Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
- Is there any direct reason for the timing (US elections, attack on Mosul or other current headlines)?
- Was there any imminent release? (last week there was an announcement of a leak but it didn't materialize as far as I know)
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13159914/wikileaks-hillary...
- You'd assume that Wikileaks the organization will continue to work even without Assange having internet access so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
edit: another comment here suggests the reason may be because his extradition is imminent.
More interesting that CNN thinks they can read them but the public can not. Media organizations have no security clearances and thus are subject to the same access as anyone else.
Oh CNN.
Proving that those who say the media thinks they're above the rest of us are right.
There is also the famous Pentagon Papers case, which to my knowledge rests on the "freedom of the press" language in the First Amendment.
That said, this was a stupid thing for the CNN anchor to say. Regardless of the law, no federal prosecutor is going to waste their time trying to find and prosecute every U.S. citizen who visits the Wikileaks website.
It was about the printing press and the ability to print what you wanted and, just as importantly, not be forced to print the things you didn't.
I am not a lawyer but I'd say this is a legal gray area.
The leaker probably broke a law. E.g., hacking Podesta's private emails would have been illegal under computer fraud and abuse. It's alternately possible that the leaker had legal access but breached contract to release the data publicly.
Now that the information has been leaked, it's hard to say that it's clearly illegal for John Q. Public to access what Wikileaks has made publicly available. The anchor is unable to point to a specific statute in his tweet above and also mentions that it hasn't been tested in court to his knowledge.
A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity. This HN comment has curated some links to primary evidence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722664 . Take a quick perusal and you'll be about as informed as anyone on the answer to your question.
I guess he never explicitly said it was legal for CNN -- maybe he was claiming that CNN is generously taking on all that legal risk so the rest of us don't have to?
This is a nice bit of propaganda you've put forth here.
Here's a Harvard study into the majority of the 2016 election coverage including primaries which shows a demonstrably strong bias in the media pro-Trump and anti-Clinton and demonstrates that Clinton has received a FAR more harsh relationship with the major press.
http://shorensteincenter.org/pre-primary-news-coverage-2016-...
http://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/figu...
It demonstrates that coverage of Clinton was on average negative about her for the entirety of 2015.
It demonstrates that Trump enjoyed a very positive and cushy relationship with newsmedia who combined to give him hundreds of millions USD of free exposure.
I would argue that Clinton has had mostly negative coverage up until the end of September 2016.
Hrm: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/785615427913199616
"tell the press to [take] them seriously"
I hope you are rational enough to see the hilarious doublespeak being engaged in here:
* Positive coverage of hillary is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
* Positive coverage of her opponent, is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
Come on man. I hope readers of this particular site are rational enough to apply occam's razor and think critically.
I also find it extremely telling that Donald Trump, Mr Reality TV and the "hyper-successful" media and real estate man isn't responsible for his own success, but rather it's his opponent which is apparently so powerful that every single event occurring is by her design...?
How feckless Trump appears in your "everything good or bad happening to both candidates was preordained in a conspiracy" viewpoint!
Not everything is a conspiracy, I hope you're capable of rational thought.
I, for one, am also comfortable blaming the Republican electorate for allowing the three pied pipers, including Trump, to have been elevated.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-press-buries-hillary-clinton...
> But the Clinton #wiki cache doesn't include any classified info as far as I know. So fine to read/download.
> Only classified or state secrets. Regular emails can be downloaded without consequence by media or others. I was wrong to group both types.
There is a caveat to the legality of classified materials, usually you must have been "entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of". Which alludes to the fact that you would first have to have been read in, or taken the material that you knew was classified.
There is also a "requirement" to "knowingly" cause harm. I put these in quotes because the wording and the enforcement of that requirement has been in flux and selective. Also relevant is that gross negligence would also meet the requirement.
I guess a creative prosecutor could challenge that visiting wikileaks would be knowingly removing the material from the server, but it would probably be beyond difficult to meet all of the guidelines for prosecution.
That being said. If you do currently hold a clearance, visiting Wikileaks is a violation of your NDA/ReadIn, Employment Agreement, and the UCMJ for service members.
Interesting. Could you explain that more?
So even possessing the appropriate clearance level doesn't give you the right to just start reading anything that interests you on a classified network. You're supposed to have a "need to know" in case you're questioned about it.
We always get stuff here (contractor on AFB) about "don't read this or that" or else you could be in trouble. But I've never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble.
Jokes aside, I found myself on the site for the first time ever last week... Didn't want to fuck with that shit during my service or while holding a clearance. But question... While I no longer have a clearance, I am still eligible for a clearance if I need it within the next few years... Should I be concerned?
Congress cannot prohibit speech or press. If it has been written down or spoken, then the US Constitution provides absolute legal justification for viewing it, copying it, and discussing it, without any restriction.
He might work around it but it's an option. I don't know about whether it's legal under UK law but their surveillance organizations seem to get away with a lot.
If GCHQ are involved with any such interference, their actions are fairly unconstrained by law. Paraphrasing Intelligence Services Act 1994, s.(3)[1]:
> [GCHQ shall] monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions [...] in the interests of national security, [or] in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands [or] in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.
As far as I know, there is nothing in statute that constrains how they go about that (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 adds a couple of hurdles in regards to interception). Any oversight comes from various Parliamentary committees.
[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/13/crossheading/gch...
My money is on this being an errant backhoe or similar, and Assange is just turning it into a big deal because he can.
And, while Ecuador hasn't had to deal with meaningful diplomatic repercussions from sheltering Assange, the high-profile role WL is taking in the 2016 elections, and specifically the partisan and selective nature of their leaks, means that Ecuador is dealing with a very different qualitative situation than when WL was acting as an impartial if indiscriminate journalistic source.
In other words, Quito may very well be looking at the situation and deciding that being implicated in attempts to manipulate the US election is way more trouble than it's worth.
Assange: "Unplug it and plug it back in" Ambassador: "I did" Assange: "Are the lights blinking?" Ambassador: "Some of them..." Assange: "Which ones..." Ambassador: "Why am I doing this?" Assange: "Which lights?" Ambassador: "All of them..."
Increasingly I think every citizen of the world has a stake in this election, given how global the reach of the US is.
For a high profile "wanted" man like Assange, I can imagine it's much more than us regular people.
I'd have a grudge too.
IMO, it was likely a joke.
Speaking for myself I know I would never say that, so the response would be "No, I never said that."
I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.
https://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/1...
I had a quick search around to see what I could find, and I did find a recent tweet from Wikileaks showing a clip from some pundit on Fox News called Bob Beckel calling for exactly that: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656/vide...
But a little further checking showed that despite this being tweeted in August this year with a headline and hashtag suggesting a link to the leaked emails, this video is actually from 2010, moreover from my exhaustive five minute search (it wasn't exhaustive really) I couldn't find any evidence of a link to Clinton's campaign, in fact according to Wikipedia the last campaign this strange chap worked on was Walter Mondale's in 1984.
http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wiki...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuQW0US2sJw
(not particularly partisan, many calls for his death-- honestly mostly from the right but not exclusively.)
>Sarah Harrison, a British journalist and a longtime WikiLeaks editor, says that the organization would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them.
The bloomberg article also quoted someone from reddit as evidence that the right wing was 'shivering in anticipation' of leaks damaging to clinton. It's not great journalism and seems biased but it doesn't seem there is any evidence that assange is pro trump.
But if there is no agenda, it does make one wonder why the Wikileaks of late have focused on Clinton in the run up to the election
Seems to me like anyone with credible evidence against Trump can sell it to the highest bidding mainstream media org and be sure it will get national attention. Why would a Trump leaker need wikileaks?
Nerddom and the left (and I'm somewhere in the overlapping circles on that Venn diagram) have a powerful rooting interest in Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who many of us see as a vanguard of an effort to disrupt politics and the media, both of whom we as a demographic have little respect for. The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. But that's very hard for us to admit, regardless of the amount of evidence we're confronted with.
One possible explanation for this is that Assange will support the candidate that he believes will hurt US interests most.
Assange is savvy enough to know their position inevitably supports Trump, but there isn't any reason to think if they viewed Trump as more corrupt they would be against him. So it is possible they take a principled position while wrongly accused of having a preference in who wins the election.
But very few observers of US politics believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. A more widely held belief is that he's the most corrupt major party nominee in the history of US politics.
Clinton's happens in secret and is masked by insincerity, lies, etc.
I think there's a brain glitch at play here -- corruption in the style of Clinton feels more corrupt because it's secretive, even if the out-in-the-open corruption is just as bad or worse.
Only this time, it seems the Clintons were trumped...
Disclosure: I support neither candidate and will probably vote the Party for Socialism and Liberation this cycle.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/10/politics/hillary-clinton-donor...
There really are people who believe that.
In fact, depending on where you get your news, you might also believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actual literal demons, who smell of sulfur.
I definitely don't think you should disregard others opinions just because,
"There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms."
That has no weight, and is just a deflection.
But, again! This is an unproductive political argument. If you support Trump, your support for Wikileaks is entirely coherent. I'm not here to argue that people shouldn't support Trump (I hope those arguments are self-evident). I'm here to point out that people who oppose Trump should recognize the role Wikileaks is playing.
Again, what you said has no bearing on what I said... I wasn't even discussing wikileaks - I was responding to the parent, mentioning how nothing sticks.
As for political ideology, again I made no comment. It's fair to call Hilary corrupt because she is, there's no political leaning involved in my comment. She clearly did a bunch of stuff on the edge of what was moral/legal. She clearly makes deals to gain favors - that's basically what politics is. I made zero comments on trump.
Finally, I am not a supporter of either candidate - they both suck and both aren't representative of my views. Nor are either going to improve my quality of life or increase my personal (or family) security.
Pointing to fringes to discredit the mainstream of said fringe is just a cheap tactic, not something worth doing out of concern for the truth.
It is not only possible but actually somewhat likely that her mails were safer on her own server.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/anatomy-of-a-medi...
In contrast, a wide range of right-wing people have spent three decades and many millions of dollars going after both Clintons, with considerable personal demonization over that time. When Obama was elected, the GOP's goal was to limit him to one term. That means a bunch of people had angles to exploit anything remotely plausible: it kept the base riled up and voting accordingly, it helped attack the sitting president by association, and maybe damage his most likely successor. The entire email story was only discovered as part of the endless attempts to trump up a scandal from the Benghazi attack, by which time the pattern of relentlessly litigating everything was just the assumed default.
There just isn't an equivalent on the Democratic side. Yes, there are people who don't like Bush (or now Trump) but there aren't rich people pushing to scrutinize his private life and the members of Congress don't seem to think that's a good use of their time.
I'm sorry, none of these seem like witch hunts to you?
- He wasn't born in the United States
- He's a Muslim
- Connection to William Ayers
- Connection to Jeremiah Wright
- Connection to ACORN
- IRS targets enemies
- Benghazi
- Fast and Furious
- Solyndra
- Death Panels
- Not saluting soldiers
- Not putting his hand on his heart during anthem
And let me highlight that Colin Powell referred to Benghazi as a "stupid witch hunt".
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/14/politics/colin-powell-benghazi...
Um, are you just blanking 2004 out of your head? This is just the same stuff all over again. All of the screaming and shouting about birth certificates and generally shady connections? His ultimate Muslim agenda to bring down the Great Satan that is America?
Absolutely nothing of worth is coming from the leaked documents, despite all hell being raised about a smoking gun (that no one can point to) in them. It literally is a witch hunt. If these past 4 elections aren't going to kill the GOP in general, I don't know if anything will. It should be disgusting the out right lies and propaganda that they employ, with a complete lack of integrity and standards. But people still buy into the juicy conspiracy theories and the generally "known and accepted" unknowns.
If HRC is the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics, then then last 4 decades of investigations and general obstructionism were undertaken by the most incompetent politicians in the history of politics. Not just one, a whole collection of individuals (senators, house members, governors) from one party who despite their best efforts continually fails at proving claims they have no problem repeating until people start to believe them.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/29176...
Of course, that's not what's going to happen, because Wikileaks is in effect if not design a propaganda organ of the Russian Federation.
This is classic US politics. This A vs B mentality is what leads to such a fierce two party system.
If you don't support choice A, then you are assumed to support choice B. Any attack on Hillary is viewed as support for Trump and vice versa.
I don't think that's a fair interpretation.
Assange is many things, but "stupid" isn't one of them. Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump has the obvious impact of helping Trump, which is why the Trump campaign claims to coordinate with him.
And it's not because I think security experts are stupid and don't realize the obvious commercial impact that a security vulnerability has.
If I was to favor the majority opinion, to oppose both Trump and Clinton is to campaign for democracy. If I had to guess what motivities Assange, if Clinton win people won't trust the government and if trump win people will fear the government. It is possible that the later will slightly produce more Snowden's.
It is still a lizard that get voted into office at the end of the day.
Some would point to the political events that the dc leaks talked about.
In favorability or approval (whatever that means in the context of a nominee) ratings? They mean different things, and aren't always directly related[1]. I could definitely see how Sanders would be liked more, but people would believe he's less likely to do a good job.
1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/14797/presidential-approval-vs-fa...
Say I rated taco, pizza and Italian salad as 10, 8, and 2, and you rated them as 2, 8, and 10, we can easily see that pizza wins even if neither of us has it as our primary pick. pizza in this case has highest opinion rating while the other two choices are quite far behind.
So, what I wonder is what questions are actually asked regarding candidates? There isn't any data on them doing the job itself yet (unless they are an incumbent, which none are this cycle), so are they asking about how much they like the person, like the policies, or how confident they are the candidate can perform well? The answer to that question may lead to different likely reasons for the question at hand. Sanders is a likable guy. I like him. I'm also not convinced his policies, as expressed on the campaign trail, are feasible. Conversely, Hillary Clinton isn't very likable. I don't really like her. I do agree with many (but not all) of her policies, but most importantly I think her policies are feasible and have a chance of being implemented if she's elected. I am, in fact, the exact sort of person that might have expressed a favorable opinion for Sanders but voted for Hillary.
Says right in the article, it was Russian hackers aiming to undermine the US democratic system. They saw this beautifully pristine, perfect and fair democratic system and said to themselves "let's undermine the fuck out of this thing".
Surely if it was already undermined to the point of being utterly broken they wouldn't have to bother, right?
Your choices are Clinton + Kaine (Dem), Trump + Pence (Rep), Johnson + Weld (Lib), and maybe Stein + Baraka (Grn). No one else could win without deadlocking the electoral college.
To oppose Clinton is little more than calling a turd sandwich a turd sandwich. One does not also need to point out that her douche opponent is a douche.
While the US elections systems virtually guarantee a two-party system, it does not mean the two on top always have to be the same parties. If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I do wish a pox on both houses--along with a hemorrhagic fever, parasitic worm infection, and some kind of blotchy skin rash. I am not staying out of the election. I think Clinton would competently lead the country in the wrong direction, and I think Trump would be a national embarrassment on multiple fronts. Strategically, the best strategy I could follow would be to bash the presumptive front-runner, whomever it may be, to keep the two major candidates as close as possible, and hope that the minor candidates can somehow win enough states to deadlock the electoral college.
Note that it is unlikely that is the primary motivation for Wikileaks. But it does show that this game is not a zero-sum either-or.
But they do not have those votes--largely because many people who share your general opinion keep hammering home the message that if you do not vote for one of the top two candidates, then at best your vote does not matter, and at worst it destroys America.
My concerns are that Trump is a misogynistic sleaze who will undermine US diplomatic prestige, be generally ineffective as a government executive trying to act like a business executive, and will damage international trade; and that Clinton is a corrupt politician who will undermine US liberty, continue indefinitely the harmful policies of Bush II and Obama, and will damage the rule of law. The fact that those third-party candidates have a statistically zero chance of winning actually makes me more comfortable in voting for one of them.
On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place. And on the even more remote chance that the Democrats self-destruct, I want the Greens to be big enough to step into their shoes. Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power.
They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
> On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place.
Don't kid yourself about some other party ever taking the place of the Democrats or Republicans. The best you can hope for is that the libertarians gain more influence than they currently have through the larger Republican party consuming them. Whether you view this as a needed shift in the right direction for the Republicans or not enough of a shift and at the cost of any power the libertarians had likely depends on how far you lean libertarian. Same with the Democrats and Green Party.
Our two party system hasn't survived for as long as it has because each party innately catered to it's constituents needs from the beginning. Each party has shifted greatly over time to track what their constituents cared about.
> Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power. ... They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
They are never going to die, period. But that's okay. They don't need to die, they just need to change, and there's plenty of precedent for that.
In presidential elections, because of the US political system, you really do have just two choices. You may lament this - I have! But it's the world we live in. Saying you'll vote for a third party candidate to "register your complaint" is a null gesture.
If you really care about politics, you'd have to work to push the party of your choice in the direction you want. This is long, hard work, and happens outside the presidential cycle. You have to march with signs, attend boring meetings, and persuade people you just met.
Complaining about the broken system every four years is neither mature nor effective.
I am moved to write this because, for multiple election cycles, I was that guy, until I realized my folly.
I think it's far more likely that if the Republicans fall apart, a large component will pivot and eat up one or more of those other parties to retain a Republican designation with slightly different values. It's a mistake to think of either of the two major parties as static.
This is in strong contrast to Westminster parliaments, where political parties are for the most part a monolith, only occasionally allowed a "conscience vote" (that's not to say there isn't infighting). To vote against the party is a very good way to get booted from the party, which as far as I'm aware is practically impossible in Congress, the closest you have is being expelled from a caucus.
well, when the system is this broken, the only throw away vote is a vote for either Clinton or Trump, because it validates the system.
you are right that my idealistic attitude might end up getting Trump elected. but that's the kind of attitude that makes clinton the alternative.
Imagine a lake of piss, next to it, a mountain of shit.
Now I dump a whole bunch of garbage onto one of them.
Which am I supporting?
Or maybe you can explain this bit from the article that really mystified me: "[Russian hackers did something] with the aim of undermining the US democratic process". We've all seen what this democratic process looks like on TV, so what does it actually still mean, to undermine this democratic process?
Most Americans, do not really want to support Clinton over Trump or vice versa, they're angry and disappointed that from a nation of several hundred million people, apparently these two are the choices given to them by "the democratic process".
And apparently this is the way it is, because the election system makes it that way. It's probably the same causes that make just about every US election for as long as I remember end up just about this close to 50/50. Which, if you know anything about voting systems theory, is the number one failure mode of majority voting. But nobody finds this cultural either/or winner/loser fixation alarming at all, apparently. So again, what's left to undermine, really?
It's just like accusing someone of trying to undermine freedom of speech in China.
If anything, Assange would want the third party libertarian to win since he is the only guy advocating to stop the wars and reduce American involvement overseas, which is what Assange wants. He sees America as a menace and wants to stop the brutality of American "peace" in countries they have no business being in.
As an anarchist, Assange probably wouldn't care about the libertarians more than any other candidate, since any candidate would only futher the existence and legitimacy of a state which he would rather see destroyed. If he did support Trump, it would be because he believes a Trump Presidency would only hasten America's demise.
Citation please. I haven't heard anything about that.
> Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump
Wikileaks can only leak what they've been given. Maybe people are feeding them more info about Hillary, but I would respect Wikileaks far less if they withheld information during an election year to protect a candidate.
The voters deserve to know everything there is to know about their candidates. It's an assault against the voters to withhold negative information about a candidate because you don't want their opponent to win.
Obviously, he doesn't have to say anything positive about Trump at all to support him, and in fact the kind of support he's offering (a drip-drip feed of the products of Russian hacking calculated to create an "October Surprise") is far more valuable than any verbal support he could give Trump directly.
I mean here to be dismissive without being too disrespectful. But I'll be candid: people who say Assange isn't supporting Trump sound pretty silly. Like, the claim says more about them than it does about the election.
Believing that sort of dichotomy is "pretty silly" and says plenty about you.
Neither case really paints a good picture of Wikileaks as an impartial journalistic organization.
Through I must say, it does making viewing news more interesting. Someone say a negative about a product, I wonder which competitor paid them? Someone released a security vulnerability, I wonder what competing product they are trying to sell.
It basically makes all negative statements into a conspiracy, which honestly is silly, but fun thought experiment.
And the proof is...
Hillary has made it quite clear that would never happen however Trump has been far more supportive of Assange especially since Wikileaks has been his biggest asset.
Secondly, and with a little more convoluted reasoning: it seems to be a truism that Republican/Conservative presidencies are harder economically for people living in poverty. Republicans are less socialist, in other words. I think it's pretty clear that Assange would like to see a revolution in the US, and revolutions tend to happen when the people don't have enough to eat. Hoping for Trump to win could be seen as hoping for a revolution in that light.
1. http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wiki...
If I could, I would encourage Julian Assange to stop fearing for his life, and start living it, whatever precious little (or lot) of it he might have left. Unfortunately, if he can't access the internet, he can't read this comment.
It's true that the whole world is watching this, and a lot of us in the US care not only for the fate of Assange, but also for the fate of our nation, how these two have become intertwined, and what it will mean if Assange does indeed come to harm as a result of his journalistic actions.
If I were Julian, I would use right now as the perfect opportunity to walk out, and face the charges in Sweden. At least then I could serve actual time (if necessary), and have an end to my imprisonment within sight.
Above all, this is certainly an excellent opportunity for Hillary to show that she can resolve a crisis diplomatically. If she could just tone things down a bit, she could assure Julian (and the world) that she does not actually mean him any harm. Of anyone, I would think that Hillary could be quite good at projecting soft power globally.
Besides, can you imagine what it would be like if they killed him now? The Hollywood trailer of his biopic would have to start with, "First, they cut your internet access ..." ;)
If the answer is "no", you're not part of the left and you're likely more of a liberal then.
Aristotle said there are 6 kinds of government, 3 good ones and 3 bad ones. The bad ones are where the ruler rules in their own interest. The good ones are where the ruler rules in the public interest. How many people rule: In Tyranny - 1 person rules in their own interest Monarchy - 1 person rules in the public interest (a good tyrant is a monarch) Aristocracy - a few people rule in the public interest Oligarchy - a few people rule in their own interest Democracy - all people rule in the public interest Bad Democracy - all people rule in the interest of the majority and oppress the minority
Let's take a few highly profitable corporations as examples. How do workers seize the means of production of Apple or Google?
Particularly, how do they do it without destroying the said means?
>http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/08/26/assange-trumps-ever...
This is hard to swallow.
There is nothing in Wiki/Assange past behaviour that would indicate they would like to support Trump.
Unless: They like 'whoever is against Hillary'
OR
Wiki is getting a lot of support from Russia, and they may be indirectly leaning towards conspiring with them for political favour etc..
Putin just might have enough pull to eventually get Assange out of his prison.
And despite his 'vendetta' I have no doubt that he would release anti-Trump bits if he had them.
Wikipedia - whatever it's credibility - is headed by a dude with somewhat demagogic and self-glorifying tendencies himself.
This kind of language is common for propaganda and astroturfing.
HRC likely just has a larger attack surface.
Who knows what they have?
[1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-...
[2] http://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/russian-propaganda-on-wikile...
He's in sanctuary, in part, because of fear of extradition to the US. So yeah, he does have a stake.
If Clinton wins she has no motivation to stop an extradition, since she figures in WL and other leaks.
If Trump wins, and Assange/WL is seen to have implicitly supported him, there is a hope for Assange that President Trump could prohibit his DoJ from extraditing, and his DoD from rendering. Not from gratitude, but because Trump is vindictive and that would be a way to stick it to ... to ... The Global Media/Banking/Government/NotWhite Conspiracy.
I'm kind of amazed that WL or someone else hasn't hacked and released Trump data. Do they just not use computers?
I haven't seen any word on their explanation, though.
I guess that if you are living in a state of fear, expecting storm troopers through the door at any moment, then you could reasonably presume that the CIA are to blame for one's lack of wifi.
To be honest, I wish it was newsworthy when I spent a day or two offline. But it isn't.
With all the propaganda and accusations going around, please substantiate this.
Which seems like a rather large issue with your theory.
I see no reason to trust their judgment here. As the kids might say these days, evidence or GTFO.
I was surprised by your claim that wikileaks posted something antisemitic, so I googled for it.
Is http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil... what you're talking about? I don't agree that's antisemetic in any honest sense of that word (ie "hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews"). Like, the article's explanation of why it's anti-semitic starts off with "this might be a little hard to follow" -- not something you'd expect in an article throwing around serious accusations.
Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed. --reputation[Slate];
> and wild conspiracy theories
Interesting, any you'd care to link?
> You're also assuming that whoever posts to the Wikileaks twitter account doesn't want people to believe the most sympathetic, conspiratorial possibility.
I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
It's using the clearly anti-Semitic (((echo))) format, and linking those people to a mysterious cabal working against them. That is an incredibly standard anti-Semitic view. In what way is that not prejudiced against Jews?
>Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed.
What is Hanlon's razor for including an anti-Semitic key in their tweet? I'm honestly asking what the simpler explanation is for them including that, and then going on to link (((those people))) to an international conspiracy, something people have accused Jews of for centuries.
>Interesting, any you'd care to link?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/08/09/wikileaks_...
>I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
That they'd never heard of the key? (I hadn't, as the slate reporter seemed to anticipate with their "might be a little hard to follow" comment)
> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/08/09/wikileaks_...
Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did. Posting a wild conspiracy theory in this case would be openly accusing a specific person or group of people of murder with no evidence.
I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
> Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause -- aka a lot of cost with no benefit. Seems surprisingly stupid/pointless/shortsighted.
Then why use it? You're saying it's more likely they hadn't heard of it, but used it anyway? You've never heard of it, have you ever surrounded a reference to people you don't like and are accusing of nefarious deeds with triple parentheses? What about the additional part about a shadowy cabal that you ignored?
>Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did.
If I offer a reward for proof that aliens abducted Elvis, you don't consider that lending credence to a conspiracy theory?
>I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
>They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause
No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
Yes, right. They used it as a way of naming the thing they were seeing, not using it like someone familiar with it.
> What about the additional part about a shadowy cabal that you ignored?
I just rechecked the article. What shadowy cabal part?
> If I offer a reward for proof that aliens abducted Elvis, you don't consider that lending credence to a conspiracy theory?
I think a reward initially signals interest in the area, and then longer term acts as a disproof of the theory. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_... for a famous example of this effect.
> Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
Leaks of significance are of course worth more. Soliciting leaks is absolutely something they do (and should do).
> No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
Well, except that denying hard evidence doesn't usually work (#include those who have been leak subjects). Also people all over the web are having conversations like this one, so the situation degenerating into a head-said/she-said situation would have a cost. Which as I pointed out before was an obvious outcome of their tweet.
Happy travels :)
You do know that the people they were talking about in their tweet didn't literally have (((echoes))) around their names, right?
Maybe not specifically to Assange, but they might be able to get close to that. An embassy probably wants to have separate, isolated networks to keep various classes of users apart. The top diplomats and officials who deal with the most important, most secret stuff on one. Another for lower level officials who deal with secret, but more routine stuff. A third that provides wifi for people visiting the embassy to use its services. Maybe a fourth for foreign diplomats attending meetings.
I could see them going beyond just building one physical network and then using firewalls to segment it into separate isolated logical networks and actually having separate physical connections for some of the networks, such as the one for visitors seeking services, and the one for foreign diplomats.
If they do have multiple physical networks, I'd expect they have Assange on one of the ones that is not important to the normal functioning of the embassy, such as one mostly used by people visiting to apply for visas and things like that. A large fraction of such visitors will have cellular internet on their phones and won't even notice that the embassy public wifi is broken.
Surely Assange or someone has a smartphone. If that's cut too, you can be sure it's something big.
I mean, what would be the goal? They go to all this trouble, and risk an international incident, for what? It's not like they'd actually be able to prevent Assange from communicating. At best they'd inconvenience him slightly until he figures out an alternate means of communication.
On the one hand we have a guy with the big cache of emails he really wants people to pay more attention to before November 9th, and a police interview originally scheduled for today that he might want to find a reason to postpone for more than a month next time. On the other hand, I'm really struggling to see what forcing Assange to wait a few hours or change computers achieves, or what the motivation for shutting him off today rather than November 8th is?
Also, I bet some industrious hackers could hack together a microcontroller, photodiodes, and cheap lasers for a line of sight connection as a bridge.
But based on where the embassy is, it's probably easier to stand near a window and get on the WiFi from Pret a Manger next door.
I don't know about wireless standards to say whether or not it's possible to selectively disable regions or devices.
Random, unverified claim, but all we have.
When a system is failing it enters a death spiral where the pool from which it can hire people gets shallower and shallower (less people are interested in working for the government) until the only persons left are either morons or sociopaths (who want power)
"We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/19/wikileaks-ecua...
Ever since the DNC leaks and the subsequent accusations against Russia, it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former. Since the RNC, Trump's campaign has been entirely pushing "Don't believe their lies", and the gaslighting from both sides seems to be hitting a nadir at this moment. It's becoming far more difficult to find reality in the fog.
These are indeed interesting times.
Agreed. It's like some people somewhere woke up and realized hiring some script kiddies to hack old people that use the same password for all their accounts is a lot cheaper and easier than old-fashioned espionage.
The frenzied pace at which all of this is happening reminds me a child with a new toy.
>gaslighting from both sides
I disagree that Clinton is trying to distort reality. She is more old school - she just stright up lies from time to time. Trump, on the other hand, is quite literally trying to create an alternate reality.
"What that means specifically is that they are going to turn over all the Blumenthal emails to the Committee that they hav along with some other HRC emails that include a slightly broader set of search terms than the original batch. That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that HRC didn't, which will make clear to them that she didn't have them in the first place, deleted them, or didn't turn them over."
- Purposefully witholding all emails that were between HRC and POTUS [2]:
"Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That's the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I seems like they will."
- Evidence that the DNC purchased craigslist ads in attempt to frame Trump [3]
"We’re proud to maintain a “fun” and “friendly work environment, where the boss is always available to meet with his employees. Like it or not, he may greet you with a kiss on the lips or grope you under the meeting table. Interested applicants should send resume, cover letter, and headshot to jobs@trump.com<mailto:jobs@trump.com>"
- Clinton Foundation accepting $1 million from Qatar for Bill's birthday. [4]
1. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9272
2. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9545
How is your reading comprehension this bad?
1. Your understanding of the comment here is miserable given the point you are trying to make. If you should find anything suspicious, it is that the 2nd set of e-mails, with a broader search, included e-mails that should have been turned over previously but weren't. If you want to go down that angle, you think the Benghazi committee would sit on those e-mails and not say anything if there was anything particularly salient in them?
2. You have an issue that State is considering whether releasing POTUS e-mails are subject to executive privilege and should be cleared first?
3. Really? I'll parrot the guys that give out free comedy show tickets - "you don't like to laugh? you don't like humor?"
4. Please point me to the illegal or unethical behavior here.
Well to start, Qatar is funding ISIS according to other emails so maybe don't accept money from states that sponsor terrorism?
I mean we could go into how they stone gays for being themselves and women for having the gaul to think they can drive but we all know that's totally ethical.
[1] https://www.charitywatch.org/ratings-and-metrics/bill-hillar...
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-...
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/09/22/clinton-cash-autho...
Page 18 and 19. Out of a budget of $217 million, they spent $34 million on direct program expenditures. That's about 16%, not 88% as your link would lead us to believe.
Additionally, what is this money spent on?
Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton Presidential Center, Clinton Development Initiative, Clinton Health Matters Initiative, Clinton Giustra Sustaninable Growth Initiative
A little self-serving, don't you think? And what percentage of the money going to those initiatives do you think are spent on directly charitable causes?
No one should be under the illusion that the Clinton Foundation is a charity. It isn't. It's a slush fund for political purposes. Look at how mismanaged the billions of dollars for Haiti has been if you want to see how charitable the Clintons are (spoiler: nearly none of the money has actually been spent on Haiti, and virtually none of it on direct relief).
It's easy to imagine situations where that money is not being spent 100% efficiently, but it also seems unlikely that it is being spent perfectly inefficiently.
If the foundation were trying to fight AIDS by directly funding the distribution of treatments the numbers in the report would be pretty bad, but that's not the picture here.
[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/22/12893444/cl...
HRC is the same woman that literally laughed and bragged on a television interview about killing Gaddafi. As shitty as he was, he was a real person. A living human, and she laughs about killing him. It's fine to have pride in protecting your country, but killing someone (much less a head of state) should never be a laughing matter.
I find it a bit troubling that in the article he makes passing mention of the drug company the CGI was working with but no mention of how they got into huge trouble for not actually passing many drugs, including the AIDS vaccine through QA.
You really have to wonder the about effects of pushing down the margins of a drug company who wasn't even following safety standards at the time.
Every time we get a new accusation from Trump (Clinton Foundation is a slush fund!!!) it turns out that Trump is actually the one doing it.
It's classic mis-direction. Accuse your opponent first to put them on the defensive, then when evidence if your own wrongdoing comes out you can muddy the waters and say no one has clean hands.
The Clintons used their personal connections and foundation money to lobby drug companies to give massive discounts on AIDs drugs to poor people. They've literally saved thousands of lives.
Trump's charity has done nothing charitable. He hasn't even donated to it in many years.
This is unproductive and dishonest hyperbole and I'm not going to waste my breath explaining the obvious.
>It's classic mis-direction
So is your post. "Just look at how bad Trump is!".
>to lobby drug companies to give massive discounts on AIDs drugs to poor people
What they've actually done is lobby drug companies into business dealings that make money for everyone. Do you think the drug companies are just giving shit out for free because Hillary and Bill asked nicely? Of course not. This would be like Trump saying he's saved lives by providing employment with health benefits.
>Trump's charity has done nothing charitable
It's funny that you try to say this in the same post as "Trump uses his charity to pay off his businesses legal settlements" because that pay-off was actually a donation to a charity for veterans (something the city of Palm Beach agreed to).
The view the plebs demands often don't align with either the politicians vision for the country, what's possible near or long term, or the people you are indebted to (donors, etc).
In many cases it's acceptable and even advisable, in my opinion.
A head of state has insight into facts and knowledge of others about realities and facts that most will / can / not understand (and SOMETIMES shouldn't even be known publicly).
What's not acceptable is if a politician is a puppet for donors.
The amount of money and network it takes to become president in the US is ridiculous, and basically necessitates being dirty and indebted.
---
Also, Clinton is most likely no worse than most previous presidents. There's just considerably more information about her.
But if you have the choice between that and Trump, I cannot imagine how you could choose the latter.
Status quo vs. something different. The status quo is that Obama/Hillary have destabilised countless countries, and are sabre rattling against Russia, possibly leading to an eventual nuclear war.
By contrast, Trump is promising less wars, less interventionism, and otherwise is a relative wildcard with a penchant towards pragmatism and deal-making.
I'm not American, but on paper, it looks like Trump would be an improvement as far as world stability goes, I'd vote for him based on his policy concerning Russia alone.
The Clinton/Bush/Obama dynasties have not made the world a better place, have not contributed to anything positive IMO, and judging by all the leaked emails, they're all corrupt as well.
Also, I wouldn't call what Obama did sable rattling. Russia did invade several countries in the last years (Georgia, Ukraine, and maybe I'm missing one more?). If you don't have a good response for that, then how can you be trusted to defend your other allies (Poland, etc.)
Again, both actions you cite were reactions to US meddling in the region in the first place.
The fact Trump hasn't threatened any new invasions is already an improvement.
PS. Do you know who Mikheil Saakashvili is, what he did, where he is now, and why he's exiled from his own country? And have you seen Victor Yushchenko's face recently, what it looks like? The answers to both of these questions give a lot of insight into US actions in the region.
Right -- the several thousand army and special forces troops that Putin has since openly acknowledged sending there to size buildings and other strategic checkpoints were just out on vacation.
Either way -- the main point is (and presumably you do know this), the leased military base at Sevastopol != the Crimean peninsula.
Trump would improve relations with Russia.
I truly believe Trump is a populist reformer, trying to help the Everyman.
But keep in mind that even though the Populares were nominally "for the people", they only used them for their own ends. They were very much as political as the Optimates.
It's a sad state of affairs when a relative madman looks like a saner alternative to a truly sick and twisted authoritarian war-hawk.
But perhaps a madman is needed to tear down this malfunctioning and corrupt system where a few elites benefit at the expense of the common man.
It wouldn't surprise me if this election is the last one we'll ever have.
Populists can be dangerous, but they can also do a lot of good. It seems worth a chance in the current environment, though ever since I read this passage from http://www.constitution.org/eng/patriarcha.htm I've been wary of those with mass support: "Nero, Heliogabalus, Otho, Vitellius, and such other monsters of nature, were the minions of the multitude and set up by them. Pertinax, Alexander, Severus, Gordianus, Gallus, Emilianus, Quintilius, Aurelianus, Tacitus, Probus, and Numerianus, all of them good emperors in the judgment of all historians, yet murdered by the multitude."
The POTUS can literally end humanity with a few words. That's not an exaggeration. I want change as much as the next guy, but not if it means handing the power to start the apocalypse to a man like Donald Trump.
I'm struggling to comprehend how you can look at Trump's statements and come out thinking that he'll improve world stability. Trump thinks that NATO is obsolete - he's happy for the US to abandon it and totally change the balance of power in Europe. He has stated that nuclear proliferation is a good thing, even encouraging an Asian nuclear arms race between the DPRK and ROK/Japan. He's asked, "why can't [the US] use nuclear weapons?"
She tries to run on anti-establishment but there is no-one that is more establishment than her.
She tries to run on fighting for women's rights but she is an apologist for her husband's sordid history of sexual abuse towards other women, and not only that but she will readily accept funds from people that are the most misogynistic on the face of the Earth (the Gulf monarchies).
The difference is her stance is opposite from what she campaigns on -- there is a word for this: hypocrite. She clearly has no moral center.
Source?
> She tries to run on anti-establishment but there is no-one that is more establishment than her.
Sure, but that's just marketing, not substance.
> She tries to run on fighting for women's rights but she is an apologist for her husband's sordid history of sexual abuse towards other women, and not only that but she will readily accept funds from people that are the most misogynistic on the face of the Earth (the Gulf monarchies).
It is not clear that Clinton ever sexually abused women. He cheated on his wife, yes. But that is a far cry from 'sexual abuse'.
Re: gay rights.
How about that cackle?
What is a political opportunist? The Clintons have always operated via the polls. Against gay marriage when being against it was popular, now an ardent supporter.
> her private positions is nothing short of abject disdain for LGTBs.
You recognize and admit (as you have no choice doing, after the mountain of proof) that the media willingly prostitutes itself to further the cause of the current administration, with no regard for actual truth.
But you allow yourself to be influenced in your opinion of Donald Trump by that same media.
Imagine if a mean girl in your office told everybody that you were a brown-nosing little weasel who stared at her all the time, even though it's not true. Nobody will sit next to you at lunch, and you refuse to sit next to Billy, since that same girl said he picks is nose and eats it. Can't you understand that once you know she's a liar, you can't trust her about Billy either?
Watching a video of one of his rallies or a debate is sufficient to form my own opinion.
He (is)
- lies or distorts the truth almost everytime he opens his mouth
- extremely authoritarian
- very anti free media (at his rallys, media is cordoned off and he gets the crowd to yell at them for minutes. that is if the outlet hasn't been banned for reporting the truth. I wonder why the media is anti Trump...)
- sexist and abusive (enough evidence there, he says so himself)
- racist (again, no more evidence needed, he said it all)
- only cares about his own interests (yay, big tax cuts for the rich are his tax plan)
- very uneducated and uninformed on the actual issues
and just generally a disgusting man (my opinion).
It might very well be that he is not actually racist and that a lot of what he says is just what works with the crowds. That really doesn't matter much, though.
He is a populist par excellence. You can't trust anything he says.
And a very dangerous man to be the head of state in a country where that position holds so much power.
Were I American, I'd have a hard time voting for Clinton too. But that more than 40% would even consider voting for Trump scares me.
I guess you haven't been paying attention. Trump was, for many years, a celebrity, making millions of dollars for NBC with his TV shows. Everything about him that they complain about now they happily accepted then, when it suited them.
For example, where was this 11-year-old video during the primaries? Answer that question and you will begin to understand what's going on here.
This "anti-free-media" claim is weird when you compare it to Clinton's campaign. For nearly a year she had zero press conferences--not even giving the media a chance. Now we find that her campaign specifically wanted to avoid answering any questions, to prevent the media from having a chance to question her about inconvenient stories. And we discover that the mainstream media is actively colluding with her campaign, giving them veto power over stories and quotes, etc.
So shouldn't you at least claim that she is as anti-free-media as he is?
> But that more than 40% would even consider voting for Trump scares me.
There is much more at stake here than these two individual people running for the office. The real contest here is between the movements they represent.
One of these two campaigns has been co-opted by a candidate who is not even a member of it. How did this candidate do so? With the help of the media, which vehemently attacked all other candidates during the primaries.
Now that same media is trying to destroy that candidate. That candidate is virtually a strawman candidate, set up for the sake of being torn down.
So, what does that tell you? Based on that, which candidate--which movement--should one vote for?
Seriously, can you provide references to back up some of this? The only thing I've heard about it so far is that in a profile piece, a portion was talked about off the record, and the reporter requested the use of some of the off the record material, and gave them a chance to review what could be used, since it was at their discretion it be used at all. The same reporter explained that there was a portion of his profile of Trump earlier he didn't use because it was off the record as well. The reporter is on record explaining this[1].
If there are other instances, please explain them, otherwise people are going to assume you are referring to this, which I think is pretty well explained. This is the reason people keep asking for sources. Without sources, it's just hearsay.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/anatomy-of-a-medi...
How about Jake Tapper of CNN describing one of the events described in the emails about a question being leaked to the clinton campaign as "Journalistically it’s horrifying"?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/10/...
A Democratic Party official suggested the question was actually prep for a panel Brazile was set to appear on, saying Brazile normally checked with both Democratic candidates for their positions. The day after the email was sent, Brazile appeared on ABC's "This Week" as a panelist.
Now, this isn't the best excuse, so I'm not sure I believe it, but I'm also not sure what I'm supposed to expect the Clinton campaign to have done. Loudly proclaim they got a town hall question beforehand when Brazile may have been misinterpreted, or wrong? Denounce her afterwards when they had already benefited from the knowledge, so people would vilify them anyway? If this was as bad as it looks, I'm still left concluding it was, until proven otherwise, and isolated incident, and one in which I think the campaign may have benefited, but ultimately didn't act in any way I wouldn't have expected them to (barring further information, such as them pumping her for more info). I also don't harbor any fantasies that the Trump campaign would have acted any differently.
Finally, I agree, it is journalistically horrifying. That's because journalism has it's own standards and ethics to consider. It was horrible for a journalist. But Clinton and her staff aren't journalists, they are politicians, and while it would be great if it wasn't true, we expect less from them. That's why journalism is so important and why it's protected under the first amendment, because it keeps politicians in check.
1: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/wikileaks-email-hack-c...
Of course that's not indicative of a problem--they're just exercising their free speech rights, right? They're not biased at all...
(And before you go all wikipedia on me with "sources, sources! hearsay!", just google "journalist campaign contributions" and do your own homework.)
>racist (again, no more evidence needed, he said it all)
Trump has more support of black and hispanic people than any other Republican presidential nominee. [1] He has that because the ones who speak English (not getting their news only from Univision) understand that he wants to help Americans of all ethnic groups.
The co-opting of minority votes by the democratic machine is legendary, but it's over. Those minority AMERICANS that are getting the message undistorted by the media are understanding that their lives are made worse by liberal policies, not better.
It's not racist to wish to enforce current immigration law. It's not racist to wish to protect the jobs and lives of American citizens. If you're reading HN, I know you actually understand this, but choose to spit venom anyway.
[1] http://truthfeed.com/trump-surging-with-black-americans-beat...
The only way you can defend this kind of claim is cherry picking a high outlier poll against the comparable-time polling consensus (or low outliers) for previous GOP nominees.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/08/donald-trump-continu...
Is it your contention that any poll that doesn't support your thesis is an "outlier poll"?
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old...
You can actually read the sampling percentages yourself, on most of them.
Anyway, I'll just leave this here. http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/actuarial-review-of-...
Truthfeed pointed out that NBC/WSJ didn’t mention that the poll was created by a Hillary Super PAC.
The sourced article does not prove that. It proves that the polling organization that did the polling received money. Now, as a rational person, I might think that was money required to actually run a poll, since they aren't free, and cost money to run. Zero consideration was given to this, no follow up was done with the polling organization to ask them what this money was for, nor to ask them if they received money from other organizations (from ones supporting Trump, for example).
A partisan blog is very low journalistic standards sourcing its news from another blog with both low journalistic and low investigative standards should not be your source of news. Seriously, how can you put forward a link like this with a straight face? Did you actually look into this at all, or did you just take what was written on random blogs as de facto truth, and completely suspend all disbelief?
It’s also well known that the Monmouth University poll is run by a Hillary Huckster who recently was caught manipulating a poll and then lied about it.
Already off to a good start! Such unbiased reporting, referring to a "Hillary Huckster". This claim, that they only weighted based on party affiliate, is easily proven false. I downloaded the PDF with the poll results in question[1], located the tables references, and ran some numbers. No weighting is immediately apparent by gender, but the gender breakdown is close to the actual makeup of the country/region, so none may have been needed (or it may have been small enough to be undetectable). There is definitely weighting by age and race, and of course past political affiliation. The claims that only political affiliation were weighted for are provably false. Even by the data shown in the blog, if anyone had bothered to actually look, rather than just take what was said at face value.
With all the liberal distortions and dishonesty we decided to have a small team of actuarial and statistics professionals take a look at a couple of the recent polls to get their take on the reliability of these polls.
Good! That sounds like a good way to investigate this. So who are these actuaries and statisticians? They aren't ever identified. See, this is where a real journalist would be called out for sloppy reporting. Are these actuarial and statistician professionals "self-professed", or are they recognized in their fields? Do they even really exist? We have no way to know for sure, beyond "this blog referenced them".
By selecting more Dems the polls are designed to provide a Dem result.
Actually, that's what the weighting is for. You know, the thing this blog recently calling out as unfair? The whole purpose is to account for random sampling error. If the population was split evenly at 50% Democrat and 50% Republican, but your sample showed of the 100 people you asked a question, 45 were Democrat and 55 were Republican, due purely to chance and the fact you are sampling, not asking every person, how do you propose we would adjust for that to account for how we think it would really break down on election day? We weight the Democrats up to 50%, and the Republicans down to 50%. In reality, it's not obviously not 50%, but that's the point of weighting a poll.
Let me put it very simply. If your news sources refer to Clinton as "Crooked Hillary" or alternatively to Trump as "The Donald", or refers to "The Democrats" or "The Republicans" as a singular force that can be corrupt, or make blanket statements like "Let’s face it NOBODY likes Hillary and NOBODY trusts Hillary" or reference blogs as their source that do any of those things, you can't really trust them to give you an honest, impartial view of anything. You may think the MSM is biased, but usually what I hear as evidence of that assertion is that they aren't reporting on "news" such as this, when it's very cleat this isn't "news", by any journalistic standard. The MSM might be somewhat biased, but I think it's clear they are definitively less biased than the source you referenced, which ranges between referencing other sources that are plain wrong and itself making unsubstantiated statements without evidence.
If you want info on polls to trust, it's not too hard to find people willing to look into them with a more balanced approach[2].
1: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthP... PDF at bottom.
This is absolutely ridiculous, trump has been a public figure for 30+(?) years. Even if you ignore the smearing that's been happening for the past year in the media, there's plenty of reasons to think this guy is the last person you'd want as president
Absolutely! I agree wholeheartedly.
> The amount of money and network it takes to become president in the US is ridiculous, and basically necessitates being dirty and indebted.
I thought we just agreed that politicians should not be puppets? And now they must be dirty and indebted? The situation is definitely ridiculous!
> Also, Clinton is most likely no worse than most previous presidents. There's just considerably more information about her.
That is certainly a rational outlook on the matter. We are definitely in a period where we have more information available.
But something else has changed (some 60 years and just 10 presidents past) - politicians are now evaluated largely according to TV performance, and costs have spiralled out of control. Perhaps when it was much less costly to become president, you didn't need to be dirty and indebted?
> But if you have the choice between that and Trump, I cannot imagine how you could choose the latter.
Only this convoluted bit of logic could possibly suffice: I think Clinton would make an acceptable President, and would continue the status quo. There would be little reform-instead, things would just get a little bit worse. Trump would be awful. However, I think that I (and my son, who will not be 18 in this presidency) could probably survive with only moderate loss of personal resources. As a result of that... experiment, I expect that in coming years the DNC and the country in general would institute various reforms that would be good for the long-term health of the country.
Really? Even with binary opinions like supporting gay marriage?
So you agree that she is trying to create an alternative reality for private purposes?
No, wait, that was the Trump Foundation protecting the fraudulent Trump University.
For Trump, it's completely different. His strategy is built on two pillars - exposing the existence of the corrupt system and presenting himself as somebody who can fix it. The second part, unfortunately, is completely false and that's where alternative reality comes in - he needs to paint himself as somebody capable of doing a thing he has no idea how to do and no capability to do. That's why he always proposes over the top things - to capture one's imagination and paint himself as somebody who can do things. The proposal itself does not matter, neither the facts he claims to base it on - what matters is the image of somebody who knows how to do things, and has the guts to do them. Since the reality of his capabilities is rather modest, constant stream of fiction is required to keep this idea alive.
It's not irrational paranoia to believe your government operates as a separate entity, one that is not subject to the rule of law. From the Iraq war, to torture, to retroactively legal bulk collection, to immunity granted to telecoms for doing illegal surveillance, to no one going to jail in response to 2008, the list goes on and on.
We have a government all too happy to throw millions of us in jail for the most minor of offenses, yet the same rules don't appear to apply to the people constantly on our TV screens or ones that aren't with enough connections.
HRC is not the devil, but she represents something deeply unsavory to a lot of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum.
Trump is an obvious mad man. The fact that so many people are willing to give such a man the ability to unilaterally destroy humanity speaks volumes about where western civilization is at right now.
As a simple example, in a narrative film I'll cut from angle to another when actor A takes a drink from a glass of water. The reason I want to cut is that I have begun to feel bored by shot #1 already for whatever reason - actor A may not be that good looking, or not a great actor, or the scripted dialog may be dull, whatever. It's boring, and that means you the viewer will be bored with it soon too. But I can't just cut away or you'll know what I'm up to. I'll wait until actor A engages in a physical movement and your visual cortex will quietly paper over the transition for me. Hmm, Actor A drank from the glass at different times during different takes, and the action of drinking doesn't line up with the dialog? No problem, I'll just cut briefly to a shot of actor B reacting to actor A (and by exploiting the Kuliekov effect, I can significantly change the meaning of the scene depending on what facial expression I choose to show on actor B) and then I'll cut back to actor A talking again from the new angle.
You would be surprised how many movie scenes depicting two people in a room were shot across 2 different days with the actors never actually meeting in person. Likewise you would be astonished at the number of ways the same footage could be combined to tell radically different stories. I have made edits where I have run pieces of footage backwards and not even the director noticed until I pointed it out. Don't think you can't be fooled by even a semi-skillful editor, your brain has been trained in how to watch TV and movies probably from infancy, and while it is not too hard to break free of that training, nor is it hard for others to manipulate your pre-existing mental reflexes.
The hidden video he released today looks incontrovertible. One can only imagine all the other things these dark political operatives do if they were willing to discuss what they did so explictly with people they presumably don't know well.
Could you elaborate on the Kuliekov effect? Couldn't find anything related with a quick google search.
I know you're trying to be dismissive with your glib comment but let me tell you: I do hold him to the same standard and I find him to be a jackass.
That doesn't change the fact that James O'Keefe is a convicted criminal (attempted to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu's office).
It also doesn't change the fact that he heavily edited the ACORN video to skew the story, nor that they were humoring him and reported his nonsense to the police. Conservatives wanted to believe his lies so they did.
O'Keefe has zero credibility.
I remain in awe of the state apparatus, and the cynical brilliance required to run it all (assuming there is such a central clique).
I mean, how brilliant you have to be to hire a person that would go to reddit to ask about how to cover up your tracks? Or claim you forgot everything about it when asked, including seeing documents that bear your signature? A five year old could do such performance.
I'd discount some of the paranoia around the FRB, but the modern monetary system appears to be a very very clever way of herding a population; really if you control the banks, you essentially control a population (since loans become the only way to obtain currency). Taxes then for instance would be superfluous were it not necessary to bring a currency into circulation and to avoid inflation (and thus avoid seditious movements).
I've been trying to find mathematics that describes the banking system, but it appears there are none (other than such hand-wavy deductions).
[1] http://www.infowars.com/expose-rapist-bill-clinton-win-5k/
Infowars does not hide it - it is on their website.
Clinton campaign's plots/schemes would have remained unknown to the public, if not for Wikileaks.
I encourage anyone reading to watch the video, acknowledge it's biased and draw your own conclusions.
You can't edit words into someone's mouth.
I think this is the soundest advice here. The formatting of the video makes it obvious that there is a partisan motivation behind this investigation. However, the video also provides a certain amount of raw and non-processed evidence that can be judged on their own merits.
This is like in football (soccer) where it's against the rules to grab your opponent inside the box when they're taking a free kick on your goal but everyone is doing it anyway, it becomes pointless to complain and moan about it. The same goes for hand-checking in basketball and I'm sure you could find analogies in American football as well.
Of course, everyone knows that in a presidential race, things get pretty heated up. However, the violence of the conflict between the two campaigns goes well beyond the violence I anticipated. It seems that everything is now fair game.
More importantly, it is clear that there is a huge collusion between the mediatic and political sphere. Again, on a magnitude that goes well beyond what was suspected. Finally, it is quite disturbing - again, from a contemplative PoV - that high-ranking party officials and a candidate themself actually take an active role in this. Before watching this, I would have expected some shady consulting firm running through an ocean of intermediaries and headed by a "special advisor" to some high-ranking DNC official. No, in fact the hierarchy height is much smaller.
Wikileaks notified of an incoming set of documents dangerous to the DNC well before those Trump videos arose.
So they promised releases well in advance and then released them.
> And they also released social security numbers, names and addresses for hundreds/thousands of people, so they're obviously not that concerned with protecting people.
That wasn't Wikileaks, it was Michael Best. Did you read the update at the top of the article you linked?
From Michael Best himself:
> @WikiLeaks didn't upload the #AKP files with the private info on Turkish women - I did (and they've been removed)
https://twitter.com/natsecgeek/status/758059030527021056
Stop reading the Huffington Post; it's a rag.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? They promised releases to occur each week, until eventually weeks later an actual leak came out.
>That wasn't Wikileaks, it was Michael Best. Did you read the update at the top of the article you linked?
Yes, did you? It shows that he passed the data to Wikileaks, who didn't do the protection of information you say they do, and just released the information. And then never took responsibility. I mean, look at their own responses to that tweet. They're denying that anything they did was even bad.
I notice you also completely ignored the part about them releasing the private information of DNC donors.
>Stop reading the Huffington Post; it's a rag.
Stop complaining about sources when you are getting basic facts incorrect.
Wikileaks linked to the information; it was hosted on the Internet Archive, who took it down[0].
> And then never took responsibility.
It wasn't theirs to take down. The parties responsible took it down, responsibly.
> They're denying that anything they did was even bad.
They denied that members of the APK are an at-risk group.
> I notice you also completely ignored the part about them releasing the private information of DNC donors.
Because that's not the example you used. I wasn't aware you were refering to DNC donors with your accusation.
0: https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/07/26/the-who-and-how-of-t...
This is what I said
>And they also released social security numbers, names and addresses for hundreds/thousands of people, so they're obviously not that concerned with protecting people.
Sorry if that wasn't clear what I was referencing
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/22/12259258/wikileaks-leaked-...
Yikes.
The persons who need to defend their actions are the DNC, who sent personal information over plaintext. Don't shoot the messenger.
Moreover, if you had a stack of printouts containing your customer's credit card information sitting on your counter while you left your front door wide open, and _that_ was stolen, I would consider that you had improperly cared for the private information of your customers.
Nothing is assured to remain safe.
>Moreover, if you had a stack of printouts containing your customer's credit card information sitting on your counter while you left your front door wide open, and _that_ was stolen, I would consider that you had improperly cared for the private information of your customers.
You have stopped trying to defend WikiLeaks and put all the blame on the DNC. Even if I grant you all of this, that still doesn't abdicate the responsibility of the people who took the data, or the people releasing the data. Taking someone else's private data, even if they made it easy for you to do, and broadcasting it to the world, putting people at risk and exposing their private information unrelated to any government transparency goal you may have, is irresponsible and dangerous.
The DNC put its donors at risk by engaging in ludicrously unsafe storage practices for their private information. Someone, who was not Wikileaks, made off with that information as a result.
Wikileaks provided the information when it received it; but in no way can the donors be certain that Wikileaks is the only party who received the stolen information.
Wikileaks did those donors a favour by declaring to the world that their private information was stored and transferred irresponsibly by the DNC.
Every one of those donors should now immediately contact the proper authorities to protect themselves from credit card and identity fraud. That agony is upon them as a direct result of the irresponsible practices of the DNC, and it is only because of the actions of Wikileaks that they are now aware that they are at risk.
And I have pointed out that they actively put people at risk. Of course, you deflect it onto the DNC, as evidence by:
>The DNC put its donors at risk by engaging in ludicrously unsafe storage practices for their private information. Someone, who was not Wikileaks, made off with that information as a result.
And WikiLeaks made that information publicly available, without any effort made to protect individuals. That is dangerous and irresponsible. If I leave my wallet on the sidewalk, whatever claims of negligence you want to level at me it's still morally wrong (and illegal) for you to take it and use it to steal my identity.
>Wikileaks did those donors a favour by declaring to the world that their private information was stored and transferred irresponsibly by the DNC.
We're on Hacker News, so I'm hoping you're at least somewhat familiar with the term Responsible Disclosure? If someone discovers a vulnerability in a banking website, you think the best way to help their customers is to make the vulnerability immediately available to the whole world? They "helped" these donors by making their private information public? That's just straight up delusional, to completely flip reality on it's head just to support a group you like.
>That agony is upon them as a direct result of the irresponsible practices of the DNC
And the irresponsible actions of WikiLeaks.
I don't agree with most concepts of responsible disclosure; most would have Wikileaks contact the DNC, who would then likely attempt to hide their mistake. I am in favour of informing those harmed by the negligent actions of those they trusted; and so the right thing to do is to expose the donor list, as well as what data was present.
Personally, I would have replaced credit card numbers with Xs, but as the CC values could no longer be considered secure I fail to see the egregious additional injury caused by revealing them. It's unkind, but not particularly beyond the harm that the DNC had already done by failing to properly secure them. Who knows who has had them, and for how long? Not the DNC, and not Wikileaks.
Not at all. They broadcast it to the world. They are an accessory.
>I don't agree with most concepts of responsible disclosure; most would have Wikileaks contact the DNC, who would then likely attempt to hide their mistake. I am in favour of informing those harmed by the negligent actions of those they trusted; and so the right thing to do is to expose the donor list, as well as what data was present.
That's... just ridiculous. You could get the same result by just redacting all the private info except names. Then everyone knows but no one is put at risk. But they didn't even bother to do that.
>Personally, I would have replaced credit card numbers with Xs, but as the CC values could no longer be considered secure I fail to see the egregious additional injury caused by revealing them
What you personally consider to be secure has no bearing. They took private sensitive data that was not public and made it public. Just because you think that maybe it probably was already at risk is irrelevant.
>but not particularly beyond the harm that the DNC had already done by failing to properly secure them
How can you even try to make this point? It makes no sense. If I know your credit card info, all I have to do is assume that other people already have it so it's fine if I publish it?
>Who knows who has had them, and for how long? Not the DNC, and not Wikileaks.
EXACTLY. Who knows? Not you, so it's irresponsible and damaging for them to release them when it's possible no one had them.
correct. you saw the exact same defamation routine a few years ago with the iraq leaks, and again (not as strongly) with the diplomatic cable leaks. the only twist this time is the attempt to conflate russia-us geopolitical tensions with wikileaks involvement.
does the source of the information matter, if the information is legitimate? no. the dems live in fear of wikileaks and the endless dirt on hillary.
it's clear that russia does view assange as an asset, however-- the whole RT show a few years ago spelled that out for me. what is also clear is that unhappy facts are more effective propaganda than mere rhetoric. assange seems content to be a participant in russia's propaganda schemes, so long as he is actually releasing documents whose beef was agnostic to the context of geopolitical rivalry.
in other words: i want the dirt, too. i don't care if russia helps assange, we need all the help we can get against our own government at this point.
100% agree.
I'm constantly amazed at how some ordinary citizens can be mad at Snowden or Assange for releasing information. Wouldn't you want to know? Even just for interest sake I like to know what government and politicians around the world are up to.
HN readership doesn't really represent the average citizen. So while you may want the info that likely doesn't hold for a lot of folks who really only care about a very minor set of immediate concerns (food, shelter, children).
Children call eachother snitches. That's the level of discourse we're dealing with in these matters?
Most of them are biased against Trump, of course, and follow a fairly obvious strategy: "Hillary is extremely unpopular, we cannot make her more popular, so let's make Trump even less popular."
It works very well. Just to make this clear, I'm a European left-wing liberal democratic socialist, not a Trump or Hillary supporter of any kind. But I've seen many US elections and it was never like that before. It's as if all US media and news organizations have sold out to the highest bidder at once. (To be fair, I don't follow that many of them, just a few newspaper sites like L.A. times, NY times, TV channels like CNN, Fox, nbc and a few social media sites.)
There is no conspiracy.
Conspiracies, when they happen, seem to rather often fail; those requiring secrecy are in particular prone to failure. But people act according to their own interests all the time, and when their interests are even slightly aligned the outcome can certainly resemble or even be indistinguishable from an actively-managed conspiracy.
That being said, don't underestimate the amount of ordinary collusion and the work of spin doctors during election times. My point is that this is massive this time, definitely more than in past elections.
Finally, although I generally agree, a little warning about your last comment: Since we only see failed conspiracies, we lack the data to adequately assess the question of how much real conspiracy there is. ("conspiracy theories" on the other hand, are easy to debunk, but that's another issue.)
At a certain point there is evidence to show people in the media coordinating in private to try and reach a common outcome. If a bunch of people in the media working together to distort the truth isn't a conspiracy then I'm not sure what is.
What really bothers me is not being able to watch any national news coverage without a constant stream of Democratic narrative. I'm genuinely curious about what other issues or political offices are going to be on the ballot, but I'm going to have to take it upon myself to research any of it. Maybe that's a good side-effect though.
6m50s > "The thing that we have to watch is making sure there is a double blind between the campaign and the actual DNC and what we're doing. There's a double blind there. So they can plausibly deny that they knew anything about it."
9m35s > Aaron Black, DNC Rapid Response Coordinator, boasts about coordinating a Chicago protest at a Trump event. Two Chicago police reporters were injured and this event got a lot of news coverage.
Wikileaks announced for weeks when they were releasing the emails. It was a pre-planned event that the entire world was waiting for.
The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point, since the very emails they are trying to distract us from, detail instance after instance after instance of such collusion.
I share your concern that we'll ever get honest reporting from the media again, and I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
The trust I have had in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ABC/NBC/CBS, Democratic and Republican parties has been irreparably damaged.
I've been a cord cutter for over a decade. This year I graduated to pitying people who repeat the latest front page story as naive fear-junkies. Everything is suspect. Why burn processing cycles reading stories that on their face are actually stupid with conclusions that are unsupported by verifiable facts? (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cia-prepping-possible-cy...)
Between the Sponsored Content, Native Ads and all of the investigative journalists who (according to DNC emails) are labeled as "friends," I have no choice but to say "I quit." They are pretty lies that don't nourish!
For a long time now, all forms of traditional media have had a bent. It's just gotten very monied and politicized as of late.
That's what's really depressing about this: it is absurdly easy to get to the bottom of whether a fricking blender is worth buying, but important events happening in the world? Get your researchin' shoes on.
By the way, thank you very much for your input - your experience in that arena is unique and very valuable to the discussion.
Given my position, I think it's useful to state what would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. It's actually really simple: if it persistently reports incidents for which there is no proof, or if it reports incidents in such a way that obscures the facts themselves (spin). Any institution that regularly confuses editorializing for journalism losses its credibility. By these rules there are many institutions that are not trustworthy (e.g. Fox) but there are many institutions that are (the NYT).
The NYT frequently publishes articles critical of Hillary Clinton. Here are several hundred: https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Athe_donald+site%...
I'm using this example as an internet community that curates information critical to Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party campaigns. In that list are several that discuss content within the email leaks in a fashion critical to Hillary Clinton.
Publications should be permitted to publish stories critical of both major political parties.
The paper has also declined to collaborate with Assange to release stories about many other leaks. The NYT is America's Pravda.
By the establishment and for the establishment... the definition of conservative.
To think of all those who undertook personal risk over the years to build a great news organization! Too much competition from buzzfeed seems to have left the paper toothless and officious.
Historians will likely view the gutting of the adversarial, investigative press as the factor that accelerated our civilization's return to authoritarianism.
> Many of these are old and do not address the content of the emails. There are perhaps 100 significant stories that could have been written based on the information leaked in the past 10 days. We got zero.
I found this after 1 second of internet searching: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/us/politics/hillary-clinto....
> Too much competition from buzzfeed seems to have left the paper toothless and officious.
Buzzfeed has a substantial investigative reporting arm; its depth has been lauded frequently on HN: https://www.buzzfeed.com/news
For someone ragging on the lack of investigation the press are doing, you're doing a poor job of it yourself. Simply googling 'nyt clinton email' comes up with a handful of stories from the past 10 days (there's also a lot of stories older than 10 days in the search).
I'm no fan of Trump and would never vote for him, but the free and adversarial press is a crucial aspect of democracy which is not doing its job.
The Post has three stories based on emails in the last 48 hours:
- State pressuring FBI: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/docum...
- Goldman Transcripts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/17/...
- Foreign Government Donations (story originated on Reuters): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hacked-emails-show-e...
It's disingenuous to pretend the mainstream media is not covering the email leaks.
The NYT has not run any stories about the content of the emails on its front page in the last ten days. The stories people have linked are buried deep behind the paywall.
Where's the story about the machinations to deliberately harm the Sanders campaign? Where's the interview with Sanders asking what he'd have done if the emails had been leaked a few weeks earlier? Where is the headline "DNC corruption widespread", etc.
The purpose of an adversarial press (and press freedom in general) is to ask the very tough questions. The NYT has been derelict in its failure to do this when it comes to the leaked emails.
Yes, we all knew the likely content of the Goldman speeches. But the story has to do with how the HRC campaign went to great lengths to please Wall Street while also dealing with the Sanders left which was pretty strongly anti-Wall Street. Is there historical precedent for a politician to speak out of both sides of their mouth to this degree on a fairly important issue (highly likely laws will be passed pertaining to wall street reforms (or lack thereof) during her term in office, in contrast to many other wedge issues where the probability of laws being passed is next to nil)?
There has been a tremendous need for top-tier reporting on the leaked emails. You point out three stories, but there have been stories on less than 30% of the newsworthy items, vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks. Incidentally, the remarks speak for themselves and there is little a "journalist" can do other than quote them and let people be (appropriately) horrified.
Perhaps with respect to the lewd comments, an interactive timeline of each accuser and a status of any legal action pertaining to the claims would be helpful, but is it seriously deserving of 3-4 front page slots on the NYT every day for the past week?
Also, there has been no serious coverage of the third party candidates' positions on key issues. Frankly in spite of the few awkward aspects of each, both of them are far more impressive (and seem significantly more intelligent) making ad-hoc comments about nearly any issue.
There is nothing wrong with a news organization presenting its political opinions -- on the opinion page! The rest should be old fashioned factual reporting intended to enrich the discussion not color it or focus it on a subset of issues.
I brought up Buzzfeed simply because I fear that too much of the NYT focus has become about the number of online views/clicks a story gets, to the point where this has impacted page layout, headline copy, etc.
You assume they are newsworthy. Most of what I've seen, from a running tally Politico is doing as they go through them, doesn't seem overly newsworthy. The ones that have been reported seem to be mostly explainable, and look much worse when you assume context rather than put it in context, or allow the Podesta to put it in context.
> vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks.
Many people are very upset about those "lewd remarks". Possibly because they admit to real actions of misconduct. I think there's a false equivalence going on here. One situation is about a staffer for the Clinton campaign with lots of emails that sometimes seem to allege something, but are generally somewhat informal and it's hard to pin down specifics, and the other is about Trump himself admitting to sexual assault on tape, and then saying it was just words and he never would do something like that, and then people coming forward saying he specifically did it to them. For many people, a single true instance of this is enough to immediately discount him as a possible candidate they could vote for. That's a big story, and will get a lot of attention, as much as you might like it not to.
Inter-agency conflict and negotiation happens all the time within the federal government. It's not corruption because both sides are career civil service. For there to be a serious story here, the Post would need to have some evidence that Clinton asked Kennedy to do this, which they don't.
Even when I do agree with their positions, it is disconcerting to feel like I am being spoonfed political ideology.
The fact that the emails were LEAKED OMG is not the newsworthy part. It is what is in them. And largely speaking, there's not much news in them.
IMO a major problem in the U.S. today is that not many people understand how political campaigns or the federal government actually work. So a lot of people can be led to believe that boringly standard practices like revising talking points over email, and getting updates on court hearings, are actually proof of corruption. But they're not.
I've not heard anywhere that they were leaked, which suggests a disgruntled insider. The US government claims that they were hacked, and apparently that information was communicate to both Trump and Clinton in their national security briefings.
Assange has not been forthcoming about the source of the emails.
Is a conspiracy by top officials at the DNC to harm a party candidate during the primary a minor deal? To me this is corruption at close to the highest level. Yes, it's a private org, but one that is critical to the functioning of our democracy.
Is a candidate making promises to wall street that directly contradict her campaign promises a minor deal? Well, we can cynically assume all pols are dishonest, or the press can help us simply hold all pols accountable for their promises. I'd like to see fewer promises made and more promises kept. It was frankly a bit shady that HRC refused to release the transcripts, and I think there is a newsworthy story detailing the interest groups she was courting and why they are so influential in American politics.
I've looked through the Goldman transcripts, and maybe I'm stupid, but I didn't see her making any promises. If you've got a direct quote, lay it on me.
I'm not holding my breath, though, since so far you only seem interested in vague concern-trolling.
Yes, followed by the person who was forced to step down being immediately re-hired by the HRC campaign. What is troubling about it is what it suggests about HRC -- that she got cronies into powerful positions in the DNC, that they helped subvert the primary process in her favor, and that she re-hired the disgraced DNC leader, signaling to any other cronies that she'd have their back if they got caught, too.
The issue is institutional corruption, and it should be the main story out of the leaked emails. Politics can get ugly, but the purpose of the primary is to vet the candidates that have pledged allegiance to the party by letting party members vote in the primary election.
In my opinion, HRC should have been put on the spot to answer for why the corruption that benefitted her happened, and why she re-hired DWS the next day.
I'm not aligned with either party so I don't care so much who the candidate is, but I do care about the quality of the institutions that are part of our democratic system. We should all care, because the institutions (and their lack of corruption) is more important than who wins any single election (primary or secondary).
When you think about all the idealistic Sanders supporters who donated money and time only to have their trusted DNC leaders try to sabotage their preferred candidate, the amount of harm done to our democracy by this was substantial. Think of the cynicism and frustration it created, all so that HRC would be a few percent more likely to win the nomination, and win it in an unfair way.
Politics is a long term game. Partisans like to tell us it's urgent and that we must act immediately (regardless of the costs) to impact the most important election in history. This fake urgency is the technique GWB used to sell the Iraq war. It's an effective but embarrassingly dishonest propaganda technique.
https://medium.com/@Starkweather/new-york-times-edited-berni...
EDIT: for context, if you go read the actual emails, what you see are totally bog-standard comments of a PR team reacting to a story once it posted, and again when the NYT updated it, as the NYT (and other papers) often do.
Edit: for context "We were able to keep him from including more on the JVF, it has a mention in there, but between us and a conversation he had with Marc Elias he finally backed off from focusing too much on that."
This email chain is a total non-story. The NYTimes called the DNC for comment, and the DNC attempted to shape the story. That is basic PR 101.
We know the Sanders campaign did the same thing, because the story includes confidential information from his campaign, and comments from his surrogates. We just don't have Wikileaks access to the emails from his campaign (thank goodness).
That being said, I read the Goldman transcripts and other things that were supposed to be so damaging, and they really weren't that bad, beyond any other typical politician. Is she corrupt, absolutely. Is there a giant media conspiracy (now including SNL) against Trump? Ridiculous. He makes his own wounds.
In addition, even Mike Pence has now admitted Russia is disseminating information to Wikileaks. So we have a clear connection between Russia / Putin and Trump. I don't believe it's as far as many think with them working together, but clearly someone as thin skinned and easily manipulated as Trump would be a total win for Putin. We can talk about Hillary's collusion, Clinton Foundation corruptness and such, but how the Putin pro Trump position is not as relevant is beyond me, if not the deal breaker considering the state of Russia / American current affairs.
Also there's no real need to take anti-Trump info to Wikileaks. The NYT was willing to publish one of Trump's tax returns from the 90s and those are legally protected. You can take anti-trump documents to any major newspaper.
Wikileaks' current agenda appears to be to disrupt Western governments through leaking damaging information. I don't see a clear preference for political parties; the Manning leaks were damaging to the Republican Bush administration.
I believe that the most probable source of the DNC leaks is Russian government units, but not for the purposes of election manipulation. Here is an article that most credibly posits this theory: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-spycraft-how-kre....
I had mixed feeling about Wikileaks before (as I think anyone should, since it's a very complex topic), but any thoughts I had as to him be impartial in any way (as a good journalist should be) are now out the window.
Honestly, Assange shouldn't have been the face behind the leaks. It should've been the agency's "face", and it should've been dumped all at once, like most of their past releases.
Also, think of the political dynamic. There isn't much difference between one huge scandal and ten - there's still only so much airtime. Anything leaked as a unit can be responded to as a unit.
Anyone could anonymously create a torrent and paste it in some related thread, the important thing, and why people go to Wikileaks, is getting it read faster than "they" can delete it.
One look at Assange's Twitter is all it takes to see the obvious anti-Hillary bias. The shrill "Hillary's got an earpiece!" post is one of the most glaring examples.
Perhaps you can provide more info on exactly what documents you think Putin is not happy about?
There are multiple access points, some within Federal Government.
The current angle is that Trump is a bad guy, and you just have to look at the photos of him to get the angle - 99% of him making a weird face.
It does not make the story false, but there is an angle.
And then some of the women show up on TV with their lawyer, Gloria Allred, who is in close connection with HRCs campaign(as attested by the Podesta wikileaks) and has vowed her support for HRC to win. And then there is strange behavior from some of the accusers, like begging Trump to visit their restaurant/business, which would be a strange thing to do to someone who sexually assaulted you(not impossible behavior, but all of these things add up)
If you are not one of those 1-2%, how would you know about it?
I just can't understand how this does not scare people. How is this different from the state run media in third-world countries we used to laugh at as kids?
It may be working out for your team _this_time_, but the same behavior will almost certainly be used against you in the future.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWKwEBIkYhI [2] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/5205
In fact, I think they were going on in the 15 years before that as well, though they were less pronounced, less obvious and less extreme. The media has probably always been a bit of a propaganda organ... it's just that the voices were a lot more diverse.
The really alarming thing we've seen this year is Google, Facebook and Reddit starting to use algorithms to suppress some voices and amplify others. Combine that with "Correct The Record" (the army of paid hillary shills who have taken over at least reddit) and the internet is no longer the alternative where you can have a reasonable discussion.
Why participate when your opponent is most likely a hired troll?
Your <s>'tinfoil hat conspiracy theory'</s> is anything but. Balanced, objective reporting in the US died in 1987, the very day it was no longer required by law:
My counterpoint: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/technology/yahoo-data-b...
Anonymous quotes. Unsourced claims. Revisionist history designed to tear down one individual (Mayer) to protect another (Stamos)
You missed out the most important thing which would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. And it is the the most common one which is the most heavily engaged in. And that is choosing not to report certain stories and facts, even though they are of great significance.
it is similar to reading financial news or watching CNBC with the mindset of reading between the lines, wondering who and why is interested in propagating such stories.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/world/rise-of-saudi-prince...
I could be as much skeptic as you and I can draw my own conclusions for why this particular story might have been published now and not before, and for what purpose, but this doesn't stop me from enjoying reading it and absorbing its juicy details and knowledge.
I'm still thankful for NYT for dedicating time and effort to expose this person as a fraud and hypocrite and I'm looking forward to reading more of these in the future for other despicable figures.
Maybe none. But one way the times could re establish credibility with me is to be transparent about how much the writer engaged with pr reps or communications teams in each story. It doesn't have to be exhaustive.
By the way- Part of my journey to this level of skepticism was "Trust me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulato...
That would be the worst PR piece you could ask for, unless you mean that you suspect that his political foes were the ones behind this story which is not unlikely but again not a deal-breaker and what's only important to me is the question, were the details listed in the piece factual or not?
Nothing more.
There is no truth in "The Truth" and there are no news in "The News".
Update: Added links to wikipedia
To borrow a phrase that usually makes me think of a milennial with a punchable face, "This^100."
I always held those news organizations skeptically in the back of my mind as Every Educated Person Ought To, but this is just...unbelievable.
Is anyone else doing this?
Why would you trust them? You think they would go through all that shit to give you information and work for you for a few pennies or for free? When they could be working for the rich and powerful to become one of them... all while getting your pennies?
Was it actually week(s) plural? I thought they only came out about a week late.
> The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
I think this is a little much. Some cast and crew from The Apprentice made some noise about how generally unpleasant Donald Trump was, and multiple parties started seeking unused footage from that show. NBC also had the Access Hollywood video and were preparing it for release, but got scooped when someone leaked it to the Washington Post reporter who investigated the Tump Foundation.
No event in the chain happened without precedence and, to be perfectly frank, none of the information that has come out has been a genuine shock. The overwhelming majority of the damage done by the Access Hollywood footage has been because Donald Trump a) did a very poor job in delivering his apology, strategically speaking and b) from a), set himself up to have yet more sunlight disinfect his past.
> This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point
Ooh, me, me, I debate it. This is a dumb thing to say and you should feel dumb for saying it. It makes no sense and is not based on anything.
> I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
Probably ever since the industry started to consolidate. Just because it happens doesn't mean that it happening means what you think it means, if that makes any sense [1].
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/477656-when-you-re-young-you...
Insults do not qualify as debate. His claim is based on, or should include, the portions of the Podesta emails that have showed a dismaying amount of coordination with the press. Approving quotes, approving stories, printing talking points. Compare their behavior against the guidelines set out by the Society of Professional Journalists. It's a disgrace.
Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access.
The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
This isn't happening because journos care about Hillary Clinton. This is an alignment of the incentives of politicians and journalists that ultimately reduces transparency and harms public discourse. The fact that the same thing likely isn't happening with the Trump campaign says more about the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Glenn Thrush, Politco's Chief Political Correspondent, decided to make it crystal clear in the
following email to Podesta back in April 2015 in which he admits that he has "become a hack."
The email below from Thrush was sent to get guidance related to an article he published the
very next day entitled "Hillary's Big-Money Dilemma."
Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u
Please don't share or tell anyone I did this
Tell me if I fucked up anythingThe whole purpose the press existence is to be an independent check on government and to pose to politicians the questions that the electorate cares about.
edit: Just to be clear, nobody (or nearly so) finds your claim controversial or new. It's flaw isn't that it's incorrect, it's that it isn't useful*.
The rhetoric I was replying to implied that the politicians and the journalists are on the same team because they have the same goals. That's not the case. I think keeping that in mind is plenty useful.
Of course, as The Center for Public Integrity [1] recently pointed out, "journalists" aren't just
making "in-kind" contributions to the Clinton campaign, they're donating real cash as well.
In fact, according the their review of political contributions made by people working in
various media outlets, 96% were found to go to Hillary while only 4% accrued to the benefit
of the Trump campaign.
If they were motivated purely by money, they'd all be promoting Trump. He has driven a shocking amount of traffic / wealth to all journalist outlets. Stories they write on him are massively more popular, and he's demonstrated he'll cut off access for their lying. So if it was just money, pussy grabbing would be a good thing.
They did not mention that the deleted emails were deleted AFTER the subpoena was issued [1]. They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI. They did not comment on the number of "I don't remember" answers that Clinton gave to the FBI. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to not remember what a "c" meant on documents. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to have no memory of receiving training on the handling of sensitive documents. I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
Suffice it to say that the media have been complicit in matters dating back years before Podesta emails, not days or weeks. Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
[1] http://www.empirestatenews.net/2016/10/16/worse-than-waterga...
Yet they were requested to be deleted long before the subpoena was issued[1]. Specifically:
In December 2014, after the work-related emails were preserved, Mills told Platte River Networks – which at the time was managing Clinton’s private server – that Clinton “decided she no longer needed access to any of her e-mails older than 60 days.” Mills instructed the PRN employee — who was not identified — “to modify the e-mail retention policy” on Clinton’s server “to reflect this change,” the FBI said.
But the PRN employee mistakenly did not make the retention-policy change and did not delete the old emails until sometime between March 25 and March 31, even though Mills had sent PRN an email on March 9 that mentioned the committee’s request to preserve emails.
The PRN employee who deleted the emails was a recipient of Mills’ message. However, the employee told the FBI that “he had an ‘oh shit’ moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server containing Clinton’s e-mails.”
Read into that whatever you want, but the fact that it's not really true might have something to do with why it isn't being reported on.
> They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI.
That's not what happened[2]. As secretary of defense, she had old phones after she switched destroyed.
> I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
You could substantiate your statements with sources. You could have done that from the beginning. Perhaps if you looked for less biased and more fact based sources rather than blogs that feature a giant picture of Clinton snapped in an inopportune moment with giant neon green letters saying "LOL!" photoshopped on.
> Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
Well, I've been following and reading reporting on the emails. It's all pretty ho-hum and what I would expect from any campaign so far. Of course, it's easy to taking boring things out of context and imagine salacious components to them. That doesn't make them any more damning in reality though.
1: http://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/the-fbi-files-on-clintons-e...
2: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-hillary-clinton-aide-dest...
Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that. Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Either way, I've heard rumors they've been recovered, so disagreements there could be resolved in due time. If not, we can argue then :)
If they are personal records, she does, because they are her personal property, and are covered under her fourth amendment rights until they are specifically requested by subpoena. I'm not sure if the subpoena requested all email, or work email. The question really being asked usually is whether they were all actually personal emails or not.
I think it's worth noting that her behavior with regard to deleting personal emails is not out of what would be considered normal for someone completely innocent. If I knew I was innocent but was under subpoena for work email and I had personal email that I would really rather not get out, I might delete them as well before turning everything over. Unless specififed not to, there's nothing illegal with doing so, as long as you can whether any flak if people want to cast doubt.
It's worth noting the Podesta emails address this[1]. One of the interesting thing about the Podesta email summaries I've seen is how they don't really corroborate any of the accusations we've seen.
> Further, she claims she wanted them deleted then, but never clarifies if they were deleted at the time of request or when the subpoena arrived.
It seems pretty well covered to me. She specified she wanted them deleted months prior to the subpoena, but the employee did not act on that command until much later (after the subpoena arrived). So, emails were deleted after a subpoena arrived, but the request to do so happened long prior to that.
> Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that.
It's your right to be cynical. That said, as I mentioned above, unless the subpoena should have covered personal emails, I'm not sure what she did was wrong, even if it does cast doubt on whether we can be sure we got all the work emails.
> Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Actually, I believe her lawyers determined that. They didn't actually read all the emails though, they used Subject lines and addresses. That said, while it might have miscategorized some (and some were lost prior to that for reasons explained in that summary), that process is unlikely to have randomly happened to remove all majorly incriminating emails, so you're still left with whether you trust the lawyers tasked with reviewing them or not.
What this all really comes down to is whether you think someone can really get away with criminal activity at this level for decades. My belief is that if there was real evidence in any of the umpteen things she's been investigated for, we'd have seen it. Instead, we have lots of accusations, but nothing ever seems to add up to anything. This lends itself to two conclusions, either the Clintons are masterminds at committing crime and never getting caught, or they have been a favored political target due to their high political profile for an extended period of time. Considering I think even if they originally where complicit in a problem or too long in their past, the return on investment for piddly amounts of money (to them) for what amount to favors seems a stupid trade-off. If you make millions of dollars a year, and are already one of the most powerful people in the world, why would you get caught up in the stupid things she's accused of, like taking a large donation to her charity, which she can't really use, in order to get a meeting? To my sensibilities, it's much more likely that someone donated to one of her charities in hope that it would help (or on bad info that it would help), and maybe it did help, but in the same way that donating to the Red Cross would have, by showing the person was a philanthropist and making a good impression that way.
1: http://www.politico.com/live-blog-updates/2016/10/john-podes...
Agreed.
>Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access. The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
I was trained as a journalist before I became an engineer. I'd argue I understand this stuff better than most. Perhaps I had the benefit of a journalism program that was better than it had any right to be, but we had ethics drilled into us pretty heavily. I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
Further, if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate. It's supposed to be the role of the press to take an adversarial stance to government and hold them accountable. Clearly this doesn't happen much, but worse still, the Podesta emails reveal that they're actively facilitating the goals of a presidential nominee. That's horrible. If you want an off-topic thing to look into for this, look up Amber Lyons. I had her in the 'maybe she's credible' pile until this came out. Now she's in the 'There's something to her claims' pile.
>the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Most news organizations are staffed with people who lean fairly heavily to the left. It sounds like you might be surprised to find out just how much. It used to be the case, and was what I was taught, that you fought your bias as much as possible, did your best to avoid editorializing and didn't let yourself just become a mouth piece. There's a reason why someone picks up the New York Times rather than combing through the press releases from the Clinton & Trump campaigns. Obviously Fox News is the notable dissenter in providing this kind of service to Republican candidates. Still, if you run the numbers it's something like 80% / 20%.
Overall, the thing that has been pretty evident to me during this campaign, even before the Podesta leaks, is that the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton. This even goes back to when she was campaigning against Sanders for the nomination, though to a lesser extent. I think the moment something smelled off to me was when she won the six coin tosses in Iowa (?) to begin the primaries and I didn't see many eyebrows raised in the reporting I looked at. Maybe I missed it, but since then They've held to a pretty consistent pattern of burning bridges to protect her.
> I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
And programmers get taught to write documentation and not make things work with hacks or produce spaghetti code. The way the sausage gets made not comporting with professional standards is neither unheard of nor is it isolated to journalism.
They're being shameful, yes. But they're doing it because it's a living, not because they have an agenda.
> if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate
Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech, for which I am an irrationally ardent proponent.
We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening. You seem to want to ascribe agency to it. I think that's a mistake, in the aggregate. Maybe I'm just being a cynic, but I don't think so.
> the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton
I'm not a fan of Clinton by any stretch of the imagination. I see how Clinton scandals get significantly less airtime than Trump scandals, but I have a hard time believing that isn't being driven by ratings. Trump has been graded on a heck of a curve at times, in ways that can't be considered "objective."
And it was seven coin tosses ;-)
>And programmers get taught to write documentation
That isn't an ethics issue, it's disingenuous to compare the two (not trying to ascribe malice to you). I do recognize the point you're trying to make in terms of quality being sacrificed to business concerns, and I'll touch on that (a bit indirectly) in a moment.
>Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech
Two things here. 1.) You (presumably) aren't and have never been a journalist or tried to be one. I assure you that this is a thing that sits at the heart of American Journalist philosophy, at least as I experienced it. I probably shouldn't have phrased it in a way that let you have an opinion. Also, sorry for the appeal to authority :) 2.) The first amendment specifically calls out religion, press and assembly. There was a vision for the role of press in government; they aren't within a country mile of living up to that but still enjoy the freedom. 2a.) We can agree on rabid amounts of free speech at least, and despite press failings I don't want to take away their freedom to print whatever.
>We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening.
Yeah, that would just be a diversion. Let's leave it, as I imagine we agree anyway.
>You seem to want to ascribe agency to it
Well, to cheat and be a jerk: All people have agency. To be more honest, I think there's a mix of business concerns and ideology. As I was trying to point out, Trump has made them a shitload of money. He's probably the best thing that's ever happened to print and cable news, at least in the last decade. Even were they to report on him honestly, he would make them a shitload of money. He's controversial without them needing to help.
This might just be something that I will fail to convey to you, but my experience from a (kind of) insider's view, is that most journalists are partisan. Nobody has to love that, it's an acknowledged reality, and uncontroversial (for any journalist with credibility). The trouble is that the effort or even pretense of trying to mitigate bias has gone away, which I don't think you disagree with. Something that might be less known to you is that most credible news outlets try to make it a point to separate the business concerns from editorial concerns for just this reason. At least publicly that is certainly the case. Theoretically there's a publicist and an executive editor, and the two manage their respective departments without consultation. We're probably both cynical enough to realize they're full of shit, but that rule didn't come out of a vacuum and was adhered to in the one paper I wrote for (though I was freelancing / interning so obviously my insight was limited). Additionally, you might be familiar with the idea of an ombudsman. Theoretically, this is a person who is paid by the paper to shit all over it when it fucks up. It's painful but necessary. Clearly these people aren't doing their jobs.
My point is that, at least historically, and recently at that, papers have acknowledged bias and at least made a reasonable effort to counter it. In another comment, maybe from you, business concerns have taken a toll. Consolidation mixed with adopting modern, short-sighted executive level business decisions have had a deleterious effect on quality. C-levels aren't trained in, and don't care about, the ethics training journalists get, and anyone given free reign to indulge their bias is going to struggle to resist that. I guess I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but rather that there's been a decay in journalism (caused by your opinion) that's resulted in the present conditions (caused by my opinion).
This is already so long 90% of people aren't going to read it, so I'll leave it here: Because of my previous passion for journalism, the current failures deeply pain me, and have been more of my focus than the candidates. The failure is not caused just by business concerns, but people gleefully letting their bias loose and enjoying their ethical lapse. We can probably both agree it's a disservice to the country and will hasten the demise of print and cable news. But in the meantime they will reap the seductive gains of short term thinking. I'll save predictions for the future for another time.
I hope you're stuck on a bus or something where this screed is a welcome diversion :)
I'm honestly unsure at this point how to take any specific cry about a Clinton scandal, and it's a problem of the Republicans' (and Trump's) making. You can only cry wolf so many times, so loudly, again and again for the exact same incident even, until people assume you can't be trusted to watch for wolves at all.
"She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia… It could also be China… It could also be somebody sitting on their bed who weighs 400 pounds."
"If I were running ‘The View’, I’d fire Rosie O’Donnell. I mean, I’d look at her right in that fat, ugly face of hers, I’d say ‘Rosie, you’re fired’"
"I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."
"She doesn’t have the look [...] She doesn’t have the stamina."
"How is Bernie Sanders going to defend our country if he can't even defend his own microphone?"
"Everybody is laughing at Jeb Bush [...] A pathetic figure!"
Indeed, they do not.
>> This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point.
>Ooh, me, me, I debate it. This is a dumb thing to say and you should feel dumb for saying it. It makes no sense and is not based on anything.
To which you respond with a bunch of Trump quotes. How did they address at all the point of media collusion with the Clinton campaign? How is this not just an attempt at ideological bickering used to redirect the conversation to something you presume I'm interested in arguing about rather than focus on something pretty damning?
The bus tape was archival footage. If you're suggesting that every hour of archival audio and video of Mr. Trump should have been sought after as soon as he became the nominee, then, again, you're underestimating just how volatile and fickle the news cycle is.
The plausibility of "the official story" (to reiterate: that the footage became an object of interest for NBC after former cast and crew from The Apprentice came forward to disclose his ill manner on the set of that show) seems pretty plain to me. Occam's razor defeats your conspiratorial thinking without breaking a sweat.
Regarding Stern, CNN had as "BREAKING NEWS!@!" that Trump told Stern it was OK to call Ivanka a piece of ass. Possibly CNN was lying about presenting this as something they just discovered; is that what you are claiming?
Yes, I am suggesting that every show would have stuck someone (more likely, a team) on reviewing their material (prioritizing the outtake material, if anything) on Trump as soon as it turned out he was a big deal. I am not clear as to why you think this would not have occurred; why Occam's razor supports that viewpoint. The bus tape would have been a huge story at any time and would not have required building off interest in other stories to investigate (e.g. "Gee whiz, we should look at the archival footage and see what we have! Why didn't we think of this before!")
Because those "teams" live from headline to headline and those sorts of fishing expeditions are expensive.
I have no doubt that they will rig the election if the media doesn't get the job done. How else could they let Hillary run? They must be pretty confident that it doesn't matter that most people hate her.
WashPo released it on the same day that they got it, after several hours verifying it's authenticity.
That's not evidence to fit your claim of premeditated collusion.
another way in which Trump is a political tsunami... to paraphrase Warren Buffett: when the tide goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked
Regarding the media, all are culprits in biased news coverage whether those on the right like Breitbart or Fox News or on the left like NYT or Washington Post but this held belief that you should expect nothing less than 100% impartial coverage of the elections when they endorse their favorite candidate publicly is also a bit misplaced.
And it's not like the nomination process is sacrosanct. For many years primaries were ignored altogether in favor of smoke filled rooms. That only started changing in 1968. It was made more democratic in 1972, which resulted in the nomination of George McGovern, who got his clock cleaned in the general. Sometimes party elites do know better.
At least they pretend to be so now. Traditionally, newspapers were not terribly concerned with that, and didn't even bother much to hide this fact.
It's actually better than it's ever been. Not that it's good now; it was just much worse before.
Implied in it is the idea that the Clinton campaign had an obligation to release their opposition research on Trump as soon as they had it. But of course, they have no such obligation: they're not journalists!
On the other hand, Wikileaks clearly is structuring their releases to draw out the impact on the Clinton campaign and (vainly) to blunt the impact of Trump's own behavior (mostly, Clinton has won the news cycles despite these attempts).
But Wikileaks is not supposed to be an organ of the Trump campaign. Unlike the HRC campaign, Wikileaks ostensibly does have an obligation to serve the public interest. It clearly does not honor that obligation; instead, it's transparently servicing the Trump campaign.
It's a two-person race. It's zero-sum. To materially oppose one candidate is to materially support the other. That is, i assume, why Trump's campaign keeps claiming they coordinate directly with Assange through an intermediary.
Can someone (calmly) explain why anyone should take seriously the idea that Assange can singlehandedly run virtually the entire opposition research campaign against Hillary Clinton and not be supporting Trump?
No, not buying it.
https://www.rt.com/usa/361459-secretary-clinton-drone-assang...
She explicitly asked to have Assange assassinated -> people laughed -> until they realised she was serious because she offers arguments why it would be better to kill him.
My 2 cents: Assange is anti establishment and that's why he helps Trump.
It was on 23rd Nov 2010.
It's not nothing, but it's pretty damn close.
He thinks Trump will severely harm America, and he really hates America.
Perhaps the idea is that they might get off easier if Trump feels Wikileaks gave him an election present, but I find that to be a high risk gamble, especially at this point. That said, the argument could perhaps just as easily be made if they leaked a bunch of Trump stuff too.
I don't think anyone can really determine motives at this point with the current base of information.
If I want to be internally consistent as a supporter of truth/justice/liberty/all those tasty things, I MUST NOT hesitate to release damaging information along those lines for the sake of a "lesser of two evils" justification. Your statement of zero-sum two person race is also a principle I believe one must sacrifice a "lesser of two evils" discussion to rally against, I believe that accepting we are in a two person race is part and parcel with the level of polarization/group-think we're seeing nowadays. The first steps to a better world in my eyes are to question EVERYTHING and become as vehemently anti-tribal as possible, and that means not withholding things that my moral code would demand I act on, even if it might harm the horse I'm rooting for. (quite to the opposite actually, if I saw that my main candidate had flaws and wasn't getting called out on them, I would see it as my obligation to do so even MORE so, since to whitewash in that direction to my eyes weakens what would otherwise be a valid stance. e.g., all things have negatives, even perhaps a positive choice, but to ignore them is duplicitous.)
tl;dr, my goals in this are not "this election" or "this candidate"; it's "getting people to question more"; "getting people to realize it doesn't NEED to be a zero-sum game". One may say this is idealistic/drop in the ocean etc; but I cannot reconcile with my personal philosophy giving up, because if I did, then there is no justification for ANYONE ELSE to push for these "impossible" goals, and thus the status quo/tragedy of the commons continues.
The problem is that what Wikileaks is doing is much worse than that.
We all wanted Bernie, but he sold out :-(
In a two horse race, throwing stones in front of one horse has an obvious and calculated effect.
There was a time when I believed in Wikileaks.
But collusion, orchestrated or not, with Putin and Trump crosses a clear line.
When you sell your services or align your actions with fascists, you are not longer serving the public interest, merely your own.
Let's not equivocate. Trump is an opportunistic fascist, apparently with aspirations to become America's analog to Putin the authoritarian fascist thug.
The cynic in me wonders what Putin has on Assange.
I can't read Hillary Clinton's mind. I can't realtalk with Julian Assange. I can't read Trump's emails. I'm not part of any intelligence community.
Was the announcement of the video timed to preempt the Wikileaks Podesta emails, or were the emails released as a direct reaction to the video? Is Wikileaks a puppet or the media? Nobody has the relevant meta-information to discern this. We're getting bombarded with scandalous new information against both candidates on a daily basis, so much so that it's nearly impossible to meaningfully judge their weight and discern who the bad actors really are.
What happens from this is we in our Trump or Hillary bubbles, or whatever bubble we may be in, with full-time jobs and a family to feed don't have the time to invest in these issues. This is really the logical conclusion of the problem with Internet/information bubbles.
The US is in a post-fact world where people get their opinions from the media rather than facts (though to some extent it's always been that way). When Wikileaks, a supposed bastion of free information appears to be biased or compromised, perhaps from possible grudges by Assange or international influence, we lose another source of that meta-information.
Better way of looking at it is: what would the effect be of the media letting a psychopath through until the late stages, letting the election get close, and then and only then actually educating the voting public on some of the most unsavory parts of his past?
The answer, if it isn't clear, is in the 50% bump in debate viewers over the 2008 election.
But these women are coming out on their own because of cooper's question? I don't understand.
In this case, we had Trump attempting to cast the video as entirely just talk, with no action involved. I think it's entirely within expectations that someone that had experienced this behavior may have had their hopes of justice which had risen during this incident dashed (given there wasn't an actual person to respond, just the video), and decided that was the straw that broke the camels back.
We saw this with Cosby as well, or do you think he's innocent? If you think he's not innocent, how do you explain all the people that only really spoke up loudly after the main report? We see this all the time. Coming forward is a risk, and until the perceived risk is lowered, you may not see many (or any people).
Now, it is possible that the people coming forward are making it all up, as it's always a possibility, but given the video and Trump's very affirmative statements on the video (of a 60 year old man, mind you. He should have learned long ago what is and is not okay with regard to sexual advances), I think it's far more likely that at least some of the women coming forward are telling the truth.
PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
That's my main problem with all these arguments «false equivalency» in their pursuit of seeming and sounding fair, balanced and impartial, they resort to equate all the horrendous things that Trump said or did with these harmless details that Hillary or her chief of staff said behind closed doors or in private emails.
It's just not right and unfair for Hillary and her campaign.
1. Having read the emails I disagree that there is anything damning in them. Even when campaign staffers suggested bad things they got shot down. The email releases have been one big nothing-burger after another. The media is like a toddler... unless you have something interesting going on their attention wanes quickly.
2. The Trump sexual assault tape is not bad because he had a foul mouth. In some cases focusing on that is a deliberate effort at mis-direction. Trump can swear all he likes and no one except a few pearl-clutching grandmas care. What is gross is Trump boasting that he commits sexual assault against women and they let him get away with it because he's rich and famous. That's what was so offensive about that video.
Now they're releasing the emails in parcels to manipulate the 24 hour news cycle - e.g. "More Hillary Emails leaked!"
There's no smoking gun in those emails, and the majority of the "There's a lot there" statements boil down to examples like this: http://i.imgur.com/eRRc02n.png?1
That's be the tail wagging the dog.
They release daily to participate in the 24h news cycle.
If there was any actual news in the emails, released each day, then it wouldn't be manipulation. It would be news, like how WashPo released the Trump sex assault tape the same day they got it.
As it is now, they're withholding empty, hacked information and timing the releases to participate and manipulate headlines during the U.S. election period.
Empty information? What does that even mean?
So you think it was fine for the current head of the DNC to leak questions from CNN to hillary during the primary?
And you think it's fine for the under secretary of state to be trying to bribe the FBI to reduce the classification of emails found on her server? Personally I don't see how that isn't a crime.
A subpoena was already in place for those documents, it's tampering with evidence.
Wow.
Trump is a buffoon; I'm sure you can scour the public record for innumerous idiotic things he's said over the years. What do you expect from the guy?
Clinton, on the other hand, is a career politician and public servant. I think those behind-the-scenes dealings are far more dangerous.
Trump is the Republican nominee for the 2016 US presidential elections which means that he's as much a politician as Hillary or Obama is and should be held against the same set of standards like every politician does and this notion that since he's novice in this field he deserves to get preferential treatment and be forgiven for all his mistakes and wrongdoings is bit disingenuous.
I hope you're kidding when you say he's as much a politician as Hilary. He has very limited political experience. She's been doing it for 30+ years.
He's a candidate, but has held precisely zero public offices thus far.
>this notion that since he's novice in this field he deserves to get preferential treatment and be forgiven for all his mistakes and wrongdoings is bit disingenuous.
What preferential treatment are you talking about? Who said anything about "forgiving" him? I'm saying, "what on earth do you expect by nominating a TV personality"? I expect more from my politicians. Apparently you don't. Perhaps that's why your election is a mess?
This is not a game. This is a real and serious national election for a superpower, and this levity when dealing with these matters is not helpful.
Your position seems to be along those lines above. If not, please clarify.
Unless your single source of news is the Trump sub-reddit, most of the mainstream media does nothing but rip Trump.
>This is a real and serious national election for a superpower, and this levity when dealing with these matters is not helpful.
Don't lecture me, my country isn't having this issue. You put a bizarre TV personality up for president, not me. Citizens get the government they deserve.
> Who said anything about "forgiving" him? ... I expect more from my politicians.
gotchange's point is that some people give Trump a lower bar of expectations because he's an 'outsider' or 'new at this' - that difference in expectations is forgiving him to a certain degree. Like a handicap at sport.
gotchange's whole point is about expecting more from politicians, and asking why the expectations are lowered on the Trump side.
To argue that he's remotely as experienced as Hilary Clinton is simply disingenuous.
>gotchange's whole point is about expecting more from politicians, and asking why the expectations are lowered on the Trump side.
gotchange's whole point was that somehow, something (not sure what) is biased against Hilary here. Trump is being skewered about this on every channel, on every website. What more do you want? This is a massive scandal, and I'm sure there's more to come.
>gotchange's point is that some people give Trump a lower bar of expectations because he's an 'outsider' or 'new at this'
No, my expectations are lower for Trump because he has a history of being a buffoon. But you do realize there's a difference between "expectation" and "acceptance"?
For what it's worth, I think they are both terrible candidates. I have no idea how Trump got this far, but I don't think there's another candidate that Hilary could have possibly beat.
No-one is saying that. I just said that he's not "very limited".
> Trump is being skewered about this on every channel, on every website. What more do you want? ... my expectations are lower for Trump because ... realize there's a difference between "expectation" and "acceptance"
The fact that despite all his mess, he is still a serious contender in the competition, and that means plenty of people are forgiving him and accepting him, despite the media coverage, and regardless of your personal opinion. It's actually a pretty shameful indictment on the American public, that so many of them support such a candidate.
I'm not sure why that's a bad thing?
Not saying it is.
If you have some time, scroll through the Wikileaks Twitter. Very little noise, mostly content. https://twitter.com/wikileaks
Why does this canard keep coming up? This isn't 1973. The Middle East does not have the West by the balls with respect to energy anymore. We're invested in Saudi Arabia to keep it from imploding, not for natural resources. Not directly, at least, since oil money is one of the few things keeping it from imploding.
The US may well be largely energy independent but a large number of significant client states within its sphere of influence are not. The viability of those client states goes directly to the global effectiveness of US hegemony.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/57vefh/podesta_...
Some of the things found were:
1. The Goldman Sachs speeches, showing that Hillary has a "public and private position", is still against gay marriage, wants open borders, wants to enact gun bans, and wants to establish a hemispheric common market.
2. John Podesta (Hillary's campaign chair) giving a list of "needy latinos" to call.
3. The DNC planning fake Trump assault scandals
4. Clinton Campaign Discusses Which Emails To "Hold" Hours After Subpoena
...all among many, many other things. We still have another 10k Podesta emails to go.
With the exception of a common market I must strongly disagree with your assessments.
I'll also point out that everyone has public and private positions and everyone except the most socially inept tries to tailor what they say to their audience to get a better reception. That's half of being a politician: glad-handing and smooth-talking your constituents and colleagues into going along with your plan.
> 2. John Podesta (Hillary's campaign chair) giving a list of "needy latinos" to call.
What's your point? Is that supposed to compare to calling Mexicans rapists, saying more countries should have nuclear weapons, calling for a ban on muslim immigrants, saying you want veto-power over the press, claiming US elections are illegitimate, attacking a Gold Star family, ... I mean I could go on and on and on here.
> 3. The DNC planning fake Trump assault scandals
I haven't seen anything legit on this. Care to elaborate? I know some campaign staffers have occasionally proposed really stupid ideas but they were always shot down. If there is proof that anyone actually carried out such a plan please let us know.
> 4. Clinton Campaign Discusses Which Emails To "Hold" Hours After Subpoena
This is standard practice. It's called a document retention notice and every single company in the US follows this exact procedures. The court orders you to deliver evidence and you must figure out which documents are covered under that order. If you just backed up all your servers and dumped them on the court wholesale you'd be held in contempt.
In the end, I've been voting Libertarian and/or "not the incumbent" for a few years now, and wish more people would do so.
But I guess who can use the toilet where is more important than spying on people, taking away their freedom, being habitual liar and hypocrite by taking money from the people who are supposed to be everything you believe in against.
How is Trump any worse? He is just smart enough to think what he's saying, all in all they would make a great team with Hillary.
2. Current DNC chair (then CNN analyst) Donna Brazile giving Hillary Townhall questions early http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/10/roland-martin...
3. Hillary admitting that our greatest allies Qatar and Saudia Barbaria fund ISIS https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3774
4. Bill Clinton getting a $1m birthday gift from Qatar for access http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/13/wikileaks-em...
I found this site which summarizes the finding (tweeted by a Trump supporter): http://www.vaskal.ca/podestafiles
The Clinton Foundation is the new SuperPAC.
At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "charitable donation" ?
Sure, there's no evidence of pay for play in explicit terms. Doing so would be tantamount for a legal definition of bribery. However, consider the natural progression of the PAC if it were to use the same loophole of charity instead. Would a charity request for money be considered access, at the same level as PAC influence?
At some point, the foundation should be considered a profitable business rather than a charity, given the immense staffing and expenditures of operation in a billion dollar+ charity organization.
It's not trivial to ignore the oddities that abound when it does not operate like any other charity organization. Plane tickets for Hillary and Chelsea, car expenses, six figure living expenses, etc.
The grey area of having ~70 year billionaires running for president is when you see just how they live and work, and how they got there... It's usually disgusting or disappointing. It almost always has to be.
If you disagree, examine what it is you believe is good about the process of allowing, then choosing between the richest of egomaniacs, to lead a nation with a sense of morality or ethical standards. The democratic process is acutely broken by any standard if you believe that PACs and now, "charity organizations" is a net benefit.
Considering all of the organizations affiliated with the Clinton Foundation, he said, CharityWatch concluded about 89 percent of its budget is spent on programs. That’s the amount it spent on charity in 2013, he said.
We looked at the consolidated financial statements (see page 4) and calculated that in 2013, 88.3 percent of spending was designated as going toward program services — $196.6 million out of $222.6 million in reported expenses.
We can’t vouch for the effectiveness of the programming expenses listed in the report, but it is clear that the claim that the Clinton Foundation only steers 6 percent of its donations to charity is wrong, and amounts to a misunderstanding of how public charities work.
> Would a charity request for money be considered access, at the same level as PAC influence?
Is it pay of play in the same way if a donation was made to a completely unaffiliated charity, such as the American Red Cross? What if the donation is made first, and the politician notices and it happens to make them look favorably on a meeting because it bodes well for the character of the person in question?
> At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "charitable donation" ?
It's a gift to you when it's actually to you, and not to a separate organization that spends it on things that aren't for your own benefit.
> At some point, the foundation should be considered a profitable business rather than a charity, given the immense staffing and expenditures of operation in a billion dollar+ charity organization.
I'm not sure you understand how charities work. They are generally rated by how much money donated goes back out in programs, services or donations to other organizations to achieve the same.
> It's not trivial to ignore the oddities that abound when it does not operate like any other charity organization. Plane tickets for Hillary and Chelsea, car expenses, six figure living expenses, etc.
You should substantiate statements like that with references. Preferably to trusted sources.
> The democratic process is acutely broken by any standard if you believe that PACs and now, "charity organizations" is a net benefit.
I don't believe charity organizations working as a PAC is beneficial, but I haven't seen any evidence of that either.
As some one coming to US from mainland China, I find this collusion between the media and the Democratic party familiar, yet the case with US is much more disturbing. Because in China, the relationship between CCP and the press is out in the open, people knew the press is the mouthpiece of the party and treat the information they receive from the press accordingly. Here in US, people do not know. This is truly frightening.
The Trump tapes? You mean that one 11-year-old video that shows him talking very crudely about sexual escapades?
Sure, that's reprehensible. Is it worse than what past presidents have done while in office? If not, why is it a problem now?
Why is one candidate's personal sex life a bigger problem than collusion with the media during the campaign and using a cabinet-level position to enrich oneself? That is, why is his sex life a bigger problem than her corruption exhibited while in public office, as well as her criminal mishandling of classified material, which directly harmed U.S. interests abroad, when many have been jailed for less (including since Comey's press conference)?
> PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
That's nice. A suggestion: if you really care about who wins, look less at the candidates and more the platforms of them and their parties. The media makes it appear that this election is a contest between two people--but it's actually a contest between two competing worldviews which are vastly different from one another. You could swap any other Democrat for her and any Republican for him (though any actual Republican would differ much more from Trump than any other Democrat would differ from Clinton), and the underlying issues would be the same. The individual candidates are virtually a facade, a distraction from the real issues at stake.
If you're prepared to dismiss allegations of (and supporting boasts about) sexual molestation to simply be "his personal sex life" you have a very screwed up idea of sex and personal space.
Did you see the Project Veritas stuff? You know, where the Democratic campaign staffers confess to having hired mentally ill people to commit acts of violence at Trump rallies? And to hiring people to vote out-of-state, specifically using their own cars or rentals to avoid the obvious concern that would be generated by busing them in?
So think about this: if you have at least one of the campaigns having confessed to criminal electioneering, why would you believe anything they say? Why would you believe anyone they bring forward to slander the opposing candidate?
I don't support any such boasts. I support healthy skepticism. NBC didn't have any problem with Trump's conduct when he was a TV star raking in millions for them, but now that he's opposing Dear Leader, the evidence must be brought forward.
And you try to turn this around and make it about me? You're clearly not interested in truth of any kind.
a) mishandling of classified information
b) insisting that as commander-in-chief, you will order the US military to commit war crimes
Which do you think more directly harms US interests abroad?
Is evidence of financial ties of Clinton and foundation aides to Russian oligarchy damaging? Depends on whether you think being financially tied to Putin and claiming Trump is in Putin's pocket in the same time is something bad to do or a clever game?
Is evidence of pay-for-play arrangements between State Dept., Clinton foundation and foreign investors - including same persons working for both at the same time - damaging or just a successful charity that nobody has to be ashamed of?
Is revelation that the president knew what he claimed to have no knowledge of damaging or just a clever tactic to defeat attacks?
Is revelation that Supreme Court was (successfully) pressured into making certain decisions by threatening to make it a campaign issue otherwise damaging or just a successful management?
Is calling your voters "needy latinos"[2] and Catholics "amazing bastardization of the faith"[3] damaging or just funny banter?
Is telling "we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry"[4] and complaining "compliance is obviously fading rapidly" damaging or accurate assessment of their electoral strategy?
It all depends on your point of view, I guess.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...
[3] http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/12/hillary-clinto...
For my part, I do both. I have bitched and kvetched at times about my clients being cripplingly needy, aggressively brain dead, and the like. I certainly wouldn't say it to their faces, and it doesn't mean I don't rely on their dollars to support my business. Nor either does it mean I am producing lesser-quality work for them.
This is a non-issue. People everywhere bitch about the outsiders they have to deal with in language that would never be used in business proper.
It is a massive chasm of difference between calling a group "needy" and categorizing them as illegals, rapists and murderers.
Now, if I were talking one on one with peers over beers, that's a different matter. There is much more freedom and it would allow some things said which are not meant to be heard by anybody not in the audience.
> People everywhere bitch about the outsiders they have to deal with in language that would never be used in business proper.
This is not exactly business - those are people that pretend to be champions of those "needy latinos" and represent them. It's a higher bar than just business transaction - I would have no problem doing business with a person I disagree with on everything and who maybe secretly hates me, as long as the business end is fine I'm fine. But I probably prefer to choose somebody else to represent me and speak for me.
For instance, the comment about public/private positions is one of the most common ones you hear people complain about (and Clinton was asked about it during the debate). Here's the full statement:
"You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work."
I would encourage everyone to look at the original source anytime someone makes a claim about what was said in the e-mail.
The most damaging thing at the moment would have to be the attempted bribery from the under secretary to the FBI. Even in their excuse they are kind of admitting they attempted to bribe, but it just failed so we shouldn't worry.
The other part that really gets me is the death penalty question that the head of the DNC smuggled out of CNN when she was working there. I don't know how she hasn't resigned when you have been caught working within the media to manipulate things to benefit your prefered candidate.
And that skips over the whole issue of how the DNC was bias against bernie, it's just pilling on now how rigged the system was against him.
I mean, I guess it's a little bit underhanded, but only just barely. If there were something significant in the emails then it still would have been reported on, but as far as I can tell, there wasn't.
But be may be seeing another outcome: the greatest tax is on the organizations where its supporters care about what's right and wrong and true and false, while organizations that spew empty invective and bullshit have no tax. Perhaps what we ended up with is an 'intellectual honesty' tax.
I want to know the dirt on our candidates because they will LIE LIE LIE as Trump put it.
The other thing is we have no idea if they are all authentic. It would be trivial to slip a few extra sentences in here or there. Everyone just seems to take it as given that they're legit but Assange didn't hack anyone to get them. We know nothing about who actually did, so we don't even have a flimsy "reputation" pretense to rely on.
This.
There has been no verification that these are completely real emails (the checksum matches so to speak).
Podesta himself admitted he got hacked and the password he emailed himself in plaintext worked for his other social media accounts.
For any one email, it's easy to check and dispute a discrepancy.
Checking thousands of emails takes time but you have to take that time to avoid the chance of validating a forgery. During that time, they're in the news a lot and someone may confirm a legitimate email in the dump, which will be taken by many as proof that the entire thing is valid. Many people will never change their memory of that. If you do find anything tampered with, it may be hard or impossible to prove to a level which will satisfy critics. It doesn't need to be provable to the level needed for a court case to be damaging politically – just look at how much mileage the GOP got from birtherism based on repetition and incredibly clumsy forgeries even with contradictory evidence available.
So if you compromise a political target's account, you could get the most damage from real dirt but you can get almost as much from a clever forgery among all of the normal office chatter as long as you don't do something like adding a Russian name to the Office metadata or claim something happened when it was unquestionably impossible (e.g. claiming a secret meeting when someone was giving a speech nowhere near the purported location).
Wikileaks has a 100% accuracy rating(meaning they have not once pushed a falsified leak).
You showing other falsifications by other corrupt organizations isn't enough for me to throw away evidence as 'false' when there is no reason to do so. Again, if there was an individual falsification why wouldn't DNC officials call it out? Can you provide me a rational explanation.
In the context of a leak dropped a day before the election with no chance to fact check, sure, I could entertain the possibility there might be forgeries to control the election results.
Weeks ahead? What is stopping any forgeries from being called out? Where is _your_ proof these are false emails?
You have none, because there is none.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...
Whatever you may believe about their actions in the past, they don't appear to be checking before publishing much now and that means it's on the reader to look for confirmation rather than credulously assuming nobody would lie about matters of political importance.
In this case, we've already seen that cycle with the Guccifer documents being heavily cross-promoted by Russian state media and Wikileaks but showing many signs of modification and misrepresentation (e.g. the alleged Clinton Foundation documents which didn't hold up to non-casual examination).
That doesn't mean that Wikileaks might not have real data but it definitely shows that anyone who isn't just looking for propaganda should take time to investigate rather than assuming they're legitimate or correctly summarized.
It does suck that they're timing their release with political motives, and Assange appears to be a gaping asshole (though not a rapist), but none of this is even remotely novel for Wikileaks.
My totally off the cuff hypothesis:
We are approaching a tipping point where new energy technologies (solar+batteries, etc.) will get cheap enough to "go exponential" vs. fossil fuels. This has huge geopolitical implications.
A more or less permanent crash in fossil fuel prices could completely realign the world. The biggest winners would probably be the USA, EU, and China since these are net energy importers and have economies based on high tech, manufacturing, finance, and services. The biggest losers would be Russia and the Middle Eastern petro-states, but certain regions within the USA and Canada would also lose substantially vs. others. More importantly you'd have a major crash in the value of certain corporations vs. others. Apple being briefly worth more than Exxon Mobil is perhaps a preview.
I've heard the view before that WWI and WWII were really about dominance of the emerging petroleum age. If that age is now ending, what happens next? WWIII?
Edit: Second hypothesis:
The world economy is about to crash again hard, and when that happens there will be a great window to enact all kinds of changes. Various parties are struggling to make sure they are in power for that window.
Personally, I don't understand the brouhaha about all the Trump tapes. If you had even a remote inkling of fact about the man NONE OF THIS IS A SURPRISE.
While I'm definitely in the opposing camp, I have zero respect for those who are now abandoning Trump. You stuck with him on superficial grounds and now you are leaving on superficial grounds. Nothing about the man has changed.
I think it points towards people fooling themselves as to his character so they could continue to support him in good conscience. Once presented with hard evidence, that's harder to do. If something definitive came out tomorrow about Clinton accepting cash for favors (not donations to a charitable foundation for meetings, which is what is poorly alleged now), then I think a lot of Clinton supporters would have a similar crisis of conscience.
Huh? I remember the leaks coming out first then the video? I remember because I had fox news live on in the background, they started talking about the email dump and when they came back from break it was pussygate.
"State actor" can only really mean UK or Ecuadorian government - or at the very least one of those two must be pulling the trigger.
If it's Ecuador that makes some sense, they control the connections to the outside world - they could just change some passwords and internet is cut. But that would be very obviously what had happened so why not just name them.
Alternatively the UK could cut the connection from outside the embassy. I don't see how that could be done without cutting off the internet for the whole embassy. That would possibly be in breach of the Vienna Convention [0] but at the very least I can't imagine it happening without creating a gigantic diplomatic stink.
Neither of those options sound that plausible. Is there a third I've missed? Somehow know it's Assange browsing and kill all his packets in flight?
Also, this is central London - the internet floats freely through the air. Contingency measure is tethering?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomati...
The third option you've missed is "this is all bullshit." Either because it's not happening at all, or because the embassy's internet is down due to some routine outage.
Perhaps a temporary data hiccup might be a more realistic solution (or simulation, if malicious) versus "Call cannot be connected".
I don't think Assange runs the wikileaks twitter account. So probably he messages them every day and when they don't get a message they know something is wrong.
Not necessarily. Russia could think that it's best interest is that Wikileaks' dead man switch goes off. They could be pressuring Ecuador or actually have cut the connection themselves.
> Also, this is central London - the internet floats freely through the air. Contingency measure is tethering?
Cellphone signals can be easily jammed, as shown at DEFCON and other events. No one has reported on whether or not they can get signal at the Ecuadorian embassy AFAIK.
EDIT: Some people streamed Periscope from the embassy, so no cellphone jamming. If Ecuador is involved, of course, they could just take away all of Assange's devices.
As for signal jamming. Not an area I know a lot about, but I assume it is achieved by flooding an area with noise. Pretty detectable is what I'm saying - anyone nipped down to see if that's actually happening? Would be quite a scoop.
In any case, this is all speculation until we get some kind of evidence of some kind.
>We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs.
I mean, until there is actual evidence that Hillary Clinton[1] deployed a highly trained collection of seals (the animal, not the US military contingent) to cut through his tube wires in the death of the night and then pelt across hide park and hide in the serpentine, perhaps we should just consider that public services in the UK are incompetent.
My internet went down last week, you don't see me reaching for the anti-seal spray.
[1] Well, the robot that replaced Hillary Clinton obviously, as we all know she's been dead for 20 years
2/ Since you post on HN I guess you sure understand that there is no need to alter the physical layer if you want to ostracize a subnetwork from the Internet.
Also, he's not the only person running Wikileaks , he's mostly the public persona, but there are other people who are not stuck in an embassy right?
Doesn't that make almost too much sense?
If he has and holds evidence of something so damaging that a tweet of the supposed hash of the file is enough to be a threat to a person in power, then why has he allowed himself to live under effectively self-imposed house-arrest for the past 4 years?
I can't imagine that the Wikileaks apparatus doesn't have sufficient op-sec and op-capability to ensure that whatever they're holding gets released effectively should they choose for it to be, so I find myself erring towards this being an over-played hand for the most part.
Also they have the ability to spread information as they see fit. See his various leaks for example. Assange isn't hosting an ftp for everyone at the embassy. This stuff goes out via torrents, mailed drives to journalists, and via Assange's army of helpers.
In the former case he might fear he releases the secret to stop the Dead Man's Switch, in the latter case his contacts might avoid him or be tortured themselves just to pressure JA, so it doesn't sound like a free life either.
So you hold onto it to protect a high value asset - your life. Assume that you want charges dropped unto you - and you get that granted. Then you want something more annoying to the powers you control - maybe that would be granted. But at a certain point the cost to grant you wishes is going to be on the same level as the threat you hold over me, and then I may decide to take the fallout, and be done with it.
I suspect we're on the verge of this - Assange has something so damning that the fallout of having him taken out in broad daylight becomes something you contemplate. If this is so, at this point if Assange goes public with what he knows, he's a dead man anyway.
Assange's ego really dilutes the wikileaks original goals and its no surprise that the actual doers in the organisation upped and left in 2010.
> pre-commitment 2: Ecuador eae5c9b064ed649ba468f0800abf8b56ae5cfe355b93b1ce90a1b92a48a9ab72
(For those not aware, (((echo parenthesis))) are an anti-semitic symbol used by white supremacists to highlight people who are Jewish.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses
Edit: Wow, here it is: http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/wikileaks-echoes-tweet-anti-s...
Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses.
Here's a white-supremacist organization praising Assange for the tweet: http://www.dailystormer.com/julian-assange-and-general-flynn...
Anti-Semitism is rising. Everywhere. We are going high-profile.
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and General Flynn this week have tweeted openly anti-Semitic tweets.http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/echoes-means-twitte...
The "horrible" idea is that maybe who ever made the Wikileaks tweet was running Coincidence Detector, IGNORING that for weeks the echo had been exposed and co-opted.
Then why do I see self proclaimed jews on twitter with the walls? I though it was a joke.... Considering it's... twitter.
Also, how it that funny? Using Jewish stereotypes and anti-semitic labeling to imply your critics are Jews trying to climb the social ladder? Is that supposed to pass for humor? Maybe next he'll make some comment about a group of people with no jobs, having great tans, and that just love to eat fried chicken and watermelon. What a comedian, that guy.
Was it a "state actor" the last time your internet stopped working?
1) "John Kerry has threatened the Ecuadorian President with "grave consequences for Equador" if Assange is not silenced @StoneColdTruth" [1]
2) "Reports the Brits storm the Ecuadorian Embassy tonite while Kerry demands the UK revoke their diplomatic status so Assange can be seized" [2]
It really does make me wonder what documents Wikileaks might have that could make US diplomats so riled up.
[0] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/roger-stone-back-chann...
[1] https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/787858612844695552
[2] https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/787863160149598208
Rather I'm guessing it's just speculation based on fact the John Kerry is currently visiting the UK.
I doubt the USG is involved in this. They have a pretty solid track record of both respecting human rights and due process. Keep in mind the US government is the most ethical government in the world. Assange, on the other hand, is a rapist and a Russian puppet trying to hijack the US election. He probably is a Trump supporter in disguise and a closeted systemd committer. If that wasn't enough, there are multiple reports claiming that Assange does not respect PEP8 in his code. This last thing was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
Edit: Fair characterization of their level of systemd hate; not any correlation to US politics or Wikileaks.
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=search...
Would this change your opinion?
Do you honestly think anyone could storm such an embassy and not have a massive media footprint? When the Iranian embassy was stormed there was wall-to-wall coverage on the news, and that was in the 1980s, before every second person on the street had a cellphone and twitter.
2. At the time the Internet got cut-off it was 6:40am in the UK. Pretty early.
3. The British government has the power to issue DA-notice to media outlets.
4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
5. "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating. If you have up-to-date information, feel free to share.
Surely they can suppress all blogs and all of twitter and facebook at the same time. Oh, hold - why didn't they suppress the tweet we're discussing.
> 4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
It require a little more than a bobby walking up to the door and asking politely. It's fairly likely that this would get noticed by someone passing by - mind you: That's not somewhere in the woods, it's central London.
> "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating.
No. You are speculating. The null hypothesis is that nothing of that sort happened. Apart from handwaving speculation you haven't offered anything that would even resemble proof or supporting evidence.
Secondly central London has rather good wifi and 4G coverage. Presumably the "appropriate contingency plans" are to switch his phone's personal hotspot on and carry on as normal. Though there might be a nasty phone bill coming down the line.
British media didn't report anything today, so the D-Notice threat is very likely.
Strange security vans with a strange white side wall to be opened sidewards appeared today near the embassy.
I've already said why I think such a storming would provide evidence that even state-sponsored actors would not be able to suppress. The Brompton Road and Sloane street both have plenty of pedestrians and vehicular traffic at 6:40am (I'm speaking as someone who used to bicycle down them every day around that time).
Given no evidence to the contrary, a much better hypothesis that fits the known facts is that there was some sort of standard ISP snafu or similar tech problem.
Given that cutting off internet before means he can't do any new live data releases ("Maybe he screwed up setting up his dead man's switch?" unlikely but possible at this point) and means that during a raid there'd be no heroic live stream from inside the safe room "resisting the oppressive dogs of the US government come to silence him."
I don't really see what there is to gain from a raid to seize him now though. Presumably wikileaks is capable of trickling out whatever 'damning' emails/cables/files they already have without him so it's probably not the goal.
Though it might be something: a guy claiming to be a CIA intelligence analyst says that Assange is about to get extradited. We will know in the coming hours for sure. If this is true it is pretty damaging to the sexual assault accusations he was facing in Sweden. That would confirm that it was indeed the end-goal of getting him transferred to Sweden.
It was posted a few hours before everything unravelled and so far the anonymous poster was right. Of course, he could just be lucky and trolling for replies. At such an early stage it is interesting to share anyway.
The fact that once he leaves the long-delayed wheels of justice start turning is merely a side-effect. The end-goal is not getting him transferred to Sweden, it is for Assange to be able to show the world that he was right all along by defending himself against the charges against him and not hiding until he could run out the clock.
Why not? Considering that not too long ago it was deemed legal to rape your wife? It's not too long ago that rape wasn't exactly treated as the crime it is now. Without wanting to apologize any of the behavior, it's less than my lifetime ago that the man who took a woman against her will wasn't considered a rapist but rather a role model in large chunks of the population. So yes, it's quite well possible that all of them are rapists. That's the kind of world we live in.
Pop history. Be specific (time, place, evidence) or stop with the demon-haunted characterisations of the past.
2. Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire) 1947 Play
Just two that spring to mind. I'm sure a diligent person could find plenty of other examples of rapist protagonists in 20th century literature.
I mean, didn't you read and discuss "Native Son" in high school? Do you think that the fact that its protagonist committed murder means that Richard Wright or society at the time approved of murder?
And by the way, when "The Fountainhead" and "Streetcar Named Desire" came out, those rape scenes were just about as controversial as the publication of "Native Son".
Look at early Bond movies for example. Quite a lot of behaviour in those movies would be considered sexual assault if happened today.
That Bond was a lonely, bitter, alcoholic (beyond "vodka martini, shaken not stirred", but in many of the books Bond would often find himself alone at the bottom of a bottle of liquor), misogynist with a short temper.
So certainly they could, and in many cases, that would have been the underlying premise - not that he was (just) a ladies' man who would have women falling over themselves.
The Human Centipede
People in positions of power often feel like they can get away with sexually aggressive behaviour. Just like Trump unequivocally stated on tape. And you have selectively chosen a handful there but there a lot of politicians e.g. Obama, Bernie, Biden, Ryan, Romney etc who haven't had charges of rape labelled against them.
And remember there are many successful leaders, visionaries and pillars of society with fatal personality flaws. You only have to look at Trump using the argument that "she was ugly" to dispute a rape charge as an example of this.
In the meantime, I'm curious, for people who are angry about this: suppose it is actually true that Assange is working together with Russian hackers in an attempt to influence a US election. Do you believe there is any point at which governments should intervene to protect national sovereignty and integrity of the political process?
If WikiLeaks was releasing dirt on both candidates I would feel much differently.
The releases expose corruption, it isn't necessarily partisan. Wikileaks used to release documents about George W Bush, and Putin as well.
That's not what the FBI investigation is saying:
> Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that they are confident that senior-level Russian officials were involved in the hacks.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/john-podesta-wikileaks...
Are you implying that the DNC intentionally leaked the emails to wikileaks and are colluding with the FBI to blame Russia?
Nope. He's just implying that FBI and DNC are working together.
What is more likely though is: DNC was hacked, Wikileaks is doing what it has done for 10 years i.e. releasing information so that it makes maximum impact and Clintons are trying to damage-control by implying that Russia is involved... all while telling their Russian friends to pretend as if they support Trump (who has never worked with anything Russian ever... unlike the Clintons).
> Trump (who has never worked with anything Russian ever... unlike the Clintons)
I can't tell if this is satire. Trump's campaign manager was responsible for installing 2 Pro-Putin dictators [1]. Also considering that Assange works for RT [2] (Russia's international Propos machine [3] which is all pro-Trump ATM), I think it's more likely that the FBI isn't fabricating facts here when they say the hack was related to Russia.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/global-news/article/2016/may/02/pa...
[2] https://www.rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Propaganda_and...
The democratic process is about open and free exchange of ideas and transparency.
Keeping information secret by attacking journalists does NOT support democracy.
Ever wondered if there is no dirt, there is nothing to release? Unlike the mainstream media which takes command from the Clintons, Wikileaks doesn't fabricate their releases... so it is not possible to release dirt on Trump.
>Unlike the mainstream media which takes command from the Clintons
Seriously?
Yep, like calling fat people fat and saying "pussy" in a private conversation.
>Seriously?
Don't take my word for it. Read the emails by media broker of the DNC: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/7216
This is what he says:
>This is who I will meet with in NYC. At each meeting, I’ll discuss hits we’ve executed (if relevant) and future hits. Anything I should add?
also, why would I believe some anonymous HN'er about anything. Information is either true or false, the source isn't really relevant, all that matters are the facts.
Absurd. Of course your sources matter. A credible source is more believable than an incredible source. Ever heard of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? Looking only at the material presented and not at the presenter of the material is only giving you part of the picture.
Possible facts:
Assange has had his internet access shut down (probably true)
Assange has been extradited (status unknown at this point, you seem to want to discredit it based on the source I simply withhold my judgment until there is more information about this)
And there is no such thing as a "probably true possible fact". There are facts and there are allegations.
By your reckoning no anonymous source can ever be credible. Some pretty interesting stuff has come out over the years from anonymous sources and turned out - retrospectively - to have been accurate and likely to have been a leak by an insider. Given that nobody is ever (Snowden excepted) to go on the record about an imminent operation from inside some government agency the only way such information could ever come out is through anonymous sources.
See also: watergate.
If the NYT says they got a tip from an anonymous source about Assange, it means more to me than if my neighbor Steve says HE got a tip from an anonymous source.
This causes all kinds of havoc and requires more skepticism on the part of the consumer but that does not diminish the fact that it might be true and that the timing is interesting.
Now chances are better than even (a lot better) that this is false, but so far it fits the facts as good (and in some cases better) than most other theories about why this is happening other than the one about today being the day of the 'interview' with the Swedish representatives.
As an example, the UNHCR follows a similar protocol when investigating reports of atrocities. The individual reporters, while not fully anonymous, frequently have no previous basis to assess credibility. If their stories generally correspond, you've got an indication of truth. If the stories differ on material points, there are problems.
The story of Susannah from the Book of Daniel (Bible or Torah) has an excellent early exemplar of this: the stories of two claimed witnesses differed materially in the description of a crucial tree, impeaching their credibility.
What basis do you have for the (probably true) rating?
The man literally told people he rescheduled his election-changing news conference from a balcony to a middle-of-the-night webcast, because he thought a sniper was going to kill him on the balcony. As if this was likely. Then it turned out his election-changing news conference was an advert for his book.
The man is great at marketing himself.
Absent any proof that he actually has access I'm going on the assumption that he does not because that is what they claim.
Now whether or not it really is a state actor (could be Ecuador!), Assange's laptop frying the network card or some other reason why he hasn't got access (didn't pay the phone bill?) is up for grabs.
Do you understand what I'm saying when I say I don't believe Assange when he says his internet is cut off?
Also, as has been mentioned elsewhere, the Ecuadorian embassy has a policy against making any sort of statements about Assange.
Note that Wikileaks is making the claim not Assange and they are not the same entity (they'd have to, given that Assange can't go online).
Now, it could all be not true but what would be the point of lying about this when the truth will come out regardless?
2. The truth will not "come out regardless" if he was lying. It's very hard to prove a negative. Even if the embassy puts out an announcement saying "As far as we know, his internet is fine," Wikileaks can just say "The embassy is in cahoots with the Americans," or "It was cut earlier, and sources told me it was the gubbment." No one will care much at that point, his martyrdom point will have been made.
Disingenuous even if technically true.
We now have complete radio silence from for >12 hours and embassy employees are no longer allowed to talk about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_jhLcvoZqc
"no longer" ? It's quite likely that they were never allowed to talk about him
I guess time will tell.
That said the content of the post is pretty unbelievable.
TL;DR: a 4chan poster claiming to be an intelligence officer says that the United States forced Ecuador to allow extradition of Assange.
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In response to mejari (both of his replies) below, I'm rate-limited:
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Did you even read that article? That's not what it says. They just didn't publish the documents. What it does say is that the hackers that stole the documents were joking about editing them before sending them to wikileaks.
You keep using the word fake, and I don't think you know what the work fake means.
You didn't say that they released fake data. You implied that all the data that they DID release was true and accurate, but there was some other true data that they didn't release.
:shows truepundit article:
seems flimsy, doesn't really contain any actual sources other than "sources said". can you cite any other articles that don't use truepundit as the source?
:crickets:
yes. one article on an arguably either satire or hard-right website is the source of all the "drone him" talk
All is possible. This guy lives a fucking dystopian nightmare.
Also, other people have reported, and it's pretty common in a lot of embassies, not just the Ecuadorian, that cell phones are either actively jammed or the embassy is built as a Faraday cage. I had no cell service in the US embassy in Sydney, despite being in the middle of a capital city within 10 ft of a window.
"Wikileaks says Wikileaks was stopped from posting, according to what people told Wikileaks".
The entire case is a joke and whatever the US-election result is, it's bad for the entire world since our corrupt politicians will do whatever American corrupt politicians say.
The rape allegations won't be past the limit until 2020.
I dont think its that simple as "Just go there and have the hearing".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomati...
The thing protecting Assange right now isn't the judicial process, but rather the inviolability of embassies. The UK police are adhering to the norm that they can't enter the embassy without permission. That norm is routinely violated in other places, but I think everyone involved is comfortable with Assange's self-inflicted house arrest.
> That norm is routinely violated in other places
No, it isn't. That would severely damage relationships between the two countries. It's more than a "norm", it's a fundamental principle of diplomacy going back millennia.
At any rate: we agree: it's the Vienna Accords that keep the UK from simply lassoing Assange and hauling him out of the building. It has nothing to do with whether he's on Ecuadorian soil (he is not).
Whilst subject to use and abuse, most countries have agreements that while certain officials may not be prosecuted (oftentimes, this is only "for offenses related to their official capacity") in the guest country, that they will be, in their home state.
Even general principles around arrest or detainment have "reasonable constraints" for self-defense, public safety or for the prevention of a serious criminal act/felony.
But no, Ecuador does not have a vote in whether Assange can be extradited. The UK and Sweden do because they are both parties to a treaty that says they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_an...
And I can't ind any examples of extrajudicial extraordinary rendition originating in the UK, unlike Sweden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#United...
And they could preemptively refuse to allow him to be extradited for the leaks by stating definitively that it was not a crime by their laws.
Presidential pardons are irrelevant as Sweden is not the USA, but in any case, the President cannot preemptively pardon people for future offenses for which they may or may not be convicted.
>And they could preemptively refuse to allow him to be extradited for the leaks by stating definitively that it was not a crime by their laws.
Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority to override the courts and declare that someone isn't guilty of a crime in the absence of any proper legal process?
Well, in Assange's case, those would be past offences for which they may or may not be convicted. And I think that would be the same situation as Nixon when Ford pardoned him - he'd already done the deed, but hadn't been convicted yet.
edit: Though, since we're speculating already - does it even make sense for an American president to pardon an Australian citizen?
They could push the courts to issue a declaratory judgement on the issue of leaks, for instance. Or pass a new law making whistleblowing specifically legal and give retroactive immunity. Or investigate the prosecutor for misconduct because of their persecution and unwillingness to advance the investigation. Or allow the courts to try the case remotely.
Or they could simply throw the paperwork away, making prosecution impossible. It might not be legal, but you're living under a rock if you think that much of what your government does would be legal in the courts.
> Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority
Nobody cares. That question is the sole point of blame-diffusion systems. All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
Bush didn't have the authority to do much of what he did, but he had the ability and by the time we could point out the difference it was a done deal and now he's not prosecuted so I guess he did have the authority...
The rules work differently at that level. But, even if they didn't, better the leader of a country sits in a country-club prison for doing the right thing than yet another innocent is illegally kidnapped and tortured.
None of these suggestions makes any sense.
(i) A declaratory judgment on the issue of leaks, whatever that means, would have no bearing on Assange's arrest warrant for rape.
(ii) Assange is not being charged with whistleblowing; he is being charged with rape.
(iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
(v) I'd be wary of throwing legal niceties aside. It's only those that are preventing the UK government from entering the embassy and arresting him there.
>All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
This is false as far as anyone can tell. If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate.
Nicely numbered, but not well thought out.
Assange is avoiding going to Sweden because he rightfully expects a high chance of being rended to USA custody. A program the Swedish government embraced. Eliminating one of the main legal avenues for this is precisely the point.
> (iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct
Totally untrue. The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
The organizations I work with have rules for automatic investigations of people who deviate from the norm in suspicious circumstances. If there's any question, there's an investigating. Perhaps it's nothing, but if there was an investigation which found no unjust influence from the political side of the equation it would greatly increase public trust in the outcome of the trial.
It makes no sense to turn yourself in to the law when you have good reason to assume you will NOT get a fair trial, and all indicators point to corruption.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
That's not true. There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
Also, tough. They had custody and let him go. Why do they deserve infinite do-overs? They could try him and ban him from entering Sweden if they were serious, as that would also serve the goal of making Swedish people safer.
>> All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
> This is false as far as anyone can tell.
No, you just need to use your imagination. Picture your mother being arrested on a fabricated charge. Think of all the points along the way that you could ruin the government's case through interference if you were the court clerk, a beat cop, etc. Vastly many people have to do just the right things for a arrest/trial/charge to be valid. Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process. Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
This in fact is your moral responsibility. If you join an organization its crimes are on your shoulders unless you take an effort to correct them.
> If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate
Start by reading the wiki article. Fix that if you think it doesn't match the citations. Then come back and ask about anything you still don't understand.
Consider also reading the article about Civil Disobedience.
It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
> The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
>There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
>Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
>Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process
The hypocrisy of this part of your comment is quite astonishing. You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
> None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
It's well documented. He was interviewed in Sweden and left weeks later after notifying the police. That means he isn't a fugitive.
Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return, showing that they can if they want to. This means they are choosing not to advance the case while loudly declaring otherwise. That's the process deviation.
> It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
> Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
Just because you would lie doesn't mean Assange would. I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
> How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Assuming he didn't comply willingly, I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons. But even if not, house-arrest has proven successful so far.
> You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice. Humanity 101.
I'm pointing out the deviations of the prosecutor to explain the irregularities that people would be calling to have investigated. It's not a baseless fishing trip.
EAW.
"Fugitive" isn't a precisely defined term, but he is subject to an arrest warrant and isn't complying with it.
>Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return,
As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions, and according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
> A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
I doubt that this is possible. At least, you appear to be the only person who has suggested it. Has anyone with the relevant legal expertise indicated that this is a possibility?
>I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW. Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
> I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons.
How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
>Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice.
You already accept that Sweden can try Assange. Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
Color me a traditionalist, but only valid warrants count.
> As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions
Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
> according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
> I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW.
He's not ignoring them, he's refusing to comply with non-legal orders.
You have no reason to think he wouldn't comply with legal orders, because he has always complied before. This isn't wikipedia, but Assume Good Faith.
> Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
Right, and he's not under any obligation to do with them to participate in the sham.
> How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
> You already accept that Sweden can try Assange.
It's their courthouse, they can try Kermit the Frog if they want. It's the legitimacy of the trial that's in question.
> Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
Because one requires extraordinary rendition. If it's legal for me to eat an icecream cone, why is it illegal for me to kidnap you, lock you in a box, and transport you to a foreign country, then eat an icecream cone? (Hint, the kidnapping and rendition...)
The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
>Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him. This was explained repeatedly at the time. See e.g. paragraph 140 of the high court judgment:
In our view, the terms of the EAW read as a whole made clear that not only was the EAW issued for the purpose of Mr Assange being prosecuted for the offence, but that he was required for the purposes of being tried after being identified as the perpetrator of specific criminal offences. He was therefore accused of the offences specified in the EAW. Nothing in the EAW suggested he was wanted for questioning as a suspect.
Or, directly from the Swedish prosecutor (paragraph 142):
It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries.
>Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
He is not wanted merely for questioning.
>I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities would do under hypothetical circumstances. If you have some inside knowledge, please share it. (I thought wikileaks supporters, of all people, would believe in transparency?)
>Because one requires extraordinary rendition.
What on Earth are you talking about? Assange could go to Sweden today and the trial could be held there. No extraordinary rendition required.
Why on earth would he be that stupid though? They clearly aren't prosecuting the case properly so why would he believe he'd get a fair trial?
The only way they'll get him there is if they or the brits abduct him at gunpoint. Extraordinary rendition.
> No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him.
They can say it all they want but that doesn't make it true. They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely. The reason they don't is that it's not about the case, with its likely short sentence, it's about capturing and controlling him. If they tried him remotely he would serve his sentence in a foreign (Ecuadorean likely) prison and they wouldn't have achieved their goal.
> This was explained repeatedly at the time.
Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
> He is not wanted merely for questioning.
Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
> I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities
You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement. You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist so you have the burden of proof.
> The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
No, valid means it's not a setup. The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
That wouldn't be extraordinary rendition, assuming he was being arrested by the British police. (It would be a violation of various diplomatic protocols, which is why the UK hasn't done it.)
>They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
>Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely
They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.) But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
>Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
>Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up. Whether they always wanted to do this is irrelevant. (Although, that being said, your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.)
>You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement.
I may have used the word "know", but of course I admit that this is merely what I suspect. Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia. But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
>You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist
I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
>The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
If he's arrested on trumped up charges, then yes, it would be. (I'm sure the CIA printed up some sort of receipt (err, warrant) for the people it had smuggled out of the country. Paperwork doesn't make things right.)
> You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
Right, and they always have. But their lies around that, and framing him for fleeing, etc, have rendered that moot. Any legitimacy the trial may have had is up in smoke. If he can't get fair treatment pre-trial why would we think he'd get a fair trial?
> They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.)
That directly contradicts the text of the law. Trials in absentia are possible - there are merely rules for notification, etc.
Also, they've lied before so the default position is that they're lying this time too.
> But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
Because it's their fault, not his. Their fuckups and their lies. Anyone in his position deserves proper treatment.
> They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up.
A warrant they wrote themselves. Not very convincing. Prosecutorial misconduct is not justice and they can't pretend that it is by doubling down.
> But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
To achieve justice.
> I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
No, but you're sure he'll get convicted and that he wouldn't report for jail. That means: rapist, and unrepentant. You didn't say it out right, and now you're walking it back to "strongly suspect"...
> It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
You're saying the usual process involves lies and slander? I doubt that. And no, I don't have a general problem with EAWs...
> Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia.
If he was convicted in absentia, by a clown court, I imagine he'd thumb his nose at Sweden. I would. But if he was given the chance to participate in a real trial, remotely, that would be vastly different.
> your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.
The UN working group on arbitrary detention didn't idly side with him. If the charges appeared to have merit they wouldn't have come out in support. I think they're read both sets of sources...
"""Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange. [...] The Working Group also considered that the detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation."""
Swedish prosecutors said the questioning would take place on 17 October and be conducted by an Ecuadorian prosecutor.
Note: Today is 17 October.
Now, I will absolutely grant you that the amount of manpower and money spent on such monitoring is ridiculous.
But to act as though the government is imprisoning him against his will by attempting to enforce a legal warrant is ... disingenuous.
Why should that count towards any prison term?
BTW, I don't think Assange would really face prison in Sweden. My best guess of what would have happened had he been extradited to Sweden:
An interview, being held a few weeks, then released to a country of his choosing.
He is inside the embassy because he likes the martyrdom that his followers clearly recognize. Not because there is any factual reason for it.
Seems like am aweful lot of money for such a small crime that you are making it out to be.
But perhaps there is other things that they are trying to deter people from doing.
Like, maybe they want to deter people from pissing off powerful governments by leaking and embarrassing world leaders?
Mind you, multiple American leaders have called for him to be arrested.
Maybe the giant elephant in the room has more than a little to do with why the government is spending so much money and effort trying to arrest him.
Sweden refuses to interview him there even though in the 4 years that he's been holed up in the embassy Swedish authorities have interviewed 44 other people in the UK. They also refused to promise to not extradite him to the USA where he would most likely be convicted of espionage and possibly executed.
If you were in his shoes do you think you would step outside given the circumstances? The UK has also stated that even if the Swedish investigation was closed they would still arrest Assange the minute he steps outside. Why wouldn't the UK extradite Assange to the USA if given the opportunity?
And how is this supposed to be "corrupt". Are you implying a vast conspiracy were the CIA is orchestrating everyone from a random prosecutor up to the highest courts of Sweden (Not that that would even be corruption as it's traditionally defined)?
If you're a state party trying to prevent leaks, silencing Julian is probably the worst way to go about it. It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
Well, I'm off to read some classic Tom Clancy.
If you looked at how long it took to find the gold nuggets in the Podesta mails it sounds reasonable willing to force their hand.
Apropos of the keyword list, dissecting the corpus could be done in a few hours with a promo-code worth of AWS time.
3.6GB - http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-A.aes256.t...
49GB - http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-B.aes256.t...
349GB - http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-C.aes256.t...
94GB - https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/2016-06-03_insurance.aes2...
I don't know why they would put out a few hundred gigabytes of fake files. The contents might not be as interesting as people hope, though.
Seems to me as likely as not that there is nothing really there.
Ciphertext indistiguishability[1] is a basic requirement for any encryption scheme. All modern ciphers are designed to make that hard.
That said he can't really play that card too often.
Looks like you can check it now. The keys went public:
pre-commitment 3: UK FCO f33a6de5c627e3270ed3e02f62cd0c857467a780cf6123d2172d80d02a072f74
pre-commitment 2: Ecuador eae5c9b064ed649ba468f0800abf8b56ae5cfe355b93b1ce90a1b92a48a9ab72
pre-commitment 1: John Kerry 4bb96075acadc3d80b5ac872874c3037a386f4f595fe99e687439aabd0219809
To trick people like you? `dd if=/dev/urandom` is much easier than finding a comparable quantity of actual info.
I don't know enough to have much opinion on the odds that's the case, vs them being real, though.
The same reason a stick-up man might put their hand in their pocket to mimic the shape of a gun. If you have no weapon, it's still often useful to make people think you have one.
And following on from this line of thought, it is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that they did think of this scenario, but feel that the risk of calling Assange's bluff (see the speculation that the insurance files are just random data meant to seed misinformation) is less than the risk of whatever they think he knows about them being leaked.
Which makes you wonder, what are they afraid of to consider such action?
Something is going to happen in the next few months. Question is, how much agency does Assange really have left?
Of course, those friends would have to visit him in person and give him some public keys or something to verify their identity.
then the state actors would just bug that good friend.
Assuming the nodes themselves are not compromised (big ask) and identity can be confirmed(like via key exchange), state actors can listen as much as they want to the wires, they won't be getting much.
Except if some private key were out there...
Please explain, I was under the impression that the above could not reasonably be claimed anymore with any kind of certainty [1][2][3]. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something important here or the 'Happy Dance!!' slide [4] made me paranoid.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/how-the-nsa-could-pu... [2] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/cisco-firewall-explo... [3] http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/how-the-nsa-can-brea... [4] http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35515.pdf
Of course router/firmware exploits cannot be prevented in the general case, so NSA-likes could figure out a way get in. But the null hypothesis is still that the NSA cannot crack strong encryption without some sort of pre-built backdoor IMO.
Based off of the leaks, NSA gets into things via two ways: - poisoning the encryption methods - social engineering/legal coercion to get keys
And probably even if not.
Granted, most of Trump's output is not even properly formed sentences, so maybe he's doing a malformed data denial-of-service attack on voters' senses?
If Clinton gets elected, nothing will change. If Trump gets elected, the hope is that it will dip negative for a few months, he gets impeached and removed from office, and at the next election we vote in Jill Stein or something.
The Weimar Republic was broken in many ways, and many Germans essentially voted against it in the 1933 elections... That example of "creative destruction of a democracy using its own tools" didn't work out great.
One example of a nation deciding overnight that the way they've done things in the past was not the way they wanted to continue.
He also seems to be quite anti-globalization, anti-TPP etc. Slapping Wall St banks would be cherry on top.
In any case a change of "elites" (if not economical, at least political) would be welcome. Probably won't be less corruption, but different corruption instead.
Re: Trump's speeches - mostly non-sensical, yes, but at least he's not pretending to be truthful. Personally, I don't have any trust in what Hillary says either - even though her lies are much more sophisticated and eloquent.
It seems extremely generous to characterize Trump as being interested in anything at all except himself. All accounts suggest that he doesn't read. On his private plane he watches his own TV appearances. He has put his name on a hundred products, but he's not an entrepreneur and doesn't care at all about developing the actual products.
Trump claims to be an expert on taxes, at least... But his former accountant Jack Mitnick says he did all the work, and when Trump visited once a year, his wife was actually asking more questions than Trump himself.
Really the best-case scenario for a Trump presidency is that his quantum-sized attention span moves to something else and he leaves the United States to run itself, like he did with the Trump University. That means Vice President Mike Pence would be the effective president, supported by a Republican Congress... And you can look at Pence's track record to see whose interests he represents: ultraconservative fundamentalist Christian Republicans. Pence is as much part of the establishment as Clinton. Is that really the change America needs?
Trump's speeches - mostly non-sensical, yes, but at least he's not pretending to be truthful.
What do you mean by that? He is definitely pretending to tell the truth. For example, since last week he has been saying that the election is rigged against him and there will be widespread vote fraud. There is not a shred of evidence of this. Republicans all over the country are actively countering the notion that the election is somehow being rigged. Yet Trump persists. That's not a harmless white lie -- no candidate has questioned the legitimacy of US elections since before the Civil War.
Pretty certain Trump called for US troops to be used in both Syria and Libya. He's also called for an escalation of bombing of ISIS, and supported torture. And he's made intemperate remarks about reacting to provocation - Russian planes shot down for flying over US ships, Iranian ships shot at if the crew make rude gestures. I would say it's at least arguable to say there will be fewer wars under Trump. Personally I find it quite difficult to follow that line of argument. I'd expect Clinton to be more hawkish than Obama, but Obama has been one of the US Presidents most keen on diplomacy and de-escalation for decades.
I have sympathy with where Doug is coming from, let's just get it over and done with already.
But that candidate has decided to take the low road. And I mean LOW.
In a First Past the Post voting system like the one in America, a vote for a third-party is, and always will be a vote against your preferences. Rank-choice is a far superior system (though it has its own downsides as well), but that isn't what we have in America. The lesser of two evils is still the better of two options. You want "better" candidates, get involved in party politics and vote in the primaries.
And I don't collect welfare because it's such a small paycheck compared to my salary. But for people who could really use that money, it's a huge help.
It really depends how you weight this election vs others coming up. But if you're in, say, California, your vote for President will not swing the state at all -- it's locked in for Hillary. If (and it's a big if) some other party is closer to your preferred policies, feel free to vote for them without a trace of guilt about making your side weaker for this election.
Most voters live in states that are essentially a lock-up for one of the two candidates. Arguably about 10 states might swing, but third party candidates could easily get 10+ percent of the popular vote nationally and largely influence the direction of the major parties if the voting public understood the electoral college and the multi-election game theory of it.
Another crook, Clinton, for the next years is survivable, but long term a strong third party has to invade this broken system, sooner or later.
Initially I hoped Trump will tear the GOP apart, but he made it impossible with his latest stupidities.
Consider that it is the crooked system that has led you to believe that.
See this, newly released, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuJGHuIkzY shocking stuff.
Yeah, so many libtards would be triggered... it's hardly worth it.
"We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."
Almost had my mind off it for 2 minutes while reading this Intercept article about Hillary's relationship with the press https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...
If this is Clinton attempting to seal-the-deal on the election, I'm officially not voting. Anyone that uses the power of the state (read: the power of the gun) to silence speech is a non-starter in my book.
EDIT: you may have noticed the establishment propaganda instruments like MSNBC and Fox News have a real campaign to discredit all 3rd party candidates in all elections. Chuck Todd did a particularly shameless review of many 3rd party candidates, mocking them, and mocking people who would vote for any 3rd party candidates. What an asshole, and what un-American behavior. Everyone's opinion should be respected.
So you're saying that voting 3rd party makes it harder for "the establishment" to fool people into thinking they had a choice to begin with? That voting makes it harder for the media to fool you into thinking your vote matters? That drinking the Kool-aid makes it harder for Big Brother to trick you into drinking the Kool-aid?
What is the point of these tweets:
pre-commitment 1: John Kerry 4bb96075acadc3d80b5ac872874c3037a386f4f595fe99e687439aabd0219809
pre-commitment 2: Ecuador eae5c9b064ed649ba468f0800abf8b56ae5cfe355b93b1ce90a1b92a48a9ab72
pre-commitment 3: UK FCO f33a6de5c627e3270ed3e02f62cd0c857467a780cf6123d2172d80d02a072f74
(From WikiLeak's twitter account.)
Are they hashes of some larger documents and somehow verify authenticity? Some kind of keys or passwords? His dead man switch?
Anyhow, I find the tweets very interesting. But I lack the context to know what they mean. Were those tweeted before the blackout? After?
The UK FOC thing is particularly interesting. This might sound silly, but perhaps somebody at MI5 was not happy the possibility of Foreign Office correspondence being leaked and decided to something, anything, to stop it from happening.
They are not the keys because nothing that terrible happened yet. All they say is that they have files on those topics, and if someone in the future releases keys to some files, and those decrypted files' signature is as it says on the tweet, then they must come from Wikileaks, since they posted that signature.
Wikileaks today is about curating facts, interpretation and using facts towards an end.
The "fact" state actor w/o proof is another step away from the roots.
Now it isn't.
Wikileaks is bad.
From that location you have Base station's covering all 4 major UK mobile networks and I'd guess a large number of wi-fi hotspots.
So to "cut off" internet access, you've got to cut all BT lines in and out of the building, block all 3/4G signals all round the building and block each and every wi-fi band around that area, without smegging up all the frequencies in a very central part of london, right next to large shopping areas like Harrods.
you cant' just cut off devices known to belong to Assange, as anyone can buy a 4G router with cash from a shop in London which isn't easily attributable to him.
oh yeah and I forgot there's the satellite internet bit they'd need to block too.
It's not unlikely that a person could be targeted to have communications access disrupted across multiple devices and networks.
I am now laughing manically with you...
I mean, the point of the DNC leaks is that they (the party) helped a specific candidate (Hillary) - even before she was elected a nominee - so they in essence acted undemocratically.
Unless you're speculating that the GOP was secretly sheming for Trump - something which I find extremely unlikely - then it's more than possible that any GOP leaks would in fact help Trump, as well!
They'd be more than happy to release any information on Trump. Unfortunately, they don't hack the information themselves. Someone else has to send it to them.
Here is what Assange had to say about Trump: "I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day". Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/08/26/assange-trumps-ever...
I'm glad this was posted on HN, because I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) more informed discourse than I found on Reddit.
PS. Have you seen the Podesta emails? They range from hilarious to pretty disturbing.
"There was no way to immediately verify if he had been knocked offline, and if so, how a state actor was suspected."
As far as I can tell, no one has verified any of this. Given JA's recent bizarre state of mind, I'm not sure where all of this breathless HN commentary is coming from.
You'd have to ask him that. Unfortunately, he is not allowed to talk.
It is very likely Assange knows the difference between an internet connection that is just suffering an outage, and an internet connection that has been deliberately cut. If the "outage" only affects the embassy, and no other clients on the same fibre, and if the ISP is unable to give information due to "security issues", that would for example, be a big red flag, I would imagine (I have no insight into what the situation really is, I'm just giving a for instance).
Wikileaks also seems to be a broadly decentralised organisation, from what little they've given away in past press releases about how they operate. I'm sure I remember they once boasted about their crypto phones, etc. So it is unlikely Assange has lost contact with the world, or that he personally is maintaining their Twitter feed. The issue here is more what this portends, rather than what it might do to Wikileaks.
[1] http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/London-Threatens-Quito...
BBC has not verified any of those claims, and they went and reported it despite the fact that part of it either isn't clear or doesn't make sense -- what does it even mean to have his internet "cut"?
This story could just as well turn out to be of a tree or a jackhammer.
"This happened! Why? We said so! Gospel truth!"
Interfering with the election?
"Why? Because they said so? Fool!"
The tinfoil hats run really hot there.
Twitter has deleted whatever periscopes that were near or around the Ecuadorian embassy.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/11/europe/julian-assange-question...
https://twitter.com/VerizonSupport/status/787890336270090240
So either he's in custody, or faking the whole thing IMHO. Surely his buddies in London should be able to verify the former, and if they can't they'd surely be screaming like hell that "We can't find Julian!".
The fact that everyone is radio silent tells me this is a stunt, honestly.
Please provide evidence that the leaks are from Russia.
Also, many people care a lot about Assange. Millions of people care about Assange and WikiLeaks. It is absolutely absurd (and almost un-humanitarian) to try to downplay the work that he has done.
Also, regarding Assange, I believe evgen meant to say that the administration was happy with where he was holed up until he started stirring up the pot.
No they have not. Read the statement [0] very, very carefully.
> "We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Has there been any evidence of this yet? I trust the government and main stream media to accurately report the geographic source of technical transactions about as much as I trust Facebook with privacy.
I doubt there is concrete, independently verified evidence, but I'm not sure how much more fishy the Kremlin could possibly be about the whole thing.
I usually don't mind giving the benefit of the doubt to people, but I don't tend to feel the same way about governments.
No. That's been consistent with their response since the DNCLeaks.
I could be wrong, but honestly, "who cares who did it" is a fishy enough govenrment response that it's hardly any wonder the Russians are being looked at funny.
The top results for a Google search for Putin on DNC Leaks is an article from a month and a half ago (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/putin-interview-dnc-ha...) with Putin denying it was the Russians and also saying does it matter who did it.
I recall similar news from when the DNC leaks broke and people were blaming Russia then too.
He just believes that whatever the government puts out is 100% the truth. The type of citizen that Goebbels would have loved.
The Russia myth comes from everyone repeating each other and pretending like it's fact. I don't really think Americans think of Russia as the big boogeyman anymore so that whole propaganda spiel is of dubious advisability.
I think they also do this because they don't want people to know how simple it is to conduct this kind of cyberattack. If they tell everyone you have to have your own KGB to do it, there will be less people looking into it. I believe this same strategy is why North Korea was blamed for the Sony Pictures leak.
The media and some politicians are full force memeing this, saying USG blames Russia for the hack and leaks. The statement does not say this in the slightest.
Those aren't really weasel words.
There are weasel words if you are led to believe they are referring to the DNC/Podesta hacks. Again read carefully. To which activity are they referring to in that sentence?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-charges-five-chinese-milit...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-a...
Normally, I agree with some of the stuff you said.
Wikileaks tends to talk big talk without actually delivering.
This time though seems a bit different. If they have anything, anything at all left, I think they are going to be leaking it tomorrow, with how much they are hyping this up.
If tomorrow the leaks are just a bunch of nothing, well that means they probably don't have anything at all of significance. We will surely see.
I'm astonished she's still a viable candidate after such unbelievable information was disclosed.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/dnc-ceo-resigns-amid-t...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
[0] https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/57vu5l/red_alert...
That sounds like the ramblings of someone unhinged.
"Thermal imagery" - in the middle of the day.
"I wanted to take pictures but a policeman told me I'd be prosecuted, and in any case, they are digitally obfuscating all pictures" "All I know is I can't upload photos and all my camera images don't work" - huh, what? Which is it, you wanted to take pictures, but were told not to, or you did, but they didn't work, or ...
"Military surrounding the entire blocks aiming guns at people." - and no word of this on ... anywhere
"... so I went and had a coffee." - "Oh man, I just saw a military operation to grab Assange. We had guns pointed at us and they're messing with our phones and cameras so we can't even take a picture without it being corrupted, so I'm gonna go get me some Starbucks, and post on The_Donald about it..."
"D-notice so media won't report" but apparently the block / street shutdown was so close to the embassy that anyone in the area could watch the whole operation...
I'm going to call BS, like the sibling says, you could make millions selling tinfoil to /r/The_Donald subscribers
It doubt its a bluff, as JA hasn't bluffed with these things before.
What does "cut" mean? Why can't he just use a hotspot?
So if Ecuador decided to cut his internet access, they may just have confiscated every device Assange has.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722929 [208 points, 144 comments, buried]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724507 [50 points, marked as dupe]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724939 [23 points, buried]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724525 [7 points, marked as dupe, dead]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725175 [3 points, buried instantly]The only sure conclusion I've personally reached in this election cycle is that no one sane would want to run for American president, or even be a part of any American political system (beyond the local level where things seem a bit more level headed)....
If Assange did lose internet access it is because the Ecuadorians changed the wifi password and didn't tell him. I am absolutely sure that we will be getting a mea culpa from Roger Stone any minute now...
In the interest of full disclosure, I tend to lean more conservative than most people, especially relative to HN. So maybe I have my partisan goggles on here, but why are so many people buying into the idea that there is solid evidence that Russia is actually behind these leaks?
Details are incredibly hard to come by. Try doing a Google search and look for yourself. You'll find dozens of articles that rehash the joint DHS and FBI statement (dare I link to submarine.html?), and after a couple pages you'll find their statement itself, but none of these articles or statements contain actual details for why they believe what they believe around these more recent hacks, which, to me, is indicative of a huge problem in and of itself with our media-- not (necessarily) bias like the Trump camp is saying, but simply a lack of basic technical intuition to question a basic premise. It happened with the iPhone, it happened (to a lesser degree) with Silk Road, and I think it's happening here, too.
Pew research from 2014 said there was a little bit under 4MM people working in the tech sector in the US. For comparison, a quick Google suggests suggests there are roughly 1.25MM lawyers in this country. And yet, when a controversial court decision is made and journalists are expected to write on it, the press generally is able to grok the arguments made and summarize it in some form. If a presser is held, they are capable of asking relevant questions and challenging things. I don't think that's the case when it comes to anything related to computers, and I think that's indicative that our liberal arts colleges are failing to stay up-to-date. They are creating well-rounded individuals that are prepared for life in the 1990's. If you go to J-School, you get a short but sweet background in political science and maybe some philosophy and maybe even logic... But as far as I'm aware, if you don't graduate with a degree in CS, everything that you understand about computers is done on your own time, and that's not hyperbole.
Anyway, as I understand it, the DHS and FBI believed that the DNC leaks came from Russia entirely because some tools were left behind on a couple vulnerable machines, and these tools were used before by Russian state actors. I think I read somewhere that there was an IP embedded within these tools that had been used by Russia before... So the narrative is basically that these professional state-backed hackers did not try to mask their identity whatsoever, and left a card saying, "Russia wuz h3r3, lel!". And to be clear, maybe that's 100% what happened. I don't know! But the point I'm trying to make is that I don't think anyone can say that they "know" who was behind these hacks with any kind of confidence.
And I can understand why that would be good enough for journalists who don't know better. And with the media reporting this so widely, I can understand how this would permeate into the general population. But I think a lot of Hillary supporters around here are subduing their skepticism to avoid cognitive dissonance, and I think that sucks.
Among other reasons, because cybersecurity experts who, insofar as they have partisan political bias that they might act on would be more likely to oppose Clinton and the Democrats than aid them, were the first to confidently attribute the hacks to specific threat actors tied to specific components of the Russian intelligence apparatus. (DHS and NSA much later jointly announced the same conclusion that private cybersecurity experts had previously reached.)
I'm still not certain that the presence of a Russian RAT necessarily means that Russia was behind this.
Are you a CS professional by any chance? This sounds like the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/231746/after-seei...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/07/russia-hillary-clinto...
Meanwhile 5 rape suspects were released without even being indicted because the rape victim - a 33yo physically handicapped (wheelchair-bound) Swedish woman - did not 'resist enough' for the allegations of rape to stick, according to the prosecutor [1]. Might it be so that a physically handicapped woman has problems 'resisting enough' due to her handicap and the position in which she was placed - in the toilet, out of reach of her wheelchair?
So, Sweden, please define rape for us uninformed bystanders. If forcing a handicapped woman to have sexual intercourse with up to 6 men (5 of whom were arrested, the sixth was never taken) is NOT rape but having more sex with a willing partner who was fine with having sex before IS rape we do need some guidance to know what is right and what is wrong there. It would be good to know given that I live in Sweden, maybe I'm guilty of something I did not realise before?
[1] https://www.google.se/search?q=rape+gotland+wheelchair (pick your source)
So basically Assange is prosecuted for rape against two women that claim they weren't actually raped, while doesn't prosecute rape of someone that DID complained of being raped.
This cross outright into the non-sensical law land.
While this Assange case for sure is controversial, Sweden has done more for the rights of women than most other countries. And that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Whether Assange is guilty of anything or not, I have no idea. But you don't have that, either.
Something Assange has attempted to thwart at every step, blaming everybody but himself for his predicament.
>the fact that they'd had intercourse several times before
I don't care what you think about this specific case, but statements like these show a great deal of ignorance about how most sex crimes happen and the relationship between the abuser and the victim.
If there is not consent (or capacity for consent) at the time of the act, it's rape. In any reasonable justice system, the proof problems that come up, in certain situations, with that clear definition weigh in favor of the accused, since they make it difficult to prove that sex occurred without consent.
"Rape can happen under complex emotional mechanics, therefore the word of the victim is sufficient to prosecute and jail the accused, as this overrides any other objective evidence" isn't a position likely to be enshrined into law any time soon.
I simply stated that the ideas someone can't be raped if they have previously had consensual sex with their rapist or that they must immediately end contact with their rapist are ignorant ideas.
> I simply stated that the ideas someone can't be raped if they have previously had consensual sex with their rapist or that they must immediately end contact with their rapist are ignorant ideas.
Agreed. Luckily the commenter you were calling "ignorant" never claimed anything of the sort, so I'm afraid you're the one that started this particular straw man (perhaps unknowingly)
I mean OP put both crime and rape victim in scare quotes and their first argument as to why is she "still did not mind having dinner with him afterwards." They then say that they don't think the claims would stick because "they'd had intercourse several times before during the same night". I'm not sure how to take those statements any other way. Am I missing something here?
I guess I was approaching the situation from the known information of the case, which is fairly clearly a very crude attempt at finding a crime of rape where one doesn't exist (even the supposed "victims" deny there was rape).
I could see how the parent's wording is off putting, but notice how I've also put "victims" in between quotes. None of the evidence of the case points at them being victims. Therefore, there is no evidence (not just strong evidence, but any evidence) that a crime was committed. I think that's a fair use for quotes, and no more or less dishonest than calling them "scare quotes". If an accusation of a crime stands on a very flimsy foundation of made up evidence, I think it is fair to call it a "crime".
Maybe if you read the comment as coming from someone who has ill feelings against the government of Sweden for doing this (rather than any ill will against the alleged victims) you will see that it's not so cut and clear that the parent is a misogynist or ignorant with regards to rape or whatever other first impression you may have received from the comment.
Don't be too quick in assuming misogyny when confronted with a differing opinion in a discussion related to a rape accusation. The same goes for any of the other 'touchy' subjects like racism, (gender) discrimination and whatever-phobia. The world is not black and white so it is not sensible to claim than anyone who does not support your version of 'the truth' (between quotes because 'truth' is sometimes hard to define, what is 'true' for the one can be 'false' for the other on equally valid grounds) is wholly opposed to whatever position you hold related to that subject - gender, religion, race, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724507
for another thread that was on front page when most of US was asleep
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722929
Mods, would it possible to keep this story up?
Otherwise I'd like a guarantee that we Europeans get to see all those interesting stories that broke 12h earlier.
We'll avoid marking this one as a duplicate and try to merge the discussions as best we can.
But she's still horrible. We have serious problems, problems that will destroy all faith in Government, if left unchecked -- and problems HRC won't address because she's too busy exploiting and expanding them.
She prefers 0 transparency -- this runs in total contradiction to democratic values. Anyone who opposed the levels of secrecy under Bush / Cheney should also oppose HRC.
The choice isn't Trump or HRC, the choice is to vote your conscience.
* Hillary Clinton Liked Covert Action if It Stayed Covert, Transcript Shows - The New York Times || http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/us/politics/hillary-clinto...
* Stone: Secrecy is the Enemy of Democracy | University of Chicago Law School || http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/stone-secrecy-enemy-democra...
Amazing how Bob Woodward was a journalist hero who went onto have unprecedented access to future Presidents for his books and yet this is Assange's fate. It's disgusting.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3842846/Rumors-swirl...
"Rumors that Pamela Anderson 'fatally poisoned Julian Assange with vegan meal' spread after 'coded' Wikileaks tweets lead to speculation that he triggered 'dead man's switch'"
And thanks for the downvote.
Cut off his wifi? Little toad is lucky they just don't boot him out onto the pavement.
That gigabyte file he's holding onto? Supposed to be a bunch of cat gifs, or so an "insider" told me.
FYI, at the moment the statute of limitations have ended for the sexual assaults and the rape statute ends in 2020.
Seems more likely the reasons for taking political asylum in a non-US alliance embassy, is, political.
Regardless I don't have a dog in this fight; I find both sides pretty polarizing and difficult to get to the facts.
Assange has always been opened to being questioning over the allegations (within the Embassy) and the Swedish prosecutors only recently agreed to allow him to be interviewed within the Embassy, which is strangely set to happen today (17 October 2016).
The whole "but the Swedes won't guarantee not to extradite him" is neatly covered by the whole point the US hasn't requested an extradition, and no legal system can or will get involved with hypothetical situations.
To add - the Swedish Supreme Court has also ruled against him last year, and a Swedish court in September ruled against him as well following the UN report. That is an awful lot of court rulings against him...
The great irony of it all is that Max penalty Assange faces is 6 years in comfy swedish prison. He chooses instead to lock himself in an embassy for 4 years so far...
That's the difference between "rendition" (kidnapping) and legal extradition.
There's no plausible crime to use for a UK extradition because Assange didn't hack into the systems himself, and isn't bound by our laws on the release of classified information.
Ecuador already has incentives to stop helping Trump, as Trump has recently taken a hard line against Latin American strongmen, of which Correa, President of Ecuador, is one. Some assurances from Hillary, and threats from Obama, could have been enough to push him over.
I imagine that one of the currently unspoken fears that the Democrats have with wikileaks is that they've built up immense credibility and could choose to cash it in by dropping a fake leak a day or two before the election. Or they could drop an incredibly damaging REAL leak, which is even scarier for the Democrats. There's no doubt that the Clintons have skeletons in their closet.
What I find extremely disturbing is that Obama was fine with RT and Wikileaks when they were mostly advancing the then-leftist agenda of better relations with Russia and US non-interventionism. Now that things have shifted and they are now undermining Obama's agenda and chosen successor, he's suddenly discovered his inner cold warrior.
The real winner here is Mitt Romney. The Democrats mocked him, nothing short of laughing in his face, when during the 2012 election he said Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat. Obama, around the same time, was caught telling the Russians he could be "more flexible after the election". They took that flexibility and marched all the way into Ukraine, Syria, and (allegedly) DNC and Clinton email servers with it. Obama owes him an apology.