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barracuda wrote:That thread is in the data dump. I wonder - should we move it to G.D. for currency?
JackRiddler wrote:barracuda wrote:That thread is in the data dump. I wonder - should we move it to G.D. for currency?
Why doesn't anyone listen to me?!
Everything should be in GD!
Everything should also be assigned to one of the subforums by way of a drop-down menu for all OPs.
Then you've got the advantages of both, subfora and one big forum for everything. (It's not like this place is too big for that.)
barracuda wrote:I don't particularly enjoy it. But I think there's a degree of responsibility to respond to the anti-leftist leanings and supercilious certitude of lupercal and some of his sources, lest the forum be overrun by the likes of Scott Creighton and F. William Engdahl. If you recall, about a year and a half ago, Creighton was warning us all that WikiLeaks would cause the shutdown of a large portion of the internet. Remember?Scott Creighton wrote:It’s unfortunate what is going to happen. We all know it. We all see it.
Now that this inevitability hasn't come to pass, he's blithely off to the next dalliance, this one in which Glenn Greenwald is a "propagandist of the right" and Assange is responsible for the thought processes of David Horowitz. At some point it should be made clear that these crypto-LaRouchians and NWO/ZOG proponents are simply wrong or lying for an agenda, rather than happily forgetting that whole pages of discussion were spent countering their paranoid pronouncements.
AlicetheKurious wrote: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…
LinkAJ: 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
** 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.
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.
JackRiddler wrote:barracuda wrote:That thread is in the data dump. I wonder - should we move it to G.D. for currency?
Why doesn't anyone listen to me?!
Everything should be in GD!
Everything should also be assigned to one of the subforums by way of a drop-down menu for all OPs.
Then you've got the advantages of both, subfora and one big forum for everything. (It's not like this place is too big for that.)
lupercal wrote:Now that's a pretty silly thing to say, considering that Jacko here has compiled an entire thread of threads devoted to "Threats to Internet Freedoms," listing30- 40 RI threads including his own "War on the Internet -- What's the RI game-plan?," which I won't bother linking to as I'm sure he'll come along and do it himself.
the less said the better
Though often dismissed as a bizarre political cult, the LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology.[1] Beginning in the 1970s, the LaRouchites combined populist antielitism with attacks on leftists, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and organized labor. They advocated a dictatorship in which a "humanist" elite would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists. They developed an idiosyncratic, coded variation on the Illuminati Freemason and Jewish banker conspiracy theories. Their views, though exotic, were internally consistent and rooted in right-wing populist traditions.
let's not reinvent that wheel
wintler2 wrote:Nice summary, can somebody mint a label for it? I hereby announce a competition for an appropriate label for this phenomenon, prize: copy of my complete Marx Broz movie collection, mailed on a flash drive to anywhere in the world. Winner by popular usage here on RI. Conspiratard is a little inflammatory, WOO(ist) not i think quite the same thing tho they often co-occur. Get your entries in before nathan28 ramps the field!
lupercal wrote:^ okay you either can't or won't take a hint and spent what looks like the better part of another workday directing the Passion of the Barracuda against a target that is marginally relevant to this thread, namely Creighton, and one that is totally irrelevant, namely LaRouche.
Why?
barracuda wrote:Besides, I had the morning off.
barracuda wrote:And I'm really making a good faith effort to determine from where your perspective arises, a perspective in which Glenn Greenwald is a "propagandist for the right", as you put it.
barracuda wrote:Yep. It kind of speaks for itself, but just in case those reading along would care to do a bit of compare-and-contrast, here's a nice summary of the relevant issue:Though often dismissed as a bizarre political cult, the LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology.[1] Beginning in the 1970s, the LaRouchites combined populist antielitism with attacks on leftists, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and organized labor. They advocated a dictatorship in which a "humanist" elite would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists. They developed an idiosyncratic, coded variation on the Illuminati Freemason and Jewish banker conspiracy theories. Their views, though exotic, were internally consistent and rooted in right-wing populist traditions.
Some definite correlations there, though I'll be the first to admit that folks can inhabit very similar points of view and yet have very different goals.
lupercal wrote:Whoa there cowboys, before we get carried away with the aspersion casting I see barracuda hasn't turned in the homework I gave him yesterday:
viewtopic.php?p=408705#p408705
So let's finish the easy stuff before launching into the heavy-duty pyramid speculation which has even less to do with this topic than det cord.
p.s. none of your delightful badinage has the least relevance to Creighton's analysis of the Greenwald quote, which is up there for all to see.
barracuda wrote:Lyndon's Little Liver Pills?
Perpetual Single-Identity Organizational Perpetrator Syndrome?
Irrational National Socialism?
Dr. Prouty's Thought Relief Insert Souls?
World view for kidz?
Torpid Irrealism?
I'm still working on it...
lupercal wrote:barracuda wrote:Besides, I had the morning off.
Okay you had the morning off. How about all day yesterday? You seem to have an awful lot of time to devote to defending rather feeble official conspiracy theories.
barracuda wrote:And I'm really making a good faith effort to determine from where your perspective arises, a perspective in which Glenn Greenwald is a "propagandist for the right", as you put it.
Then continue the conversation in the Weiner thread, which is where the quotation is from. Dragging it into this thread does not strike me as "a good faith effort." Just the opposite in fact.
1. What "relevant issue" is that quotation a "nice summary" of? Specifically.
2. What "definite correlations" are there? Specifically.
3. If you want to discuss LaRouche, why haven't you answered the reasonable question I asked in the thread he has come connection to, namely the one mentioned below?
I know you'll take pains with your answers because after all, what you're really seeking here is a civilized conversation and not just a lot of trollery in defense of an intel hoax, right? Right.
jingofever wrote:Actually I'm the one who bumped this thread, at the suggestion of lupercal.
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