This website was dying already, ie. not being updated since Julian was imprisoned, but still a massive treasure trove for journalists and investigators.
It is a very worrying sign of the times that it is vanishing, as the state powers seem to be fighting back against democracy and independent journalism.
Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
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.
Whistleblowers are allowed to have an agenda. In practice most do. But for society it's better that shady stuff get revealed than them staying hidden because the whistleblower is not a paragon of morality.
You can be a whistleblower, you can be a journalist. I don't think you can be both. It's the job of a journalist to keep personal grudges out. It would be their job to keep political bias out too, but I guess we can't have that.
Journalists are people, and people have not been impartial ever. I don’t know where this meme came from, but even deciding to report on a story is being partial. There is no such thing as objective reporting, and it was not better 60 years ago.
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.
Which meme? The straw-man you just attacked?
There is a difference between the attempt to be impartial, or "declared" partial, on one side, and reporting maximally optimized to be one-sided, manipulative and biased on the other. Many US outlets are the latter. Many German ones are still the former.
It is clearly in the job description of a journalist. The complaint is not about the inability of humans to not live up to the ethics. The complaint is about not even trying. The pervasiveness of this has certainly increased, and is not the same between countries. The thought that this has been static in a profession which has changed dramatically (print to online, just as an example), is "laughable".
There are different cultures in different countries. While journalist often had a political lean in Germany, I think it has gotten worse. And the amount of manipulative methods US media outlets employ in current times is astonishing.
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.
nor ever. The only things in the news that are not biased are the sports scores and stock quotes. A major difference between good and bad journalists is whether they are up front about their biases. Julian was very upfront.
It’s probably the one that said not to use ivermectin and now say that what they said is that they didn’t recommend it meanwhile all news orgs and social media suppressed any mention of ivermectin and when they did it was to confound it with veterinary medicine.
Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations that turned out to be best to their knowledge and not absolute truth?
No government officials promoted certain narratives which have been proven false and they walk things back and the news doesn’t push back on that.
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…
I just don't see how a government body responsible for the public health having an advice for health which is pushed by some of the media counts as ministry of truth.
It's already been pointed out to you that when people say "Ministry of Truth", they're referring to the defunct "Disinformation Governance Board" created within the DHS. You chose to ignore that.
> Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations
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.
They "shut it down" when it became public due to the backlash[0]. But not really, they just started working in secret. Now we have a secret ministry of truth[1] like some nations have secret police.
Yes, the disinformation board was actually an attempt to formalize and create some oversight over the ad hoc, unaccountable process that the government has to go through today to pressure media companies to manipulate and censor the public.
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.
You mean the fascist that kept bombing a country his own invaded because of "self-defense"? the same one who presided over the biggest government surveillance leak in the entire history, and then made sure to hunt down the leaker into the only place that would provide him safety and now conveniently uses it to discredit him?
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.
Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here, but let me try to engage constructively here, by pointing out that your text betrays a complete ignorance of what exactly fascism is and how it acts upon societies it infects.
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.
> Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here
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.
Again, you need to study up on the difference between fascism and other forms of authoritarian government. If you said that the US government has been becoming more authoritarian we would have no argument, because it absolutely has been doing that, but it has only been going fascist for a very short time, relatively speaking. Many bad things happened in the last fifty years, but this is something worse that a bunch of people seem to be convinced is something better. A conflagration that they are mistaking for a light at the end of a tunnel.
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.
Yeah I definitely don't agree with that opinion. Whistleblowing is about helping the public By doing the right thing for the right reasons. It's a highly moral act. When society puts a higher value on selfishness over selflessness corruption becomes a big part of the problem. We already live in a world where people are too selfish we don't need any more of that.
It's your prerogative to not care about someone being imprisoned indefinitely and illegally as a political prisoner because they have different politics than you, but it's not a virtue.
I don't care about legality, I'm not a judge or in the law enforcement. Was he wronged? Yes. Did he wronged the people who supported him in an attempt to get back to people wronged him? Yes. Well, then it's up to him and his remaining supporters to pursue justice. I don't care as long as he doesn't do more harm to me.
I have family in Turkey and spent good chunk of my adulthood in this country. Trump was a big enabler for Erdogan, to the point that 2020 election results were broadcasted live all day together with live graphics and stats just as the elections in Turkey as it was viewed as Erdogans last hope if Trump wins again.
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.
This whole thing didn't start with Trump. I have family that is no longer eligible for ESTAs in the US and people like to put it all on the racists in Trumps admin like Miller.
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.
The coup of 2016 and many other independent things happened through the years, what having Trump in power instead of someone else changes how Erdogan navigates through these things.
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.
You mean just like how you go back 1.5 decades and Putin was a pro-West liberal? Just like like how Biden with his almost 80% Obama cabinet navigated the Ukraine-Russia thing so nicely. Biden and Burns both called Ukraine the brightest of all red lines for Russia[1]. I'd like to post the wikileaks link for Burns' comment, but it's sadly gone.
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.
As I said, Trump was one of the factors how he navigates. Obviously, if the coup hand't happen or a meteor struck Istanbul we would have completely different political landscape. Trump was a very influential enabler for Erdogan and that's why all the pro-Erdogan media covered the US elections as if they are Turkish elections.
What kind of nonsense is that Trump enabled Erdogan. Sure, if Trump hadn't been POTUS then, would you have expected another President to intervene in Turkey? Definitely, not.
I think you underestimate the kind of example the US president sets in the world. Lesser devils Luke Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Orban, were quick to mimick Trump talking points and policies, just as they are quick to package and pace things differently when a Democrat's in office. Potus sets a tune that's heard far and wide. Pointing at Amicans and the American president as an excuse for bad behaviour is a time honored tradition amongst the opportunistic after all.
People gave him some crap because he didn't leak the white rose Trump leak, but it was already everywhere and he mostly just declined to promote it. Other than that, there were no Trump related leaks in the inbox, so it's not like he leaked for one side of an election, but not the other. Also Trump's corruption was already known far and wide. It's the kind of shit he brags about.
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.
Lots of people were saying he was gonna win, including me to everyone around me. It's not that we were so smart, I'm sure of that because Michael Moore is an idiot much of the time.
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.
You seem to assume, that one can know what the impact of one's actions will be. That's basically asking for the ability to predict the future.
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.
We have evidence that when the DNC was hacked, so was the RNC. Only one of those hacks has ever been released. Unless you believe republicans have literally never done anything wrong, something doesn't add up.
Assuming those hacks did happen, is there any evidence that the hackers gave the info to Assange? And what could they have found that would hurt Trump?
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.
>And what could they have found that would hurt Trump?
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?
No, I think the original accusation was "selective information feeding", meaning that Assange was trying to hurt Hillary and help Trump, and therefore held something back.
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.
It's just made up. The "logic" goes: if there was bad stuff about H. Clinton out there, there must be worse stuff about Trump out there, because Trump is worse than H. Clinton. Therefore, Assange ignored all of the bad stuff (that neither the FBI, constant congressional investigations, numerous private intelligence firms, and every single anti-Trump media outlet spent nearly a decade at this point looking for still have yet to find) just to target poor H. Clinton.
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.
> 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.
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 would also love more in-depth coverage of her involvement in the early days of the Syrian civil war. Her leaked calendar showed weekly meetings with the Saudi foreign minister (much much more than any other FM), and other leaked documents showed her involvement in arming groups of Saudi jihadists who were flown from Riyadh to northern Iraq and Syria - where ISIS subsequently formed.
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.
Regardless of his personal reasons, he lost credibility.
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.
Why on earth is this website asking me who I voted for before letting me read an article?
Why does the headline make it sound like the FBI wants the documents sealed for 66 years rather than accurately conveying that they'll be release the documents at 500 pages per month, and that therefore it will mathematically take 66 years?
>If Mazzant upholds his order, the FBI wants a lengthy period of time to perform the work—66 years, or 500 pages a month.
Oh, it's the Epoch times... I guess that answers both questions
There are FOIA statutes that require federal, state and local governments to release documents and other data in the public interest in a reasonable amount of time. In this case, the statute gives the FBI 14 days. Limiting the release of documents to 500 per month to make the process take 66 years start to finish (IMO) is a violation of this statute. And there are tools the government has to automatically scrub documents of potentially sensitive information and these tools can run at a clip far higher than 500 documents a month. And so far, this district judge appears to agree.
If I could find any other publication covering this court case I would have provided the link.
Similarly, the FDA has asked a court for 55 years to respond to a FOIA request for COVID vaccine data. Assume you won't object to this source. [0]
Look I'm all for massively boosting FOIA funding across the government to improve FOIA compliance. Note that that is not what the Epoch Times is trying to advocate with their deceptive headline here. I'm annoyed when "news" sources - especially ones that are deeply connected to cults - borderline lie in their headlines to get people riled up.
The FBI has an annual budget of $9.7-billion. How much more do you think they need to use tools they already have to scrub a hard drive image of sensitive information and send the rest to this FOIA requester on a thumb drive? FOIA allows the government to set a reasonable price for the labor and equipment involved in processing such a request, but that doesn't appear to be the sticking point here.
State and federal governments arguing "it's really hard and expensive so you shouldn't make us do it" is the default response to pretty much any FOIA request. This instance isn't special.
How large were the documents you requested that needed review? Was it the first time they were being reviewed?
Edit: also, I haven't looked further into this but can almost guarantee you that the FBI was trying to work with the requester to narrow down what they're requesting to something that is slightly more focused than hundreds of thousands of pages that all need review first
Yeah I'm sure that 66 years is actually how much time that should take and not just a delay tactic. I'm also sure that they aren't going to release anything juicy last.
Like I said to the other commentor, I'm all for advocating for massive funding for FOIA for all agencies. However, that is absolutely not what the Epoch times is doing with deceptively edited headlines like this.
If I’m ever murdered, I hope the FBI isn’t forced to hand over the contents of my private laptop to random strangers who file FOIA requests. This whole thing is despicable and you should be ashamed.
What if the FBI seized a personal laptop of yours? Should that be subject to FOIA requests by anyone who wants it?
The Fourth Amendment rights against government seizure of your property should also extend to giving that property to random yahoos who can fill a form out.
at the risk of tying my horse to the epoch times (which I am not trying to do), I think it should be pointed out that the DNC and RNC being in a separate category of scrutiny from government agencies is utter horseshit.
If we lived in a world where a third party had a fighting chance, fine, but these institutions are literally deciding who we get to vote for.
If you wanna make a "the RNC and DNC are subject to FOIA" rule, fine. This isn't how you accomplish it. It wasn't an investigation of the DNC; it was an investigation of Rich's murder, of which there's zero evidence of DNC involvement.
A standard of "if you're the victim of a crime, your personal info is fair game to anyone who wants it" would be a very, very dangerous precedent to set.
Are you implying that this court case and FOIA request don't exist? Or that the FBI did not request 66 years to release documents? It's fine if you don't find Epoch Times to be reputable, just curious what alleged facts you are objecting to. Court filings are typically a matter of public record. Seems like you are just rejecting this information wholesale based solely on the source? Is that the optimal personal filter you are advocating?
As far as I can tell the facts of the matter are that a federal judge with his own agenda attempted to force the FBI to give over all of Seth Rich's personal data and gave them 14 days to comply.
The FBI responded that 14 days was an unreasonable amount of time and asked the judge to either specify exactly what it is they want, or give them time to review the data themselves.
The alt-right media has twisted what the FBI was saying about the time it takes to review documents and trying to paint their rebuttal as 'they want to hide this forever', which is not the case. .. which is why you won't find this "66 years" thing on any reputable website.
> As far as I can tell the facts of the matter are that a federal judge with his own agenda attempted to force the FBI to give over all of Seth Rich's personal data and gave them 14 days to comply.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is law. The judge was following the law here. 14 days is what the statute provides. Seems unfair to call this a personal agenda by the judge?
> The FBI responded that 14 days was an unreasonable amount of time and asked the judge to either specify exactly what it is they want, or give them time to review the data themselves.
14 days is statutory. The FBI responded with an even less reasonable amount of time (66 years from start to finish). Why is that acceptable but 14 days is not?
> The alt-right media has twisted what the FBI was saying about the time it takes to review documents and trying to paint their rebuttal as 'they want to hide this forever', which is not the case. .. which is why you won't find this "66 years" thing on any reputable website.
The 66 years is how long it will take the FBI to release 396,000 documents at a rate of 500 a month. The individuals involved in this case will likely be deceased by the time they are done, which might as well be forever.
The whole point of FOIA is government transparency. If the public is expected to wait until they are long dead to get access to public records, then that is undermining both the spirit and letter of the law.
Assange was leaking selectively for years for different reasons. You can hardly find any leaks on China or Russia. This is why the Surkov leaks went through just random forums and later Suddeutsche. Finding a humanized agenda there is a bit more difficult.
The duty to report on Russian or Chinese crimes against humanity and war crimes, falls on the shoulders of Russian or Chinese citizens.
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.
> 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.
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.
Given that the ones calling out Russia are also the ones committing and justifying the commission of continued war crimes and crimes against humanity, I do not agree with your assessment one bit.
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 think that you can catch criminals by setting criminals, then you're not going to have a good time in life.
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.
Americans certainly do not have the moral authority to call any other nations crimes out while they continue to allow their state to murder innocent people with impunity, on average every twenty minutes.
Neither do Ukrainians. Nor Russians, or indeed, Chinese.
"Superstate" is not a thing unless the five participants in the "5-eye" intelligence sharing program actually agree to form a state. So to stick with your logic, Assange should be responsible for leaking Australian things only. To be fair, a pretty strange logic tho, since you only allow the perpetrator of the crime to confess as means of accountability.
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.
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.
Because you are a coward and lazy? Here's a summary:
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.
No, because your position is indefensible. You argue that only the biggest perpetrator of terrible crimes should be held accountable, and everybody else could be left out. Which is a double standard and you know it, which is why all that you have left is emotional diatribes and ad hominem.
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.
I'm arguing that the largest criminal is not qualified to police the next-largest criminal.
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.
> 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.
You are blaming Russias invasion of Ukraine, on Ukrainians?.
Ukraine certainly played its part in extending the hostilities that resulted in 14,000 murdered Russian-speaking citizens in its border regions prior to Feb 23.
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.
> Ukraine certainly played its part in extending the hostilities that resulted in 14,000 murdered Russian-speaking citizens in its border regions prior to Feb 23.
Do you have a credible source for this?, id be interested to see one if you do.
> Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
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.
What an opportunity for her to make a sequel to "Citizenfour". Something like "Russian Citizenfour". Lots of opportunities to reflect on how Ed took her for a ride with his BS and now serving Putin. In "Risk" she implies that something is not like it seems with Julian BTW. New generations should be accustomed with a concept of a useful idiot. It is not strictly an old Comintern/USSR tactic.
What crime was revealed by the leaked emails. There's a nice recipe in there, and some emails about getting together, but what shady dealings are in those leaked emails?
Why does it have to be a crime to be morally wrong? It showed active opposition of Bernie Sanders directly from the DNC. And it showed collusion between Clinton and the DNC. As a Democrat, at the time it made me leave the party.
I am trying to say that you are being brianwashed into thinking Assange is the evil persons when it is the people you are idolizing and who want to kill him in prison.
People love defending Bernie when it means they can turn the DNC into the Illuminati, but they never seem to want to talk about his platform.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The New York Times' political stances are just as obvious as those of WikiLeaks, and I say this as a long-time NY Times reader.
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.
>"There are also hypocrisies, but that still doesn't get you to equivalence."
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.
>"And by shades of shit we mean all of human thought, all publications, political projects, and basically everything else?"
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.
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!”
No. I acknowledged the comment about the NYT, but it's not particularly relevant. We were discussing wikileaks. GP's point was that no one's opinion of wikileaks' could have been influenced by the conduct of wikileaks' because everything is hypocrisy period, no exceptions.
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.
> Purely from the surrounding noise, it sounds like it's all coming from people brand new to critiquing history books or social theory....
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.
"People who say that WikiLeaks isn't a journalistic organization because it 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.
I just gave the 1619 Project as an example (alongside the NY Times burying a massive story at Bush Jr's request in 2004, so that it wouldn't come out during the election) of the political biases of the NY Times.
> 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.
to sum up, political slant that aligns with your politics is good, the rest is bad/edgelord/nihilism.
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.
journalism. noun. writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation
--> 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.
People of the wrong political orientation are now cheerleading the Russians in their invasion of Ukraine, so they are bad regardless of their current position on Iraq of 2002. Wrong/bad because of the suffering brought to the world.
im not sure what people are looking for when they ask this absurd question. while this may not be the case with you, i suspect its usually asked in bad-faith by people who are trying to insinuate that all actions are equally (non)reprehensible--which is of course, nonsense.
we start with certain foundations, we hold that certain truths are self-evident. and we build from there.
I've honestly been amazed in these past few years how many people have started hating Wikileaks for leaking things that didn't agree with either their interpretation of the world, or made their favorite politician look bad. The only interpretation I can draw from it is that many people crave ignorance. And when they're confronted with something that challenges their ignorance they blame the messenger.
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.
A lot of people in the USA were fans of Wikileaks when it was almost entirely anti the current administration of the time, which was Bush Jr. Not by design but because that's who was in charge of the illegal offensive wars at the time. But then the diplomatic cable leaks in 2010 included high profile Democratic party leaders, and that's when I believe people not only turned their backs on Wikileaks but leaks in general. They already knew their enemies were garbage and they didn't want to admit their own were too.
Wikileaks, pro-Russian propagandists? I believe they have leaks on Russia too, so we're gonna need something more solid than "published documents that happened to come from Russian agents".
I agree. But keep in mind the narrative makes the opinion. If modern media has become masterful at one thing, it is manipulating the narrative and deceiving their readers without them realizing.
You are right: People would much rather not know how bad the world really is, especially if it affects those that they held in high esteem. There is only a limited willingness to update one's information state (in the Bayesian sense), they'd rather vilify the bearer of the news (=WikiLeaks, investigative journalists etc.).
> The only interpretation I can draw from it is that many people crave ignorance.
"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.
I guess people expected WikiLeaks to expose the corruption in governmental institutions and are not buying the idea that Hillary was corrupt therefore exposed and Trump was clean as an angel and therefore there was nothing to expose. Just at the election time.
People don't feel that WikiLeaks is impartial which makes it espionage and not whistle blowing in the eyes of the affected.
The major issue with Trump is that his dirty laundry is public. There's very little to leak, even back then.
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.
The major issue is that if a whistleblower takes side, its no longer whistleblowing but espionage. Maybe there was stuff that could have hurt Trump but wasn't released? His presidency wasn't a smooth sail and ended with a bang.
We wouldn't know because there's no ant-Trump whistleblower organisation.
>The major issue is that if a whistleblower takes side, its no longer whistleblowing but espionage
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.
> 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?
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.
1) I said that there's not much dirty laundry on Trump to leak and I explained why.
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.
It's not that Trump was clean. It's that he was a game show host. Government agencies don't spend much time compiling information on game show hosts that can then be leaked.
> We live in post-factic time when anything can be disputed and I think its one of sign of healthy democracy.
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.
You're speaking as if rationality was something most people aspire to. Something acknowledged as worth the effort. However, it doesn't look like this view is shared by many people.
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.
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).
One thing I know for sure is that the leaks concerning the US were real. That's the reason why Assange has been so relentlessly pursued by the US. US authorities aren't doing this for fun or when someone posts fictitious information that would give them no legal grounds for prosecution.
We know from history that a lot of government actions has no legal grounds whats so ever. I'm not saying that what you write is right or wrong. I just cannot prove any of leaks, you probably either.
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.
That's not the whole story, though. If government employees with security clearance are reminded by their government that reading leaked documents constitutes a crime, as happened with documents stored by Wikileaks, you have good indication that the leaks are genuine.
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.
That's a deviation from the topic and completely irrelevant to this thread. Even worse, what falsified photos would tell me or not is also logically independent of my claim that his photos did not show any evidence of UFOs.
Moreover, Arnu wasn't arrested for making up stories about UFOs, so the whole subthread is pointless and cries false analogy.
So your analogy is simple. Leaked data are 100% true because government take action against publishing. There is no chance whats so ever that some of data could be falsified/manipulated, ie to deceive foreign intelligence. Correct?
Wrong, of course, and I believe you know that very well and are trolling. I laid out how to use corroborating evidence to come to a reasonable conclusion about the authenticity of the data while you're just setting up a strawman argument. "100% true" What a nonsense and waste of time...
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.
If that is true, then that's still no allegation of political selectivity (by US partisan standards - of course, WikiLeaks doesn't deny being political). I see no reason to doubt Hrafnsson's statement that they would have wanted to publish them in full.
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.
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.
I'm not gonna say it's a lie because I don't know, but that's not the leaker's version of the story.
> 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.
Sounds to me like the leaker was trying to get their attention without handing over all the documents. There are plenty of reasonable explanations where all parties are telling the truth here. I bet the Wikileaks inbox was flooded with more straightforward submissions, and the Panama Papers leaker wasn't being entirely forthcoming.
Leaks are terabytes in size. Of course he's gonna provide a small sample and then wait for the news organization to provide him a secure way to transfer it all.
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.
It's unclear if even a sample was provided, but yes, in general with Wikileaks the idea is to throw all the data over the fence to them, and let them take care of the rest. Trying to negotiate terms of how the data should be released etc is a non-starter.
Cool, say you've done so despite obvious issues (no microSD is over 1 TB, since TrueCrypt is no more there's no obvious trusted encryption software for that sort of thing, then there's borders, being on a security camera at a post office, etc).
Which address would you ship it it to so it reaches Wikileaks?
So you need to send two microsds, fine. You'll probably want to use something more trustworthy like luks with a detached header and a largeish offset. Finally, drive some tens of kilometres and throw it into a mailbox somewhere in the fields at 3 o'clock.
I don't know what address wikileaks has, but then again I never tried to contact them.
I was such a massive and uncritical supporter of Julian Assange for his breathtakingly ballsy attempt to free information... right up until the moment he threw his chips in with the FSB, the ultimate disinformation crew who believe all information is only a set of lies waiting to be discovered and people waiting to be manipulated. Since then, fuck that dude. He didn't live up to the promise. Whether out of cowardice or greed, he betrayed his own beliefs under pressure, and it has unfortunately tainted everything he ever touched. The world of distributed whistleblowing could have been better with any avatar besides him, but then again almost anyone in that position would have been assassinated in character. My main beef with him is that he pawned himself to Putin when the 2016 election was on the line, and it's entirely unclear why he did that.
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.
> Did they ever leak something that turned out to be a lie?
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
The main three things Assange/Wikileaks did that lost my assumption of good faith:
* 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.
No. Not that it hit the wrong guys. He (Assange) was fed a ton of arbitrary/meaningless email which had no major significance, stolen from Hillary Clinton a few days before an election - literally fed to his organization by Russian intelligence - and chose to publish it as if it would incriminate her, to create the appearance of leaking something important and so stain her and help the Russians tilt the election toward their ally Trump.
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.
The very fact that the mails were kept on a private server in a basement installed, breaking compliance, is very valuable information to me regarding the ability of HC to be a good US president.
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.
Neither of the major email leaks in 2016 were from the Clinton private server. One was from the DNC and the other was from John Podesta's gmail account. There were also (legal, redacted) releases of emails from Secretary Clinton's time in office that were obtained via FOIA. The fact that these completely distinct categories of "emails" are still regularly conflated and mistakenly identified as being from "the server" on a technical forum 6 years later should be more evidence than anyone requires that the propaganda campaign was wildly successful.
This entire premise is false, the hacked emails didn't come from her personal server at all. As of November 23, 2022 there's no evidence that her personal email machine was ever compromised.
1) those emails didn't come from hilary's server, and the fact that you don't know the difference 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.
add 2) Well, from an outsider perspective (not a US-citizen):
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.
If we should "lock her up" for having an unsecured email server, than shouldn't Trump have turned himself in?
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.
But if those mails were arbitrary and meaningless why would the media ("mainstream media" without any kind of conspiracy vibe) make such a big deal out of it?
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.
This is the same media that pilloried Obama for wearing a tan suit, and ran a day long expose on Trump wanting an extra scoop of ice cream. Making a big deal out of meaningless stuff in politics is sort of their bread and butter.
The US media absolutely is A problem, but telling partial truths doesn't actually count as telling the truth. Assange openly stated he judged leaks on "impact" and obviously timed things near the end of his tenure in order to stir more shit. I don't consider that airing dirty laundry, I consider that attempting to influence things.
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".
Meaningless? We learned that Hillary Clinton's team was responsible for promoting Donald Trump as the republican nominee. Their "pied piper" candidate.
It began as mostly anti-Bush Jr. admin leaks because that's who was in charge. But once the leaks became ubiquitous over time, yeah the leaks began hitting "the wrong guys", eh "gal".
So you were a massive supporter of Julian Assange, but at the same time you believe the US Government's story about him to be 100% truth? There's not much overlap between people who support Julian Assange and people who trust the government.
World Economic Forum. In essence, it's an NGO with globalist agenda and as a result the boogyman of the ant-globalist movement. There are some valid criticism and very creative conspiracy theories around it. Capitol invading shamans level stuff, highly recommend it.
"Globalist" became a too obvious anti-Semitic whistle so now the far-right is fear-mongering about one specific international NGO that cares about global issues like climate change and international trade.
The far-right has always claimed that the Jews are the puppeteers of various progressive movements they don't like. A century ago they accused the Jews of being behind and secretly controlling the Bolshevik movement. Now they accuse Jews of being behind globalism, international trade agreements, and mass immigration.
I'm sure the far-right accuses Jews of those, and many other things. But that (obviously) doesn't mean we can't be critical of those things.
And if you say that criticizing those things is being an antisemite, aren't you just implicitly endorsing the far-right theories you just denounced? I mean, we should be able to criticize mass immigration, or international trade agreements, globalism, etc. regardless of who supports those ideas, but especially if jews aren't even involved then what's the harm? (Note that jews being involved still would not change the fact that we should obviously be able to agree or disagree with, and criticize any political idea, policy, theory or ideology).
For me, criticizing globalism is not that different from criticizing imperialism, since (at least IMHO) globalism, and more specifically global governance, is a form of imperialism. One of the best-known critic of globalization is Noam Chomsky, who happens to be Jewish (but, again, that is completely incidental and not really relevant to what he thinks).
The left likes to vilify the practices of the IMF, BlackRock and GoldmanSachs. Is that also a "too obvious anti-Semitic [dog]whistle"? Or does that only apply to those evil people on the right?
There's stuff on the left end that ends up in Antisemitism. Usually when the nuance goes missing, and it becomes "a cabal of organizations (whose make up may differ at times) controls what's going on in the world."
"I dislike the IMF for its simplistic monetary policy that they enforce with their loans and which often leaves countries worse off than they were before" is very different from "The IMF controls all money flows to try to enslave us all."
I don't understand how this thread and comment about WEF turned into name calling between you two, but I'd like to address this:
> Because when you look at NGO that openly works to support young people and is openly proud when young people succeed you see conspiracy.
They don't care about young people and their success. They influence impressionable people and having them owe them favours. Young, politically passionate and famous people fit that bill nicely. All they care about is lining their pockets, at the end of the day. They're a bit like modern Mafia. Mafia used to threaten people physically, and these people hang the looming threat of getting cancelled.
WEF is a lobbying group. And everyone knows (sans those in lobbyists circles) lobbying is just corrupt. A pig with lipstick is still a pig, and all that.
If you look at the videos posted, they either circle jerk about how great they are and set vague and forgettable goals about the "greater good".
Look, I like your version much more, but it's naïve to ignore human nature. They're using people's good faith like yours to spread their bullshit gospel.
A comment here linked a wikipedia link to the WEF; I recommend reading it in full before forming your opinions.
Plenty of jewish people all throughout history have been anti-semites. It's no different than the pastor who screams the evils of pedophiles while diddling altar boys or the republican congressman voting against gay rights while getting a handy in the airport bathroom.
Trudeau and Schwab are catholics, Macron is masonic, at what point am I even talking about Jewish? I hadn't even checked their religions. Their "club" of World Leaders has nothing to do with religion, they share an ideology which again has nothing to do with religion, and they document it themselves, go ahead and read the Great Reset by their guru Schwab.
You can call me a conspiracy nut, it's fine, I could even feel proud about it, but antisemitic is definitely not.
You believe in justice, good for you, reality will teach you otherwise (if their cover up for Epstein and Biden hasn't already) one day or another, the hard way.
"Trudeau and Schwab are catholics"
Their politic and public behavior has nothing to do with catholic doctrine. They could name themselves as Catholics, but their actions are not.
What discussion? I don't see a discussion but interpretation of facts in a way to fit a narrative of a conspiracy and I provide alternative interpretation.
Did justice, medias, zuckerberg, meet with biden who told them to cover for him? No, who would believe in such conspiracy.
Does justice, medias, zuckerberg, biden, share an ideology that drives them to manipulate the masses? Yes, they are under the influence of the ideology of the WEF guru.
You need to realize we're way past conspiracy theories, we're fighting an ideology which has way too much power, such as making an election with mass manipulation, and religion has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I'd like to mention that I used to be on the other side, with the "anti conspirationists" and other "fact checkers" before realizing over time that I was on the wrong side of what's happening.
When ever you start to see the world in "sides", you need to recognize this as a canary and reflect on your world view. It is more complex than that. Your blanket statements here are typical, jump to conclusions that fit your theories, conspiracy statements, so don't be surprised if people don't bother to look behind the crass words.
Heck, I'm seeing evidence to that in my own country. Where a number of unpopular decisions supported by fallacies are taken by some of our government officials, using some of the most expedient and least democratic tools possible.
There's this article from the French constitution where the prime minister can force the parliament to vote for a particular law without further discussion, unless the parliament gathers enough votes to kick the entire government out (at which point the President has to name another Prime minister). It requires more than half of all congress people (translating/simplifying here), not just more than half of the votes, and lately this procedure was used quite a bit more often than we should be comfortable with.
It seems the end game for those people is maturing corporate capitalism all the way to cyberpunk, though without the cool implants I'm afraid.
i.e. rush the world into some globalist, "sustainable" future as soon as possible and never mind the impact on the regular people. As long as Davos man can still swan about to conferences in a private jet it's all good.
> 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.
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.
The link you shared doesn't appear to mention anything about funding or defunding anything. It seems to be more about coordinated dissemination of documents. I don't feel like I'm any closer to knowing who does or doesn't fund on going operations of WikiLeaks.
It would be really easy to figure such things out if intelligence agencies published all their activity, but shockingly this is not the world that we live in.
Cause there leaked documents were/are on it as well. At some non-ideologic point the interests of all state actors meet. The might makes right mentality of a seasoned bureaucrat is the same everywhere. Which is why the narrative of Wikileaks being funded as a psy OP does not hold up. Such a "attack" would only host one type of document and its journalists wouldn't "attack" all governments equally.
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.
How did this become the narrative? Wikileaks was started by the Russian secret service, so of course they wouldn't leak their own stuff. Assange was a useful idiot to them.
"The Democratic National Committee emails, provided to WikiLeaks ahead of the 2016 election by Russian state entities posing as rogue hackers, are similarly missing."
Although the CIA would appreciate that and it's part of their smear campaign against Wikileaks, I don't think a leak website should wait with publishing dirt on country X until it has collected dirt on all other countries in the world. That would make no sense.
They were doing the opposite, releasing some documents and holding onto others for their own strategic reasons. It was always super shady, compounded by the fact that much of it was driven by one man’s ego.
Whether they held on to documents for strategic reasons, as you claim without presenting any evidence, doesn't concern me at all and it shouldn't concern you. What matters is whether the published documents were genuine leaks, and for all that we know they were. That's why Wikileaks was prosecuted and is being destroyed.
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.
Come on, we all know about the dead mans switch. Or does that not count for some reason? With regard to your last paragraph - they had no published standards about how they treat the data they are entrusted with, and no governing body to ensure transparency, and that led to the shit show they became. I didn't and don't trust WL org any more than I do any government you can point me to.
If millions of people die in a war in Russia, the government doesn’t feel anything, because they are not the ones going to war. If their own people turn against them, they feel it.
But, at least in Russia, they don't and they won't because that's not how power transfers work in this country.
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.
It's amazing the amount of crazy stuff people trick themselves into beleiving due to their hatred of Trump. Wikileaks works for Russia? This wikileaks?
well. what if the public consists of 10% independent thinkers and 90% that follows whatever propaganda gets shoved through their eyes and ears. And if you can use your current power and money to create the most propaganda. Are people really voting? Or is the money/power that does the voting? And this is not some invented theory, if you question people why they believe what they believe, you'll discover quit fast that they dont know why they believe what they believe, except for, they were told so, by friends, tv, media, etc etc. It's easier to copy opinions (and be angry) than to establish your own.
The definition of "democracy" is not subject to your broad, sweeping, unfalsifiable judgments about human nature and other peoples' apparent ignorance. (Presumably the author and reader are excluded from this, through some luck?)
Who'd be more qualified to assess what impacts voters than politicians, who have proven knowledge and ability to influence such? And they spend billions of dollars on media that amounts to 1 of 3 derivatives:
- "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.
"Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (that's North not South) comes to mind — even less genuine than clicking "I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions" on the average pre-GDPR EULA, but nevertheless perfectly illustrates the vagueness of the word.
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?
Dictionaries are there to report actual usage not dictate how it should be. I still get to say it's being used as a way to unreasonably paint positive associations on unrelated topics in the same way that the word "right" means both "correct" and also a specific political team. Yes I know this isn't new, Latin for left is "sinister" etc., but I like clarity and dislike the entire pattern this represents, even if it is hard to get away from — both with positive and negative examples — in natural language.
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).
I think you are reading far more into this than there actually is.
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.)
In my experience, "independent thinkers" are always the ones most susceptible to manipulation, because they believe themselves smarter than everyone else, which makes them perfect targets for propaganda.
As an extreme example, you would consider Einstein to be easily manipulated? He was certainly one of the greatest independent thinkers.
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
Quite, but the point still stands. Democracy gives 100% of power to the person who can convince 51% of the public. In reality in the US sometimes you just need to move the needle by a few thousand votes to make a difference, certainly changing 5% of the public views (either to flip or to stay at home or not stay at home) will settle it in your favour.
We have a trillion dollar industry designed to manipulate peoples views. Nobody is smarter than that.
It's not really. While they managed to make the news, and were the most prominent, they are hardly the most effective at providing leaks or whistle blowing (assuming you believed that was their purpose)
With "democracy" in «against democracy» the original poster clearly meant "that transparency that enables the decision and judgement of the People" (those conditions that allow the functioning of the empowerment of the People).
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?
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.
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.
> But perhaps the most frightening way in which the COVID-19 crisis could
> undermine democracy is by reducing popular confidence in the democratic
> model.
Preliminarily: the article in the Harvard Political Review seems to equate Democracy and Freedom, but that it is just a perspectual effect: it is substantially equating autocracies and _arbitrary_ limitation of freedom. (Which, in the context you propose, should be compared to "_clumsy_ limitation of freedom", plotting data in the two dimensions of malice and stupidity.)
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.
Apropos of WikiLeaks itself, does anyone remember "information wants to be free."
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.
More originally, and with more context (as the ways and reasons in which information "wants" each of these things matters).
> 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 don't understand the level of JA/Wikileaks hate - reading the comments it seems to be mostly American ( DNC leaks related ).
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.
Assange's original theory was that WL would create a "secrecy tax", making life difficult for evil orgs that had to keep secrets. But as far as I can tell, WL ended up damaging regular orgs more than evil ones. Because:
- 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.
This depends on your own subjective view of which organizations are evil, and which aren't.
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.
Let me be clear - I'm not blaming American's per se ( though they do share some of the blame - the idea that America can do no wrong because it's America, is surprisingly pervasive even among highly educated people ).
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.
I wonder wether a democracy should make intervention wills. As in, if i ever go below this or that treshold, i want democratic neighbours to restore the nation.
Or have a backUp Voting system, that if people do not show up to a vote in full majority autorestores a constitution.
The US Constitution does sort of have a back-up voting system in that it allows a supermajority of states to convene a new constitutional convention and rewrite the document however they like.
Americans compare politics to sports all the time, and it's bizarre.
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.
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.
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.
The obvious answer is that you end up as a useful idiot for the United States's enemies. Yes, the Podesta leaks were probably largely true, but this one-sided airing of dirty laundry in the lead up to the 2016 election obvious impacted the result. So if you endorse this, aren't you just opening the door for every election cycle whereby the US's enemies get to wade in and strategically release information that they've obtained through espionage? And don't you also therefore, start to create a dynamic in the election that candidates have to attempt to appease foreign adversaries in order to avoid damaging their election hopes?
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?
And what is stopping those patriotic principled leakers from leaking things to just about anyone else? If the republican party e-mails were leaked for example I can guarantee you'd have a huge amount of journalists willing to publish them, even if in the theoretical wikileaks wouldn't do it.
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.
There's a big difference between principled citizens who choose to leak information, and foreign adversaries of the US. I would have thought this was obvious but it's down to US citizens to decide the US election, and external interference should be met as the attack on the US that it is.
>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.
>There's a big difference between principled citizens who choose to leak information, and foreign adversaries of the US. I would have thought this was obvious but it's down to US citizens to decide the US election, and external interference should be met as the attack on the US that it is.
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.
> So if you endorse this, aren't you just opening the door for every election cycle whereby the US's enemies get to wade in and strategically release information that they've obtained through espionage?
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.
My politicians ideally shouldn't. And absolutely should lose elections when their dirty laundry is aired if that's what the voters think when seeing the truth.
"one-sided airing of dirty laundry in the lead up to the 2016 election"
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.
Ok, if your position is that you want ideological purity at the cost of all practical considerations, then fine, you'll end up with whoever Russia/Saudi Arabia etc wants you to have. I don't think that's a good practical trade off, but it's one you're welcome to make.
Practical considerations? Hm, if I consider it practically I feel like Europe shouldn't consider the US an ally. (And before someone assumes something wrong: nor should it consider Russia, China or Saudi Arabia an ally.)
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 :)
What an absurdly stupid position. Fine, you openly want to encourage foreign adversaries to determine the outcome of US elections. Fine. That's a position you advertise widely, because it makes you look absurd.
Yeah Assange was directly working with Russian intelligence, Trump was directly working with Russian intelligence, Elon Musk is directly working with Russian intelligence and Kanye West is also directly working with Russian intelligence.
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".
"Russian intelligence" at this point is liberal Pizzagate. The organization that can't even spy on its neighbor's openly operating military cannot subvert the world.
Give the parent credit (as the HN rules ask you to do): the poster said nothing about people who aren’t assange.
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”.
> It also follows that over time, Russia could “convert” Assange.
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.)
Occam’s razor says that the simplest explanation is usually the right one.
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.
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...
Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Turks, Chinese, Bri'ish, Kenyans, Iranians... Pick any national origin, and you will see a fraction of them commit war crimes. So why focus on one nation, when those crimes are commited by individuals, and often ordered by entrenched unelected bureaucratic government interests?
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".
Americans are responsible for the crimes of their state. As are Russians responsible for the crimes of their state. Such is the nature of citizenship.
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.
Americans* are literally extorted by their state, democratic accountability is a myth, as the bureaucracy remains, and the results are imposed even if you refuse to participate. Courts take years and decades, and do not judge against themselves. A more direct method of accountability, has, every time, been used to expand the surveillance state and the militarization of police.
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.
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.
Your deployment of the "ma' Russia" narrative belies a glib understanding of the issues in the region.
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.
Thank you for conceding the point. I too condemn the USA for being one of the globalist funders of terrorism, closely followed by the French- and British-governments, etc.
That is just a lie pushed by western intelligence agencies, popular because it deflects blame for a well-known electoral defeat.
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.
Bullshit. Unlike Wikileaks, of which the 'Russian intelligence' smear has never been substantiated, DDoSecrets works with organizations that are indirectly and directly financed by intelligence agencies and smears those outside of this information complex. Namely, Wikileaks.
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.
Seymour Hersch came to similar conclusions, and was pilloried for it.
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.
Seymour Hersch, who has published 0 evidence for his claim about Syria chemical attack and also just happens to be defending Russia any chance he gets?[1]
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.
Rubbish, not when DDOS hacked GoFundMe, exposing Freedom Convoy donors in order to help Justin Turdeau's irresponsible government shut down public dissent in Canada.
That put them squarely in the far-left, antidemocratic, not to mention criminal activist category. As if we didn't know that already
Yeah, they installed mediawiki or something similar IIRC in the first years, but did they ever enabled public contributions through it? I recall the Assange committee have always tried to get the leaks through other means, the anonymous/encrypted version du jour of "send a letter to the newsroom".
On a purely technical level, suppose you currently wanted to start a site like wikileaks that hosted all this insider pirated leak shit. Where would you host it?
Think of your top 10 onshore options and then all your offshore options. Could anyone even launch that site now in 2022? Is there still a nuke shelter in Denmark and a basement in Norway willing to physically protect you? Realistically, how would you do it and maintain any reasonable uptime when one government or another was dedicated to shutting you down?
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).
Just host the data on the darknet somewhere with hundreds of cheap VPS as internet facing fronts. Some countries still have strong protection laws for journalists (e.g. scandinavian countries, iceland) where these VPS would probably stay up for a while.
If someone controls your entrance and exit nodes they read your traffic. A substantial enough minority of network nodes have always been controlled by the government that Tor is not and has never been anything other than a massive sting operation.
To be honest your best bet is probably obtaining a stolen credit card, sticking it up on one of the big cloud providers and then rest safe in the knowledge the second you release the data it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists and political operatives. If you really want to continue your campaign, just continually pop up with new stolen credit cards on various cloud providers, the barrier to entry is so low now.
So I'm trying to pretend you realistically have something huge to expose... and want to make it through the week or possibly the rest of the month without going to jail. Booting up a site on Amazon with a stolen CC is probably not that smart.
>> it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists
Probably hours of up time is good enough, and let's say you're Assange or Snowden or Manning, I think the assumption should be that you're either fleeing the country or facing life in jail. They're gonna get you no matter where you distribute the information.
The big cloud providers have encountered this many times, and are experts at combatting drive-by fraud like this.
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.
IPFS isn’t uncensorable. The only thing it changes is that there isn’t a single DNS name which can be revoked or blocked. Otherwise, a government can follow the same process: resolve an IP, get it taken down or block it nationally, repeat.
That's much harder to do though, they need to continuously monitor new nodes and make sure blocking the IP does not have too much side effects unless I misunderstand how it works.
Getting the nodes is easy: IPFS is designed to let you discover that.
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.
According to that link, Wikileaks said they thought those documents were (1) published elsewhere, (2) not noteworthy and (3) unverifiable. When they were published elsewhere, no one cared, even though they related to Russia during a time when the US media was running all sorts of stories related to Russian corruption. I don’t see the problem with Wikileak’s behavior on that one.
> In February 2022, after many anonymous donors supported the 2022 Freedom Convoy, DDoSecrets began providing journalists and researchers with a hacked list of donors' personal information from GiveSendGo
Oh sure. Go give a government organization government leaks. What a great idea!
These idiots gave money to a group of white supremacists who were blocking off trade routes in support of spreading a deadly virus in the midst of a global pandemic. Karma happens.
It's really not any more complicated than "see a nazi, punch a nazi". These people were swastika waving full blown white nationalists. People have every right to support these dirtbags, but don't be surprised if you get outed because of it.
It subjectively seems to me that upto the mid 2010s hacktivists were mostly against government power abuse, but nowadays they seem to be mostly against right-wing leaning targets
There WAS supposedly a dead man's switch; numerous encrypted multi-gigabyte files have been shared over the years, and the theory was that their keys would be released if Assange or one of his associates didn't hit a button every X amount of time. But that doesn't seem to have materialized.
I don’t think any deadman’s switch has been confirmed by Wikileaks. They did however publish insurance files which are supposed to contain full unredacted archives of various leaks.
One such insurance file was exposed when an either incompetent or malicious journalist at the guardian revealed the encryption key in a publication.
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.
There certainly was a wave of publications when it first came out, and still many investigative reports can be found using wikileaks as a resource, particularly the diplomatic cable leaks.
Craig Murray, who I trust, claims to have collected the information from a DNC insider in the United States. Conveniently, the claims of “Russian hackers” was never actually investigated (although the claim was repeated again in the Mueller report), it was just an assertion from CrowdStrike.
There is no evidence of collusion with 'Russian hackers'.
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 ..
It was "toxic to touch" in that it was hacked material of an American political party, which you might not want to be redistributing publicly (such as hosting on a server) if you can't afford lawyers.
In the US, once a secret is leaked, it becomes public knowledge. The DNC could try to assert copyrights over the emails, but that would be admitting they are genuine, and unlikely to actually work.
Like the biden laptop story. We must hide information that can be used by far right republicans to prevent Trump from being elected and starting WWIII with say, Russia. Did I get it right this time hn ? :)
Pity. There were some good ones there. I'm actually a bit upset about this one document that described data centers and network topology. I have it somewhere on one of my computers, though. And soon only I and a few others shall have it. Haha!
Pretty much, yeah; it was thanks to Wikileaks and the technologies they pushed that made media implement ways to anonymously report things to them. If I recall correctly, that's what Assange had to teach the journalists at the time.
Read a book about the history of Wikileaks, and you'll find out.
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.
The symptoms sound like the website is in dire need of basic maintenance. Who's paying the bandwidth bills if there are no admins left? And surely there are mirrors of the site out there?
I suppose the conspiracy theory answer is that the Democrats only became motivated (or petty) enough to illegally(?) attack the WikiLeaks website after Assange caused Hillary to lose.
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).
Sad to see support for Assange disappear from HN, a lot of your talking points are vague empty slogans. There has never been proof Assange was a Russian asset even if he was God forbid someone gave you information to make informed decisions.
The sad truth is you want to believe the lie, and you're upset at being woken up.
That is correct, people are a tad miffed at WL + JA for earning their trust that WL stands for transparency … only to betray and squander it on being the gru intelligence launderer in order to get the kremlin approved potus. All just because of a mutual grudge the leader had.
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.”
Given the disaster of the Arab Spring, which the Clinton state department supported, he's not far wrong.
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.
Seconded. I realize this is (probably as a direct consequence!) a contentious position, but I'm concerned that Wikileaks is as much an arm of an imperialist state actor as Russia's Internet Research unit. And, like it, a more effective weapon than the actual deteriorating military of the state… and accordingly in heavy, aggressive use.
Since I'm not interested in seeing Russia win anything but 'best dubtechno the world will ever see' I'm not interested in seeing Wikileaks prosper. It's a bit of a litmus test to me: I'm suspicious of anyone who passionately supports something like it, or 'Q', and so on. It is of great importance to the Russian imperialist effort.
It's simply a bad position. You've characterized all of Wikileaks by the one leak that upset your party, the (at the time) ruling party of a hegemonic state.
Do you have anything other than the leaks about the Democrats as evidence of anything? Have you surveyed Wikileaks materials and seen evidence of the evil Russian hand in anything except your own personal grievance, which is that your party lost an election, partially because its process was shown to be corrupt?
Wikileaks hasn't even added any material since then, but somehow it's been relentlessly working for Putin.
It has become very popular among certain political groups to reference Karl Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" in order to justify silencing of people they disagree with.
However, "we must not tolerate the intolerant" seriously misrepresents the actual argument.
It was not intended as an enthusiastic endorsement of silencing tactics. It is an uneasy acknowledgement that liberal ideals, if embraced completely, leave the door open to the destruction of liberalism. It presents a question with no comfortable solution. It is absolutely not a demand that we trample the rights of people whose ideas we don't like.
Here's the actual argument:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
First of all, it is not talking simply about tolerance but about "unlimited tolerance." It's not saying you should extend no tolerance to the intolerant, simply that you should not extend unlimited tolerance to them.
Nobody is suggesting unlimited tolerance, the parent is merely positing introspection on matters of our position in the world.
Our enemies become our leaders, if/when our leaders move against our interests as a country surreptitiously and the subsequently keep knowledge of wrongdoing from us.
in this case: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but only since our enemy seeks to enlighten us.
Our leaders should be scared of this, and act in our interests accordingly and with transparency. This is the only way to build trust, and would completely eliminate any power our foreign adversaries would have in destroying trust in political power.
I would much prefer that knowledge come from proper journalistic methods, but given the fact that only a handful of people own all the news media, and the US has been so extremely heavy on any whistleblower journalism: I fear that we have to take what we can get; and I do not say that with happiness or pride... I say that as a person who feels utterly defeated by the crushing weight of the state and the fact that all my heroes are in prison or exile.
> It is absolutely not a demand that we trample the rights of people whose ideas we don't like.
Good, because that's not what I'm advocating. I'm not advocating an act of destroying Wikileaks, I'm advocating for it getting destroyed by omitting active support to it.
By that I mean that all you see in the media is but a spectacle.
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.
Hillary and the DNC also worked to undermine Sanders, though he had far, far better polling vs Trump than Hillary did.
At that time, Hillary was the second most disliked politician in the country. Only Trump was lower. Bernie was the most liked. By a lot.
So again - the second-most hated politician in America worked with the DNC to attack the most popular politician, while making sure that Trump got as much attention as possible...
...And you blame Wikileaks for Trump winning. You really see no problem with this?
I said it had a hand in it, I didn't say it was the only cause, or even the biggest or most relevant one. Assange backed the wrong horse, here, but I wouldn't credit him for carrying it on his back, all by himself, all the way down the racetrack. That's too big a job for any one man.
I also can't say much about her campaign was done well, for that and other reasons. But oh, boy, did we not need hindsight to foresee what a disaster the Trump presidency was going to be. He delivered exactly what he promised.
For all those who keep spouting this Russia leaked it nonsense, former NSA technical director William Binney along with some others did the technical anaylsis which showed the leaker used a usb drive to copy the emails.
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)
No, his analysis is not. He talked about how they even directly tested from servers in a few of the potential countries for real world data transfer speeds and they couldnt reproduce the rate. He also explains how it fits a FAT32 filesystem very well. VIPS has a long history of being corrwct and way ahead of the curve, hence the frequent character assassinations.
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.
> So, to do proper forensic analysis, I need to physically take the servers?
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.
