It is sad to see how low WikiLeaks has fallen, and makes me think more and more that there has never been much of WL beyond Assange himself.
It has reached comical levels of insanity, illusion of grandeur and narcissism.
It has reached comical levels of insanity, illusion of grandeur and narcissism.
What are you criteria for near certainty and what evidence-supported claims are there that satisfy those criteria?
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Their behavior is consistent with what you'd expect from an intelligence agency. Such as well-timed releases during the 2016 US Presidential Election which seemed to heavily favor a candidate with strong ties to a foreign government well known for their intelligence capabilities.
Alright... Help me understand how this does not reflect WaPo, CNN, NYT, and others in an identical way.
Emails which, by the way, were so boring and mundane and contained so little evidence of misconduct that people determined to hate Clinton needed to treat "pizza" as secret code for "child sex slaves", to extract a scandal from them.
Why were the podesta emails different if not to influence the election?
Unfortunately, it seems to have happened anyway.
Also wikileaks has done multi-part staged releases on many occasions before and after, including the russia files and vault 7.
If by "theft" you mean "the person who got the most votes got the nom," sure. That's not really news though. I mean, it is, but not for the reason you think it should be.
The DNC seat was stolen through illegal redirection of funds, manipulation of public debates, and a deliberate media smear campaign which led to the DNC chairwoman's forced resignation.
You could have stopped there. The major disconnect between public perception of the political parties and actual party function is the party ultimately nominates who it chooses. Votes are cast because it's assumed Americans wouldn't support a party that simply nominated a candidate via authoritarianism or autocracy, not because either party believes in the wisdom of the mob structurally. If anything, "wisdom of the mob" voting is more reflective of the Republican party's process (and with the nomination of Trump, it kind of showed).
You claim there was illegal redirection of funds. Was it actually illegal? Or merely in apparent violation of the party's charter (which could make the party less trustworthy but is not otherwise automatically illegal)? The best I can dig up is that there is a lawsuit alleging the DNC violated campaign finance law.
You may want to spot-check your data.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/a-new-report-puts-mi...
Keep in mind, the company contracted to produce this report, Fusion GPS, was also paid to produce "evidence" that north korea was responsible for hacking Sony in 2014... so you may want to spot-check your evidence.
And the consensus appears to generally be that NK did hack Sony in 2014, so I don't know what you're on about. There are suggestions of alternatives but nothing concrete or in accordance with the known evidence.
No, the modern candidate selection process in each of the major parties isn't an abstract response to theoretical concerns about what Americans would respond to, but a concrete response to real issues identified through previous nomination processes.
> If anything, "wisdom of the mob" voting is more reflective of the Republican party's process
No, it's not; the Republican Party process is designed to artificially create an insurmountable perception of momentum for the early leader because of experience about how early lead usually favors the institutional candidate, and the set of early primaries and caucuses favor, more than the country generally, the establishment faction of the party, so that this provides both the right candidate and a short competitive part of the primary with an early shift to general election campaigning. The Democratic system through 2016 (changes are planned for 2020 in response to 2016) in general design (pushing committed superdelegate counts into horserace delegate coverage hasn't historically been the norm) favors a longer competitive period and broader geographic competition but provides a safeguard against a hung convention. Each of these has failure modes—if superdelegates commit early and the media included them in horserace coverage, the Democratic system gets the same kind of artificial inevitability as the Republican system. If a celebrity candidate sucks up early attention with a large but weak field where establishment support is divided, the Republican method work against the establishment and lock in the same kind of advantage for the celebrity it is designed to for an establishment candidate. And if a well-funded establishment decides to take that fight down to the wire with whoever it has standing after the early winnowing, it can drag out into a long primary fight if the type the system is designed to avoid.
Very few people would have considered Trump "the institutional candidate", although I guess the GOP conspiracy has maybe fooled us. Even fewer people would have considered all the DNC superdelegate crap to have been a broad geographic democratic competitive scenario.
The DNC does not function as a popular vote, but with a complex system of campaigning, finance, and ultimately delegate voting.
An anti-Clinton stance rather than pro-Trump would be more likely.
Several GRU officers have been brought up on charges related to the hacking of the DCCC and DNC, the subsequent dissemination of their findings to Wikileaks, and related payoffs. This suggests that there is concrete evidence that the GRU was collaborating with Wikileaks, it's just not yet publicly available.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-manaforts-flip-may-...
And that's surprising how, exactly? Guess what, 4chan /pol/ supported the exact same candidate, rare pepes and all, purely "for the lulz". Would you expect Assange to behave any differently?
We do have this statement (and a little more detail inside) in a report by a joint report by the US Intelligence Community (regarding Russian interference with elections):
"We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks."
Source: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
But that doesn't explain whether Assange is either a "compromised front" for the GRU or someone else, or more a "useful idiot" to Russian intelligence for their goals.
Nonetheless, I will say, at minimum, Wikileaks and Julian Assange can no longer be seen as a neutral player, at minimum. And not a reliable narrator, either. For example, some of their tweets on the Panama Papers, which in theory I would think would be something they would in theory support, were rather strange, and actually stooped into ridiculous conspiracy theory involving USAID and George Soros (eg https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7176700566505308... and https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7174580643249643...). I generally don't treat sources that delve into conspiracy theory with a whole lot of respect...
It's a joint report by the US Intelligence Community. There is no “US National Intelligence Agency”; the position of Director of National Intelligence was created to specifically split the role of overall head of the intelligence community (the DNI) from the head of a particular agency (the overall head of the IC used to be the Director of the CIA.)
Just using the "George Soros" dog whistle should disqualify them as a reliable source
They no longer publish everything they have been given (Assange once claimed to have documents embarassing to Russia but they are as yet unpublished).
They no longer publish documents indiscriminately (Podesta emails trickled out over the course of October 2016 for maximum political effect on the election)
If that wasn't enough, everyone should've been convinced that wikileaks is compromised when Assange refused to demonstrate that he held the wikileaks signing private key during his reddit AMA
Allow me to amend: Wikileaks now publishes Russia and putin related material long after they aquire them and only after they are called out on it.
They sat on the "spy files" for a full year, and only published them after their source went around telling other publications about them. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
releasing some doesn't mean he released everything, or stuff Russia wasn't okay with him releasing.
What is Assange’s motivation for not releasing proof of the signing key, because he can’t, but keeping that a secret?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cabl...
Based on this statement, you don’t seem to be familiar with WikiLeaks and didn’t read the linked article that specifically addresses this claim.
... except that they couldn't, because they would be compromised and operating as a front. Wheels within wheels... ;)
they did change the outcome of a US election, and probably the course of world history, which is more than all of the anti-trump media combined, so that is a pretty big accomplishment ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
How much did Trump and similar non-Russian PACs spend on microtargetted facebook ads, compared to Russian intelligence? Your article contains no hint of this. I think we're all aware that Russian intelligence was buying a lot of ads on social media, but I'm trying to understand the relative scope of this. To be frank, the scope of Russian propaganda seems dwarfed by domestic propaganda. The propagandists who deserve the most blame are probably Americans, or were paid by Americans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/secret-ca...
At this point, he's dodging Sweden's justice system because he can and because Ecuador allows him to. And all of this distracts from Wikileaks' ostensible goal of shining light into the dark places of power; public trust in them weakens as they continue to refuse to cut ties with an accused rapist dodging charges.
He was never charged with a crime, but they were satisfied by their interview 2 years ago and dropped all investigations, as was requested by the alleged victim years prior.
Also the sealed indictment allowing for Assange to be extradicted has been leaked. It is very real.
I was unaware of the leaked US charges from November however; that's news for me. Thank you for bringing it to my attention (I've updated my original post). Given that, however, I don't believe it's credible to assume that even if he were extradited to the US, he wouldn't have a fair day in court. He's too famous to disappear. So my original contention that he's a stain on the organization due to the fact he's dodging justice because he can stands.
I’ve been profiled by cops various times in my life, and the overwhelming feeling was that if I didn’t do what they wanted (things which I had no legal obligation to do) that they could have found a reason to take me in. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. So if you’re doing something that many people consider wrong, I think there’s plenty of injustice in our history to warrant preemptive protection if ones self.
Maybe Assange isn’t innocent. Maybe he deserves to be locked up. I have no idea. But if I were him and I were innocent, I still wouldn’t trust that I’d get fairness.
The lone member of Obama's State Department who spoke out against that treatment-- P.J. Crowley-- had to resign the next day for doing so.
If you didn't know about any of those events I'd suggest reading up on them before commenting further on the subject.
She got off very easy for the deaths she (unintentionally) facilitated by deciding her conscience spoke more loudly than the expertise of thousands of State Department operatives trained to deal with delicate international political issues.
Assange did the opposite. He came out guns blazing. When you do that, the court system often will find a way to bone you. And that doesn’t usually result in repercussions because the system can say “well maybe we were a little wrong but he wasn’t helping his case!”. And tragically that’s often enough for the external watchers to let it go.
Defend himself from people saying that he smells? That he paints his hair? Really?
This is beyond ridiculous, it is sad and pathetic...
Assange doesn’t have that. This is an odd little release, but you’ve gotta consider more than “public figure” and look into what means the public figure has to get a message out.