
In Election Hacking, Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision Becomes Reality - dankohn1
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/business/media/assange-wikileaks-dnc-hacks.html
======
panarky
People are confused by Assange apparently attacking one US political party and
then switching to attack the other party.

What's missing is an understanding of his underlying motivations. This piece
hints at it, but it doesn't quite get there.

Assange sees the existing power structure as a connected graph that requires
secrecy to function.

His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by
exposing secrets.

    
    
      Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every
      conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though
      all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy,
      others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others
      still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between
      important sections or groupings of the conspiracy.
    
      If all conspirators are assassinated or all the links between
      them are destroyed, then a conspiracy no longer exists. This
      usually requires more resources than we can deploy, so we ask our
      first question: What is the minimum number of links that must be
      cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number?
      (divide and conquer).
    
      When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see
      a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose
      blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied;
      unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its
      environment.
    

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/con...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/conspiracies.pdf)

~~~
devoply
What does Assange want to replace the conspiracy with? A true democracy. There
is no such thing. Have you seen the Game of Thrones. That's how the world is
without a super power. All that this will end up doing is cause the US to lose
its place as a super power. Which will enable other powers play more freely.
Which will in the end cause different types of chaos in the world rather than
that which the US causes. These things don't go away. Problems are not solved,
they just move, wiggle, and multiply.

~~~
brbrodude
That goes against everything sensible and is FUD(tbh, I don't watch Game of
Thrones, I don't care much for fiction and prefer reality, history, etc). I'd
like to see you make this offer with a straight face to all that have been
affected by the imperialist policies. We don't even need to go too far, to the
other side of the Atlantic, we can start with Mexico, central America,
Honduras and Latin America.

~~~
Bartweiss
The best painfully-funny bit I've seen recently is "Foreign power undermines
election to install right-wing authoritarian; CIA outraged".

I'd challenge that poster to tell anyone from South America, East Asia, or the
Middle East (or North Africa, or Eastern Europe, or...) that superpowers are a
way to _preserve_ effective democracy.

~~~
brbrodude
Well it's not to bash the person individually, but obviously it you think this
through there's clearly double standards. Anyway, there's no morality here,
it's all about power and control, I don't delude myself. But yeah, the US
could at least own up to it, or be coherent with the values it says it
defends(I guess it's too late for that tho). The hipocrisy is getting uglier
with each passing day :/

------
rihegher
A bit out of topic but quite interesting the last minute transcript of the
last wikileaks PR on periscope:
[https://www.periscope.tv/WikiLeaks/1YpKkqmkDkmJj?t=4250](https://www.periscope.tv/WikiLeaks/1YpKkqmkDkmJj?t=4250)

"Tomorrow I will give an ‘ask me anything’ on reddit where I’ll talk about why
it is that many people came to believe that I was dead or missing or
kidnapped, quite interesting story, not just an organic phenomenon but people
placing deliberately false file report to say that I was dead and then for
wikileaks could not be trusted and no one should give us leaks or
information."

~~~
cloakandswagger
This is Wikileaks own fault for three reasons:

1) Julian disappeared completely after the internet to the Ecuadorean embassy
was cut in October 2016

2) Wikileaks inexplicably changed their policy for insurance file hashes,
publishing the hash of the _decrypted_ files instead of the _encrypted_ ones.
This meant the hash of the insurance files didn't match the .AES files, giving
the impression that they had been altered

3) Wikileaks stopped issuing verifiable proof of life for Assange. A simple
PGP signed message would have sufficed.

With all that was going on, it was actually very believable that Assange had
been abducted/killed during the internet blackout, and that Wikileaks was now
being run as a black-ops site for a three letter agency.

~~~
Bartweiss
I'm excited for the AMA to see if any of this is touched on. There was a whole
string of unforced errors enabling these theories, and what's stranger is that
none of them were abrupt choices under pressure. There was plenty of room to
offer some kind of proof of life _after_ these theories started circulating,
and I'd love to know what drove the decision to not, say, have Assange walk up
to the embassy window.

~~~
cloakandswagger
I hope they do address it, but they've been squirrelly about this topic in the
past.

If I had to speculate, it is a calculated decision on WL's part to try and
shift the organization's integrity away from Assange. Currently all trust in
WL rests on Assange's existence which isn't good for the longevity of the org
if/when he decides to retire (or meets his untimely demise).

~~~
Bartweiss
That would make some sense, yes. (And I don't much expect an answer either.)

WL has certainly been in a weird spot over the last few years, with nowhere
near the straightforward anti-establishment reputation they pulled off in
their Collateral Murder days. Assange's charges and sanctuary issues,
Snowden's failure to partner with WL, the Appelbaum revelations, bizarre
arguably-anti-Semitic tweets, and a suddenly-bipartisan-and-effective effort
to cast them as anti-American.

I wouldn't be at all shocked if there's an attempt underway to quiet things
down a bit and change focus. Without getting into the validity of any of the
things pressing on them, there's certainly a lot of evidence that they're
short on reputation and resources, and struggling to run successful PR, redact
releases, etc. Moving away from Assange's centrality, and perhaps from the
American focus, might give them some leeway to become a longer-term-player.
Maybe.

------
samirillian
Antonio Gramsci, in "The Modern Prince," observes that Machiavelli himself was
not at all "machiavellian". The information conveyed in "The Prince" was
already well-known by those in power. The purpose of "The Prince" was, rather,
to give the knowledge of how political power is wielded to the masses.

Interesting parallels with Assange's project.

------
exabrial
This is simply fake news. No "election hacking" happened; the integrity of the
vote was never compromised.

What we have here is a bunch of media organizations throwing a tantrum because
they were no longer the primary influencers of the election.

~~~
g_sch
The article actually discusses the DNC email hack, and nowhere in the article
does it allege that any election systems were compromised.

The lexical ambiguity in the headline is not optimal, true, especially when
allegations of the latter sort are being tossed around. But "fake news"
(another term that has IMO become pretty loaded) is a rather uncharitable term
for this article, which is largely a historical look at Wikileaks' vision in
the context of the DNC leaks.

~~~
exabrial
I disagree, there is no lexical ambiguity about the title. Those two words
have a very exact meaning, and it simply is not true, per your own statement.

If the title was simply the second half, and the facts were not begrudgingly
acknowledged in the article, I'd feel differently about an otherwise
interesting opinion piece.

~~~
dekhn
"Election hacking" is a general term that exceeds your definition of it.
Please accept that as a given, regardless of your own tendency to interpret it
in a limited way.

~~~
digler999
so Hillary and Trump each "hacked" the election by posting negative campaign
ads ? how come this pejorative term, "hacking", wasn't used against either of
them ?

~~~
burkaman
Because negative campaign ads are a conventional, authorized method of
affecting an election. For the same reason, getting a job and going to work
every day is not considered a "life hack".

~~~
digler999
just like pay-to-play is a "conventional, authorized method" of converting
power to cash ?

~~~
burkaman
You could call bribery "governance hacking" or something if you wanted to, I
guess.

