WikiLeaks is struggling to stay online as millions of documents disappear
dailydot.com
dailydot.com
EDIT: i mean individual freedom.
First of all, of course Democracy has nothing to do with any supposed "absolute defense of freedom", because it is a system of attribution of power, involving coercion - because a fine line separates balance of interests ("politics") and actual coercion. So, of course, if one empowered inadequate individuals the rules will be absurd and damaging - and this has been actually happening, and it is not surprising at all to an etiologic analysis.
But second, soon after Hammurabi started his reign in minus 1792 of the typical timescale, already since the framework established those many millennia ago power is limited - constitutionalism is very old. So, not only it is already well established that some will be empowered, it is also well established that they will not be fully empowered.
There is no lesson that, in general, "power limits freedom": there is full evidence that the current systems need much more R&D. To note that, you already had e.g. gerrymandering, which is very graphic, or the failures in quality citizenship development - kind of the opposite of the hopeful depiction in "12 Angry Men" - which is very pervading.
https://harvardpolitics.com/a-last-stand-for-freedom-global-...
When the article mentions that risk of «reducing popular confidence in the democratic model», it clearly indicates it as an hysterical response, suggesting literally the possibility of «apparent [only] success» increase on the side of autocracies. The whole sub-context reinforces the evidence that Democracy requires, as a foundation, curbing the roots and risks of phenomena like hysterical responses - there is a systemic matter about the care for the roots enabling Democracy, a matter which the article notes in terms like those stating an «already declining state of global democracy». If there is a risk that some may think "ah but an iron fist would solve it" (oversimplifications, "silver bullets" - populism), then you have a problem, gravely impacting Democracy, that you have to solve through Education.
The contextual opposite of the caused damage, of arbitrary measures, is not a "freedom to", but a "freedom from" - freedom from the absurd. This requires proper maintenance of the system. That requires proper information subsystems, with special regard to investigative journalism. That is to be free to live in a well working and fair system - a specific form of Freedom.
Are people in Africa free? Are they happy? Is you dependency on state and money a freedom? What about morale? Is it freedom to be narcissistic? Is it freedom to has millions different laws? Is it freedom to have imaginary choice of voting for someone who has money and someone who has even more money? Is it freedom to be forced to use platform that collects data about you? Is it freedom to live in society where fear drive politics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
But we have failed to implement them. I think we need to admit that democracy worked well towards that goal in the 20th century but it has been set back with the help of technology in recent decades. The amount of surveillance and manipulation of the current world is astounding by historic standards and it is used against the individual. We should also not compare our democracies to failed mafia states or undeveloped ones, but to ourselves.
Like if you were Russia or Iran right now, paying a bit of money to keep wikileaks' servers running would seem like money well invested.
What makes it different is that Russia is expected to be like that. Not the US.
"The Democratic National Committee emails, provided to WikiLeaks ahead of the 2016 election by Russian state entities posing as rogue hackers, are similarly missing."
Imagine you leak some important classified information to Wikileaks and they don't publish it. You'll just send it somewhere else. There are hundreds of journals and thousands of journalists to whom you can alternatively send the information. It's frankly speaking stupid to claim that not publishing a leak "for strategic reasons" could somehow be harmful. It is also worth mentioning that journalists do that very often for a vast number of reasons such as national security, their own security, protecting contacts, protecting sources, fear of legal repercussions, political agenda of the editor in chief, etc. There is nothing special about Wikileaks in that regards.
What was special about Wikileaks was their policy of publishing everything with only minor redaction and, most importantly, without asking the befriended intelligence community for the green light first. That's what normal news outlets tend to do, unless they have a very high level story like Watergate.
Alexei Navalny was the last person attempting to change this, but he failed.
Also Russia has its own social media, search engine etc., so some information simply doesn't reach the common Russian.
Over here in eastern Europe as far back as in the 00s there was the concept of "Russian internet"(Runet) - it wasn't technically sealed off from the rest of the world, but was more a small, independent world in and of itself that exchanged information mostly internally, in Russian.
But hey, if i betrayed the fourth pillar of democracy and suffered from cognitive dissonance therefore, this not being supported by the "evils" behind it, would be woven into some nice story too.
Who do you think paid for those servers in the past, lol. Seems that the GRU has defunded the project, though - they must have other higher priority projects.
Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU#Unit_74455
The know-how is in Assange's mind, and he's in prison.
Democracy is a word with almost no consistent meaning or definition, yet everyone treats it as if it's clean and defined.
Other than "communism is whatever the communist party does," what is democracy anyway?
My own personal bugbear is when people say they want to "democratise" nouns and verbs, e.g. "democratise maths" or "democratise running" (both real examples) and yet there is no idea at all what that might mean. Votes? And if so, who and how and when?
> to make (something) available to all people : to make it possible for all people to understand (something)
That said:
Democratise running.
Running.
Even with that definition, nope.
(But what it does do is serve as a further example of why the word has such broad usage as to be almost meaningless).
This is not a new meaning and is one that I learned a long time ago, have seen widely used for decades and has an even longer history.
The word is far from precise, but it is also far from meaningless. I understand exactly what is meant by "democratize running" (though I don't think running is a good example of something that needs democratization since there aren't systematic barriers to popular adotion.)
I, sincerely, have no idea at all what this phrase is supposed to mean. Even with what you previously wrote.
Hmm. I'm British; where, geographically, did you encounter your usage?
- "You're great. I'm great. We're great together. Now watch some emotionally exploitative happy music while watching emotionally exploitative happy imagery. Vote for me!"
- "You don't like bad people. I don't like bad people. My opponent is a bad person. Now watch some emotionally exploitative scary/dystopic music while watching emotionally exploitative angering/scaring imagery. Vote for me!"
- And a mixture of the two where you segue from the bad to to the good with mixed emotional exploitation alongside. "Hope and Change" and "Make American Great Again" are clear examples of this one.
Little to nowhere in the picture do appeals to logic, rational, education, or information come into the picture. It's just emotional manipulation and tribalism. And it works phenomenally well. Beyond this I'd also appeal to your own experience. Take any topic you're an expert on. Now go into any venue where "the masses" are discussing it, or the media. Cringe at the site of all of it, and now imagine the media and masses (including yourself/myself) are any better on the topics you are not an expert on.
We have a trillion dollar industry designed to manipulate peoples views. Nobody is smarter than that.
I think you're talking about the people that go against the mainstream ideas and authorities. It's very difficult to create an opinion about these people, because they might be right or they might be wrong or might be right/wrong 50% of the time. I cant really tell, and it changes all the time and also depends in which country/society you live.
All i can say is, questioning authorities is a good thing. As Einstein said: blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth
Meme of the year
For example, they didn't even respond to Panama Papers leaker who approached them before he approached Süddeutsche Zeitung.
they wanted to give the public full access. and that's how wikileaks always worked.
> "That is what I'd want to see with these 'Panama Papers.' They should be available to the general public in such a manner so everybody, not just the group of journalists working directly on the data, can search it," Hrafnsson added.
> The impact is real: in addition to Süddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ, and despite explicit claims to the contrary, several major media outlets did have editors review documents from the Panama Papers. They chose not to cover them. The sad truth is that among the most prominent and capable media organizations in the world there was not a single one interested in reporting on the story. Even Wikileaks didn’t answer its tip line repeatedly.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160506-j...
They had the opportunity to publish it in full, they didn't, leaker went to someone that had a different strategy in mind.
Say you got your hands on 2.6 terabytes leak. Where would you upload it before approaching a news org while preserving your identity? And keep in mind that your average leaker is probably less tech-savvy than your average HN viewer.
Which address would you ship it it to so it reaches Wikileaks?
I don't know what address wikileaks has, but then again I never tried to contact them.
There could have been any number of explanations why they didn't follow up the alledged inquiry from the Panama Papers leaker - most likely it came in the "spam folder" equivalent. It can't be easy for WikiLeaks to separate the wheat from the chaff, and Assange had very little opportunity to do it at the time.
If you listen to WikiLeaks people or the greater associated clique, I think it's clear that they're a politically oriented group. It's not a conventional/general journalistic ethos. More like a party publication.
This is my opinion, and mostly based on speaking to people in Melbourne att of Assange's initial persecution.
In any case, even if they were just motivated by not getting scooped, the actions stand.
The same goes for any journalistic outlet. It's not difficult to guess the political leanings of most New York Times journalists. Hello, 1619 Project!
No. I disagree. Not everything is the same because no one is perfect. There are differences of ethos. There are also hypocrisies, but that still doesn't get you to equivalence. If you have a negative opinion of the NYT, that's fine... but why would you even bother forming an opinion if they're all the same.
In any case, if you do believe your own position... how does that change anything? Some people formed an opinion of WikiLeaks as an organisation by how they conducted themselves during an election. How does a more nihilistic attitude towards journalism generally supposed to affect that.
This is just edgelord stuff. It doesn't lead anywhere. Has no conclusions or consequences beyond attitude.
Everything else aside, if you just compare Nytimes and wikileaks, it's easy to see who the good guys are - the one who stood up against the biggest power in the history of mankind at immense personal and organizational cost vs the ones who perpetuated lies to support Iraq Wars, US sponsored Coups, Genocides. One siding with nytimes on his/her politics ignoring everything is on him/her. Maybe from US internal politics perspective Nytimes is the good guy, but for everyone else, they are absolutely the bad guys.
I gave the 1619 Project as an example of how the Times' political biases shine through. It's a clear-cut case in which the Times ignored the objections of the actual experts on American history (including the historian they asked to fact-check the project, but also several heavyweights of American history, such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson), and published ideologically motivated, rubbish history. The way the Times then dismissed the criticisms of academic historians (the 1619 Project lead dismissed them as "white historians") left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. This was one of the Times' flagship projects, which they put on the cover of the paper and which they have heavily promoted since.
> nihilistic attitude towards journalism
I'm not nihilistic about journalism. The NY Times, despite its obvious political sympathies, is still a very useful source of information. So is WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks published some extremely important information that the public had a right to know. The value of WikiLeaks was that it did not have the same close relationship with the US government that the NY Times has, and that it was therefore more willing to publish material that would gravely embarrass the US government.
To give you one such example of how the NY Times' relationship with the government compromises its journalism: the Times knew about Bush's unconstitutional warrantless wiretap program before the 2004 election. It refrained from publishing the story, at the request of the Bush administration. It was only when the journalist covering the story threatened to publish it by himself, outside the Times, that the Times finally decided to run it. That was a year after the Times found out. In other words, the Times withheld a major story during a Presidential election, because the President (who was also one of the candidates) claimed vague security concerns.
WikiLeaks would not have withheld that story. That's the major difference between the Times and WikiLeaks - not that the Times is a bastion of political neutrality.
Julian Assange has been sitting in prison in the UK for years, fighting extradition to the US, which wants to lock him up for 175 years. The suggestion that he's not a journalist, because he's politically outspoken, is one of the tactics the US political establishment has used to justify going after him.
Did you accidentally reply to your own post?
The person pointed out that the NYT and journalists more broadly engage in overt propaganda — eg, lying about the Hunter Biden laptop during an election. And so the distinction the person above them was drawing between “journalists” and politically motivated actors is nonsense: the mainstream journalists routinely spread propaganda as a core part of their work.
I think you made a vapid edgelord post because you don’t have a real defense to your position:
“Guys, guys — I really trust the people who lied about Iraq WMDs to tell me the truth about Ukraine!”
That's vapid, tldr edgelord nonsense. GP stands accused.
Hypocrisy exists therefore every narrative begins and ends there. By the same reasoning, you cannot have possibly been influenced by the details of 1619 fact checking or whatnot.
You have to live in the world that is. People lie. They have biases, agendas, etc. Knowing this doesn't give you the ability to see through the matrix. You still have to use judgement... and people do. People generally grow out of black pill mode by either moderating and backing out or eventually checking out, b/c even they are sick of listening to them. There isn't really a way forward.
I haven't read 1619 or taken an interest. Purely from the surrounding noise, it sounds like it's all coming from people brand new to critiquing history books or social theory.... Welcome to critical theory and enjoy trying to board the Titanic as it sinks.
The criticism came from the historical profession. The NY Times tasked someone who is not a historian to lead their flagship project on American history (and if you follow her on Twitter, it quickly becomes clear that she's not even a well read amateur historian, and she doesn't appear to have even a better than average grasp of history at all). She made some really explosive - and straight-up incorrect - claims about American history. For example, a central part of her thesis is that the Americans rebelled against Britain because Britain was about to abolish slavery. That's utter nonsense, and the historian the NY Times hired to check the piece for accuracy told them as much. They ignored that historian and printed the claim anyways.
Some of the most famous historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War saw the newspaper of record making these kinds of absurd claims in print, and flipped out. These are liberal historians who read and respect the NY Times, so they were upset that it was making an utter mess of their field. They wrote a letter to the Times explaining their objections. The Times responded by basically saying, "We know better," and that they weren't going to correct anything. On Twitter, the 1619 Project lead dismissed those historians as "white men." Finally, the historian the Times originally asked to fact check their piece, who is a black woman, wrote an article explaining that she had told the Times they were wrong before publication, but that they had ignored her. The Times then went and did a minimal "clarification," which watered down one of their original, incorrect claims just enough so that it is now unfalsifiable.
This wasn't just some squabble between historians. It was a fight between historians and a newspaper (and a project lead who doesn't know anything about history) that wanted to sell a narrative that is simply incorrect.
Why did the Times do this? Because it fit in perfectly with the angle they had decided they wanted to pursue. The NY Times had an all-hands meeting around the time of the 1619 Project in which Dean Baquet told the staff that the paper was going to try to connect every story to race. That was going to be the Times' signature feature going forward. They did that with their big, feature historical piece, completely messed it up, and then responded arrogantly to the historical profession.
People who say that WikiLeaks isn't a journalistic organization because it has an agenda are incredibly naive about how journalistic organizations actually behave. This line of attack is being used to artificially separate WikiLeaks from journalism and justify the government's campaign against it and Assange. If we accept this line of argument, then in the future, the government can go after any organization that publishes news, but which the government claims has an agenda.
We're like 15 deep into a flame thread... and I'm pretty sure no one up this thread has said anything like that.
As I said, I haven't read it or taken much interest... and hence commented only on the noise that has reached the uninterested. Seems mostly like politibait, drawing conservatives into a tussle the way Trump drew in liberals. I'll note that this thread is not about 1619, american history or NYT. It's about wikileaks. 1619 came into it as "proof" that everything everywhere is hypocrisy and only hypocrisy. Hence anyone's opinion on Wikileaks as an organisation reflects only hypocrisy, and in no cases is caused by Wikileaks conduct, ethos, etc.
This is exactly what I meant by noise. 1619 always seems to always be one person ranting to a nonconsensual partner that something they had assumed happens all the time (and don't care) is happening right now. I don't care! Go write the 1620 project in protest. There are lots of books to get angry about. Diversify. This is boring to those of us not into that sort of thing. Be considerate.
> Seems mostly like politibait, drawing conservatives into a tussle the way Trump drew in liberals.
Liberal and left-wing historians were actually the most outraged about the project. Trump only caught onto the controversy much later. The claim that the critics of the project were just conservatives was a dishonest deflection often used by the Times' supporters in the controversy.
The claim was made above that WikiLeaks isn't a journalistic organization because it has an agenda. Most journalistic organizations, even the paper of record, have strong biases and agendas. That doesn't justify labeling them "non-state hostile intelligence agencies" and trying to lock up their editors for 175 years.
> If you listen to WikiLeaks people or the greater associated clique, I think it's clear that they're a politically oriented group. It's not a conventional/general journalistic ethos. More like a party publication.
This is the line of attack that's been used over the last decade to build public support for the US government's campaign against WikiLeaks. This culminated in Pompeo's labeling of Wikileaks as a hostile intelligence agency (as I quoted above).
Assange is facing extradition to the US and 175 years in prison for publishing evidence of US war crimes in Iraq. The US government's case hinges on trying to separate WikiLeaks from journalism. Your argument plays right into that.
"I can't imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this"
0: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/22/2022/ap-fired-a-report...
You are right. Some shit is greenish yet the other is yellowish. Personally I dislike hypocrisy way more than trying to equate different shades of shit.
Sheesh... Smarty pants nihilism has devolved into a mishmash of clichés. No wonder if automates so well.
Really, where did you get that idea from?
>"Smarty pants nihilism has devolved into a mishmash of clichés"
Is it "nihilism has devolved" or "smarty pants" hypocrisy will come up with any shitty argument to prove that "yeah we did it but we are the good guys (TM) and we did it for so ever noble reasons"? This automates even better.
That election behaviour is sometimes seen as distasteful because it's partisan. The OP's point seems to be that all journalism is partisan, in which case that behaviour isn't actually evidence that WikiLeaks is less reliable than any other journalistic outlet.
--> this function is what makes "journalism" special and why excessive political leanings contaminate the enterprise. Publishing a website, having an audience, makes one a part of the mass media as compared to a journalist.
Overall I find the sentiment pathetic and cowardly. I want to know what my government and powerful people are up to. I have a right to know it and Wikileaks was giving me information about this.
IMO people who get angry at WL for telling them what powerful people and governments do behind their back are pathetic bootlickers.
It was only when they turned out to be pro-Russian propagandists that the support turned.
I mean, Trump's scandals were pretty public already, and people voted for him all the same.
People don't feel that WikiLeaks is impartial which makes it espionage and not whistle blowing in the eyes of the affected.
Holding political office gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself, because every day you make difficult decisions.
That fancy dinner that someone paid for as a sign of good faith, was that a bribe for a decision you had already made or was it completely innocent? Does it matter if it's a news outlet, what about a diamond miner? What about Google?
But a business person not paying taxes, or a bigot misogynist saying something obscene about women? That's expected.
We wouldn't know because there's no ant-Trump whistleblower organisation.
What? So if I'm an employee of the DNC, and I want to blow the whistle on what I see by leaking documents, I need to somehow get the corresponding RNC documents or else I'm a spy?
This viewpoint makes no sense. Maybe you're calling Wikileaks the whistleblower, but they really can't be considered one.
No, that's not what the parent is saying. If (1) you have acquired documents on both the DNC and the RNC, (2) they are both damaging and (3) you choose to only leak the ones about the DNC... well then it's not as clear cut and ethical as leaking both troves.
2) Even if there was, it doesn't mean you need to wait for leaks from both sides of a political spectrum to report on them
3) Even if point 2 was true: how would you reconcile one side having more leaks than the other side, or if one is unverified or hard to verify?
4) Even if you could reconcile point 3 somehow: people will still call you biased because the nature of the leaks might not be symmetrical.
How would you operate in such a world.
FWIW I have no real dog in that fight, I am not on one of the US sides, I'm mostly worried about my own politics in the UK and I'm worried that our journalism is not functioning properly, and part of the reason is because the UK is following tact of the US and poisoning public opinion and treating journalists as inhuman meat to be derided publicly and discarded when public support wanes enough.
Even if they did take a side there (which is unclear to me), journalists take sides all the time.
It feels like the narrative has shifted from us vs them to us vs us with them on the side controlling it all.
We live in post-factic time when anything can be disputed and I think its one of sign of healthy democracy.
TLDR you believe in leaks, others don't. At the end it's just a personal decision of what you want to believe.
Dangerous wording there. The ability to dispute stuff is good, but the facts are the facts, and what we think of the shape of the Earth or whodunnit, doesn't change the actual shape of the Earth, nor who actually did it. And sometimes the evidence is overwhelming enough that disputing it is at best a distraction.
> At the end it's just a personal decision of what you want to believe.
I hope for your own sake that you only want to believe true things. Besides, you don't really have a choice: what "choosing to believe" a false thing even means? If you make that choice it's too late already: you can't believe something you know to be false. Maybe you can persuade yourself that you believe it, but… you don't.
You need to distinguish the political ideal, where it is very important that you do not mandate or forbid people from believing any particular thing, from the rational ideal, where you need to recognise that you don't actually have a say in what you believe. Evidence comes your way, and that evidence is supposed to make you believe things to various degrees. The maths of it (probability theory) is intractable, but it is inevitable.
For instance, if you see a green traffic line you probably don't want to walk across that road just yet.
Leaks on internet are information that you probably cannot verify by yourself. So you cannot clarify it as observable fact.
"you can't believe something you know to be false"
Yet, a lot of people believe in things that cannot be proved as fact. And I'm not talking about religious things. Just random information in news, internet, etc. For example there are a quite a lot people who believe in in flat earth, third gender, global warming, alliens or immunity from vaccines, even though they cannot prove it (and I'm not saying it if that is right or not).
I'm just trying to explain you why there are people who don' believe in same things as you do. Or simply find out that information are irrelevant for them.
If leaks are not genuine, then governments simply say so and move on. They're not overly concerned with false stories, these are everywhere. It's not as if they persecute people who make up stories about UFOs in Area 51. They are persecuting Assange, however, and with an unusually malignant ferocity.
Moreover, Arnu wasn't arrested for making up stories about UFOs, so the whole subthread is pointless and cries false analogy.
We can safely close the discussion at this point.
And to continue the false analogy: Yes, I do believe Arnu made actual photos and not imaginary ones and that's why he has been arrested. I very much doubt he would have been arrested for publishing falsified photos of Area 51.
Not to mention, people are perfectly capable of believing in something (whether it's in any way a fact or not, doesn't matter) while still acting rational regarding something else. You'd think that schizophrenic state of mind has to collapse at some point. Yet, in many people, it's perfectly stable, and they live and die without ever confronting the contradiction.
> you can't believe something you know to be false.
Of course you can. The easiest way is to simply ignore the question of falsity completely. Another is to cling to controversies, blowing them out of proportion and invalidating the question that way. There's a conspiracy-theoretic way, too.
I don't know if people are on average more rational than irrational, but I know for sure that every single person can be both rational and irrational at the same time. I'd say this is the natural, innate state of the human mind, even.
"People" want to be informed themselves, so they themselves seek out novel information, but they do not want that for others. For others, they simply want them to support their causes - even if it means supporting lies and hiding truth.
At least I understand why Snowden eats and spews Russian crap all day. Poor guy got stuck in the wrong airport. Assange is much more insidious.
I understand that some people are upset for it being "one-sided" but it's an absolute honest question:
Did they ever leak something that turned out to be a lie?
Or (and please don't take this as an attack, it's not meant to be one) was it just that the leak hit "the wrong guys" so to speak?
There was no purpose of free information served by that act of burning Assange and WikiLeaks years of trust. It was the most useless waste of public goodwill in the history of whistleblowing and only came about because he was pressured into it. It was a pure one time self-immolation of every good he'd ever accomplished in the service of Putin.
Because of the timeframe?
Other than that I feel a democracy includes duties by the voters.
If, for whatever reason, they can't decide what to make of some information, it's a systematic problem.
There is a difference between "look at this bad thing a person did, and consider it over a course of time so you can make reasoned decisions about it" and "THE ELECTION IS TOMORROW HERE'S STUFF THAT YOU CAN'T EVEN BE SURE IS TRUE NO TIME TO THINK JUST ACT ON IMPULSE".
In the same way as Ursula von der Leyen wiped her Blackberry, which the result that legal evidence was destroyed that had been requested, to give a second example.
Or Sarah Palin, who used her Yahoo! email account for (some) business, to give a third example.
Even if most emails in all of these cases are harmless, the fact that people work around transparency rules itself is telling.
2) The unfortunate truth is that while it is against the rules for high level politicians to have their own separate email server without extra stuff around security, it is unfortunately the norm. Hell, Trumps entire admin/family ran private email servers, as did plenty of people in Obamas admin, as does most of congress, let alone the other stuff like not using the secured government phone and using their personal phone for convenience sake.
Old fart politicians are almost never a security analyst and spy, so they tend to not understand what security means.
If A commits a crime (or does something forbidden, not sure if it's a crime in the US) and B does the same, B cannot say that "Well, I did it, but so did A!"... well, they can, but in general the expectation would be that both get punished if there is evidence for both "crimes"
Saying "but everybody does it" should either lead to a change in the law or an execution of said law, meaning persecution.
The point is not that Hilary is innocent (of, like, anything), but that nobody in the republican party gave a rats ass about election integrity or actual rule of law. Every single day of Trump's presidency was evidence of not giving a flying shit about the email server, they were just throwing shit at the wall and hoping it stuck.
>expectation would be that both get punished if there is evidence for both "crimes" I freaking wish. Instead I get to watch the pot call the kettle black, and my brother, father, friends, and other relatives enthusiastically nod their heads.
Hell, the exact same guy that said "lock her up" about an insecure email server put one in his basement, right next to the giant pile of classified documents that he assured the DOJ several times he didn't have.
I want them both in front of a judge.
Also this isn't a "both sides are the same" argument because they fucking are not at all. If all politicians were murderers, but some also wanted to put my friend in jail for being gay, I'm not voting for those ones.
Steve Jobs died of Aids not cancer "leak" looks a pretty dubious revelation.
When you are a "journalist" dumping every document that a high school kid could photoshop in seconds that comes your way there is bound to be a bunch of lies, defamation and disinformation
* Innuendo regarding Seth Rich (Assange clearly had no information on this subject and should have been honest about it); * Falsely presenting a leaked cable about Robert Mueller bringing a sample of uranium to Russia as part of an investigation as related to the supposed Uranium One scandal; * Privately corresponding with Donald Trump, Jr. to support the campaign and ask for favors.
It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.
The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.
I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
I agree, mostly. I stopped caring about Assange since the incident because selective information feeding is not a whistleblowing move but political manipulation. I don't have doubt that people representing my interests are corrupt to some degree but I don't want them eliminated in favor for people who don't represent my interest and are just as corrupt but protected from expose because the interests of the leaker aligns with them.
Moreover the government had embeds and was in communication with social media and traditional coordinating what to disseminate and what to suppress.
The. You have more dignitaries at the WEF and UN COP saying how wonderful it was that Covid prepared people and provided for better government control…
If you think the government phone-calling people at social media companies flagging specific instances and people for "misinformation" is not a form of intimidation, then you need to familiarize yourself with the legal precedent here.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Bo...
[1]https://libertyjusticecenter.org/media/social-media-censorsh...
I prefer it this way. It's better for people to feel like criminals who whiteboard in backrooms how to manipulate public opinion by laundering prior restraint through putting pressure on the incomes of billionaires. Formalization of this process would just be permanent institutionalization, and the US government has shown throughout the 20c to now that a public board won't prevent abuses, abuses will just be routed around the board.
In summary, there is no link so to speak of. There are leaked DM's.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdjQWuJeVqE [video]
Or you mean the fascist warhawk that actually started several wars that ravaged the middle-east and passed the patriot act to give the government untold power over its citizens, both with bipartisan support I might add?
How can Trump be seen with such disdain in comparison when at worst he's just a more incompetent version of Obama with a social media addiction and republican slant. The NSA scandal was merely a decade ago, george w bush wasn't that far back either, how short are the memories. If anything his unconditional withdraw of all troops in afghanistan is the biggest anti-fascist action the last 3 presidents have done, although this one action certainly doesn't put him above being one given he wasn't even pulling the breaks on their actions beforehand.
Now if you want to talk about the many times that Democrats and Republicans all had a big lovefest so they could all vote together to invade a country, I'm with you on that, but it's a problem of both parties, as the voting record clearly demonstrates.
What's been happening the last decade or so is another thing entirely.
Funnily enough, so is yours.
What I highlighted pointed towards government becoming increasingly overbearing and ramping up surveillance on its citizens(NSA and patriot act), military extremism(patriot act again and the middle east), paternalism over other cultures(fear that the people would choose the "wrong"side in a country they invaded as an excuse to keep troops or to install proxy governments), and the list goes on.
You're at a point that covering true stories like the hunter biden laptop(that now journalists are verifying its authenticity) have made people like glenn greenwald persona non-grata in mainstream journalism circles, while having the intelligence agencies saying it is false. You have people that risked and are paying with their life to make information known to the public demonized because apparently leaking things about the candidate I like is bad, regardless of it being true. You have people asking for oversight for the contributions to Ukraine being labelled as russian assets(ie:enemy of our great state). You have intelligence agencies being labelled as some all knowing benevolent protectors of the populace not even a decade after the NSA leaks. The only thing that could be disguising it is because as it stands mostly the democrats seem to be on this publically, but make no mistake the moment push comes to shove the republicans will also take such position as they had taken before trump, and with thunderous applause from the "bipartisan" population if the current outlook is something to go by.
Fascism has been acting on the american society for a long time, Trump just coincidentally showed where the allegiances lied once someone that wasn't a career politician took over, luckily for them the man was an incompetent buffoon with his own laundry list of problems who got assimilated into the machine very fast, even if he would say otherwise.
If all of this for you isn't clear signs of fascism and instead trump, who mostly just inherited the actions of his predecessors is(making him just as much as the others I might add), we'll just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Fascism arises from a bad economy and a population who feel that they have no prospects or future. This tends to create a lot of angry young men hanging out in the streets, with nothing but time and cheap beer on their hands - a resource for sociopathic power seekers.
Whether these young men are Germans living under the absurd conditions of the Versailles treaty, lads from the trampled working class in Thatcher's England, or Americans working under late stage capitalism with No Child Left Behind Act schools, the fascist always works from the same playbook: Stoke the anger, and provide a convenient, nearly always racialized scapegoat outsider, then promise to do something about those outsiders with a never-ending reign of power as the actual goal.
One way to spot a fascist is, if they lose legitimate elections, they will attempt things like insurrections where they storm capital buildings. It's like a dark spot on the society's x-ray.
Those putsches don't always succeed, but as far as getting a movement of armed thugs to fight in the streets, the playbook works every time. The Republican party has been showing signs of a willingness to engage in Fascist behavior for decades, ever since they embraced the Southern Strategy, which even [Barry Goldwater](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/777519-mark-my-word-if-and-...) said would be the death of the party. And here we are, living with the GOP that he predicted would come as a result of their doing just that.
You bring up the NSA's surveillance, the Patriot Act, the various foreign wars that everyone except Bernie voted for with a rah rah rah - these all happened under GOP presidents, with a compliant, cooperative Democratic party that got behind the president, supposedly for the safety of the nation. This is the opposite of fascism.
I leave it to you whether you're gonna choose to notice the clear difference between the recent actions of the two parties, and I hope at the very least you can employ the right terminologies. Sometime in the early aughts I got into it with a Bush cheerleader who kept saying things like "You don't understand the philosophy of terrorism. Terrorists make women wear robes that cover their entire bodies and their societies are like, sexist!" That's what your use of the term "Fascism" reads like.
The fairness doctrine meant that when they aired something considered controversial, they had to give equal time to the opposing viewpoint. That didn't mean they had to be fair, since everybody got latitude on what was considered controversial i.e. if they ban you for something on twitter now, it wouldn't have been "controversial" then, it would have been settled, so you'd get no time without at least going to court over it. Also, they could just give some objector 2 minutes to make their case into a camera and play it during the news.
The things that would end up being "controversial" are things that your local Chamber of Commerce or an international fossil fuel lobbying group would find controversial.
Its scary how easy you think it is to dictate actual fairness and impartiality in law, though. The only places that have laws like that are extremely authoritarian and corrupt, like Zimbabwe.
The idea that journalist are not perfect, therefore they are terrible and entirely untrustworthy is much more dangerous than any journalist’s corruption.
The idea that it used to be better a century ago is laughable.
The most bizarre part of this theory is why anyone would think that Trump, a NYC real estate guy who wasn't good at actually building things so turned into a guy who sold his branding to real estate projects, a wrestler, a game show host, would have more or worse skeletons in his closet than H. Clinton, somebody at the center of one of the two ruling parties of the world hegemon for 25 years. We know everything that H. Clinton did (she was proud before she wasn't, like the rest of the New Democrats), so the leaks were literally about her corruption and DNC corruption during the election. The DNC also fired all of their executives over it because they were obviously corrupt. If the DNC were actually concerned about corruption rather than being caught, you'd think they'd celebrate Assange for smoking it out.
I always used to wonder how dictatorships or strikebreakers could call in huge groups of thugs to beat up people at protests, or to show up to rallies for the dictator. A lot of them are paid, of course, but a lot of them just have the mindset that really prioritizes trying to figure out if Trump was misrepresenting his net worth by exaggerating the success of some of his buildings in order to secure financing from new investors, over what H. Clinton did to Haiti. Or Honduras. Or Iraq.
But, you know, I think the Trump Foundation was a way for him to avoid paying taxes on a painting in the lobby of his building. Lock him up.
As far as I can remember, the RNC was openly anti-Trump in 2016. There was no need to leak that, unlike the DNC being anti-Bernie, which wasn't so open.
And any damaging leaks about the RNC would only have helped Trump's anti-establishment campaign. Other Republicans being corrupt was a big part of his message.
So just to be clear, you think information should only be released if it hurts someone you want to hurt? Is that the ethical standard that was touted by Wikileaks?
That accusation falls apart if the accuser can't even think of a plausible scenario in which Assange might have had information that would have hurt Trump. Assange couldn't hold back information he didn't have.
Erdogan is destroying my alma mater, his ridiculous economics are having very bad impact on my parents and friends, kids are sent to religious schools in much larger numbers than before which means social problems in the years to coma and the general totalitarian approach of his is something I don’t like enduring.
That’s one aspect.
>Why Did WikiLeaks Help Dox Most of Turkey’s Adult Female Population?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-he...
Quite a bit of this stuff actually went through both House and Senate during the Obama presidency. The coup d'etat in Turkey happened in July 2016 and the subsequent purge and extra radicalization of Erdogan didn't just suddenly happen with Trump. Things like this are usually planned a while in advance. On top of that Trumps cabinet was a mess and took a while to get started, so it's inconceivable that it started during Trump days.
It doesn't really absolve Trump's administration from anything, but at the same time don't think that Obama's administration and by extension Hillary and Biden didn't have their hand in this crap either.
I'm quite concerned that some of these leaks that are now gone are for example the current CIA directors Burns' warnings about Ukraine when he was still ambassador to Russia back in the days. Or just unrelated things like documentations about Landmark or other cults that were removed from all other parts of the web due to lawsuits.
Do you know that Erdogan today is a nationalist and pro Ataturk(Ataturk himself is not purely right or left wing) right winger? A decade ago he was almost the exact opposite and was targeted harshly by his current coalition partners and his primary rivals were his partner in crime. Go back one more decade and Erdogan was pro-West liberal. He simply navigates the conditions and the US president is one of the major conditions.
Yes presidents are supposed to navigate these situations. But none of the past couple of administrations have. To try to pin it all on Trump is a cop-out.
[1] https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1500782351831662592
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clin...
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11135388/trump-general-election
Up and downvoting to gauge what the mob thinks is the worst invention of the internet.
I was pretty shocked not only at how far right media twisted the contents of the Podesta emails into wild conspiracy theories like PizzaGate etc, but fully disgusted at the sheer volume of people who just ate all that up without a moment of critical thinking.
Even still, no sane person thought that Trump was going to win. Even the couple days before the election, all the polls had Hillary up by a wide margin. I highly doubt that Julian was hoping for a Trump presidency. I think it's much more likely that he was imagining a Clinton presidency, but where people were a lot more critical of her actions.
Nobody cares, though, what he thought he was doing. In social justice circles, we talk about impact being what matters, not intention. There's a lot of impact that he has to answer for.
I don't want to imply that the outcomes don't matter. But at least I prefer living in a justice system where planned murder and fatal accident are not considered as equal offences, although outcomes might be the same.
The correct response to this is more whistleblowing, not less.
Hillary was the secretary of the united states when those charges was written (and leaked). There was also reports about political pressure done by the US government directed at the Sweden and UK, allegedly to influence the legal case around Assange. Accusations was made, long before the election, that Hillary was the person responsible of authorizing and organizing those deeds.
Based on that I find the events of the 2016 elections to be fairly self-explanatory. It is just sad that we will never fully know the full extend of what Hillary role was as the secretary of US during in the aftermath of the cable leaks, or how much real involvement the US had in the Swedish and UK legal cases.
I'll also never forget the leak that proved that she encouraged the media to take Trump seriously and "elevate" him in the GOP primary because she thought a radical would be easier to beat in the general election.
She was not fit to be president. 2016 was the year of two horrible choices.
[citation needed]
He wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds (leaks).
Assange is a citizen of the criminal 5-eyes superstate, and in that context has every right to select materials designed to reign in the crimes of that criminal, 5-eyes superstate - especially since it has, as an entity, been responsible for the utter destruction of countless sovereign nations and the mass murder of their innocent civilians - at scales far, far exceeding that of Russia or China.
The moral authority that you claim should have been exercised over Russia and China, simply doesn't exist. 5-eyes states are not 'better' at these things than Russia or China.
By statistics of "murder of innocent people", and "destruction of civilian infrastructure designed to make the target state fail, utterly", the worst criminal state in the world is the USA and its minion lapdogs - by a wide, wide margin.
It is, therefore, entirely appropriate for 5-eyes citizens to focus on the crimes of their own states, and utterly inappropriate for members of war-crime committing, crimes-against-humanity committing states, to be calling for the destruction of any other sovereign nation - while their own war criminals roam free to do whatever continued evil they desire.
Your statistics is a function of how you count it. You could, for example, include "use of rape as a military tactic"[1] or "deliberate genocide"[2, 3] - which might have a bearing on the whole thing.
Not to mention the blatant, veiled whataboutism. Just because "USA bad" doesn't mean that countries such as Russia and China can do anything they want and we shouldn't hold them accountable.
To claim any kind of moral authority "calculation" here is perverse.
____
[1] - https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221014-rape-used-in-...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
[3] - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/why-russias-war-ukrai...
Did the citizens of the 5-eyes superstate vote to invade Iraq? (No: the war legislation in each state was abrogated utterly by the USA's criminal cabal, which decided to invade and destroy Iraq, illegally, on the basis of utter lies.). Were their democracies utterly corrupted in order to refactor the world order according to fundamentally racist, bigoted views, demolish countless other sovereign states, and leave their people in utter ruins? (Yes, and this injustice still goes on.)
Have you moved on from those crimes to focus on other 'whataboutist' situations in order to deflect, demur from oversight and degrade any attempt at addressing our own war crimes? (Yes, because Americans/5-eyes'ers are incapable of finding the courage to jail our own war criminals and would rather run to stir up the mob at the next house fire.) Is Russia/Ukraine more important to you now than the suffering of the Iraqi people? The Yemeni people? The Somalian, Libyan and Afghani people?
Why is that, exactly?
Yes, it is a criminal superstate, inasmuch as it doesn't have legitimacy and has been committing crimes against humanity with impunity. The member states of the 5-/9-eyes superstate are no longer sovereign, as their civilians' rights have been utterly abrogated by the construct. You are correct in pointing out it isn't really a "superstate" - it is factually a criminal cabal.
Such a cabal has no moral authority over any other state in the world. Period. The 5-eyes states violate the human rights of far, far more human beings on the planet than any other, including Russia and China combined.
>"we shouldn't hold them accountable."
You can't expect a mass murdering, baby-raping, house-fire starting criminal to have the moral authority to do anything about other murderers in the neighborhood, except maybe steal their spoils and reduce their competition over further criminal enterprises.
This is an utterly fallacious leap to make and speaks more to your own personal complete lack of understanding of ethics than anything else, which I agree is perverse to an extreme.
The USA and its 5-eyes minions do not have the Right nor the Moral Authority to do anything other than jail our own war criminals, and only then will the rest of the innocent world accept our oversight of Russian and Chinese crimes.
Unless of course you consider the USA and the 5-eyes superstate to be somehow morally more superior to any other state?
>"USA Bad"
The superiority you claim that belongs only to the USA and its 5-eyes minion 'allies' belies your heavy investment in the fallacy that the USA isn't the worlds worst actor when it comes to crimes against humanity and war crimes - perhaps on the basis of blind nationalism?
34 million refugees from our wars would like a word. The souls of the missing 5% of Iraqs' population, murdered by "our side", are also standing in line. The Syrian people would like their nations' wealth back. Yemen wants to return the American-made bombs that have been used to genocide their children. Libya would like to close the slave markets and send the CIA a bill for the infrastructure rebuild.
You might find it easy to ignore these 5-eyes crimes, but the rest of the world is not so cowardly.
Fix the heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by your own state, and only then will you have the moral authority to do anything, effective, about the crimes of other states.
In fact, that's an extremely evil thing to push, because - who holds USA accountable? Surely not Russia or China. So nobody is held accountable. Well done!
And being Ukrainian I have enough moral authority to call out Russia at least.
The US has no moral authority when it comes to illegal invasions and murdering innocent people. Period.
If you want to do something effective about criminal, illegal wars - jail your own war criminals. Ukraine has plenty of them, even prior to Febuary 23rd. You did nothing effective about them, and thus the mess you are in.
Anything less is hypocricy and moral grandstanding.
You are blaming Russias invasion of Ukraine, on Ukrainians?.
If you are unaware of this, and just swallowing the agitprop designed to sell more weapons into the region, then I'm sure you have nothing more productive to add to the conversation.
Do you have a credible source for this?, id be interested to see one if you do.
This is not a logical statement. A person can, of course, absolutely call out the crimes of Russia and China, while also calling out the crimes of people in their own country. You are fabricating a moral restriction without basis.
Until the USA prosecutes its war criminals it should not be allowed to start any futher wars, fund terror groups, or further involve its intelligence apparatus in the destruction of any additional sovereign states. The fires started by American war criminals are far, far more destructive to the peace of the free world than anything Russia or China are up to. The imperative is to put out the greater fire: American war crimes.
If you truly think that Americans should have the moral authority to call out Russians for their war crimes, to the point that the nation is being prepared for war conditions against Russia in the immediate future, then Americans should not be committing war crimes every twenty minutes. They should be better than the Russians on this subject.
The trouble is, they are really not better. They are worse. America kills more innocent people, on a more regular basis - for the last twenty years - on the basis of lies and falsehoods, than Russia and China combined.
Americans, and indeed the willing Western coalition which supports the war crime-committing aparatus at the core of the US' economy, simply don't have the moral authority to challenge any other nation on this issue. It is the height of hypocricy, and will simply never work.
Want to do something effective about Russia or China? Set your own example. At the moment, the world is following America's lead in starting aggressive wars, it isn't following America's lead on peaceful activities.
You set the precedent by allowing the illegal invasion and subsequent murder of 5% of Iraq's population. Russia isn't doing in Ukraine anything that the USA and its criminal allies haven't already done in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc...
Clean that up and you might have a valid point about Russia and China. Ignore it all, and the world simply sees you as the pathetic nation of cowardly hypocrites that you are.
Neither do Ukrainians. Nor Russians, or indeed, Chinese.
He scuttled an entire country over his personal grudge, if I'm reading you correctly. Sounds like he's exactly where he needs to be.
You are saying you wanted your crooks to be the winner instead of someone else's crooks?
And say what you will but the Democrats wanted Trump to be on the ticket.
And you think that everything was great in the US before the 2016 election? There were no big bank bail outs, no wars? You all are delusional.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/mar/02/how-can-berni...
"So how does Sanders qualify to run in the Democratic primary when he's an independent in the Senate?
The bottom line is that he's done everything the Democratic National Committee has asked him to do in order to prove his support for the party."
and...
https://www.newsweek.com/clinton-robbed-sanders-dnc-brazile-...
Since you're very concerned about Bernie, that means you're totally 100% about Medicare For All and Free Tuition and a Federal law guaranteeing access to free, safe abortions by real doctors, right?
Cause if you're just using him as a cudgel, that says more about you than it does about anyone else.
Seriously, have you people no human compassion?
If he had done the same to make sure Clinton won he would have lost credibility as a trustworthy source too.
You can in fact lie with facts, especially without context. You can arrange and frame them so as to paint a biased or outright false picture.
If the GRU manipulated him that just shows as well how foolish it is to think amateurs can play spy games with the pros. It’s like having your local street ball league go up against a pro basketball team.
I wonder if his television deal with Putin compromised his “radical transparency”.
This conclusion can only be made on the basis of nationalistic pride and blind faith in the spooks running the country.
On that basis, it should be entirely ignored, since those spooks are also war criminals who are running from justice.
Evidence?
It does not really matter. You cannot pretend to be all about freedom of speech and exposing government misbehaviour without taking sides and play these partisan games.
I was supportive of the whole Wikileaks thing before his role as a pawn for totalitarians became really visible.
The fact was that at that point disrupting the election meant acting for a Trump presidency, and I cannot see how any properly-calibrated moral compass would want that. The most charitable interpretation is that he was played and a useful idiot.
> I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
Yes. It also does not make Assange any less of an arsehole. Your enemy being immoral does not give you the moral high ground.
As years go by, the www is decreasingly capable of disseminating information without monopoly, government or some other official backing.
Basic web technologies are designed to make documents available. This should all should be trivially achievable using early 90s computers. Maintenance/sysadmin shouldn't be a major hurdle.
Yet... Here we are.
> On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.
I do wonder, when the party in power changed, but the damaging leaks didn't - it started to become far too apparent that the problem wasn't Bush or the republicans, the problem was America - irrespective of who was in charge.
Maybe that's too hard for many American's to accept, hence the shooting of messenger instead, rather than facing up to the uncomfortable truth - that America's vision of itself, doesn't reflect reality.
I think it's quite clear that democracy is failing in the US - why else would you have father and son or husband and wife as presidents or almost presidents.
Clearly the statistical chance of them being the best on merit is quite slim.
So yes there is institutional capture.
It's not all bad though - the US is very dynamic country, there is a chance of change.
In basketball, Dell Curry led to Seth Curry and Steph Curry, and the latter just broke the 3-point record. That's merit.
I get it - we have only two teams that are really allowed to participate. Decisions all boil down to 'our team wins' or 'their team wins' 99% of the time. Like basketball, or football, or baseball, or tennis, etc.
But the notion that W and Hillary earned their positions on merit, like Steph Curry did, is astounding. That's hilarious that anyone can say that with a straight face. Hillary was the second most detested politician in America, second only to Trump - who she deliberately elevated for that exact reason.
You think George W Bush inherited the 'good at being president' genes from his father?
And how do you explain Hilary?
In my view what George W inherited was power and connections.
Countries were power is inherited, rather than earned aren't typically viewed as democracies.
Or have a backUp Voting system, that if people do not show up to a vote in full majority autorestores a constitution.
Yep he is different.
But I see the main difference as him having oodles of integrity and courage, in contrast to going for the quiet life in the middle of the herd.
A lot of the accusations that have been thrown at him frankly don't bear detailed examination - the whole assault thing, the idea that he put US operative lives at risk, the idea he was in cahoots with the Russians, the idea he was active in hacking rather than being a journalist receiving information from a source.
In my view, this is all mud thrown to dehumanise him, so nobody complains when he is effectively tortured and imprisoned for life for telling the uncomfortable truth.
- minor scandals within regular orgs created large damage because the members have high ethical standards. While the members of evil orgs didn't care how corrupt their leadership was.
- evil orgs were more effective at keeping secrets, so most leaks were from non-evil orgs that didn't think they had much to hide.
That these second-order effects would end up dominating the first-order effects Assange intended wasn't obvious in advance, so I don't blame the guy for not foreseeing it. But at this point, we have to consider the "leaks in general are good" theory thoroughly discredited.
Essentially, the evil groups weaponized the tool of transparency.
WikiLeaks' biggest document dumps were about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about American diplomacy around the world. The latter also revealed countless local scandals that were big news in different countries (for example, about corruption in Tunisia, which helped spark the Arab Spring).
I don't see any credible argument for the idea that WikiLeaks did more harm than good. What decisively turned American liberals against WikiLeaks was the publication of the DNC emails, which revealed a real scandal (the DNC trying to stack things against Bernie Sanders during the primaries) that had real consequences (the head of the DNC having to resign). American liberals turned against WikiLeaks for that largely partisan reason (the fact that Democrats were desperate for scapegoats after their election loss to Trump made the backlash against WikiLeaks even worse), while American conservatives wouldn't like an organization that leaks American state secrets anyways, so Wikileaks was left with no support in the US.
UPD Another news story from 2022: https://therecord.media/how-ddosecrets-built-the-go-to-home-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Staff,_name_and_foun...
Wikileaks had the public backing of, and was composed of, people who had proved the painful way that they weren't working for governments or other established interests.
Merely getting access to flashy hacks will never win DDoSecrets that.
Assange paid a huge price for being the organization's public face, but it wasn't for nothing. It could never have worked as well as it did unless someone was willing to play that role.
But I did not say they were above politics. On the contrary, they had very strong anti war, anti establishment politics, which they were credible about from their long public history as non-anonymous actors. (Which is also why we laugh at your unsubstantiated accusations that he worked for Putin.)
DdoSecrets will never have that. God knows what they actually believe. They don't think it's important that you know, at least we know that.
This nonsense narrative is merely designed to deflect from the very real, heinously evil, war crimes that Americans commit on the regular, every twenty minutes, for the last twenty years - for which there is a lot of evidence you Americans choose to ignore in the rush to maintain pride in yourselves...
Why blame all Americans, all Chinese, for the crimes of a few of them? All Chinese didn't force Uighurs into organ harvesting camps. All Turks didn't genocide Armenians, All Americans don't commit war crimes every 20 minutes, although some gangs in Chicago come close if you loosen your definition of "war crimes".
Are you American? Then fix the crimes of your state. Are you not-Russian? You can do nothing about Russia for as long as you are unable to jail your own war criminals.
The moral authority you claim is non-existent.
The only remaining effective option is to identify the source of the problem, and shift public opinion to recognize it; With further draconian measures, more people notice the corruption and overextension of the state, and with enough people alternate means of accountability become viable. Until then you're mushed crabs dispersing amongst the waves and cliffs.
Where have I claimed moral authority?
*all citizens of all nations are
Then your nation is a farce and you should be rioting. The fact you aren't is due to the decadence that the military-industrial complex provides. Too bad its dependent on the death of innocent people around the world.
Or, just perhaps, you should hold yourselves accountable, and resist the anti-Wikileaks agitprop that is clearly coming from the very war criminals, themselves, in order to escape justice from public oversight.
>Where have I claimed moral authority?
Justifying American war crimes and crimes against humanity, whatabout-ma'-Russia, is a particular type of posturing designed to elevate the moral authority to commit those crimes over any other nation. The USA is not a moral nation, by any stretch of the imagination - it does not take care of its own people, even, and is murdering innocent people, on average, every twenty minutes ..
If that is not the #1 priority for your political mind to address, then you do not have any moral authority to address the Russia situation.
How would rioting benefit? So far it has only played right into their hands.
Again; Where have I claimed moral authority?
I have listed various nations not to compare them and declare one to be better than others "because of muh morals". I was merely pointing out how war crimes are commited by all nations, and hinting at the fact that war in itself is a crime, only possible by the extortion of the populace. Saying Americans are "muh evil", is guilt by association, and does not identify the root cause. How effective has it been to get Americans to effect change by calling them evil? Otherizing whole swaths of the world population based on the actions of their local slave masters, is not going to ingrain trust in your judgment, instead is more likely to have them reject and ignore you as some radical blowhard.
Also, you are the one who has mentioned Russia, not me. You and I both know the Motherland is the only nation where the people truely pay their taxes voluntarily, government actually works to support the people and not some corporations, war is a myth, and milk and honey flows. I would never speak up against the Motherland, Tovarisch.
The USA kill innocent people every twenty minutes, and is the #1 funder of terrorism and calamity across the globe. This is only possible because of ignorant bootlickers choosing to cowardly ignore the crimes and engage in distraction.
Put out the bigger fire: the US' funding of terror across the globe in order to foment conditions for further weapons sales.
As long as the published work is the truth, even if just "one side" of it, it's better than lies all the way down.
Would it be better if we had leaks about every regime? Sure!
Wouldn't it even be better if we had no regimes and no need for Wikileaks at all? Definitely!
But "one-sided" truth is still (part of the greater) truth.
What if Hilary had come out in February of 2016 and said "Hey, Putin's not so bad, he's got legitimate interests in Ukraine and I think we should leave Europe to stand on it's own" - do you think the campaign of leaking hacked material to wikileaks would've happened? Or do you think maybe Trump's tax returns might have come out instead?
What I care about is the truth and the truth alone.
And if it turns out both Trump and Clinton were bad candidates for the US maybe the US should finally change their voting system.
I mean if it's that easy to topple an election in the most powerful country in the world, we should really make democracy more resilient
It's game of thrones in the truest sense and I personally don't think the track record of the US is much better for Europe in the last 7 decades, so...
When it comes to meddling with elections I think nobody has as much experience in doing so than the US.
So part of me was quite happy that this super power could have a taste of their own medicine at some point.
While at the same time I wish all the people in the world the best, including the US and Russia :)
Are you talking about the mainstream media here? They leaked every scrap of dirty laundry about Trump that they could find (not all of which were true), yet Wikileaks was the only one willing to leak the DNC leaks.
At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the same as some supposed FSB spy.
Expecting anyone to be impartial is a big mistake, especially when you can conveniently persecute and try to kill said person and with that pretty much force them to cease being being "impartial" at the very least in the public perception. Under the circumstances laid out all it takes to discredit someone as an "useful idiot" is to persecute and corner them into "enemy territory".
Also let's take a step back and differentiate between something being of interest to exclusively US enemies, that would be a detriment to the US directly, or a matter of international policy, which is the case of the Ukraine position you cited. The Ukraine position is not a threat to the US either way, it's just a position in foreign policy.
Edit: It seems the case of an example of that exact alternative to wikileaks cited did exist already, by micheal moore of all people, focused on trump however. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-im-launching-trumpileaks-...
>At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the
Absolutely, they could, this weird whataboutism doesn't help your position. Either what I'm saying is correct - and you concede that, in which case we can talk about the US capabilities - which we can view in the correct context of capabilities operated under a free accountable democratic society. Or you don't agree, in which case your whatabouttery is moot, since you think it's fine, and therefore the US intelligence could just intervene to get their way. As you say, they probably have more capabilities.
I can't agree with that, the election was decided by the US citizens, they saw the information and made their choice. Unless you're arguing that said leaks are fake as far as I'm concerned information is information, if the candidate did something the voter base wouldn't approve of and it was unveiled the source is completely irrelevant. Under those pretenses any kind of leak can be trivially attributed to some enemy and now its discredited, call those who report on it pawns of the $enemy_state and there you go. You can see this being attempted in real time in US politics, thankfully with waning success.
My point about the capabilities of the US espionage comes in when you factor counterintel and exposing falsehoods, as I said before my position is that information is information and the only thing that can be argued against information is whether it was fabricated or not. For an example, as far as I'm concerned the entire hunter laptop scandal being completely pushed under the rug by intel agents[0] is far closer to actual manipulation than the DNC e-mail leaks, because it was a lie that it wasn't real and conveniently no journalist wanted to fact check it, just to come out now 2 years later after the election is done and walk back on it. I'm citing this to try and make clear that the veracity is far more important than the source.
I do concede the point that arguing that just because the US can do the same supposed leaking of documents to another country doesn't change much, although assuming they're actual leaks i'd like them to.
[0]:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...
If there's no dirty laundry to air, this strategy doesn't work. Clean up your act at home and your enemies will have no ammunition. Guess what's the first step to do that...
Even if this was a Russian ploy, you should be thanking them.
Individuals have a right to privacy. Those who hold power in the public's trust, have no right to secrecy.
That's like seeing a weird shaped airplane and saying it's UFO's instead of the obvious explanation that a 3 year old can come up with: "maybe they just believe what they say and the corruption in the government is both real and bad".
Second, it’s possible to believe that statement and still follow Occam’s razor: if Assange says something convenient for Russia, it makes sense for Russia to offer its support. It also follows that over time, Russia could “convert” Assange.
I never liked Assange, but someone with a similar story that I did like is Snowden. I am under no belief that he was a Russian spy “all along” as implied by many conspiracy theories, and I have a huge amount of respect for him (even now…).
But it only takes a glance at his Twitter feed to realise that in his time being hosted by Russia (who likely just offered its help to someone convenient for them to help), the guy got turned. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
In other words, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
The simple explanation is that these people had no idea about each other, since identifying and coordinating that effort would be tantamount to a grand conspiracy theory; and I don't buy that people are so extremely competent as to have working apparatus to catch this.
That it was politically convenient for Russia doesn't necessarily mean there was any collusion and I think it's odd to jump directly to that conclusion.
There are lots of things that are politically convenient for Russia, like the way the wind is blowing in Ukraine right now. -- that does not mean the wind is colluding with Russia.
It does not. Do you truly not understand that people can be principled?
Assange has a long history of anti war and anti establishment activism. He is dying in jail for his convictions as we speak. He was arrested within days of publishing evidence of war crimes, and hasn't been a free man since. And he knew exactly what he was getting into, too.
If you think a man like that can be "turned" by extending a little sympathy and server space, well, it says a lot about what kind of person YOU are.
And Snowden was prepared to sacrifice everything too, except that Assange, who Snowden didn't even trust at the time, set heaven and hell in motion to save his life and get him to Latin America. (The US preferred to strand him in Russia, which should tell you a lot about what they really feared.)
They work with the OCCRP, which is made up directly of intelligence shills like Radio Free Europe, and groups funded by the NED. That's the agency the CIA used to finance armed groups in Nicuragua after the Iran-Contra affair. This is not an independent organization.
Such as suggesting Syria chemical attack was false flag[2].
[1]https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
By Bellingcat, the Western intelligence services' pet wikileaks.
Assange did 'citizen journalism' wrong, and he has been deprived of normal human freedoms for more than a decade because of it, while never being charged of any crime.
Even now he resides in quasi-solitary confinement in one of the UK's most notorious prisons, still he has never been charged with a crime.
The treatment of Assange is, with Guantanomo Bay, an obvious and continuously damaging rebuke to the West's posturing about human rights and freedoms. In retrospect we should not have been surprised by the EU's blanket censorship of Russian media and 24/7 pro Ukrainian propaganda.
What is happening to Assange is a warning to all of us. If we choose to pettifog about the definition of a journalist, or complain about political partisanship, we are missing the larger point completely.
No wonder people would 'pilloried' him, because someone as well respected journalist as him should know better than just throw out conspiracies.
Sorry but Assange treatment or mistreatment in jail has nothing to do with the credibility of WikiLeaks.
And how this somehow has something to do with the Russian media and Ukrainian media is relevant, how exactly?
The irony is that comments that are like this is most similar to that of propaganda, lose references, emotional appeal and creating a smokescreen to redirect people away.
[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/seymour-hersh-...
It just sounds like their web-app is being severely throttled on CPU or memory or similar, so can't hit the indexes it needs to?
Ten years ago you could do it and possibly even change the world. Today it's not possible. Even hint at it, you're toast... it's that you couldn't even get an access point to try (without being murdered before if you uploaded something).
>> it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists
not really if it's a fucking terabyte of data
The largest and default "big cloud provider" in the US is also a retailer and might be the best organization in the world at detecting and preventing credit card fraud.
I have never understood why it's called "wiki" leaks... what is wiki about it?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
Blocking them is generally low impact but there is one exception: I believe Cloudflare’s gateway (cloudflare-ipfs.com) uses their regular CDN IP ranges so it’s the same level of difficulty as blocking any content on their service.
To be clear, IPFS is a neat idea. I would just be very hesitant to recommend its use to anyone who has to worry about government restrictions.
Oh sure. Go give a government organization government leaks. What a great idea!
https://thecjn.ca/perspectives/swastikas-and-other-symbols-o...
Anyone who claims these people are "successors to WikiLeaks" is full of it
There are videos of it available for anyone who wants to fact check the claim you're making here. Watched a bunch, can't find a swastika anywhere
And because of geopolitics, there aren’t that many friends of Assange left in the west. Sad, I guess?
Whereas nowadays, they cover up for them.
What a great testimony about the decline of western democracy.
There’s a reason Godwin repealed his law.
My info was "shared" as part of a hack/accounting dump. Wikileaks has little useful value that can't be found through other means
A deadman’s switch would be a specific mechanism to reveal such key. But the existence of it has to my knowledge never been confirmed by WL.
I think, that overall, it was an interesting and meaningful leak. Not just "toxic".
The laptop is a shibboleth, voters don’t actually care because the right already poisoned their own wells.
There is MASSIVE evidence of corruption and war crimes, crimes against humanity, in the Wikileaks' materials.
Cowards choose the 'easy path' - adopt the "but ma' Russia!" narrative, and ignore the heinously evil crimes against humanity committed in every Americans' name ..
I could give a shit less if X foreign govt leaks the info, the politicians are the ones we should really be concerned about
Independent investigative journalism was, and is, in a sorry state.
Even most of the best investigative journalists operating today defend a two tier system, where you have to trust them. You don't get access to their source documents.
For instance the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, was never published. Not even by the media hawking it. Only supposed excerpts from it have been published.
The same is true for ICIJ releases like the Panama Papers. Some people have access. You don't.
Assange was determined to fight that, to provide to the public the source material journalists use, so that you don't have to trust him (or anyone) that they're being selective, or slipping in their own details.
Wikileaks was also the first anonymous submission platform, by many years.
James Dolan and Aaron Swartz, who worked at the second one, are both dead by suicide. The latter after harsh persecution by the US government. It's likely that one or both of them earlier secretly worked with Wikileaks' submission system.
So yes, it was important.
SRE here with many pro-bono hours, if anyone is able to let their IT team
For most of the period between her losing the election and now, Trump has been in power, and Biden has had more important things to focus on than getting revenge against Assange/WL/Russia. (Also, it would be hard to maintain plausible deniability if the website started failing right after Biden took office).
The sad truth is you want to believe the lie, and you're upset at being woken up.
Had WL been transparent that JA was motivated out of his grudge against Clinton and antipathy of the US and put that disclaimer out clearly, then I suspect people would feel less betrayed by his lack of transparency as he burned their trust.
Also, while it was apparent at the time to those who avoided a fox instilled Pavlovian response to Clinton that a trump presidency would be a bad thing for America and rampant with cronyism and corruption, now with hindsight everyone is faced with that factual reality and how russia benefited in spades.
For those who’d trusted JA it really stings when stark reality shows them he was actually trying to get themselves to shoot themselves in the foot all along. Realizing one had been hoodwinked doesn’t breed fuzzy goodwill.
“We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” he typed into a private Twitter direct message group to an assortment of WikiLeaks’ most loyal supporters on Twitter. “Dems+Media+liberals woudl then form a block to reign in their worst qualities,” he wrote. “With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute.” He paused for two minutes before adding, “She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.”
The destruction of Libya alone, and the sociopathic gloating on daytime television, should disqualify Clinton from holding high political office again.
She also brought the neocons into the State Department with predictably appalling results.
I mean sure. It also has a built in censorship mechanism (documented in the fucking paper).
Did Wikileaks achieve anything else but raising the degree of angst and learned helplessness in mere mortals of this world? Maybe there occurred a revolution somewhere against the entities whose corpus delicti was leaked? Any supreme moron convicted? Anything positively changed in the global state of affairs?
Nope, all it did is communicate the message about how both utterly corrupted and invulnerable those entities are, and everyone trying to expose their crimes is doomed, like the character of Assange.
In simple words: Wikileaks == controlled opposition.
I also specifically remember doing a deep dive on the limited Crowdtrike report... which based their entire argument around a list of IPs in the Netherlands they somehow labelled as "known Russian IPs", but never provided any evidence for or methodology for.
The servers were never provided to the FBI, and Crowdtrike is extremely questionable as an organization for other reasons.
Furthermore, the accusation that Wikileaks was selectively publishing doesn't stand up to scrutiny, with it being fairly obvious in context they were trying to get leaked docs about Trump too. Even then, who was controlling the Wikileaks twitter then? I doubt it was Assange himself.
I started reading Assange when he was a cryptophreaker in the 90s, and it's been a wild ride to watch inteligence agency character assassinations become so effective at forcing a narrative that supposedly educated people around HN have gobbled up. I'm proud to see the pushback that does exist though.
All that said, Assange's childhood in what is likely to have been an intelligence front cult, has always made me just a bit wary of him, but to me it always felt more like a person who barely escaped and was transformed by it into what he became. (again, a lot of this context people don't know because they never read his stuff pre-wikileaks)
William Binney's "analysis" is a little suspect.
The servers were never provided to the FBI, and Crowdtrike is extremely questionable as an organization for other reasons.
So, to do proper forensic analysis, I need to physically take the servers? I can't log in and take all the data?
ALso, please enlighten us...Why is crowdstrike "suspect?
As someone who has had formal forensic training, your statement about physical servers made me laugh! Have you never heard of chain of custody? Even if someone provided image files the break in chain of custody by a third party would make the evidence useless.
As for Crowdstrike, even before 2016 they had a reputation in the industry. When it came to the Russiagate stuff, I think the following article is a good start.
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/17/fbi-never-saw-crowdstr...
Obviously.
> I can't log in and take all the data?
The DNC did not allow the FBI to do that either.
> Why is crowdstrike "suspect?
Because Dmitri Alperovitch - Crowdstrike's Russia-born co-founder and former CTO - is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Because Shawn Henry - Crowdstrike CEO - admitted in a December 2017 congressional testimony that they had found no proof that data had been exfiltrated from those DNC servers they had exclusive forensic access to.