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Comment by gjmacd | Hacker News Reader

He tried to help Chelsea Manning brute force hack passwords on government computers. He's also suspected of being and taking part as Gucifer 2.0. I don't think people can call a person a "journalist" who fronts as one but is really doing illegal activities to obtain documents and data. Receiving them from someone else and publishing is a different issue. Getting them yourself and breaking the law... very fine line.

My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US. If you're truly a journalist operation, you'd do more to publish and "seek truth" in other countries. You won't find a single story about Russia that's damaging.

Bottom line for me? I think the US believes he's a Putin sympathizer. Or worse, he's a Russian asset.

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>My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US. If you're truly a journalist operation, you'd do more to publish and "seek truth" in other countries. You won't find a single story about Russia that's damaging.

Were you aware of Wikileaks prior to 2016? I can't help but think that you're unaware of their work prior to the 2016 US election cycle. Granted, you mention Chelsea Manning. But the idea that Wikileaks was a shell organisation for Russian intelligence all the way back from 2006 beggars belief, if only because of the diverse range of sources they have received material from.

Regarding Guccifer 2.0, I've seen the information linking that account to Russian intelligence, but I haven't seen any evidence that Assange himself is suspected of being Guccifer and essentially orchestrating the conversation(s) between Guccifer and Wikileaks. Could you share your information with the rest of us?

How does one know propaganda works? When everyone on the internet starts spewing the same line at the same time.

Are you addressing me? Or is that just for the benefit of other readers?

> My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US

The theory here seems to be that Russia is perfidiously undermining the US by exposing the truth to the cold light of day, by nefariously revealing primary sources with limited editing.

I'm not sure I'd rate that as the most successful strategy in their playbook, but maybe it'll work. If it were me, I'd go with more traditional propaganda. That is not a good theory.

Sure, "the truth to the cold light of day".

The point of it is being able to choose what truth to publish, with what context, and when.

The instructive case being the Podesta e-mails, being acquired by Russian intelligence (aka Fancy Bear) and released through WikiLeaks in the month before the 2016 election, controlling the news-cycle by staggering the releases.

That would be pretty solid evidence that the Russians are releasing information to the public, but the fact that they used Wikileaks doesn't support anything. There are a lot of ways to release information -particularly if the information happens to be true.

On a strictly irrelevant note, but because I don't like passively accepting premises I disagree with...

And the idea that the Russians extracted and released those emails is still fishy - if the Democrats win a batch of elections then Russia is going to start looking really stupid. It isn't impossible that the US intelligence services are wrong in their accusations, simply because as plots go it is a totally stupid one. It doesn't make any sense unless considered in context of only 1 election cycle.

If Russia had a magic button to decide elections, the DNC and RNC would have found it too by now. It is much more likely the actions of a rogue troublemaker, not acting on specific instructions to do what he did. Even if he was affiliated with the Russians.

> nefariously revealing primary sources

Russia deliberately targeted, hacked and stole the email of a US presidential campaign manager. What kind of crazy spin is this?

Whether Assange specifically should be culpable here is an open question. Whether the act was criminal is not.

Nobody disputed that the emails were genuine. What if Russians had just released them via RT - or indeed the New York Times?

It is still a story even if the source is shady. Even more impressive if the Russians are known to be involved.

Releasing the emails via Wikileaks isn't evidence of anything. Someone as well resourced as the Russian Intelligence service could have released them on The Pirate Bay and had a similar effect.

On my original point, Russia does not have a scary scheme to reveal the truth to unwitting Americans via Wikileaks. The idea is absurd.

> shady

There's no "shade" here. It's straight up criminal. He got phished, deliberately, via a targetted human engineering operation. Again I just don't understand the desire to hide the underlying crime here.

It's possible to be very uneasy with the direct prosecution of Assange for this stuff, to view Manning as having been unfairly targetted, but to also recognize that there's a really serious underlying crime here that we need to address.

But no, everyone wants to pick sides here and stand with... Putin. Seriously?

I suspect the difference here is between people old enough to remember the Cold War and those whose political awareness doesn't go beyond the election of Trump. I've been watching NATO expand to Russia borders and hearing US officials pine for the days of the Cold War for decades. I say fuck that. Putin is what he is, but that doesn't mean i want to go back to the days of nuclear brinksmanship and paranoia.

You don't think it's possible to recognize legitimate crimes without... pining for nuclear brinksmanship? The end of the cold war means we need to be OK with random foreign powers phishing our email?

Again, this binary nonsense is just crazy to me. It's possible to view the current geopolitical environment as safer than the 80's and see Putin as a dangerous despot and his actions in the 2016 election as crimes worthy of prosecution. Right?

Phishing our email is extremely low on the scale of “bad” things governments do.

Personally, I am much happier with intelligence agencies collecting information remotely than supplying weapons and overthrowing governments etc. In relative terms releasing accurate information is just not a major issue.

So, my concern is people take issue with this not because of what happened but because of the country that did it. And if that’s what’s going on, it’s the continuation of some very dark times. I have genuine concerns about what’s happening to the in Russia, but I think we need to judge their actions in absolute terms rather than let bias spiral.

Podesta used “Pa$$w0rd” and fell for a spear phish. Let’s not pretend this was some well financed nation state level hack. My mom successfully resists these every week.

Everything revealed about Clinton, Podesta and others was completely true. I’ve never seen a worse case of shoot the messenger than this.

Not only that but it was a phish not a spear phish. They sent the same phishing email to tens of thousands of people. It was just a generic common phishing operation. Only thing notable about Podesta was he asked his tech guy if the phishing email was legit and his tech guy said it was and he should click on it and sign in.

Assange a russian asset?

Why is he not in russia then? For plausability he let himself being locked in for years? Being the selfish narcisst that he is? Not likely.

Assange is a kind of internet-anarchist. He published some kind of manifest a while ago. Crypto-anarchism. Basically the idea (if memory serves right) that people need crypto etc. to balance the power with total governments.

So he really is not a supporter of the russian government, except maybe as a counter to the US. He hates the US as super power number one, so thats why he might accepted help from the enemies of his enemy, but Wikileaks also published documents about russia.

You’ve just made up loads of stuff with no evidence haven’t you? We should consider Collateral Murder much more damaging than the release of the video, the act itself has caused much more harm to your beloved American interests.

> We should consider Collateral Murder much more damaging

I think it was right to release the video. But to me, with no military experience and and non-native speaker, it seemed totally possible that the pilots took the reporters for combatants. I wouldn’t want to judge them. In comparison, I found the video of a cop shooting a fellow American crying in fear with an automatic rifle because he was reaching for his pants much more disturbing.

Or the autistic kid tazed to death in the shower.

Shooting a journalist because you think his camera is a gun means you did not exercise reasonable diligence in identifying the enemy target and are still liable for the death. If someone goes to a playground and shoots the children there and says they thought they were armed robbers, it isn't accepted as a defense.

The pilot came back for and shot a guy in a van who was taking his two kids to school. He had stopped to help the reporter.

Anyone watching the video can see the kids in the van. That the pilot didn't proves he was criminally negligent.

What about when they came back to shoot people who were helping the wounded? Also, "it was a war zone" is a shitty excuse given that the war was illegal and we had no business positioning helicopters over civilian marketplaces in Iraq, period.

What is collateral murder?

https://youtu.be/HfvFpT-iypw

A video some claim was leaked by Chelsea Manning (to Wikileaks) showing what I believe to be war crimes by US military.

Personally I also think that he is now a Russian asset or whatever its called. Maybe he needed their help and they were glad to welcome them into their arms, but that's besides the point. No love lost between him and 3 letter agencies BUT, as I said they could have charged him with a lot of other things that carry a long prison sentence.

What evidence is there he’s a Russian asset?

He released completely true but negative information about Hillary Clinton. That seems to be enough for some people.

He seems to have published no embarrassing or damaging information on Russia (at least in latter years?), and seemed willing to serve their purposes when it came to the 2016 election, by releasing hacked Democratic Party emails timed to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Prior to that, I had considered Wikileaks a brave experiment in radical transparency. Since then, I've considered Wikileaks a somewhat biased source. The truth is the truth, yes, but every truth is partial, and context matters.

"Asset" is perhaps too strong a word, but "useful idiot" may apply, or "the enemy of my enemy".

Or maybe he was threatened.

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