In Election Hacking, Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision Becomes Reality
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What's missing is an understanding of his underlying motivations. This piece hints at it, but it doesn't quite get there.
Assange sees the existing power structure as a connected graph that requires secrecy to function.
His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by exposing secrets.
Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every
conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though
all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy,
others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others
still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between
important sections or groupings of the conspiracy.
If all conspirators are assassinated or all the links between
them are destroyed, then a conspiracy no longer exists. This
usually requires more resources than we can deploy, so we ask our
first question: What is the minimum number of links that must be
cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number?
(divide and conquer).
When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see
a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose
blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied;
unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its
environment.
I'd challenge that poster to tell anyone from South America, East Asia, or the Middle East (or North Africa, or Eastern Europe, or...) that superpowers are a way to preserve effective democracy.
Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.
The funny thing is people misconstrue the emails as an attempt to influence our election instead of actually looking at the fact that it exposed the idea that the DNC was already in the bag for Hilary long before the primaries even started.
If you want a conspiracy, you should look at how incredibly slanted the DNC was in favor of electing Clinton. All the emails did was confirm what a lot of people had long suspected was already going on.
Don't you think this vastly overestimates the technical competence and infosec understanding/awareness of the organization in question? It seems obvious that they presumed that their unencrypted emails were not going to become public information.
It vastly overestimating the technical competence of every organization. That the DNC presumed their unencrypted emails were not going to become public is the default stance of pretty much everyone.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clint...
What was particularly interesting was how behind-the-times White House IT was.
This seems to have a baseline assumption of competence that I don't think is warranted. There's shockingly little relationship between privacy intentions and privacy actions. Presumably "let's attack Sanders for being Jewish" isn't something the DNC wanted to see on the front page of a newspaper, no matter how clumsy they were about protecting it.
More broadly, what you describe in the other two paragraphs is exactly what Assange has been pulling for. Elsewhere, he's talked about raising the difficulty of secret dealings until powerful organizations have the choice of being ethical or inefficient. If transparent dealings are enough easier than opaque ones, opaque and anti-public-interest dealings should become rarer.
There are a bunch of criticisms here, some of which are quite reasonable. Assange nominally respects personal privacy while opposing institutional privacy, but revealing institutional behavior after the fact almost always compromises some personal information. And anti-public-interest is not 1-to-1 with opaque; plenty of groups do incredibly harmful things based on deniability or sheer boringness instead of secrecy.
Even so, I think things like "showing the DNC was in Clinton's pocket" are exactly in Assange's wheelhouse. If the DNC was neutral (as their bylaws required), there would have been no problem. If it had been an open pro-Clinton PAC it would have been non-notable. As is, he's hopefully raised the difficulty of screwing the public as a nominally-neutral organization.
"Tomorrow I will give an ‘ask me anything’ on reddit where I’ll talk about why it is that many people came to believe that I was dead or missing or kidnapped, quite interesting story, not just an organic phenomenon but people placing deliberately false file report to say that I was dead and then for wikileaks could not be trusted and no one should give us leaks or information."
1) Julian disappeared completely after the internet to the Ecuadorean embassy was cut in October 2016
2) Wikileaks inexplicably changed their policy for insurance file hashes, publishing the hash of the decrypted files instead of the encrypted ones. This meant the hash of the insurance files didn't match the .AES files, giving the impression that they had been altered
3) Wikileaks stopped issuing verifiable proof of life for Assange. A simple PGP signed message would have sufficed.
With all that was going on, it was actually very believable that Assange had been abducted/killed during the internet blackout, and that Wikileaks was now being run as a black-ops site for a three letter agency.
Shouldn't we wait for the explaination he may come up with tomorrow on reddit? I just don't know on which channel this AMA will happen.
On Periscope he implied that it was done maliciously to discredit Wikileaks, I'm explaining how it was completely avoidable for them.
If I had to speculate, it is a calculated decision on WL's part to try and shift the organization's integrity away from Assange. Currently all trust in WL rests on Assange's existence which isn't good for the longevity of the org if/when he decides to retire (or meets his untimely demise).
WL has certainly been in a weird spot over the last few years, with nowhere near the straightforward anti-establishment reputation they pulled off in their Collateral Murder days. Assange's charges and sanctuary issues, Snowden's failure to partner with WL, the Appelbaum revelations, bizarre arguably-anti-Semitic tweets, and a suddenly-bipartisan-and-effective effort to cast them as anti-American.
I wouldn't be at all shocked if there's an attempt underway to quiet things down a bit and change focus. Without getting into the validity of any of the things pressing on them, there's certainly a lot of evidence that they're short on reputation and resources, and struggling to run successful PR, redact releases, etc. Moving away from Assange's centrality, and perhaps from the American focus, might give them some leeway to become a longer-term-player. Maybe.
Wouldn't that just prove that someone knows the private key of the signer? That's not sufficient to prove that the signer is alive.
Interesting parallels with Assange's project.
What we have here is a bunch of media organizations throwing a tantrum because they were no longer the primary influencers of the election.
The lexical ambiguity in the headline is not optimal, true, especially when allegations of the latter sort are being tossed around. But "fake news" (another term that has IMO become pretty loaded) is a rather uncharitable term for this article, which is largely a historical look at Wikileaks' vision in the context of the DNC leaks.
If the title was simply the second half, and the facts were not begrudgingly acknowledged in the article, I'd feel differently about an otherwise interesting opinion piece.
Or "actual computer hacking" in the sense that someone downloaded Trump''s tax returns from the IRS servers and passed them to the NYT?
If such general term exists, it would be more appropriately used to describe the DNC's unconventional relationship with media employees. But please, for the sake of everyone's sanity, let us not randomly redefine english words - even if regurgitated by your favorite media news outlet.
OP used the word "fake news" and got downvoted to oblivion, but it's truly a wonderful demonstration of how subjective terms are used to manufacture narratives. Down with the hyperbole, man.
A) "Election hacking" has become a common shorthand of the event in multiple media sources (whether this reflects a "manufactured narrative", I cannot say, but I've seen "election hacking" as shorthand all over the place), and
B) The article did contain a detailed description of the event, in a way I think accurately reflects the current state ("major data breaches of the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton adviser John Podesta, committed, allegedly, by Russian-sponsored hackers and fed to the world via WikiLeaks".)
I do agree that this portion of the headline is inaccurate at face value, and that there are much better shorthands for this event, but calling an article "fake news" just for a bad headline is too harsh.
Based on what you know about the human primate, what do you think the truth is?
Too harsh or not harsh enough, who knows. All I know is "fake news" will be used to describe news you don't agree with, for whatever reason you like. Let's at least be honest with ourselves.
I see the general term "election hacking" or variations thereof on news sites that are conservative as well, such as the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/articles/congressional-calls-grow-for-a-p...) and Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/01/07/was-fridays-declas...).
So I have trouble accepting the narrative that this term itself is a tantrum being thrown by media that "lost", if some of the media that lean on the side that won are also using the term.
And, yes, you are right, I do suspect that the OP probably used the term "fake news" because he or she did not agree that there was an election hack, or at least believes that the source reporting is too biased in some way. With no further argument other than the "fake news" term, I found that post rather weak.
In a perfect world, the headline would be intended to provide unambiguous information. In that, it demonstrably fails as evidenced by this thread. In the real world, it must convey information, but also hook eyeballs. So while the term 'election hacking' may not be explicitly wrong, and while I do not fault the Times for going with it, it is at best ambiguous and quite probably meant to grab attention more than convey information.
Apparently you didn't check the headline