- You'd assume that Wikileaks the organization will continue to work even without Assange having internet access so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
edit: another comment here suggests the reason may be because his extradition is imminent.
Even if the embassy was shut down surely just a cheap smart phone would rectify the situation and get him back online. Are they somehow blocking mobile signals as well?
All your theories rest on the assumption that someone deliberately and maliciously 'cut' his internet access. There's no evidence of that or even that his access has been 'cut', whatever that means.
Technical question: assuming no targeted malware, is it possible for an actor outside of the embassy network to cut internet access to Assange's devices while leaving the other devices in the network unaffected?
> so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
When a system is failing it enters a death spiral where the pool from which it can hire people gets shallower and shallower (less people are interested in working for the government) until the only persons left are either morons or sociopaths (who want power)
We're in the middle of some crazy propaganda war right now, and it's been this way for quite a while. It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Ever since the DNC leaks and the subsequent accusations against Russia, it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former. Since the RNC, Trump's campaign has been entirely pushing "Don't believe their lies", and the gaslighting from both sides seems to be hitting a nadir at this moment. It's becoming far more difficult to find reality in the fog.
Wikileaks announced for weeks when they were releasing the emails. It was a pre-planned event that the entire world was waiting for.
The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point, since the very emails they are trying to distract us from, detail instance after instance after instance of such collusion.
I share your concern that we'll ever get honest reporting from the media again, and I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
Directly related to what you are saying, DNC consultants and execs caught on tape explaining how they plant fake Trump supporters at rallies to disrupt them or get negative media coverage. It is pretty interesting from: 1/ a partisan PoV, 2/ a methodological PoV; you are right there is a war for information that is being waged.
Is there something really damaging in Wikileak emails? Even on Fox News they are not able to mention anything that is at the level of Trump tapes. Sure, there is some amusing stuff and quipes by aggressive campaign staff about opponents but nothing that can points to big corruption directly on Clinton's part. The media coverage is unexpectedly very low but I can see why media will want to put these rather boring emails front and center while juicy Trump stuff keeps coming out. If anyone has studied these emails, please feel free to comment.
PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
>We're in the middle of some crazy propaganda war right now
Agreed. It's like some people somewhere woke up and realized hiring some script kiddies to hack old people that use the same password for all their accounts is a lot cheaper and easier than old-fashioned espionage.
The frenzied pace at which all of this is happening reminds me a child with a new toy.
>gaslighting from both sides
I disagree that Clinton is trying to distort reality. She is more old school - she just stright up lies from time to time. Trump, on the other hand, is quite literally trying to create an alternate reality.
The magnitude of the falseness of this equivalence tells you everything you need to know about Wikileaks role in this election.
Implied in it is the idea that the Clinton campaign had an obligation to release their opposition research on Trump as soon as they had it. But of course, they have no such obligation: they're not journalists!
On the other hand, Wikileaks clearly is structuring their releases to draw out the impact on the Clinton campaign and (vainly) to blunt the impact of Trump's own behavior (mostly, Clinton has won the news cycles despite these attempts).
But Wikileaks is not supposed to be an organ of the Trump campaign. Unlike the HRC campaign, Wikileaks ostensibly does have an obligation to serve the public interest. It clearly does not honor that obligation; instead, it's transparently servicing the Trump campaign.
> It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Wikileaks notified of an incoming set of documents dangerous to the DNC well before those Trump videos arose.
Wikileaks's foundational theory was there were bad organizations and good organizations, and random leaks would impose a 'secrecy tax' on the bad ones, forcing them to take extreme opsec measures which would make them less effective, and this would gradually bend the moral arc of the universe towards goodness.
But be may be seeing another outcome: the greatest tax is on the organizations where its supporters care about what's right and wrong and true and false, while organizations that spew empty invective and bullshit have no tax. Perhaps what we ended up with is an 'intellectual honesty' tax.
I've read many of the emails. There just isn't much to them. It's almost all boring day-to-day crap. Even the release of Clinton's speech transcripts is about as mild and inoffensive as you can get.
The other thing is we have no idea if they are all authentic. It would be trivial to slip a few extra sentences in here or there. Everyone just seems to take it as given that they're legit but Assange didn't hack anyone to get them. We know nothing about who actually did, so we don't even have a flimsy "reputation" pretense to rely on.
I completely agree with your analysis. To add to this, I've been watching US media closely over the past few months and have never seen them so biased in any matter before, including past elections. It appears to me that there is not a single news source in the US that does not entirely follow some political agenda. There seem to be no dissenters or cautious writers left.
Most of them are biased against Trump, of course, and follow a fairly obvious strategy: "Hillary is extremely unpopular, we cannot make her more popular, so let's make Trump even less popular."
It works very well. Just to make this clear, I'm a European left-wing liberal democratic socialist, not a Trump or Hillary supporter of any kind. But I've seen many US elections and it was never like that before. It's as if all US media and news organizations have sold out to the highest bidder at once. (To be fair, I don't follow that many of them, just a few newspaper sites like L.A. times, NY times, TV channels like CNN, Fox, nbc and a few social media sites.)
Releasing what people said and wrote is not propaganda, it's leaking. Choosing to release only things that make one candidate look bad is propaganda-ish, but to label leaks propaganda is to say it's bad to leak bad things the candidates have said or written, which I completely disagree with.
I want to know the dirt on our candidates because they will LIE LIE LIE as Trump put it.
If this is the case (and I think it is), then what is the underlying motive? It seems to me that if things are coming to a head like this it's because there is an underlying Issue (capital-I) that is also coming to a head or will be soon. I get a sense of near desperation from some of this.
My totally off the cuff hypothesis:
We are approaching a tipping point where new energy technologies (solar+batteries, etc.) will get cheap enough to "go exponential" vs. fossil fuels. This has huge geopolitical implications.
A more or less permanent crash in fossil fuel prices could completely realign the world. The biggest winners would probably be the USA, EU, and China since these are net energy importers and have economies based on high tech, manufacturing, finance, and services. The biggest losers would be Russia and the Middle Eastern petro-states, but certain regions within the USA and Canada would also lose substantially vs. others. More importantly you'd have a major crash in the value of certain corporations vs. others. Apple being briefly worth more than Exxon Mobil is perhaps a preview.
I've heard the view before that WWI and WWII were really about dominance of the emerging petroleum age. If that age is now ending, what happens next? WWIII?
Edit: Second hypothesis:
The world economy is about to crash again hard, and when that happens there will be a great window to enact all kinds of changes. Various parties are struggling to make sure they are in power for that window.
its also abundantly transparent now that "fact checking" services have lost all credibility, ie. "DT claimed HRC server was acid-washed: FALSE", "DT claimed HRC laughed at an 11-year-old rape victim: FALSE".
Never mind the info war how about DNC co-ordinating with paid agitators to start violence at Trump rallies
6m50s > "The thing that we have to watch is making sure there is a double blind between the campaign and the actual DNC and what we're doing. There's a double blind there. So they can plausibly deny that they knew anything about it."
9m35s > Aaron Black, DNC Rapid Response Coordinator, boasts about coordinating a Chicago protest at a Trump event. Two Chicago police reporters were injured and this event got a lot of news coverage.
> It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Personally, I don't understand the brouhaha about all the Trump tapes. If you had even a remote inkling of fact about the man NONE OF THIS IS A SURPRISE.
While I'm definitely in the opposing camp, I have zero respect for those who are now abandoning Trump. You stuck with him on superficial grounds and now you are leaving on superficial grounds. Nothing about the man has changed.
> We're in the middle of some crazy propaganda war right now, and it's been this way for quite a while. It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Huh? I remember the leaks coming out first then the video? I remember because I had fox news live on in the background, they started talking about the email dump and when they came back from break it was pussygate.
Regardless of what you believe about Wikileaks, it doesn't follow to think they're in league with the provider of the leaks. If you know anything about how Wikileaks solicits material, you'd know such isn't the case...
It does suck that they're timing their release with political motives, and Assange appears to be a gaping asshole (though not a rapist), but none of this is even remotely novel for Wikileaks.
> it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former.
correct. you saw the exact same defamation routine a few years ago with the iraq leaks, and again (not as strongly) with the diplomatic cable leaks. the only twist this time is the attempt to conflate russia-us geopolitical tensions with wikileaks involvement.
does the source of the information matter, if the information is legitimate? no. the dems live in fear of wikileaks and the endless dirt on hillary.
it's clear that russia does view assange as an asset, however-- the whole RT show a few years ago spelled that out for me. what is also clear is that unhappy facts are more effective propaganda than mere rhetoric. assange seems content to be a participant in russia's propaganda schemes, so long as he is actually releasing documents whose beef was agnostic to the context of geopolitical rivalry.
in other words: i want the dirt, too. i don't care if russia helps assange, we need all the help we can get against our own government at this point.
Might sound silly, but I think more adjectives equals less trustworthy. So when I see words like 'powerful, emotional, hateful' I tend to dismiss the article as rubbish. Try it sometime.
I'm a bit confused by all the comments here spinning off down conspiracy theories, but not much on facts.
"State actor" can only really mean UK or Ecuadorian government - or at the very least one of those two must be pulling the trigger.
If it's Ecuador that makes some sense, they control the connections to the outside world - they could just change some passwords and internet is cut. But that would be very obviously what had happened so why not just name them.
Alternatively the UK could cut the connection from outside the embassy. I don't see how that could be done without cutting off the internet for the whole embassy. That would possibly be in breach of the Vienna Convention [0] but at the very least I can't imagine it happening without creating a gigantic diplomatic stink.
Neither of those options sound that plausible. Is there a third I've missed? Somehow know it's Assange browsing and kill all his packets in flight?
Also, this is central London - the internet floats freely through the air. Contingency measure is tethering?
Instead of jumping on this as a giant conspiracy, it might be worth considering that it's just that his internet went down.
I mean, until there is actual evidence that Hillary Clinton[1] deployed a highly trained collection of seals (the animal, not the US military contingent) to cut through his tube wires in the death of the night and then pelt across hide park and hide in the serpentine, perhaps we should just consider that public services in the UK are incompetent.
My internet went down last week, you don't see me reaching for the anti-seal spray.
[1] Well, the robot that replaced Hillary Clinton obviously, as we all know she's been dead for 20 years
I do find myself confused by Assange's motivation when taken in context of his circumstances.
If he has and holds evidence of something so damaging that a tweet of the supposed hash of the file is enough to be a threat to a person in power, then why has he allowed himself to live under effectively self-imposed house-arrest for the past 4 years?
I can't imagine that the Wikileaks apparatus doesn't have sufficient op-sec and op-capability to ensure that whatever they're holding gets released effectively should they choose for it to be, so I find myself erring towards this being an over-played hand for the most part.
It suits Assange's narrative to say its a "state actor", just as it suited Yahoo's board to claim "state actors" as they disclosed their latest breach.
Assange's ego really dilutes the wikileaks original goals and its no surprise that the actual doers in the organisation upped and left in 2010.
Rodger Stone (who may have back-channel communications with Wikileaks staff [0]) shared two tweets suggesting that this might be US backed action. Note these tweets are still unconfirmed. At time of writing I have not yet seen this information corroborated elsewhere.
1) "John Kerry has threatened the Ecuadorian President with "grave consequences for Equador" if Assange is not silenced @StoneColdTruth" [1]
2) "Reports the Brits storm the Ecuadorian Embassy tonite while Kerry demands the UK revoke their diplomatic status so Assange can be seized" [2]
It really does make me wonder what documents Wikileaks might have that could make US diplomats so riled up.
I'm still processing this information, and holding out to form a full opinion until more details become available/confirmed.
In the meantime, I'm curious, for people who are angry about this: suppose it is actually true that Assange is working together with Russian hackers in an attempt to influence a US election. Do you believe there is any point at which governments should intervene to protect national sovereignty and integrity of the political process?
If WikiLeaks was releasing dirt on both candidates I would feel much differently.
My understanding is that we do not have any proofs of life from Assange. It could be many things: assassination, deal with Ecuador, extradition by Ecuador or someone else, simply an internet censorship, a PR stunt by Assange.
All is possible. This guy lives a fucking dystopian nightmare.
From a Swedish perspective the Julian Assange case is particular close to the heart since it really shows how corrupt even our courts and politicians are. Sweden is rated as one of the countries with the lowest corruption but still 6 years have passed without even interviewing him for the pathetic accusations.
The entire case is a joke and whatever the US-election result is, it's bad for the entire world since our corrupt politicians will do whatever American corrupt politicians say.
Seems to me like whichever "state party" this was didn't consider the implications behind their actions. Wikileaks has released insurance files in the past, and I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't, automatically or not, trigger a dead man's switch for more leaks.
If you're a state party trying to prevent leaks, silencing Julian is probably the worst way to go about it. It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
Ecuadorian president Correa is outgoing, not running for another term. There will be a new president in a few months and it is almost inconceivable that a new president could be nearly as accomodating as Correa towards Assange.
Something is going to happen in the next few months. Question is, how much agency does Assange really have left?
When Assange accesses the internet, I am guessing that state actors would be trying to see what his traffic contains. How would a person in such a situation access the internet and be sure that his traffic cannot be decrypted and/or there is no man in the middle modification of his traffic. For the sake of discussion, assume he has a brand new laptop with Debain/tails or another FOSS OS. The general consensus seems to be to avoid MacOS and Windows in cases where your life is on the line.
I am getting so damn sick of all of the corruption we're seeing in governments all around the world, including the US/UK. Makes me want to vote for Trump and take the whole crooked system down (unfortunately, that would cause a LOT of pain for good everyday people).
The more I look at this, the more it seems like a brilliant move by Assange to force the media to report more on Wikileaks and the Podesta emails, not just Trumps locker-room antics.
Perhaps this is this election cycle's "October Surprise"?
If this is Clinton attempting to seal-the-deal on the election, I'm officially not voting. Anyone that uses the power of the state (read: the power of the gun) to silence speech is a non-starter in my book.
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
- Is there any direct reason for the timing (US elections, attack on Mosul or other current headlines)?
- Was there any imminent release? (last week there was an announcement of a leak but it didn't materialize as far as I know)
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13159914/wikileaks-hillary...
- You'd assume that Wikileaks the organization will continue to work even without Assange having internet access so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
edit: another comment here suggests the reason may be because his extradition is imminent.
http://time.com/4532984/wikileaks-julian-assange-theories/
[+] [-] malz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
My money is on this being an errant backhoe or similar, and Assange is just turning it into a big deal because he can.
[+] [-] weavie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leereeves|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephenboyd|9 years ago|reply
"We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/788099178832420865
[+] [-] botverse|9 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/19/wikileaks-ecua...
[+] [-] DominikR|9 years ago|reply
When a system is failing it enters a death spiral where the pool from which it can hire people gets shallower and shallower (less people are interested in working for the government) until the only persons left are either morons or sociopaths (who want power)
[+] [-] fluentintypo|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anthony_romeo|9 years ago|reply
Ever since the DNC leaks and the subsequent accusations against Russia, it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former. Since the RNC, Trump's campaign has been entirely pushing "Don't believe their lies", and the gaslighting from both sides seems to be hitting a nadir at this moment. It's becoming far more difficult to find reality in the fog.
These are indeed interesting times.
[+] [-] pdx|9 years ago|reply
Wikileaks announced for weeks when they were releasing the emails. It was a pre-planned event that the entire world was waiting for.
The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point, since the very emails they are trying to distract us from, detail instance after instance after instance of such collusion.
I share your concern that we'll ever get honest reporting from the media again, and I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
[+] [-] AvenueIngres|9 years ago|reply
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuJGHuIkzY
[+] [-] sytelus|9 years ago|reply
PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
[+] [-] alistproducer2|9 years ago|reply
Agreed. It's like some people somewhere woke up and realized hiring some script kiddies to hack old people that use the same password for all their accounts is a lot cheaper and easier than old-fashioned espionage.
The frenzied pace at which all of this is happening reminds me a child with a new toy.
>gaslighting from both sides
I disagree that Clinton is trying to distort reality. She is more old school - she just stright up lies from time to time. Trump, on the other hand, is quite literally trying to create an alternate reality.
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
Implied in it is the idea that the Clinton campaign had an obligation to release their opposition research on Trump as soon as they had it. But of course, they have no such obligation: they're not journalists!
On the other hand, Wikileaks clearly is structuring their releases to draw out the impact on the Clinton campaign and (vainly) to blunt the impact of Trump's own behavior (mostly, Clinton has won the news cycles despite these attempts).
But Wikileaks is not supposed to be an organ of the Trump campaign. Unlike the HRC campaign, Wikileaks ostensibly does have an obligation to serve the public interest. It clearly does not honor that obligation; instead, it's transparently servicing the Trump campaign.
[+] [-] dleslie|9 years ago|reply
Wikileaks notified of an incoming set of documents dangerous to the DNC well before those Trump videos arose.
[+] [-] tlb|9 years ago|reply
But be may be seeing another outcome: the greatest tax is on the organizations where its supporters care about what's right and wrong and true and false, while organizations that spew empty invective and bullshit have no tax. Perhaps what we ended up with is an 'intellectual honesty' tax.
[+] [-] xenadu02|9 years ago|reply
The other thing is we have no idea if they are all authentic. It would be trivial to slip a few extra sentences in here or there. Everyone just seems to take it as given that they're legit but Assange didn't hack anyone to get them. We know nothing about who actually did, so we don't even have a flimsy "reputation" pretense to rely on.
[+] [-] JohnStrange|9 years ago|reply
Most of them are biased against Trump, of course, and follow a fairly obvious strategy: "Hillary is extremely unpopular, we cannot make her more popular, so let's make Trump even less popular."
It works very well. Just to make this clear, I'm a European left-wing liberal democratic socialist, not a Trump or Hillary supporter of any kind. But I've seen many US elections and it was never like that before. It's as if all US media and news organizations have sold out to the highest bidder at once. (To be fair, I don't follow that many of them, just a few newspaper sites like L.A. times, NY times, TV channels like CNN, Fox, nbc and a few social media sites.)
[+] [-] daveheq|9 years ago|reply
I want to know the dirt on our candidates because they will LIE LIE LIE as Trump put it.
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
My totally off the cuff hypothesis:
We are approaching a tipping point where new energy technologies (solar+batteries, etc.) will get cheap enough to "go exponential" vs. fossil fuels. This has huge geopolitical implications.
A more or less permanent crash in fossil fuel prices could completely realign the world. The biggest winners would probably be the USA, EU, and China since these are net energy importers and have economies based on high tech, manufacturing, finance, and services. The biggest losers would be Russia and the Middle Eastern petro-states, but certain regions within the USA and Canada would also lose substantially vs. others. More importantly you'd have a major crash in the value of certain corporations vs. others. Apple being briefly worth more than Exxon Mobil is perhaps a preview.
I've heard the view before that WWI and WWII were really about dominance of the emerging petroleum age. If that age is now ending, what happens next? WWIII?
Edit: Second hypothesis:
The world economy is about to crash again hard, and when that happens there will be a great window to enact all kinds of changes. Various parties are struggling to make sure they are in power for that window.
[+] [-] dingbat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SixSigma|9 years ago|reply
6m50s > "The thing that we have to watch is making sure there is a double blind between the campaign and the actual DNC and what we're doing. There's a double blind there. So they can plausibly deny that they knew anything about it."
9m35s > Aaron Black, DNC Rapid Response Coordinator, boasts about coordinating a Chicago protest at a Trump event. Two Chicago police reporters were injured and this event got a lot of news coverage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuJGHuIkzY
[+] [-] bsder|9 years ago|reply
Personally, I don't understand the brouhaha about all the Trump tapes. If you had even a remote inkling of fact about the man NONE OF THIS IS A SURPRISE.
While I'm definitely in the opposing camp, I have zero respect for those who are now abandoning Trump. You stuck with him on superficial grounds and now you are leaving on superficial grounds. Nothing about the man has changed.
[+] [-] shard972|9 years ago|reply
Huh? I remember the leaks coming out first then the video? I remember because I had fox news live on in the background, they started talking about the email dump and when they came back from break it was pussygate.
[+] [-] dimino|9 years ago|reply
It does suck that they're timing their release with political motives, and Assange appears to be a gaping asshole (though not a rapist), but none of this is even remotely novel for Wikileaks.
[+] [-] cryoshon|9 years ago|reply
correct. you saw the exact same defamation routine a few years ago with the iraq leaks, and again (not as strongly) with the diplomatic cable leaks. the only twist this time is the attempt to conflate russia-us geopolitical tensions with wikileaks involvement.
does the source of the information matter, if the information is legitimate? no. the dems live in fear of wikileaks and the endless dirt on hillary.
it's clear that russia does view assange as an asset, however-- the whole RT show a few years ago spelled that out for me. what is also clear is that unhappy facts are more effective propaganda than mere rhetoric. assange seems content to be a participant in russia's propaganda schemes, so long as he is actually releasing documents whose beef was agnostic to the context of geopolitical rivalry.
in other words: i want the dirt, too. i don't care if russia helps assange, we need all the help we can get against our own government at this point.
[+] [-] calsy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PJDK|9 years ago|reply
"State actor" can only really mean UK or Ecuadorian government - or at the very least one of those two must be pulling the trigger.
If it's Ecuador that makes some sense, they control the connections to the outside world - they could just change some passwords and internet is cut. But that would be very obviously what had happened so why not just name them.
Alternatively the UK could cut the connection from outside the embassy. I don't see how that could be done without cutting off the internet for the whole embassy. That would possibly be in breach of the Vienna Convention [0] but at the very least I can't imagine it happening without creating a gigantic diplomatic stink.
Neither of those options sound that plausible. Is there a third I've missed? Somehow know it's Assange browsing and kill all his packets in flight?
Also, this is central London - the internet floats freely through the air. Contingency measure is tethering?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomati...
[+] [-] JD557|9 years ago|reply
>We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs.
[+] [-] SCdF|9 years ago|reply
I mean, until there is actual evidence that Hillary Clinton[1] deployed a highly trained collection of seals (the animal, not the US military contingent) to cut through his tube wires in the death of the night and then pelt across hide park and hide in the serpentine, perhaps we should just consider that public services in the UK are incompetent.
My internet went down last week, you don't see me reaching for the anti-seal spray.
[1] Well, the robot that replaced Hillary Clinton obviously, as we all know she's been dead for 20 years
[+] [-] herghost|9 years ago|reply
If he has and holds evidence of something so damaging that a tweet of the supposed hash of the file is enough to be a threat to a person in power, then why has he allowed himself to live under effectively self-imposed house-arrest for the past 4 years?
I can't imagine that the Wikileaks apparatus doesn't have sufficient op-sec and op-capability to ensure that whatever they're holding gets released effectively should they choose for it to be, so I find myself erring towards this being an over-played hand for the most part.
[+] [-] willvarfar|9 years ago|reply
Assange's ego really dilutes the wikileaks original goals and its no surprise that the actual doers in the organisation upped and left in 2010.
[+] [-] Pilfer|9 years ago|reply
1) "John Kerry has threatened the Ecuadorian President with "grave consequences for Equador" if Assange is not silenced @StoneColdTruth" [1]
2) "Reports the Brits storm the Ecuadorian Embassy tonite while Kerry demands the UK revoke their diplomatic status so Assange can be seized" [2]
It really does make me wonder what documents Wikileaks might have that could make US diplomats so riled up.
[0] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/roger-stone-back-chann...
[1] https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/787858612844695552
[2] https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/787863160149598208
[+] [-] haberman|9 years ago|reply
In the meantime, I'm curious, for people who are angry about this: suppose it is actually true that Assange is working together with Russian hackers in an attempt to influence a US election. Do you believe there is any point at which governments should intervene to protect national sovereignty and integrity of the political process?
If WikiLeaks was releasing dirt on both candidates I would feel much differently.
[+] [-] unixhero|9 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/abcVS6q.jpg
[+] [-] Iv|9 years ago|reply
All is possible. This guy lives a fucking dystopian nightmare.
[+] [-] staticelf|9 years ago|reply
The entire case is a joke and whatever the US-election result is, it's bad for the entire world since our corrupt politicians will do whatever American corrupt politicians say.
[+] [-] Shank|9 years ago|reply
If you're a state party trying to prevent leaks, silencing Julian is probably the worst way to go about it. It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
[+] [-] Tomte|9 years ago|reply
Something is going to happen in the next few months. Question is, how much agency does Assange really have left?
[+] [-] anondon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DougN7|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordo|9 years ago|reply
"We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."
[+] [-] harryf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway98237|9 years ago|reply
If this is Clinton attempting to seal-the-deal on the election, I'm officially not voting. Anyone that uses the power of the state (read: the power of the gun) to silence speech is a non-starter in my book.
[+] [-] chvid|9 years ago|reply
What is the point of these tweets:
?(From WikiLeak's twitter account.)
Are they hashes of some larger documents and somehow verify authenticity? Some kind of keys or passwords? His dead man switch?