Ola Bini, Swedish Software Developer with Ties to Assange, Arrested in Ecuador
nypost.com
nypost.com
And then
>"Ecuadorian diplomats told their counterparts in the UK that they were worried that Assange’s associates would try to seek revenge with cyberattacks and information leaks if he was handed over.
Britain agreed to assist Ecuador in shoring up its cybersecurity, the newspaper reported."
If I'm reading the subtext here, correctly, Bini was arrested but not charged with anything, presumably as a measure to keep him from orchestrating "retaliation".
>"Ecuadorian officials believe Bini may be part of a blackmail ring assembled to pressure President Lenin Moreno and his government to allow Assange to remain in the embassy, according to the Times of London."
I don't see how they can claim blackmail, if the INA Papers were released before they ousted Assange. Isn't this the antithesis of how blackmail works...?
Edit: Ecuador is now saying hacking is the charge, it sounds like (admittedly, my Spanish isn't that great).
https://www.fiscalia.gob.ec/ciudadano-sueco-fue-procesado-po...
There were also those strange tweets back in 2016 - codes or something, I don’t remember clearly - and speculation about some sort of dead man switch.
Who knows if it’s true, but this seems to be what they’re worried about.
What seems more credible is that only he has the keys to some data kept by other persons and he could release these keys via others like e.g. his lawyers. Arresting others who might help him with releasing the data once they have the key makes "sense" from that perspective, although it could be illegal (but IANAL in Ecuador).
If true, this could also mean they were in agreements with the Ecuador govt. to arrest him a long time ago.
If the leak is nuclear level - e.g irrefutable proof that the ruling class ARE reptilians - you want to keep that unreleased for as long as you can.
I can imagine a bot somewhere scanning top 10 international newspapers daily and looking for the words 'Assange' and 'dead' before the countdown begins.
If they had some crazy leak to make, it doesn’t seem like something they would just sit on to use as personal leverage for assange.
Really? They seem to have a narrow focus of interest with their leaks. I wouldn't put something like that beyond them at all.
Maybe it's just a coincidence that they only leaked Russian-hacked emails from the GOP opponent who was critical of WikiLeaks while ignoring ongoing stories about Russia itself and remaining silent on the many GOP scandals.
They were also really critical of the Panama Papers leak which exposed several cases of corruption, but again it was probably just a coincidence those were more of a condemnation of Russian oligarchs than Western intelligence.
He was critical of some news stories about the Panama papers pushed by USAID. He did not criticize the leaks directly.
You say that like there isn't overwhelming evidence of Russian influence operations in western democracies and widespread cyber warfare going on as we speak.
It's one thing to make the counter argument that the US conducts influence ops and engages in cyber warfare too and you don't care one way or another about either nation, but it's not "McCarthyism" to call out aggression when Russia is clearly acting aggressive in multiple theaters.
I can't speak for all of the people involved in WikiLeaks but Assange clearly has a bias against the west, particularly the Democrat party and western intelligence agencies. He also seems happy doing intel business with Russia and auctioning off classified data to the highest bidder in addition to the leaks.
As for the leaks: the evidence for the attribution of pretty much every hack in the last 5 years is farcically weak (e.g. IP addresses in logs).
As for the supposed hack of US power plants - that was classic McCarthyism. The evidence was made up and the target was Russia.
That's just people looking for an easy answer to a complex question. It happens everywhere. Trump may or may not have won without the assistance of Russia. But that doesn't mean Russia didn't assist.
It's not McCarthyism to say that the IRA was attempting to fuel public divisions given the types of ads they were placing and events they were scheduling.
And it's not McCarthyism to say that a Russian APT hacked the DNC server and leaked those emails selectively in an attempt to sway the election towards one candidate. The evidence of this is much greater than "IP addresses in logs".
> As for the supposed hack of US power plants - that was classic McCarthyism. The evidence was made up and the target was Russia.
Frankly I don't know enough about that, you could be right there. Bad attribution happens everywhere though, it happens with China and Iran too, so "McCarthyism" doesn't seem like a useful label here.
How about Stuxnet? As far as I've seen there wasn't a ton of evidence to confirm the US was involved in that but Russia and Iran seemed happy with that explanation. The world of cyber warfare is new and we're all paranoid right now but that also doesn't mean it's all the same and it's all wrong.
For the DNC hack, the US was monitoring that activity the whole time. They warned the DNC before it even happened that those servers were being probed (the fact that the DNC failed to act is unfortunate but beside the point here) and there are multiple points of evidence linking it back to Russian-based hackers. They were pretty sloppy about registering for VPN accounts and renting servers for exfiltration.
One thing that amazes me about all of this is that people condemn US intelligence for intercepting data and mass collection but then they seem unable to believe that the agencies possessing those tools and access to internet companies would have evidence of events like this.
It was the DNC looking for a reason why losing to Trump wasn't their fault allying with neocons (e.g. Kristol) looking for reasons to kick off cold war part 2 after what happened in ukraine.
>And it's not McCarthyism to say that a Russian APT hacked the DNC server
Evidence was and still is sparse. The fact that it's "generally accepted" among the media and intelligentsia is no reason to assume it's actually true. They're the same suckers who bought the WMD lie.
>Frankly I don't know enough about that, you could be right there. Bad attribution happens everywhere
The interesting thing about that story is that it demonstrated what they wanted to be true. They obviously wanted the Russians to be behind it and quickly discovered that this time it awkwardly was easy to disprove their hypothesis.
>They were pretty sloppy about registering for VPN accounts and renting servers for exfiltration.
Bear in mind that being sloppy and deliberately leaving a misleading trail look the same and deliberately leading a misleading trail is standard opsec.
>but then they seem unable to believe that the agencies possessing those tools and access to internet companies would have evidence of events like this.
That's not the slightest bit amazing. The intelligence agencies are geared towards dragnet surveillance, not hack attribution. Just because they have access to all Snapchat nudes doesn't mean that they can attribute hack attacks.
What's amazing is that the agencies that lied consistently in the past and who always release secret evidence when it's supports their agenda can just say "yeah, so this happened trust us we have logs of a couple IPs" and technical people who know full well how easy it is to spoof an IP believe them.
Suckers.
For what it's worth, the intel community wasn't behind the false claims of WMD in Iraq and the news basically was just being given false information from the Bush admin. The CIA was investigating it and writing reports showing that they didn't believe there was evidence of WMD. It was a small circle of Bush admin conservatives who were lying to the media about those reports. That's actually the core of the whole Valerie Plame affair [1].
That's not what's happening here. Multiple independently-managed intelligence agencies are agreeing that there's evidence Russian-based hackers infiltrated the DNC servers. A few foreign intelligence agencies have added evidence to these claims as well (Dutch intelligence, for instance [2]).
> Bear in mind that being sloppy and deliberately leaving a misleading trail look the same and deliberately leading a misleading trail is standard opsec.
Couldn't this same logic be applied to everything attributed to US intelligence? Maybe someone else fabricated the CIA Vault7 leaks, because surely the CIA is too smart to get caught. Must be opsec. And maybe Iran's nuclear program failed on its own and they blamed Stuxnet on the US and Israel? At some point this takes a turn towards conspiracy-based thinking though...
You're willing to go out of your way to believe in mass delusion or conspiracy within the media and intel communities to avoid believing that maybe Russia did hack the DNC. If the evidence is a lie then multiple independent groups are conspiring to perpetuate that lie. How big is this network of conspirators?
Or maybe Russia did hack the DNC and Assange is the only one lying about their source?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...
No, because documentation is easier to corroborate and harder to deny (and indeed the CIA doesn't deny vault7 is theirs).
A string of IP addresses and a narrative, on the other hand... yeah that's rather more circumstantial.
If tomorrow there is a leak of Russian documents corroborating the American story that arent obviously fabricated then I'll take that as clear evidence that it was true.
>You're willing to go out of your way to believe in mass delusion or conspiracy within the media and intel communities to avoid believing that maybe Russia did hack the DNC.
I don't think that clear attribution of hacks is ever really possible and whichever narrative takes hold will generally be believed in perpetuity.
I think the intelligence agencies aren't above a little self delusion, no, and I also think the fact that it's unlikely evidence will emerge to corroborate or disprove the hypothesis (hack evidence disappears very quickly) makes self delusion, where it does exist, a little easier.
The "Russians hacked the power plant" story demonstrates what kind of blow back happens when they do drink their own kool aid (zero) and serves as a clear examppe that they are perfectly capable of self delusion when it comes to the topic of Russian hacking.
>Or maybe Russia did hack the DNC and Assange is the only one lying about their source?
Anything is possible. However, it's worth noting that the "assange is a Russian spy" story is similarly convenient to the "Russians hacked our power plants" and it similarly rests on extraordinarily weak evidence.
The spirit of McCarthy lives and it's way more pissed about the collateral murder video getting out than it is about the murdered journalist in the video. Obviously.
You mean like what Dutch intelligence is corroborating?
Ha really? He said that?
I felt the same way but a Californian’s vote doesnt influence representation
Its been a great few years: we operate better with agencies paralyzed, disarray in legislative consensus, and an ongoing appetite for risk in the markets. I understood which taxes would likely be lowered.
I remember being at the voting booth thinking of this decision tree. But there is nothing a Californian could have done by that point in time. I would say the outcome has been very accurate and predictable on these fronts.
It has been entertaining listening to other Californians tell me what people think if a left vote isnt deemed the clearly favorable vote for those people. I would say it doesnt really factor in what people think at all.
Which shadowy non-Western organization wanted the whole Icelandic parliament ousted? They would probably have opted for the opposite.
The impact of the organization the past few years have mainly regarded money laundering. And agencies you want to implicate in this have overwhelmingly had their connections to the subjects of those scandals.
Why push this narrative so hard? Completely without sources? It is not very helpful.
From your article:
"“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
"WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache."
"A WikiLeaks spokesperson told the Daily Dot that no emails were removed from what the organization published. The spokesperson also suggested the Daily Dot was “pushing the Hillary Clinton campaign’s neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories about critical media.”"
They published the PizzaGate conspiracy theory.
Why don't they put all speculative stories related to candidates on their site?
They admitted they had documents on Trump, the RNC, Russia, and Putin that they never released. The first time wikileaks (IIRC almost a decade ago) mentioned releasing Russia documents; they mysteriously never released them. Then Assange got a show on Russian television.
Really? A major part of Wikileaks has done the past 5 years has been in relation to the personal wants and desires of Julian Assange. I'm referring here to the intense focus of Wikileaks on Hillary Clinton and the DNC while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the corruption of Russia (who were helping Wikileaks attack Hillary).
I understand why Assange disliked Hillary Clinton, but let's not pretend that his personal desires and vendettas didn't play a large role in Wikileaks' interference in US elections (a deed that placed him on the same moral ground as the Western intelligence agencies he so loved to criticize for similar work).
If Assange has a panic button rather than a dead man switch, he is much dumber than he is portrayed at which point most of the claims that are dismissed as ridiculous (i.e. a smart man would not do X) become not only plausible but likely.
I think Assange is kind of crazy for playing brinkmanship with the world's intel agencies but I will definitely miss a lot of their leaks, for example that leaked CIA guide to bypassing airport security while undercover, where used as an example in the guide (if I remember correctly) a field agent using a diplomatic passport who was detected by airport screening trying to transit through European airports while having explosives residue on him, and how he successfully lied and talked his way out of being arrested while undercover. This of course leads to the question, why are intel agents assembling/transporting explosives around European cities and one of the reasons I liked having Wikileaks around to embarass these agencies and their invisible shenanigans but I guess the party is over.
The article body says they apprehended a lot of electronic equipment on his house, and many credit cards. It also says he travels a lot. I'm not getting into any specifics because the article doesn't get into them either...
Also, it says nothing about what he actually hacked.
Ecuador has quite strict computer crime laws. E.g. distribution of hacking tools is illegal.
The law he is being charged with violating reads: "Diseñe, desarrolle, programe, adquiera, envíe, introduzca, ejecute, venda o distribuya de cualquier manera, dispositivos o programas informáticos maliciosos o programas destinados a causar los efectos señalados en el primer inciso de este artículo."
which google translates as: Design, develop, program, acquire, send, introduce, execute, sell or distribute any malicious means, devices or programs or programs intended to cause effects indicated in the first paragraph of this article.
Laws that criminalize creation/distribution of "hacking tools" are dangerous and scary because there's really no bright line as to what constitutes a hacking tool; e.g., it's even possible that Ola's work on JOpenSSL or OTRv4 could be construed as a "hacking tool" under this law :(
A good if unfortunate reminder to anyone who works in computer security to check local laws before traveling and especially before emigrating.
Hope they’re keeping him away from telephones: wouldn’t want to see him whistle any nucular launch codes...
/s
There is a deeper problem with the notion of Assange having a 'dead man's switch'. Imagine that in the crown jewels of Wikileaks secret secrets there is some hypothetical document proving that a senior government figure was directly responsible for a high profile murder. The family of the victim may have been suffering without knowing what happened for years.
Now, this being a juicy scandal, Assange, in his great wisdom decides to hold this one back for the purpose of blackmail.
He also has another somewhat less juicy scandal about how some politician has not returned a library book on time. Then there are stories in-between, a whole smorgasbord of things for the 'dead man's switch'.
Now, if he reveals the scandal about the library book then everyone is going to say 'so what?'. But then, at the other end of the scale, if he reveals the one about the high profile murder then it puts him in the class of people that 'harbour terrorists'. In effect he would have been covering up the crime by being silent about it and not putting it in the public domain. He would have caused undue suffering to the victim's family and allowed the police to waste resources searching in the wrong direction.
If one of his minions in his little cult decide to 'go nuclear' and reveal all the secret secrets held back by Wikileaks then it is the same problem. They won't be viewed favourably for being complicit in the cover up to date.
Imagine there is the fictional incident of a senior government figure guilty of murder, if that got brought to trial and justice prevailed then, even though Wikileaks might have provided the breakthrough needed for the investigation, holding back evidence would still be a crime. Wives of murderers who harbour their other halves can get prosecuted for being silent even if they are the ones that eventually snitch.
So Assange has got nothing? Well, there is a however. Some scandals are far too taboo for the era and you need a new generation to be able to discuss them. So Assange may have content that is too hot for any sane journalist to want to touch and ultimately it is always the mainstream media that disseminates wikileaks. If Wikileaks have something that damns all of them then that ain't gonna get an audience, no matter how punchy it is.
or perhaps even they don't have the keys to the insurance files because they're just the mouthpiece, so the insurance is not theirs :o
Everything is written-of by some very dumb reason that looks OK on the surface. It is the epitome of "think of the children" reaction. it can be a completely unfounded claim that was never official in any way and just started as hearsay and then the press makes it official ("officials believe Bini may be part of a blackmail ring") or downright avoiding the discussion ("national security". "nothing to see here"). The point is, avoid the issue, do what you want. You are the state, there will be no consequences. For more information see https://www.amazon.com/Coup-dEtat-Practical-Handbook-Luttwak...
This is simply the new Ecuadorian strongman doing a favour to his NorthAmerican friends. It changes nothing in how the Ecuadorean justice system works (or doesn't work).
Ecuador is n. 114.
2) political assassination can happen in any country, preventing it is very hard
3) all countries have problems but some have bigger problems than others: https://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview
In the past I've found them to be pretty much a celeb gossip mag and the harder news they cover has similar skewed and sensationalized stories.
I hate to go down the path of questing every media source like happens these days, but nypost in particular seems a bit of generally speaking.
Not saying I know any different that this story or if they're right / wrong.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/12/julian-assange...
Swedish state television (swedish only)
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/ecuadors-ambassad-i-sveri...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...
I don’t trust much that appears in that paper.
And the questions remains, how could Manafort sneak three times into that place without any visual evidence being made? London is infamous for video surveillance. The embassy entrance logs are also empty of his name and ecuadorian consul in London formally denied that Manafort’s three visits had happened. Which makes this a nice conspiracy where everything except the guardian points in the same direction.
US journalist Glenn Greenwald summed it up: ‘It is certainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself “secretly” visited Julian Assange in the embassy. It’s possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un joined them’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post#History
It is as reliable as the nytimes. Meaning it has a bias towards their benefactors like every media source.
I'm not sure Alexander Hamilton is relevant as to my question.
Thomas Friedman obliterated any credibility he ever had over that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Augus...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecuador-imf/ecuador-inks-...
A search for his name brings up lots of columns (Swedish only, sorry):
https://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.50095?actionType=search&queryTex...
Ouch. Don't miss with nation state officials.