Former U.S. officials describe details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
2) Those Vault7 CIA leaks are incredibly embarrassing, it's like so closet criminal organization - and with a program to run cyberwarfare attacks using Russian/Chinese signatures in the code to hide atttribution? That's kind of insanely deceptive and criminal I think.
All told, those revelations make the State Dept. and the CIA look more like some kind of organized white-collar mafia outfit in the service of Wall Street shareholders than anything else. That kind of raw exposure makes the corrupt insiders in the US government very sad.
I'd guess they've got a lot more to hide, and are most worried about further eruptions of embarrassment.
That just seems like standard for spy agencies along with a pretty mild black propaganda angle. Even books about WW2 propaganda cover the topic.
I think people just underestimate what spy agencies actually do and how dirty it’s always been.
They do. But maybe they do, because of being told by the governments and in schools, that the CIA and co only fight terrorist and evil empires.
Those leaks showed the general public more of the real picture, not the fake official one. And sure, they do not like that.
That's not their image in the US at all and that's not how formal education about the CIA works in schools in the US. The opposite is closer to the truth.
You're maybe aware of the common American conspiracy theory that JFK was murdered by the CIA? As retribution for the Bay of Pigs, among other things.
Every other Hollywood movie in which they make an appearance has portrayed the CIA as up to no good for decades now, especially when it comes to topics like the war on drugs and terrorism. They're frequently portrayed as duplicitous and incompetent. That's because that's how the culture views them at this point. They do not have a good reputation with the American public.
See: American Made (2017), Kill the Messenger (2014), Syriana (2005), The Siege (1998), The Jason Bourne movies, among many others
- but the official picture and the ones painted by a common movie, is still a very different one, from reality. I mean take James Bond for instance. Glorification of the noble spycraft par excellence. (but I have not watched the latest ones, maybe there was change, too?)
And I have no first hand experience with US school education, but here in germany we kind of were educated about our intelligence agencies(and about the ones of the US) in a very friendly way. One that does not match reality.
"I think people just underestimate what spy agencies actually do and how dirty it’s always been. "
Most of the time that blowback is the gradual, steady erosion of America's soft power, ideals, and "good guy image"
Sometimes it is planes crashing into skyscrapers.
I absolutely love this nick
They certainly do, and that is one of the reasons we are seeing a massive authoritarian crackdown on free speech. The last thing the spy agencies and the rest of the deep state want is for people to understand what they actually do and how dirty they actually are.
I mean, if you left Russia fingerprints on, for example, a CIA-led cyberattack on a nuclear reactor, that could start a major war. It's pretty reckless in my opinion to even make such tools.
I can’t tell if you’re being willfully obtuse or you’re just an extremely histrionic, but it’s clear you didn’t reach that conclusion through principled reasoning.
Is this a shock to anyone? "Human rights and democracy" is the new imperial "white man's burden". We use it to justify invading, colonizing and stealing from others. When have we ever cared about human rights and democracy? I forget if it was chomsky or someone else who said that we've murdered more people, caused more human suffering and stolen more wealth in the name of "human rights and democracy" than nazi germany did in the name of nazism. Think about that.
I wish the non-western world would just collectively laugh at and mock any western leader when they talk about "human rights", "democracy", "western values", etc. How can they stand the hypocrisy? How can we?
The US's foreign policy has set back the cause of democracy and liberalization in China by decades with its underhanded shenanigans. To recieve their support, even moral support, is the kiss of death in China.
Yes, some countries have independently produced pro-Western democracies, but if they have enough value and start electing anti-Western leaders their democracy will become a target of Western attack. See the ~2002 US backed coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, or the recent Morales elections.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/tunisians-protest-again...
However, let's not forget that 50/80 years were dominated by a two-headed fight for world hegemony under the threat of nuclear war and potential apocalypse.
In this fight, while the US was far more evil than anyone cared to admit at the time, and the USSR far less than the US propaganda would have you believe, RELATIVELY speaking one side did offer more freedom, liberty, and prosperity than the other. And the primary counterargument from the Communists was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
This remains true today with China. CPC apologists are all too happy to point out (factually correct) gaps in US integrity and freedom. But in the grand scheme of things, relatively speaking, for all it's flaws, "The West" still has due process, doesn't ban religious expression, and doesn't put millions of citizens into force re-education camps.
The most recent Chinese return of the 2 incarcerated Canadians in return for the Huawei executive is the most blatant current example that China will do absolutely whatever it wants.
Whereas even in this news story - where you have government agents freely discussing assassinating Assange - there are others working against them, Lawyers using legal guidelines to flummox the plan, and ultimately it doesn't go forward.
For all of the US's evils, Russia and China would not have hesitated to kidnap or execute Assange in identical circumstances if he was hiding in an Ecuadorian embassy on their soil. He would have been disappeared a decade ago.
Nuclear war? And in that 50/80 years, only one side has ever nuked a city full of civilians. Twice.
> This remains true today with China. CPC apologists are all too happy to point out (factually correct) gaps in US integrity and freedom.
"CPC apologists". Did we have any integrity and freedom when we were colonizing china? You do realize that we colonized china for nearly 100 years. It was the "CPC" and the communists who liberated china. You do realize that right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
How anyone can claim a nation brutally ( and partly motivated by racism ) colonizing another nation is the one with integrity and freedom is beyond me.
> And the primary counterargument from the Communists was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
"Whataboutism" is a well-worn social media propaganda term used a few years ago. Nobody uses it anymore because it exposes the person who uses it.
> The most recent Chinese return of the 2 incarcerated Canadians in return for the Huawei executive is the most blatant current example that China will do absolutely whatever it wants.
China arrested two canadian spies/operatives in retaliation for canada kidnapping one of their spies/operatives? Shocking. What do you expect. It's statecraft. Tit for tat. Like when we kick out chinese or russian diplomats. They do the same. Or are you still pretending china arbitrarily locked up two innocent canadian tourists?
Strangely you aren't worked up about canada kidnapping a chinese national. Kidnapping chinese is fine but kidnapping canadians is wrong?
> For all of the US's evils, Russia and China would not have hesitated to kidnap or execute Assange in identical circumstances if he was hiding in an Ecuadorian embassy on their soil. He would have been disappeared a decade ago.
But two canadian spies were arrested and not "disappeared". Using your logic, china should be shipping two body bags right? China hasn't disappeared the dalai lama. How many chinese traitors hiding all over the west has china "disappeared"? Absolutely none.
You are just stating the same propaganda we've heard over and over again. It gets stale and boring. China bad. Russia bad. US good. Right. At least you didn't bring up anything about genocide.
At the end of the day, everyone has done good and everyone has done bad. But one has done far more evil than good while hypocritely pretending to be the world's beacon of good. This hypocrite not only colonized one of the "bad", it also invaded the other "bad".
It's the hypocrisy that's just unbearable. I don't remember china claiming to be the world's beacon of good. Don't remember russia claiming to be the epitome of freedom and democracy.
Depends on what you mean by "liberated". The bulk of the fighting against the Imperial Japanese military was done by the KMT Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-Shek. The KMT lost the civil war afterwards due to still being a shitty unpopular government, and then the CPC went on to "liberate" tens of millions of Chinese from their corporeal bodies during the Cultural Revolution.
>>>I don't remember china claiming to be the world's beacon of good.
The Chinese government is VERY good at information operations.[1] It is usually more subtle than America's ham-fisted chest-thumping. The CCP uses a lot of proxies to sing its praises, like this: [2]. But Xi Jinping is generally assertive in casting China as a model for the world. From [3]: "China will become more assertive on the world stage and believes its governance model is attractive to other countries will likely raise all sorts of alarms in Asian and Western capitals. Xi declared that China "has become a great power in the world" and "it is time for us to take center stage in the world and to make a greater contribution to humankind".
[1] https://www.iri.org/sites/default/files/bridge-ii_fullreport...
[2] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-05/31/c_139980463.htm
[3] https://sinocism.com/p/welcome-to-the-xi-era-sinocism-weekly...
at some level all political claims are ridiculous but all countries mentioned in your post are pathological liars, they just lie about different things in different ways.
Russia has sham elections where Putin always gets 99% of the vote. It absolutely tries to pretend it’s a democracy.
There is an obvious moral appeal to democracy that is inherent to the idea. Likewise guarantees of human rights. China and Russia could embrace these ideals for real and have the same moral high ground, but that is obviously not the state of things, and the fact that they are both run by leaders not accountable to a real vote is why I they are unlikely to change soon. At least the US has means to course correct.
Basically your argument is an un-nuanced "muh US is evil". Even though you can simply look at the countries aligned with the US and factually see that they are the freest, have the least corruption, and have the most open elections.
the benefits of unrestricted freedoms and open elections have also never been as questionable as now, so you should not be surprised that others do not also believe that those are universally considered good.
Whataboutism is not a propaganda term from a few years ago. It's a decades-old term from the Soviet union using LEGITIMATE criticisms of the US (the US civil rights record should have been/was an international embarrassment for Americans and humanity) to deflect OTHER Legitimate criticism of the USSR's appalling human rights and civil liberties concerns that ultimately were worse than Americans. (e.g. the number of black americans lynched in the US was DWARVED by the number of soviet citizens killed by the system in the gulags, etc)
This remains the case today. Regardless of the US actions, any sensible impartial observer (from a non-US or even non-western perspective) can see that the PRC is far more of a reprehensible civil rights abuser than any country in The West. This is not up for debate.
When was the last time the Dalai Lama visited China? My point is that China and Russia would have treated Assange differently if his equivalent was on THEIR soil like Assange was on British. There would have been no respect of rule of law, or international sovereignty of diplomatic missions. He would have been gone.
Lastly, I'll give you some credit on one point. The US nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a reprehensible and unforgivable act by any ethical code. It was not needed to end the war. There is no defending it. That does not change the reality of the next 50 years of nuclear deterrent.
> At the end of the day, everyone has done good and everyone has done bad. But one has done far more evil than good while hypocritely pretending to be the world's beacon of good. This hypocrite not only colonized one of the "bad", it also invaded the other "bad".
> It's the hypocrisy that's just unbearable. I don't remember china claiming to be the world's beacon of good. Don't remember russia claiming to be the epitome of freedom and democracy.
Personally I don't care about hypocrisy, just objective actions - positive or negative. The US has done plenty bad, but overall has been a net good for the world - both for increasing the liberty/quality of life for their citizens, and for the rest of the world by establishing overall peace and prosperity through globalism (which improved the quality of life for Billions).
China has also done the same. But the costs to it's citizens seem higher.
Have you not heard of Stalin? Many more murders than the fascists / Nazis / holocaust.
Really can't believe I'm about to defend Stalin, but if you hold the Facists/Nazis responsible for all the deaths in WW2 (Which I think you have to), they were responsible for more deaths.
Purely direct victims in concentration/death camps, yes Stalin killed more people.
But let's not forget, that was all in the 30's. The Cold War started AFTER WW2, after Stalin's death, and the narrative of The Evil Empire vs The Land of The Free all occurred then.
If you think the US went to war with Nazi Germany for purely altruistic reasons you’re sorely mistaken.
But at the same time an evil fascist dictatorship was defeated because the US got involved.
The world is a messy complicated space and human actions are messy and complicated.
Every activity in that bakery, in one way or another, depends on energy. That is also true for any other economic activity.
By selling energy you effectively have a share of everyone's business.
Also, if you control the fuel supply, you can control entire economies.
The United States has plenty of domestic energy reserves and the capability to build a lot of renewable energy and nuclear energy. There’s zero reason to be catering to Middle East despots, other than corruption and cronyism.
But governments and organized crime have a lot in common.
You can go to the cable archive and type 'human rights' in the search box and see this isn't remotely true. Whatever one might think of US diplomacy and its goals, the cables are mostly of historical interest and cause for mild embarrassment. They don't really show some diabolically clever empire cynically manipulating the world. They mostly show it pursuing its publicly stated goals and interests - one can have a pretty dim view of these goals and interests but you don't need the cables to develop or support that viewpoint.
Hegemony is a publicly stated goal of the US. What do you think that entails? What do you think is necessary for a nation of 327 million to be the hegemon over 7.5 billion?
Where? Stated by whom?
A president? We’ve had 46 with wildly conflicting public statements and goals. A Congress? We’ve had 117 sessions of Congress.
“The US” isn’t a single entity. I don’t think you can make any blanket statements across that much time and that many people much beyond “they are all humans.”
The prospect of the US having to live in a world shaped by forces it has no control over is melting brains across the board. Americans, and yes this is a generalization but not a wrong one, cannot imagine a world that is run on values utterly foreign to them.
[1]https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987...
Yes, there are unclassified and even classified cables discussing human rights initiatives - but I'm guessing 'SECRET' is what they really care a lot about, and that stuff in my experience of reading literally hundreds of cables (okay I was leaning more towards energy research) that's just not an issue anywhere I've seen. For example, Syria? It's all about forcing Assad to cut ties with Iran and get into the Saudi-Qatar gas pipeline deal. UAE? Huge arms deals. Ditto for Saudi Arabia. For grim laughs, look up Raytheon and Yemen.
It's really not very flattering, although the writers seem intelligent and well-informed.
I don't think it makes much difference either way because I think you're over-interpreting the classification level as some sort of extra level care. All of this stuff was readily available to a Private First Class stuck on a forward base in the Iraqi desert. And I think my point still holds - whatever views one might have on US foreign policy, one can form them and support them just as well by simply reading the news. Besides piles of detail, the cables don't tell you anything different. They're basically this but for diplomacy:
We are fortunate that they need to bathe themselves in the trappings of democracy, unlike, say, Putin's services.
It's instructive that they view the third world and the UK as different rules. They get to shit all over the third world and know they can get away with it. Assassinations? Abductions? All A-OK in the brown countries.
This isn't me characterizing things, the quotes are from the officials in the article.
As for the mafia, the founding basis of all mafia romanticism is that government is just another source of power and abuse, and the mafia are simply another competing source.
That would be ridiculous, but the security agencies of the feds certainly do their best to make it plausible.
Uh… I assume you can see how leaving a note saying “CIA was here!!!” might run counter to the goals of a spy agency. You might separately not like some of the missions they are tasked with, but this is what they would be doing even if they spent all their time rescuing orphans and their puppies from North Korean salt mines.
The CIA is more of a propaganda outfit than anything else in my opinion, although their dirty banking and drug dealing games are right up there to. Their 'intelligence role' on important issues could be entirely subsumed by the DIA. Should have been shut down in the 1960s like JFK wanted to do. Useless failure agency on 9/11, too. And, the CIA was behind all the dirty Iraq/Afghanistan torture programs, were they not?
I've heard many people say that Assange committed actual crimes and it's time for him to face the consequences of those actions. While I personally disagree about whether he's done anything illegal, even if he has it impossible for him to get a fair trial and justice to be served. Everything being done to him is an effort to get revenge on the person who embarrassed the military and intelligence communities.
The U.K. just denied the US extradition request, so the US isn’t even close to “capturing” Assange.
Not sure how OP could be more clearer
Did they try? The US also "considers" invading Canada. Consideration means nothing. And the US monitors people suspected of crimes all of the time. I'm tired of hearing about hypothetical "unfair" trials.
Once again, the alternative you guys seem to want is a world where people that you like can do whatever they want. You like Assange and because of his celebrity status no trial can be fair- very convenient. Nobody famous has ever stood trial?
My 2 cents
Even when they have a warrant allowing them to monitor a suspect, which they do not seem to have acquired here, those do not allow the breaking of attorney–client privilege.
My "alternative" is that the US obeys the limits placed on them, and conducts fair trials of alleged criminals.
And again, I don't like Assange. What I like is the right to a free press and a fair trial.
If you caught a policeman planning to shoot an innocent African American, or if a neo-nazi was found to be planning to blow up a synagogue, would you not suggest taking legal action?
If I planned to kill someone just like the us govt did, I would be in prison the next day.
Assange should be given a fair trial. But the government spying illegally and planning to kill him doesn't give anyone confidence in that.
Planning to kill him is terrible, but was the spying actually illegal? With all the permissions the government has on spying, I have such a hard time determining if any single instance of spying is illegal or not, regardless of whether it's ethical.
Also "illegal" may not be the right term. Similar actions by intelligence operatives led to the Ellsberg case being dropped, but no charges were filed as a result of those actions.
But the core point still stands - the general consensus remains that it would be impossible for Assange to have a fair trial in the US legal system.
I'd just like some answers. I'd like it to be tried in court. I don't think the trial would necessarily be unfair. These conversations go in circles because we are all denied the truth so we argue hypotheticals.
Assange said he'd try. The only answer unknown is whether he did try, and I doubt the US has any evidence showing that he did. That's it.
The trurth to all his charges is basically already out there.
It's odd to read what was really at stake. Pompeo's team was ready to assasinate Assange in London, and the only thing stopping them was the justice dept and only nominally the office of the President. What WL (and Snowden) did was show to the public the intelligence community, who was ostensibly accountable to them, for what they truthfully were. The news media took a bigger credibility hit for their history of spiking these stories and delivering hit pieces than the spies ever did.
Most people saw how the sausage was made and decided they still liked sausage. Not only do we tolerate what these services do, but now that we know about it and have done nothing to change it, we have acknowledged it and rewarded them for it all. Snowden's story practically created the ability for retired generals to accept pulpits from tv news where they can armchair QB the issues of the day, and they should thank him for the minor television celebrity and speaker circuit fêting they now enjoy. Whether that undermines the credibility of their institutions is still to be seen, but all that plotting to kill Assange just to sustain some lame narrative about a bureaucracy seems like it was just a fatal distraction from the real unseating of western power that we are clearly into the endgame of today.
I'm not sure that's really true. All of the stuff Snowden and Assange leaked was very much down-played by the popular media - it felt like it was very under-reported and even then with a fair bit of bias.
If you ask some people about how they feel now, they'll say that it wouldn't affect them "because they haven't done anything wrong", or "but Assange is a rapist!", or even "that's just movie stuff, conspiracy bullshit".
I really believe that the population at large either don't believe what the CIA are doing, are in denial about it, or just don't care because it largely affects brown people in far off lands.
If American's don't adopt the big lie, then all of a sudden they need to accept:
- the US enacted genocide on Native Americans and still effectively does via reservations and enforce poverty
- the US started the vietnam war and would need to realize that we did in fact do the Gulf of Tonkin
- the US has strongly backed dozens of repressive regimes that have collectively murdered millions of people. By strongly backed, I mean trained, advised, and directed these operations to kill and torture political opposition "inconvenient" to the US.
- the current Mexican cartel leaders were formally trained by US operatives at the "School of the Americas", as part of the program to strongly back repressive regimes
- the Iraq War was a massive scam from its inception to the end
- the Afghanistan War was a massive scam for 90% of its period
- the CIA and other security agencies have a 100% functional total information awareness and infrastructure for complete totalitarian control of the US. All it needs is one president to decide to activate it on a whim. It's basically a switch sitting in the Oval Office.
and so so so many other transgressions.
> I'm not sure that's really true. All of the stuff Snowden and Assange leaked was very much down-played by the popular media - it felt like it was very under-reported and even then with a fair bit of bias.
It was not at all played down, especially not Snowden, it was rolling 24 hour news for weeks, they still try and drum up some drama over it whenever they get a chance.
The problem is, people dont care. I feel genuinely sad that Snowden blew up his life, and outside of a few privacy communities nothing has changed. Everyone agrees it is wrong, but they dont care, you are a traitor if you dont believe it has to be done.
He should have won a Nobel prize and been given a ticker tape parade for blowing the whistle, but instead he is holed up in Russia, the illegal spying goes on, and the people call for more spying at every turn.
If you wanted to know what the leaks said, you basically had to go to the source materials. If you wanted to hear some talking head give his opinion about whether or not Snowden did "treason," who more often than not said it was, you didn't have to work very hard.
You missed the bits about 'the NSA had a direct pipe into google, microsoft, yahoo, att and hoovered up everything you said, did and wrote'
This wasn't just a case of the partisan press with whom you disagree. This was the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
I would trust an everyday criminal before one of these organizations, and I'm being totally serious. The ordinary criminal does not harm me.
What value, other than terrible things like deception, do we get out of these agencies in a free society?
Assange received classified material and published it. This has been done countless times by journalist and it’s a pretty far stretch to somehow apply criminal charges just because he published it.
Honestly from the CIA perspective it would probably have been better to assassinate him. This sends a message to other journalists on what the US will do to protect its interest. A trial just further embarrasses the US since everyone knows the outcome and that it is largely a farce
I think that's the difficult part of this, right? It's a spectrum with many levels of gradation, that each imply different levels of legality and illegality.
This gets repeated a lot but is not what Assange is charged with. He didn't just "receive" classified information. He's alleged to have not only communicated with Manning to direct her to grab specific information and tried to help her break into systems.
He'd have a much better case if he had just been a passive publisher of information. You can't be involved in a crime and then claim journalistic protections after the fact.
Assange is not a journalist. He's a wannabe spymaster and muckraker. Zero percent of his case has anything to do with real journalists as none of them would have participated in the exfiltration of classified documents.
Assange has no oath to the US and despite his interest in the material it is quite a stretch to somehow suggest he “made” Chelsea share this info.
One of the seventeen charges is about this. The others are all solely to do with publishing classified information.
If all of the other charges were dropped, maybe you'd have a point but it's clear that the entire thing is primarily about his work as a journalist publishing documents.
He's been imprisoned for nearly a decade without trial now.
> Cisco quickly reassigned staff from other projects to turn their focus solely on analyzing the attack and to figure out how the CIA hacking worked, so they could help customers patch their systems and prevent criminal hackers or spies from using similar methods.
> On 20 March, Cisco researchers confirmed that their study of the Vault 7 documents showed the CIA had developed malware which could exploit a flaw found in 318 of Cisco's switch models and alter or take control of the network.
No idea why Assange feared to be extradited from Sweden to the USA./s
received “sketches” of plans for killing Assange and other Europe-based WikiLeaks members
I clipped it at an unfair point, but remember Anwar al-Awlaki? Obama ordered the execution of a US citizen in a foreign country without trial.
After Biden was done murdering innocent people in Afghanistan, then he stabbed our oldest ally - France - in the back to such a degree they pulled their ambassador in anger.
Good thing we got rid of Trump, he was super damaging to the US reputation and relationships in Europe and around the world.
Stating that we just launched an attack on an innocent family for PR is doesn't stretch credulity it explodes it.
Insofar as France nations don't have friends they have interests. The France/Austria sub contract was first posed 5 years ago and they haven't delivered much but the projected price has balooned from 40 to 60 Billion and the original proposal was finally signed 16 months later than the proposed 2018 deadline over concerns about the suitability of the French design and concerns about the process.
The most recent milestone was this January and France again failed to meet requirements.
France is like the guy who thinks he's doing a great job who absolutely everyone knew was going to get fired. Ego alone demands that they be shocked at this.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australian-docume...
In the list of goals of the leadership of nations nowhere is it written sacrifice substantial national interests in order to maintain ephemeral good will exchangeable not even for carnival stuffies at the local fair. As long as our interests align with France and they have reason to believe that our actions will consistently align with those interests we will continue to find common cause.
That is why Trump's inconsistency, love affair with dictators, and unpredictable persuit of personal interests was so damaging. It gives nations cause to doubt whether their long term interests and values are aligned at all and whether long term strategic alignment will therefore pay dividends. Chaos discourages investment of literal and political capital.
You can change that
The Democrats and Bill Clinton considered Mandela a terrorist.
It was George W Bush who in 2008 lifted Mandela from the terrorist watch list - although he waited till the end of his second term and for Mandela to approach the age of 90.
https://www.france24.com/en/20080702-us-drops-mandela-terror...
> He explained that the original purpose of the law, introduced during the 1980s while Ronald Reagan was president, was to fight terrorism. "So we're pleased that we could make this correction to what is otherwise a good and important piece of legislation," he said.
>> Their original placement on the list occurred during the Reagan admininstration.
?
Sowing discord within the group seemed an easier route to success
That is why you need some fervent believers in some arbitrary COC. Worked for the church, why shouldn't it work for intelligence agencies. Just get some crazy something to stick it to the patriarchy. You always find tools like that.
This guy sent helicopters full of swat teams to arrest a single guy - Kim Dotcom. The whole thing was super illegal and almost hilariously over the top. "Almost" because there was nothing amusing about the whole thing. It was ugly
Let's not forget that Kim Dotcom is a miserable piece of shit who rats on his friends and used his position of trust to snoop through people's data and then snitch to governments and criminals for profit.
Not enough people know his real history but the guy is a pure scumbag, credit card fraud criminal and con artist masquerading as freedom-loving CEO.
He's exactly the kind of person that should be thrown in a hole somewhere and not heard from again and if you knew anything about him you would do it if you could.
Kim funded Megaupload largely off of his fraudulent gains on carder forums and a legitimate business that he scammed money off of.
Kim is the kind of person that deserves to have his asshole tickled with glowing hot metal rods...but that isn't an endorsement if somebody goes and does it.
It's fine to be outraged at the US & NZ governments, but it's not fine to spare the man a shred of sympathy.
He has spent his life lying about his credentials, and then selling the influence he gains in the us government to foreign countries.
No, I don’t think Biden will be pardoning Edward Snowden.
Drone strike: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/us/politics/pentagon-dron...
Disinterested: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/25/fac...
Joes plagiarism: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/18/us/biden-admits-plagiaris...
More lying about law school credentials: https://apnews.com/article/cd977f7ff301993f7976974ba07c5495
Selling influence: https://news.yahoo.com/independent-source-confirms-authentic...
https://reason.com/2015/04/09/the-feds-want-a-back-door-into...
"One fine day in 1991, an ambitious senator named Joe Biden introduced legislation declaring that telecommunications companies "shall ensure" that their hardware includes backdoors for government eavesdropping. Biden's proposal was followed by the introduction of the Clipper Chip by the National Security Agency (NSA) and a remarkable bill, approved by a House of Representatives committee in 1997, that would have outlawed encryption without back doors for the feds."
The man is an authoritarian, him playing an absent minded nice man of advanced age and his empty SJW phrases don't change that. You can get real glimpses of the personality like him "losing patience with the unvaccinated" lately.
Firmly embedded in the swamp.
It's hard to define someone in a phrase, but I just view him as a half-bright grifter with backers. The backers are the people to be angry at. His views on civil liberties are probably more taking the easy road (or easy money) rather than being for or agin'.
In fact, it would have been politically expedient last summer for him to say the 1994 crime bill was a mistake in hindsight, but he did the opposite. I think this is who he really is.
"In the letter dated May 2010, the al Qaeda 9/11 mastermind wrote he had no assassination plots against Biden because he deemed him “totally unprepared” to lead the United States."
"Bin Laden warned in 2010 letter that Biden would ‘lead US into crisis’"
https://nypost.com/2021/08/20/bin-laden-warned-in-2010-lette...
Biden might pardon Snowden at the end of his term, but don't count on it. I haven't seen a single sign that Biden (or any American presidential candidate for that matter) would side with anyone for leaking government secrets. The government is sitting on many more juicy details that'd upset the global political balance and transparency is not in the USA's interests.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/leaker-of-drone-secrets-ge...
Much like I can - randomly or otherwise - choose any faction in the Nigerian elections.
Or is their some planet-wide law that he fell under?
Furthermore, as Assange isn’t an American citizen and doesn’t get to vote in the USA, none of them have no reason to put personal dislike aside and defend him or his actions.
Hell, he might have been a lot better off now if he was a USA citizen, or even if he’d been officially working for Russia.
Right now, he’s a conveniently unlicensed hot potato: held personally liable by the powers, not even really seen as a journalist even if he was one.
Indeed, hate away.
But its a big jump to imprisoning (or as some would like killing) him.
Just as - and focus here - its not ok to extradite atheists to Saudi Arabia for heresy committed in say New Zealand.
Its after all just a wee election.
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't take the actions of others into account?
How do you pardon a foreign citizen?
Based upon the talking points at the time, establishment Democrats very much wanted this to be true. This makes sense since the Russians are a convenient scapegoat.
>suppressing damaging information on Republicans.
They wanted this to be true but it didnt happen:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/5pmo25/debunked_...
In any case, hitting up sources for leaks is, well, journalism.
"if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters"
They explain their interest in a Bernie angle as a result of Trump, in their minds, having a low probability of winning:
"we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting"
He still didnt conceal any leaks in pursuit of that goal and he wasnt a russian spy. Nonetheless, both claims are frequently made in the mainstream media linked to Democrats.
They are lies.
lol I kid. Literally 0% chance CNN will give him one.
Every establishment critic faces the same choice:
1) appear on PressTV or RT
2) face ridiculously hostile interviewers
3) dont appear on TV
Mostly they go for a mix of 1 and 2.
It makes him a journalist who doesnt appreciate being threatened with a drone strike by a sitting secretary of state for practising journalism.
The fact people give him shit for this is pretty unbelievable.
Excusing Russian style journalist assassination is not compatible with respect for Democracy.
Do you expect him to have been neutral on her candidacy?
The DNC had their email server itself hacked, which is an entirely different level of compromise.
Of course, they crafted a narrative that “republicans were hacked too!” which of course is true but highly misleading (typical of such propaganda campaigns).
This was highly effective, as it’s still popping up in discussions like this one 5+ years later.
[1] https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-tru... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-said-considering-pardo... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/16/tr...
https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/politics/republicans-2016-edw...
I think this shows on either side of the aisle, there is little love for Snowden and people alike.
No need to steer away from "deep state" so hard you go hyperbolic.
Maybe use "Multiple competing power cabals", if you prefer?
It's no deep state conspiracy that the Pentagon or the CIA have their own opinion on world politics. If anything, the Trump administration has shown that there are still some restraints to the president's power. At some point details were made foggy or even left out in Trump's security briefings out of fear they might get leaked to Twitter. The end result of this process isn't to keep the elites in power or to control the people, it's much more tame than that. People don't like change and when a new guy rolls in and decides that the way some government body does something is wrong, people will naturally resist.
There is always a power balance, usually in favour of the democratically elected officials, between the elected government and the government that sticks around. When push comes to shove the elected officials always have the power to overrule the unelected ones, but any future endeavours related to these parties would become difficult once you force matters.
The CIA, FBI, DoJ and FDA don't get a complete reshuffle every four years. The figureheads and even organisational top can get replaced, but there are many layers of middle management below them that have cemented their ways in difficult to change processes, workflows and office culture.
The system has its advantages, notably that the country doesn't collapse after giving a complete lunatic the reigns for four years, but also a great many disadvantages, notably elected officials being worked against in their quest for improvement and change. This effect can be increased or decreased, but it won't ever go away and denying that there is more to politics than elites at the top is just nonsensical in my opinion.
It will erode away as American influence does. Just ask the Brits what happened with their War Office, India Office, Colonial Office etc etc etc. No one thought those were ever going away either.
If it wasn’t Snowden it would have been someone else, matter if time.
Here’s what the gov should do:
1.) Pardon Snowden publicly 2.) Work with Snowden as public front, to build a better (more privacy conscious) surveillance network and win back the public’s trust
Will this ever happen? Probably not
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/15/494157921...
> The committee unanimously voted to endorse the report, and all members signed a letter to President Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden.
Federal court has in the 90 percent conviction rate. Is it because they have such air tight cases and evidence to follow? No, it's a purely political kangaroo court.
Someone would do well do wipe this cancerous 'judicial' system off grid.
Too many distractions, bad layout, autoplaying videos.
...and this is with heavy ad blocking.
As it was my first visit to Yahoo news, it gave me the options on which kind of cookies/tracking I want to accept. Obviously I select "none". I shudder to think what would happen if I had selected "accept-all".
Sorry for the rant - but I can see why Yahoo is in decline if this is what they offer. No idea if the article's content is actually any good - I feel bad for the people who wrote it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-view/ecabif...
This extension apparently uses Mozilla's open-source Readability implantation.
> One of those officials said he was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him “options” for how to do so.
I don't understand how this can be legal. Cannot such a request be considered a conspiracy to commit a murder? Or some people are "more equal" and the law doesn't apply to them?
Doing something bad or making a mistake doesn't make the actor bad. That's just an un-nuanced world view.
And from Trump's perspective, he may like seeing his rival taking a bullet - but that doesn't imply he'd feel protective of the spent shell casings on the ground.
In reality hawks in the miliary have wanted him since the video release showing that bombing at the wedding.
He made enemies of both sides.
If you think about it both sides play for the same team. Any powerful voice uncontrolled needs silencing. Hence why he is inprison and why laws were broken to get him in jail.
Basic Realpolitik.
Clinton's sense of entitlement and both parties' history of not supporting the working class lost her the election.
Who's gonna agree to extradite him knowing that Trump was planning to assassinate him? Seems like a hard sell.
E: Turns out that this isn't even news https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-...
And the article makes it sound lime the British were kept in the loop for most of it, the previous assassination allegations didn't stop extradition so I doubt these ones will.
Obviously the plan was never executed. I am sure that was a choice based on risk factors and not just professional ethics.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/... [1] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-r... [2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/i...
I know that Russia has enormous corruption, as a matter of fact I don't even try to understand the degree and inner workings of said corruption and I very much doubt that it being public would really improve anything, that is, sadly, par for the course regarding Russia.
I care that when confronted with some ugly truths, a good deal of the American public immediately sided with authoritarianism because it was inconvenient for them to do otherwise, going all the way to conspiracy theories (pee tape, Russian prostitutes etc) and deep into propaganda, It's not "blackmail", it's now "kompromat", it's not "geopolitics" it's "realpolitik", it's not just "the elite", it's "Russian Oligarchs", there is this effort of antagonization, of alienation that both disgusts and scares me, and I think that's a way bigger problem than anything related Assange himself.
At least that seems to have nothing to do with Russia.
If we’re being honest though, we’d frankly acknowledge that we’re not talking about Russian corruption. In this specific case we’re talking about supporting chemical weapon attacks against civilians, but we could also talk about the brutal war crimes in Chechnya.
Assange sees himself as at war with America and accepts Putin as his necessary patron to continue it. I just find it weird that other Americans (typically on the fringe left and right) try to tell me I need to view America as my enemy and Putin as my friend, and agree that we need to help censor truths about his rule in order to further his cause.
Personally, I’m disgusted by people who see a dictator who regularly murders his opponents, bombs his own cities, supports chemical weapon attacks against civilians, and think “he’s on my side”, then try to defend censoring the truths of his actions under the guise of “well we hate the same people”.
He is not a US citizen, and he was never a "pro-western-mainstream" or "pro-establishment" type (he was born into a cult with a history of systematic children sex abuse in Australia, one of the leaders was close to the AU government, Assange then became a teenage hacker, etc). He was a contrarian against the West from the start, while being of the West.
Do you use the term in relation to some of Wikileaks goals or mission statements, some hacker ethos, in the sense that he compromised himself in regards to some personal conviction of his ?