If you want full control, you've got to be in full control. But you can't do that if you delegate that control to a third party. That's the whole point of bitcoin.
Instead of complaining, WikiLeaks can set up their own payment processing server and do away with Coinbase altogether.
"It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligence—the GRU—had used WikiLeaks to release data of US victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks."
- Mike Pompeo, current CIA director and nominee for Secretary of State
I'm all for skepticism of what people say, especially people in positions like CIA Director, but when a Republican CIA director agrees with the DNC about what happened, it seems not entirely unreasonable to give it some credence. He is in the absolutely perfect position to say otherwise, if he believed otherwise, and is in the perfect position to reevaluate the previous intelligence report. He's the director of the CIA! If he thinks there's evidence backing another narrative, he can just come out and say so.
Even if Satan himself proved he was real and aided Wikileaks by publishing true information, I'd be all for it. What's being suggested is that they selectively publish true information by not publishing certain things that don't suit a particular agenda. This accusation is being asserted without evidence, and can therefore be dismissed without evidence.
> This accusation is being asserted without evidence, and can therefore be dismissed without evidence.
What? There's plenty of evidence. Wikileaks consistently published information damaging to Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the election, and published zero information damaging to Trump.
Unless you can prove that WikiLeaks received some information damaging to Trump and then REFUSED to publish it, all you're saying is that nobody sent them such information.
Assange intention has been rather clear after the statement Hillary gave as the Secretary of State during cablegate and the involvement of US diplomats in the Swedish investigation. I don't get it why people think that he is supposed to be unbiased in his view of her and trump.
What is a normal reaction to be publicly declared a murderer and enemy combatant (with an implied statement to be droned) for publishing documents from people involved in the US military that wanted to give the public information? In the context of what he perceive she has done against him, what is the likeliest outcome if he comes into contact with damaging information and a request to publish it? "No thank you, only if you provide equally damaging information on her opponent or else it will look bad?".
Obviously they should have withheld their timely and important trove of Clinton's wrongdoing until they had roughly an equal amount of material on her primary political opponent. That seems totally reasonable.
So the intelligence community's conclusion that the GRU hacked the RNC, and the Republican administration CIA director's endorsement of that report doesn't hold any weight whatsoever? When the civil servants and the political appointees of two administrations from different parties all three agree that the DNC and RNC were both hacked and exactly one set of data was leaked, does that carry no weight at all? If it wasn't true, why isn't the RNC chair out there insisting they weren't hacked?
It's also a ridiculous argument since Wikileaks does not have a monopoly on leaking secrets. Any whistleblowers who were censored by Wikileaks can not only find another channel to release their original documents, but also have another piece of important news about a provable systematic bias in Wikileaks'publishing patterns.
Supposing that the GRU hacked the DNC and RNC, but only gave WikiLeaks the DNC stuff, the RNC stuff would not see the light of day. Now maybe that exculpates Wikileaks, since they didn't have the RNC stuff to leak. Maybe it implicates them- if they knew the info was from Russia, and knew that Russia was trying to damage Clinton, and coordinated with the GRU to maximally damage her. Both things could be true.
On the third hand, Assange spent time suggesting that the information definitely didn't come from Russia, and suggesting it might have been Seth Rich. But information came out the shows that he was talking with Guccifer 2.0, who was widely suspected (at the time!) to be GRU and if he wasn't, was meant to be a Romanian hacker, not a DNC whistleblower. So there's at least tenuous evidence that Assange was willing to both work with Russian intelligence and rope in an entirely unrelated death to muddy the waters on where the info came from.
> Maybe it implicates them- if they knew the info was from Russia, and knew that Russia was trying to damage Clinton, and coordinated with the GRU to maximally damage her. Both things could be true.
Going by my earlier comment - I would coordinate with the Satan to release true information, the source of the information does not necessarily contaminate its truthiness. Publishing true information, as a hypothetical whistleblower organization, is my hypothetical raison d'etre.
This only ever becomes suspect if I am selectively publishing, or if I am aware that I am selectively publishing.
In this case there needs to be evidence of either. Conversations with biased parties are not evidence unless they clearly state that the selective publishing is known.
It's also extremely important to realize what exactly the voters learned from the emails. CAP President Neera Tanden, and a prominent figure in HRC's campaign, expressed sharp criticisms for her favored candidate's judgment. DNC Chair Donna Brazille emailed privately about how the statistical job growth under President Obama was essentially a "technical" win, but had very little impact on people's lives. She also went on to leak debate questions to her favored candidate, exposing one of hundreds of different instances of a party-wide effort to sabotage the primary process.
Contrast this with the RNC primary. Virtually the entire party leadership loathed then-candidate Trump. As opposed to rallying around him, they actively rallied against him. In October there were discussions of replacing him on the ticket. Even at the convention, Ted Cruz reportedly went off-script and asked attendees to vote their conscience, as opposed to voting for candidate Trump. The divisions in the GOP were laid bare for the world to see. The divisions in the DNC stayed hidden from voters. Voters only learned much after the election that Donna Brazille contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton with another candidate after she fainted on 9/11, an event that ironically followed weeks of mainstream media outrage against "right wing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's Health", which also included a pickle-jar opening gag on a late night talk show.
What truths would Wikileaks have exposed about the RNC that weren't already publicly known? Is this an empty box containing any convenient allegation?
One of the USA's major political parties sabotaged the primary process, engaged in debate cheating, media manipulation and bird-dogging, all for a candidate whom many of the party's own leadership found wanting in terms of judgment. After all this - the outrage seems fixated on the messenger, Wikileaks, as if their alleged selective leaking somehow absolves the Democrats of these monumentally disgusting actions.
If you look at the election from the perspective of damage done to candidates - the sheer volume of substantiated negative press received by candidate Trump makes it really difficult to argue that voters could have somehow heard something else from the RNC's emails that would changed their minds about him.
But it's still important to be aware of the bias in a source.
Supposed I'm biased against you and I report that you hacked into Bob's computer and I have evidence to prove it. I paint that to make you look like some kind of cyber villain and neglect to report the important fact that Bob asked you to do it.
If the reader knows about my bias towards you then they know to take my reporting with a grain of salt because even if it is true, it might not be the whole story.
You are right of course, it is important to know the bias of sources which is why so many fact checking sites popped up after 2016. Before then I would always go wikipedia for unbiased information. Sadly we live in a time where the majority of news papers has a clear and sometimes publicly stated political leaning and bias. Often this can be traced through ownership since many are now owned by the same entity.
If the emails and documents was leaked today then hopefully fact checking sites would be all over it and pulling it apart regardless who originally published them. I do recall a few people were looking at checksum and correlate statements to previously public information, but nothing news worthy came out of that.
It's impossible to eliminate bias. Even if it's not political bias some people just naturally agree more with one side of an issue or are more interested in certain subjects. But that doesn't mean that bias is irrelevant.
In my opinion, having followed WikiLeaks over the years, I think it's safe to say that they have an anti-western intelligence/military bias. That doesn't mean that what they publish is untrue. It just means that I'm skeptical about their motives and sources when they release something and I make it a point to try and find a good counter-balance to their take on the issue. Because they probably only presented a tiny portion of the truth that fit their agenda.
My interpretation of events is that before 2010 wikileaks operated mostly like a dumb disk drive that publish whatever with minimal editorial.
The War documents leak established them in international news, which change wikileaks tactic to more editorial style. This then resulted that they got the cable leak the next year.
After this there were internal fighting, blocking, ddos, economical blockades, volunteers being detained at airports and a lot of intelligence agency taking a lot of interests. The new "editorial" style also meant that they now held on to leaks rather than publishing.
And then we had the Swedish investigation and all that mess. Calls for assassinations, "enemy combatant", drones, diplomatic back channels, all contributed to a very antagonistic/paranoid relation between the US government and Assange personally. At this point there is nothing resembling the original style of wikileaks. I see it less like a "anti-western intelligence/military bias", but rather a anti-Hillary/US government bias.
> I see it less like a "anti-western intelligence/military bias", but rather a anti-Hillary/US government bias.
I can't disagree with that.
Then there are things like the Vault7 leaks, which were stoked by teaser announcements and theatrics. And while they did contain some surveillance tactics that seemed interesting they mostly contained tools and internal communication that was clearly sensitive and generally not information that the public even cared about (their exact code obfuscation algorithms?).
The net effect is that most people didn't care much while anti-western intelligence groups probably had a field day.
And given the sophistication to obtain the data it likely came from a nation state in the first place wishing to accomplish exactly that goal.
There's no way they didn't realize what they were doing. They played part in an attack.
The content here is raw emails from prominent Democrats discussing things like cheating in debates to favor Hillary Clinton, telling each other about how Hillary Clinton has really bad judgment, and an orchestrated campaign with friends in the media to discredit her primary challenger.
There can't really be any "bias" in this kind of primary source information. What would you argue here? That candidate Sanders wanted this to happen? We already know from Donna Brazille's book that this is all true, and there is no other side of this story.
Would you argue that folks like Neera Tanden were emailing wisecracks about Hillary Clinton's poor judgment (while publicly saying the opposite), is somehow mischaracterized? Contrast this with how the RNC treated their frontrunner - they publicly criticized him at every opportunity, and nobody rigged the RNC primary to favor candidate Trump - in fact, they did the complete opposite rather publicly, all but endorsing his opponent.
If equivalent information was in the RNC's emails, it was not brand new information to the public, because they were saying those things in public about their candidate, while the DNC did it in secret.
Wikileaks are not journalists and they do not follow e.g. journalistic ethics. They've done unprofessional things like posting anti-semitic statements[1] and bizarre things like doxing most of the women in Turkey[2] or posting sensitive information about people who've been victims of rape, suffer from mental illnesses, or are gay in countries where that's a big risk. That's all politically neutral and completely outside of what real journalists would sanction.
They may not be officially part of the Russian intelligence apparatus but they definitely don't seem to act contrary to Russian interests, they actively ignored leaks about the Russian government[4], and their public tweets about the Panama Papers were a lot more consistent with protecting Russian interests rather than the purported belief in exposing secrets[5]. They also didn't ask whether they were being used by sources like Guccifer 2 which was later revealed to be a Russian front.
Other governments have come to the same conclusion – e.g. here's a German report which alleges British and French agreement:
“actively ignored” is a high burden of proof for an accusation against someone who is in prison.
Wikileaks has been openly critical of Russia and its administrators for some time.
Most of what you’re positing is simply your opinion about their (possible) motives, not an issue with their actual actions.
Expecting full editorial capability (eg PII redaction) from someone imprisoned indefinitely without trial (inb4 “but he could walk out and face the same unfair trial and torture that Manning did!”) is complete lunacy.
You don’t personally get to decide who does or does not qualify as a journalist, thankfully. As someone who dislikes the warmongering and totalitarian democratic party exactly as much as the warmongering and totalitarian republican party, I found their releases to be a tremendous public service, as did millions of others.
“These people that I don’t like aren’t releasing enough factual data about the other people I don’t like whilst releasing factual data about these people I do like” is not a condemnation. It is a (relatively unimportant) opinion.
If we define a set of criteria by which that tweet can be deemed “antisemitic”, then applying that same criteria to comments about white people made by countless progressive-minded journalists would deem those journalists fanatically anti-white.
I read through your first link, and I don't see how I could take it seriously. Here is a link to the original tweet from Wikileaks, as shown on archive.is. https://archive.is/5g8LF
The link you posted to slate relies upon ((( and ))) around people's names being some nefarious anti-jew meaning. When, in reality, this was the actual tweet: "Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre."
Relying upon that sort of cruft just isn't convincing.
I must hang with a different crowd that doesn't add a specific # of parentheses to send dog-whistle messages. You should ask yourself, was the tweet wrong? Did the people who it referenced all have their names surrounded by ((( and )))? That would in fact be bizarre.
Let me spell it out for you. It's fine to be unaware of a particular trend, but it's not fine to continue to be unaware and to disbelieve it when you read an article that directly points it out.
* Neo-Nazis invented the "echoes" meme, where when saying the name of a Jewish person in a podcast they would add a sinister echo effect, or in text they would add three parentheses around it.
* Jewish people and others on Twitter reclaimed the parentheses in a positive sense.
* WikiLeaks is referring to the fact that people that complain about them are Jewish, not a random bizarre coincidence about punctuation.
The echoes meme comes from a neonazi podcast who would play an echo sound effect behind every single mention of a Jewish sounding name. When people on Twitter put the (()) around their own names, they are intentionally marking themselves as Jewish so as to raise a middle finger to the neonazis who started the meme. So if someone references "people with (()) around their name", they're talking about Jews. That's who puts (()) around their own names on Twitter.
It's actually more complicated than that. At the time (2016), most of the people who used the brackets for their own names were pro-establishment political types who wanted to make a public stand against the neo-Nazis. This included many people who were not Jews, in fact my own perception in 2016 was that most of the people who chose to use the brackets at the time were not in fact Jewish. As part of the daily conversation, WikiLeaks understood this! This totally changes the intent of the WikiLeaks tweet. My impression of the tweet has always been that they were skewering the mainstream political commentator class, who they perceive as being both virtue signaling (hence the brackets) and fashionably "intellectual" (hence the glasses).
Was it a stupid tweet, prone to misunderstanding? Absolutely. But one vague tweet does not justify labeling a person or organization as anti-Semitic.
Lets imagine we had a list over every official leaked story that an intelligence service has given to any of the global large news papers. NYT, guardian, CNN, fox news and so on.
Can we assume that that list is not empty? Is it not likely that a few stories that the guardian has posted is from US intelligence service, knowingly or unknowing. If so, should we label them also non-state hostile intelligence service? I would bet that this is how other nations would justify blocking unwanted news papers in national firewalls. They are after all not blocking the free press but rather the (non-)state hostile intelligence service.
What would a reasonable definition be of a hostile intelligence service.
There was no report signed off by the CIA, DNI, and DHS that concluded with high confidence that the Iraq government had WMDs. The WMD intelligence, such as it was, came from raw reports pulled directly from the lower levels of the CIA bypassing the ordinary processes. The report on Russian hacking pulled from conclusions drawn by the entire US intelligence community.
Also, did you read the Mueller indictment of a dozen Russian hackers? It goes into some detail on the kinds of information that the IC has about it.
The thing is- the IC makes mistakes. But a single disaster of a conclusion like the WMD debacle cannot be used to discredit every single subsequent conclusion, otherwise we could never prosecute anyone on terror charges ever again. Pointing at the WMD fuckup and using that to disprove every conclusion you don't like means you aren't actually engaging in the substance. If tomorrow they conclude something you agree with and I don't, will you take me seriously when I say "but Iraq tho"? Probably not.
I wasn't saying, "but Iraq" to discredit every subsequent conclusion. You will be hard pressed to find that in my comment. I mentioned that to help temper the people who are apparently engaging in confirmation bias, accepting statements without evidence when it seems to align with their beliefs.
You also make another interesting point, even if it wasn't your intent. Mueller's indictment of hackers was in a legal system that would throw out the indictment if it were not logically and legally sound. The followup to that is, why wasn't there a presentation of the actual data that formed the conclusions of the IC the in the other cases that you mention? If you look at them, carefully, they have also been discredited since their presentations. The conclusions should be: 1) people are people with their own agendas and designs, and 2) appealing to authority isn't critical or independent thinking.
> He is in the absolutely perfect position to say otherwise
Let's explore that claim:
Mike Pompeo had three general options, regardless of the truth:
1) State that he has no such evidence. In this case he'd draw the ire of the dems, probably the ire of various dem/republican pundits, and certainly the ire of members of the intelligence community who had already stated a clear link exists.
2) Say nothing. This is a decent short term tactic but would open him up to being vulnerable in future hearings since he has no stated position.
3) Claim that evidence exists. This puts him safely in the company of republican/dem pundits, rest of intelligence community, etc.
We don't know the truth because we don't have the evidence. But I don't think we can say with certainty that Mike Pompeo was in the "perfect position" to reveal the truth. It's equally likely he was in the perfect position to go along with a narrative that was both popular and unsupported by factual evidence.
Literally nobody else in the Trump administration minds drawing Democratic ire. If he was afraid of Democratic anger, he would be the only guy in the administration who does. Pompeo cheerleaded the Benghazi inquest when he was in Congress!
"Triggering the libs" is approximately 30% of the Trump administration's modus operandi. I don't see much evidence that Pompeo is an exception.
If he is, then Trump's goal of draining the swamp has been thwarted by his own appointee. So... why did Trump appoint him to be Secretary of State? He's obviously been coopted by the Dems, blinded to the truth, and willing to go along with Deep State shenanigans. But Trump trusts him to talk to Kim Jong Un. That seems like terrible judgment. The only resolution to this is that Trump himself has been compromised by the Deep State, or is too stupid to realize that his own guys are.
Either that or he's telling the truth as he understands it.
It's just so sad that you aren't going to get your war in Syria! This discussion is a microcosm of why: Wikileaks simply releases items of interest, while their competitors in the official Western media have to always worry about whether their reporting contributes to More War Always. Thus despite all the braying about Wikileaks' motives, the average thinking human automatically believes them more than the "Russia is teh devil" media firms.
Coinbase has been fishy from the start... For example, I placed buy orders for some Bitcoins when they dropped sharply years ago (Coinbase just started at that time) and they canceled those orders after I placed them. Now what they do is that they bring the servers down when it happens.
They did the same with Bitcoin Cash, or maybe worst... (see stories about when they first introduced bitcoin cash)
Sure, maybe, but if you have been aware of the issue for a year and it's still going on 2 years later it might be considered just a good excuse... How often do you get that problem trading stocks?
I'm no fan of Coinbase so don't mistaken me for a shill but I've also heard of countless cases of the opposite case (e.g. order gets declined and the coin drops drastically post order, resulting in a "gain" for the person whose order got declined).
It seems reasonable that these are genuine mistakes. It seems ludicrous for Coinbase to implement order cancellation so that they can do some risk-free hedging when something like that is ripe for some serious whistleblowing.
They're essentially selling shovels in a Pyramid-Ponzi scheme gold rush, collecting fees in this new found "gold" as well; and with their Earn.com acquisition, they're trying to strengthen the ecosystem to help prop up the perceived value of the crypto-assets they hold/collect.
Fun to see how bitcoin has come full circle in reinventing everything its cheerleaders initially railed against: fraud, then centralization, regulation, and now “censorship”.
I guess the lesson here should be about the primacy of law, and how you won’t succeed in using technology to undermine it.
The problem I suspect is that a are real company (eg incorporated legal presence - not dismissing other companies, just distinguishing them as things that have government identity), and so must abide by the laws set by their host country (USA), and the policies of banking corps, etc that they interact with.
Assuming they need a bank (liquidity, etc) they need to follow their bank’s rules. Given all us banks hammering WL it would be unsurprising if they were pressured to do that.
That said I despise Wikileaks for a number of reasons, but don’t feel like starting the firestorm that is arguing about them in a comment forum :)
> I guess the lesson here should be about the primacy of law, and how you won’t succeed in using technology to undermine it.
What? I think the lesson is that centralization and regulation are necessary to prevent undesirable outcomes amongst large groups of people. That's literally the reason we invented governments...
Sure governments are fallible, but they're still a more effective tool in ensuring stability than most other paradigms we can think of (and certainly more so than anarchy).
It's not really Bitcoin's fault that people are using Coinbase.
But the fact is, there's always a price to decentralization. Centralized services are fast and can be cheaper! It's not a huge surprise that something that seems bulky and annoying to deal with has sprouted companies like Coinbase.
Don't be so defeatist. You can realistically sidestep law a few ways, eg.
(1) by being fervently multi-jurisdiction
(2) by being transparent and high-profile and community-popular enough ("think of the children!") to resist attempts at regulation
(3) by throwing the dog a bone (ie. making it profitable for a jurisdiction not to legislate against you or interfere)
(4) by being nominally jurisdictionless (ie. darknet only)
Morally and progressively speaking, I suppose the last is the superior option. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow banking integration, so speed of settlement, scaling and trust become challenges. Hacker quest: solve them and win big money.
I was being triumphant rather than defeatist. I believe democratically enacted laws are far better than power being exerted by those with technological might against those without.
Why yes - democracy in the idealistic sense and anarchism in the free sense are not so dissimilar. Such a pity about the small reality of human behavior!
I cannot recommend Coinbase at all. I operate an adult comic book publisher and they shutdown our account without notice and blamed the bank they work with (despite the fact that we were not converting our BTC to USD). All support tickets took weeks to get a reply and it was always unhelpful.
For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers.
I had my personal account blocked from buying without explanation and customer service was a brick wall. They did answer, but refused to provide any explanation, recourse or escalation.
Had they wanted additional verification of my identity, citizenship or ownership of my bank account, I was ready to provide it.
I think that the barrier to entry to accepting bitcoin or cryto payments in general directly can be fairly high, depending on the ecosystem. It's been intimidating to me.
I'd love to see a collection of crypto tutorials to get started accepting payments and buying coins in any ecosystem.
https://globee.com/ accepts multiple cryptocurrencies and pays out in either fiat or Monero (the closest thing to digital cash there is). They are based in South Africa with different laws.
Last year they went in 50/50 with the Monero community and worked on https://www.projectcoralreef.com/ which is the implementation of many famous music artists accepting Monero in their online stores.
> Pompeo, in an address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “a fraud” and “a coward.”
> “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Pompeo said.
I wouldn't taken this particular statement as the official position of the whole U.S. Federal Government towards the Wikileaks organization.
The CIA director, a former Congressman and a Republican said that. I mean, you want to know what the Center for Disease Control and EPA think of Wikileaks?
Exchanges like Coinbase are going to continue to lock themselves down. Then regulators are going to get into bed with their favorite companies. Then They're going to make love and use tax dollars to send guns to the exchanges that do not meet "sane requirements."
This is why we need decentralized exchanges... It was only a matter of time before Coinbase started acting like traditional payment processors / PayPal...
89 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadInstead of complaining, WikiLeaks can set up their own payment processing server and do away with Coinbase altogether.
Can't do that with a bank account!
Could you provide a source? I'd love to know more.
- Mike Pompeo, current CIA director and nominee for Secretary of State
I'm all for skepticism of what people say, especially people in positions like CIA Director, but when a Republican CIA director agrees with the DNC about what happened, it seems not entirely unreasonable to give it some credence. He is in the absolutely perfect position to say otherwise, if he believed otherwise, and is in the perfect position to reevaluate the previous intelligence report. He's the director of the CIA! If he thinks there's evidence backing another narrative, he can just come out and say so.
https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/
What? There's plenty of evidence. Wikileaks consistently published information damaging to Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the election, and published zero information damaging to Trump.
What is a normal reaction to be publicly declared a murderer and enemy combatant (with an implied statement to be droned) for publishing documents from people involved in the US military that wanted to give the public information? In the context of what he perceive she has done against him, what is the likeliest outcome if he comes into contact with damaging information and a request to publish it? "No thank you, only if you provide equally damaging information on her opponent or else it will look bad?".
On the third hand, Assange spent time suggesting that the information definitely didn't come from Russia, and suggesting it might have been Seth Rich. But information came out the shows that he was talking with Guccifer 2.0, who was widely suspected (at the time!) to be GRU and if he wasn't, was meant to be a Romanian hacker, not a DNC whistleblower. So there's at least tenuous evidence that Assange was willing to both work with Russian intelligence and rope in an entirely unrelated death to muddy the waters on where the info came from.
Going by my earlier comment - I would coordinate with the Satan to release true information, the source of the information does not necessarily contaminate its truthiness. Publishing true information, as a hypothetical whistleblower organization, is my hypothetical raison d'etre.
This only ever becomes suspect if I am selectively publishing, or if I am aware that I am selectively publishing.
In this case there needs to be evidence of either. Conversations with biased parties are not evidence unless they clearly state that the selective publishing is known.
It's also extremely important to realize what exactly the voters learned from the emails. CAP President Neera Tanden, and a prominent figure in HRC's campaign, expressed sharp criticisms for her favored candidate's judgment. DNC Chair Donna Brazille emailed privately about how the statistical job growth under President Obama was essentially a "technical" win, but had very little impact on people's lives. She also went on to leak debate questions to her favored candidate, exposing one of hundreds of different instances of a party-wide effort to sabotage the primary process.
Contrast this with the RNC primary. Virtually the entire party leadership loathed then-candidate Trump. As opposed to rallying around him, they actively rallied against him. In October there were discussions of replacing him on the ticket. Even at the convention, Ted Cruz reportedly went off-script and asked attendees to vote their conscience, as opposed to voting for candidate Trump. The divisions in the GOP were laid bare for the world to see. The divisions in the DNC stayed hidden from voters. Voters only learned much after the election that Donna Brazille contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton with another candidate after she fainted on 9/11, an event that ironically followed weeks of mainstream media outrage against "right wing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's Health", which also included a pickle-jar opening gag on a late night talk show.
What truths would Wikileaks have exposed about the RNC that weren't already publicly known? Is this an empty box containing any convenient allegation?
One of the USA's major political parties sabotaged the primary process, engaged in debate cheating, media manipulation and bird-dogging, all for a candidate whom many of the party's own leadership found wanting in terms of judgment. After all this - the outrage seems fixated on the messenger, Wikileaks, as if their alleged selective leaking somehow absolves the Democrats of these monumentally disgusting actions.
If you look at the election from the perspective of damage done to candidates - the sheer volume of substantiated negative press received by candidate Trump makes it really difficult to argue that voters could have somehow heard something else from the RNC's emails that would changed their minds about him.
Supposed I'm biased against you and I report that you hacked into Bob's computer and I have evidence to prove it. I paint that to make you look like some kind of cyber villain and neglect to report the important fact that Bob asked you to do it.
If the reader knows about my bias towards you then they know to take my reporting with a grain of salt because even if it is true, it might not be the whole story.
You are right of course, it is important to know the bias of sources which is why so many fact checking sites popped up after 2016. Before then I would always go wikipedia for unbiased information. Sadly we live in a time where the majority of news papers has a clear and sometimes publicly stated political leaning and bias. Often this can be traced through ownership since many are now owned by the same entity.
If the emails and documents was leaked today then hopefully fact checking sites would be all over it and pulling it apart regardless who originally published them. I do recall a few people were looking at checksum and correlate statements to previously public information, but nothing news worthy came out of that.
In my opinion, having followed WikiLeaks over the years, I think it's safe to say that they have an anti-western intelligence/military bias. That doesn't mean that what they publish is untrue. It just means that I'm skeptical about their motives and sources when they release something and I make it a point to try and find a good counter-balance to their take on the issue. Because they probably only presented a tiny portion of the truth that fit their agenda.
The War documents leak established them in international news, which change wikileaks tactic to more editorial style. This then resulted that they got the cable leak the next year.
After this there were internal fighting, blocking, ddos, economical blockades, volunteers being detained at airports and a lot of intelligence agency taking a lot of interests. The new "editorial" style also meant that they now held on to leaks rather than publishing.
And then we had the Swedish investigation and all that mess. Calls for assassinations, "enemy combatant", drones, diplomatic back channels, all contributed to a very antagonistic/paranoid relation between the US government and Assange personally. At this point there is nothing resembling the original style of wikileaks. I see it less like a "anti-western intelligence/military bias", but rather a anti-Hillary/US government bias.
I can't disagree with that.
Then there are things like the Vault7 leaks, which were stoked by teaser announcements and theatrics. And while they did contain some surveillance tactics that seemed interesting they mostly contained tools and internal communication that was clearly sensitive and generally not information that the public even cared about (their exact code obfuscation algorithms?).
The net effect is that most people didn't care much while anti-western intelligence groups probably had a field day.
And given the sophistication to obtain the data it likely came from a nation state in the first place wishing to accomplish exactly that goal.
There's no way they didn't realize what they were doing. They played part in an attack.
Meanwhile Assange yawns at the Panama papers...
The content here is raw emails from prominent Democrats discussing things like cheating in debates to favor Hillary Clinton, telling each other about how Hillary Clinton has really bad judgment, and an orchestrated campaign with friends in the media to discredit her primary challenger.
There can't really be any "bias" in this kind of primary source information. What would you argue here? That candidate Sanders wanted this to happen? We already know from Donna Brazille's book that this is all true, and there is no other side of this story.
Would you argue that folks like Neera Tanden were emailing wisecracks about Hillary Clinton's poor judgment (while publicly saying the opposite), is somehow mischaracterized? Contrast this with how the RNC treated their frontrunner - they publicly criticized him at every opportunity, and nobody rigged the RNC primary to favor candidate Trump - in fact, they did the complete opposite rather publicly, all but endorsing his opponent.
If equivalent information was in the RNC's emails, it was not brand new information to the public, because they were saying those things in public about their candidate, while the DNC did it in secret.
They may not be officially part of the Russian intelligence apparatus but they definitely don't seem to act contrary to Russian interests, they actively ignored leaks about the Russian government[4], and their public tweets about the Panama Papers were a lot more consistent with protecting Russian interests rather than the purported belief in exposing secrets[5]. They also didn't ask whether they were being used by sources like Guccifer 2 which was later revealed to be a Russian front.
Other governments have come to the same conclusion – e.g. here's a German report which alleges British and French agreement:
http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/merkel-vorgefuehrt-russi...
1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil...
2. http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-help-do...
3. https://apnews.com/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb7987fb/private-...
4. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-le...
5. https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7174580643249643... and https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7176700566505308...
Wikileaks has been openly critical of Russia and its administrators for some time.
Most of what you’re positing is simply your opinion about their (possible) motives, not an issue with their actual actions.
Expecting full editorial capability (eg PII redaction) from someone imprisoned indefinitely without trial (inb4 “but he could walk out and face the same unfair trial and torture that Manning did!”) is complete lunacy.
You don’t personally get to decide who does or does not qualify as a journalist, thankfully. As someone who dislikes the warmongering and totalitarian democratic party exactly as much as the warmongering and totalitarian republican party, I found their releases to be a tremendous public service, as did millions of others.
“These people that I don’t like aren’t releasing enough factual data about the other people I don’t like whilst releasing factual data about these people I do like” is not a condemnation. It is a (relatively unimportant) opinion.
The link you posted to slate relies upon ((( and ))) around people's names being some nefarious anti-jew meaning. When, in reality, this was the actual tweet: "Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre."
Relying upon that sort of cruft just isn't convincing.
* Neo-Nazis invented the "echoes" meme, where when saying the name of a Jewish person in a podcast they would add a sinister echo effect, or in text they would add three parentheses around it.
* Jewish people and others on Twitter reclaimed the parentheses in a positive sense.
* WikiLeaks is referring to the fact that people that complain about them are Jewish, not a random bizarre coincidence about punctuation.
Was it a stupid tweet, prone to misunderstanding? Absolutely. But one vague tweet does not justify labeling a person or organization as anti-Semitic.
Can we assume that that list is not empty? Is it not likely that a few stories that the guardian has posted is from US intelligence service, knowingly or unknowing. If so, should we label them also non-state hostile intelligence service? I would bet that this is how other nations would justify blocking unwanted news papers in national firewalls. They are after all not blocking the free press but rather the (non-)state hostile intelligence service.
What would a reasonable definition be of a hostile intelligence service.
Also, did you read the Mueller indictment of a dozen Russian hackers? It goes into some detail on the kinds of information that the IC has about it.
The thing is- the IC makes mistakes. But a single disaster of a conclusion like the WMD debacle cannot be used to discredit every single subsequent conclusion, otherwise we could never prosecute anyone on terror charges ever again. Pointing at the WMD fuckup and using that to disprove every conclusion you don't like means you aren't actually engaging in the substance. If tomorrow they conclude something you agree with and I don't, will you take me seriously when I say "but Iraq tho"? Probably not.
Let's explore that claim:
Mike Pompeo had three general options, regardless of the truth:
1) State that he has no such evidence. In this case he'd draw the ire of the dems, probably the ire of various dem/republican pundits, and certainly the ire of members of the intelligence community who had already stated a clear link exists.
2) Say nothing. This is a decent short term tactic but would open him up to being vulnerable in future hearings since he has no stated position.
3) Claim that evidence exists. This puts him safely in the company of republican/dem pundits, rest of intelligence community, etc.
We don't know the truth because we don't have the evidence. But I don't think we can say with certainty that Mike Pompeo was in the "perfect position" to reveal the truth. It's equally likely he was in the perfect position to go along with a narrative that was both popular and unsupported by factual evidence.
"Triggering the libs" is approximately 30% of the Trump administration's modus operandi. I don't see much evidence that Pompeo is an exception.
If he is, then Trump's goal of draining the swamp has been thwarted by his own appointee. So... why did Trump appoint him to be Secretary of State? He's obviously been coopted by the Dems, blinded to the truth, and willing to go along with Deep State shenanigans. But Trump trusts him to talk to Kim Jong Un. That seems like terrible judgment. The only resolution to this is that Trump himself has been compromised by the Deep State, or is too stupid to realize that his own guys are.
Either that or he's telling the truth as he understands it.
They did the same with Bitcoin Cash, or maybe worst... (see stories about when they first introduced bitcoin cash)
https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/
That's a pretty bold allegation. Do you have any evidence that this is the case.
If you need many examples, look for Reddit threads that talk about Coinbase created right after Bitcoin dips.
Any serious software engineer knows about the CAP theorem.
It seems reasonable that these are genuine mistakes. It seems ludicrous for Coinbase to implement order cancellation so that they can do some risk-free hedging when something like that is ripe for some serious whistleblowing.
https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver
I guess the lesson here should be about the primacy of law, and how you won’t succeed in using technology to undermine it.
Assuming they need a bank (liquidity, etc) they need to follow their bank’s rules. Given all us banks hammering WL it would be unsurprising if they were pressured to do that.
That said I despise Wikileaks for a number of reasons, but don’t feel like starting the firestorm that is arguing about them in a comment forum :)
What? I think the lesson is that centralization and regulation are necessary to prevent undesirable outcomes amongst large groups of people. That's literally the reason we invented governments...
Sure governments are fallible, but they're still a more effective tool in ensuring stability than most other paradigms we can think of (and certainly more so than anarchy).
But the fact is, there's always a price to decentralization. Centralized services are fast and can be cheaper! It's not a huge surprise that something that seems bulky and annoying to deal with has sprouted companies like Coinbase.
If masses are expected to do so then there will likely be a sort of centralized "trusted few".
(1) by being fervently multi-jurisdiction
(2) by being transparent and high-profile and community-popular enough ("think of the children!") to resist attempts at regulation
(3) by throwing the dog a bone (ie. making it profitable for a jurisdiction not to legislate against you or interfere)
(4) by being nominally jurisdictionless (ie. darknet only)
Morally and progressively speaking, I suppose the last is the superior option. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow banking integration, so speed of settlement, scaling and trust become challenges. Hacker quest: solve them and win big money.
For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers.
Do not use Coinbase.
Had they wanted additional verification of my identity, citizenship or ownership of my bank account, I was ready to provide it.
I'd love to see a collection of crypto tutorials to get started accepting payments and buying coins in any ecosystem.
Maybe another commenter has a good source?
Last year they went in 50/50 with the Monero community and worked on https://www.projectcoralreef.com/ which is the implementation of many famous music artists accepting Monero in their online stores.
> Pompeo, in an address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “a fraud” and “a coward.”
> “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Pompeo said.
I wouldn't taken this particular statement as the official position of the whole U.S. Federal Government towards the Wikileaks organization.