Wikileaks founder and good North man Julian Assange

[ferball]

For mine the real US election interference was in 2020 when the DNC knifed Bernie

I think he went along with that tho.

 

[ferball]

I have no interest in playing your game.

I can sit here and explain there was Russian interference in the election and that numerous Russian intelligence operatives and Trump campaign staff were indicted, tried, and convicted over it...
... but it's pointless to raise these facts with you because you put on a tin foil hat and just dismiss the entire US Justice System as untrustworthy.

I can sit here and ask you to justify how the DNC allocating all their resources and efforts for Hillary equates to them "rigging the election" for her, but the Trump campaign illegally colluding with Russia to harm the Democratic campaign and sow discord and enmity among Democratic voters doesn't meet your threshold for "election interference"...
...but it's pointless to challenge your hypocrisy because you will just deny the facts of the cases at hand that don't suit your agenda.

There's literally no point in discussing these matters if you unilaterally dismiss the mountains of evidence and convictions simply because you think America is bad and Russia is good.

Yeah okay fair enough. I get what you're saying and have for this whole discussion.

To me that's just trivial.

Don't you understand that?

Its miniscule, even in terms of election interference by seppos in their own elections. The stuff Cambridge Analytica did, when employed by the Cruz and Trump campaigns, had a much greater effect.

What Russia did barely registers on the election interference spectrum.

Rupert Murdoch, an American who owns a significant proportion of Australia's media, was able to interfere in our elections to a much greater degree for decades.

Its not like the Russians attempted to kidnap Obama (ie the US Commander in Chief of the Army at the time) and that attempted kidnapping resulted in him being shot, enabling them to launch a coup two years later where Trump overthrew Hilary. Like the US did in Chile in 1970.

Its not like they openly funded and resourced presidential candidates, while assassinating opposition candidates the way the USSR (and the US) did for years.

The reason Hilary lost the election was her own hubris. Not the Russians.

Also lolling seriously at you defending the US "justice" system.

This is a system where poor people are offered appalling deals because there is no way for them to access a fair trial while (for example) a fraud like the events that led to the GFC resulted in no significant findings against any of the people ultimately responsible.

The US "justice" system has just resulted in a finding of journalism = espionage.

lol.

 

[The Warlord]

Yeah okay fair enough. I get what you're saying and have for this whole discussion.

To me that's just trivial.

Don't you understand that?

Its miniscule, even in terms of election interference by seppos in their own elections. The stuff Cambridge Analytica did, when employed by the Cruz and Trump campaigns, had a much greater effect.

What Russia did barely registers on the election interference spectrum.

Rupert Murdoch, an American who owns a significant proportion of Australia's media, was able to interfere in our elections to a much greater degree for decades.

Its not like the Russians attempted to kidnap Obama (ie the US Commander in Chief of the Army at the time) and that attempted kidnapping resulted in him being shot, enabling them to launch a coup two years later where Trump overthrew Hilary. Like the US did in Chile in 1970.

Its not like they openly funded and resourced presidential candidates, while assassinating opposition candidates the way the USSR (and the US) did for years.

The reason Hilary lost the election was her own hubris. Not the Russians.

Also lolling seriously at you defending the US "justice" system.

This is a system where poor people are offered appalling deals because there is no way for them to access a fair trial while (for example) a fraud like the events that led to the GFC resulted in no significant findings against any of the people ultimately responsible.

The US "justice" system has just resulted in a finding of journalism = espionage.

lol.

I'm reminded that the Maidan Coup that overthrew a democratically elected government ... where US State Department officials handed out cookies to protestors who had their own literal Nazi armed wing ... was "the will of the people".

Turns out what constitutes election interference is all in the eye of the beholder when it is convenient.

 

[shintemaster]

It's irrelevant whether Assange is likeable, has the right hair do or sucks off Putin under the table during conjugal visits. The reality is that the US tried to extract him and punish him for exposing exactly how they operate behind the scenes with the tacit endorsement of their much vaunted 4th estate.

He embarrassed the wrong people and you'll note that not a single person was ever even slapped on the wrist for gunning down civilians.

 

[Bojan KantKick]

Who gives a shit where Assange got the evidence from. War crimes are ****ing war crimes. I want to know the truth and Assange revealed it to the world. He should never have been imprisoned in the first place. All the ****ers committing war crimes and other illegal actions should have been.

Obama campaigned on whistleblower protections which was a lie and Killary wanted to drone Assange. **** those campaigners.

 

[ferball]

BTW Manafort, who is a long time US spook, involved in decades worth of susness from Angola to Ukraine, was charged over money laundering and shonky business deals, regular white collar crime of the sort that happens every second of every day in the US.

He was also charged over his involvement with the government of Ukraine in the years before Maidan, not over actual events to do with Russian interference in the election.

The charges against Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates center on a series of criminal allegations related to their lobbying for a pro-Russia government of Ukraine, not to Mr. Trump or the campaign. It is widely believed that Mr. Mueller is hoping to pressure Mr. Manafort into providing information about the central subject of his investigation.

Anyway there was a thread we could discuss that stuff in but it was locked because Senator Chad McCarthy made it dysfunctional.

 

[Bojan KantKick]

BTW Manafort, who is a long time US spook, involved in decades worth of susness from Angola to Ukraine, was charged over money laundering and shonky business deals, regular white collar crime of the sort that happens every second of every day in the US.

He was also charged over his involvement with the government of Ukraine in the years before Maidan, not over actual events to do with Russian interference in the election.

The charges against Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates center on a series of criminal allegations related to their lobbying for a pro-Russia government of Ukraine, not to Mr. Trump or the campaign. It is widely believed that Mr. Mueller is hoping to pressure Mr. Manafort into providing information about the central subject of his investigation.

Anyway there was a thread we could discuss that stuff in but it was locked because Senator Chad McCarthy made it dysfunctional.

Did he cry to the mods until they closed it? Thread ran smoothly when he wasn't filling it with propaganda.

 

[ferball]

Did he cry to the mods until they closed it? Thread ran smoothly when he wasn't filling it with propaganda.

No he just spammed it with garbage because no one agreed with him.

 

[DesertRoo]

Who gives a shit where Assange got the evidence from. War crimes are ****ing war crimes. I want to know the truth and Assange revealed it to the world. He should never have been imprisoned in the first place. All the ****ers committing war crimes and other illegal actions should have been.

Obama campaigned on whistleblower protections which was a lie and Killary wanted to drone Assange. **** those campaigners.

In theory yes who cares where he got the factual information from, he’s a journo, his job is to inform the public, which is what he did.
In practice, it’s the one thing used to discredit wikileaks, the reality is you can follow the data, it doesn’t lie and it doesn’t point to a hack, it was a leak.
The rest is conjecture.

 

[The Warlord]

Who gives a shit where Assange got the evidence from.

I do.

If you're going to call yourself a journalist, where and how you source your info is vital.

By the time of the 2016 US campaign, he'd abandoned any pretence at journalism, and was locked in some form of combat with Hillary Clinton (not unreasaonably)

War crimes are ****ing war crimes. I want to know the truth and Assange revealed it to the world. He should never have been imprisoned in the first place. All the ****ers committing war crimes and other illegal actions should have been.

Agreed.

Obama campaigned on whistleblower protections which was a lie and Killary wanted to drone Assange. **** those campaigners.

This too.

 

[Chadwiko]

I do.

If you're going to call yourself a journalist, where and how you source your info is vital.

By the time of the 2016 US campaign, he'd abandoned any pretence at journalism, and was locked in some form of combat with Hillary Clinton (not unreasaonably)

Warlord and I are largely in agreement here.

The main point of difference is that I think even before Assange's (very clear) radicalisation in the 2014-2016~ range, he was a pretty shoddy "journalist".

Warlord is 100% correct that a journalist has to care about where and how you source your info. You also need to be judicious in how you vet and disseminate that info. Assange did none of this, even for the (very important) war-crimes cache leak.

He coached Chelsea Manning in how to obtain it (which is not something any actual journalist would ever do, cognisant of the consequences it would have on Manning), and he didn't go through and carefully decide which parts to release and which parts not to release. He just dumped it all into the public without any consideration.

You might disagree with me, but IMHO that's not journalism.

 

[ferball]

Warlord and I are largely in agreement here.

The main point of difference is that I think even before his (very clear) radicalisation in the 2014-2016~ range, he was a pretty shoddy "journalist".

Warlord is 100% correct that a journalist has to care about where and how you source your info. You also need to be judicious in how you vet and disseminate that info. Assange did none of this, even for the (very important) war-crimes cache leak.

He coached Chelsea Manning in how to obtain it (which is not something any actual journalist would ever do, cognisant of the consequences it would have on Manning), and he didn't go through and carefully decide which parts to release and which parts not to release. He just dumped it all into the public without any consideration.

You might disagree with me, but IMHO that's not journalism.

Wikileaks still claims the entire contents of Cablegate were encrypted and the Guardian was the organisation that released the keys to enable anyone to decrypt them. Which is different to what you're saying...

In August 2010, Assange gave Guardian journalist David Leigh an encryption key and a URL where he could locate the full Cablegate file. In February 2011, shortly before Domscheit-Berg's book appeared, Leigh and Luke Harding, another Guardian journalist, published WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy via Guardian Books. In it, Leigh revealed the encryption key Assange had given him.[7]

It does appear that Wikileaks attempted to redact information that may have impacted individuals but this process was prevented when those Guardian journalists revealed the encryption keys.

So the idea that he just dumped it all into the public without any consideration seems to be a falsehood spread to smear Assange, Wikileaks and the whole process of holding power to account using journalism. Its a story that's been debunked and it shouldn't be left unchallenged in a thread about him.

 

[tazaa]

Alright so lets say CNN pay for his $500k plane trip to Australia.

What's the AFP going to do about that?

Best thing I read was Andrew Tate donated 8 BitCoin to Julz to pay for it lol

 

[Chadwiko]

Wikileaks still claims the entire contents of Cablegate were encrypted and the Guardian was the organisation that released the keys to enable anyone to decrypt them. Which is different to what you're saying...

First things first, did you really just cite wikipedia as your source? Bruh.

Secondly, if you keep reading the wikipedia section you just copy/pasted from...

On 29 August, WikiLeaks published over 130,000 unredacted cables. On 31 August, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to a torrent of the encrypted data. On 1 September 2011, WikiLeaks announced that an encrypted version of the un-redacted US State Department cables had been available for months. WikiLeaks said that it would publish the entire, unredacted archive in searchable form on its website the next day.

On 2 September, WikiLeaks published searchable, unredacted copies of all of the cables on their website.

According to Glenn Greenwald, WikiLeaks decided that the "safest course was to release all the cables in full, so that not only the world's intelligence agencies but everyone had them, so that steps could be taken to protect the sources and so that the information in them was equally available." According to The Guardian, "the newly published archive" contained "more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists; several thousand labelled with a tag used by the US to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger; and more than 150 specifically mentioning whistleblowers".

It is not a "falsehood spread to smear Assange". It is an indisputable fact.

 

[ferball]

First things first, did you really just cite wikipedia as your source? Bruh.

Secondly, if you keep reading the wikipedia section you just copy/pasted from...

Wikipedia is fine. If something isn't sourced with a good reference then Wikipedia flags that lack of sourcing immediately. Did you notice the footnote I left in that quote? That's the source for that statement. If you are conducting "your own research" wikipedia is a great place to start. This is because it sources everything. Once you start reading the sources it relies on you can then spend most of your time analysingthat information and critically evaluating it. Wikipedia should represent 2 or 3% of the time and energy you put into learning about something.

It is not a "falsehood spread to smear Assange". It is an indisputable fact.

I think you'll find wikileaks released the entire thing but didn't release the encryption key. I had a copy of that stuff I couldn't access on an old computer. After the guardian compromised their security there was no point in them continuing to encrypt the data so they reverted to their previous position.

Before the War Logs and Cablegate Wikileaks made everything available to the public with no intervention, editorialising or what have you. It was a secure site for whistleblowers to dump documents into the public domain.

The halted this policy for Cablegate because of the seriousness of the data dump and the potential for bad outcomes then they lost control of the encryption keys because Harding and Leigh made them public.

You said he "dumped it all on the public without any consideration" when Wikileaks (not Assange) released it all after consideration that it was now available anyway and the best course of action was make everything public.

Even in the bit you posted which you claim shows "with no consideration" it states:

According to Glenn Greenwald, WikiLeaks decided that the "safest course was to release all the cables in full, so that not only the world's intelligence agencies but everyone had them, so that steps could be taken to protect the sources and so that the information in them was equally available."

This is, by definition, consideration of what they are doing. It also happened a year after they gave the encryption keys to the people who first released them.

Ergo its a smear not an indisputable fact.

 

[Chadwiko]

I think you'll find wikileaks released the entire thing but didn't release the encryption key. I had a copy of that stuff I couldn't access on an old computer. After the guardian compromised their security there was no point in them continuing to encrypt the data so they reverted to their previous position.

You've got your facts not quite correct. Like, you're almost correct... but you're wrong enough that it changes the entire issue.

Here's a simplified timeline of what actually happened;

1. August 2010: Wikileaks provided the Guardian journalists with a private download URL and the necessary encryption key.
2. February/March 2011: the Guardian publishes the encyption key (because of the editorialised style of the key). Important note: the download URL is still not public. (this is where you're getting tripped up, I think)
3. August 2011: after the Wikileaks website is DDOS'd, Wikileaks set up mirror websites and put the entire site into Torrent files for anyone to download so they could also host a mirror site. As part of these mirror websites, a couple of German journalists noticed that the mirror site data included the encrypted files.
4. August 2011: realising they had ****ed up and the cat was out of the bag, Wikileaks published the full unredacted cables, unencrypted.

You can check all of that yourself, including in the Wikipedia page and it's sources you were citing. But that timeline is accurate and factual.

So, it was Wikileaks that released it all publicly, not the Guardian or any other journalists. And most journalists tend to believe that they did so sorta by accident/mistake, and then tried to play it off as being intentional and righteous. But I suspect you'll disagree with that assessment and that's fine. I'm not trying to change your mind about that specific part.

 

[The Warlord]

Given the second Bolivia coup was crushed it's worth reminding ourselves of this gen from last time round.



Seeing as you support the US role in the Maidan Coup, turns out you've got the same politics as Elon lol Chadwiko

 

[DesertRoo]

Best thing I read was Andrew Tate donated 8 BitCoin to Julz to pay for it lol

When Mastercard and others attempted to de-bank Wikileaks, it forced Assange to move across to digital currencies for donations. a lot of donations came in the way of bitcoin over a decade ago.
you can probably don the math

 

[Chadwiko]

Also the original documents were available online without the public encryption key

Only unintentionally as of August 2011 when Wikileaks put their entire site on Torrents.

It was never released prior to that.

That's a simple and easily verfiable fact.

(I'm not responding to any off topic issues)

 

[ferball]

Only unintentionally as of August 2011 when Wikileaks put their entire site on Torrents.

It was never released prior to that.

That's a simple and easily verfiable fact.

(I'm not responding to any off topic issues)

There was an encrypted file available for download from Wikileaks late in 2010 that thousands of people downloaded and mirrored across the internet.

 

[Chadwiko]

There was an encrypted file available for download from Wikileaks late in 2010 that thousands of people downloaded and mirrored across the internet.

Yes but that was the redacted cables.

So again, you're almost correct but you're getting tripped up on the very important detail.

 

[DesertRoo]

There was an encrypted file available for download from Wikileaks late in 2010 that thousands of people downloaded and mirrored across the internet.

The above is how Wikileaks operated. Disseminate files, so they were decentralised, no one could delete it and hold the encryption keys.
Leaking the encryption keys went against their model. only a dolt or bad actors disagree with this premise.

 

[ferball]

Yes but that was the redacted cables.

So again, you're almost correct but you're getting tripped up on the very important detail.

It might have been. I never opened it. I thought the same unredacted files were released to media organisations with the onus being on them to redact where necessary ie the files released back in August or July 2010 were also unredacted, just encrypted. IIRC it was some sort of insurance policy to protect the organisation and the people involved. At the time we had no idea what was on them. I also don't understand why wikileaks would release an encrypted redacted version over a year before they released the unredacted version.

Essentially tho we've clearly shown that Wikileaks (and by extension Assange) never released those files willy nilly and without any consideration.

Altho attempts to portray him as a "bad faith actor" don't acknowledge that.

The point is the encrypted files were out there already (as "insurance") and Leigh/Harding released the key to that encryption.

 

[Chadwiko]

Essentially tho we've clearly shown that Wikileaks (and by extension Assange) never released those files willy nilly and without any consideration.

Altho attempts to portray him as a "bad faith actor" don't acknowledge that.

Did you even read what I wrote?

Wikileaks did release those files "willy nilly" and without consideration. Whether you think it was intentional or a screw up is irrelevant.

 

[ferball]

Did you even read what I wrote?

Wikileaks did release those files "willy nilly" and without consideration. Whether you think it was intentional or a screw up is irrelevant.

After they were already available anyway and with specific consideration that I quoted about twenty posts back.