Wikileaks

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

A tape of Assange and one of his Wikileaks groupies having sex has been released online; it appears to exonerate the silver-haired sex-pest of any wrongdoing.

 

[Park Life 71]

http://www.slate.com/id/2277096/

 

Julian Assange's Great Luck

Why his arrest and jailing in the United Kingdom is good news for him.

 

Good article.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

HF has gone quiet

[Anth 113]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/assange...ccuser-cia-ties

[Happy Face 29]

HF has gone quiet

 

Fuck Wikileaks.

 

Pardew Man?!

 

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/assange...ccuser-cia-ties

 

Bit of common sense in the comments section on that one:

 

This is a really really digusting and shameful article that should be posted on Fox News. The headline is totally overblown. The Ladies in White are a well respected dissident group who are the mothers of political prisoners. Castro isn't perfect. Critizing Castro doesn't make someone a CIA informant, or mean they have ties to the CIA.

 

Writing an article on "how to get back at your boyfriend" and being a gender equity official doesn't mean that you hate all men and thus run around accusing everyone of sexual assault.

 

Julian Assange being a hero on the left doesn't mean he is incapable of sexual violence against women.

 

In the absence of any real evidence, I would expect a site like the raw story not to resort to Fox News style "journalism" in order to protect their golden boy.

 

 

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The comment is a little overboard but that article lacks real substance. I shouldn't speculate but I doubt Assange is guilty of anything that could see him a convicted criminal in this country at least - the law is different in Sweden. I will await the trial to pass comment on this whole debacle. Assange could use it to his advantage easily.

 

Someone (in those comments) also cited the Kennedy assassination as some great cover-up and a crime against humanity; you hear this a lot from certain types, completely ignoring the fact that Kennedy was a terrible president. They make out like we would be living in a sexy-utopia land now if he had lived.

Edited December 8, 2010 by Kevin S. Assilleekunt

[Happy Face 29]

1. The statement released with the last leak, "Americans are taught George Washington never told a lie, yada yada yada." I think they definately over-egged that one. Also, I find Assange in interviews to be melodramatic and his world-view - or at least my perception of it - preposterous. Ultimately, the crime of over-egging is not a serious one, and the plight of Wikileaks makes for a very interesting case in terms of freedom of information.

 

I've not read that statement (if you have a link I'd like to). As you suggest, it seems this is more a case of perception. Whether you percieve it to be an exagerrated case for the importance of the contents of the leak will always be debateable because it's not an absolute, I don't think they've misrepresented the actual content though.

 

2. I think that counter-argument is kinda dumb. They do make decisions on what the public sees and doesn't see, because they only accept certain leaks that fit their criteria. This is just common sense. Even if they were to be even more selective it would be completely different from the 'new media' because they seldom release classified information. A more selective approach be more effective in terms of affecting changes in legislation or instigating legal action. They seem to have taken your view on board in the latest set of leaks where they've only put the documents up that the papers report on as important...incorporating all of their redactions.

 

3. You make references to TV news which has always been shit, they go for ratings and nothing else. I disagree with, say, Noam Chomsky's assessment that the public are controlled by the media in a significant way, I just think most people aren't interested and agree with the agendas of various media outlets. There is plenty of good current-affairs coverage which is easily accessible via the internet for those who have the volition. The leaks themselves are easy to access, at least for now .You must agree that leaders rely on and capitalise on that level of apathy though.

 

4. I didn't say, or intend to say, that the leaks pin the blame where it doesn't belong, rather Assange does. Again, I've not seen quotes from Assange where he does that. I'd be happy to read them though. I've said in this thread I don't think Assange does himself or Wikileaks any favours in giving the organisation a face, speaking unscripted and perhaps misrepresenting leaks or presenting bias. He's been asked about that though, and given a reasoned response

 

I originally tried hard for the organisation to have no face, because I wanted egos to play no part in our activities. This followed the tradition of the French anonymous pure mathematians, who wrote under the collective allonym, "The Bourbaki". However this quickly led to tremendous distracting curiosity about who and random individuals claiming to represent us. In the end, someone must be responsible to the public and only a leadership that is willing to be publicly courageous can genuinely suggest that sources take risks for the greater good. In that process, I have become the lightening rod. I get undue attacks on every aspect of my life, but then I also get undue credit as some kind of balancing force.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

'I have become the lightening rod. I get undue attacks on every aspect of my life, but then I also get undue credit as some kind of balancing force.'

 

That's a nice rehearsed soundbite that I've heard him use in separate interviews, it comes across as false modesty to me. I think he relishes his role in some respects; certainly the groupies. Got to get me some sleep now so can't reply fully to your post till later.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010...nge_days_indeed

 

Strange Days, Indeed

Scenes from Julian Assange's WikiCircus in London.

[Park Life 71]

For me the real problem with it is that people have to be told if the news is good or bad or if the info is good or bad. The commentary is perhapls now more important than the locus itself.

[manc-mag 1]

Out on bail, fresh outta jail, California dreamin'.

[Park Life 71]

Out on bail, fresh outta jail, California dreamin'.

 

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12005930

 

Comes across well here; regardless of my thoughts on him his detention has been farcical.

[Park Life 71]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12005930

 

Comes across well here; regardless of my thoughts on him his detention has been farcical.

 

 

Yeah but if it ain't a farce it don't make the news.

 

"Hey look 3000 people just died of the plague in Lesotho!"

 

Journo: What's the angle?

Edited December 17, 2010 by Park Life

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Put down the crack-pipe and step away from the bong

[Park Life 71]

Bored with it now. Might pay attention again if he gets assasinated. But of course it would have to be in a humorous way.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

you sound like a teenage girl: "I'M BOORORRRRREEEDDDDDDDDDDDD"

 

Perhaps if he went on a mad booze-cruise around Britain with Gazza in a Honda Civic in an attempt to escape extradition your interest would be reignited?

 

"AVV GAN AN GOT 2 FISHIN RODS AN A KFC PET WES GANNA B OK"

[Happy Face 29]

As it's been resurrected by others and I'll not be accused of being obsessed .....

 

In The New York Times this morning, Charlie Savage describes the latest thinking from the DOJ about how to criminally prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Federal investigators are "are looking for evidence of any collusion" between WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning -- "trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped" the Army Private leak the documents -- and then "charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them." To achieve this, it is particularly important to "persuade Private Manning to testify against Mr. Assange." I want to make two points about this.

 

First, the Obama administration faces what it perceives to be a serious dilemma: it is -- as Savage writes -- "under intense pressure to make an example of [Assange] as a deterrent to further mass leaking," but nothing Assange or WikiLeaks has done actually violates the law. Moreover, as these Columbia Journalism School professors explain in opposing prosecutions, it is impossible to invent theories to indict them without simultaneously criminalizing much of investigative journalism. Thus, claiming that WikiLeaks does not merely receive and publish classified information, but rather actively seeks it and helps the leakers, is the DOJ's attempt to distinguish it from "traditional" journalism. As Savage writes, this theory would mean "the government would not have to confront awkward questions about why it is not also prosecuting traditional news organizations or investigative journalists who also disclose information the government says should be kept secret — including The New York Times."

 

Continue reading

But this distinction is totally illusory. Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren't typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to "nearly a dozen current and former officials" to induce them to reveal information about Bush's NSA eavesdropping program. Dana Priest contacted numerous "U.S. and foreign officials" to reveal the details of the CIA's "black site" program. Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.

 

In sum, investigative journalists routinely -- really, by definition -- do exactly that which the DOJ's new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal "conspirator" in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with "espionage" for publishing classified information.

 

Second, Savage's story appears to shed substantial light on my story from yesterday about the repressive conditions under which Manning is being detained. The need to have Manning make incriminating statements against Assange -- to get him to claim that Assange actively, in advance, helped Manning access and leak these documents -- would be one obvious reason for subjecting Manning to such inhumane conditions: if you want to have better treatment, you must incriminate Assange. In The Huffington Post yesterday, Marcus Baram quoted Jeff Paterson, who runs Manning's legal defense fund, as saying that Manning has been extremely upset by the conditions of his detention but had not gone public about them in deference to his attorney's efforts to negotiate better treatment.

 

Whatever else is true, the DOJ seems intent on pressuring Manning to incriminate Assange. It would be bizarre indeed to make a deal with the leaking government employee in order to incriminate the non-government-employee who merely published the classified information. But that may very well at least partially explain (though obviously not remotely justify) why the Government is holding Manning under such repressive conditions: in order to "induce" him to say what they need him to say in order to indict WikiLeaks and Assange.

 

 

UPDATE: Several others make similar points about the DOJ's prosecution theory, including Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin ("the conspiracy theory also threatens traditional journalists as well"); former Bush OLC Chief and Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith ("it would not distinguish the Times and scores of other media outlets in the many cases in which reporters successfully solicit and arrange to receive classified information and documents directly from government officials" and "would be a fateful step for traditional press freedoms in the United States"); Politico's Josh Gerstein ("Reporters seek classified information all the time in telephone conversations, in private meetings and other contexts" and thus "the distinction . . . strikes me as patently ridiculous"); and The American Prospect's Adam Serwer ("the slippery slope is only the slightest bit less steep" than charging Assange under the Espionage Act).

 

Indeed, Bob Woodward's whole purpose in life at this point is to cajole, pressure and even manipulate government officials to disclose classified information to him for him to publish in his books, which he routinely does. Does that make him a criminal "conspirator"? Under the DOJ's theory, it would. All of this underscores one unavoidable fact: there is no way to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks without criminalizing journalism because WikiLeaks is engaged in pure journalistic acts: uncovering and publicizing the secret conduct of the world's most powerful factions. It is that conduct -- and not any supposed crime -- which explains why the DOJ is so desperate to prosecute.

 

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_gr...eaks/index.html

Edited December 17, 2010 by Happy Face

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/1...-assange-sweden

 

Assange has addressed this badly.

[Park Life 71]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/1...-assange-sweden

 

Assange has addressed this badly.

 

Tbh I'd be more interested if he was dressed badly.

[Happy Face 29]

It's really not an overstatement to say that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are the new Iraqi WMDs because the government and establishment media are jointly manufacturing and disseminating an endless stream of fear-mongering falsehoods designed to depict them as scary villains threatening the security of The American People and who must therefore be stopped at any cost. So often, the government/media claims made in service of this goal are outright false, which is why I have focused so much on the un-killable, outright lie that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped 250,000 diplomatic cables without regard to the consequences (on Thursday, The New York Times, in its article on Assange's release from prison, re-printed the lie by referencing "Mr. Assange's role in the publication of some 250,000 American diplomatic documents" only to delete it without any indication of a correction in the final version of the article, while the always-conventional-wisdom-spouting Dana Milbank in The Washington Post -- in the course of condemning "the absurd secrecy of the Obama administration, in some ways worse than that of George W. Bush" -- today wrote of "Assange's indiscriminate dump of American government secrets over the last several months - with hardly a care for who might be hurt or what public good was served").

 

But this new example from Joe Biden is extraordinary, and reveals how government officials are willing to say absolutely anything -- even things they know are false -- to demonize WikiLeaks. First, here's Biden with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell -- on Thursday, December 16 -- happily insisting that the leak of the diplomatic cables has done no damage to U.S. relations:

 

MITCHELL: This is Vice President Joe Biden, who told me that the leaked cables created no substantive damage -- only embarrassment . . . .

 

BIDEN: And I came in [to the U.N.] almost all to embraces - it wasn't just shaking hands - I know these guys, I know these women - they still trust the United States - there's all kinds of --

 

MITCHELL: So there's no damage?

 

BIDEN: I don't think there's any damage. I don't think there's any substantive damage, no. Look, some of the cables are embarrassing . . . but nothing that I'm aware of that goes to the essence of the relationship that would allow another nation to say: "they lied to me, we don't trust them, they really are not dealing fairly with us."

 

But here's the very same Joe Biden, in a preview of an interview with David Gregory -- taped the following day, Thursday, December 17 -- to air this Sunday on Meet the Press, gravely lamenting that Julian Assange has harmed American foreign relations (video below):

 

This guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of other parts of the world. He's made it more difficult for us to conduct our business with our allies and our friends. For example, in my meetings -- you know I meet with most of these world leaders -- there is a desire to meet with me alone, rather than have staff in the room: it makes things more cumbersome -- so it has done damage.

In one day, Biden went from giddily declaring that "I don't think there's any damage" to gravely warning that "it has done damage." I have no idea whether Biden was told that his Thursday no-damage admission would severely harm the Government's efforts to prosecute Assange, but what is clear is that he was perfectly willing to march into Meet the Press the following day and say things that he knew were false in order to depict the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable disclosures as harming U.S. national security. It's true that in the first clip, he was asked specifically about diplomatic cables, while the second interview may have encompassed all the releases, but in that second interview, he clearly claimed that the disclosures harmed relations with other countries: exactly the opposite of what he said the day before. Even his demeanor completely changed, from breezy, fun dismissiveness into serious, concerned leader talking about a True Threat.

 

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_gr...eaks/index.html

[Park Life 71]

Lost interest in this now till the farcical failed assasination attempt. Cause the story must go on...NO really it must..

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

http://gawker.com/5714043/the-creepy-loves...-julian-assange

 

[Happy Face 29]

On Dec. 9, 2006, an unsolicited e-mail arrived for Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower of Vietnam War renown. The return address said only "WikiLeaks," and the signature at bottom, "WL." In the orotund prose of a manifesto, the message invited Ellsberg to become the public face of a project "to place a new star in the firmament of man." Ellsberg knew nothing of the group, which had yet to make its debut. Nor had he heard of its leader, a then 35-year-old Australian named Julian Assange, best known in his own circles as a teenage hacker turned "cypherpunk" — a prolific coder with visions of technology as a tool for political change.

 

The audacity of the e-mail kept Ellsberg reading. WikiLeaks aimed at nothing less than the decline and fall of oppression by organized exposure of its secrets. "Governance by conspiracy and fear," the author wrote, depended on concealment. "We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention." So fanciful did the proposal appear that Ellsberg saw only two ways to read it, he told TIME: as either "a little ploy by the CIA or NSA to draw in leaks" or "a very naive venture to think that they can really get away with it." Ellsberg made no reply.

 

Four years later, a great deal can be said about Assange, much of it unpleasant. He is inclined to the grandiose. Contempt for nearly every authority drives his work, and unguarded e-mails — leaked, naturally — reveal hopes that transparency will bring "total annihilation of the current U.S. regime." In London, he is fighting extradition to face allegations in Sweden that he sexually assaulted two WikiLeaks supporters.

 

What no one can say about the man, any longer, is that his boasts are empty. In 2010, WikiLeaks became a revolutionary force, wresting secrets into the public domain on a scale without precedent. Assange and company wrought deep disruptions in the marketplace of state power, much as tech-savvy insurgents before them had disrupted markets in music, film and publishing. The currency of information, scattered to the four corners of the globe, is roiling not only U.S. foreign relations but also the alliances and internal politics of other nations.

 

WikiLeaks has established itself, too, as a competitor to news media and intelligence agencies. By posting documents in their entirety, the site "disintermediates" the market, as economists say, weakening the old prerogatives of editors and analysts to filter information for their audiences. "This is not just a threat to those who would want to keep their own secrets," says a former member of the site's steering committee, who declined to be named. "WikiLeaks is a threat to those who would like to have other people's secrets too."

 

Not the least of Assange's achievements is a technological one. WikiLeaks brought to life what one of its early advisers described as "a recurring idea in hacker culture — a digital safe haven that is anonymous, massively collaborative and highly resistant to attack or penetration by intelligence services." Redundant hardware and Web servers span international borders. Participants in its design say WikiLeaks has made novel use of an alphabet soup of existing geek tools, such as mutually anonymous file sharing, decoy ciphering to flood eavesdroppers with empty data, and encryption of files in transit and in storage.

 

The results are impressive. In Ellsberg's day, it took nearly a year to photocopy the 7,000-page Pentagon papers and most of another year to get excerpts published. The push-button model of WikiLeaks compresses the timeline radically and permits the universal broadcast of voluminous archives in full, so much so that leak hardly seems to suffice as a metaphor. This year's breach of containment spilled nearly half a million documents, including 76,607 military reports from Afghanistan, 391,832 from Iraq and, beginning Nov. 28, a stream of diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks says will eventually number 251,287.

 

The Obama Administration responded with new floodgates. "The government has recognized that WikiLeaks is not an event — it is a capability — and anybody who can get material out of a classified system can now publish it worldwide in a way that can't be redacted or removed," says Clay Shirky, a New York University Internet scholar. "The idea of a widely shared but secure secret is over." So in the U.S. national-security establishment, the scale of the loss induced a retreat from the "need to share" culture that emerged after Sept. 11, 2001, and that pressed rival agencies to exchange information instead of hoarding it. In the run-up to the WikiLeaks dump, the State Department cut the link from its Net-Centric Diplomacy database, which stores cable traffic, to the Pentagon's classified SIPRNet. Today, three shifts of officers and analysts are working around the clock in separate State and Defense Department crisis teams, sending alerts about fresh disclosures in real time.

 

Yet for all the efforts to bar the stable door, there has been little agreement on what has happened. Had the world just witnessed an act of journalism? Theft? Public service? Espionage? As talk turned to action, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had little doubt, announcing a "very serious, active, ongoing" criminal investigation, and sources said the FBI sought foreign-intelligence warrants to search for evidence of contact between WikiLeaks and Army Private First Class Bradley Manning before the soldier allegedly sent his trove of documents on a compact disc.

 

An important legal precedent loomed. If Assange did nothing more than accept the disc and publish its contents, lawyers in and out of government said, criminal charges against him would put the New York Times and other news organizations in equal jeopardy. The Espionage Act of 1917 is so vaguely drafted, according to Louis Klarevas of New York University's Center for Global Affairs, that it could be "interpreted as making it illegal to post a link to WikiLeaks on your Facebook page." Conspiracy to steal government property, another charge under consideration, faces much the same objection if it is defined as asking a source for information to be published.

 

Nor was the threat of legal action the only way authorities responded. A sustained assault on the economic and structural foundations of WikiLeaks soon followed. The Swiss bank PostFinance closed WikiLeaks' account because Assange is not a full-time resident of Switzerland (as if that always mattered to Switzerland's famously discreet banking industry). Visa and MasterCard, which process payments for the Ku Klux Klan , cut off WikiLeaks — "pending further investigation," Visa said, "into the nature of its business." PayPal ejected WikiLeaks for promoting illegal activity, which has yet to be alleged in court. Amazon, a major Web-hosting provider, removed WikiLeaks from its servers after a telephone call from Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.

 

Because public access to the Internet relies on private companies, these precedents were alarming. "This is absolutely a tipping point," says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "This should be a very clear call to anyone who takes freedom of speech online seriously." Many foreign leaders, even U.S. allies, agree. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged support for Assange and accused Washington of mounting a "siege on freedom of expression." Bolivian Vice President Alvaro García Linera responded by hosting WikiLeaks cables on his official government website.

 

Assessing the real-world impact of WikiLeaks will take some time. On the one hand, with far richer access to the workings of their governments, citizens and scholars were able to assess the performance of elected leaders and take part in the direction of policy. But mainstream advocates of open government were prepared to acknowledge the costs. Steven Aftergood, a relentless campaigner against excessive secrecy and director of the Federation of American Scientists, says Assange "fails to comprehend that some uses of secrecy serve to strengthen and defend an open society against attack from without or subversion from within."

 

And in that connection, the costs of the WikiLeaks affair were hard to predict. Would Iran, for example, slow its nuclear-enrichment program after reading Saudi King Abdullah's plea for U.S. forces to destroy it, or would the Saudis rush to mollify their powerful neighbor? Would Italian voters tolerate a Prime Minister who, by the U.S. ambassador's account, appeared to be "profiting personally and handsomely" from sweetheart energy deals with Russia? Would bruising personal observations about the Russian Prime Minister, the British royal family, the French President, the German Chancellor and — oh, my — the First Lady of Azerbaijan ("poorly informed"; "substantial cosmetic surgery") hurt delicate relationships?

 

These secrets were not, by any measure, the crown jewels of U.S. classified archives. None of the diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks were top secret, and none bore the NODIS stamp to indicate restricted distribution of close-hold material. The U.S. government has suffered graver losses. American spies sold their Soviet handlers the design of the hydrogen bomb, the names of double agents, the keys to American cipher codes and locations of U.S. eavesdropping equipment.

 

Yet the sheer scale of the recent breach transcended the impact of any one leak. Government officials often joke that they should write nothing down that they do not want to read on the next day's front page, but they do not usually behave as though they believe it. Now, says former U.S. ambassador Christopher Hill, several of whose cables from Baghdad were published, "the hazard is so broad, so systemic, it will have an effect on the communications system in and of itself." The broadcast of a cable in which Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spelled out his fears about Iran, Hill says, ensures that "Maliki will not want to talk quite as loquaciously to the next ambassador."

 

Assange's declared efforts at "harm minimization," which involved removing some names from the documents, left many identifying details intact. Helmut Metzner, fired from his role as chief of staff to the German Foreign Minister, was the first known career casualty, after a leaked cable from the U.S. embassy attributed confidential information about German political talks to "a young, up-and-coming party loyalist who was taking notes." Though unnamed, an Iranian businessman, an Algerian journalist and a Chinese academic who gave sensitive information to U.S. officials were also thought to be identifiable and at risk of retribution. The Obama Administration, a senior official says, has quietly begun relocating vulnerable sources as well as intelligence officers who may be identifiable by rival services.

 

Assange, for his part, has generally dismissed assertions that lives are at risk, though he told the New Yorker he is prepared to accept "blood on our hands." When Aftergood asked him, in an e-mail exchange, whether he would publish the names and schools of children of U.S. officials, Assange replied in the abstract. Harms to innocents "tend to affect isolated individuals," he said, while the benefits of disclosure "affect systems of policy, planning [and] governance and through them the lives of all."

 

The worst — or best, in the view of advocates for radical transparency — could be yet to come. John Young, a New York City architect who left the WikiLeaks steering committee after clashing with Assange, says the group members are storing "a lot more information underground than they are publishing on the surface." Some of it comes from a hacker-on-hacker sting in 2006, when data jockeys at WikiLeaks detected what they believed to be a large-scale intelligence operation to steal data from computers around the world. The intruders were using TOR, an anonymous browsing technology invented by the U.S. Navy, to tunnel into their targets and extract information. The WikiLeaks team piggybacked on the operation, recording the data stream in real time as the intruders stole it.

 

In an encrypted e-mail dated Jan. 7, 2007, decrypted and made available to TIME by its recipient, one of the participants boasted, "Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inxhaustible supply of material?... We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, apec, UN sections, trade groups."

 

The theft scandalized some WikiLeaks insiders, and Assange has held back from publishing most of its fruits. But shortly before his arrest in London, he issued a veiled threat that "comes straight out of cypherpunk fiction," according to Christopher Soghoian, a well-known security researcher.

 

Last July, it turns out, as controversy erupted over its release of the Afghanistan war logs, WikiLeaks had posted, without explanation, a 1.4-gigabyte encrypted file called "insurance.aes256." Some 100,000 people around the world have downloaded it. On Dec. 3, Assange said in an online chat with readers of the Guardian newspaper that the file contains the entire diplomatic archive, most of which has yet to be released, and additional "significant material from the U.S. and other countries." He added, "If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically."

 

That cryptographic dead man's switch, poised to launch a missile of payload unknown, made for a fitting close to Julian Assange's year. Whatever his fate in courts British, Swedish or American, he had built a machine that no one knew how to stop and loosed it on the world. "I don't think this is a practice or a culture that will change," says Jennifer Robinson, one of his lawyers. "Julian has really started something. By taking him out, they're not going to stop it."

 

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages...2037146,00.html

 

 

But......

 

Time Person of the Year 2010

Mark Zuckerberg - creator of Facebook....7 years ago.

 

Fucking pussies.

 

With his 18,353 votes, Zuck was 363,672 votes behind WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. Also beating out Zuck by substantial margins: Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recording artist Lady Gaga, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and television personality Glenn Beck.

[Happy Face 29]

What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange? Let's take a look. Assange gives you private information about corporations for free. And is a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's Man of the Year.

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20026127-71.html