Seems to me like whichever "state party" this was didn't consider the implications behind their actions. Wikileaks has released insurance files in the past, and I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't, automatically or not, trigger a dead man's switch for more leaks.
If you're a state party trying to prevent leaks, silencing Julian is probably the worst way to go about it. It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
Seems overblown. Do they really have enough data to dead man switch? I'm unconvinced. Sure they may have something but if it was that good they would have released it by now. Even if whatever they have (if anything) is actually good I would imagine risking it leaking is much better than leaving Julian in position to constantly leak things for a lifetime.
So long as we're all speculating, perhaps the state actor who leaked the documents to Wikileaks in the first place didn't agree with Assange's schedule and wants to trigger the dead man's switch.
That sounds sensible, they say it's over 500GB of Documents. The release of such a flood of files would swamp all "public intelligence capacity" until after the election.
If you looked at how long it took to find the gold nuggets in the Podesta mails it sounds reasonable willing to force their hand.
I think that any intelligence community that couldn't digest 500GB in full text / keyword searching (keywords that are likely already configured/known) between now and the election would be a pretty sad intelligence community.
Apropos of the keyword list, dissecting the corpus could be done in a few hours with a promo-code worth of AWS time.
I think "Public Intelligence Capacity" was referring to the ability for use regular members of society to find and verify meaningful information from the leaks.
Yes, i thought more of "people on 4chan" than actually any Intelligence Service of any nation state. I'm pretty sure they are mining it, but there would be political fallout from publishing their findings.
Or there's no insurance files and Assange is bluffing. He won't sit on some scoop harming the United States for long, his ego and power trip would force his hand.
"Bluffing." It takes zero effort to distribute a a few hundred gigabytes of encrypted random data, relative to the amount of investigation and speculation as to what if anything is in those files. They are called "insurance." Assange/Wikileaks wanted to deter actions being taken against him.
Seems to me as likely as not that there is nothing really there.
There was a link on HN not too long ago to a quote from Assange, stating that part of the strategy is to sow uncertainty and doubt among the players to increase the secrecy tax. A multigig encrypted dump could have that effect.
That said he can't really play that card too often.
I speculate that these are only SHA256 hashes of keys or documents that will be released in the future. It's pre-commitment. I didn't try decrypting one of the files with a key yet, though. I'm busy with other things (like browsing HN, aaah).
> I don't know why they would put out a few hundred gigabytes of fake files.
The same reason a stick-up man might put their hand in their pocket to mimic the shape of a gun. If you have no weapon, it's still often useful to make people think you have one.
> It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
And following on from this line of thought, it is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that they did think of this scenario, but feel that the risk of calling Assange's bluff (see the speculation that the insurance files are just random data meant to seed misinformation) is less than the risk of whatever they think he knows about them being leaked.
Which makes you wonder, what are they afraid of to consider such action?
Rodger Stone (who may have back-channel communications with Wikileaks staff [0]) shared two tweets suggesting that this might be US backed action. Note these tweets are still unconfirmed. At time of writing I have not yet seen this information corroborated elsewhere.
1) "John Kerry has threatened the Ecuadorian President with "grave consequences for Equador" if Assange is not silenced @StoneColdTruth" [1]
2) "Reports the Brits storm the Ecuadorian Embassy tonite while Kerry demands the UK revoke their diplomatic status so Assange can be seized" [2]
It really does make me wonder what documents Wikileaks might have that could make US diplomats so riled up.
I doubt the USG is involved in this. They have a pretty solid track record of both respecting human rights and due process. Keep in mind the US government is the most ethical government in the world. Assange, on the other hand, is a rapist and a Russian puppet trying to hijack the US election. He probably is a Trump supporter in disguise and a closeted systemd committer. If that wasn't enough, there are multiple reports claiming that Assange does not respect PEP8 in his code. This last thing was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
Im on my first coffee of the day, and it did not click :) I wish people could add a /s or we could add a new voting button to mark something as sarcasm / a joke?
It is not clear whether Assange is tweeting or a third-party is. For all we know, they could have stormed and the only information available to the person maintaining the Wikileaks twitter account is that Assange cannot be reached. The situation is not clear atm.
The Ecuadorian embassy in London stormed without as much as a trace on the internet? Come on - I like a good conspiracy theory, but that's going a little far, isn't it? It would require the Ecuadorian government to hold tight and then storming the embassy wouldn't make sense - they could just have kicked Assange out and called the local police who'd happily pick him up.
Seriously? Here's the Ecuadorian Embassy: https://goo.gl/maps/gtwjXtGrv9p Note that it's not in the middle of nowhere, it's right behind Harrods (ie 100 yards away from one of the busiest shopping streets in one of the world's largest and most diverse cities, with 1000s of people walking by every minute carrying cellphones).
Do you honestly think anyone could storm such an embassy and not have a massive media footprint? When the Iranian embassy was stormed there was wall-to-wall coverage on the news, and that was in the 1980s, before every second person on the street had a cellphone and twitter.
1. Calm down. No one is saying this is what happened. No need to get on your high horses.
2. At the time the Internet got cut-off it was 6:40am in the UK. Pretty early.
3. The British government has the power to issue DA-notice to media outlets.
4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
5. "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating. If you have up-to-date information, feel free to share.
> 3. The British government has the power to issue DA-notice to media outlets.
Surely they can suppress all blogs and all of twitter and facebook at the same time. Oh, hold - why didn't they suppress the tweet we're discussing.
> 4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
It require a little more than a bobby walking up to the door and asking politely. It's fairly likely that this would get noticed by someone passing by - mind you: That's not somewhere in the woods, it's central London.
> "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating.
No. You are speculating. The null hypothesis is that nothing of that sort happened. Apart from handwaving speculation you haven't offered anything that would even resemble proof or supporting evidence.
Firstly D-notices are only advisory, while the media tend to comply with them they are in no way legally enforceable.
Secondly central London has rather good wifi and 4G coverage. Presumably the "appropriate contingency plans" are to switch his phone's personal hotspot on and carry on as normal. Though there might be a nasty phone bill coming down the line.
I'd be surprised if the police or military couldn't dig out a jammer from somewhere if they wanted to - or just turn off the local cell towers for a while. Wouldn't be the first time.
And there'd be no report on the Internet that cell coverage around the Ecuadorian embassy mysteriously failed? They'd have to compel every person in the area to keep quiet or to not leave the area.
Many people have their internet service go down from time to time (I know I do) and most of the time it isn't caused by state-sponsored action/governments storming their place of residence.
I've already said why I think such a storming would provide evidence that even state-sponsored actors would not be able to suppress. The Brompton Road and Sloane street both have plenty of pedestrians and vehicular traffic at 6:40am (I'm speaking as someone who used to bicycle down them every day around that time).
Given no evidence to the contrary, a much better hypothesis that fits the known facts is that there was some sort of standard ISP snafu or similar tech problem.
What could he really do with advance warning and no communications? Assange can't really run anywhere so the most he can really do it bunker down in a safe room or something, which he's probably ready to do anyways at a moment's notice any ways.
Given that cutting off internet before means he can't do any new live data releases ("Maybe he screwed up setting up his dead man's switch?" unlikely but possible at this point) and means that during a raid there'd be no heroic live stream from inside the safe room "resisting the oppressive dogs of the US government come to silence him."
I don't really see what there is to gain from a raid to seize him now though. Presumably wikileaks is capable of trickling out whatever 'damning' emails/cables/files they already have without him so it's probably not the goal.
Though it might be something: a guy claiming to be a CIA intelligence analyst says that Assange is about to get extradited. We will know in the coming hours for sure. If this is true it is pretty damaging to the sexual assault accusations he was facing in Sweden. That would confirm that it was indeed the end-goal of getting him transferred to Sweden.
It was posted a few hours before everything unravelled and so far the anonymous poster was right. Of course, he could just be lucky and trolling for replies. At such an early stage it is interesting to share anyway.
What it would confirm is that Assange has made himself more trouble than he is worth the the Ecuadorian's and they have decided to simply kick him out of their embassy. They have no moral obligation to continue providing shelter for someone who thinks their protection is some untouchable perch from which to play political games and are simply asking them to leave. Assange is that guy you once knew from high school who you let crash on your couch for 'a few days' and find still there a year later trying to run a mail-order scam out of your kitchen. He is being shown the door.
The fact that once he leaves the long-delayed wheels of justice start turning is merely a side-effect. The end-goal is not getting him transferred to Sweden, it is for Assange to be able to show the world that he was right all along by defending himself against the charges against him and not hiding until he could run out the clock.
I think if this election cycle has taught us anything, it's that allegations of the worst kind can be created for political reasons. Surely Bill Clinton AND Donald Trump AND Julian Assange AND Anthony Weiner can't all be rapists, right? What kind of a world do we live in if they all are?!
Why not? Considering that not too long ago it was deemed legal to rape your wife? It's not too long ago that rape wasn't exactly treated as the crime it is now. Without wanting to apologize any of the behavior, it's less than my lifetime ago that the man who took a woman against her will wasn't considered a rapist but rather a role model in large chunks of the population. So yes, it's quite well possible that all of them are rapists. That's the kind of world we live in.
Wow, just because a protagonist does something in a piece of literature or theater doesn't mean that the author, much less society, approves of the deed in question (rape, in this case), or considered the one responsible for the deed a "role model".
I mean, didn't you read and discuss "Native Son" in high school? Do you think that the fact that its protagonist committed murder means that Richard Wright or society at the time approved of murder?
And by the way, when "The Fountainhead" and "Streetcar Named Desire" came out, those rape scenes were just about as controversial as the publication of "Native Son".
In many ways, for better or worse, the early Bond movies mixed the 'suave, debonaire spy' with the reality of the books:
That Bond was a lonely, bitter, alcoholic (beyond "vodka martini, shaken not stirred", but in many of the books Bond would often find himself alone at the bottom of a bottle of liquor), misogynist with a short temper.
So certainly they could, and in many cases, that would have been the underlying premise - not that he was (just) a ladies' man who would have women falling over themselves.
People in positions of power often feel like they can get away with sexually aggressive behaviour. Just like Trump unequivocally stated on tape. And you have selectively chosen a handful there but there a lot of politicians e.g. Obama, Bernie, Biden, Ryan, Romney etc who haven't had charges of rape labelled against them.
And remember there are many successful leaders, visionaries and pillars of society with fatal personality flaws. You only have to look at Trump using the argument that "she was ugly" to dispute a rape charge as an example of this.
A patriarchy where powerful men are essentially unaccountable for abuse of women. Or, in other words, exactly the same world we've been living in for centuries. (Not saying all the allegations are true, just that even if they were, it wouldn't fundamentally alert the nature of the world, which is one of the reasons they spread so easily--they are quite consistent with the way the world is observed to work.)
Roger Stone is a so called ratfucker (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ratfucking). He posts a lot of inane garbage in the hopes that it will help Trump and discredit his opposition. He started the completely false rumor that Ted Cruz had several affairs to help Trump win the Republican election. His words are not worth anything.
Whatever action was taken (and I'd bet that it was the UK acting on behalf of the US government) was almost certainly done with the Ecuadorean government's "permission" -- although that permission might have been obtained somewhat coercively.
I'm assuming parent is referring to the sexual assault and rape allegations against him. Depending on which side you're on you may believe they're made up charges to get him locked up or you may think he's a criminal hiding from doing said things to multiple women (2 IIRC).
FYI, at the moment the statute of limitations have ended for the sexual assaults and the rape statute ends in 2020.
It's hard to believe the Ecuadorian government is complicit with helping a rapist escape justice. Rape allegations also fall neatly into NSA/GCHQ's playbook for character assassinations.
Seems more likely the reasons for taking political asylum in a non-US alliance embassy, is, political.
Yeah honestly I find it hard to find solid information in either direction. As far as I can tell it's not proven either way (he hasn't stood trial) so even if he did it I can't imagine the Ecuadorian government feeling complicit.
Regardless I don't have a dog in this fight; I find both sides pretty polarizing and difficult to get to the facts.
For crying out loud. He went to the UK Supreme Court arguing that he shouldn't have to face extradition and that the crimes he was accused of weren't crimes in the UK and didn't warrant extradition. The Supreme Court disagreed vehemently and he jumped bail before he could be extradited to Sweden.
Which doesn't prove guilt only that he wanted to avoid extradition. If he is innocent and believes the allegations were manufactured whose purpose was to eventually extradite him to the U.S. (plausible given their convenient timing), he'd have every reason to want to avoid extradition.
Assange has always been opened to being questioning over the allegations (within the Embassy) and the Swedish prosecutors only recently agreed to allow him to be interviewed within the Embassy, which is strangely set to happen today (17 October 2016).
The “the rape allegations were made up so Sweden can extradite me to the U.S.” line never made sense. The UK is even friendlier with the US than Sweden is, there's no way he couldn't be extradited from the UK.
It is also worth pointing out that the UK has to give permission for onwards extradition from Sweden to the US if a request were to be made. If the ultimate game plan for the US was to engineer his extradition it seems a little odd to not have requested it from the UK alone while he was here, rather than have to throw the Swedish legal system into the mix as well. Both Sweden and the UK are required to not extradite when there is a risk of the death penalty being applied - so that wasn't an issue either.
The whole "but the Swedes won't guarantee not to extradite him" is neatly covered by the whole point the US hasn't requested an extradition, and no legal system can or will get involved with hypothetical situations.
As I understand it, the UK government has to give permission for extradition from Sweden, but extradition from the UK to the US requires the support of both the UK government and the UK courts - and extradition requests from the US are held to a higher standard of evidence than ones from the EU. The UK government is certainly pretty friendly to the US so that's no obstacle, but the UK courts are less predictable.
If he is guilty he also has every reason to avoid extradition - there are plenty of possible motivations. Regardless of what he believes criminal complaints have been made and demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the highest court in the UK, that he has a case to answer in Sweden and that justice is best served by extraditing him. Questioning him in the Embassy does nothing to mean that he would be available to be tried in Sweden, that is a simple enough reason for Sweden to want to question him in Sweden.
To add - the Swedish Supreme Court has also ruled against him last year, and a Swedish court in September ruled against him as well following the UN report. That is an awful lot of court rulings against him...
Assanges version is "The rape charges are fake smokescreen used to extradite me to USA via sweden". Now this fails the Occam'ss razor. If USA cared they would extradite Assange directly from UK, Swedish detour adds nothing of value. Only makes things much more complicated. The relationship between UK and USA spooks have much warmer relation than USA and Sweden, and Sweden would still needs UK's permission to to extradite to USA. Wikileaks is now become all about Assanges inflated ego, where he believes world revolves around him and Hillary is personally targeting drones against him. Meanwhile in real world, if Assange weren't, someone else would be publicizing leaks.
The great irony of it all is that Max penalty Assange faces is 6 years in comfy swedish prison. He chooses instead to lock himself in an embassy for 4 years so far...
You need an actual crime to extradite someone. That's why the rape case is so important.
That's the difference between "rendition" (kidnapping) and legal extradition.
There's no plausible crime to use for a UK extradition because Assange didn't hack into the systems himself, and isn't bound by our laws on the release of classified information.
Given current trends with Wikileaks-distributed Russian intel dumps, the upcoming 'surprise' will be another big fat nothing-burger. Most likely case is that Assange went a step too far in using the Ecuadorian's hospitality just to become a Russian cut-out and at some point his ongoing attempts to influence the election (and failing miserably at that) reminded the Ecuadorians that they were gaining nothing by hosting him and now were looking at another four years of fallout. TBH I don't think anyone really cared too much about Assange, but his desperate need for attention ended up leading him to play with fire.
Please provide evidence that the leaks are from Russia.
Also, many people care a lot about Assange. Millions of people care about Assange and WikiLeaks. It is absolutely absurd (and almost un-humanitarian) to try to downplay the work that he has done.
U.S. intelligence services and the Obama administration have explicitly accused Russia of the leaks and assessed that this must have been orchestrated from high in the Russian government. That's a pretty bold statement in politics. Of course we can point to cases where U.S. administrations have lied, but it still should count as evidence, at least on a probabilistic level.
Also, regarding Assange, I believe evgen meant to say that the administration was happy with where he was holed up until he started stirring up the pot.
Also note that the U.S. government did not implicate any foreign governments in cases of cablegate or NSA leaks, and these were as big as they get. Obama administration does not seem to throw such accusations lightly.
I do agree that the Obama administration doesn't seem to throw such accusations lightly. But Obama and the entire Democratic party didn't necessarily have their ass on the line when the NSA leaks happened.
There's certainly first time for everything. However, I assume when Snowden backed out from his path to martyrdom and landed in Russian asylum, the temptation to label him as a foreign agent must have been great. Being penetrated by a spy is perceived differently than suffering from gross incompetence, and quite a few high ranking asses in NSA and elsewhere could be saved.
> "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations."
> "We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Has there been any evidence of this yet? I trust the government and main stream media to accurately report the geographic source of technical transactions about as much as I trust Facebook with privacy.
Originally it was a flat out denial IIRC. The sudden recent mention of who cares is what raised a red flag for me, it didn't seem consistent with the original statement at all.
I could be wrong, but honestly, "who cares who did it" is a fishy enough govenrment response that it's hardly any wonder the Russians are being looked at funny.
There is no hard evidence that Russia is involved. Representatives of well-known internet security firms have stated that they believe the attack comes from the Russian government, but have nothing to provide other than their professional opinion (which is not based on specific data afaik).
The Russia myth comes from everyone repeating each other and pretending like it's fact. I don't really think Americans think of Russia as the big boogeyman anymore so that whole propaganda spiel is of dubious advisability.
Yeah, the unifying theory here is that they're all taking orders from the administration and pushing the baseless narrative that Russia is the source of everything anti-Clinton to try to discredit all of the dirt that's out there on her. It's no surprise that the government is following its own orders.
I think they also do this because they don't want people to know how simple it is to conduct this kind of cyberattack. If they tell everyone you have to have your own KGB to do it, there will be less people looking into it. I believe this same strategy is why North Korea was blamed for the Sony Pictures leak.
We very quickly went from Representatives of well-known internet security firms have stated that they believe the attack comes from the Russian government, but have nothing to provide other than their professional opinion to a giant, airtight conspiracy.
Read the statement very carefully. At no point do they actually say, or directly suggest that Russia is behind the Podesta and DNC leaks.
The media and some politicians are full force memeing this, saying USG blames Russia for the hack and leaks. The statement does not say this in the slightest.
>Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
There are weasel words if you are led to believe they are referring to the DNC/Podesta hacks. Again read carefully. To which activity are they referring to in that sentence?
Normally, I agree with some of the stuff you said.
Wikileaks tends to talk big talk without actually delivering.
This time though seems a bit different. If they have anything, anything at all left, I think they are going to be leaking it tomorrow, with how much they are hyping this up.
If tomorrow the leaks are just a bunch of nothing, well that means they probably don't have anything at all of significance. We will surely see.
If it really was the Russians then it would be pointless to attack Assange in the embassy or cut off Internet access as the leaks would come regardlessly.
Well, so far we've had shocking revelations -- like the fact that the Clinton campaign pays attention to polls and tries to craft advertising and messaging campaigns to match what likely voters want.
I'm astonished she's still a viable candidate after such unbelievable information was disclosed.
You're right, there's nothing wrong at all in any of those emails. Sure is strange why so many people in the democratic national committee resigned over them.
I wish I could help Assange. This guy deserves a medal, and barely any country has enough morals to host him. Here we have a presidential candidate seriously saying "Can't we just drone this guy?" (Hillary Clinton, obviously) and barely anyone stands up for him. People get extradited because otherwise there will be economic embargos. Trade your morals for a 4K TV. Disgusting.
For the average population of the US, just say someone's actions increase the possibility of a terrorist attack, and you will have majority backing to throw them to the wolves (and I mean literally). There's nothing I can do as an American. Swedes, you have more power per capita, you should fight to get these ridiculous rape charges dropped so he can make safe passage to Ecuador.
Amazing how Bob Woodward was a journalist hero who went onto have unprecedented access to future Presidents for his books and yet this is Assange's fate. It's disgusting.
Don't forget this is the subreddit that has believed every bizarre, alt-right conspiracy theory under the sun. You do nothing but make yourself look ridiculous posting that nonsense.
Wow...I can understand that not everyone would agree with this comment, but how can this end up in the grey?? Have people actually visited /r/the_donald lately?
Yeah, that subreddit is terrifying. I'm more afraid of the people in there than any other terrorist group. E.g. another comment on the same thread says very matter-of-factly: "Let's just say by now you should have already bought multiple guns."
That sounds like the ramblings of someone unhinged.
"Thermal imagery" - in the middle of the day.
"I wanted to take pictures but a policeman told me I'd be prosecuted, and in any case, they are digitally obfuscating all pictures" "All I know is I can't upload photos and all my camera images don't work" - huh, what? Which is it, you wanted to take pictures, but were told not to, or you did, but they didn't work, or ...
"Military surrounding the entire blocks aiming guns at people." - and no word of this on ... anywhere
"... so I went and had a coffee." - "Oh man, I just saw a military operation to grab Assange. We had guns pointed at us and they're messing with our phones and cameras so we can't even take a picture without it being corrupted, so I'm gonna go get me some Starbucks, and post on The_Donald about it..."
"D-notice so media won't report" but apparently the block / street shutdown was so close to the embassy that anyone in the area could watch the whole operation...
I'm going to call BS, like the sibling says, you could make millions selling tinfoil to /r/The_Donald subscribers
Pure coincidence I'm sure. It's got nothing to do with protecting Hillary Clinton and claims by many (including Matt Drudge, Milo Yiannopoulos) that today some kind of sex tape (lesbian) of her is going to leak.
What do you mean "pure coincidence"? How could a state actor cutting off Assange's internet be a coincidence with anything? It was done on purpose by someone for some reason. That is by definition not a coincidence.
"Rumors that Pamela Anderson 'fatally poisoned Julian Assange with vegan meal' spread after 'coded' Wikileaks tweets lead to speculation that he triggered 'dead man's switch'"
When Assange accesses the internet, I am guessing that state actors would be trying to see what his traffic contains. How would a person in such a situation access the internet and be sure that his traffic cannot be decrypted and/or there is no man in the middle modification of his traffic. For the sake of discussion, assume he has a brand new laptop with Debain/tails or another FOSS OS. The general consensus seems to be to avoid MacOS and Windows in cases where your life is on the line.
which would require infecting the VPN machines themselves? Just wiretapping isn't sufficient because of public key encryption
Assuming the nodes themselves are not compromised (big ask) and identity can be confirmed(like via key exchange), state actors can listen as much as they want to the wires, they won't be getting much.
Please explain, I was under the impression that the above could not reasonably be claimed anymore with any kind of certainty [1][2][3]. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something important here or the 'Happy Dance!!' slide [4] made me paranoid.
in the slides, check Slide 28. There's a bunch of useful software for wiretapping, but they need access to things like the Pre-Shared Key, or to be using an easily-exploitable connection mechanism like PPTP.
Of course router/firmware exploits cannot be prevented in the general case, so NSA-likes could figure out a way get in. But the null hypothesis is still that the NSA cannot crack strong encryption without some sort of pre-built backdoor IMO.
Based off of the leaks, NSA gets into things via two ways:
- poisoning the encryption methods
- social engineering/legal coercion to get keys
Aaaaaand like all of Wikileaks' dumps, this one turns out to be completely overblown BS. Boots on the ground confirm that absolutely NOTHING is happening at the embassy, no one is breaking in and the report out of London is the standard Monday morning complaint about the morning rain and the annoying signal failure on the Central line that is messing with commutes.
If Assange did lose internet access it is because the Ecuadorians changed the wifi password and didn't tell him. I am absolutely sure that we will be getting a mea culpa from Roger Stone any minute now...
Sorry, this is all old news to us in London who have been listening to the echo chamber freak itself out for 12 hours over a bit fat nothing. Here is a quick pointer to a similar query that went out to /r/London when the first tweets were sent: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/57w670/amy_truth_th... and people on the scene confirmed that contra the Roger Stone claims there was no 'assault' on the embassy. For chuckles I actually went by this afternoon and there was absolutely nothing to see. Verizon (who provides a lot of business connectivity in London) has been having problems in some places for most of the day, and it is a somewhat wet Monday so it is possible some lines shorted, but so far there is no confirmation that Assange has lost internet access and no indication from the outside that this is anything other than another day here in rainy London.
I'm just so over Assange. Good. Cut his damn internet access. He's really starting to remind of that kid who just bugs you so much. Just go away please.
That gigabyte file he's holding onto? Supposed to be a bunch of cat gifs, or so an "insider" told me.
Assange rape is an allegation only. Current U.S. administration ignores U.S. constitution. This smells of support for Hillary Clinton, not justice for Assange.
A bit of an interesting dilemma in the spirit of transparency. Given an N-way race, do you just reveal secrets pertaining to one participant (since this may be all you have) or do you with-hold until you can reveal secrets from all participants?
What choice do you have? You can only release what you have and you have no way of knowing what you don't have. He's not trying to reveal all of the facts in the world. He's trying to reveal the facts that he has.
I mean, the point of the DNC leaks is that they (the party) helped a specific candidate (Hillary) - even before she was elected a nominee - so they in essence acted undemocratically.
Unless you're speculating that the GOP was secretly sheming for Trump - something which I find extremely unlikely - then it's more than possible that any GOP leaks would in fact help Trump, as well!
The GOP may be divided on Trump but am sure there is private information that could help the HRC team. It doesn't have to be incriminating as planned strategy could be of value. Unsure how this is different from, say, an (american) football team playbook being revealed to the opponent.
Wikileaks is NOT helping Trump. They're merely releasing information that would make impact in the election. Assange doesn't even support Trump. He supports Jill Stein.
They'd be more than happy to release any information on Trump. Unfortunately, they don't hack the information themselves. Someone else has to send it to them.
Here is what Assange had to say about Trump: "I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day". Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/08/26/assange-trumps-ever...
I've been struggling with this a lot. Granted it's pretty much all speculation, but if it is a state actor that is giving Wikileaks this information, and if said state actor was trying to influence the election, I question the responsibility of Wikileaks. It could also be (and I'm aware of this) simply that they're exposing information on "my" candidate, in which case maybe I'd feel differently if was the other way around.
I'm glad this was posted on HN, because I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) more informed discourse than I found on Reddit.
Given that most of the leaks are emails from a single party, when said party was known to use a weak email server, which was known to have been hacked at one point, my guess is that it could be anyone, and doesn't need to be a 'state actor'.
PS. Have you seen the Podesta emails? They range from hilarious to pretty disturbing.
I've poked a bit at the Wikileaks emails. My conclusion is that the email release is designed not to understand the emails in any sort of context but rather to be selectively quote-mined. The use of Courier can obscure the fact that the message is a quadruple-forwarded quote, as well as hide what was highlighted in the original HTML versions of emails. The lack of any attempt to reconstruct threading makes this worse than even the new IETF mailing list archive for trying to read email archives--and that is a bar I didn't think could be cleared.
- You'd assume that Wikileaks the organization will continue to work even without Assange having internet access so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
edit: another comment here suggests the reason may be because his extradition is imminent.
Funny too because the argument is that Hillary wasn't negligent with classified data, thus why would Podesta emails be unlawful to read? Either information is classified and Hillary was criminally negligent or it's not and therefore nothing 'unlawful' about WikiLeaks.
More interesting that CNN thinks they can read them but the public can not. Media organizations have no security clearances and thus are subject to the same access as anyone else.
Well to be fair, media organizations like CNN have legal departments staffed with experts ready to fight on this type of stuff. You and I probably do not.
There is also the famous Pentagon Papers case, which to my knowledge rests on the "freedom of the press" language in the First Amendment.
That said, this was a stupid thing for the CNN anchor to say. Regardless of the law, no federal prosecutor is going to waste their time trying to find and prosecute every U.S. citizen who visits the Wikileaks website.
I am not a lawyer but I'd say this is a legal gray area.
The leaker probably broke a law. E.g., hacking Podesta's private emails would have been illegal under computer fraud and abuse. It's alternately possible that the leaker had legal access but breached contract to release the data publicly.
Now that the information has been leaked, it's hard to say that it's clearly illegal for John Q. Public to access what Wikileaks has made publicly available. The anchor is unable to point to a specific statute in his tweet above and also mentions that it hasn't been tested in court to his knowledge.
A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity. This HN comment has curated some links to primary evidence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722664 . Take a quick perusal and you'll be about as informed as anyone on the answer to your question.
It seems like his tweet defends the possibility of it being illegal, but not the idea that somehow it could possibly be legal for CNN & "the media" while still illegal for everyone else, which seems like the most absurd part to me.
I guess he never explicitly said it was legal for CNN -- maybe he was claiming that CNN is generously taking on all that legal risk so the rest of us don't have to?
>A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity.
This is a nice bit of propaganda you've put forth here.
Here's a Harvard study into the majority of the 2016 election coverage including primaries which shows a demonstrably strong bias in the media pro-Trump and anti-Clinton and demonstrates that Clinton has received a FAR more harsh relationship with the major press.
It demonstrates that coverage of Clinton was on average negative about her for the entirety of 2015.
It demonstrates that Trump enjoyed a very positive and cushy relationship with newsmedia who combined to give him hundreds of millions USD of free exposure.
I would argue that Clinton has had mostly negative coverage up until the end of September 2016.
Yes, it's almost as if Trump's positive media attention in late 2015 was coordinated somehow. Like they were instructed to take him seriously or something...
Wait, so because a political opponent identified him (and 2 others) as the weakest and most unpalatable candidates, that means media outlets were "instructed" to prop him up?
I hope you are rational enough to see the hilarious doublespeak being engaged in here:
* Positive coverage of hillary is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
* Positive coverage of her opponent, is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
Come on man. I hope readers of this particular site are rational enough to apply occam's razor and think critically.
I also find it extremely telling that Donald Trump, Mr Reality TV and the "hyper-successful" media and real estate man isn't responsible for his own success, but rather it's his opponent which is apparently so powerful that every single event occurring is by her design...?
How feckless Trump appears in your "everything good or bad happening to both candidates was preordained in a conspiracy" viewpoint!
Not everything is a conspiracy, I hope you're capable of rational thought.
There's a dimension/axis of time involved in the pattern. At least some (substantial?) positive coverage of Trump before Republican nomination is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media.
I, for one, am also comfortable blaming the Republican electorate for allowing the three pied pipers, including Trump, to have been elevated.
There is a caveat to the legality of classified materials, usually you must have been "entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of". Which alludes to the fact that you would first have to have been read in, or taken the material that you knew was classified.
There is also a "requirement" to "knowingly" cause harm. I put these in quotes because the wording and the enforcement of that requirement has been in flux and selective. Also relevant is that gross negligence would also meet the requirement.
I guess a creative prosecutor could challenge that visiting wikileaks would be knowingly removing the material from the server, but it would probably be beyond difficult to meet all of the guidelines for prosecution.
That being said. If you do currently hold a clearance, visiting Wikileaks is a violation of your NDA/ReadIn, Employment Agreement, and the UCMJ for service members.
> That being said. If you do currently hold a clearance, visiting Wikileaks is a violation of your NDA/ReadIn, Employment Agreement, and the UCMJ for service members.
I never saw anything in writing, but after the Bradley Manning leaks we got a SHIT TON of briefs about not visiting WL, no looking at the leaked docs, and a whole lot of other "don'ts". Never heard of anyone visiting the site after that, and never heard of any shit rolling down from people violating the orders.
In order to access classified information, you must posses two things:
1) the appropriate clearance level (confidential, secret, top secret)
2) a need to know
So even possessing the appropriate clearance level doesn't give you the right to just start reading anything that interests you on a classified network. You're supposed to have a "need to know" in case you're questioned about it.
We always get stuff here (contractor on AFB) about "don't read this or that" or else you could be in trouble. But I've never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble.
Insert meme about protection from DD214 blanket...
Jokes aside, I found myself on the site for the first time ever last week... Didn't want to fuck with that shit during my service or while holding a clearance.
But question... While I no longer have a clearance, I am still eligible for a clearance if I need it within the next few years... Should I be concerned?
IANAL, but the primary concern for service members is the UCMJ and violation of a lawful order as it is far more black and white legally. That being said, I would be cautious if you were interested in anything that included a CI or Full Scope Poly requirement.
Congress cannot prohibit speech or press. If it has been written down or spoken, then the US Constitution provides absolute legal justification for viewing it, copying it, and discussing it, without any restriction.
Technical question: assuming no targeted malware, is it possible for an actor outside of the embassy network to cut internet access to Assange's devices while leaving the other devices in the network unaffected?
The ISP could do it in theory with filtering based on traffic patterns. The use of cryptography in the embassy plus where the normal traffic was going would determine how effective it was in terms of just hitting him.
Seems totally unnecessary, considering he could just be handed someone else's laptop, right? I'd imagine it would have to be the entire embassy, or else the network that he has access to in his space.
What I'm saying is that most of the embassy connections are probably not going to Tor, Wikileaks, known proxies, etc. They could filter just that to give him lots of headaches. Plus look at and block every site they connect to. They probably already have a team dedicated to him anyway.
He might work around it but it's an option. I don't know about whether it's legal under UK law but their surveillance organizations seem to get away with a lot.
> I don't know about whether it's legal under UK law but their surveillance organizations seem to get away with a lot.
If GCHQ are involved with any such interference, their actions are fairly unconstrained by law. Paraphrasing Intelligence Services Act 1994, s.(3)[1]:
> [GCHQ shall] monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions [...] in the interests of national security, [or] in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands [or] in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.
As far as I know, there is nothing in statute that constrains how they go about that (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 adds a couple of hurdles in regards to interception). Any oversight comes from various Parliamentary committees.
On the other hand, "state actor" could certainly refer to Ecuador deciding to turn off Assange's access. WikiLeaks tends to be fairly economical with the truth about its own operations, so being purposefully ambiguous isn't anything new for them.
And, while Ecuador hasn't had to deal with meaningful diplomatic repercussions from sheltering Assange, the high-profile role WL is taking in the 2016 elections, and specifically the partisan and selective nature of their leaks, means that Ecuador is dealing with a very different qualitative situation than when WL was acting as an impartial if indiscriminate journalistic source.
In other words, Quito may very well be looking at the situation and deciding that being implicated in attempts to manipulate the US election is way more trouble than it's worth.
Assange and Ecuadorian ambassador (crawling under desk in office):
Assange: "Unplug it and plug it back in"
Ambassador: "I did"
Assange: "Are the lights blinking?"
Ambassador: "Some of them..."
Assange: "Which ones..."
Ambassador: "Why am I doing this?"
Assange: "Which lights?"
Ambassador: "All of them..."
I don't think Assange is a partisan. He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election. I think he is releasing info on Hillary because that is what he has and is timing the release for maximum public exposure. If he had similar info on Trump, I firmly believe he would be doing the same thing.
It's pretty well known that Assange has a vendetta against Hillary Clinton. Just searching for Assange Clinton on Google brings up lots of articles on the subject.
It looks like the True Pundit article (linked above) is the original source for this claim, which is sourced as "according to State Department sources". Then there was a wikileaks email (https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1099) which has the subject "an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks", but which doesn't actually mention the strategies and only says "The result is the attached memo, which has one interesting legal approach and I think some very good suggestions about how to handle our public diplomacy". The attachment is not provided as far as I can tell.
I agree that it sounded like a joke. However the article says she pushed ahead discussing it after the laughter ended. Given that the source didn't want to be identified it makes it rather hard to verify.
She didn't deny it, but said “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don't recall that.” I say that indicates she likely said it, although maybe jokingly.
Speaking for myself I know I would never say that, so the response would be "No, I never said that."
When your entire life is recorded, you never know what soundbite is floating around out there that will contradict your position. If you say something as a joke or that could be taken out of context, and then later claim to have never said it, suddenly you are a liar even though you didn't actually do anything wrong. It's possible that she just didn't want to get contradicted by some frustrated exclamation she had made years previously.
and yet, it's exactly this same person who will strengthen the NSA security apparatus that slurps up domestic communication wholesale, and saves it for all eternity. I hope you don't end up on the wrong end of a powerful person's anger, because you will go down the exact same way.
yeah, but everything she and WJC say has to be filtered through the lawyer lens... depending on what the definition of is is. She's good at that - almost anything she says can be spun multiple ways.
This election is trending beyond being too much too keep up with. I think we'll see more bullheaded decision making in the this same vein as we get closer to the date.
Aside from the "can't we just drone this guy" comment that Clinton doesn't remember saying and if she did it was a joke, etc. the closest I can find:
I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.
But a little further checking showed that despite this being tweeted in August this year with a headline and hashtag suggesting a link to the leaked emails, this video is actually from 2010, moreover from my exhaustive five minute search (it wasn't exhaustive really) I couldn't find any evidence of a link to Clinton's campaign, in fact according to Wikipedia the last campaign this strange chap worked on was Walter Mondale's in 1984.
>Sarah Harrison, a British journalist and a longtime WikiLeaks editor, says that the organization would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them.
The bloomberg article also quoted someone from reddit as evidence that the right wing was 'shivering in anticipation' of leaks damaging to clinton. It's not great journalism and seems biased but it doesn't seem there is any evidence that assange is pro trump.
The Guardian one is slightly better. I don't think there is real evidence, and Assange isn't so stupid as to publicly say he supports Trump (even if he does, for whatever reason).
But if there is no agenda, it does make one wonder why the Wikileaks of late have focused on Clinton in the run up to the election
Occams Razor says that they've only received credible leaks about the HRC campaign.
Seems to me like anyone with credible evidence against Trump can sell it to the highest bidding mainstream media org and be sure it will get national attention. Why would a Trump leaker need wikileaks?
Simple. Wikileaks can only leak what others have hacked and submitted to them. Someone submitted a treasure-trove on Clinton and DNC. As soon as someone hacks the RNC and Trump (though Trump does not use email at-all, ever) and submits the result of that hack to leak to Wikileaks, they will be published.
Not for nothing, but "the rest of the World" is pretty tired of America being a bully and starting never-ending wars. It is really not that spectacular that an anti-war person like Assange doesn't want the Presidency to go to Clinton or Trump, but of whom want more war and are not even limiting themselves to just 'the middle east' anymore. It is far more likely that Assange wants the only anti-war candidate in office - Gary Johnson.
No, it's pretty well known that Assange claims to have a vendetta against HRC. The details of that vendetta don't make much sense. It's clearly easier for him and his supporters to claim that they're acting out of enmity towards Clinton --- a minor figure in virtually all of Assange's dealings with the US --- than to simply cop to the fact that they are aggressively and overly supporting Donald Trump.
Nerddom and the left (and I'm somewhere in the overlapping circles on that Venn diagram) have a powerful rooting interest in Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who many of us see as a vanguard of an effort to disrupt politics and the media, both of whom we as a demographic have little respect for. The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. But that's very hard for us to admit, regardless of the amount of evidence we're confronted with.
Assange/Wikileaks nemesis is secrecy and corruption, not HRC specifically. Now if they view her as the most corrupt, they would naturally be against her, and inevitably that supports Trump. But that is not the same as the rabid right wing supporter of Trump.
Assange is savvy enough to know their position inevitably supports Trump, but there isn't any reason to think if they viewed Trump as more corrupt they would be against him. So it is possible they take a principled position while wrongly accused of having a preference in who wins the election.
This argument depends on Trump being "less corrupt" than HRC. If you believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate, you can plausibly argue that Assange is somehow justified in supporting a candidate who is calling for the death penalty for leakers. It won't be a strong argument, but it'll be coherent.
But very few observers of US politics believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. A more widely held belief is that he's the most corrupt major party nominee in the history of US politics.
I hear people saying the 'most corrupt candidate ever!' about both candidates. More about HRC than Trump though. For some reason I doubt both assertions.
Look, if you're a Trump supporter, I exempt you from criticism about support for Wikileaks. As a Trump supporter, your support for Wikileaks is totally coherent.
Trump's corruption and naked greed is overt and out-in-the-open. He's even proud of it.
Clinton's happens in secret and is masked by insincerity, lies, etc.
I think there's a brain glitch at play here -- corruption in the style of Clinton feels more corrupt because it's secretive, even if the out-in-the-open corruption is just as bad or worse.
It depends what you consider to be corruption. I don't have any confidence that they will enact the policies they describe. Trump is a well-known charlatan and liar. Clinton, however, comes closer to corruption via corporate interests and wealthy friends.
Disclosure: I support neither candidate and will probably vote the Party for Socialism and Liberation this cycle.
You write as if Trump is just as dirty as Clinton and Assange is simply choosing to not release that information. It is possible that Clinton is, as Trump says, the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics. She's been hit with scandal after scandal. And before you say those scandals are a result of partisan witch-hunting, Obama never had these scandals that Hillary did.
The Republicans have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars investigating Hillary and so far, nothing has stuck. She may actually be the cleanest candidate in the history of politics.
Nothing sticking on her doesn’t have to mean she is the cleanest. It could also mean she has the best spin-doctors or very influential friends that help steer the public discourse.
There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms.
There really are people who believe that.
In fact, depending on where you get your news, you might also believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actual literal demons, who smell of sulfur.
I don't believe I made any outrageous claims. I literally linked to a CNN article (which is usually considered middle to slightly left leaning) regarding a top clinton donor being appointed to a security committee.
I definitely don't think you should disregard others opinions just because,
"There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms."
The article you linked to does not make the claim you did. Why is your spin more credible than the claim that Clinton is a sulfurous demon who is motivated only by a hatred of Christianity?
But, again! This is an unproductive political argument. If you support Trump, your support for Wikileaks is entirely coherent. I'm not here to argue that people shouldn't support Trump (I hope those arguments are self-evident). I'm here to point out that people who oppose Trump should recognize the role Wikileaks is playing.
The article did make the claim, it was pointing out how one of the largest clinton foundation donors, as well as straight political donors was given a seat on the state departments Intel board, despite not being qualified. Eventually, they had to step down.
Again, what you said has no bearing on what I said... I wasn't even discussing wikileaks - I was responding to the parent, mentioning how nothing sticks.
As for political ideology, again I made no comment. It's fair to call Hilary corrupt because she is, there's no political leaning involved in my comment. She clearly did a bunch of stuff on the edge of what was moral/legal. She clearly makes deals to gain favors - that's basically what politics is. I made zero comments on trump.
Finally, I am not a supporter of either candidate - they both suck and both aren't representative of my views. Nor are either going to improve my quality of life or increase my personal (or family) security.
There are also people who believe exactly what you do politically, but also believe in alien abductions, crop cirles, homeopathy and what have you. You can be sure of it.
Pointing to fringes to discredit the mainstream of said fringe is just a cheap tactic, not something worth doing out of concern for the truth.
I wouldn't say "cleanest". A lot of the stuff she's been investigated for is completely true, but for whatever reason hasn't stuck. We know for a fact the whole emails thing was completely true. She sent state secrets over a private email server using non-secured devices, and those emails were leaked to foreign governments. Doesn't sound "clean" to me.
We in fact do not know that. Moreover, during the time period Clinton was using her personal mail server --- a thing she discussed at length with Colin Powell, her predecessor --- the State Department's own email server was comprehensively owned up by (wait for it) Russian hackers.
It is not only possible but actually somewhat likely that her mails were safer on her own server.
The "msm echochamber" thing is an especially funny trope, as it amounts to saying, "source on that claim, apart from all of the journalists who actually investigate claims like this".
There's evidence in the leaked emails that parts of the media take orders from political entities or politically interested parent companies. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a source that isn't essentially a known liar.
There are literally multiple hundreds of 'media-related' emails and in some cases, the campaign wrote the articles and gave them to reporters to print. So, good on ou for finding one of those hundreds who went on record to clarify and defend their agreement with the Clinton campaign, but you have hundreds more to go.
An aside - it's been mentioned many times in recent years that the rules regarding email for adminstration officials were never so clearly defined as to preclude someone from running their own email server and the Bush administration employed many non governmental email accounts and servers. They even 'lost' Up To 22 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
I'm honestly curious as to why that was never investigated with the same level of intensity.
The simplest explanation is that the Democrats were only briefly in power in Congress and going after the Bush administration didn't make political sense — Obama rather famously called to move forward rather than fight over the past.
In contrast, a wide range of right-wing people have spent three decades and many millions of dollars going after both Clintons, with considerable personal demonization over that time. When Obama was elected, the GOP's goal was to limit him to one term. That means a bunch of people had angles to exploit anything remotely plausible: it kept the base riled up and voting accordingly, it helped attack the sitting president by association, and maybe damage his most likely successor. The entire email story was only discovered as part of the endless attempts to trump up a scandal from the Benghazi attack, by which time the pattern of relentlessly litigating everything was just the assumed default.
There just isn't an equivalent on the Democratic side. Yes, there are people who don't like Bush (or now Trump) but there aren't rich people pushing to scrutinize his private life and the members of Congress don't seem to think that's a good use of their time.
>And before you say those scandals are a result of partisan witch-hunting, Obama never had these scandals that Hillary did.
Um, are you just blanking 2004 out of your head? This is just the same stuff all over again. All of the screaming and shouting about birth certificates and generally shady connections? His ultimate Muslim agenda to bring down the Great Satan that is America?
Absolutely nothing of worth is coming from the leaked documents, despite all hell being raised about a smoking gun (that no one can point to) in them. It literally is a witch hunt. If these past 4 elections aren't going to kill the GOP in general, I don't know if anything will. It should be disgusting the out right lies and propaganda that they employ, with a complete lack of integrity and standards. But people still buy into the juicy conspiracy theories and the generally "known and accepted" unknowns.
If HRC is the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics, then then last 4 decades of investigations and general obstructionism were undertaken by the most incompetent politicians in the history of politics. Not just one, a whole collection of individuals (senators, house members, governors) from one party who despite their best efforts continually fails at proving claims they have no problem repeating until people start to believe them.
Trump is much dirtier, and most of that, including outright bribery illegally using charity fund, had come out without needing anything like WikiLeaks.
Interesting. I was under the impression that it was mostly a vendetta against Clinton, not support of Trump. I don't pay that much attention to Assange or Wikileaks to be honest, I personally find quite a lot of what they do distasteful.
And I'm sure, were his sources to give him a cache of (ostensibly) damaging documents about Trump, he'd drip-drip it out along with teasers and editorialized (and falsely contextualized) snippets, too.
Of course, that's not what's going to happen, because Wikileaks is in effect if not design a propaganda organ of the Russian Federation.
You're entitled to think whatever you want, but I am entitled to remind you that 2 + 2 = 4. We have an "A vs B mentality" because that's the design of our political system: it is structured to favor two dominant parties, which are themselves coalitions of interests.
Assange is many things, but "stupid" isn't one of them. Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump has the obvious impact of helping Trump, which is why the Trump campaign claims to coordinate with him.
That is really dangerous way to view people. I hope we have more common sense when we view security researchers that publish security vulnerabilities, rather than see them as campaigning for the competitor. Every published security vulnerability for windows is not an advertisement for apple, or vice versa. "If you are not in favor of Microsoft, you are in favor or Apple" is unhealthy way to view the world.
And it's not because I think security experts are stupid and don't realize the obvious commercial impact that a security vulnerability has.
I mean, you've made it clear how you feel, but not so much what that feeling has to do with the facts of this election. The choices are Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. To oppose Clinton is to support Trump. It is a zero-sum contest. If Assange wishes a pox on both parties, he could stay out of the election altogether. But of course, that's not what he's doing.
In a election that has the lowest ever recorded public opinion of the two candidates, my feeling of the election is this. The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.
If I was to favor the majority opinion, to oppose both Trump and Clinton is to campaign for democracy. If I had to guess what motivities Assange, if Clinton win people won't trust the government and if trump win people will fear the government. It is possible that the later will slightly produce more Snowden's.
"Public opinion of the candidates" doesn't mean anything. Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie Sanders, beating him by ten times the number of votes Obama beat HRC with in 2008. Similarly, Trump demolished his Republican opponents in the GOP primary. The voters made a clear choice.
Douglas Adams joked about this phenomenon by describing that people will vote for lizards they hate so long it means that the wrong lizard won't win. In a zero-sum game, that result is a Nash equilibrium.
It is still a lizard that get voted into office at the end of the day.
None of this is responsive to my comment. Hillary Clinton did not win in a squeaker over Sanders; she crushed him. The voters made a clear choice, and it wasn't for "the right kind of lizard". This is the Democratic primary we're talking about, and it wasn't a "lesser of two evils" race there.
If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion. Popularity opinion is shared between the left and right while same can't be said when talking about the vote for party candidates.
Some would point to the political events that the dc leaks talked about.
> If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion.
In favorability or approval (whatever that means in the context of a nominee) ratings? They mean different things, and aren't always directly related[1]. I could definitely see how Sanders would be liked more, but people would believe he's less likely to do a good job.
To suggest an explanation myself, voting where majority vote win has a different result that voting where highest ranking wins. When there is extreme high and extreme low opinion about choices, there is commonly a third option which is rated higher in average.
Say I rated taco, pizza and Italian salad as 10, 8, and 2, and you rated them as 2, 8, and 10, we can easily see that pizza wins even if neither of us has it as our primary pick. pizza in this case has highest opinion rating while the other two choices are quite far behind.
I don't dispute that, but it's not what I was referring to. Some polls ask what people think of the president (favorability ratings), and some are more specifically geared to asking about the job the president is doing (approval ratings). The article I linked to from Gallup points to situations where they do not always correlate as you would expect. For example, Bill Clinton in 1993 and 2000. In 1993 he had 59% favorability and 49% approval,and that just about reverse by 2000 when he had 60% approval, but only 46% favorability. People disliked him after the scandal, but they also conceded he was doing a good job.
So, what I wonder is what questions are actually asked regarding candidates? There isn't any data on them doing the job itself yet (unless they are an incumbent, which none are this cycle), so are they asking about how much they like the person, like the policies, or how confident they are the candidate can perform well? The answer to that question may lead to different likely reasons for the question at hand. Sanders is a likable guy. I like him. I'm also not convinced his policies, as expressed on the campaign trail, are feasible. Conversely, Hillary Clinton isn't very likable. I don't really like her. I do agree with many (but not all) of her policies, but most importantly I think her policies are feasible and have a chance of being implemented if she's elected. I am, in fact, the exact sort of person that might have expressed a favorable opinion for Sanders but voted for Hillary.
> The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.
Says right in the article, it was Russian hackers aiming to undermine the US democratic system. They saw this beautifully pristine, perfect and fair democratic system and said to themselves "let's undermine the fuck out of this thing".
Surely if it was already undermined to the point of being utterly broken they wouldn't have to bother, right?
Your choices are Clinton + Kaine (Dem), Trump + Pence (Rep), Johnson + Weld (Lib), and maybe Stein + Baraka (Grn). No one else could win without deadlocking the electoral college.
To oppose Clinton is little more than calling a turd sandwich a turd sandwich. One does not also need to point out that her douche opponent is a douche.
While the US elections systems virtually guarantee a two-party system, it does not mean the two on top always have to be the same parties. If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I do wish a pox on both houses--along with a hemorrhagic fever, parasitic worm infection, and some kind of blotchy skin rash. I am not staying out of the election. I think Clinton would competently lead the country in the wrong direction, and I think Trump would be a national embarrassment on multiple fronts. Strategically, the best strategy I could follow would be to bash the presumptive front-runner, whomever it may be, to keep the two major candidates as close as possible, and hope that the minor candidates can somehow win enough states to deadlock the electoral college.
Note that it is unlikely that is the primary motivation for Wikileaks. But it does show that this game is not a zero-sum either-or.
Unless your argument is that HRC would be equivalently as bad for the US as Trump, this argument does not make sense. Neither Stein nor Johnson can win this election; neither has a chance materially better than that of Joe Exotic Speaks For America 2016.
I have no expectation that Johnson or Stein could win, except in a strictly mathematical-theoretical sense. They are both on enough ballots that they could win a majority in the electoral college, if and only if enough people voted for them.
But they do not have those votes--largely because many people who share your general opinion keep hammering home the message that if you do not vote for one of the top two candidates, then at best your vote does not matter, and at worst it destroys America.
My concerns are that Trump is a misogynistic sleaze who will undermine US diplomatic prestige, be generally ineffective as a government executive trying to act like a business executive, and will damage international trade; and that Clinton is a corrupt politician who will undermine US liberty, continue indefinitely the harmful policies of Bush II and Obama, and will damage the rule of law. The fact that those third-party candidates have a statistically zero chance of winning actually makes me more comfortable in voting for one of them.
On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place. And on the even more remote chance that the Democrats self-destruct, I want the Greens to be big enough to step into their shoes. Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power.
They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
> On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place.
Don't kid yourself about some other party ever taking the place of the Democrats or Republicans. The best you can hope for is that the libertarians gain more influence than they currently have through the larger Republican party consuming them. Whether you view this as a needed shift in the right direction for the Republicans or not enough of a shift and at the cost of any power the libertarians had likely depends on how far you lean libertarian. Same with the Democrats and Green Party.
Our two party system hasn't survived for as long as it has because each party innately catered to it's constituents needs from the beginning. Each party has shifted greatly over time to track what their constituents cared about.
> Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power. ... They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
They are never going to die, period. But that's okay. They don't need to die, they just need to change, and there's plenty of precedent for that.
Just to amplify the comments nearby: politics is more than presidential elections.
In presidential elections, because of the US political system, you really do have just two choices. You may lament this - I have! But it's the world we live in. Saying you'll vote for a third party candidate to "register your complaint" is a null gesture.
If you really care about politics, you'd have to work to push the party of your choice in the direction you want. This is long, hard work, and happens outside the presidential cycle. You have to march with signs, attend boring meetings, and persuade people you just met.
Complaining about the broken system every four years is neither mature nor effective.
I am moved to write this because, for multiple election cycles, I was that guy, until I realized my folly.
> If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I think it's far more likely that if the Republicans fall apart, a large component will pivot and eat up one or more of those other parties to retain a Republican designation with slightly different values. It's a mistake to think of either of the two major parties as static.
This. An extremely important thing to understand about the American political system, and also the exact reason why the Trump campaign is failing (the belief that the Republican party is a single ideological force and not a coalition of different interests).
I learned this from The West Wing, along with most of my knowledge of how federal politics works. There are conservative Democrats, and liberal Republicans. Being a bleeding heart liberal in a swing state isn't going to win you the a seat.
This is in strong contrast to Westminster parliaments, where political parties are for the most part a monolith, only occasionally allowed a "conscience vote" (that's not to say there isn't infighting). To vote against the party is a very good way to get booted from the party, which as far as I'm aware is practically impossible in Congress, the closest you have is being expelled from a caucus.
Suppose someone decides whether he wants to join the military or not. Isn't it important for him to know, that either a moron or a psychopath will decide where to deploy him? That he'll be deployed either because a foreign leader said something mean about the president on twitter or because someone bribed the president?
Are those the only choices? Or could the nation undergo a transformation about how money & politics are entwined and rethink the presidential elections?
Imagine a lake of piss, next to it, a mountain of shit.
Now I dump a whole bunch of garbage onto one of them.
Which am I supporting?
Or maybe you can explain this bit from the article that really mystified me: "[Russian hackers did something] with the aim of undermining the US democratic process". We've all seen what this democratic process looks like on TV, so what does it actually still mean, to undermine this democratic process?
Most Americans, do not really want to support Clinton over Trump or vice versa, they're angry and disappointed that from a nation of several hundred million people, apparently these two are the choices given to them by "the democratic process".
And apparently this is the way it is, because the election system makes it that way. It's probably the same causes that make just about every US election for as long as I remember end up just about this close to 50/50. Which, if you know anything about voting systems theory, is the number one failure mode of majority voting. But nobody finds this cultural either/or winner/loser fixation alarming at all, apparently. So again, what's left to undermine, really?
It's just like accusing someone of trying to undermine freedom of speech in China.
Why would Assange, a confirmed Anarchist, support conservative, capitalist Republicans? That doesn't make any sense.
If anything, Assange would want the third party libertarian to win since he is the only guy advocating to stop the wars and reduce American involvement overseas, which is what Assange wants. He sees America as a menace and wants to stop the brutality of American "peace" in countries they have no business being in.
Assange doesn't support Trump or the Republicans. He supports Hillary Clinton not becoming President, because of his personal vendetta against her. It just happens that his efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign help Trump.
As an anarchist, Assange probably wouldn't care about the libertarians more than any other candidate, since any candidate would only futher the existence and legitimacy of a state which he would rather see destroyed. If he did support Trump, it would be because he believes a Trump Presidency would only hasten America's demise.
Citation please. I haven't heard anything about that.
> Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump
Wikileaks can only leak what they've been given. Maybe people are feeding them more info about Hillary, but I would respect Wikileaks far less if they withheld information during an election year to protect a candidate.
The voters deserve to know everything there is to know about their candidates. It's an assault against the voters to withhold negative information about a candidate because you don't want their opponent to win.
Could you link to statements where Assange is given praise to Trump and encouraging people to vote for Trump, you know like quality comments do that make assertion about peoples intentions. It would be a nice change to the many political opinions being thrown around here that assume that people can't just hate both political figures and view them both as corrupt and harmful.
This is one of those weird arguments I hear all the time from WL supporters that I don't understand why I'm supposed to even take it seriously; it's gaslighty in the same way Mike Pence's claim that Trump hadn't said those things about Syria and Russia are.
Obviously, he doesn't have to say anything positive about Trump at all to support him, and in fact the kind of support he's offering (a drip-drip feed of the products of Russian hacking calculated to create an "October Surprise") is far more valuable than any verbal support he could give Trump directly.
I mean here to be dismissive without being too disrespectful. But I'll be candid: people who say Assange isn't supporting Trump sound pretty silly. Like, the claim says more about them than it does about the election.
You're asserting that Assange supports Trump because of the fact he's opposing HRC on the basis of "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality.
Believing that sort of dichotomy is "pretty silly" and says plenty about you.
I entertain many ideas, though I don't see that one as particularly likely. I was just pointing to an unstated assumption, not one that I saw as likely to be false.
There actually is what I believe a credible alternate explanation to Wikileaks supporting Trump, and it's that Wikileaks (or perhaps just Assange) is fighting for relevance, and is willing to be the obvious pawn of others to keep that relevance. What if it's not Wikileaks that's drip-feeding the information, but the source itself? One would think Assange would be smart enough to not promise what he hasn't already gotten hold of, but perhaps he agreed to a release schedule before getting all the information, and is following through on his promise. Not that I think that excuses being a pawn for what is most likely a state actor trying to meddle in the national election of another country.
Neither case really paints a good picture of Wikileaks as an impartial journalistic organization.
To be equally candid, I find people silly who proclaim that every time someone say a negative about something they are promoting something else.
Through I must say, it does making viewing news more interesting. Someone say a negative about a product, I wonder which competitor paid them? Someone released a security vulnerability, I wonder what competing product they are trying to sell.
It basically makes all negative statements into a conspiracy, which honestly is silly, but fun thought experiment.
Assange is an Anarchist who was to end America's constant war with the rest of the world. Trump and Clinton are the last people he would want to see in the Whitehouse. You know who make perfect sense for Assange to Support? Gary Johnson, the only anti-war candidate and Libertarian. But continue on with your mental gymnastics to turn the anti-war Assange into a capitalist, warhawk republican.
Assange is stuck in an embassy in the UK. Any normal, rational person would want to leave that situation.
Hillary has made it quite clear that would never happen however Trump has been far more supportive of Assange especially since Wikileaks has been his biggest asset.
He could imagine (perhaps justifiably) that by serving as Putin's pawn and supporting Trump he could secure a better venue to seek asylum from Swedish rape charges than the Ecuadoran embassy, whether at the hands of Putin or Trump.
Secondly, and with a little more convoluted reasoning: it seems to be a truism that Republican/Conservative presidencies are harder economically for people living in poverty. Republicans are less socialist, in other words. I think it's pretty clear that Assange would like to see a revolution in the US, and revolutions tend to happen when the people don't have enough to eat. Hoping for Trump to win could be seen as hoping for a revolution in that light.
No, Trump hasn't joked about drone-striking Assange. He has joked about torturing suspected terrorists and stated his intention to see Edward Snowden executed. But he didn't make a tasteless drone joke, that's true.
Right. Trump hasn't attacked Assange personally. If I had read a news article alleging that HRC had said, "Can't we just drone this guy?" about me, I would be pretty terrified to leave my flat as well. Even more so if it appeared that she was about to become the CEO of the US military.
If I could, I would encourage Julian Assange to stopfearingfor his life, and startliving it, whatever precious little (or lot) of it he might have left. Unfortunately, if he can't access the internet, he can't read this comment.
It's true that the whole world is watching this, and a lot of us in the US care not only for the fate of Assange, but also for the fate of our nation, how these two have become intertwined, and what it will mean if Assange does indeed come to harm as a result of his journalistic actions.
If I were Julian, I would use right now as the perfect opportunity to walk out, and face the charges in Sweden. At least then I could serve actual time (if necessary), and have an end to my imprisonment within sight.
Above all, this is certainly an excellent opportunity for Hillary to show that she can resolve a crisis diplomatically. If she could just tone things down a bit, she could assure Julian (and the world) that she does not actually mean him any harm. Of anyone, I would think that Hillary could be quite good at projecting soft power globally.
Besides, can you imagine what it would be like if they killed him now? The Hollywood trailer of his biopic would have to start with, "First, they cut your internet access ..." ;)
This is completely tangential to the OP, but what do the "means of production" mean nowadays? It's more and more about intelligence, intelligence property, knowledge and brain power. The latter is clearly owned by the workers who have brains; how do you socialize or nationalize them? And how do you nationalize IPR?
It means power -- power to the people in the interest of constitutional equality and liberty, not a tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, or bad democracy.
Aristotle said there are 6 kinds of government, 3 good ones and 3 bad ones.
The bad ones are where the ruler rules in their own interest. The good ones are where the ruler rules in the public interest.
How many people rule:
In Tyranny - 1 person rules in their own interest
Monarchy - 1 person rules in the public interest (a good tyrant is a monarch)
Aristocracy - a few people rule in the public interest
Oligarchy - a few people rule in their own interest
Democracy - all people rule in the public interest
Bad Democracy - all people rule in the interest of the majority and oppress the minority
>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” Mr. Assange said on Fox News. “I mean, from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second of the day.”
That's the thing. Rather than being a neutral clearinghouse, that it pretends to be, it's more and more selectively his mouthpiece, used to release information on people Assange dislikes, threaten others, and withhold release for groups he approves of.
There is Assange's alleged Russian sponsorship [1]. The lack of Wikileaks activity critical of Russia and the attribution of some of its content to Russian intelligence operations [2] supports that.
> He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election.
He's in sanctuary, in part, because of fear of extradition to the US. So yeah, he does have a stake.
If Clinton wins she has no motivation to stop an extradition, since she figures in WL and other leaks.
If Trump wins, and Assange/WL is seen to have implicitly supported him, there is a hope for Assange that President Trump could prohibit his DoJ from extraditing, and his DoD from rendering. Not from gratitude, but because Trump is vindictive and that would be a way to stick it to ... to ... The Global Media/Banking/Government/NotWhite Conspiracy.
I'm kind of amazed that WL or someone else hasn't hacked and released Trump data. Do they just not use computers?
i think it is pretty silly to say he has no stake in the election. almost everyone on in the world has a stake in who the american president is. even if it didn't have a direct effect on him, he is extremely idealogical and sees it as himself fighting against the global elite.
Yup. No explanation from @Wikileaks either
(a two day delay after the original enigmatic tweet and kludging yet another reference to Hillary Clinton Goldman Sachs emails - hardly likely to be Ecuador's main concern - into the followup suggests that whoever is managing the Twitter account is more worried about managing the US election news cycle than anything else...)
There goes whatever credibility they had left. Ecuador shut him off, but they deliberately word the original announcement to make it sound like it was the US or the U.K. Good going, guys.
I think that it is just one of those random down times that Virgin Media have on their super-fast optical internets. When this happens to me I curse my housemate for not paying the bill - why else would it be off for days at a time? Then it comes back on, unannounced with my housemate not to blame.
I guess that if you are living in a state of fear, expecting storm troopers through the door at any moment, then you could reasonably presume that the CIA are to blame for one's lack of wifi.
To be honest, I wish it was newsworthy when I spent a day or two offline. But it isn't.
I have no direct evidence. My bet is based on the simple fact that 1) the claim of access being cut off by a state actor is pretty huge and completely unsubstantiated, and 2) random internet outages are not uncommon.
Whoever runs the Wikileaks twitter has posted anti-Semitic tweets and wild conspiracy theories. You're also assuming that whoever posts to the Wikileaks twitter account doesn't want people to believe the most sympathetic, conspiratorial possibility.
> Whoever runs the Wikileaks twitter has posted anti-Semitic tweets
I was surprised by your claim that wikileaks posted something antisemitic, so I googled for it.
Is http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil... what you're talking about? I don't agree that's antisemetic in any honest sense of that word (ie "hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews"). Like, the article's explanation of why it's anti-semitic starts off with "this might be a little hard to follow" -- not something you'd expect in an article throwing around serious accusations.
Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed. --reputation[Slate];
> and wild conspiracy theories
Interesting, any you'd care to link?
> You're also assuming that whoever posts to the Wikileaks twitter account doesn't want people to believe the most sympathetic, conspiratorial possibility.
I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
>I don't agree that's antisemetic in any honest sense of that word (ie "hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews").
It's using the clearly anti-Semitic (((echo))) format, and linking those people to a mysterious cabal working against them. That is an incredibly standard anti-Semitic view. In what way is that not prejudiced against Jews?
>Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed.
What is Hanlon's razor for including an anti-Semitic key in their tweet? I'm honestly asking what the simpler explanation is for them including that, and then going on to link (((those people))) to an international conspiracy, something people have accused Jews of for centuries.
>I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did. Posting a wild conspiracy theory in this case would be openly accusing a specific person or group of people of murder with no evidence.
I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
> Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause -- aka a lot of cost with no benefit. Seems surprisingly stupid/pointless/shortsighted.
Then why use it? You're saying it's more likely they hadn't heard of it, but used it anyway? You've never heard of it, have you ever surrounded a reference to people you don't like and are accusing of nefarious deeds with triple parentheses? What about the additional part about a shadowy cabal that you ignored?
>Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did.
If I offer a reward for proof that aliens abducted Elvis, you don't consider that lending credence to a conspiracy theory?
>I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
>They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause
No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
> Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
Leaks of significance are of course worth more. Soliciting leaks is absolutely something they do (and should do).
> No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
Well, except that denying hard evidence doesn't usually work (#include those who have been leak subjects). Also people all over the web are having conversations like this one, so the situation degenerating into a head-said/she-said situation would have a cost. Which as I pointed out before was an obvious outcome of their tweet.
> They can't possibly isolate it to just Assange, so it must be the whole embassy.
Maybe not specifically to Assange, but they might be able to get close to that. An embassy probably wants to have separate, isolated networks to keep various classes of users apart. The top diplomats and officials who deal with the most important, most secret stuff on one. Another for lower level officials who deal with secret, but more routine stuff. A third that provides wifi for people visiting the embassy to use its services. Maybe a fourth for foreign diplomats attending meetings.
I could see them going beyond just building one physical network and then using firewalls to segment it into separate isolated logical networks and actually having separate physical connections for some of the networks, such as the one for visitors seeking services, and the one for foreign diplomats.
If they do have multiple physical networks, I'd expect they have Assange on one of the ones that is not important to the normal functioning of the embassy, such as one mostly used by people visiting to apply for visas and things like that. A large fraction of such visitors will have cellular internet on their phones and won't even notice that the embassy public wifi is broken.
I believe he's staying in some sort of separate guest house on the embassy grounds...of course forcing him to walk across the lawn to the main building hardly seems like a worthwhile op.
I don't get why everyone is so willing to believe this claim, based on nothing but what Wikileaks says.
I mean, what would be the goal? They go to all this trouble, and risk an international incident, for what? It's not like they'd actually be able to prevent Assange from communicating. At best they'd inconvenience him slightly until he figures out an alternate means of communication.
All your theories rest on the assumption that someone deliberately and maliciously 'cut' his internet access. There's no evidence of that or even that his access has been 'cut', whatever that means.
It's certainly a lot easier to conceive how announcement that state level actors had interfered with his internet access benefits Assange than how a deliberate, malicious and above all temporary and ineffective cut in his internet access on this particular day benefits state actors.
On the one hand we have a guy with the big cache of emails he really wants people to pay more attention to before November 9th, and a police interview originally scheduled for today that he might want to find a reason to postpone for more than a month next time. On the other hand, I'm really struggling to see what forcing Assange to wait a few hours or change computers achieves, or what the motivation for shutting him off today rather than November 8th is?
To me, the simplest and obvious explanation, barring any new evidence from independent sources, is that Wikileaks (the only source so far) is simply trying to generate attention and stay in the news cycle. It's not like these email releases have produced anything mildly interesting, let alone scandalous.
The actual article states that the BBC tried to contact the embassy by phone, but the staff there are not authorised to comment. They have thus far been unable to raise the ambassador by email. People have been down there by foot, and there is apparently nothing to see.
Catch 22. People showed up at the embassy clerk today, but they told them you need a prior appointment with Julian. Which is only possible via internet. So nada.
Even if the embassy was shut down surely just a cheap smart phone would rectify the situation and get him back online. Are they somehow blocking mobile signals as well?
It would be a fun hackathon project to build such a thing out of the components you could find in typical office equipment, and I wouldn't expect it to take a competent EE more than a few hours (if you'll allow continuous wave Morse code as a transport layer).
But based on where the embassy is, it's probably easier to stand near a window and get on the WiFi from Pret a Manger next door.
Yes, but Assange cannot step out of the embassy to buy one himself, and he's fairly paranoid. There are probably only very few people in the world from whom he would accept a phone to enter all of his precious passwords, if he is willing to use a phone for that at all.
It's probably all the same to him. Assange is likely clever enough to assume all his traffic is combed through by smart people, no matter which data transport he uses.
So wouldn't many other people be able to confirm this? How many other people visit or work in said embassy, and how many officially assigned to the embassy work there??
> so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
When a system is failing it enters a death spiral where the pool from which it can hire people gets shallower and shallower (less people are interested in working for the government) until the only persons left are either morons or sociopaths (who want power)
I had began archiving the /news and /newest because a lot of the Wikileak threads I was upvoting were disappearing into the ether. Seems they were getting mass-flagged/killed, this one survived. Also seems there has been discussion earlier today but the threads were mass-flagged off the front page.
No, not that I've ever seen. Though they do have a habit of burying/flagging topics pertaining to the release of documents when they concern a particular party. First few times could be brushed off as coincidence but over the last few months topics from DCLeaks, Guccifer and Wikileaks have been targeted
The problem with this story as I see it is it instantly connects with the shitshow of the American presidential cycle, and thus has attracted a wide variety of low quality (speculative / rumor mill) type of commentary unfortunately.
The only sure conclusion I've personally reached in this election cycle is that no one sane would want to run for American president, or even be a part of any American political system (beyond the local level where things seem a bit more level headed)....
From a Swedish perspective the Julian Assange case is particular close to the heart since it really shows how corrupt even our courts and politicians are. Sweden is rated as one of the countries with the lowest corruption but still 6 years have passed without even interviewing him for the pathetic accusations.
The entire case is a joke and whatever the US-election result is, it's bad for the entire world since our corrupt politicians will do whatever American corrupt politicians say.
It's not that simple. They had to find a procedure that is acceptable to Swedish, Ecuadorian and British courts. These negotiations have only recently been completed and a meeting has tentatively been booked for the end of October.
Yes, I'm sure that there was no way this could have been done faster and that the statue of limitations in Sweden running out had nothing to do with it. /s
In my (Western European!) country, a women was just arrested after being convicted in 2000. I don't know the Swedish legal system, but it doesn't surprise me that such a thorny issue takes a long time.
Some allegations remain (the most serious ones, obviously) some have run out or are running out. It would make good sense to try to get those in before they expire.
Last time I heard (about 2-3 months ago) the Ecuadorians had accepted that the swedish prosecutors were present when the hearing took place. They should not be allowed to ask any questions. Questions had to be sent in first and asked by the Ecuadorians.
I dont think its that simple as "Just go there and have the hearing".
He went ever further than that. He proposed to go to Sweden if he could be provided with a document promising he would not get deported to US. It was refused.
It's an absurd request. No country could issue such a document. For one thing, it would establish a precedent that the government could arbitrarily decide to overall any future decisions of the judiciary. For another, it would probably violate Sweden's treaty obligations.
He has in fact more protections against extradition in Sweden than he does in the UK, both because the UK has a friendlier bilateral extradition agreement with the US and because the ECHR would require the consent of both the UK and Sweden at this point for him to be extradited.
Doesn't being in the Ecuadorean embassy mean he is technically/politically residing in Ecuador? Or is that an oversimplification when it comes to how embassies work?
That doesn't really mean anything. If Assange was arrested in the embassy, or, like, by a helicopter when he's out on the balcony, he would very much end up subject to the UK judicial process.
The thing protecting Assange right now isn't the judicial process, but rather the inviolability of embassies. The UK police are adhering to the norm that they can't enter the embassy without permission. That norm is routinely violated in other places, but I think everyone involved is comfortable with Assange's self-inflicted house arrest.
Assange cannot be arrested in the Ecuadorian embassy without the permission of the Ecuadorian ambassador. The British police can't enter the embassy without permission. The balcony makes no difference.
> That norm is routinely violated in other places
No, it isn't. That would severely damage relationships between the two countries. It's more than a "norm", it's a fundamental principle of diplomacy going back millennia.
It's a fundamental principle of diplomacy going back 55 years, and if you'd like to put money on my inability to cite you an example of a country not respecting the inviolability of a diplomatic mission on their own soil, I invite you to name a number.
At any rate: we agree: it's the Vienna Accords that keep the UK from simply lassoing Assange and hauling him out of the building. It has nothing to do with whether he's on Ecuadorian soil (he is not).
The Vienna Convention is only the current basis for international law. The concept of diplomatic immunity is at least as hold as history itself. Yes it gets violated occasionally, like nearly every law and custom we've ever created. That's generally treated as an act of war though. You're the only one in this thread that said anything about Ecuadorian soil.
Similar to "diplomatic immunity". It's not like Lethal Weapon where you can openly deal drugs and assassinate people and upon your imminent arrest, waive your diplomatic credentials and walk off.
Whilst subject to use and abuse, most countries have agreements that while certain officials may not be prosecuted (oftentimes, this is only "for offenses related to their official capacity") in the guest country, that they will be, in their home state.
Even general principles around arrest or detainment have "reasonable constraints" for self-defense, public safety or for the prevention of a serious criminal act/felony.
It's an oversimplification. The embassy is not Ecuadorian soil. But the embassy itself is inviolable, and while that privilege is not absolute (it has been routinely broken by countries around the world), violating it is a big deal, which is why the UK hasn't simply hauled Assange out.
But no, Ecuador does not have a vote in whether Assange can be extradited. The UK and Sweden do because they are both parties to a treaty that says they do.
I can't actually find any examples of extrajudicial extraordinary rendition originating from the UK. The best I can find is that some of the CIA flights refueled in a UK territory.
It's not possible within the limits of the Swedish constitution, as has been endlessly explained by now.
Presidential pardons are irrelevant as Sweden is not the USA, but in any case, the President cannot preemptively pardon people for future offenses for which they may or may not be convicted.
>And they could preemptively refuse to allow him to be extradited for the leaks by stating definitively that it was not a crime by their laws.
Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority to override the courts and declare that someone isn't guilty of a crime in the absence of any proper legal process?
> but in any case, the President cannot preemptively pardon people for future offenses for which they may or may not be convicted.
Well, in Assange's case, those would be past offences for which they may or may not be convicted. And I think that would be the same situation as Nixon when Ford pardoned him - he'd already done the deed, but hadn't been convicted yet.
edit: Though, since we're speculating already - does it even make sense for an American president to pardon an Australian citizen?
Ok, you are correct that the US President can in fact pardon people preemptively (though it is very rare). But no such power is available to anyone within the Swedish government or judiciary, so far as I am aware, and to pardon Assange preemptively would in any case violate Sweden's treaty obligations.
No, as has been explained before, that's just apologist rhetoric. Yes, their government is different than the USA but it's ridiculous to think that the leader of a free country couldn't figure out a way to make it work.
They could push the courts to issue a declaratory judgement on the issue of leaks, for instance. Or pass a new law making whistleblowing specifically legal and give retroactive immunity. Or investigate the prosecutor for misconduct because of their persecution and unwillingness to advance the investigation. Or allow the courts to try the case remotely.
Or they could simply throw the paperwork away, making prosecution impossible. It might not be legal, but you're living under a rock if you think that much of what your government does would be legal in the courts.
> Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority
Nobody cares. That question is the sole point of blame-diffusion systems. All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
Bush didn't have the authority to do much of what he did, but he had the ability and by the time we could point out the difference it was a done deal and now he's not prosecuted so I guess he did have the authority...
The rules work differently at that level. But, even if they didn't, better the leader of a country sits in a country-club prison for doing the right thing than yet another innocent is illegally kidnapped and tortured.
>They could push the courts to issue a declaratory judgement on the issue of leaks, for instance. Or pass a new law making whistleblowing specifically legal and give retroactive immunity. Or investigate the prosecutor for misconduct because of their persecution and unwillingness to advance the investigation. Or allow the courts to try the case remotely. Or they could simply throw the paperwork away, making prosecution impossible. It might not be legal, but you're living under a rock if you think that much of what your government does would be legal in the courts.
None of these suggestions makes any sense.
(i) A declaratory judgment on the issue of leaks, whatever that means, would have no bearing on Assange's arrest warrant for rape.
(ii) Assange is not being charged with whistleblowing; he is being charged with rape.
(iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
(v) I'd be wary of throwing legal niceties aside. It's only those that are preventing the UK government from entering the embassy and arresting him there.
>All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
This is false as far as anyone can tell. If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate.
> (ii) Assange is not being charged with whistleblowing
Nicely numbered, but not well thought out.
Assange is avoiding going to Sweden because he rightfully expects a high chance of being rended to USA custody. A program the Swedish government embraced. Eliminating one of the main legal avenues for this is precisely the point.
> (iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct
Totally untrue. The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
The organizations I work with have rules for automatic investigations of people who deviate from the norm in suspicious circumstances. If there's any question, there's an investigating. Perhaps it's nothing, but if there was an investigation which found no unjust influence from the political side of the equation it would greatly increase public trust in the outcome of the trial.
It makes no sense to turn yourself in to the law when you have good reason to assume you will NOT get a fair trial, and all indicators point to corruption.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
That's not true. There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
Also, tough. They had custody and let him go. Why do they deserve infinite do-overs? They could try him and ban him from entering Sweden if they were serious, as that would also serve the goal of making Swedish people safer.
>> All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
> This is false as far as anyone can tell.
No, you just need to use your imagination. Picture your mother being arrested on a fabricated charge. Think of all the points along the way that you could ruin the government's case through interference if you were the court clerk, a beat cop, etc. Vastly many people have to do just the right things for a arrest/trial/charge to be valid. Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process. Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
This in fact is your moral responsibility. If you join an organization its crimes are on your shoulders unless you take an effort to correct them.
> If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate
Start by reading the wiki article. Fix that if you think it doesn't match the citations. Then come back and ask about anything you still don't understand.
Consider also reading the article about Civil Disobedience.
> A program the Swedish government embraced. Eliminating one of the main legal avenues for this is precisely the point.
It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
> The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
>There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
>Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
>Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process
The hypocrisy of this part of your comment is quite astonishing. You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
> None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
It's well documented. He was interviewed in Sweden and left weeks later after notifying the police. That means he isn't a fugitive.
Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return, showing that they can if they want to. This means they are choosing not to advance the case while loudly declaring otherwise. That's the process deviation.
> It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
> Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
Just because you would lie doesn't mean Assange would. I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
> How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Assuming he didn't comply willingly, I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons. But even if not, house-arrest has proven successful so far.
> You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice. Humanity 101.
I'm pointing out the deviations of the prosecutor to explain the irregularities that people would be calling to have investigated. It's not a baseless fishing trip.
>It's well documented. He was interviewed in Sweden and left weeks later after notifying the police. That means he isn't a fugitive.
EAW.
"Fugitive" isn't a precisely defined term, but he is subject to an arrest warrant and isn't complying with it.
>Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return,
As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions, and according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
> A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
I doubt that this is possible. At least, you appear to be the only person who has suggested it. Has anyone with the relevant legal expertise indicated that this is a possibility?
>I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW. Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
> I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons.
How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
>Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice.
You already accept that Sweden can try Assange. Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
> "Fugitive" isn't a precisely defined term, but he is subject to an arrest warrant and isn't complying with it.
Color me a traditionalist, but only valid warrants count.
> As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions
Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
> according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
> I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW.
He's not ignoring them, he's refusing to comply with non-legal orders.
You have no reason to think he wouldn't comply with legal orders, because he has always complied before. This isn't wikipedia, but Assume Good Faith.
> Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
Right, and he's not under any obligation to do with them to participate in the sham.
> How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
> You already accept that Sweden can try Assange.
It's their courthouse, they can try Kermit the Frog if they want. It's the legitimacy of the trial that's in question.
> Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
Because one requires extraordinary rendition. If it's legal for me to eat an icecream cone, why is it illegal for me to kidnap you, lock you in a box, and transport you to a foreign country, then eat an icecream cone? (Hint, the kidnapping and rendition...)
>Color me a traditionalist, but only valid warrants count.
The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
>Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him. This was explained repeatedly at the time. See e.g. paragraph 140 of the high court judgment:
In our view, the terms of the EAW read as a whole made clear that not only was the EAW issued for the purpose of Mr Assange being prosecuted for the offence, but that he was required for the purposes of being tried after being identified as the perpetrator of specific criminal offences. He was therefore accused of the offences specified in the EAW. Nothing in the EAW suggested he was wanted for questioning as a suspect.
Or, directly from the Swedish prosecutor (paragraph 142):
It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries.
>Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
He is not wanted merely for questioning.
>I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities would do under hypothetical circumstances. If you have some inside knowledge, please share it. (I thought wikileaks supporters, of all people, would believe in transparency?)
>Because one requires extraordinary rendition.
What on Earth are you talking about? Assange could go to Sweden today and the trial could be held there. No extraordinary rendition required.
> What on Earth are you talking about? Assange could go to Sweden today and the trial could be held there. No extraordinary rendition required.
Why on earth would he be that stupid though? They clearly aren't prosecuting the case properly so why would he believe he'd get a fair trial?
The only way they'll get him there is if they or the brits abduct him at gunpoint. Extraordinary rendition.
> No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him.
They can say it all they want but that doesn't make it true. They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely. The reason they don't is that it's not about the case, with its likely short sentence, it's about capturing and controlling him. If they tried him remotely he would serve his sentence in a foreign (Ecuadorean likely) prison and they wouldn't have achieved their goal.
> This was explained repeatedly at the time.
Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
> He is not wanted merely for questioning.
Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
> I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities
You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement. You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist so you have the burden of proof.
> The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
No, valid means it's not a setup. The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
>The only way they'll get him there is if they or the brits abduct him at gunpoint. Extraordinary rendition.
That wouldn't be extraordinary rendition, assuming he was being arrested by the British police. (It would be a violation of various diplomatic protocols, which is why the UK hasn't done it.)
>They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
>Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely
They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.) But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
>Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
>Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up. Whether they always wanted to do this is irrelevant. (Although, that being said, your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.)
>You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement.
I may have used the word "know", but of course I admit that this is merely what I suspect. Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia. But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
>You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist
I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
>The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
> That wouldn't be extraordinary rendition, assuming he was being arrested by the British police. (It would be a violation of various diplomatic protocols, which is why the UK hasn't done it.)
If he's arrested on trumped up charges, then yes, it would be. (I'm sure the CIA printed up some sort of receipt (err, warrant) for the people it had smuggled out of the country. Paperwork doesn't make things right.)
> You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
Right, and they always have. But their lies around that, and framing him for fleeing, etc, have rendered that moot. Any legitimacy the trial may have had is up in smoke. If he can't get fair treatment pre-trial why would we think he'd get a fair trial?
> They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.)
That directly contradicts the text of the law. Trials in absentia are possible - there are merely rules for notification, etc.
Also, they've lied before so the default position is that they're lying this time too.
> But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
Because it's their fault, not his. Their fuckups and their lies. Anyone in his position deserves proper treatment.
> They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up.
A warrant they wrote themselves. Not very convincing. Prosecutorial misconduct is not justice and they can't pretend that it is by doubling down.
> But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
To achieve justice.
> I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
No, but you're sure he'll get convicted and that he wouldn't report for jail. That means: rapist, and unrepentant. You didn't say it out right, and now you're walking it back to "strongly suspect"...
> It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
You're saying the usual process involves lies and slander? I doubt that. And no, I don't have a general problem with EAWs...
> Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia.
If he was convicted in absentia, by a clown court, I imagine he'd thumb his nose at Sweden. I would. But if he was given the chance to participate in a real trial, remotely, that would be vastly different.
> your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.
The UN working group on arbitrary detention didn't idly side with him. If the charges appeared to have merit they wouldn't have come out in support. I think they're read both sets of sources...
"""Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange. [...] The Working Group also considered that the detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation."""
He's repeatedly offered to be interviewed in the UK (before he was jailed in the embassy), and Ecuador has offered (at least publicly) for him to be allowed to be interviewed in the embassy.
If there's a warrant for your arrest, and law enforcement knows that you're in a location, do they a) wait for your departure of the location (when they can't, as in the case of an embassy, obtain a warrant to forcibly enter), or b) shrug their shoulders and wander off, and say "I guess you beat us this time", a la crossing the County line in the Dukes of Hazzard?
Now, I will absolutely grant you that the amount of manpower and money spent on such monitoring is ridiculous.
But to act as though the government is imprisoning him against his will by attempting to enforce a legal warrant is ... disingenuous.
I guess you missed the part about how Sweden was going to interview him today and then magically Assange's lawyer wasn't available so they (Assange and the Ecuadorian embassy) postponed the interview a month.
What government cheerfully accepts the precedent that you can dodge legitimate exercise of government authority like this? I mean, the U.S. Post Office will send armed officers after someone for mail fraud in even small amounts – not because it costs less than the crime but to serve as a deterrent for anyone else who might try it in the future.
According to https://justice4assange.com Sweden regularly questions people within the EU yet they have refused to question Julian Assange even though they are free to interrogate him inside the embassy whenever they want.
Sweden refuses to interview him there even though in the 4 years that he's been holed up in the embassy Swedish authorities have interviewed 44 other people in the UK. They also refused to promise to not extradite him to the USA where he would most likely be convicted of espionage and possibly executed.
If you were in his shoes do you think you would step outside given the circumstances? The UK has also stated that even if the Swedish investigation was closed they would still arrest Assange the minute he steps outside. Why wouldn't the UK extradite Assange to the USA if given the opportunity?
It's possible they refuse to interview him there because that's possibly the first step to an international incident. As it is now, they can claim they he's providing barriers to an interview. If they actually interviewed him and decided he needed to be taken unto custody, they would then actually have to address that he's under asylum in an embassy, and possibly come under local pressure to pressure Ecuador to release him. If they refuse, it escalates back and forth until someone backs down and loses face. If they've already received confirmation that Ecuador will not give him up, I can see not interviewing him as what they see as the best option to prevent that situation.
In a legal system, the accused doesn't get to negotiate the details of his interview. Assange, being the narcissistic idiot that he is, chose to imprison himself because for him, being imprisoned in an embassy at least feels a bit like a spy novel instead of just a case of him getting a bit too rapey.
And how is this supposed to be "corrupt". Are you implying a vast conspiracy were the CIA is orchestrating everyone from a random prosecutor up to the highest courts of Sweden (Not that that would even be corruption as it's traditionally defined)?
It is not worth trying to put the blame on Assange here, no matter if and in that case what sort of personality (disorder) he has. The simple fact is that the Swedish justice department acted in very strange ways in this case. I can not find blame for the first round of the case, he'd been accused of rape and those accusations need to be taken seriously. The accusations were investigated after which the prosecutor decided there was no case. This would and should have been the end, were it not that a new prosecutor (Marianne Ny) took up the investigation again and decided to prosecute, lack of case notwithstanding. She refused to hear him in the UK, refused to hear him in Sweden with a guarantee not to be extradited to the US. She refused and waited and drew out the case for such a long time that most of the charges went past the statute of limitations. The details of the case have been discussed far and wide [1] so there is no need to dig into them here, if you're interested just read a few sources (preferably from all sides of the political spectrum to get something resembling the truth).
No, I don't believe it, but it is a possibility I had not thought of and the fact that Assange's internet access has been shut off lends at least a little bit of credibility to the comments (note how that post was made already 8 hours ago).
also, why would I believe some anonymous HN'er about anything. Information is either true or false, the source isn't really relevant, all that matters are the facts.
>Information is either true or false, the source isn't really relevant, all that matters are the facts.
Absurd. Of course your sources matter. A credible source is more believable than an incredible source. Ever heard of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? Looking only at the material presented and not at the presenter of the material is only giving you part of the picture.
Yes, sources matter if all you do is to look at the information and it's source. But if you look at the information and you can find independent verification of rejection of the information then you can form a conclusion that is a lot stronger than just speculation based on info+source.
Possible facts:
Assange has had his internet access shut down (probably true)
Assange has been extradited (status unknown at this point, you seem to want to discredit it based on the source I simply withhold my judgment until there is more information about this)
How can you tell if a piece of information is independently verified if you don't know the source? If you're ignoring who presents the facts and who presents the verification, how do you determine whether or not the reporter of the verification is independent from the reporter of the fact? Sources matter.
And there is no such thing as a "probably true possible fact". There are facts and there are allegations.
> How can you tell if a piece of information is independently verified if you don't know the source?
By your reckoning no anonymous source can ever be credible. Some pretty interesting stuff has come out over the years from anonymous sources and turned out - retrospectively - to have been accurate and likely to have been a leak by an insider. Given that nobody is ever (Snowden excepted) to go on the record about an imminent operation from inside some government agency the only way such information could ever come out is through anonymous sources.
An anonymous source is vetted by the news agency which reports on the story. You're trusting the news agency to do their due diligence and think critically about the information they are given. The source is rarely completely anonymous as their identity is known by the news agency.
If the NYT says they got a tip from an anonymous source about Assange, it means more to me than if my neighbor Steve says HE got a tip from an anonymous source.
Whether you like it or not, the world has moved on and sources are now able to post stuff directly without having to go through intermediaries like the established press.
This causes all kinds of havoc and requires more skepticism on the part of the consumer but that does not diminish the fact that it might be true and that the timing is interesting.
Now chances are better than even (a lot better) that this is false, but so far it fits the facts as good (and in some cases better) than most other theories about why this is happening other than the one about today being the day of the 'interview' with the Swedish representatives.
Multiple accounts, particularly ones which are 1) detailed and 2) generally support one another, are a good start. Even if you don't know who the individual reporters are.
As an example, the UNHCR follows a similar protocol when investigating reports of atrocities. The individual reporters, while not fully anonymous, frequently have no previous basis to assess credibility. If their stories generally correspond, you've got an indication of truth. If the stories differ on material points, there are problems.
The story of Susannah from the Book of Daniel (Bible or Torah) has an excellent early exemplar of this: the stories of two claimed witnesses differed materially in the description of a crucial tree, impeaching their credibility.
> Assange has had his internet access shut down (probably true)
What basis do you have for the (probably true) rating?
The man literally told people he rescheduled his election-changing news conference from a balcony to a middle-of-the-night webcast, because he thought a sniper was going to kill him on the balcony. As if this was likely. Then it turned out his election-changing news conference was an advert for his book.
Because he could easily prove his internet access wasn't shut down by sending out a message to the contrary. Also the Ecuadorian embassy could deny it.
Absent any proof that he actually has access I'm going on the assumption that he does not because that is what they claim.
Now whether or not it really is a state actor (could be Ecuador!), Assange's laptop frying the network card or some other reason why he hasn't got access (didn't pay the phone bill?) is up for grabs.
1. Because it makes him seem like a martyr to the cause without him actually having to do anything, just like when he implied he couldn't give a speech on the embassy balcony because Clinton's forces were about to kill him with a sniper rifle. (http://www.angrypatriotmovement.com/wikileaks-huge-hillary-a...) ...so he had his followers tune into a 3AM webcast instead, which ended up just being a promo sales pitch for his book. He is excellent at marketing.
2. The truth will not "come out regardless" if he was lying. It's very hard to prove a negative. Even if the embassy puts out an announcement saying "As far as we know, his internet is fine," Wikileaks can just say "The embassy is in cahoots with the Americans," or "It was cut earlier, and sources told me it was the gubbment." No one will care much at that point, his martyrdom point will have been made.
Time will tell. You could be right, you could be not. I believe that if Assange says something that is not truthful that reflects bad on Ecuador (one possible explanation is that Ecuador blocked his access) that they would make a statement if what he said was incorrect. And I'd believe them over Assange if that's what it came to.
There was another poster this summer who claimed to be an FBI insider. He spilled a lot of info about their corrupt investigation into the Clinton emails. He made a lot of predictions that ended up being true. So I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility; 4chan is a known safe place for anonymity online.
You don't need to be an intelligence anything or work for any 3 letter agency to make a prediction like "HC will not suffer any consequences", which is essentially what it all boiled down to.
Difficult to imagine this being "influenced" by Clinton. It feels like it would be to Trump's significant advantage if this happens. It plays directly into his narrative.
Not necessarily. If she is fearful of very damaging leaks in the pipeline, Clinton would want to make sure that, at the very least, they don't come out through Wikileaks, which has a 100% track record of real leaks and can't be denied.
Don't twist my words. I said that they have never leaked fake documents. They clearly have an agenda in what they select for publishing.
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In response to mejari (both of his replies) below, I'm rate-limited:
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Did you even read that article? That's not what it says. They just didn't publish the documents. What it does say is that the hackers that stole the documents were joking about editing them before sending them to wikileaks.
They faked the documents by editing their contents to remove data they didn't want released. How is that twisting your words to show that your claim they've never leaked fake documents is false?
The part where you said that your problem with wikileaks was that they chose to not release some of the info they have.
You didn't say that they released fake data. You implied that all the data that they DID release was true and accurate, but there was some other true data that they didn't release.
The fact that they explicitly removed data from their release is faking their release. It's not like there was even an entire release they chose not to do, they did the release but selectively removed a small part of it, seemingly in support of Russia. Then they presented their leak as the entire leak. That is false, they presented a false picture.
They leaked falsified documents. Either through receiving falsified documents and releasing them or through falsifying them themselves. Either way your claim is false.
Respectable organizations don't copy text from unsourced articles on partisan blogs, change the font to Courier to make it look like a cable, and then screenshot the result.
Hmm, that's actually a good point, I didn't realize the primary source was so sketchy. Thanks for correcting me, seems I was too quick in my judgement. I'd like to edit/delete my comments, but I don't see the interface. Are HN comments immutable?
yes please link me to an article that actually says that
:shows truepundit article:
seems flimsy, doesn't really contain any actual sources other than "sources said". can you cite any other articles that don't use truepundit as the source?
:crickets:
yes. one article on an arguably either satire or hard-right website is the source of all the "drone him" talk
Well, 12 hours have passed and no one is dead or imprisoned, so more 4chan lolz here it seems. No one in their right mind working for an intelligence agency would leak on such a public forum. The risk would be too great.
I immediately thought the 12h are strange, no half-insider would know the exact time schedule, yet it's also plausible to just exaggerate from "soon" to "within 12h".
Extradition is a process that involves an extradition court and a right of appeal. There is absolutely no way they are bundling Assange onto a plane without Wikileaks screaming blue murder. This is highly unlikely to be credible.
Are you joking? This is beyond rule of law. If Ecuador caves Assange will be(or already was) transported unconscious (if not dead) in a black bag by same rendition team that organized and operated concentration camps in Poland, Romania and Ukraine.
The US gov/Obama must be really pissed off he's trying to bring Clinton down (I hope it's obvious this wasn't just a UK-only decision - it's never been a UK-only decision to keep Assange sequestrated there anyway).
The Twitter thread got buried mostly by flags and the flamewar detector, and though we usually override those penalties when it's clear that another discussion will just take its place, sometimes we're sleeping off another political controversy.
We'll avoid marking this one as a duplicate and try to merge the discussions as best we can.
The more I look at this, the more it seems like a brilliant move by Assange to force the media to report more on Wikileaks and the Podesta emails, not just Trumps locker-room antics.
1,223 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 625 ms ] threadIf you're a state party trying to prevent leaks, silencing Julian is probably the worst way to go about it. It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
Well, I'm off to read some classic Tom Clancy.
If you looked at how long it took to find the gold nuggets in the Podesta mails it sounds reasonable willing to force their hand.
Apropos of the keyword list, dissecting the corpus could be done in a few hours with a promo-code worth of AWS time.
3.6GB - http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-A.aes256.t...
49GB - http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-B.aes256.t...
349GB - http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-C.aes256.t...
94GB - https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/2016-06-03_insurance.aes2...
I don't know why they would put out a few hundred gigabytes of fake files. The contents might not be as interesting as people hope, though.
Seems to me as likely as not that there is nothing really there.
Ciphertext indistiguishability[1] is a basic requirement for any encryption scheme. All modern ciphers are designed to make that hard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_attack
That said he can't really play that card too often.
Looks like you can check it now. The keys went public:
pre-commitment 3: UK FCO f33a6de5c627e3270ed3e02f62cd0c857467a780cf6123d2172d80d02a072f74
pre-commitment 2: Ecuador eae5c9b064ed649ba468f0800abf8b56ae5cfe355b93b1ce90a1b92a48a9ab72
pre-commitment 1: John Kerry 4bb96075acadc3d80b5ac872874c3037a386f4f595fe99e687439aabd0219809
https://twitter.com/wikileaks
To trick people like you? `dd if=/dev/urandom` is much easier than finding a comparable quantity of actual info.
I don't know enough to have much opinion on the odds that's the case, vs them being real, though.
The same reason a stick-up man might put their hand in their pocket to mimic the shape of a gun. If you have no weapon, it's still often useful to make people think you have one.
And following on from this line of thought, it is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that they did think of this scenario, but feel that the risk of calling Assange's bluff (see the speculation that the insurance files are just random data meant to seed misinformation) is less than the risk of whatever they think he knows about them being leaked.
Which makes you wonder, what are they afraid of to consider such action?
1) "John Kerry has threatened the Ecuadorian President with "grave consequences for Equador" if Assange is not silenced @StoneColdTruth" [1]
2) "Reports the Brits storm the Ecuadorian Embassy tonite while Kerry demands the UK revoke their diplomatic status so Assange can be seized" [2]
It really does make me wonder what documents Wikileaks might have that could make US diplomats so riled up.
[0] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/roger-stone-back-chann...
[1] https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/787858612844695552
[2] https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/787863160149598208
Rather I'm guessing it's just speculation based on fact the John Kerry is currently visiting the UK.
I doubt the USG is involved in this. They have a pretty solid track record of both respecting human rights and due process. Keep in mind the US government is the most ethical government in the world. Assange, on the other hand, is a rapist and a Russian puppet trying to hijack the US election. He probably is a Trump supporter in disguise and a closeted systemd committer. If that wasn't enough, there are multiple reports claiming that Assange does not respect PEP8 in his code. This last thing was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
Edit: Fair characterization of their level of systemd hate; not any correlation to US politics or Wikileaks.
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=search...
Would this change your opinion?
Do you honestly think anyone could storm such an embassy and not have a massive media footprint? When the Iranian embassy was stormed there was wall-to-wall coverage on the news, and that was in the 1980s, before every second person on the street had a cellphone and twitter.
2. At the time the Internet got cut-off it was 6:40am in the UK. Pretty early.
3. The British government has the power to issue DA-notice to media outlets.
4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
5. "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating. If you have up-to-date information, feel free to share.
Surely they can suppress all blogs and all of twitter and facebook at the same time. Oh, hold - why didn't they suppress the tweet we're discussing.
> 4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
It require a little more than a bobby walking up to the door and asking politely. It's fairly likely that this would get noticed by someone passing by - mind you: That's not somewhere in the woods, it's central London.
> "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating.
No. You are speculating. The null hypothesis is that nothing of that sort happened. Apart from handwaving speculation you haven't offered anything that would even resemble proof or supporting evidence.
Secondly central London has rather good wifi and 4G coverage. Presumably the "appropriate contingency plans" are to switch his phone's personal hotspot on and carry on as normal. Though there might be a nasty phone bill coming down the line.
British media didn't report anything today, so the D-Notice threat is very likely.
Strange security vans with a strange white side wall to be opened sidewards appeared today near the embassy.
I've already said why I think such a storming would provide evidence that even state-sponsored actors would not be able to suppress. The Brompton Road and Sloane street both have plenty of pedestrians and vehicular traffic at 6:40am (I'm speaking as someone who used to bicycle down them every day around that time).
Given no evidence to the contrary, a much better hypothesis that fits the known facts is that there was some sort of standard ISP snafu or similar tech problem.
Given that cutting off internet before means he can't do any new live data releases ("Maybe he screwed up setting up his dead man's switch?" unlikely but possible at this point) and means that during a raid there'd be no heroic live stream from inside the safe room "resisting the oppressive dogs of the US government come to silence him."
I don't really see what there is to gain from a raid to seize him now though. Presumably wikileaks is capable of trickling out whatever 'damning' emails/cables/files they already have without him so it's probably not the goal.
Though it might be something: a guy claiming to be a CIA intelligence analyst says that Assange is about to get extradited. We will know in the coming hours for sure. If this is true it is pretty damaging to the sexual assault accusations he was facing in Sweden. That would confirm that it was indeed the end-goal of getting him transferred to Sweden.
It was posted a few hours before everything unravelled and so far the anonymous poster was right. Of course, he could just be lucky and trolling for replies. At such an early stage it is interesting to share anyway.
The fact that once he leaves the long-delayed wheels of justice start turning is merely a side-effect. The end-goal is not getting him transferred to Sweden, it is for Assange to be able to show the world that he was right all along by defending himself against the charges against him and not hiding until he could run out the clock.
Why not? Considering that not too long ago it was deemed legal to rape your wife? It's not too long ago that rape wasn't exactly treated as the crime it is now. Without wanting to apologize any of the behavior, it's less than my lifetime ago that the man who took a woman against her will wasn't considered a rapist but rather a role model in large chunks of the population. So yes, it's quite well possible that all of them are rapists. That's the kind of world we live in.
Pop history. Be specific (time, place, evidence) or stop with the demon-haunted characterisations of the past.
2. Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire) 1947 Play
Just two that spring to mind. I'm sure a diligent person could find plenty of other examples of rapist protagonists in 20th century literature.
I mean, didn't you read and discuss "Native Son" in high school? Do you think that the fact that its protagonist committed murder means that Richard Wright or society at the time approved of murder?
And by the way, when "The Fountainhead" and "Streetcar Named Desire" came out, those rape scenes were just about as controversial as the publication of "Native Son".
Look at early Bond movies for example. Quite a lot of behaviour in those movies would be considered sexual assault if happened today.
That Bond was a lonely, bitter, alcoholic (beyond "vodka martini, shaken not stirred", but in many of the books Bond would often find himself alone at the bottom of a bottle of liquor), misogynist with a short temper.
So certainly they could, and in many cases, that would have been the underlying premise - not that he was (just) a ladies' man who would have women falling over themselves.
The Human Centipede
People in positions of power often feel like they can get away with sexually aggressive behaviour. Just like Trump unequivocally stated on tape. And you have selectively chosen a handful there but there a lot of politicians e.g. Obama, Bernie, Biden, Ryan, Romney etc who haven't had charges of rape labelled against them.
And remember there are many successful leaders, visionaries and pillars of society with fatal personality flaws. You only have to look at Trump using the argument that "she was ugly" to dispute a rape charge as an example of this.
I am now laughing manically with you...
FYI, at the moment the statute of limitations have ended for the sexual assaults and the rape statute ends in 2020.
Seems more likely the reasons for taking political asylum in a non-US alliance embassy, is, political.
Regardless I don't have a dog in this fight; I find both sides pretty polarizing and difficult to get to the facts.
Assange has always been opened to being questioning over the allegations (within the Embassy) and the Swedish prosecutors only recently agreed to allow him to be interviewed within the Embassy, which is strangely set to happen today (17 October 2016).
The whole "but the Swedes won't guarantee not to extradite him" is neatly covered by the whole point the US hasn't requested an extradition, and no legal system can or will get involved with hypothetical situations.
To add - the Swedish Supreme Court has also ruled against him last year, and a Swedish court in September ruled against him as well following the UN report. That is an awful lot of court rulings against him...
The great irony of it all is that Max penalty Assange faces is 6 years in comfy swedish prison. He chooses instead to lock himself in an embassy for 4 years so far...
That's the difference between "rendition" (kidnapping) and legal extradition.
There's no plausible crime to use for a UK extradition because Assange didn't hack into the systems himself, and isn't bound by our laws on the release of classified information.
Please provide evidence that the leaks are from Russia.
Also, many people care a lot about Assange. Millions of people care about Assange and WikiLeaks. It is absolutely absurd (and almost un-humanitarian) to try to downplay the work that he has done.
Also, regarding Assange, I believe evgen meant to say that the administration was happy with where he was holed up until he started stirring up the pot.
No they have not. Read the statement [0] very, very carefully.
[0] https://www.dhs.gov/node/23199
> "We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Has there been any evidence of this yet? I trust the government and main stream media to accurately report the geographic source of technical transactions about as much as I trust Facebook with privacy.
I doubt there is concrete, independently verified evidence, but I'm not sure how much more fishy the Kremlin could possibly be about the whole thing.
I usually don't mind giving the benefit of the doubt to people, but I don't tend to feel the same way about governments.
No. That's been consistent with their response since the DNCLeaks.
I could be wrong, but honestly, "who cares who did it" is a fishy enough govenrment response that it's hardly any wonder the Russians are being looked at funny.
The top results for a Google search for Putin on DNC Leaks is an article from a month and a half ago (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/putin-interview-dnc-ha...) with Putin denying it was the Russians and also saying does it matter who did it.
I recall similar news from when the DNC leaks broke and people were blaming Russia then too.
He just believes that whatever the government puts out is 100% the truth. The type of citizen that Goebbels would have loved.
The Russia myth comes from everyone repeating each other and pretending like it's fact. I don't really think Americans think of Russia as the big boogeyman anymore so that whole propaganda spiel is of dubious advisability.
https://www.dhs.gov/node/23199
I think they also do this because they don't want people to know how simple it is to conduct this kind of cyberattack. If they tell everyone you have to have your own KGB to do it, there will be less people looking into it. I believe this same strategy is why North Korea was blamed for the Sony Pictures leak.
The media and some politicians are full force memeing this, saying USG blames Russia for the hack and leaks. The statement does not say this in the slightest.
Those aren't really weasel words.
There are weasel words if you are led to believe they are referring to the DNC/Podesta hacks. Again read carefully. To which activity are they referring to in that sentence?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-charges-five-chinese-milit...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-a...
Normally, I agree with some of the stuff you said.
Wikileaks tends to talk big talk without actually delivering.
This time though seems a bit different. If they have anything, anything at all left, I think they are going to be leaking it tomorrow, with how much they are hyping this up.
If tomorrow the leaks are just a bunch of nothing, well that means they probably don't have anything at all of significance. We will surely see.
I'm astonished she's still a viable candidate after such unbelievable information was disclosed.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/dnc-ceo-resigns-amid-t...
Amazing how Bob Woodward was a journalist hero who went onto have unprecedented access to future Presidents for his books and yet this is Assange's fate. It's disgusting.
[0] https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/57vu5l/red_alert...
That sounds like the ramblings of someone unhinged.
"Thermal imagery" - in the middle of the day.
"I wanted to take pictures but a policeman told me I'd be prosecuted, and in any case, they are digitally obfuscating all pictures" "All I know is I can't upload photos and all my camera images don't work" - huh, what? Which is it, you wanted to take pictures, but were told not to, or you did, but they didn't work, or ...
"Military surrounding the entire blocks aiming guns at people." - and no word of this on ... anywhere
"... so I went and had a coffee." - "Oh man, I just saw a military operation to grab Assange. We had guns pointed at us and they're messing with our phones and cameras so we can't even take a picture without it being corrupted, so I'm gonna go get me some Starbucks, and post on The_Donald about it..."
"D-notice so media won't report" but apparently the block / street shutdown was so close to the embassy that anyone in the area could watch the whole operation...
I'm going to call BS, like the sibling says, you could make millions selling tinfoil to /r/The_Donald subscribers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3842846/Rumors-swirl...
"Rumors that Pamela Anderson 'fatally poisoned Julian Assange with vegan meal' spread after 'coded' Wikileaks tweets lead to speculation that he triggered 'dead man's switch'"
Of course, those friends would have to visit him in person and give him some public keys or something to verify their identity.
then the state actors would just bug that good friend.
Assuming the nodes themselves are not compromised (big ask) and identity can be confirmed(like via key exchange), state actors can listen as much as they want to the wires, they won't be getting much.
Except if some private key were out there...
Please explain, I was under the impression that the above could not reasonably be claimed anymore with any kind of certainty [1][2][3]. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something important here or the 'Happy Dance!!' slide [4] made me paranoid.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/how-the-nsa-could-pu... [2] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/cisco-firewall-explo... [3] http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/how-the-nsa-can-brea... [4] http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35515.pdf
Of course router/firmware exploits cannot be prevented in the general case, so NSA-likes could figure out a way get in. But the null hypothesis is still that the NSA cannot crack strong encryption without some sort of pre-built backdoor IMO.
Based off of the leaks, NSA gets into things via two ways: - poisoning the encryption methods - social engineering/legal coercion to get keys
And probably even if not.
If Assange did lose internet access it is because the Ecuadorians changed the wifi password and didn't tell him. I am absolutely sure that we will be getting a mea culpa from Roger Stone any minute now...
https://twitter.com/VerizonSupport/status/787890336270090240
That gigabyte file he's holding onto? Supposed to be a bunch of cat gifs, or so an "insider" told me.
I mean, the point of the DNC leaks is that they (the party) helped a specific candidate (Hillary) - even before she was elected a nominee - so they in essence acted undemocratically.
Unless you're speculating that the GOP was secretly sheming for Trump - something which I find extremely unlikely - then it's more than possible that any GOP leaks would in fact help Trump, as well!
They'd be more than happy to release any information on Trump. Unfortunately, they don't hack the information themselves. Someone else has to send it to them.
Here is what Assange had to say about Trump: "I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day". Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/08/26/assange-trumps-ever...
I'm glad this was posted on HN, because I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) more informed discourse than I found on Reddit.
PS. Have you seen the Podesta emails? They range from hilarious to pretty disturbing.
- Is there any direct reason for the timing (US elections, attack on Mosul or other current headlines)?
- Was there any imminent release? (last week there was an announcement of a leak but it didn't materialize as far as I know)
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13159914/wikileaks-hillary...
- You'd assume that Wikileaks the organization will continue to work even without Assange having internet access so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
edit: another comment here suggests the reason may be because his extradition is imminent.
http://time.com/4532984/wikileaks-julian-assange-theories/
More interesting that CNN thinks they can read them but the public can not. Media organizations have no security clearances and thus are subject to the same access as anyone else.
Oh CNN.
Proving that those who say the media thinks they're above the rest of us are right.
There is also the famous Pentagon Papers case, which to my knowledge rests on the "freedom of the press" language in the First Amendment.
That said, this was a stupid thing for the CNN anchor to say. Regardless of the law, no federal prosecutor is going to waste their time trying to find and prosecute every U.S. citizen who visits the Wikileaks website.
It was about the printing press and the ability to print what you wanted and, just as importantly, not be forced to print the things you didn't.
I am not a lawyer but I'd say this is a legal gray area.
The leaker probably broke a law. E.g., hacking Podesta's private emails would have been illegal under computer fraud and abuse. It's alternately possible that the leaker had legal access but breached contract to release the data publicly.
Now that the information has been leaked, it's hard to say that it's clearly illegal for John Q. Public to access what Wikileaks has made publicly available. The anchor is unable to point to a specific statute in his tweet above and also mentions that it hasn't been tested in court to his knowledge.
A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity. This HN comment has curated some links to primary evidence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722664 . Take a quick perusal and you'll be about as informed as anyone on the answer to your question.
I guess he never explicitly said it was legal for CNN -- maybe he was claiming that CNN is generously taking on all that legal risk so the rest of us don't have to?
This is a nice bit of propaganda you've put forth here.
Here's a Harvard study into the majority of the 2016 election coverage including primaries which shows a demonstrably strong bias in the media pro-Trump and anti-Clinton and demonstrates that Clinton has received a FAR more harsh relationship with the major press.
http://shorensteincenter.org/pre-primary-news-coverage-2016-...
http://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/figu...
It demonstrates that coverage of Clinton was on average negative about her for the entirety of 2015.
It demonstrates that Trump enjoyed a very positive and cushy relationship with newsmedia who combined to give him hundreds of millions USD of free exposure.
I would argue that Clinton has had mostly negative coverage up until the end of September 2016.
Hrm: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/785615427913199616
"tell the press to [take] them seriously"
I hope you are rational enough to see the hilarious doublespeak being engaged in here:
* Positive coverage of hillary is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
* Positive coverage of her opponent, is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
Come on man. I hope readers of this particular site are rational enough to apply occam's razor and think critically.
I also find it extremely telling that Donald Trump, Mr Reality TV and the "hyper-successful" media and real estate man isn't responsible for his own success, but rather it's his opponent which is apparently so powerful that every single event occurring is by her design...?
How feckless Trump appears in your "everything good or bad happening to both candidates was preordained in a conspiracy" viewpoint!
Not everything is a conspiracy, I hope you're capable of rational thought.
I, for one, am also comfortable blaming the Republican electorate for allowing the three pied pipers, including Trump, to have been elevated.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-press-buries-hillary-clinton...
> But the Clinton #wiki cache doesn't include any classified info as far as I know. So fine to read/download.
> Only classified or state secrets. Regular emails can be downloaded without consequence by media or others. I was wrong to group both types.
There is a caveat to the legality of classified materials, usually you must have been "entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of". Which alludes to the fact that you would first have to have been read in, or taken the material that you knew was classified.
There is also a "requirement" to "knowingly" cause harm. I put these in quotes because the wording and the enforcement of that requirement has been in flux and selective. Also relevant is that gross negligence would also meet the requirement.
I guess a creative prosecutor could challenge that visiting wikileaks would be knowingly removing the material from the server, but it would probably be beyond difficult to meet all of the guidelines for prosecution.
That being said. If you do currently hold a clearance, visiting Wikileaks is a violation of your NDA/ReadIn, Employment Agreement, and the UCMJ for service members.
Interesting. Could you explain that more?
So even possessing the appropriate clearance level doesn't give you the right to just start reading anything that interests you on a classified network. You're supposed to have a "need to know" in case you're questioned about it.
We always get stuff here (contractor on AFB) about "don't read this or that" or else you could be in trouble. But I've never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble.
Jokes aside, I found myself on the site for the first time ever last week... Didn't want to fuck with that shit during my service or while holding a clearance. But question... While I no longer have a clearance, I am still eligible for a clearance if I need it within the next few years... Should I be concerned?
Congress cannot prohibit speech or press. If it has been written down or spoken, then the US Constitution provides absolute legal justification for viewing it, copying it, and discussing it, without any restriction.
He might work around it but it's an option. I don't know about whether it's legal under UK law but their surveillance organizations seem to get away with a lot.
If GCHQ are involved with any such interference, their actions are fairly unconstrained by law. Paraphrasing Intelligence Services Act 1994, s.(3)[1]:
> [GCHQ shall] monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions [...] in the interests of national security, [or] in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands [or] in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.
As far as I know, there is nothing in statute that constrains how they go about that (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 adds a couple of hurdles in regards to interception). Any oversight comes from various Parliamentary committees.
[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/13/crossheading/gch...
My money is on this being an errant backhoe or similar, and Assange is just turning it into a big deal because he can.
And, while Ecuador hasn't had to deal with meaningful diplomatic repercussions from sheltering Assange, the high-profile role WL is taking in the 2016 elections, and specifically the partisan and selective nature of their leaks, means that Ecuador is dealing with a very different qualitative situation than when WL was acting as an impartial if indiscriminate journalistic source.
In other words, Quito may very well be looking at the situation and deciding that being implicated in attempts to manipulate the US election is way more trouble than it's worth.
Assange: "Unplug it and plug it back in" Ambassador: "I did" Assange: "Are the lights blinking?" Ambassador: "Some of them..." Assange: "Which ones..." Ambassador: "Why am I doing this?" Assange: "Which lights?" Ambassador: "All of them..."
Increasingly I think every citizen of the world has a stake in this election, given how global the reach of the US is.
For a high profile "wanted" man like Assange, I can imagine it's much more than us regular people.
I'd have a grudge too.
IMO, it was likely a joke.
Speaking for myself I know I would never say that, so the response would be "No, I never said that."
I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.
https://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/1...
I had a quick search around to see what I could find, and I did find a recent tweet from Wikileaks showing a clip from some pundit on Fox News called Bob Beckel calling for exactly that: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656/vide...
But a little further checking showed that despite this being tweeted in August this year with a headline and hashtag suggesting a link to the leaked emails, this video is actually from 2010, moreover from my exhaustive five minute search (it wasn't exhaustive really) I couldn't find any evidence of a link to Clinton's campaign, in fact according to Wikipedia the last campaign this strange chap worked on was Walter Mondale's in 1984.
http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wiki...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuQW0US2sJw
(not particularly partisan, many calls for his death-- honestly mostly from the right but not exclusively.)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/14/wiileaks-from-...
>Sarah Harrison, a British journalist and a longtime WikiLeaks editor, says that the organization would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them.
The bloomberg article also quoted someone from reddit as evidence that the right wing was 'shivering in anticipation' of leaks damaging to clinton. It's not great journalism and seems biased but it doesn't seem there is any evidence that assange is pro trump.
But if there is no agenda, it does make one wonder why the Wikileaks of late have focused on Clinton in the run up to the election
Seems to me like anyone with credible evidence against Trump can sell it to the highest bidding mainstream media org and be sure it will get national attention. Why would a Trump leaker need wikileaks?
Not for nothing, but "the rest of the World" is pretty tired of America being a bully and starting never-ending wars. It is really not that spectacular that an anti-war person like Assange doesn't want the Presidency to go to Clinton or Trump, but of whom want more war and are not even limiting themselves to just 'the middle east' anymore. It is far more likely that Assange wants the only anti-war candidate in office - Gary Johnson.
Nerddom and the left (and I'm somewhere in the overlapping circles on that Venn diagram) have a powerful rooting interest in Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who many of us see as a vanguard of an effort to disrupt politics and the media, both of whom we as a demographic have little respect for. The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. But that's very hard for us to admit, regardless of the amount of evidence we're confronted with.
One possible explanation for this is that Assange will support the candidate that he believes will hurt US interests most.
Assange is savvy enough to know their position inevitably supports Trump, but there isn't any reason to think if they viewed Trump as more corrupt they would be against him. So it is possible they take a principled position while wrongly accused of having a preference in who wins the election.
But very few observers of US politics believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. A more widely held belief is that he's the most corrupt major party nominee in the history of US politics.
Clinton's happens in secret and is masked by insincerity, lies, etc.
I think there's a brain glitch at play here -- corruption in the style of Clinton feels more corrupt because it's secretive, even if the out-in-the-open corruption is just as bad or worse.
Only this time, it seems the Clintons were trumped...
Disclosure: I support neither candidate and will probably vote the Party for Socialism and Liberation this cycle.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/10/politics/hillary-clinton-donor...
There really are people who believe that.
In fact, depending on where you get your news, you might also believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actual literal demons, who smell of sulfur.
I definitely don't think you should disregard others opinions just because,
"There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms."
That has no weight, and is just a deflection.
But, again! This is an unproductive political argument. If you support Trump, your support for Wikileaks is entirely coherent. I'm not here to argue that people shouldn't support Trump (I hope those arguments are self-evident). I'm here to point out that people who oppose Trump should recognize the role Wikileaks is playing.
Again, what you said has no bearing on what I said... I wasn't even discussing wikileaks - I was responding to the parent, mentioning how nothing sticks.
As for political ideology, again I made no comment. It's fair to call Hilary corrupt because she is, there's no political leaning involved in my comment. She clearly did a bunch of stuff on the edge of what was moral/legal. She clearly makes deals to gain favors - that's basically what politics is. I made zero comments on trump.
Finally, I am not a supporter of either candidate - they both suck and both aren't representative of my views. Nor are either going to improve my quality of life or increase my personal (or family) security.
Pointing to fringes to discredit the mainstream of said fringe is just a cheap tactic, not something worth doing out of concern for the truth.
It is not only possible but actually somewhat likely that her mails were safer on her own server.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/anatomy-of-a-medi...
In contrast, a wide range of right-wing people have spent three decades and many millions of dollars going after both Clintons, with considerable personal demonization over that time. When Obama was elected, the GOP's goal was to limit him to one term. That means a bunch of people had angles to exploit anything remotely plausible: it kept the base riled up and voting accordingly, it helped attack the sitting president by association, and maybe damage his most likely successor. The entire email story was only discovered as part of the endless attempts to trump up a scandal from the Benghazi attack, by which time the pattern of relentlessly litigating everything was just the assumed default.
There just isn't an equivalent on the Democratic side. Yes, there are people who don't like Bush (or now Trump) but there aren't rich people pushing to scrutinize his private life and the members of Congress don't seem to think that's a good use of their time.
I'm sorry, none of these seem like witch hunts to you?
- He wasn't born in the United States
- He's a Muslim
- Connection to William Ayers
- Connection to Jeremiah Wright
- Connection to ACORN
- IRS targets enemies
- Benghazi
- Fast and Furious
- Solyndra
- Death Panels
- Not saluting soldiers
- Not putting his hand on his heart during anthem
And let me highlight that Colin Powell referred to Benghazi as a "stupid witch hunt".
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/14/politics/colin-powell-benghazi...
Um, are you just blanking 2004 out of your head? This is just the same stuff all over again. All of the screaming and shouting about birth certificates and generally shady connections? His ultimate Muslim agenda to bring down the Great Satan that is America?
Absolutely nothing of worth is coming from the leaked documents, despite all hell being raised about a smoking gun (that no one can point to) in them. It literally is a witch hunt. If these past 4 elections aren't going to kill the GOP in general, I don't know if anything will. It should be disgusting the out right lies and propaganda that they employ, with a complete lack of integrity and standards. But people still buy into the juicy conspiracy theories and the generally "known and accepted" unknowns.
If HRC is the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics, then then last 4 decades of investigations and general obstructionism were undertaken by the most incompetent politicians in the history of politics. Not just one, a whole collection of individuals (senators, house members, governors) from one party who despite their best efforts continually fails at proving claims they have no problem repeating until people start to believe them.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/29176...
Of course, that's not what's going to happen, because Wikileaks is in effect if not design a propaganda organ of the Russian Federation.
This is classic US politics. This A vs B mentality is what leads to such a fierce two party system.
If you don't support choice A, then you are assumed to support choice B. Any attack on Hillary is viewed as support for Trump and vice versa.
I don't think that's a fair interpretation.
Assange is many things, but "stupid" isn't one of them. Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump has the obvious impact of helping Trump, which is why the Trump campaign claims to coordinate with him.
And it's not because I think security experts are stupid and don't realize the obvious commercial impact that a security vulnerability has.
If I was to favor the majority opinion, to oppose both Trump and Clinton is to campaign for democracy. If I had to guess what motivities Assange, if Clinton win people won't trust the government and if trump win people will fear the government. It is possible that the later will slightly produce more Snowden's.
It is still a lizard that get voted into office at the end of the day.
Some would point to the political events that the dc leaks talked about.
In favorability or approval (whatever that means in the context of a nominee) ratings? They mean different things, and aren't always directly related[1]. I could definitely see how Sanders would be liked more, but people would believe he's less likely to do a good job.
1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/14797/presidential-approval-vs-fa...
Say I rated taco, pizza and Italian salad as 10, 8, and 2, and you rated them as 2, 8, and 10, we can easily see that pizza wins even if neither of us has it as our primary pick. pizza in this case has highest opinion rating while the other two choices are quite far behind.
So, what I wonder is what questions are actually asked regarding candidates? There isn't any data on them doing the job itself yet (unless they are an incumbent, which none are this cycle), so are they asking about how much they like the person, like the policies, or how confident they are the candidate can perform well? The answer to that question may lead to different likely reasons for the question at hand. Sanders is a likable guy. I like him. I'm also not convinced his policies, as expressed on the campaign trail, are feasible. Conversely, Hillary Clinton isn't very likable. I don't really like her. I do agree with many (but not all) of her policies, but most importantly I think her policies are feasible and have a chance of being implemented if she's elected. I am, in fact, the exact sort of person that might have expressed a favorable opinion for Sanders but voted for Hillary.
Says right in the article, it was Russian hackers aiming to undermine the US democratic system. They saw this beautifully pristine, perfect and fair democratic system and said to themselves "let's undermine the fuck out of this thing".
Surely if it was already undermined to the point of being utterly broken they wouldn't have to bother, right?
Your choices are Clinton + Kaine (Dem), Trump + Pence (Rep), Johnson + Weld (Lib), and maybe Stein + Baraka (Grn). No one else could win without deadlocking the electoral college.
To oppose Clinton is little more than calling a turd sandwich a turd sandwich. One does not also need to point out that her douche opponent is a douche.
While the US elections systems virtually guarantee a two-party system, it does not mean the two on top always have to be the same parties. If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I do wish a pox on both houses--along with a hemorrhagic fever, parasitic worm infection, and some kind of blotchy skin rash. I am not staying out of the election. I think Clinton would competently lead the country in the wrong direction, and I think Trump would be a national embarrassment on multiple fronts. Strategically, the best strategy I could follow would be to bash the presumptive front-runner, whomever it may be, to keep the two major candidates as close as possible, and hope that the minor candidates can somehow win enough states to deadlock the electoral college.
Note that it is unlikely that is the primary motivation for Wikileaks. But it does show that this game is not a zero-sum either-or.
But they do not have those votes--largely because many people who share your general opinion keep hammering home the message that if you do not vote for one of the top two candidates, then at best your vote does not matter, and at worst it destroys America.
My concerns are that Trump is a misogynistic sleaze who will undermine US diplomatic prestige, be generally ineffective as a government executive trying to act like a business executive, and will damage international trade; and that Clinton is a corrupt politician who will undermine US liberty, continue indefinitely the harmful policies of Bush II and Obama, and will damage the rule of law. The fact that those third-party candidates have a statistically zero chance of winning actually makes me more comfortable in voting for one of them.
On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place. And on the even more remote chance that the Democrats self-destruct, I want the Greens to be big enough to step into their shoes. Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power.
They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
> On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place.
Don't kid yourself about some other party ever taking the place of the Democrats or Republicans. The best you can hope for is that the libertarians gain more influence than they currently have through the larger Republican party consuming them. Whether you view this as a needed shift in the right direction for the Republicans or not enough of a shift and at the cost of any power the libertarians had likely depends on how far you lean libertarian. Same with the Democrats and Green Party.
Our two party system hasn't survived for as long as it has because each party innately catered to it's constituents needs from the beginning. Each party has shifted greatly over time to track what their constituents cared about.
> Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power. ... They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
They are never going to die, period. But that's okay. They don't need to die, they just need to change, and there's plenty of precedent for that.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jnf9GILjFM
In presidential elections, because of the US political system, you really do have just two choices. You may lament this - I have! But it's the world we live in. Saying you'll vote for a third party candidate to "register your complaint" is a null gesture.
If you really care about politics, you'd have to work to push the party of your choice in the direction you want. This is long, hard work, and happens outside the presidential cycle. You have to march with signs, attend boring meetings, and persuade people you just met.
Complaining about the broken system every four years is neither mature nor effective.
I am moved to write this because, for multiple election cycles, I was that guy, until I realized my folly.
I think it's far more likely that if the Republicans fall apart, a large component will pivot and eat up one or more of those other parties to retain a Republican designation with slightly different values. It's a mistake to think of either of the two major parties as static.
This is in strong contrast to Westminster parliaments, where political parties are for the most part a monolith, only occasionally allowed a "conscience vote" (that's not to say there isn't infighting). To vote against the party is a very good way to get booted from the party, which as far as I'm aware is practically impossible in Congress, the closest you have is being expelled from a caucus.
well, when the system is this broken, the only throw away vote is a vote for either Clinton or Trump, because it validates the system.
you are right that my idealistic attitude might end up getting Trump elected. but that's the kind of attitude that makes clinton the alternative.
Imagine a lake of piss, next to it, a mountain of shit.
Now I dump a whole bunch of garbage onto one of them.
Which am I supporting?
Or maybe you can explain this bit from the article that really mystified me: "[Russian hackers did something] with the aim of undermining the US democratic process". We've all seen what this democratic process looks like on TV, so what does it actually still mean, to undermine this democratic process?
Most Americans, do not really want to support Clinton over Trump or vice versa, they're angry and disappointed that from a nation of several hundred million people, apparently these two are the choices given to them by "the democratic process".
And apparently this is the way it is, because the election system makes it that way. It's probably the same causes that make just about every US election for as long as I remember end up just about this close to 50/50. Which, if you know anything about voting systems theory, is the number one failure mode of majority voting. But nobody finds this cultural either/or winner/loser fixation alarming at all, apparently. So again, what's left to undermine, really?
It's just like accusing someone of trying to undermine freedom of speech in China.
If anything, Assange would want the third party libertarian to win since he is the only guy advocating to stop the wars and reduce American involvement overseas, which is what Assange wants. He sees America as a menace and wants to stop the brutality of American "peace" in countries they have no business being in.
As an anarchist, Assange probably wouldn't care about the libertarians more than any other candidate, since any candidate would only futher the existence and legitimacy of a state which he would rather see destroyed. If he did support Trump, it would be because he believes a Trump Presidency would only hasten America's demise.
Citation please. I haven't heard anything about that.
> Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump
Wikileaks can only leak what they've been given. Maybe people are feeding them more info about Hillary, but I would respect Wikileaks far less if they withheld information during an election year to protect a candidate.
The voters deserve to know everything there is to know about their candidates. It's an assault against the voters to withhold negative information about a candidate because you don't want their opponent to win.
Obviously, he doesn't have to say anything positive about Trump at all to support him, and in fact the kind of support he's offering (a drip-drip feed of the products of Russian hacking calculated to create an "October Surprise") is far more valuable than any verbal support he could give Trump directly.
I mean here to be dismissive without being too disrespectful. But I'll be candid: people who say Assange isn't supporting Trump sound pretty silly. Like, the claim says more about them than it does about the election.
Believing that sort of dichotomy is "pretty silly" and says plenty about you.
Neither case really paints a good picture of Wikileaks as an impartial journalistic organization.
Through I must say, it does making viewing news more interesting. Someone say a negative about a product, I wonder which competitor paid them? Someone released a security vulnerability, I wonder what competing product they are trying to sell.
It basically makes all negative statements into a conspiracy, which honestly is silly, but fun thought experiment.
And the proof is...
Hillary has made it quite clear that would never happen however Trump has been far more supportive of Assange especially since Wikileaks has been his biggest asset.
Secondly, and with a little more convoluted reasoning: it seems to be a truism that Republican/Conservative presidencies are harder economically for people living in poverty. Republicans are less socialist, in other words. I think it's pretty clear that Assange would like to see a revolution in the US, and revolutions tend to happen when the people don't have enough to eat. Hoping for Trump to win could be seen as hoping for a revolution in that light.
1. http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wiki...
If I could, I would encourage Julian Assange to stop fearing for his life, and start living it, whatever precious little (or lot) of it he might have left. Unfortunately, if he can't access the internet, he can't read this comment.
It's true that the whole world is watching this, and a lot of us in the US care not only for the fate of Assange, but also for the fate of our nation, how these two have become intertwined, and what it will mean if Assange does indeed come to harm as a result of his journalistic actions.
If I were Julian, I would use right now as the perfect opportunity to walk out, and face the charges in Sweden. At least then I could serve actual time (if necessary), and have an end to my imprisonment within sight.
Above all, this is certainly an excellent opportunity for Hillary to show that she can resolve a crisis diplomatically. If she could just tone things down a bit, she could assure Julian (and the world) that she does not actually mean him any harm. Of anyone, I would think that Hillary could be quite good at projecting soft power globally.
Besides, can you imagine what it would be like if they killed him now? The Hollywood trailer of his biopic would have to start with, "First, they cut your internet access ..." ;)
If the answer is "no", you're not part of the left and you're likely more of a liberal then.
Aristotle said there are 6 kinds of government, 3 good ones and 3 bad ones. The bad ones are where the ruler rules in their own interest. The good ones are where the ruler rules in the public interest. How many people rule: In Tyranny - 1 person rules in their own interest Monarchy - 1 person rules in the public interest (a good tyrant is a monarch) Aristocracy - a few people rule in the public interest Oligarchy - a few people rule in their own interest Democracy - all people rule in the public interest Bad Democracy - all people rule in the interest of the majority and oppress the minority
Let's take a few highly profitable corporations as examples. How do workers seize the means of production of Apple or Google?
Particularly, how do they do it without destroying the said means?
>http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/08/26/assange-trumps-ever...
This is hard to swallow.
There is nothing in Wiki/Assange past behaviour that would indicate they would like to support Trump.
Unless: They like 'whoever is against Hillary'
OR
Wiki is getting a lot of support from Russia, and they may be indirectly leaning towards conspiring with them for political favour etc..
Putin just might have enough pull to eventually get Assange out of his prison.
And despite his 'vendetta' I have no doubt that he would release anti-Trump bits if he had them.
Wikipedia - whatever it's credibility - is headed by a dude with somewhat demagogic and self-glorifying tendencies himself.
This kind of language is common for propaganda and astroturfing.
HRC likely just has a larger attack surface.
Who knows what they have?
[1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-...
[2] http://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/russian-propaganda-on-wikile...
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/785571152836042752
He's in sanctuary, in part, because of fear of extradition to the US. So yeah, he does have a stake.
If Clinton wins she has no motivation to stop an extradition, since she figures in WL and other leaks.
If Trump wins, and Assange/WL is seen to have implicitly supported him, there is a hope for Assange that President Trump could prohibit his DoJ from extraditing, and his DoD from rendering. Not from gratitude, but because Trump is vindictive and that would be a way to stick it to ... to ... The Global Media/Banking/Government/NotWhite Conspiracy.
I'm kind of amazed that WL or someone else hasn't hacked and released Trump data. Do they just not use computers?
I haven't seen any word on their explanation, though.
I guess that if you are living in a state of fear, expecting storm troopers through the door at any moment, then you could reasonably presume that the CIA are to blame for one's lack of wifi.
To be honest, I wish it was newsworthy when I spent a day or two offline. But it isn't.
With all the propaganda and accusations going around, please substantiate this.
Which seems like a rather large issue with your theory.
I see no reason to trust their judgment here. As the kids might say these days, evidence or GTFO.
I was surprised by your claim that wikileaks posted something antisemitic, so I googled for it.
Is http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil... what you're talking about? I don't agree that's antisemetic in any honest sense of that word (ie "hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews"). Like, the article's explanation of why it's anti-semitic starts off with "this might be a little hard to follow" -- not something you'd expect in an article throwing around serious accusations.
Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed. --reputation[Slate];
> and wild conspiracy theories
Interesting, any you'd care to link?
> You're also assuming that whoever posts to the Wikileaks twitter account doesn't want people to believe the most sympathetic, conspiratorial possibility.
I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
It's using the clearly anti-Semitic (((echo))) format, and linking those people to a mysterious cabal working against them. That is an incredibly standard anti-Semitic view. In what way is that not prejudiced against Jews?
>Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed.
What is Hanlon's razor for including an anti-Semitic key in their tweet? I'm honestly asking what the simpler explanation is for them including that, and then going on to link (((those people))) to an international conspiracy, something people have accused Jews of for centuries.
>Interesting, any you'd care to link?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/08/09/wikileaks_...
>I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
That they'd never heard of the key? (I hadn't, as the slate reporter seemed to anticipate with their "might be a little hard to follow" comment)
> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/08/09/wikileaks_...
Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did. Posting a wild conspiracy theory in this case would be openly accusing a specific person or group of people of murder with no evidence.
I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
> Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause -- aka a lot of cost with no benefit. Seems surprisingly stupid/pointless/shortsighted.
Then why use it? You're saying it's more likely they hadn't heard of it, but used it anyway? You've never heard of it, have you ever surrounded a reference to people you don't like and are accusing of nefarious deeds with triple parentheses? What about the additional part about a shadowy cabal that you ignored?
>Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did.
If I offer a reward for proof that aliens abducted Elvis, you don't consider that lending credence to a conspiracy theory?
>I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
>They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause
No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
Yes, right. They used it as a way of naming the thing they were seeing, not using it like someone familiar with it.
> What about the additional part about a shadowy cabal that you ignored?
I just rechecked the article. What shadowy cabal part?
> If I offer a reward for proof that aliens abducted Elvis, you don't consider that lending credence to a conspiracy theory?
I think a reward initially signals interest in the area, and then longer term acts as a disproof of the theory. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_... for a famous example of this effect.
> Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
Leaks of significance are of course worth more. Soliciting leaks is absolutely something they do (and should do).
> No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
Well, except that denying hard evidence doesn't usually work (#include those who have been leak subjects). Also people all over the web are having conversations like this one, so the situation degenerating into a head-said/she-said situation would have a cost. Which as I pointed out before was an obvious outcome of their tweet.
Happy travels :)
You do know that the people they were talking about in their tweet didn't literally have (((echoes))) around their names, right?
Maybe not specifically to Assange, but they might be able to get close to that. An embassy probably wants to have separate, isolated networks to keep various classes of users apart. The top diplomats and officials who deal with the most important, most secret stuff on one. Another for lower level officials who deal with secret, but more routine stuff. A third that provides wifi for people visiting the embassy to use its services. Maybe a fourth for foreign diplomats attending meetings.
I could see them going beyond just building one physical network and then using firewalls to segment it into separate isolated logical networks and actually having separate physical connections for some of the networks, such as the one for visitors seeking services, and the one for foreign diplomats.
If they do have multiple physical networks, I'd expect they have Assange on one of the ones that is not important to the normal functioning of the embassy, such as one mostly used by people visiting to apply for visas and things like that. A large fraction of such visitors will have cellular internet on their phones and won't even notice that the embassy public wifi is broken.
Surely Assange or someone has a smartphone. If that's cut too, you can be sure it's something big.
I mean, what would be the goal? They go to all this trouble, and risk an international incident, for what? It's not like they'd actually be able to prevent Assange from communicating. At best they'd inconvenience him slightly until he figures out an alternate means of communication.
On the one hand we have a guy with the big cache of emails he really wants people to pay more attention to before November 9th, and a police interview originally scheduled for today that he might want to find a reason to postpone for more than a month next time. On the other hand, I'm really struggling to see what forcing Assange to wait a few hours or change computers achieves, or what the motivation for shutting him off today rather than November 8th is?
Also, I bet some industrious hackers could hack together a microcontroller, photodiodes, and cheap lasers for a line of sight connection as a bridge.
But based on where the embassy is, it's probably easier to stand near a window and get on the WiFi from Pret a Manger next door.
I don't know about wireless standards to say whether or not it's possible to selectively disable regions or devices.
Random, unverified claim, but all we have.
When a system is failing it enters a death spiral where the pool from which it can hire people gets shallower and shallower (less people are interested in working for the government) until the only persons left are either morons or sociopaths (who want power)
"We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/788099178832420865
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/19/wikileaks-ecua...
Previously:
The only sure conclusion I've personally reached in this election cycle is that no one sane would want to run for American president, or even be a part of any American political system (beyond the local level where things seem a bit more level headed)....
The entire case is a joke and whatever the US-election result is, it's bad for the entire world since our corrupt politicians will do whatever American corrupt politicians say.
The rape allegations won't be past the limit until 2020.
I dont think its that simple as "Just go there and have the hearing".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomati...
The thing protecting Assange right now isn't the judicial process, but rather the inviolability of embassies. The UK police are adhering to the norm that they can't enter the embassy without permission. That norm is routinely violated in other places, but I think everyone involved is comfortable with Assange's self-inflicted house arrest.
> That norm is routinely violated in other places
No, it isn't. That would severely damage relationships between the two countries. It's more than a "norm", it's a fundamental principle of diplomacy going back millennia.
At any rate: we agree: it's the Vienna Accords that keep the UK from simply lassoing Assange and hauling him out of the building. It has nothing to do with whether he's on Ecuadorian soil (he is not).
Whilst subject to use and abuse, most countries have agreements that while certain officials may not be prosecuted (oftentimes, this is only "for offenses related to their official capacity") in the guest country, that they will be, in their home state.
Even general principles around arrest or detainment have "reasonable constraints" for self-defense, public safety or for the prevention of a serious criminal act/felony.
But no, Ecuador does not have a vote in whether Assange can be extradited. The UK and Sweden do because they are both parties to a treaty that says they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_an...
And I can't ind any examples of extrajudicial extraordinary rendition originating in the UK, unlike Sweden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#United...
And they could preemptively refuse to allow him to be extradited for the leaks by stating definitively that it was not a crime by their laws.
Presidential pardons are irrelevant as Sweden is not the USA, but in any case, the President cannot preemptively pardon people for future offenses for which they may or may not be convicted.
>And they could preemptively refuse to allow him to be extradited for the leaks by stating definitively that it was not a crime by their laws.
Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority to override the courts and declare that someone isn't guilty of a crime in the absence of any proper legal process?
Well, in Assange's case, those would be past offences for which they may or may not be convicted. And I think that would be the same situation as Nixon when Ford pardoned him - he'd already done the deed, but hadn't been convicted yet.
edit: Though, since we're speculating already - does it even make sense for an American president to pardon an Australian citizen?
They could push the courts to issue a declaratory judgement on the issue of leaks, for instance. Or pass a new law making whistleblowing specifically legal and give retroactive immunity. Or investigate the prosecutor for misconduct because of their persecution and unwillingness to advance the investigation. Or allow the courts to try the case remotely.
Or they could simply throw the paperwork away, making prosecution impossible. It might not be legal, but you're living under a rock if you think that much of what your government does would be legal in the courts.
> Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority
Nobody cares. That question is the sole point of blame-diffusion systems. All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
Bush didn't have the authority to do much of what he did, but he had the ability and by the time we could point out the difference it was a done deal and now he's not prosecuted so I guess he did have the authority...
The rules work differently at that level. But, even if they didn't, better the leader of a country sits in a country-club prison for doing the right thing than yet another innocent is illegally kidnapped and tortured.
None of these suggestions makes any sense.
(i) A declaratory judgment on the issue of leaks, whatever that means, would have no bearing on Assange's arrest warrant for rape.
(ii) Assange is not being charged with whistleblowing; he is being charged with rape.
(iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
(v) I'd be wary of throwing legal niceties aside. It's only those that are preventing the UK government from entering the embassy and arresting him there.
>All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
This is false as far as anyone can tell. If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate.
Nicely numbered, but not well thought out.
Assange is avoiding going to Sweden because he rightfully expects a high chance of being rended to USA custody. A program the Swedish government embraced. Eliminating one of the main legal avenues for this is precisely the point.
> (iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct
Totally untrue. The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
The organizations I work with have rules for automatic investigations of people who deviate from the norm in suspicious circumstances. If there's any question, there's an investigating. Perhaps it's nothing, but if there was an investigation which found no unjust influence from the political side of the equation it would greatly increase public trust in the outcome of the trial.
It makes no sense to turn yourself in to the law when you have good reason to assume you will NOT get a fair trial, and all indicators point to corruption.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
That's not true. There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
Also, tough. They had custody and let him go. Why do they deserve infinite do-overs? They could try him and ban him from entering Sweden if they were serious, as that would also serve the goal of making Swedish people safer.
>> All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
> This is false as far as anyone can tell.
No, you just need to use your imagination. Picture your mother being arrested on a fabricated charge. Think of all the points along the way that you could ruin the government's case through interference if you were the court clerk, a beat cop, etc. Vastly many people have to do just the right things for a arrest/trial/charge to be valid. Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process. Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
This in fact is your moral responsibility. If you join an organization its crimes are on your shoulders unless you take an effort to correct them.
> If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate
Start by reading the wiki article. Fix that if you think it doesn't match the citations. Then come back and ask about anything you still don't understand.
Consider also reading the article about Civil Disobedience.
It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
> The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
>There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
>Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
>Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process
The hypocrisy of this part of your comment is quite astonishing. You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
> None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
It's well documented. He was interviewed in Sweden and left weeks later after notifying the police. That means he isn't a fugitive.
Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return, showing that they can if they want to. This means they are choosing not to advance the case while loudly declaring otherwise. That's the process deviation.
> It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
> Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
Just because you would lie doesn't mean Assange would. I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
> How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Assuming he didn't comply willingly, I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons. But even if not, house-arrest has proven successful so far.
> You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice. Humanity 101.
I'm pointing out the deviations of the prosecutor to explain the irregularities that people would be calling to have investigated. It's not a baseless fishing trip.
EAW.
"Fugitive" isn't a precisely defined term, but he is subject to an arrest warrant and isn't complying with it.
>Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return,
As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions, and according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
> A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
I doubt that this is possible. At least, you appear to be the only person who has suggested it. Has anyone with the relevant legal expertise indicated that this is a possibility?
>I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW. Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
> I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons.
How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
>Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice.
You already accept that Sweden can try Assange. Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
Color me a traditionalist, but only valid warrants count.
> As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions
Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
> according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
> I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW.
He's not ignoring them, he's refusing to comply with non-legal orders.
You have no reason to think he wouldn't comply with legal orders, because he has always complied before. This isn't wikipedia, but Assume Good Faith.
> Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
Right, and he's not under any obligation to do with them to participate in the sham.
> How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
> You already accept that Sweden can try Assange.
It's their courthouse, they can try Kermit the Frog if they want. It's the legitimacy of the trial that's in question.
> Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
Because one requires extraordinary rendition. If it's legal for me to eat an icecream cone, why is it illegal for me to kidnap you, lock you in a box, and transport you to a foreign country, then eat an icecream cone? (Hint, the kidnapping and rendition...)
The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
>Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him. This was explained repeatedly at the time. See e.g. paragraph 140 of the high court judgment:
In our view, the terms of the EAW read as a whole made clear that not only was the EAW issued for the purpose of Mr Assange being prosecuted for the offence, but that he was required for the purposes of being tried after being identified as the perpetrator of specific criminal offences. He was therefore accused of the offences specified in the EAW. Nothing in the EAW suggested he was wanted for questioning as a suspect.
Or, directly from the Swedish prosecutor (paragraph 142):
It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries.
>Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
He is not wanted merely for questioning.
>I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities would do under hypothetical circumstances. If you have some inside knowledge, please share it. (I thought wikileaks supporters, of all people, would believe in transparency?)
>Because one requires extraordinary rendition.
What on Earth are you talking about? Assange could go to Sweden today and the trial could be held there. No extraordinary rendition required.
Why on earth would he be that stupid though? They clearly aren't prosecuting the case properly so why would he believe he'd get a fair trial?
The only way they'll get him there is if they or the brits abduct him at gunpoint. Extraordinary rendition.
> No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him.
They can say it all they want but that doesn't make it true. They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely. The reason they don't is that it's not about the case, with its likely short sentence, it's about capturing and controlling him. If they tried him remotely he would serve his sentence in a foreign (Ecuadorean likely) prison and they wouldn't have achieved their goal.
> This was explained repeatedly at the time.
Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
> He is not wanted merely for questioning.
Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
> I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities
You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement. You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist so you have the burden of proof.
> The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
No, valid means it's not a setup. The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
That wouldn't be extraordinary rendition, assuming he was being arrested by the British police. (It would be a violation of various diplomatic protocols, which is why the UK hasn't done it.)
>They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
>Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely
They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.) But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
>Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
>Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up. Whether they always wanted to do this is irrelevant. (Although, that being said, your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.)
>You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement.
I may have used the word "know", but of course I admit that this is merely what I suspect. Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia. But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
>You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist
I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
>The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
If he's arrested on trumped up charges, then yes, it would be. (I'm sure the CIA printed up some sort of receipt (err, warrant) for the people it had smuggled out of the country. Paperwork doesn't make things right.)
> You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
Right, and they always have. But their lies around that, and framing him for fleeing, etc, have rendered that moot. Any legitimacy the trial may have had is up in smoke. If he can't get fair treatment pre-trial why would we think he'd get a fair trial?
> They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.)
That directly contradicts the text of the law. Trials in absentia are possible - there are merely rules for notification, etc.
Also, they've lied before so the default position is that they're lying this time too.
> But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
Because it's their fault, not his. Their fuckups and their lies. Anyone in his position deserves proper treatment.
> They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up.
A warrant they wrote themselves. Not very convincing. Prosecutorial misconduct is not justice and they can't pretend that it is by doubling down.
> But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
To achieve justice.
> I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
No, but you're sure he'll get convicted and that he wouldn't report for jail. That means: rapist, and unrepentant. You didn't say it out right, and now you're walking it back to "strongly suspect"...
> It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
You're saying the usual process involves lies and slander? I doubt that. And no, I don't have a general problem with EAWs...
> Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia.
If he was convicted in absentia, by a clown court, I imagine he'd thumb his nose at Sweden. I would. But if he was given the chance to participate in a real trial, remotely, that would be vastly different.
> your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.
The UN working group on arbitrary detention didn't idly side with him. If the charges appeared to have merit they wouldn't have come out in support. I think they're read both sets of sources...
"""Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange. [...] The Working Group also considered that the detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation."""
Swedish prosecutors said the questioning would take place on 17 October and be conducted by an Ecuadorian prosecutor.
Note: Today is 17 October.
Now, I will absolutely grant you that the amount of manpower and money spent on such monitoring is ridiculous.
But to act as though the government is imprisoning him against his will by attempting to enforce a legal warrant is ... disingenuous.
Why should that count towards any prison term?
BTW, I don't think Assange would really face prison in Sweden. My best guess of what would have happened had he been extradited to Sweden:
An interview, being held a few weeks, then released to a country of his choosing.
He is inside the embassy because he likes the martyrdom that his followers clearly recognize. Not because there is any factual reason for it.
Seems like am aweful lot of money for such a small crime that you are making it out to be.
But perhaps there is other things that they are trying to deter people from doing.
Like, maybe they want to deter people from pissing off powerful governments by leaking and embarrassing world leaders?
Mind you, multiple American leaders have called for him to be arrested.
Maybe the giant elephant in the room has more than a little to do with why the government is spending so much money and effort trying to arrest him.
Sweden refuses to interview him there even though in the 4 years that he's been holed up in the embassy Swedish authorities have interviewed 44 other people in the UK. They also refused to promise to not extradite him to the USA where he would most likely be convicted of espionage and possibly executed.
If you were in his shoes do you think you would step outside given the circumstances? The UK has also stated that even if the Swedish investigation was closed they would still arrest Assange the minute he steps outside. Why wouldn't the UK extradite Assange to the USA if given the opportunity?
And how is this supposed to be "corrupt". Are you implying a vast conspiracy were the CIA is orchestrating everyone from a random prosecutor up to the highest courts of Sweden (Not that that would even be corruption as it's traditionally defined)?
[1] https://www.google.se/search?q=assange+rape+case
https://i.imgur.com/abcVS6q.jpg
also, why would I believe some anonymous HN'er about anything. Information is either true or false, the source isn't really relevant, all that matters are the facts.
Absurd. Of course your sources matter. A credible source is more believable than an incredible source. Ever heard of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? Looking only at the material presented and not at the presenter of the material is only giving you part of the picture.
Possible facts:
Assange has had his internet access shut down (probably true)
Assange has been extradited (status unknown at this point, you seem to want to discredit it based on the source I simply withhold my judgment until there is more information about this)
And there is no such thing as a "probably true possible fact". There are facts and there are allegations.
By your reckoning no anonymous source can ever be credible. Some pretty interesting stuff has come out over the years from anonymous sources and turned out - retrospectively - to have been accurate and likely to have been a leak by an insider. Given that nobody is ever (Snowden excepted) to go on the record about an imminent operation from inside some government agency the only way such information could ever come out is through anonymous sources.
See also: watergate.
If the NYT says they got a tip from an anonymous source about Assange, it means more to me than if my neighbor Steve says HE got a tip from an anonymous source.
This causes all kinds of havoc and requires more skepticism on the part of the consumer but that does not diminish the fact that it might be true and that the timing is interesting.
Now chances are better than even (a lot better) that this is false, but so far it fits the facts as good (and in some cases better) than most other theories about why this is happening other than the one about today being the day of the 'interview' with the Swedish representatives.
As an example, the UNHCR follows a similar protocol when investigating reports of atrocities. The individual reporters, while not fully anonymous, frequently have no previous basis to assess credibility. If their stories generally correspond, you've got an indication of truth. If the stories differ on material points, there are problems.
The story of Susannah from the Book of Daniel (Bible or Torah) has an excellent early exemplar of this: the stories of two claimed witnesses differed materially in the description of a crucial tree, impeaching their credibility.
What basis do you have for the (probably true) rating?
The man literally told people he rescheduled his election-changing news conference from a balcony to a middle-of-the-night webcast, because he thought a sniper was going to kill him on the balcony. As if this was likely. Then it turned out his election-changing news conference was an advert for his book.
The man is great at marketing himself.
Absent any proof that he actually has access I'm going on the assumption that he does not because that is what they claim.
Now whether or not it really is a state actor (could be Ecuador!), Assange's laptop frying the network card or some other reason why he hasn't got access (didn't pay the phone bill?) is up for grabs.
Do you understand what I'm saying when I say I don't believe Assange when he says his internet is cut off?
Also, as has been mentioned elsewhere, the Ecuadorian embassy has a policy against making any sort of statements about Assange.
Note that Wikileaks is making the claim not Assange and they are not the same entity (they'd have to, given that Assange can't go online).
Now, it could all be not true but what would be the point of lying about this when the truth will come out regardless?
2. The truth will not "come out regardless" if he was lying. It's very hard to prove a negative. Even if the embassy puts out an announcement saying "As far as we know, his internet is fine," Wikileaks can just say "The embassy is in cahoots with the Americans," or "It was cut earlier, and sources told me it was the gubbment." No one will care much at that point, his martyrdom point will have been made.
Disingenuous even if technically true.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BPKRVZ0
We now have complete radio silence from for >12 hours and embassy employees are no longer allowed to talk about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_jhLcvoZqc
"no longer" ? It's quite likely that they were never allowed to talk about him
I guess time will tell.
That said the content of the post is pretty unbelievable.
TL;DR: a 4chan poster claiming to be an intelligence officer says that the United States forced Ecuador to allow extradition of Assange.
100%, huh?
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In response to mejari (both of his replies) below, I'm rate-limited:
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Did you even read that article? That's not what it says. They just didn't publish the documents. What it does say is that the hackers that stole the documents were joking about editing them before sending them to wikileaks.
You keep using the word fake, and I don't think you know what the work fake means.
You didn't say that they released fake data. You implied that all the data that they DID release was true and accurate, but there was some other true data that they didn't release.
:shows truepundit article:
seems flimsy, doesn't really contain any actual sources other than "sources said". can you cite any other articles that don't use truepundit as the source?
:crickets:
yes. one article on an arguably either satire or hard-right website is the source of all the "drone him" talk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724507
for another thread that was on front page when most of US was asleep
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722929
Mods, would it possible to keep this story up?
Otherwise I'd like a guarantee that we Europeans get to see all those interesting stories that broke 12h earlier.
We'll avoid marking this one as a duplicate and try to merge the discussions as best we can.
Almost had my mind off it for 2 minutes while reading this Intercept article about Hillary's relationship with the press https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...