Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

[Montag]

I'll try this again....

You're attacking the writer (on flimsy grounds I might add), not the ideas.

I don't know the writer... Many writers are very limited in deep politics IMO, they are on the surface level of things -- as I keep coming back to, haha.

[barracuda]

I expect Counterpunch to support Wikileaks... They printed stuff like Vote for Obama, and dissenting views the last presidential election (McKinney etc., Nader is regular Counterpunch contributor). The editorial position of Counterpunch is probably to support it -- and that doesn't surprise me at all.

Then please explain the meaning of your statement:
"It's seem Counterpunch is more openminded on this than a lot of folks here." (sic)

[Montag]

Then please explain the meaning of your statement:
"It's seem Counterpunch is more openminded on this than a lot of folks here." (sic)

Perhaps it was an overstatement. I consider the Baroud article to be something along the lines of what I was talking about.

[JackRiddler]

.

Message to Posterity: Wikileaks Threads on RI

In November and December 2010, the Rigorous Intuition board saw the near-simultaneous creation of many threads approaching the Wikileaks phenomenon from different angles. Long discussions developed organically in several of these, and sometimes seemed to be held in radically alternate realities. As an aid to your historical research, this notice is being posted in six of those threads on Dec. 10 to remind you of the others.

Here are the current top-of-the-board discussions, with start author and date, in order of the number of posts as of Dec. 10:

The Wikileaks Question
by JackRiddler » Sun Nov 28, 2010 4:10 pm (27 pages)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30362

Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 27, 2010 3:29 pm (9 pages)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29320

Questioning WikiLeaks Thread
by Montag » Mon Oct 25, 2010 1:50 pm (7 pages)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29933

Cryptome founder/Wikileaks co-founder:"Wikileaks is a fraud"
by lupercal » Wed Dec 08, 2010 5:19 am (5 pages)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30479

The rush to smear Assange's rape accuser.
by barracuda » Wed Dec 08, 2010 3:17 pm (3 pages)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30485

Cables Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels WIKI!
by seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 28, 2010 1:29 pm (2 pages)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30359

EDIT:

JackRiddler, you missed the seminal thread on the Swedish issue:

Julian Assange wanted in Sweden for alleged rapes
by jingofever » Sat Aug 21, 2010 10:09 am (5 pages)
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29246

Some pretty relevant information in that thread, already in August-September.

PS, Posterity: There are other shorter current ones as well as some older ones, so be sure to prompt Skynet to do a date-delineated search for you. Hope you are enjoying your flying cars and conveyer belts, cool jumpsuits, jauntes to Jovian moon colonies, casual sex changes and group marriages, and governing your Galactic Federation of Sentient Species by means of the Universal Metamind Congress. How's immortality treating ya? Do you still "get" irony? Do you trust Starfleet?

[Montag]

I'll just call you Jack Gatekeeper, K?

[JackRiddler]

I'll just call you Jack Gatekeeper, K?

Enjoy.

[Montag]

I'll just call you Jack Gatekeeper, K?

Enjoy.

Any thread you're absent from yes.

[Montag]

Don't think I'm alone in this Jack... You're widely know as the gatekeeper in chief here, and I don't think too many other than your sycophants aren't aware of it.

[barracuda]

Doubleyou tee eff?

Please stay on topic, and refrain from personal attacks. I can't tell what you're really saying here, but, for the record, remember that insinuating that a poster is an agent of some sort is not permitted.

[8bitagent]

Could Julian Assange be Time's Person of the year?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/0 ... 92867.html

At this point I'd be surprised if he wasn't. As much as it's validating as deep state researchers to see this wikileaks story reach critical mass, there still feels something...dubious about this Assange guy.
Maybe it's his demeanor, or hair.

[nathan28]

Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job
by F. William "I'm Not With LaRouche" Engdahl

The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous "Department of Justice" logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim "violate copyrights," yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?

The problem isn't a freedom of speech issue, it's an issue of arbitrary, inconsistent use of law--they did get warrants and get ex parte rulings, if i understand, using civil forfeiture to charge the DNS as an accessory to a crime, if I read the Info/Law story correctly--in the name of "intellectual property." But as like Bambauer says, only grabbing some sites but not others this way is not really law, that's arbitrary and ad hoc enforcement. There doesn't have to be due process because an inanimate object--it's not even clear if a DNS entry counts as that much--has no right to due process.

But let's think for a moment. Who did they shut down, websites that do, in fact, help violate IP laws. But does that make them criminally or civilly responsible? That's hard to demonstrate, I'd say.

The problem is that there's no precedent here. The average judge in the US is IIRC 69 years old. He doesn't even know what a cell phone is. You expect him to understand what some DHS deputy from the IP dep't is asking him for?

But even concocting a cockamamie forfeiture end-run to take down a site is more law and more effort at justification than what has been used in attacking WikiLeaks. Nobody even knows what to charge Assange with yet. That's part of the reason, I'd speculate, he isn't in the US in a Gitmo SI sensory deprivation suit--no nation is going to extradite on a "We'll figure it out later" charge.

[Montag]

WikiLeaks: ex-WikiLeaks staff 'to launch rival site'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -site.html

Respected daily Dagens Nyheter said the decision was made to launch the site, Openleaks, in protest against Julian Assange. It did not elaborate.

"Our long-term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistle-blowers, both in terms of technology and politics, while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects," the newspaper quoted a source connected to the new site as saying.

The report, headlined "'New WikiLeaks' rebels against Assange", said the person wished to remain anonymous.

Unusually, the newspaper printed the article in both English and Swedish on the front page of its website.

The source said a short-term goal was to complete the technical infrastructure and ensure that "the organisation continues to be democratically governed by all its members, rather than limited to one group or individual", an apparent reference to Mr Assange's leading role at WikiLeaks.

Mr Assange, who was remanded in custody in Britain after an arrest warrant issued in Sweden over accusations of sexual misconduct, has been the public face of WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks site has attracted international attention in the past two weeks with leaks of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, angering Washington.

The newspaper also said it had documents which showed discontent within WikiLeaks and that accessibility issues with the site earlier this year had been arranged by insiders as a signal for Mr Assange to step back.

The report said that though the new website was also aimed at providing the means for whistle-blowers to publish information, it would not itself publish information directly.

Instead, other organisations would access the Openleaks system and then present their audience with the material.

Documents would be processed and published by various collaborating groups such as the media, non-profit organisations, trade unions or other groups.

"As a result of our intention not to publish any document directly and in our own name, we do not expect to experience the kind of political pressure which WikiLeaks is under at this time," the report quoted another person as saying.

"In that aspect, it is quite interesting to see how little of politicians' anger seems directed at the newspapers using WikiLeaks sources," the person said.

[DrVolin]

I'll just call you Jack Gatekeeper, K?

Jack is an Oldskool wobbly grown cynical, the CT world's equivalent of a steampunk who's nearly lost his faith. You should read him more, and more carefully.

[AlicetheKurious]

If We Lose our Internet Freedoms Because of Wikileaks, You Should At Least Know Why
Posted on December 10, 2010 by willyloman

by Scott Creighton

Just a little more background on the “hero” Jullian Assange and Wikileaks…

Wikileaks was started up in Dec. of 2006. Oddly enough, as a supposed “leak” site, a dissident site, it was given a great deal of immediate mainstream attention from the likes of the Washington Post, TIME magazine, and even Cass Sunstein the now infamous Obama administration who wrote a paper on how to “cognitively infiltrate” dissident groups in order to steer them in a direction that is useful to the powers that be.

The TIME magazine article is curious because it seems that right off the bat they were telling us how to interpret Wikileaks in such a way that sounded strangely familiar to George W. Bush back just after 9/11…



“By March, more than one million leaked documents from governments and corporations in Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Bloc will be available online in a bold new collective experiment in whistle-blowing. That is, of course, as long as you don’t accept any of the conspiracy theories brewing that Wikileaks.org could be a front for the CIA or some other intelligence agency.” TIME Jan. 2007



Now remember and read closely… this article was written PRIOR to Wikileaks’ first big “leak”, which according to the article was to occur sometime in March of 2007. So why would TIME magazine be writing about them in the first place if they hadn’t done anything yet? Also, let’s not pass up on that delicious irony: this is TIME magazine singing the praises of a supposed “leak” site which will supposedly expose all kinds of “conspiracy theories” while at the same time telling their readers NOT to believe in those silly “conspiracy theories” circulating about Wikileaks. Just so long as you believe the “right” conspiracy theories, you’ll be alright I guess. This of course perfectly matches Jullian Assange’s own statements about 9/11.

TIME goes on to explain that the Wikileaks version will be the “correct” version (even though they had yet to publish anything at that point… pretty far out on that credibility limb for TIME if you ask me…)



“Instead of a couple of academic specialists, Wikileaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability,” its organizers write on the site’s FAQ page. “They will be able to interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document is leaked from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it…” TIME Jan. 2007



You have to remember, Wikileaks first started targeting China obviously and as we all know from history, typically dissident movements within targeted nations are often funded and run by covert CIA operations. Since Wikileaks started off with a host of Chinese dissidents, it would be logical to assume that at least some of them have links back to the agency. But it gets better.

Few of you might know that just prior to the unveiling of Wikileaks, the intelligence world had an unveiling of their own… a “social media” based resource called “Intellipedia”. Some of you might find this interesting…



“With its own versions of a certain search engine and a certain online encyclopedia, the intelligence community is evolving its use of tools now widespread in the commercial sector, generating both success and controversy.

The new tools include a federated search engine called Oogle and Intellipedia, a controversial intelligence data-sharing tool based on Wiki social software technology.” GCN Sept. 2006



So we see that in Sept. of 2006 there is a concerted effort in the intelligence community to embark on several new “pedia” type programs one which serves as a data-base and another which works like a Google search engine. Why wouldn’t there be a third?

John Young of Cryptome (a well-known and established whistle-blower site) was working with Jullian Assange in Dec. of 2006 while they were getting all of this off the ground so to speak. Eventually he came to a conclusion about Wikileaks and Assange. The following is from one of the last email communications with Assange that John Young sent him which he had released to the public once he came to his conclusions.



“All the messages received were published. My objections had been building, shown in later messages, after initial support. The finally fed-up turnaround occurred with the publication today of the $5 million dollar by July fund-raising goal — see messages at the tail-end. I called that — along with a delay in offering a public discussion and critique forum and failure to provide a credible batch of leaked documents for public scrutiny — a surefire indication of a scam. This is the exact technique used by snake oilers, pols and spies. Requests to Cryptome to keep stuff quiet are regular fare and they always get published. Next up, the names and affiliations of the perps if they don’t reveal themselves in an open forum.” John Young, Dec. 2006



Go here to read the entire email exchange, from start to finish, including the emails sent to Daniel Ellsberg (apparently he has been emotionally attached to this project from before day-one… so much for Mr. Ellsberg’s journalist objectivity)

It would appear that John Young had problems with the peer review part of the Wikileaks process… notice how that is first and foremost what TIME magazine praises about Wikileaks? Sounds to me like someone is trying to fix the narrative.

So it would appear that TIME and the Washington Post had to come out with supportive articles about Wikileaks because someone was “leaking” information and questions about them and their little project looked doomed to fail before it even got off the ground. Perhaps they got a little help writing all that propaganda from one of Jullian Assange’s first partners in the project… a PR guy affiliated with ABC and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch.



“Phillip Andrew Hedley Adams, AO (born 12 July 1939) is an Australian broadcaster, film producer, writer, social commentator, satirist and left-wing pundit. He currently hosts a radio program, Late Night Live, four nights a week on the ABC, and he also writes a weekly column for the News Limited-owned newspaper, The Australian. Adams is (or was) on the Advisory Board of Wikileaks.“

“Adams began his advertising career with Foote Cone & Belding and later with Brian Monahan and Lyle Dayman became a partner in the agency Monahan Dayman Adams. They took that company to a successful public listing and Adams became a millionaire in the process. He developed such successful campaigns as “Life – Be In It”[4], “Slip, Slop, Slap“[5], “Break down the Barriers”, “Guess whose mum has a Whirlpool” and “watch the big men fly for a Herbert Adams Pie”,”

“News Limited is an Australian newspaper publisher. Until the formation of News Corporation in 1979, it was the principal holding for the business interests of Rupert Murdoch. Since then, News Limited has been wholly owned by News Corporation.” Wiki



Now that’s just another of the curious associations that Wikileaks seems to hold, though you would never hear about that from Glenn Greenwald or John Pilger. But you will hear about it from me. You tack PR guys with News cork affiliations onto Chinese dissidents who have been probably funded by the CIA in times past… mesh that up with John Young’s 2006 conclusions, and you come away with a different view of Wikileaks altogether… especially when you look at the sum total of the work they have “leaked” over the years. Of course there may still be some of you who prefer to take TIME magazine’s telling suggestion to dismiss the “outrageous conspiracy theories” and for those of you who are still in that category, I offer… Cass Sunstein.

Cass Sunstein also wrote about Wikileaks in Feb of 2007 prior to their release of the first set of Chinese “leaks”. But Sunstein also wrote about infiltrating dissident groups later in 2008. Sunstein currently heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for Barack Obama.



“Sunstein co-authored a 2008 paper with Adrian Vermeule, titled “Conspiracy Theories,” in which they wrote, “The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be.” They go on to propose that, “the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups“,[22] where they suggest, among other tactics, “Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”

Sunstein and Vermeule also analyze the practice of secret government payments to outside commentators, who are then held out as independent experts; they suggest that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” further warning that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.”[22] Sunstein and Vermeule argue that the practice of enlisting non-government officials, “might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.”" Wiki



This internal discourse on the purpose and the practice on infiltrating dissident groups in order to undermine existing “conspiracy theories” was written in 2008, but don’t suppose that it hadn’t been done before. Hell, just look up the Black Panthers for god’s sake. But just take a look at the line “government can supply these independent experts with information” and you start to get the idea behind Wikileaks. Again, consider the type of “leaks” that have been coming out about Iran and North Korea and you get the picture.



“The Central Intelligence Agency disclosed the existence of its top-secret Intellipedia project, based on Wikipedia software (and now containing more than 28,000 pages), in late October. The agency hopes to use dispersed information to reduce the risk of intelligence failures. NASA officials have adopted a wiki site to program NASA software, allowing many participants to make improvements.”

“Wikileaks.org, founded by dissidents in China and other nations, plans to post secret government documents and to protect them from censorship with coded software.”

“But the track record of the new collaborations suggests that they have immense potential. In just a few years, Wikipedia has become the most influential encyclopedia in the world, consulted by judges as well as those who cannot afford to buy books. If the past is prologue, we’re seeing the tip of a very large iceberg.” Washington Post



Far from being a ringing endorsement of Wikileaks, Sunstein’s article seems to express what we can probably assume was the motivating factor behind the creation of such a program, and that is that they knew it had “immense potential”.

It’s unfortunate what is going to happen. We all know it. We all see it.** At some point that 256 character encryption code is going to be released and all of those wanna-be hackers will busily work to decode the 1.6 gig file they downloaded from all those bit torrent sites. Of course the files are unredacted, as has already been made clear by Mr. Assange himself, and the end result will obviously be that some U.S. agent in Pakistan or Somalia or even Yemen will be disclosed and killed. At that point, the Obama administration will have no choice but to shut down thousands of websites (they just ran a BETA test for that last month shutting down 70 all at once) for “national security” reasons. Once that happens, they will of course have to pass a net neutrality bill that allows for licensing requirements for hosting websites which will mean only government approved sites will be allowed and they will be constantly monitored, for the public good of course. And thus, all those troubling “conspiracy theory” sites will be gone and Cass Sunstein can sleep better at night.

I only put this information up because I want people like John Pilger and Glenn Greenwald to know the exact role they are playing in all of this. Not that it will make any difference I suppose and not that the shunting of internet freedom will affect them… Salon won’t shut down and neither will Pilger’s site. Hell, those two might even have to write articles explaining how they agree with the new measures, certainly after a U.S. agent gets killed in some country we aren’t even at war with.

Anyway, I don’t normally do predictions and I hope I am wrong. But I don’t think I am.

But just so we all know, this is the background of the mythology called Wikileaks. If we lose our internet freedoms over this fight, I certainly want us all to have a little better understanding of why.

UPDATE: John Young was just asked by AJ what he thought was the overall point of the Wikileaks program…



AJ: Is this a big theatre with Assange or are they burning him?

Young: It's a theatre operation. Partly lulling, partly testing systems. Testing public reaction “are we going to get traction out of cyber threats or not.” will this work or not, because as you know they haven’t caused any harm that is why they haven’t been charged… and then there will be some lives lost or something will happen… and at some point when this cyber war becomes a real war, we will see because the laws will be ready. Interview John Young

Link

** Not all of "us" know it, or see it; they're too busy calling those who do "conspiratards" and psychoanalyzing them and making insinuations about "antisemitism" and pretending that Wikileaks can't possibly be a COVERT operation because the NEW YORK TIMES and THE WASHINGTON POST and TIME MAGAZINE and THE US GOVERNMENT and FOX NEWS and Julian Assange himself tell us it's not. Hell, even Xymphora tells us it's not and that means something, right?

If you refuse to toe the line and BELIEVE, we will make fun of you and attack you and impugn your motives and insist on absolute, public PROOF as though any clue or evidence below that unrealistically high standard (we are talking about a covert psychological operation, right?) is beneath contempt.

If you guys were at all consistent, using the very same tactics, arguments and standards you would, like your hero Assange, find any but the official government story about the 9/11 attacks "annoying"... (what's next? will you also cite Netanyahu or another of his ilk as an advocate for truth and transparency in politics?).

Bottom line: regardless of whether the jury is in, there are too many glaring inconsistencies and red flags associated with the whole Assange/Wikileaks narrative to justify the kind of aggressive certainty that is being displayed here, that he is NOT a cleverly disguised and hyped actor in a psyop to hijack and control dissent from what too many people now perceive is a warmongering, fascist agenda.

On the contrary: if we've learned anything here at RI, the Assange/Wikileaks story is precisely the sort of thing that we should have been able to predict from the people who have brought us SITE and IntelCenter and the boogie-woogie terrorist masterminds living in caves and the PATRIOT Act and War on Terra and Iraqi WMDs and Niger Yellowcake and the Iraqi cakewalk and Mockingbird and Obama the Savior bearing Hope and Change and so on, and so on. Thus far, your strenuous efforts to deny it notwithstanding, it fits right into the pattern.

[barracuda]

It’s unfortunate what is going to happen. We all know it. We all see it.** At some point that 256 character encryption code is going to be released and all of those wanna-be hackers will busily work to decode the 1.6 gig file they downloaded from all those bit torrent sites. Of course the files are unredacted, as has already been made clear by Mr. Assange himself, and the end result will obviously be that some U.S. agent in Pakistan or Somalia or even Yemen will be disclosed and killed. At that point, the Obama administration will have no choice but to shut down thousands of websites (they just ran a BETA test for that last month shutting down 70 all at once) for “national security” reasons. Once that happens, they will of course have to pass a net neutrality bill that allows for licensing requirements for hosting websites which will mean only government approved sites will be allowed and they will be constantly monitored, for the public good of course. And thus, all those troubling “conspiracy theory” sites will be gone and Cass Sunstein can sleep better at night.

Right. The government is going to shut down the most effective surveillance tool in the history of the surveillance tools on planet earth. Okay.

You might keep in mind that the web is a government project monitoring your every keystroke in a permanent database. Just for starters. And they're gonna toss that away - why again? 'Cause some hypothetical schmuck in Yemen got killed by the WikiLeaks "poison pill" insurance file? I doubt it. Color me doubtful.