Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

My question would be, has Julian lied about sources before, and would he deviate from that if he didn't?

His claim is that the source is not Russia --people who were happy to see Julian leak things (and believe his leaks) while Bush was president are now calling him a puppet of Putin. I have no idea if Putin has goods on him. Or whether Julian is just a medium. It is, however, interesting to see people shift along political axes though.

If there was a Russian angle, I think their aim was to cause uncertainty regardless of winner. Be it Trump or Hillary, whoever the winner was, the voters of the opposition would question the results --despite there being no actual election hacking (altering the vote count).

One interesting thing though is that since the media writ large expected Hillary to win, had she won, this same evidence would have been "page 6" news and would have been rather quickly forgotten but for a few "sore losers".

View on HN

It should be noted that the entirety of the material leaked by Assange would be consistent with "Russian agent" theory (including variations along the lines of him not being directly in service, but getting backing because of being useful, even if he has his own reasons).

It might not be very obvious from inside US, but the whole mess with Iraq and Afghan wars, and especially everything that Wikileaks exposed about them, is one of the biggest providers of source material for Russian "whataboutism" (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_negroes). In early 00s, it was mainly useful to justify the way Russia handled Chechnya. But from 2008 on, it became more and more important - South Ossetia, Crimea, Donbass, Syria.

With that in mind, leaks about any American administration serve those goals. Bush was certainly fair game. As do any leaks that concern any Western countries, their allies, and affiliated countries. Which happens to be exactly what Wikileaks has been focusing on.

Now, this doesn't mean that those leaks don't have any further value, in particular, to citizens of the affected countries. This part of it is where you generally see a lot of partisanship when judging said value.

I don't get why people are so trustful of Assagne's assurances the source wasn't Russian. Unless he hacked it himself or was looking over the shoulder of the guy who hacked it, he simply cannot know who the ultimate source of the material is. The person he got it from may very well not have been Russian. But who did that person get it from? It's no different than a Tor exit node delivering information it receives: it simply isn't in a position to know the true origin.

The fact that Assange has come out very hard trying to imply it was Seth Rich and not Russians is itself the most suspicious thing.

1. He can't possibly know if Russia is the true source.

2. Seth Rich is a classic KGB style conspiracy theory with literally not one shred of evidence, at all.

So he's doing two very odd things here that he's never done. He's saying Russia is NOT the source AND Seth Rich IS the source.

It's typical for someone with good intentions to find themselves owned by a spy agency. Assange is most likely in so deep he can't fix it.

It's a fact he's taken money from Russia and the theory of him being compromised by them goes back years before the election. He's the one that arranged for Snowden to go to Russia.

So he's compromised and a tool now. It doesn't matter if he was once free or not at this point.

Putin's goal is to do whatever benefits him. Sowing dissent and confusion in the US works to his benefit. I'm sure Russian intelligence had a hand in things, either directly or by proxy, but like any intelligence operation, creating distractions, promoting false leads and casting dispersion is part of the game. Putin was a KGB counter-intelligence officer. His administration is packed with ex KGB and FSB personnel. He knows what's he doing and Russia is playing our political divisions against us and manipulating us.

From the intelligence community assessment [0]:

> The Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks. RT’s editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT, according to Russian and Western media. Russian media subsequently announced that RT had become "the only Russian media company" to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to "new leaks of secret information." RT routinely gives Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States.

[0] https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

WL also worked with the NYT and The Guardian and no one was calling him a puppet of the US or the UK.

Sure, it's possible he's FSB (or whatever) secret unit and he's their Trojan horse --but no one was saying that during the Bush years (or even Obama minus '16). Only now do they say, oh, he's such a puppet. It's hard to take the allegation seriously when previously many of the same people had no problem with him.

There's a big difference between NYT/Guardian, which de facto are somewhat independent private media (and not quite aligned with Trump and May), and RT, which is a fully controlled instrument of the state, implementing only state policy.

People in the intelligence community consider Snowden a Russian asset now. Russia could've flipped or co-opted Assange since the Bush years, or maybe it's only now coming out. Either way much of this stuff is classified, so we can't really know details one way or the other. But if you keep up with folks in the IC and look into how Russia does warfare, you see they've been doing this forever, and they're pros at it.

This is speculation and personal opinion, unlike the stuff I wrote above.

I suspect what happened is that the hacking groups gave Wikileaks the dump via a cut-out. It's entirely possible that cut-out isn't aware how the data was obtained.

I don't think Assange is a Russian agent (even though he receives money from RT etc). I think he has his own motives. At the time this was more anti-Clinton that pro-Trump specifically.

More recently his Tweets have become more supportive of Trump personally (although interestingly not really his agendas necessarily). My uncharitable suspicion is that he's hoping for a presidential pardon.

this same evidence would have been "page 6" news and would have been rather quickly forgotten but for a few "sore losers".

Of course. There's plenty of similar evidence that the Russians also supported the Green party and Sanders campaigns in various forms. No one talks about them because they ended up not mattering.

Isn't it most plausible Russia is in every party and branch as much as possible, so whoever wins they win? We need Russia out of our government all together and not make it a partisan issue.

If you want Russia to pull back, you have to pull back too (ala Bill Clinton detente) Pull back on the sanctions, pull back on hovering over and picking up pieces in their former sphere of influence (former central Asia soviet reps).

We might be able to influence N Korea with these tactics, but Russia has a lot of natural resources, people and materiel. It's a diff game.

You have had (some) people on the left defending Kim Jun-un's actions as predictable (he's being bullied, etc). Putin's are predictable too, given what he has to work with.

I think we'd be better off reluctantly working with him (in the ME, for ex.) than blocking them every corner. It sets them back into a cold-war mentality. We (the world) need the biggest powers, US, CN, RU, to get along, if not be friends. We don't see eye to eye in many things (human rights wise, ex, pollution, ex) but we can work toward a more stable planet.

Why do you believe that the Russian reaction to pulling back would be to pull back as well? If anything, all experience shows that they'll use that to do a power grab in the neighbouring countries instead. Treating "sphere of influence" as a valid concept is immoral, it essentially means allowing Russia to do whatever they want to others against their will; there's a good reason why their neighbours are allying with the west - it's because they want protection from being "sphereofinfluenced".

If anything, we can say that the current sanctions and other have been somewhat effective in deescalating violence, and if the west would have pulled back, then we'd have Ukraine dismembered by now through increased direct Russian military involvement.

Nothing "sets back" Russia to cold war mentality; they have never left it, won't will without a regime change, they won't stop treating the west as their enemy and they will aggressively (re)take the now independent states we let them to.

Do you think the West has no sphere of influence?

And, was it Russia that expanded to the NATO borders, or were the NATO borders that expanded to eventually reach Russia?

I'm saying that the whole concept of spheres of influence is outdated, immoral and invalid. Instead, you should think in terms of alliances or some other concept that gives agency to the people there, not "the West" or Russia.

The sovereign countries themselves must get a choice - if they want to join NATO, that is their right, and Russia shouldn't get a veto (nor even a vote) in that. Countries should be free to join/leave the "spheres" at will, not be placed there or given or taken.

And, actually, the whole reason why NATO is at their borders is the Russian insistence of their sphere of influence. If Russia agreed in practice that their borders stop where they are and that they won't ever poke beyond them, then their neigbours wouldn't need to even consider NATO.

> And, actually, the whole reason why NATO is at their borders is the Russian insistence of their sphere of influence.

Uhh, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO#German_reu...

Nobody forced for example the Baltic states into NATO. They did that because these countries felt threatened by Russia. I think there were even referendums on this and they came out overwhelmingly positive.

The belief in Ukraine, however, was that Russia was an ally, did not pose a threat and therefore Ukraine should have not seeked NATO membership. That assumption proved to be wrong now.

(I'm an American).

Amazing doesn't even begin to cover Americans complaining about foreign interference in our elections.

There's hardly a country up and down Central and South America, North Africa, and the Middle East whose elections we haven't meddled in. Start with the Shah of Iran, Mubarak, Hussein before he turned on us, the Bay of Pigs, Allende/Pinochet, etc.

Which is not to say we shouldn't push back on Russian interference in our elections, but just wow. I'd like to see us keep out of everyone else's elections too.

I mean, yes and no.

Back in those days it was more do or die. Let the soviets gain ground and grow their ideology or stop it within reason [stop short of no-proxy hot wars].

If we look at the toll paid by countries which went 2nd world vs those that stayed/coherced on our side, the suffering was much greater in those that went full soviet.

And often times people who point to Allende etc as bad will not point to Ghadafy or all the rest in N. Africa Obama set loose.

> Back in those days...

I think it's probably a bit naive to assume the US has stopped interfering in elections.

The sanctions are for stuff like them hacking another government or invading a sovereign country. It's hard to be friends with a nation through those situations (and irresponsible not to react at all)

What did we do about Ukraine? A little slap? He does not care. Looks like Hillary was comms with Ukraine, presumably to act tougher towards Moscow.

We just need to recall how we felt when they pranced around Cuba. We're doing similar in the eastern block (not the same degree) but all the same it gets in their craw.

Russian infiltrated US parties voting sanctions on Russia. Really?

I'm willing to go along with that.

I too would not be surprised if he favors Trump via omission rather than commission. Julian likely is severely allergic to establishment politicians because he rightfully sees them as two sides of the same coin who like Hillary see him as a US enemy, while Trump seems more pragmatic about it.

He doesn't know the source. The source claims not to be Russia, and Assange believes it because he's a useful idiot.

Assange hardly seems like an idiot.

Spiteful interloper who carefully chooses his words, relishing his part in the political upheaval of a nation-state which has effectively imprisoned him in a London embassy? Maybe.

How's that working out for him? Trump is no more in his court than Clinton was, Ecuador has cut off his Internet access, and he's squandered any support he had by helping elect an even bigger idiot.

On the other hand, he hasn't joked about extrajudicially "droning him". So there is that. On the other hand, most of DC saw Hillary as a war hawk.

The source of that purported joke is "sources in the State Department" that talked to TruePundit. If you believe TruePundit had sources in Clinton's State Department, you might believe that Seth Rich leaked the DNC emails to WikiLeaks after participating in child sex trafficking in the basement of a basement-less pizza parlor.

Yeah I dunno. TYT[1] (not a Trump mouthpiece) seem to agree her non denial as likely admission that it was said. "[Clinton] probably said it as a [frustrated] joke".

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErH29hrpqvg

What in that video suggests that TruePundit's sources were real? Cenk not only falls for the story, he makes up another conspiracy theory out of whole cloth by saying that "non-legal methods" in a Clinton email means illegal instead of methods that don't use the courts.

This is supposed to be convincing? Here's more of TruePundit's vaunted anonymous sources saying things you and Assange might be credulous enough to believe: https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/2/1590342/--True-Pund....

In October - before the election - Trump said "I love Wikileaks"[1].

It hasn't worked out well, but the logic is reasonable.

[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/330052-wiki...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com