information in an informed manner in order to prevent misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Wikileaks' purpose was to paint an impression of widespread wrongdoing despite any hard evidence. Dumping a bunch of irrelevant emails all at once aids misrepresentation.
A credible news organization would have tons of fact checkers and editors to make sure the relevant facts made it in to any article they wrote. They wouldn't, blindly, release tons of unedited emails, including some that were doctored to make the DNC and the Clinton Campaign look bad.
Doesn't need to be state-sponsored (and most news organization aren't "state-sponsored" ... unlike RT, for example) to be credible.
Since when does the constitution require journalists publish information in a manner agreeable to you? Hell, there was a court case years ago that decided news can knowingly publish falsehoods.
Which emails were doctored? I hadn't heard about that. My understanding is that the "doctoring" done by Wikileaks consisted of selectively releasing information obtained from Democratic sources while concealing similar information related to the Republican side ( https://www.wired.com/2017/01/russia-hacked-older-republican... ).
If true, that's the point at which Assange and Wikileaks departed from the path of legitimate journalism.
Pretty ironic when the first comment got deleted. WikiLeaks is of course a news organisation. There is no "especially" when it comes to freedom of the press. Besides, it's not medling to show the truth. Btw. state owned or not (hint: the BBC is also "state-backed") RT is also a news organisation.
>They have been to be a known tool for the Russian government
Known by whom? Its been over 2 years and there has still been absolutely no evidence released at all proving this. Claims made by the CIA, the US government or anyone else are proof of nothing, despite what you may think.
>even going as far as creating a show for Julian Assange on the state-backed RT TV Network.
Larry King has a show on RT too, is he an agent of the Russians also? The fact is that RT gives all sorts of people shows - especially people who make us look bad. What is really unfortunate is that so many of those shows are able to make us look bad without lying at all. They just have to give a platform to people (like Chris Hedges) willing to report on the many misdeeds we have, and continue, to commit.
The Russians are no angels and neither are we. The very heart of this case is about freedom of the press and free speech. If we let the government decide who is "legitimate" and who is allowed to publish then there is no "freedom of the press" at all.
This shit is easy to lookup ... and the fact of the matter is, trying to claim that "we" are as bad as the Russians is the same shit Putin does to dispel any criticism against his fucked up regime's actions. No matter how bad the US has been in Wars and sticking their fingers in democratic elections, the Russians are 10 times as worse and they know it.
Just because you italicize "sigh" doesn't make you any more right. I've found it easier just to assume that the heads of national security are lying. They've been caught perjuring themselves too many times to count.
Not sure what part of "claim" you don't understand. It doesn't matter who makes the claim. Claims by the Secretary of State or the CIA are no more credible than claims by you or I if they don't come with evidence we can independently scrutinize. Older people should have learned this lesson in 2003 with the WMD debacle. Those of us who are even older should have learned it at the Gulf of Tonkin.
>trying to claim that "we" are as bad as the Russians is the same shit Putin does to dispel any criticism against his fucked up regime's actions.
Demanding evidence I can scrutinize is not "dispelling criticism". If you trust the evidence- free claims of the government (or anyone else) - on any matter - you are incredibly naive. Unfortunately you aren't alone.
When it was done with the intent of influencing the 2016 election, that tends to fall under conspiracy and espionage ... especially when it comes from a former adversarial government.
> When it was done with the intent of influencing the 2016 election
Reality check - partisan newspapers, news channels, and news organizations publish partisan nonsense with the intent of influencing elections. All the time.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, freedom of speech does not mean 'Freedom of unbiased speech.' If it did, then you could shut down the entire media establishment tomorrow.
Unlike you, the law does make a distinction between expressing political opinion and unlawful interference with election process and we have independent judicial system to apply those laws.
And the distinction is usually as follows: speech that threatens or criticises those in power is generally illegal, and the speech that supports it is legal.
First, that was the Washington Post that released the tape, and second, that is more for the fitness of the candidate (at the time). Third, and more importantly, it was obtained legally, without having to break in to a server to get it.
> second, that is more for the fitness of the candidate (at the time)
How are we distinguishing influencing the election and fitness of the candidate? I'm not seeing a substantive difference between the two, other that the source (if anything, their campaign practices seem more relevant).
Wikileaks didn’t break into the server. No one knows how the emails were obtained. Your reply demonstrates your hypocrisy nicely. Clearly you just don’t like what Wikileaks has to say.
Some of the emails were altered by Russia for the purpose of spreading misinformation. Russia used Wikileaks to lend credibility to the conspiracy theories they were sowing in the run-up to the election.
NY Time has a great 3-part video series about Russia's history of spreading fake news. Each video is about 15 minutes but it's well worth the watch.
I didn't say the emails were fake. I said they were altered. The metadata, specifically. According to the NY Times they were alter to make it look like they were downloaded directly from a computer in the U.S. and to change the date the documents were obtained.
And publishing false information is not illegal. Knowingly aiding a foreign government in their efforts to undermine an election is treason.
I don't believe citizenship is a requirement to be convicted of treason. There are a lot of members of the U.S. military who are not citizens. Surely they would be guilty of treason if they divulged secrets or aided a foreign country. People with green cards as well. Not that either of those situations apply to Assange.
I've definitely read several news articles that say he stands accused of both treason and espionage, though. I do wonder how that works for a foreigner. Has he ever even been to the United States?
Yes, none of those scenarios apply to assange. How does it matter if he has visited the US at some point in the past. It would be hilarious if he gets charged with treason. That might encourage MBS to charge Erdogan with treason!
Do you have any source for that? I'm not saying it's a fact that the data had been altered but I'm saying reasonable minds can draw that conclusion based on the information we have available.[1] You're oddly defensive of Assange and don't seem to have come to this thread with any interest in discussion.
Here's the link to the video I mentioned in my original comment. I think they discuss how the metadata was altered in the second video of three but no promises I'm remembering that correctly. To be clear, I'm not saying the emails were inauthentic. I'm saying they were altered to make the source of the materials appear to be an internal leak from within the DNC as opposed to a hack. The alterations were (allegedly) for the purposes of Russia covering their trail.
Intentions and prior knowledge matter in a situation like this. It would be wise to see what information the prosecutors have before declaring the death of free press.
True, they are not a news organisation in the common sense, they are a leaks organisation which comes pretty close however.
> especially when they released campaign emails during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
As a leaks organisation this is what their job is about: leaking information, emails this time.
Was Wikileaks biased on what they released? Probably, but to my knowledge they did not release anything false - this would be similar to prosecuting say the guardian people for publishing the Snowden leaks, after all some would consider them "left wing" and "biased". I believe that especially America that was founded on the principle of freedom should take the principle of free speech more seriously.
And on top of that, WikiLeaks solicited the Trump campaign for a few pages of Trump's tax return with the explicit intent making WikieLeaks seem more non-partisan so as to make the emails inflict more harm.
Leaking documents with the intent to "do harm" shouldn't be illegal. You're treading into advocacy of making mal-intent toward The Party a Thought Crime.
The reason we try to uphold freedom of the press isn't to defend people like this or their actions. It always seems pretty clearly bad faith when people make this argument about Assange.
If true then disgusting and completely unacceptable. The way in which legal systems have been cynically abused to ruin this man's life reflects extremely poorly on the people and institutions concerned. Wikileaks' revelation of the disgusting behavior of the US armed forces in Baghdad was an extremely valuable contribution to society.
Also, being a "Russian asset", whatever that means, doesn't affect anything. If he refuses to release dirt against Russia, the would be leaker can go to someone else or just release it themselves. He isn't the gatekeeper of all leaked information.
Justifying it this way is just a ploy to punish the whistleblower and I can't believe how many people go along with it.
