Very telling PBS
interview in 2010 regarding …
“Is Wikileaks being
manipulated by interested parties?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAca9RdGl98
(go to minute 2:25)
SAMPLE of Assange's "journalism writing" in
2006 before Wikileaks, under the pseudonym "me" on his baby blog
IQ.org, before Wikileaks moved from Chinese anti-communist dissidents into his hands.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/iq.org/conspiracies.pdf
At
this juncture it is highlighted that the new Wikileaks headline grabbing
phenomena’s most mainstream news affecting outcomes, from so many low level
security cables dumped onto the internet like plastics dumped into our oceans,
were 1) to embarrass Chinese authorities
over the cable leaks in which they discussed
favoring a reunified North and South Korea; 2) along the same western media
managed political fault lines, the leaks highlighted by the media were many very
pointed references to various Arab leaders, which fueled the new Arab Spring
emergence-- which was being managed considerably by the CIA, and 3) the
singling out of Erdogan, in the media headlines of the print media made quite
public by allies of Wikileaks at that time (New York Time; Wash Post; the Guardian)
were clearly calculated to disrupt Turkish US relations to irreparable levels,
a goal of special lobbyists and foreign agencies and assorted intel agencies.
In
Spring 1991 Assange was a young lad of 19 years of age in a hackers
gang of some older boys, and they hacked into MilNet of US military and easily got
caught by Australian Federal Police. His teen girlfriend earlier got pregnant by him
when they were both 16, and after their baby was born, the 3 of them lived on
welfare benefits. It wasn't until 1994 that Assange was finally
officially charged, with the case only being heard in 1996. He pleaded guilty in
Melbourne's Victoria County Court to 24 counts of hacking but mysteriously
avoided serving any time. The judge merely fined Assange $2100 and warned
him that if he carried on hacking he would indeed go to jail.
After a few years of waiting, on Wednesday, 25 August 1993, two other hackers in Assange's hacker crew, Phoenix and Nom, pleaded guilty to fifteen and two charges respectively. The combined weight of the prosecution's evidence, the risk and cost of running a full trial and the need to get on with their lives had pushed them over the edge. Electron didn't need to come to court to give evidence. At the plea hearing, which ran over to the next day, Phoenix's lawyer, Dyson Hore-Lacy, spent considerable time sketching the messy divorce of his client's parents for the benefit of the judge. Suggesting Phoenix retreated into his computer during the bitter separation and divorce was the best chance of getting him off a prison term. (from p. 146) [note: two other of the accomplices of Julian Assange, Pad and Gandalf, served several months in prison in the same cell-- the judge ordered Phoenix to complete 500 hours of community service work over two years and assigned him a $1000 twelve-month good behaviour bond. He gave Nom 200 hours, and a $500, six-month bond for good behaviour.]
Later, in 2007, the first data dump of Wikileaks ever, direct from the consultancy firm KROLL
Securities, associated with Assange and his group of pro-western Chinese angry
with the government of China, it had been them who had created the Wikileaks
prototype and groundfloor foundation- for-expansion, with the help of some
western NGOs. Thus, Wikileaks first dump
was a Kroll Security Consultants report (Kroll is much like Stratfor or
Halliburton or Booz Allen or Academi or DynCorp), on corruption in Kenya, which
Kroll never used in its media release formats because they were unpaid due to
changing client circumstances, but this Kroll report ended up with the help of
this new thing called Wikileaks, on the front page of The Guardian. Assange’s blog at this time was call IQ.org.
"WIKILEAKS
got started with Chinese and Taiwanese anti-communist dissidents living in
Sweden and Iceland. Many of the small Wikileaks staff are
South Africans and Australians. The American ACLU is cozy with the
director, Julian Assange. A word of warning however, intel
agents can easily break the encrypted trail of Wikileaks communications,
whatever they may be up to".
IS
WIKILEAKS NOW SOME KIND OF CULT?
from Intl Herald Tribune
4/9/2010 April
WikiLeaks was in its very earliest phase
founded in 1999 by anti-communist Chinese dissidents in China & Australia
& unknown other venues, assisted by western intelligence operatives leading
up to its first public non-wiki format release in 2006. Julian Assange
registered it in Iceland as a for-profit corporation called Sunshine Press
Productions in Nov 2010 with himself as the Numero Uno spokesperson and
grandmaster of a core staff. From the 251,287 Wikileak main CABLEGATE embassy
cables November 28, 2010, only 15.000 had the mild classification
"secret", but there were no documents classified as "top secret",
which itself is not even the most secret classification, there are dozens of
more restricted ratings above "top secret" (for example, SENSITIVE
COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION (SCI) and SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAMS (SAPs).
Daniel
Domscheit-Berg, a German computer scientist, served as Wikileaks’
second-in-command until mid-2010. Domscheit-Berg left the organization after
arguments with Assange over many topics, ranging from Assange’s handling of
finances to his exaggeration of the organization’s size and influence. April of
2010 Wikileaks released the “Collateral Murder” video featuring a US military
helicopter killing children and two Reuters journalists, leaked by Bradley Manning who had
offered it to many contacts before it was picked up by Wikileaks. July 5 2012
Wikileaks published online the SYRIA FILES which they had received from
ANONYMOUS who had made the anti-Assad boast, "As long as the tyrant
[Assad] remains defiantly in power, Anonymous will continue to work
relentlessly day and night--from every country and every timezone, to assist
the courageous freedom fighters and activists in Syria," their statement
said.
RECAP:
https://www.ifla.org/publications/what-is-the-effect-of-wikileaks-for-freedom-of-information
WikiLeaks was used from 1999 to 2006 mostly by anti-communist Chinese
dissidents, journalists and mathematicians who were pro-west intelligence
agencies "friends", along with some start-up company technologists
from the United States, Taiwan, South Africa Australia, and Europe, using only
"wiki" style format which allowed ANY user to contribute and edit
content . By Nov 2010 it was a corporation tightly controlled by a small core
staff which was dominated by Julian Assange.
"NOT SO SECURE" say SOURCES who supplied to Wikileaks
The Vault 7 collection from the 200 employee Center for Cyber Intelligence,
released by Wikileaks March 2017, can probably best be thought of as an
internal corporate 'wiki' used by multiple CIA researchers (contractors) who
methodically found and documented weaknesses in a variety of popular commercial
and consumer electronics. Don't forget the CABLEGATE embassy low level security
diplomatic cables in WIKILEAKS originated from SIPRNet (Secret Internetetwork)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/siprnet-america-stores-secret-cables
-- a widely used by millions network of the US Department of Defense.
Over the past 15+ years US Embassies worldwide had been plugged into SIPRNet in
an effort to broadly increase information sharing, even temp employees filling
in for a secretary for a few days could tap into it. Documents were available
on SIPRNet for over 2 million people including all U.S. military staff who knew
how to find it. Only about 100,000 of the leaked cables were labeled
"confidential", a mere 15.000 had the higher classification
"secret", of all the trove of embassy cables in Wikileaks, but MOST
IMPORTANTLY there were no documents classified as "top secret" on the
classification scale, which has many more restricted classifications than just
“top secret”.
Most
U.S. governments' departments early reactions were
considerably milder than Hillary Clinton's concerning the possible impacts of
the leaks. According to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates at that time, the
leaks were embarrassing but he estimated that they would only have
"modest" consequences for US foreign policy. German Interior Minister
Thomas de Maizičre described WikiLeaks as irritating and annoying for Germany,
but not a threat. It has been questioned if the impact of the leaks will lead
in an opposite direction than was expected: towards more secrecy and increasing
restrictions. It may become harder to support protection for people who
disclose and publish classified information after WikiLeaks."
IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Nearly all of the hacking techniques described in Vault 7
were already widely known to most cybersecurity experts except for the really
lame in their abilities & the totally incompetent ones.
long list of leftist critics of Wikileaks grows
https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-wikileaks-2/22389
https://www.globalresearch.ca/wikileaks-a-big-dangerous-us-government-con-job/22357
https://www.angelfire.com/electronic2/haarpmicrowaves/WIKILEAKS_became_a_CULT.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaUSerKvJYE
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.globalresearch.ca/wikileaks-and-media-disinformation/22321/amp
HAS WIKILEAKS truly REALLY helped the
civilian world in any of the areas below? (like
the My Lai photos and the Abu Ghraib photos and the Bradley Manning “Collateral
Murder” Army helicopter video):
• CIA hacking into any information system they bloody want to penetrate
• Guantanamo and/or torture of prisoners at global and US military/agency sites
• NSA surveillance law suits and counter defense programs
• Bombings and droning of civilians
• arms deals and dealers running amok in the world like rabid cheetahs
• US tax money payments to mercenary soldiers/armies & defense contractor
firms
• organ and human and infant and drug trafficking blood roads
• ever broadening expansion of US military and their contractors
• secrecy of British military activities and the Crown unanswerable to
Parliament
• toxicity and criminality of Wall Street and western banksters
• gross and flagrant human rights abuses of Israel
• cover-up of the real dynamics behind World Trade Centers destruction
• US soldiers rape and abuse and murder of civilians in the middle east and
Germany and Okinawa, to name a few
• an end to EMBEDDED journalists being the only reporters allowed anywhere near
US troops abroad.
Will Assange’s
super-high 'PR cult' of Wikileaks personal promotions strategy (and the
resulting blowback) make it much worse in the end for the many more humble and
selfless whistleblowers who are anonymous and/or
unnamed or un-famed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whistleblowers#2000s
This
was published one week before any of the first Wikileaks LEAKS.
WIRED:
"Assange's Leaks For Profit" /July 2008
https://www.wired.com/2008/07/wikileaks-2/
Assange
is even toying with the idea of making his site a subscription service that
pre-releases secret documents to paying reporters. The reporters would have the
option of writing about a given leak, or passing on it and getting another, if
the reporter doesn't find it useful.
Out of 251,287 total
cables, only 15.000 had the mild classification "secret", but there
were no documents classified as "top secret"
https://www.ifla.org/publications/what-is-the-effect-of-wikileaks-for-freedom-of-information
WikiLeaks was
founded in 2006 by anti-communist Chinese dissidents, journalists and
mathematicians who were pro-western intelligence agencies, and some start-up
company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, South Africa Australia,
and Europe. The diplomatic cables in WIKILEAKS originated from SIPRNet (Secret Internet Network), a
closed network of the US Department of Defence Over the past ten years US
Embassies worldwide were plugged into SIPRNet in an effort to increase
information sharing.
Documents were available on SIPRNet for over 2 million people including all military staff. About 100,000 of the leaked cables were labeled
"confidential", about only 15.000
had the higher classification "secret", of all the trove of
cables in Wikileaks, but there were no documents classified as "top
secret" on the classification scale.
Most U.S. governments' departments
reactions were considerably milder than Hillary Clinton's concerning the
possible impacts of the leaks. According to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates
the leaks were embarrassing but he estimated that they would only have
"modest" consequences for US foreign policy.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizičre
described WikiLeaks as irritating and annoying for Germany, but not a threat.
It has been questioned if the impact of the
leaks will lead in an opposite direction than was expected: towards more
secrecy and increasing restrictions. It may become harder to support protection
for people who disclose and publish classified information after
WikiLeaks."
Tons of negative X-Wiki employees against
Assange
WHIFFYLEAKS?
https://www.dw.com/en/former-assange-associate-publishes-tell-all-book-on-wikileaks/a-14833170
Co-Founder
of Wikileaks, Domscheit-Berg, the true IT brains behind the Wikileaks
security system, splits from Assange and asserts Julian is not transparent
but is a paranoid megalomaniac who believes only in the top-down hierarchy
structure, like in a cult, with Julian only at the top.
"I
remember one evening at a club in a former slaughterhouse in Wiesbaden. The
others we were with nicknamed Julian “Disco King” or something like that for
his unusual way of dancing. Julian took up quite a lot of space when he danced
— almost like a tribesman performing some ritual. He’d spread his arms and
gallop across the dance floor, taking huge steps. He didn’t look very rhythmic
or co-ordinated and he didn’t seem to have that much feeling for the music but
he did possess a certain cool. He didn’t care anyway what other people thought
of him. You need space, he once told me, if you want your ego to flow. That
statement fit well with his dance style", even while as he always does,
"wearing his two pairs of pants" (literally, it is a weird habit of
his from his cult childhood).
Most
people forget that Assange and his Wikileaks in 2012 tried to damage Assad and
his Syrian government with THE SYRIAN FILES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria_Files
Julian
Assange also derides all researchers who claim that 911 and the Twin Towers
collapsed is in any way going against what the US Report Committee
concluded.
SAMPLE of Assange's "journalism writing" in
2006 before Wikileaks, under the pseudonym "me" on his baby blog
IQ.org, before Wikileaks moved from Chinese dissidents into his hands.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/iq.org/conspiracies.pdf
by Julian Assange (below)
(webeditor’s note:
Assange NEVER completed mathematics courses at
university level)
“Terrorist conspiracies
as connected graphs"-- JULIAN ASSANGE
Pre and post 9/11 the
Maryland Procurement Office2and others have funded mathematicians to look at
terrorist conspiracies as connected graphs (no mathematical background is
needed to follow this article). We extend this understanding of terrorist
organizations and turn it on the likes of its paymasters; transforming it into
a knife to dissect the conspiracies used to maintain authoritarian power
structures. We will use connected graphs as a way to apply our spatial
reasoning abilities to political relationships. These graphs are very easy to
visualize. First take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board
at random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail
without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine
means it is possible to travel from any nail to any other nail via twine and
intermediary nails. Mathematicians say that this type of graph is connected.
Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts
or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the
fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many
conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge
between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy
Some conspirators dance
closer than others
Conspirators are often
discerning, for some trust and depend each other,
while others say little. Important information flows frequently through some
links, trivial information through others. So we expand our simple connected
graph model to include not only links, but their “importance”. Return to our board-and-nails analogy.
Imagine a thick heavy cord between some nails and fine light thread between
others. Call the importance, thickness or heaviness of a link its weight.
Between conspirators that never communicate the weight is zero. The
“importance” of communication passing through a link is difficult to evaluate
apriori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspiracy. We simply
say that the “importance” of communication contributes to the weight of a link
in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amount of
important communication flowing across it. Questions about conspiracies in
general won’t require us to know the weight of any link, since that changes
from conspiracy to conspiracy.
Traditional vs. modern
conspiracies
Traditional attacks on
conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, cut many high weight
links. The act of assassination — the targeting of visible individuals, is the
result of mental inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which our
species evolved. Literacy and the communications revolution have empowered
conspirators with new means to conspire, increasing the speed of accuracy of the their interactions and thereby the maximum size a
conspiracy may achieve before it breaks down. Conspirators who have this
technology are able to out conspire conspirators without it. For the same costs
they are able to achieve a higher total conspiratorial power. That is why they
adopt it. For example, remembering Lord Halifax’s words, let us consider two
closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings, the US Democratic
and Republican parties. Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave
up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence — let alone the computer
systems which manage their subscribes, donors, budgets, polling, call centres
and direct mail campaigns? They would immediately fall into an organizational
stupor and lose to the other.”
--end of Julian Assange
writing sample
In
2006, Sunshine Press launched the WikiLeaks.org website,
... political dissidents, start-up technologists, and journalists from all around .... of countries such as China,
Iran, and Thailand were forced to retaliate against the opaque loss of transparency of the Kroll Report/Wikileaks evident in the smears against them.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/wikileaks/
Wikileaks is an international organization, based in Sweden, which publishes
anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents while preserving the
anonymity of sources. Its website, launched in
2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. The organization has
described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as
journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S.,
Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
Subject: 1/2007: Chinese
overseas dissidents working with CIA analyst formed first prototype for Julian
Assange's 'Wikileaks'
Chinese overseas dissidents working with CIA analyst formed
first prototype for Julian Assange's new "Wikileaks", reported
Jan 2007
https://web.archive.org/web/20071218060850/http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=15280&t=1&c=1
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Media/Chinese_WikiLeaks_Aids_Whistleblowers
January
11, 2007
Source AFP
Chinese
dissidents, with the help of powerful encryption software, say they will launch
a site designed to let whistleblowers in authoritarian countries post sensitive
documents on the Internet without being traced. Chinese journalist Shi Tao was
sentenced to a 10-year jail term in 2005 after publicising an email from
Chinese officials about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Emails or
documents posted to a website can be traced back to the source because they are
made up of data packets — and each data packet carries the address of the last
Internet service provider through which it passed. The British weekly New
Scientist, in a report in next Saturday's issue, says that WikiLeaks will
exploit "an anonymising protocol" called The Onion Router, or Tor.
Tor
routes data through a network of servers that use cryptography to hide the path
used by the data packets. "In the past, determined cryptographers have
breached Tor's security, and though each breach has led to improvements to Tor,
there is always a risk others will be discovered," New Scientist cautions.
WikiLeaks'
website says the organisation was founded by "Chinese dissidents,
mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the United States,
Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa."
"Our
advisory board, which is still forming, includes representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities,
reporters, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and cryptographers,"
it says.
There
are no formal links to the successful online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, but
"both share the same radically democratic philosophy that allowing anyone
to be an author or editor leads to a vast and accurate collective intelligence
and knowledge."
Chinese
dissidents launch censor site AFP [Thursday, January 11, 2007
http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=15280&t=1&c=1
WikiLeaks' website says the organisation was founded by "Chinese
dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US,
Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa".
"Our advisory board, which is still
forming, includes representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee
communities, reporters, a former US intelligence analyst and cryptographers,"
it says.
"Assange’s
style is an odd mixture of insight, nonsense and brass-neck salesmanship".
"Wikileaks is a pastebin
for spooks, and they're happy to be used that way."
In
1995 at age 24, Mr Assange was accused, with a friend, of dozens of hacking
activities. Though the group of young nerdy hackers was skilled enough to track
detectives tracking them, Mr Assange was eventually caught by more clever intel agents and pleaded guilty. He was fined several
thousand Australian dollars - only escaping a prison term on the condition that
he did not reoffend (some say this is when he might have been recruited by both
Australian & American intel agencies). Just free
of prison threats, Assange then spent three years working on a research team
with a Melborne Univ. academic, Suelette Dreyfus - who was writing her 1997
book Underground, on early generation hacking
subculture.
Dr. Suelette Dreyfus is an Australian French Jewish international researcher
project director on the impact of digital technologies on whistleblowing and
the trend of ‘security clearance creep’.
The
idea of WikiLeaks: A safe place where whistle blowers and others with inside
information could anonymously share data that the public needs to know. In a
digital age when the once-great newspaper industry is on the decline and there
are fewer checks than there should be on corporate and governmental power,
WikiLeaks seemed to restore a small degree of balance.
But
then things changed. In the last few months, WikiLeaks' actions and motivations
have increasingly seemed untrustworthy. Yesterday, the New
York Times published
the results of a lengthy investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder Julian
Assange. The biggest cache of leaked documents ever released (at least so far)
is 11.5 million documents from a Panamanian law firm--the "Panama
Papers"--that revealed how rich and powerful people hide their wealth in
offshore havens. Those documents were released anonymously to a consortium of
investigative reporters, but not through WikiLeaks. Why not? The anonymous
leaker claims to have tried repeatedly to contact WikiLeaks about the cache of
documents but said there was no response.
Assange's antics have turned me off to Wikileaks to the point where I
will have trouble taking anything they publish at face value. He is doing a
disservice to the transparency movement. It's pretty remarkable that someone
can be both a paranoid recluse and shameless attention whore, but Assange pulls
it off quite well. Wikileaks would be much better off with someone both low key
and competent.
July
14, 2010 It was Wikileaks' publishing of the private pager messages in New York
from the day of 9/11 that turned me off to them. (http://911.wikileaks.org ) Would Wikileaks also
have published all my private email from that day had they obtained it?
In 2010, just before publishing the first
Afghan war logs provided to WikiLeaks by Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, Mr. Assange and a group
of journalists from The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel were
engaged in a tussle over redacting the names of Afghan informants. The three
publications all decided to do so, but Mr. Assange disagreed. As he told Nick Davies of The Guardian, “If an Afghan civilian
helps coalition forces, he deserves to die.” Many people who have
met Assange are struck by how insistently he steers the conversation away from
matters of principle to personal slights against him, and his plans for
payback. He demands personal “intel” on others and dismisses questions
about his organization by saying, “I am WikiLeaks”
repeatedly.
Assange’s value to Ecuador as a political symbol has changed. Internal documents revealed that relations between embassy staff and Ecuador’s most famous asylee were fraught. Security staff were filing minute by minute reports
of Assange’s movements to Ecuador’s intelligence agency. Last year, these tensions came to the fore as Assange was publicly reprimanded by Ecuadorian officials for interfering in the US election process – by publishing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign – while claiming asylum. Assange’s internet connection was eventually cut off by Ecuador, to his visible public rage.WikiLeaks so-called Erdogan Emails are
particularly egregious. The organization said that the infodump would expose
the machinations of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately after
the attempted coup against him, but instead turned out to be mostly
correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens, which
included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political
activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters, disastrous in the week of
the coup. Zeynep Tufekci, a female sociologist at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (herself of Turkish descent), wrote an essay criticizing WikiLeaks and Western media outlets for endangering
Turkish citizens, and WikiLeaks and their supporters turned on her, hard.
"Within five minutes they called me an Erdogan apologist, which speaks volumes to their lack of research,"
Tufekci says. "And then they blocked me. So much for hearing something
they don't like."
Skeptics on JULIAN ASSANGE, as lone Truth Messiah,
speak out
Assange,
probably an intelligence asset....
THE
FAMILY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_KeVkZ_JhM
trailers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=tlDQlzx18zc
FULL
DOCUMENTARY [free] but in small embedded format (use your Cntrl + function to
enlarge video screen)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3L20Q48HeI
“THE FAMILY” cult of the Assange nomadic family: Anne Hamilton-Byrne was beautiful, charismatic and delusional. She was also
incredibly dangerous. Convinced she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ,
Hamilton-Byrne headed an apocalyptic
sect called The Family, which was prominent in Melbourne from the 1960s
through to the 1990s. With her husband Bill, she acquired numerous children –
some through adoption scams, some born to cult members – and raised them as her
own. Isolated from the outside world, the children were dressed in matching
outfits, had identical dyed blonde hair, and were allegedly beaten, starved and
injected with LSD. Taught that Hamilton-Byrne was both their mother and the
messiah, the children were eventually rescued during a police raid in 1987, but
their trauma had only just begun.
With
survivors and cult members telling their stories alongside the Australian and
international detectives who worked the case, this confronting feature
documentary exposes not just what happened within the still-operating sect but
also within the conservative Melbourne community that allowed The Family to
flourish.
ASSANGE
ARRESTED IN HIS LATE TEENS as a young father on
the lam and also as a hacker in a hacker gang organization
When
he was a late teens teenager in the late 1980s,
Assange was one of a bunch of youngsters in Melbourne who were early hackers,
when computers were newly put to wide use. Dreyfus's book UNDERGROUND is not
new; it first came out in 1997, a few years after the Melbourne trials that
ended the phase of internet culture it describes. Underground now reappears 14
years later, essentially unchanged, though Assange has been promoted from
researcher to co-author. It is the world before the internet. Seventeen year
olds are shaking up the worlds of banking, telecommunications, the military, space travel at the end of the 80s through their primitive
PCs, and they're now nearing middle age. The younger Assange is less present in
Underground than his connection with Dreyfus makes you expect. His remarkable
childhood is barely mentioned. Modesty or astuteness on his
part, or both? All the young hackers who drift in and out of the story
exist only through their online aliases, and at times their generic
similarities of age, background and interest make them hard to distinguish from
one another. The young hackers which included Assange were convicted and
punished, though none of the Australians went to jail. Some of them were
traumatised by the intensity of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) pursuit.
But the Australian judiciary, administering new laws on computer hacking for
the first time, recognised the offenders had made no profit and done no real
damage. The federal police emerge as clumsy, ignorant and rather brutal, at least
in the eyes of their victims. At the higher level, the AFP seems to have been
driven, like the Australian legislators who brought in the new anti-hacking
laws, by relentlessly punitive pressure from the US, especially the US intel agents who went to Australia to interrogate the teen
hackers, including Assange. It was in 1994 that he was finally charged,
with the case only being heard in 1996. He pleaded guilty in Melbourne's
Victoria County Court to 24 counts of hacking. Some say he got off by agreeing to
spy and when requested, work for the intelligence agencies of US and Australia.
WikiLeaks had its own internal contradictions from the start and was still
struggling to make itself noticed at the time of its publication of the video
film and soundtrack of an Apache helicopter crew killing a group of people in a
Baghdad street. The video (and film) WikiLeaks released as Collateral Murder
was seen by millions of people and changed everything for WikiLeaks and
Assange, thanks to Bradley Manning. The best thing
to come out of Assange's difficulties in fighting extradition to Sweden, and
the possible but unknown danger of onward extradition to the US and a trial for
espionage, is the mega book deal he signed for WikiLeaks Versus the
World: My Story. He has been on peacock display since the Manning
helicopter video release and thriving in the narcissistic spotlight.
WikiLeaks
was in its very earliest phase founded in 2006 by anti-communist Chinese
dissidents in China & Australia, assisted by western intelligence
operatives. Out of 251,287 Wikileak main embassy cables, only 15.000 had the
mild classification "secret", but there were no documents classified
as "top secret", which itself is not the most secret classification,
there are dozens of more restricted ratings above "top secret" (for
example, SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION (SCI) and SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAMS
(SAPs) https://www.ifla.org/publications/what-is-the-effect-of-wikileaks-for-freedom-of-information
WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by
anti-communist Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians who were
pro-west intelligence agencies, along with some start-up company technologists from
the United States, Taiwan, South Africa Australia, and Europe. The Vault 7
collection from the 200 employee Center for Cyber Intelligence is probably best
thought of as an internal corporate wiki used by multiple CIA researchers who
methodically found and documented weaknesses in a variety of popular commercial
and consumer electronics. The embassy low level security diplomatic cables in
WIKILEAKS originated from SIPRNet (Secret Internet Network) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/siprnet-america-stores-secret-cables
,
a widely used by millions network of the US Department of Defence. Over the
past 15+ years US Embassies worldwide were plugged into SIPRNet in an effort to
broadly increase information sharing. Documents were available on SIPRNet for
over 2 million people including all U.S. military staff who knew how to find
it. Only about 100,000 of the leaked cables were labeled
"confidential", a mere 15.000 had the higher classification
"secret", of all the trove of embassy cables in Wikileaks, but MOST
IMPORTANTLY there were no documents classified as "top secret" on the
classification scale, which has many more restricted classifications than just
“top secret”. Most U.S. governments' departments
reactions were considerably milder than Hillary Clinton's concerning the
possible impacts of the leaks. According to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates
the leaks were embarrassing but he estimated that they would only have
"modest" consequences for US foreign policy. German Interior Minister
Thomas de Maizičre described WikiLeaks as irritating and annoying for Germany,
but not a threat. It has been questioned if the impact of the leaks will lead
in an opposite direction than was expected: towards more secrecy and increasing
restrictions. It may become harder to support protection for people who
disclose and publish classified information after WikiLeaks."
Nearly all of the hacking techniques described in Vault 7 were already widely
known to most cybersecurity experts.
Vault
7--Wikileaks incorrectly implied that underlying encryption had been
compromised
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wikileaks-assange-persistence-of-info/
Despite cyber attacks, the loss of
key service providers and threats from government officials worldwide, the
controversial site continues to add to its online cache of cablegate documents
13
December 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-wikileaks-2/22389
IS WIKILEAKS OVERRATED?
'WikiLeaks docs embarrassing, not perilous'--US condemns leaks but Israeli
experts believe concern is overrated
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4115923,00.html
08.31.11 Do WikiLeaks documents concerning Israel truly pose a risk? US
security experts maintained on Tuesday that confidential State Department
documents leaked online "have put individuals at risk," but Israeli
intelligence and security experts were not so quick to agree.
Israeli experts downplayed the
security risk posed by the leaked documents. "The use of the word 'agents'
is misleading," a veteran of the Israeli intelligence community told Ynet.
"WikiLeaks is based largely on US State Department documents and they
don't use agents – they have diplomats. 'Agents' are
people who potentially betray their county and may pay a heavy price for their
actions. "In this case, it's more likely the names are of people who have
had lunch with American diplomats and then talked about it," he said.
"The documents may include quotes by people who didn’t mean to have their
names in the media. They may include embarrassing details of a personal nature
or of a political nature, and the sources are likely to be from a wide spectrum
of people who come in contact with American embassies. The mentioning of a
specific name may pose a problem for that individual, but it doesn’t
necessarily mean they were intelligence sources," another source added.
'No big deal'
Former Mossad Chief Shabtai Shavit said that from his experience, international
intelligence agencies do not reveal their information sources.
******
WikiLeaks' cables far from earth-shattering
For the US, damage was already
done by aggressive behaviour during the Bush era
Published: November 30, 2010
https://gulfnews.com/opinion/editorials/wikileaks-cables-far-from-earth-shattering-1.720450
The wait is over but the
‘leaks' are overrated. The over-hyped US embassy cables, published by the
whistleblower website WikiLeaks, didn't tell us much that we don't already
know. The leaked secret documents, which are the correspondence between the
American embassies and the US administration on meetings between American
officials and diplomats and foreign leaders, reveal what is supposed to be
behind-the-scene talks. But most of the cables repeat what has been published
by news agencies quoting the usual ‘officials who requested anonymity'. That is
the case with the Saudi officials suggesting an immediate stop "by all
means necessary" to the Iranian nuclear programme or the cables that deal
with the US view of Hamas or even Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The
documents are fun to read, for sure. And they make a good subject for political
gossip. But earth-shattering revelations they are not.
Therefore, the US reaction to
the leaks is perplexing. It is strange that the administration felt threatened
by what was going to be published online. The legal threats and warnings of
"endangering countless lives" were unnecessary and overzealous. It is
doubtful the world public opinion of the US would radically change because of
‘cablegate'. And the Americans would be wrong if they thought the cables will
do harm to the image of their country. The damage has already been done by
years of aggressive behaviour, especially during the George W. Bush years and
the inability — or perhaps unwillingness — of Barack Obama to improve that
behaviour. The president should know it will not get any worse.
*****
NOV 2011 THE GUARDIAN
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/02/assange-hero-zero-swedes-pitiable
Assange's attempts to depict
Sweden as a banana republic that would ship him on to the US is
another sign of how desperate Assange has become. You can blame Sweden for lots
of things – filthy weather, overrated crime novels, Ikea furniture – but to
claim this country is the CIA's accomplice, with an extremist law on sex
crimes, irritates even his most loyal fans, of whom there are still a few.
WikiLeaks really was a
historic moment in the history of journalism, but little is left of Assange's
kingdom now.
It is ironic that Sweden, the
country Assange once admired because of laws that shield our freedom of
expression and of the press, should have been the place where his sun began to
set. In the spring of 2010, when the Collateral Damage video had just been
released, he announced that he wanted to move central parts of the WikiLeaks
operation to Stockholm. This happened with the help of the Pirate Party, a
grouping which opposed surveillance on the net and intellectual property
rights.
Ours is one of the most
wired-up countries in the world, and a culture of illegal downloading and net
activism is strong here. Perhaps that's why the love affair between Assange and
Sweden started so strongly. Even among those who would never use their
computers for anything but Google and email, the remains of the
anti-Americanism of the radical left of the 70s produced a certain admiration
for the man.
From Theodore Dalrymple in 2010, also
known as Prophets of the City Journal:
[abstracted]
WikiLeaks could sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be
increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is
taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily
by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere
alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. A reign of
assumed virtue could be imposed, in which people would say only what they do
not think and think only what they do not say. The dissolution of the
distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of
totalitarianism. Opening and reading other people’s e-mails is not different in
principle from opening and reading other people’s letters. In effect, WikiLeaks
has assumed the role of censor to the world, a role that requires an
astonishing moral grandiosity and arrogance to have assumed. Even if some evils
are exposed by it, or some necessary truths aired, the end does not justify the
means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgAoUEbJLVk
I couldn't stop
crying': Soldier relives 'collateral murder' video
For the last 20 years, WHY have not any
of the tens of thousands of US soldiers in the middle east not posted their own
cell phone videos of collateral damages online via YouTube or
Facebook or at least arranged interviews with their local hometown news TV
station to address these issues like during the Vietnam Nam occupation?
... interview after failed suicide
attempts of Ethan McCord, who was a foot soldier only blocks away from the
helicopter murder of the Reuters reporters….
'Collateral
Murder' Happen Almost Daily in Iraq These abridged extracts
are from 'Julian Assange: The Unauthorised
Autobiography', published by Canongate WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange was one of the Family kids (according to many
testimonials), though he denies this, saying that his mother's boyfriend in the
1970s was in the cult, but not them. Isolated from the outside world,
the children of the Family grew up under the strict supervision of cult members
known as "the Aunties" who often starved them and beat them. Even
when she was travelling overseas, Anne would call home to Uptop
to hear the children be "disciplined" over the phone. The
psychological manipulation was intense. The most iconic photo of the
Family is that of the children dressed in matching outfits, their hair cropped
and dyed platinum blonde—this was actually designed to convince them that they
were all brothers and sisters. Now adults, the survivors recount being
indoctrinated into the Family when they were 14 years old—locked away in a dark
room for days at a time, and given huge doses of LSD. The
co-founder and leader of a notorious Australian cult called The Family, Anne
Hamilton-Byrne, is now 95, suffers from advanced
dementia and has spent the last dozen years being cared for in a Melbourne
nursing home. “My
stepfather's place in our family was usurped by a man called Leif Meynell,” stated Julian Assange. “In 1980, my mother became
pregnant by Leif with my half-brother. My
mother was in love with Leif. And so we started moving. We just kept moving
because that's what we did: my mother had work in a new town and we would find
a house there. Leif Meynell was a member of an
Australian cult called The Family. Leif Meynell was
part of that cult. And everything he did relating to us was informed by his
association with The Family. It was so tiring. Just moving
all the time. Being on the run.” Summary of many news
stories on Assange: "Assange’s style
is an odd mixture of insight, nonsense and brass-neck salesmanship". "Wikileaks is a pastebin for spooks, and they're
happy to be used that way." In 1995 at age 24, Mr
Assange was accused, with a friend, of dozens of hacking activities. Though the
group of young nerdy hackers was skilled enough to track detectives tracking
them, Mr Assange was eventually caught by more clever intel
agents and pleaded guilty. He was fined several thousand Australian dollars -
only escaping a prison term on the condition that he did not reoffend (some say
this is when he might have been recruited by both Australian & American intel agencies). Just free of prison threats, Assange then
spent three years working on a research team with a Melbourne Univ. academic,
Suelette Dreyfus - who was writing her 1997 book Underground,
on early generation hacking subculture. The idea of WikiLeaks: A safe place where whistle
blowers and others with inside information could anonymously share data that
the public needs to know. In a digital age when the once-great newspaper
industry is on the decline and there are fewer checks than there should be on
corporate and governmental power, WikiLeaks seemed to restore a small degree of
balance. But then things
changed. In the last few months, WikiLeaks' actions and motivations have
increasingly seemed untrustworthy. Not long ago the New York Times published
the results of a lengthy investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder Julian
Assange. The biggest cache of
leaked documents ever released (at least so far) is 11.5 million documents from
a Panamanian law firm--the "Panama Papers"--that revealed how rich
and powerful people hide their wealth in offshore havens. Those documents were
released anonymously to a consortium of investigative reporters, but not
through WikiLeaks. Why not? The anonymous leaker claims to have tried
repeatedly to contact WikiLeaks about the cache of documents but said there was
no response. Assange's antics have
turned me off to Wikileaks to the point where I will have trouble taking
anything they publish at face value. He is doing a disservice to the
transparency movement. It's pretty remarkable that someone can be both a
paranoid recluse and shameless attention whore, but Assange pulls it off quite
well. Wikileaks would be much better off with someone both low key and
competent. July 14, 2010 It was
Wikileaks' publishing of the private pager messages in New York from the day of
9/11 that turned me off to them. (http://911.wikileaks.org
) Would Wikileaks also have published all my private email from that day had
they obtained it? In 2010, just before publishing the first Afghan war logs
provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, Mr. Assange and a group of
journalists from The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel were engaged
in a tussle over redacting the names of Afghan informants. The three
publications all decided to do so, but Mr. Assange disagreed. As he told Nick Davies of The Guardian, “If an Afghan civilian
helps coalition forces, he deserves to die.” Many people who have
met Assange are struck by how insistently he steers the conversation away from
matters of principle to personal slights against him, and his plans for
payback. He demands personal “intel” on others and dismisses questions
about his organization by saying, “I am WikiLeaks”
repeatedly. Assange’s value to Ecuador as a political symbol has
changed. Internal documents revealed that relations between embassy staff and
Ecuador’s most famous asylee were fraught. Security staff
were filing minute by minute reports of Assange’s movements to Ecuador’s
intelligence agency. Last year, these tensions came to the fore as Assange was
publicly reprimanded by Ecuadorian officials for interfering in the US election
process – by publishing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign – while
claiming asylum. Assange’s internet connection was eventually cut off by
Ecuador, to his visible public rage. WikiLeaks so-called Erdogan Emails are particularly
egregious. The organization said that the infodump would expose the
machinations of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately after the
attempted coup against him, but instead turned out to be mostly
correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens, which
included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political
activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters, disastrous in the week of
the coup. Zeynep Tufekci, a female sociologist at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (herself of Turkish descent), wrote an essay criticizing
WikiLeaks and Western media outlets for endangering Turkish citizens, and
WikiLeaks and their supporters turned on her, hard. "Within five minutes
they called me an Erdogan apologist, which speaks
volumes to their lack of research," Tufekci says. "And then they
blocked me. So much for hearing something they don't like." 'Julian Assange: The Unauthorised
Autobiography', published by Canongate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgAoUEbJLVk
"GET THE SAND OUT OF YOUR VAGINA SOLDIER" commanded a senior officer to McCord when he endeavored to file a human rights
complaint... video, Ethan McCord New York City book signing--Incidents Like 'Collateral
Murder' Happen Almost Daily in Iraq, he affirms….
Dr. Suelette Dreyfus is an Australian reporter of French-Jewish descent who now conducts international research projects on
the impact of digital technologies on whistleblowing and the trend of ‘security clearance creep’.
click here for websites by (c) QUILLER-FOR-HIRE, including the well known "I Left My Tart in San Franciso" and "The Rabbi Who Knew Too Much"
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