Julian Assange lost his final extradition bid after almost a year of appeals, so he’ll face rape charges in Sweden. Wikileaks recently suspended publishing due to their inability to process credit card donations, and it’s been a while since they published anything new, presumably because nothing happens without Assange’s OK and he’s been consumed with his legal issues. Needless to say, today’s developments will only make that worse.
It’s surprising to me that no clear alternative to Wikileaks has emerged in the past year. Part of the reason is that it’s harder than it looks, as security expert Christopher Soghoian explained in a Times op-ed last week:
But if the hallmark of quality journalism is the ability to protect confidential sources, then WikiLeaks should, in fact, be seen as a beacon of best practices. In contrast to the shameful practices of most journalists, WikiLeaks has spectacular operational security: encrypted instant messages are used for all real-time communications, strong encryption technology is used to protect files as they are passed between individuals, and servers are hidden using the Tor Project, a popular privacy tool that enables anonymous communication.
Whatever one thinks of Mr. Assange, he is a skilled data security expert. He knows an awful lot more about information security than even the most tech-savvy journalist. His platform appears to have worked: none of WikiLeaks’s confidential sources have ever been exposed by the organization. (Bradley E. Manning, the detained Army private who has been accused of the leak, was exposed by an acquaintance.)
Until journalists take their security obligations seriously, it will be safer to leak something to WikiLeaks — or groups like it — than to the mainstream press.
PeakVT
It’s a shame Assange is such an asshat. The world could needs organizations like Wikileaks, that whistleblowers can trust.
Steve
Praising Julian Assange for his success in keeping things secret is the weirdest thing I will read all week. Dude, don’t you know all that information yearns to be free?
Samara Morgan
its possible that Assange has released all the information he is going to at this time. it maybe most of what he had.
the diplo cable release touched off the Arab Spring in Tunisia, the Iraq document drop (which the US was unable to prevent) shaped anti-US sentiment in the Iraqi population and helped force the end of a US military presence in Iraq, and the A-stan document drop shaped anti-Afghan war sentiment in the US.
And face it, Julian’s data stash is depleted as well as being fixed in spacetime.
The BoA 20gig was deleted by Domscheit-Berg when he left Wikileaks, in all liklihood paid for by the US gov and/or BoA. He tried to extort money from WL for the data before deleting it.
OTOH the paranoia induction process has been wildly successful. The US IS becoming a police state as Julian predicted.
Wikileaks released the remaining diplo cables on Sept 2.
So what does Wikileaks still have?
I wonder about the Garani massacre video. will it finally be released now?
Does WL have the crypto key as Julian has claimed in the past?
soonergrunt
Once you cut through all the bullshit, it became pretty clear that Wikileaks was only ever a machine for generating income for Julian Assange. That was certainly clear to everybody who defected from the organization.
Why would anyone be surprised that when it failed to deliver that income–banks, evil or not, aren’t going to assist someone to fuck them, after all–that he spent all of his energy trying to secure a nice palace to live in while he fought extradition charges for rape?
Samara Morgan
from al-Akhbar english.
im not so sure this is over.
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: The US has a history of police state behavior going back to well before the American Revolution. It also has a history of countering police state behavior. Read some fucking history before you insinuate that Assange has created something unprecedented that will cause the collapse of the country.
Samara Morgan
@soonergrunt: you might still have me pied, but Assange claims credit for the diplo cable release contributing to the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, and it is empirically obvious that the Iraq document dump shaped populist anti-American sentiment in Iraq.
We are gettin KICKED OUT of Iraq in December, remember?
It was Daniel Domscheit-berg that made millions in payola from the US gov and BoA for deleting the BoA doc files.
Time for another BJ round of crotchsniffing Assange, right sooner? you and eemom were the leaders on the last wave of that as i recall.
soonergrunt
Also, Wikileaks itself has been undone by the classic, the disgruntled insider.
Their entire database and the security key was released by Cryptome after somebody in the org leaked it.
When you treat your people like shit, as Assange clearly did, or even if they just perceive themselves to be treated like shit, they will fuck you when they get a chance.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: i did not say that.
Assange predicts America will become a police state on its way to NLS collapse.
I think teargassing protesters in Oakland, shutting off cell phones during OpBart, censuring websites, all emergent trends, more extreme than anything in the past.
Wikileaks purpose is also to test Assange’s crowd sourcing model.
that seems to be working….OWS and the Arab Spring are part of it.
you think history is cyclical….i think this cycle is similar to the invention of the printing press. The status quo is eroding under the pressure of social media and information access delivered by the internet.
El Cid
I’m sure that the Washington Post or New York Times will play as important a role in exposing secret government activities leading to the popular overthrows of repressive governments, including those backed by the U.S.
After all, don’t they quote anonymous officials all the time?
Samara Morgan
@soonergrunt: but not the key to the garani massacre video, eh sooner?
magurakurin
I got news for the starry eyed JA groupies, Julian fucking Assange is not going to save you from shit. Take care of yourself and stop looking for heroes and villains in the world. The Great Man theory of history was discarded long ago. There are many moving parts to the world. Assange is but one of them. And he appears to now be a broken part at that.
Samara Morgan
@soonergrunt: the entire database except for the BoA 20gig, which an insider turned opportunist deleted for filthy lucre.
you forgot to mention that, sooner.
Samara Morgan
@magurakurin: he accomplished A LOT.
and hes not done yet.
Samara Morgan
@<a href@magurakurin: he already saved us from shit.
the Iraq document drop is one thing that inflamed the Iraqi population against rewriting the SOFA.
we are getting the old heave-ho. :)
the world has changed.
and for the better.
:)
Samara Morgan
@soonergrunt: and you know what, sooner? Daniel Domscheit-berg turned for the same reason Adrian Lamo sold Manning…..FOR MONEY.
Samara Morgan
You see juicers…Assange understands one thing that both OBL and OWS understood/understand very well….the bankstahs ARE the gubmint.
This site might be pro OWS for now….but i dont think the juicitariat really gets it yet…
not a’tall.
Amir Khalid
It doesn’t reflect well on Julian Assange as a chief executive that he didn’t set up Wikileaks as a more robust organization. What it did was valuable, as PeakVT notes. I hope someone steps in either to revive Wikileaks, or to set up another organization like it.
Is Assange a hero and/or a saint? Well, he’s a journalist. I’m hardly surprised to hear that he’s also something of a dick. Weren’t we just talking, not too many threads ago, about sociopathy being part of the CEO personality? Unless you’re a war correspondent in the line of fire or you’ve got The Secret Police gunning for you, I hesitate to call a journalist heroic. And sainthood takes more than just founding Wikileaks.
Are the Swedish authorities singling him out for special persecution? Not that I can see. On the face of it, they have a legitimate rape charge against him; he’s got to face due process like any other accused person.
Steve
I’m sure the guy who lit himself on fire in Tunisia is happy to hear that it’s actually Julian Assange who deserves the credit. Likewise, the dead of Iraq are grateful that their sacrifice actually meant nothing, because it was really Julian Assange who got the Iraqi people all inflamed. Credit where credit is due.
Samara Morgan
@Steve: bulshytt talker.
Assange did the Tunisians and the Iraqis a service.
He set their information free from Amerikkka’s classified db.
They just decided what to do with it.
:)
Arent you HAPPY that Tunisia has self-representation? Arent you HAPPY that Amerikkka has to GTFO Iraq?
i am.
;)
Feudalism Now!
Assange is personally an asshat. Wikileaks is a valuable societal asset. I have no trouble discerning between the two.
The biggest information that should have been released was the BoA leak. The delay in release seemed like a setup for extortion and it turned out it was, but Assange was not the beneficiary.
Wikileaks needed to be dissociated from any one personality a long time ago. The long con of Assange paid off and he gets to go to prison for his lack of interpersonal skills, to say the least.
Samara Morgan
@Amir Khalid: hes not a “saint”.
Assange is an intellectual.
In a cuple decades Assangian Information Theory will be taught in college classrooms.
Again, Assange accomplished A LOT.
And its not over, contrary to mixies TS Eliot tag.
Samara Morgan
@Feudalism Now!: we will see.
that is such a conservative tactic– slime the messenger.
Are you a conservative?
Samara Morgan
poor mixie.
hes just another prufrock.
have you heard the mermaids singing each to each mixie?
no, i do not think they will sing to you.
let us say, it ain’t over until the mermaid sings.
:)
Feudalism Now!
Assange is not a messenger. He is a grifter. You see amazing freeing of information and I see a slow baiting of a hook for his real target, the financials.
The State department releases and the Iraq info was fluff and did little. Arab spring was fueled by the people of North Africa and the Arabian peninsula inspired by the demonstrations in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. The Australian anarchist added a little fuel to a bonfire, not a spark.
The BoA was given less priority for release than the National Enquirer worthy state department memos. Why? Why the betrayal over the BoA info while King Julian began having legal troubles?
Assange was a master of relentless self promotion. I see no reason to give him any benefit of doubt. You can think of him as a saint. All I see is means and opportunity.
lawguy
@Feudalism Now!: How do you know that Assange is persoally an “asshat?” Assange may or may not be a person I wouldn’t want to hang around with, but he certainly seems to get passionate defenders who actually know him.
And at any rate what does that have to do with what he does? As far as the case in Sweden, there are enough questions concerning that to be of concern. That will play out one way or another in the near future.
Omnes Omnibus
@ Amir Khalid: As m_c has stated previously, “Their country, their laws. BTW I am not arguing your point, I am just piggybacking off of it.
Nutella
@Amir Khalid:
Oddly enough he admitted to all the facts in the allegations against him during the extradition hearings and based his opposition to extradition on objecting to Sweden’s definition of rape. So he’s toast.
The guy who left and published the WikiLeaks info – did he ever start a new organization? The world needs something like that but it’s not easy to do it well.
handsmile
I have no idea if Julian Assange is an “asshat.” For a more balanced, though by no means exculpatory profile, I would recommend this New Yorker feature on Assange,”No Secrets”, published in June 2010:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian
I do imagine, however, that if I were pursued by the military, intelligence, and legal systems of several countries; found myself and the organization I had established demonized by virtually all Western media entities; and had that organization, though it be charged with no crime of any kind by any legal authority, commercially blockaded by financial service providers at the behest of governments: yeah, that might have an adverse impact on my interpersonal skills.
Set aside one’s personal feelings about Julian Assange. The relentless and pernicious efforts on the part of numerous governments, democratic and authoritarian alike, to disrupt, bankrupt, and eradicate Wikileaks has now been successful. It chillingly demonstrates that any organization committed to the discomfiture of powerful interests and institutions will be subject to repression. And in the cyber era, such repression does not have to be in the form of a truncheon.
(Though as the Anonymous collective belatedly realized today with its decision to refrain from disclosing details on a Mexican drug cartel, truncheons and automatic weapons do remain effective.)
burnspbesq
The legal process, WAI. We’ll know soon enough whether Assange will have an extended sojourn as a guest of the Swedish Ministry of Justice. Meanwhile, every passing day is a new opportunity for Bradley Manning to realize that the only thing he has to trade for reduced charges and/or leniency in sentencing is information that will make a successful prosecution of Assange possible.
Samara Morgan
@Nutella:
in a word, NO.
Berg was bought and paid for with your taxdollars and BoA’s “profits”… just like Adrian Lamo got paid for Manning with taxpayer dollahs…..
Samara Morgan
@burnspbesq: it wont change history, burnsy.
we are still massively fucked in A-stan and Iraq largely due to Manning and Assange.
what do you think is ging to happen with the Garani Massacre video?
Assange claims to have it, and to have the cryptokey.
Do you think he is lying?
handsmile
@Nutella: (#28)
That person is Daniel Domscheit-Berg who established “Open Secrets”/opensecrets.org in January 2011. Proclaiming with much media fanfare that it would be an organizationally more transparent alternative to Wikileaks as an aggregator of anonymous online leaks, to date Open Secrets has not published a single disclosure.
It was reported by the Guardian and several other reputable news organizations that Domscheit-Berg’s bitter split with Assange (as detailed in his book “Inside Wikileaks”) led to the September release of all 250,00+ unredacted State Department cables cached by Wikileaks. (Wikileaks/Assange alone was singled out for widespread condemnation as the irresponsible perpetrator of this alarming disclosure.)
There is quite a bit of speculation (not all of it tinfoil-hatted) in cybersecurity circles that Domscheit-Berg was handsomely paid off for thwarting the release of Bank of America files or was in fact a “plant” at Wikileaks of the financial services empire.
Samara Morgan
@burnspbesq: in a month the brit courts are going to decide if Assange can appeal the decision.
Dont hold your breath burnsy.
you might pass out.
i think…if Julian DOES have it, and if the appeals decision goes against him, he might just release the Kraken.
Blackhawk Down redux, just intime for xmas.
;)
Judas Escargot
@soonergrunt:
Yep, this. The self-righteous press releases stopped going out right about the same time the anonymous donations stopped pouring in.
And also to enhance his ‘personal brand’ for whatever computer security/espionage consulting firm he ends up founding after he gets out of prison.
Samara Morgan
@Judas Escargot: neither you or sooner have read anything Julian has written.
because all you are interested in is Amerikkka Fuck Yeah crotchsniffing.
:)
Samara Morgan
@Judas Escargot: here you go.
you and sooner should read the Mission Statement.
sounds a lot like the owies, doesnt it?
hahaha
Omnes Omnibus
@ m_c: You don’t know that. Also too, I don’t think history is necessarily cyclical; I do think that parallels can exist and it is foolish to assume that fundamental human nature changes with technology.
scav
yes yes, loco dear, all, simply all good ideas must necessarily come from the great pumpkin — there were no ideas before he voiced them. You stay in your patch girl.
Samara Morgan
@scav: i didnt say that.
here are some things i DID say.
i said Julians mission statement has similarities with the OWS movement.
And i said, alsotoo, it aint over until the mermaids sing, Julian still has the Garani Massacre video, and paranoia induction seems to be working on the Oakland police at least.
:)
i also said we are massively fucked in A-stan and Iraq for the forseeable future, due in large part to the Wikileaks doc drops being distributed to the indigenes via al-Jazeera.
Did you know we are getting kicked out of Iraq in December?
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus:
dont know what? what are you referencing?
Steve
How stupid do you have to be to believe that after everything we have done over the past 8 years in Iraq, the major reason we have been asked to leave is Wikileaks? This is a serious question. How stupid?
Samara Morgan
@Steve: hahaha, you dont get it.
Our puppet Maliki would have loved to keep the US on.
He couldn’t, because of anti-US sentiment in his electorate.
Any association with keeping on US troops was political death for any Iraqi politician.
Do you think the Iraqi people knew all the shit we did over there before WL and al-Jazeera?
you prolly believe their infrastructure was neglected by Saddam and just fell down when our soljahs walked past it.
im not the dumbass here. hint hint.
Steve
@Samara Morgan: That was a better answer to my question than I expected. Wow.
Omnes Omnibus
@ m_c: I was referring to your statement that some people had not read anything by Assange. I am using a mobile and lack the reply feature.
Samara Morgan
@Steve: lol, you DID believe the infrastructure lie.
we shock-n-awed the shit out of the Iraqi infrastructure.
every friday since February there has been a day of rage in Iraq and one of the complaints is lack of electricity and water.
Panetta lobbied Maliki and Alawi ferociously for months to leave 10k troops–while Muqtada collected 2.5 million sigs to kick the americans out.
that is the beauty of democracy.
Tim in SF
My acquaintance Jake Appelbaum works on the tor project, as mentioned in the article. He just wrote this interesting article about airport security theater:
http://boingboing.net/2011/10/31/air-space-a-trip-through-an-airport-detention-center.html
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus:
.oh, i think its obvious that sooner and judas have not read anything by Assange.
you might have– but i didnt mention you, did i?
:)
soonergrunt
@burnspbesq: And for Manning’s sake, he better hope that both Assange is extradictable to the US, and that the Attorney General wants Assange so badly that he will go to the President to request Manning’s transfer to the AG’s custody (and that the President will acquiesce.) Because otherwise he’s got nothing. If SECDEF has no reason to care about Assange one way or the other (and he really doesn’t because Assange is not subject to UCMJ) then Manning really doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot.
I don’t see the AG making a huge fuss over Julian Assange. Jail, for US purposes, is just as good in Sweden as Leavenworth, and Assange has been neutralized for the purposes of the USG anyway.
Steve
@Samara Morgan: I don’t even know what “the infrastructure lie” is. You’re insane.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Samara Morgan:
It wasn’t all that long ago that you told me that Julian hisself, what with his mysterious ways, was behind that dump.
Samara Morgan
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): link or it didnt happen. Julian crowd sourced the decision on releasing the rest of the diplo cables once the crypto key was compromised.
I have always asserted Berg deleted the BoA 20gig for PAYMENT. his website turned out to be a lie, like handsmile pointed out.
@soonergrunt: yup, the damage has been done.
except for the Garani massacre video.
hahahaha
Samara Morgan
@Steve: that might be true, but im also RIGHT!
tolejasotolejasotolejaso
Samara Morgan
@soonergrunt:
what do you think….that the US would offer Assange not to release the Garani Massacre video?
you DO remember Garani, don’t you?
Uriel
@Samara Morgan:
I’m just curious, m_c: If he does go that route- releasing the video not for information’s sake, but in a fit of outrage that he, the great Julian
Assange, must follow the laws set down for lesser men- does that leave him the hero of the piece in your mind?
Rape is an ugly thing in and of itself; Compounding it with the blackmail of nations in order to avoid answering charges for said rape- well, that seems pretty far over on the ‘really fucked up’ side of the moral continuum. But YMMV, I suppose.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Samara Morgan:
Sure, I’m going to scour through the archives here to find a Samara-driven, barely tangential conversation on a post about…FSM knows what.
I know I pointed it out when Domscheit-Berg allegedly dumped the remainder of the “Manning Files” and I know that when I credited someone who’d fallen out of love with St. Julian with dumping those docs that you asserted that Julian, for some verkakte reason all your own, was behind the dumps.
And if I’m you, with the history of U-turns, I wouldn’t be taking your stance. I’d be saying, “Yeah, I made a bad call there,” and try to salvage something from it. But you’re not going to, because you’ve decided to drink the Assange Flavor Aid.
Samara Morgan
@Uriel: crotchsniffer.
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): im a fan…i always have been. you cant produce because it never happened.
all. have you forgotten the WL motto?
maximize impact.
how better to fulfill maximum impact for Garani than to release it during his “trial”?
and to release it to outlets like al-Akhbar and al-Jazeera first, or possibly exclusively….because the guardian and the NYT have been disappointingly biased.
:)
Samara Morgan
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
WTF are you talking about? he didnt, to my knowledge. the encrypted files were already out there.
Berg just compromised the cryptokey.
;)
soonergrunt
@Steve: She actually becomes more coherent after the pie filter is applied.
Uriel
@Samara Morgan:
I don’t know- maybe releasing at a time where it didn’t look like desperate theatrics aimed at getting out from under a rape charge? Like back when WL was relevant to people who weren’t (self-described) aspie fangirls?
No, I’d never do that- I’ve been told that area of Mr. Assange’s person is a bit hazardous for those who want to remain ‘rape-free,’ if you know what I mean.
;)
THE
I really wish they’d release the Garani video so that Samara could get over it.
soonergrunt
@THE: As I noted earlier–The Garani video, if it ever existed or was ever in the hands of WikiLeaks, is gone:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/domscheit-berg-disputes/
The relevant portion:
The latest assertion about the video also does not jibe with the timing of WikiLeaks’ past statements about when it received the video and was working on decrypting it.
The video in question is likely one that WikiLeaks previously claimed it possessed, which showed a May 2009 U.S. air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan. The local government insisted the air strike killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident in 2009, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.
The Garani video was among the first files that former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning allegedly leaked to WikiLeaks. According to the government’s charging documents, Manning leaked the video to WikiLeaks some time between November 1, 2009 and January 8, 2010, when WikiLeaks announced on its Twitter feed that it had obtained “encrypted videos of US bomb strikes on civilians.” The tweet included a link to a Wired.com article about the Garani air strike.
WikiLeaks later hinted that year that it planned to release the video, but instead released another video in April 2010 under the title “Collateral Murder.” This video showed a U.S. Apache air strike on civilians in Iraq.
Assange told reporters after the “Collateral Murder” release that his organization still planned to release the Garani video. But the video was apparently contained in an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file, according to statements Manning made to a former hacker, and the organization appeared to be having trouble cracking the military-grade encryption.
Now WikiLeaks is claiming the video was destroyed by Domscheit-Berg.
Emphases mine.
She’s going to be going apeshit about this for a very long time.
Like, forever…
From Wikipedia article on Advanced Encryption Standard:
WL may have had a data file, but they never had access to the contents of that file. NEVER. There isn’t enough computing power on the face of the planet.
And then, they just lost it. Riiiiiiight.
THE
It occurs to me that if it’s a bombsight camera image, it would only be the usual big flash of light and then a long-duration, dazzled afterimage that makes it impossible to see anything for minutes. By which time the aircraft is miles away.
Samara Morgan
it existed, because the US debated releasing it.
i have never heard that it was part of the Berg deletions. that was the BoA files, the no-fly lists, and some stuff on neonazi groups.
And i do not believe you. The Insurance file was repped on all the cloud servers, at least 400 servers.
And Wired is such a reliable source.
Like for Lamo’s chat entrapment records.
and even if we never see it, it exists. and the Iraq doc drop alone massively fucked up US policy for next fifty years.
And yeah, im gloating.
Because Julian was right about a lot of things.
Samara Morgan
@THE: supposedly there is cockpit chat.
like the collateral murder video.
Wouldn’t it be a good thing for it to be released?
94 children, women and teenagers were killed.
And there is video of the aftermath.
recorded kills.
shouldnt the US acknowledge its mistakes?
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: Why is release of the video necessary as a part of the US acknowledging its mistakes? Your gruesome glee about this video makes one suspect that you just want to see bodies.
THE
That’s really ridiculous Samara. No one remembers that stuff after a year or two, and Iraq is doing OK.
China is the largest trading power in the Gulf now so it will probably be super-dominant by 2020. The US is unlikely to ever intervene on the ground in the Persian Gulf again unless it’s part of a war with China.
THE
@Samara Morgan:
I have no argument with that Samara, but I still don’t believe it’s going to change anything much now.
THE
China about to become biggest buyer of Saudi oil.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: because i want the lemonade makers noses rubbed in it.
xian
@Samara Morgan: READING COMPREHENSION: do you speak it?
xian
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): they had no backups of the BofA info? fucking amateur hour.
speaking of fucking, I think some teenage slashfic fan has a major crush on a hot outlaw.