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WIKILEAKS/ANONYMOUS capt 119= 6 23<h2 style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 25px; color: rgb(17, 17, 17); margin-bottom: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); outline: none !important;"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="https://join.theintercept.com/go/67400?t=13&utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&akid=7689%2E185521%2E5x6ldF" style="color: rgb(17, 17, 17); text-decoration-line: none; outline: none !important;">FBI Reopens Case Around Julian Assange, Despite Australian Pressure to End Prosecution</a></h2><h4 style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 5px; line-height: 16.25px; color: rgb(17, 17, 17); margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); outline: none !important;">Ryan Grim</h4>The new reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald comes as Australia is pressing the U.S. to end its attempt to prosecute Assange.<a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="https://join.theintercept.com/go/67400?t=14&utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&akid=7689%2E185521%2E5x6ldF" class="yiv8179048458read-more" style="color: rgb(102, 83, 255); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 1px; text-transform: uppercase; display: inline-block; outline: none !important;">READ MORE →</a>=major world newspapers back assange (espionage act)nixon ordered agents to completely incapacitate DE<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/14/daniel_ellsberg_john_young_assange_case">https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/14/daniel_ellsberg_john_young_assange_case</a>==6 22 kpfa phys mental state continues to degrade?=<div>=</div><div>an 6 22</div><div>after Democratic aide Seth Rich was shot and killed in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, July 10, 2016, it didn’t take right-wing media outlets long to promote bogus conspiracy theories about his death. Police believe that Rich was the victim of a street robbery, but Fox News persisted in pushing conspiracy theories about his death — inspiring Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Rich, to file a lawsuit against the right-wing cable news outlet. And a new <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/15/1104511732/fox-news-seth-rich-murder" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">interview with National Public Radio (NPR)</a> is the first public interview they have granted since reaching a settlement with Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp. in 2020.Joel Rich told NPR, "We're just beside ourselves. With all the international stories and all the national media, how do you live with that, when you know it's all false about your son and his legacy?"Under the terms of the settlement they reached with Fox News/Fox Corp. in 2020, Joel and Mary Rich could not speak directly about Fox News or any of its hosts during the NPR interview. But they talked about their son and the pain that conspiracy theorists brought them after his death. [twt tpx]"After Seth's death,” NPR reporter David Folkenflik explains, “figures friendly to former President Donald Trump portrayed him as a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter. They peddled false claims that he had secretly stolen thousands of e-mails and given them to WikiLeaks to try to stop Hillary Clinton from winning the presidency. They suggested Clinton and the Democrats had arranged his killing, and that the Riches themselves were in on some kind of cover-up. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fueled the suspicions, aided by such extremist blogs as Gateway Pundit. None of this was true.”Folkenflik adds, “As intelligence agencies in the Obama and Trump Administrations, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded, hackers were deployed by the Russian government to disrupt U.S. elections. But the falsehoods [seth rich lie?] helped deflect growing evidence that the Russians had interfered in Trump's election win.”Folkenflik notes that Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling and former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs were among the hosts at Fox News or Fox Business who “baselessly suggested that Seth Rich had been the leaker and that he was murdered because of those leaks.”Seth Rich’s death wasn’t the first time Fox News’ willingness to promote nonsense conspiracy theories created legal problems for them. Fox News is presently facing a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trial-date-set-defamation-suit-against-fox-news-over-us-election-claims-2022-04-12/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">$1.6 billion lawsuit</a> from Dominion Voting Systems for promoting the false claim that its voting equipment was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the 2020 presidential election. A civil trial in that case is set for April 2023.Fox News has also been <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/18/1087418350/fox-news-countersues-a-voting-machine-maker-saying-its-damage-estimate-is-inflat" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">sued for defamation by Smartmatic</a>, a Dominion competitor. Smartmatic’s voting equipment was never used to help Democrats steal any votes in 2020, but that didn’t prevent Fox News hosts from promoting that false claim just as it promoted false claims involving Dominion. And Smartmatic asked for <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/fox-news-smartmatic-lawsuit" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">$2.7 billion</a> in its lawsuit.Although Joel Rich couldn’t get into the specifics of the settlement with Fox News/Fox Corp., he told NPR, “We are still glad we did this, because you get a settlement. It may not have the words 'I'm sorry.' But (in effect), you have the admission they did something wrong.”Fox News, not surprisingly, declined to be interviewed for NPR’s article on Joel and Mary Rich. During the interview, they reiterated that the ludicrous conspiracy theories involving their son had no basis in fact.Mary Rich told NPR, “We thought that when the lawsuit was over, our lives would be able to go back (to a sense of normalcy)…. People would know and understand that there was a big lie. And I have realized since then, our lives will never ever be able to return.”</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>1120</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/less-redacted-mueller-report-released-on-eve-of-election-day-reveals-more-about-the-dnc-hacks-investigation/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/less-redacted-mueller-report-released-on-eve-of-election-day-reveals-more-about-the-dnc-hacks-investigation/</a></div><div>
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</div><div>'Mind-blowing' passages released from unsealed Mueller report on eve of Election Day</div><div>
</div><div>Meaghan Ellis November 03, 2020</div><div>   </div><div>A newly-released and less-redacted version of Robert Mueller's investigation into the Democratic National Convention (DNC) server hack revealed details about prosecutors' investigation into Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, President Donald Trump's close advisor, Roger Stone, and the decision not to charge them for their involvement.</div><div>
</div><div>Based on the report, although it was confirmed that WikiLeaks leaked the stolen DNC emails back in July and October 2016, and that Stone appeared to have sufficient knowledge of the impending leak prior to the emails going public, "investigators 'did not have sufficient evidence' to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing," according to Buzzfeed News.</div><div>
</div><div>The report also suggested there was no way to indicate that the hack was beneficial for Trump's first presidential campaign.</div><div>
</div><div>"In addition, federal prosecutors could not establish that the hacked emails amounted to campaign contributions benefitting Trump's election chances and furthermore felt their publication might have been protected by the First Amendment, making a successful prosecution tenuous."</div><div>
</div><div>Many have taken to Twitter with their reactions to the new release while criticizing U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr for suppressing politically damaging information that could have impacted Trump's presidential campaign.</div><div>
</div><div>The president's previous written testimony also appears to clash with the unsealed evidence in the Mueller report. In his written responses, Trump claimed he "could not recall discussing WikiLeaks with Mr. Stone."</div><div>
</div><div>Buzzfeed also offered a side-by-side comparison of both reports to show the distinct differences between the two. In many cases, full passages were suppressed from the previously released version of the report.</div></div>=https://join.theintercept.com/go/21566?t=5&utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&akid=3224%2E185521%2EPCMi95<h2 style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 20px; line-height: 25px; color: rgb(17, 17, 17); font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="https://join.theintercept.com/go/21566?t=5&utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&akid=3224%2E185521%2EPCMi95" style="color: rgb(17, 17, 17); text-decoration-line: none;"> Unprecedented and Illegal Campaign to Eliminate Julian Assange</a></h2><h4 style="margin: 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.25px; color: rgb(17, 17, 17); font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Charles Glass</h4>Assange would never receive a fair trial in the U.S., but he’s not receiving one in Britain either.=case crumbles?<a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/assange-extradition-cfaa-hacking/">https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/assange-extradition-cfaa-hacking/</a>=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/julian-assange-press-shows-little-interest-in-media-trial-of-century/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/julian-assange-press-shows-little-interest-in-media-trial-of-century/</a>no lnx pix guk
Julian Assange: Press shows little interest in media ‘Trial of Century’Alan MacLeod and FAIR September 26, 2020Labeled the media "trial of the century," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's extradition hearing is currently taking place in London—although you might not have heard if you're relying solely on corporate media for news. If extradited, Assange faces 175 years in a Colorado supermax prison, often described as a "black site" on US soil.The United States government is asking Britain to send the Australian publisher to the US to face charges under the 1917 Espionage Act. He is accused of aiding and encouraging Chelsea Manning to hack a US government computer in order to publish hundreds of thousands of documents detailing American war crimes, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. The extradition, widely viewed as politically motivated, has profound consequences for journalists worldwide, as the ruling could effectively criminalize the possession of leaked documents, which are an indispensable part of investigative reporting.WikiLeaks has entered into partnership with five high-profile outlets around the world: the New York Times, Guardian (UK), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain). Yet those publications have provided relatively little coverage of the hearing.Since the hearing began on September 7, the Times, for instance, has published only two bland news articles (9/7/20, 9/16/20)—one of them purely about the technical difficulties in the courtroom—along with a short rehosted AP video (9/7/20). There have been no editorials and no commentary on what the case means for journalism. The Times also appears to be distancing itself from Assange, with neither article noting that it was one of WikiLeaks' five major partners in leaking information that became known as the CableGate scandal.Guardian: 'Politicising' and 'weaponising' are becoming rather convenient argumentsGuardian columnist Hadley Freeman (9/9/20) turned a reader's question about "liv[ing] in a time of so much insecurity" into a bizarre rant against Julian Assange and his partner, Stella Moris.The Guardian, whose headquarters are less than two miles from the Old Bailey courthouse where Assange's hearing is being held, fared slightly better in terms of quantity, publishing eight articles since September 7. However, perhaps the most notable content came from columnist Hadley Freedman (9/9/20).When asked in an advice article: "We live in a time of so much insecurity. But is there anything we can expect from this increasingly ominous-looking winter with any certainty?" she went on a bizarre tangential rant ridiculing the idea that Assange's trial could possibly be "politicized," also crassly brushing off the idea that his young children would never see their father again, and never answering anything like the question she was asked. Holding people to account "for a mess they could have avoided," she notes, "is not 'weaponizing' anything — it is just asking them to do their jobs properly." She also claimed that believing Assange's trial was politicized was as ridiculous as thinking antisemitism claims were cynically weaponized against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which, she meant to suggest, was a preposterous idea. This was not an off-the-cuff remark transcribed and published, but a written piece that somehow made it past at least one editor.Like the Times, the Guardian appeared to be hoping to let people forget the fact it built its worldwide brand off its partnership with WikiLeaks; it was only mentioned in a forthright op-ed by former Brazilian president Lula da Silva (9/21/20), an outlier piece.The Guardian should be taking a particularly keen role in the affair, seeing that two of its journalists are alleged by WikiLeaks to have recklessly and knowingly disclosed the password to an encrypted file containing a quarter-million unredacted WikiLeaks documents, allowing anyone—including every security agency in the world—to see an unredacted iteration of the leak. In 2018, the Guardian also falsely reported that Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort had conducted a meeting with Assange and unnamed "Russians" at the Ecuadorian embassy (FAIR.org, 12/3/18). And, as former employee Jonathan Cook noted, the newspaper is continually being cited by the prosecution inside the courtroom.Der Spiegel: Mögliche Höchststrafe: 175 Jahre KnastDer Speigel's headline (9/7/20) reads: "Maximum Sentence: 175 Years in Prison."There were only two articles in the English or French versions of Le Monde (9/7/20, 9/18/20) and only one in either of Der Spiegel's English or German websites (9/7/20), although the German paper did at least acknowledge its own partnership with Assange. There was no coverage of the hearings in El País, in English or Spanish, though there was a piece (9/10/20) about the US government thwarting a Spanish investigation into the CIA spying on Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London—accompanied by a photo of a protester against his extradition.The rest of corporate media showed as little interest in covering a defining moment in press freedom. There was nothing at all from CNN. CBS's two articles (9/7/20, 9/22/20) were copied and pasted from news agencies AP and AFP, respectively. Meanwhile, the entire sum of MSNBC's coverage amounted to one unclear sentence in a mini news roundup article (9/18/20).Virtually every relevant human rights and press freedom organization is sounding the alarm about the incendiary precedent this case sets for the media. The Columbia Journalism Review (4/18/19), Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation note that the government includes in its indictment regular journalistic procedures, such as protecting sources' names and using encrypted files—meaning that this "hacking" charge could easily be extended to other journalists. Trevor Timm, founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told the court this week that if the US prosecutes Assange, every journalist who has possessed a secret file can be criminalized. Thus, it essentially gives a carte blanche to those in power to prosecute whomever they want, whenever they want, even foreigners living halfway around the world.The United Nations has condemned his persecution, with Amnesty International describing the case as a "full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression." Virtually every story of national significance includes secret or leaked material; they could all be in jeopardy under this new prosecutorial theory.President Donald Trump has continually fanned the flames, demonizing the media as the "enemy of the people." Already 26% of the country (including 43% of Republicans) believe the president should have the power to shut down outlets engaging in "bad behavior." A successful Assange prosecution could be the legal spark for future anti-journalistic actions.Yet the case has been met with indifference from the corporate press. Even as their house is burning down, media are insisting it is just the Northern Lights.==<a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-september-18-2020/">https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-september-18-2020/</a>punked by FIRE?!=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/putins-favorite-congressman-offered-julian-assange-a-pardon-if-he-covered-up-russian-meddling-lawyers/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/putins-favorite-congressman-offered-julian-assange-a-pardon-if-he-covered-up-russian-meddling-lawyers/</a>
raw storyamerican prosecutors said this week that former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) offered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a pardon from President Donald Trump if he agreed to help cover up Russia’s role in interfering in the 2016 presidential election.<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-admits-that-putins-favorite-congressman-offered-pardon-to-assange-if-he-covered-up-russia-links" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The Daily Beast reports</a> that witness Jennifer Robinson has testified that she attended a meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange in 2017 in which he made a direct quid-pro-quo offer.Rohrabacher was joined in the meeting by Charles Johnson, a pro-Trump racist internet troll, and the two men led officials at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.“They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,” Robinson said. the White House has denied that Trump was ever aware of such a scheme, however, and attorneys representing the U.S. government seemed to dispute Rohrabacher’s claims.“After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim,” The Daily Beast reports. “They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.”<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/daniel-ellsberg-warns-us-press-freedom-is-under/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/daniel-ellsberg-warns-us-press-freedom-is-under/</a>no lnx
Daniel Ellsberg warns US press freedom is under attackWritten by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now September 18, 2020Legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in London could have far-reaching consequences for press freedoms. The WikiLeaks founder faces an ever-evolving array of espionage and hacking charges related to the release of diplomatic cables that revealed war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange faces almost certain conviction, if extradited, and 175 years in prison. “The American press has remained in kind of a state of denial for 40 years, really, since my case, that the Espionage Act has wording in it that could be aimed directly at them,” says Ellsberg, who testified in Assange’s defense at his extradition trial via video stream from the United States. “Now the American press is staring right down the barrel at the use of the Espionage Act against American journalists and publishers for doing journalism.”AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we turn now to the press freedom case unfolding in London, where Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of the WikiLeaks, is fighting extradition to the United States over an ever-evolving array of espionage and hacking charges. Assange faces almost certain conviction, if extradited here, and 175 years in prison. U.S. prosecutors allege he conspired with whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who had been private in the U.S. Army, to illegally download hundreds of thousands of war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, along with a huge trove of classified cables from the U.S. State Department.Experts have lined up to defend Assange, including the legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg, who testified Wednesday at the extradition via video stream from his home in California, in Berkeley. In 1971, Ellsberg was a high-level Pentagon analyst when he leaked a top-secret report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers, which documented how officials had lied to the public about the war. Like Assange, Ellsberg provided the leaked documents to The New York Times. Also like Assange, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act and could have spent the rest of his life behind bars, though a judge threw out his case when it was revealed that President Nixon had ordered criminal break-ins seeking damaging information on him. Dan Ellsberg joins us now from Berkeley.Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Dan. We don’t have that much time, but talk about why you testified at the extradition hearing, asking that Julian Assange not be sent to the United States — though, we should say, he has basically been in captivity for almost eight years now, having gone into the Ecuadoran Embassy, where he got political refuge, but was there for years, before a new right-wing government in Ecuador revoked that political asylum status and the British authorities came in and ousted him and brought him to the Belmarsh prison, the high-security prison in Britain.DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes, I’d like to focus, Amy, on the larger implications of this case, since we only have a minute or two. Really, the American press has remained in kind of a state of denial for 40 years, really, since my case, that the Espionage Act has wording in it that could be aimed directly at them, at the journalists and publishers, although, until this case, it hasn’t done so. So, now the American press is staring right down the barrel at the use of the Espionage Act against American journalists and publishers for doing journalism, for doing what they do best, at their best, every day, of getting information that the government doesn’t want known to the public because of their wrongdoing, their lies, their crimes, whatever — there’s a lot of those. And that’s what is mainly the secrecy system is intended to protect, indefinitely.Now, it’s not only American journalists here, although the American First Amendment, the core of our form of government, I would say, is at stake at this right now and is being attacked. Actually, if Julian is extradited, as I say, as you said, it will lead to prosecution here, and probably conviction, and he will not be — he will be the first journalist and publisher, but not the last. New York Times probably won’t be the second, either; it might be the third or the fourth — and you, Amy, as well. So, everybody has a stake in this. Meanwhile, if Julian is extradited to the United States to face these charges for doing the journalism that he has, the charges that are made against him, no journalist in the world is safe from life imprisonment in the United States of America. So the stakes here are enormous. And for freedom of the press anywhere — ours is far from perfect, other places have less, a few have more — but the possibility of freedom of the press, and thus of democracy, is at stake all over the world in this. That sounds almost certainly like hyperbole, and it isn’t.The prosecution proved yesterday that they’re basing a lot of the case, first of all, on — not so much with me, but with other witnesses — on the fact that Chelsea Manning was encouraged by Julian to give this information, and he actually asked for documents. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked for documents, as was quite proper for journalists. So that conspiracy is something that every source goes through with every journalist who uses sources.On the question of what — the damage he has done, the government is seeking to focus on the fact that names, unredacted, were subject, in their minds — and quite understandably, plausibly — to danger in the countries where they were by being published. As I pointed out to the prosecutor, the way to stop that danger from occurring was to stop the publication of those names. And those were not names that either the media or WikiLeaks or Julian Assange wanted to put out. On the contrary, the media and the government was well aware — the media was participating — that they were making enormous efforts to redact from this mass of documents the names of anyone who might be put in a feeling of anxiety or danger or might be in real danger. And, second, they called on the government to supply those names that they could take out. It was in the government’s capability to prevent those people, not of all of whom they could get in touch with, from even being revealed at all, even being in a state of anxiety, and they chose not to do it. They have total responsibility for the anxiety, the fleeing of some of them from their countries — total responsibility, I would say, the government, since they could have prevented that and they chose not to. I can only infer that they preferred to reserve charges, these charges against Julian Assange, eventually, rather than to protect those people from the possible danger that they were put in.Finally, it’s utmost cynical — as I was listening just now to the reports you were making. We’re talking of people who are refugees from a state of war that the United States initiated, first with attack on Afghanistan, but in particular with its aggression against Iraq. And I did mention this the other day to the prosecutor, that it’s, I can only say, cynical — I could use other words — to say that the government, our government, is worried about 100 or 200 people being made anxious and concerned, and some of them asking to leave the country with U.S. help, to be concerned about those people, when this government has led to the flight of 37 million refugees from American-initiated wars, the plight of some of whom you have just described. It’s a mockery. And if this trial is successful, if the extradition is successful, already that will have an intimidating effect on journalists around the world and be a direct attack on the First Amendment of the United States.AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Ellsberg, we want to thank you for being with us, again, one of the world’s most famous whistleblowers. He testified at Julian Assange’s extradition hearing on Wednesday. And just to be clear, Julian Assange, from being under house arrest in Britain to holing up in the Ecuadoran Embassy for over seven years to being at Belmarsh, the high-security prison, for a year and a half, has been actually in captivity for more than a decade. That does it for our show. To see our interview with one of his lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, go to democracynow.org.<div>
</div><div></div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/is-it-a-coincidence-that-moscow-is-peddling-the-same-lies-as-the-trump-campaign/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/is-it-a-coincidence-that-moscow-is-peddling-the-same-lies-as-the-trump-campaign/</a></div><div>
</div><div>ana j wa mo</div><div>no  journalist has done a better job of fact-checking Donald Trump during his presidency than Daniel Dale. But now the CNN reporter, formerly of the Toronto Star, has done an invaluable service by <a title="outlining" href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/politics/fact-check-trump-conspiracy-theories-biden-covid-thugs-plane/index.html" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">outlining</a> the nine conspiracy theories the president is continuously peddling. As Dale suggests, “Trump has been a conspiracy theorist for <a title="years" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-conspiracy-theories-2016-5" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">years</a>.” but never before has he pushed so many at one time.Two of them align completely with disinformation campaigns coming out of Moscow. For example, we learned that the Russian government <a title="began promoting" href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/russia-amplifying-claims-mail-voter-fraud-intel-bulletin/story?id=72799959" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">began promoting</a> the lies about mail-in ballots as early as last March.<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">Russia has sought to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News, again echoing a frequent and unfounded complaint raised by President <a title="Donald Trump" href="https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/donald-trump" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Donald Trump</a>.Analysts with the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence branch issued the warning on Thursday to federal and state law enforcement partners after finding with “high confidence” that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March.</blockquote>The timing raises the question of where the conspiracy theory originated—in the Kremlin or the White House.Similarly, we now know that the Department of Homeland Security <a title="hid a report" href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dhs-wishheld-report-russia-attack-biden-health/" target="blank" rel="external nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">hid a report</a> about how Moscow was promoting the idea that Biden is mentally unfit. Their excuse for not sharing that information is that the intelligence report was “poorly written and thinly sourced.” But according to the document that was finally released, their data was incredibly solid.the report cites posts by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik about Biden’s mental health between September 2019 and May 2020. In March, a Russian proxy website “refuted media claims that the candidate’s gaffes are the result of a stutter, instead arguing these verbal miscues are symptoms of dementia,” the bulletin said.Once again, if this disinformation campaign began in September 2019, the attacks on Biden’s mental health seem to have started in Moscow and migrated to the Trump campaign.This is all reminiscent of the coordinated attack on Hillary Clinton’s physical and mental health in 2016. What we now know is that conservative authorJerome Corsi was in contact with Julian Assange on the release of hacked emails by Wikileaks. He communicated with Roger Stone, who then coordinated with the Trump campaign. Here is what Corsi <a title="wrote" href="https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/11/28/what-youre-not-being-told-about-the-stone-corsi-emails/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">wrote</a> to Stone on August 2, 2016:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: none !important;">Word is friend in embassy [Assange] plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging…Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke—neither he nor she well.</blockquote>When it comes to the lies about mail-in voting and Biden, it is clear that both Putin and Trump are drawing on the same playbook. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence. But given this history, that is unlikely.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div style=""><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">wapo: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">National Security</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ had repeated contact with Russian intelligence, Senate panel finds</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Karoun Demirjian and </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ellen Nakashima</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">August 18, 2020</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday that found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In its report, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee states that Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that purported Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It found that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, along with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016, had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report stated.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the panel also concluded that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election was “flawed” and that the bureau gave “unjustified credence” to allegations about Trump’s Russia ties made in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Document: Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three-and-a-half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The panel, significantly, agreed that the FBI overestimated Steel’s reliability and that Manafort and other aides exposed the campaign to undue Russian influence. But its leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the report’s significance, and several committee members — including its acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — endorsed dissenting conclusions about Trump’s own culpability.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The partisan divisions are a sign that the panel’s tome likely will not put to rest the political wrangling over how seriously to treat foreign interference in U.S. democracy as the country heads into its most divisive election in modern history.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion,” a group of six panel Republicans, including Rubio, wrote in a statement instead accusing the Democratic Party of coordinating with foreign actors to produce Steele’s dossier.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“In 2016, the Democratic Party, using a series of arm’s length transactions, hired a foreign citizen to seek out dirt on a political opponent, provided by foreign sources,” the Republicans wrote, attacking the FBI for “sloppy work and poor judgment.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Five Democrat senators — including Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the party’s 2020 vice-presidential nominee — asserted the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “This is what collusion looks like.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who did not sign onto the Democrats’ dissenting views, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation and also steered clear of the GOP’s dissent, struck a position in the middle.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Senate panel told Justice Dept. of suspicions over Trump family members’ Russia testimony</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Burr and Warner launched the committee’s probe before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and sustained the bipartisan investigation over the following three and a half years, even as other Congressional investigations into the same matter faltered along partisan lines. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee began its probe, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also released a 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — and Trump was impeached and acquitted after Democrats accused him of coercing Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Though the committee’s probe covers much of the same turf as Mueller’s investigation, it was different in nature. Mueller was running a criminal probe; the Senate committee was conducting an intelligence investigation — a distinction that helps to explain some of nuanced differences between their conclusions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Senate panel’s probe, which was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, included more than 200 witnesses and considered evidence relating to Russian disinformation, Trump’s personal, business and campaign contacts with Russians and the transition period following the 2016 election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At one point, the document all but concludes that Trump aides were duped and manipulated by Russian interests they were too callow to understand.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Russian officials, intelligence services, and others” acting in concert with the Kremlin “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report concluded. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The report also presents a damning portrait of the Trump campaign’s hasty move in March 2016 to assemble a foreign policy team, asserting that it had recruited inexperienced people without thoroughly vetting them and thus potentially exposed itself to Russian influence.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Ultimately,” the committee wrote, “the foreign policy team exposed the Trump Campaign to significant counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The committee pointed to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who attempted to secure a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin through “highly suspicious” contacts with people close to the Russian government. Ultimately, investigators concluded, Papadopoulos “was not a witting co-optee of the Russian the Russian intelligence services. The panel also found that while Russia seemed to show an interest in campaign adviser Carter Page, investigators “found no indication that Page had useful Campaign information for the Russian intelligence services to extract, nor meaningful influence for them to exploit.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>The committee did find however that Putin personally directed the 2016 hack-and-leak campaign targeting the Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Clinton campaign. The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks “actively sought and played a key role in the Russian campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” the report stated, surmising that a Russian military spy agency, known as the GRU, transferred hacked emails to WikiLeaks likely because it offered a more effective platform for publicity than the GRU’s own methods.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yet investigators could not “reliably determine the extent of authentic, nonpublic knowledge” Trump’s friend Roger Stone had about WikiLeaks’s coming releases and shared with the campaign.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The panel noted that its investigation was hampered by several witnesses’ refusing interviews and to produce documents, citing Fifth Amendment rights that protect against self incrimination. These included Stone, Manafort and Rick Gates, the campaign’s deputy chair at that time. The panel’s request to interview Julian Assange was rebuffed.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The committee also outright accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying that it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The committee previously released other volumes detailing aspects of its inquiry. Those reports focused on U.S. election security, Russia’s use of social media in disinformation campaigns, the Obama administration’s response to the perceived threat in 2016 and the intelligence community’s joint assessment that Russia had interfered in an attempt to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yet the panel’s effort to maintain a bipartisan approach has not saved it from partisan scrutiny. Last year, the panel came under fire from Senate Republicans after issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. to come in for a second round of testimony.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After his testimony, Trump Jr. was one of several witnesses that the panel referred to the Justice Department for closer scrutiny over discrepancies between their testimony and that of Gates, the ex-deputy campaign chair who was a key witness in Mueller’s probe.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks he sold in industries hit badly by the coronavirus pandemic. Rubio has been serving as acting chairman in his place.</div></div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div>no lnx highlight
https://gizmodo.com/dojs-new-wikileaks-indictment-has-significant-convenie-1844166678
6/20
In its push to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the U.K., the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday published a superseding indictment aimed at broadening “the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.” The names of certain organizations and individuals are masked, including that of a paid FBI informant who stole money from WikiLeaks and later confessed to having sex with nine underage boys in exchange for money and other valuables.
A decent chunk of the filing relates to Chelsea Manning, her interactions with Assange and other possible ties to known WikiLeaks associates, which serve as the foundation for the bulk of the charges against Assange, including multiple counts of espionage.
But in hopes of linking Assange to other “unlawful overt acts” as part of a broader conspiracy—one goal of which is connecting Assange to crimes against a NATO ally of the country considering his extradition—DOJ describes several alleged interactions between Assange and Anonymous hackers involved in major criminal operations. Considerable context is omitted from the descriptions of these events, however, including the FBI’s own role in furthering attacks by Anonymous against American businesses and foreign governments in South America and the Middle East, based on a review of sealed evidence by Gizmodo.
A section of the indictment titled “Sabu, Hammond, and ASSANGE” begins on the date December 25, 2011, and refers to an attack on servers belonging to a private firm identified only as “Intelligence Consulting Company.” This is obviously Stratfor, the Austin-based private intelligence company whose millions of pilfered emails comprise the WikiLeaks drop known as the Global Intelligence Files.
DOJ omits several crucial details about the Stratfor hack in its attempts to name Assange as a conspirator in a breach that happened without his knowledge. Most notably, prosecutors exclude that the actual breach of Stratfor’s security, in late 2011, occurred 83 days prior to the events they describe, unknownst by anyone DOJ identifies as part of the conspiracy, including Assange.
This has gone mostly unreported due to the fact that all of the evidence related to the hack was sealed by a federal judge in Manhattan. Attempts by the New York Times and other outlets to acquire the evidence in court all failed. Nevertheless, nearly all of it was leaked to a handful of reporters in 2013 and today form the basis of multiple detailed accounts of the hack and surrounding events. (A portion of the material has been publicly accessible for years.)
One key document is a confidential computer forensics report, completed in February 2012, describing the Stratfor breach. The report was completed by investigators working for Verizon, which Stratfor contracted about five days after the public became aware of the breach. It lays out several important facts: The first is that attempts to breach Stratfor’s email server began on September 29, 2011, and that four days later, a brute force attack against a specific user account was successful.
This break-in detailed in the confidential report occurred two months before anyone prosecutors have blamed for the attack even knew of the company’s existence.
On November 16, the data dump containing the credit card information of Stratfor customers was created. Notably, this predates the DOJ’s own timeline of Anonymous’ involvement by 19 days. That this is the actual credit card file ultimately leaked by Anonymous is indisputable: The dataset contains 79,062 credit cards, the exact number of cards held by Stratfor on November 16, according to the forensics report. By the time Anonymous published its list, Stratfor’s database contained an additional 1,860 cards, none of which were included in the leak.
Strategic Forecasting, Inc. computer forensic investigationStrategic Forecasting, Inc. computer forensic investigationScreenshot: Sabu FilesThe first Anonymous figure identified by DOJ as part of the Stratfor hack doesn’t become aware of the breach until early December, according to DOJ’s own timeline of events. In 2012, the FBI fed news reporters, including those at the New York Times, false information about how this all transpired. The FBI claimed that an Anonymous hacker found a way into Stratfor’s network on December 6 and then notified a member of his team—who happened to be an FBI informant.
In reality, the exact opposite happened.
Prosecutors have never mentioned, nor has the FBI ever acknowledged the capture of, the hacker actually responsible for breaching Stratfor and creating the stolen credit card file. The narrative has always been that Jeremy Hammond, a hacker affiliated with the Anonymous-offshoot Antisec, was chiefly responsible for the breach. (Hammond is currently serving the final year of his 10-year sentence for hacking Stratfor.)
Strategic Forecasting, Inc. computer forensic investigationStrategic Forecasting, Inc. computer forensic investigationScreenshot: Sabu FilesFor certain, Hammond gleefully ransacked Stratfor, defaced its website, encouraged others to commit fraud using its stolen credit cards, and on December 24, 2011, inputted the commands that disabled its web server and deleted its file systems. But prior to December 4, the date an FBI informant (“Sabu”) offered him the means to access those systems, Hammond had no apparent knowledge of the company’s existence.
Evidence collected by the FBI, which DOJ has fought to keep concealed, shows the hacker responsible for breaching Stratfor (known only as “Hyrriiya”) was closely tied with a group of hackers whose central focus was infiltrating the Syrian government—the same group behind the leak of the Syria Files, more than 2 million emails from Syrian government officials published by WikiLeaks in July 2012.
Moreover, the evidence appears to show a clear violation of DOJ’s guidelines for the use of confidential informants, which expressly forbid informants from initiating or instigating “a plan or strategy to commit a federal, state, or local offense.” Despite claiming in court that its informant was under constant surveillance and worked side-by-side with agents throughout his cooperation, an FBI official later said of any alleged unlawful conduct: “It’s not like we watched him every time he got up to get a coke.” (This also appears untrue as prosecutors claimed in 2014 there was a webcam in his apartment.)
In one of the most egregious examples of this violation, records show the informant providing Hammond complete credit card data belonging to a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and an employee of Raytheon as evidence the breach is authentic. Hammond responds that he’s interested and wants to “sink [his] teeth” into the target.
At the time Stratfor was hacked, companies rarely faced any scrutiny for suffering data breaches. Were the same hack to occur today, coverage of the event would likely be different. After Equifax announced its breach in 2017, the company was investigated federally and excoriated publicly, its reputation essentially torched. Stratfor, meanwhile, quietly paid out a meager $1.7 million settlement and was largely portrayed as a victim in the press.
In truth, Stratfor set the stage for its own devastating breach through its own sheer negligence. Its security, or lack thereof, was appalling, according to its own forensic report. The company had virtually no controls over remote access to its network, which was not protected by a firewall and lacked proper file integrity-monitoring. It had no password management policy. According to the report, staff “commonly use the same password to access email as the password to remotely access a system containing sensitive information.”
In 2011, Stratfor was, the report found, ignoring all routine data security standards established by the payment card industry: no firewall, no encryption, no regularly updated anti-virus software, no need-to-know restricted access, no network monitoring, no regular audits of its systems, and no existing policy to address information security. The server that held Stratfor’s unsecured credit card data wasn’t even segregating from its email server, which was the hackers’ point of entry and the only reason any financial information was stolen in the first place.
If the same hack were to have happened this year, the company would wind up eating the lion’s share of the blame.
Perhaps the most absurd twist is that Dallas-based journalist Barrett Brown ended up getting slapped with nearly $900,000 in restitution to Stratfor, even though Brown had no advanced knowledge of the attack and, to be blunt, couldn’t hack his way out of a paper bag.
As with Hammond, Brown took a deal in an effort to avoid potentially decades in prison. But in trying to ensure Brown got the harshest sentence possible, federal prosecutors repeatedly painted him as being closely allied with the hackers behind the Stratfor breach. This despite the fact that DOJ quietly withheld evidence obtained by an informant obliterating that theory. This evidence showed that the hackers secretly loathed Brown and had even discussed implicating him in the crime—textbook Brady material, which would have all but upended the government’s account of Brown being integral to the breach.
As Gizmodo previously reported, there is likely ample evidence to show that WikiLeaks aided the Stratfor hackers in the wake of the attack, after the fact. But in several places, Gizmodo can confirm, the indictment attributes statements directly to Assange when, in reality, those conversations were relayed second-hand. (Assange is also known for using a variety of methods to obscure his identity online including, notoriously, referring to himself in the third-person.) At best, these are copies of exchanges taken from chat rooms in which a user claims to be Assange, which is not likely to hold up in court.
The evidence does show that someone alleging to be Assange provided the Stratfor hackers with a script designed to help them more easily navigate the more than 5 million emails they stole (though, as FBI’s own evidence shows, the hackers found the tool was practically useless.) Nevertheless, like Brown, the evidence also shows Assange had no foreknowledge of the attack. Without WikiLeaks’ involvement, Stratfor’s customers would have still suffered the same amount of financial harm, the company’s systems would have still been destroyed, and its emails would have ended up splattered across the internet anyway, in one form or another.
Regardless of whatever alleged crimes Assange may actually be guilty of—if any—that shouldn’t distract from the fact that DOJ’s timeline of events is woefully misleading. The agency’s handling of the Stratfor breach should not be cast as a model for how to prosecute computer crimes. It is at best a paradigm for evidence mismanagement, and at worst, a glaring case of deliberate prosecutorial misconduct.
9/19
https://gizmodo.com/jeremy-hammond-anonymous-hacker-and-wikileaks-source-1837830636

==<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/julian-assange-lawyer-tells-court-trump-administration-resorted-to-extortion-after-pardon-fell-through/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/julian-assange-lawyer-tells-court-trump-administration-resorted-to-extortion-after-pardon-fell-through/</a>no lnx twt
Julian Assange lawyer tells court: Trump administration resorted to ‘extortion’ after pardon fell through
Written by David Edwards / Raw Story February 24, 2020An attorney for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accused the Trump administration of extortion in a London court on Monday.
The WikiLeaks attorney appeared at Woolwich Crown Court along with U.S. prosecutors, who argued that Assange should be extradited the United States, where he faces 18 charges and up to 175 years in jail.
Attorneys for Assange previously told the court that former Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) tried to broker a pardon deal between the White House and Assange if he would agree to say that Russia was not the source of hacked Democratic Party emails.
Defense attorney Edwards Fitzgerald said on Monday that Rohrabacher had called the pardon offer a “win-win.”
But when the pardon fell through, the Trump administration tried to extort Assange with a political prosecution, according to the attorney.Read some of the reports from the courtroom below.Ben Lewis@benlewismedia · 3hMore detail on the Assange - Dana Rohrabacher meeting. Assange's lawyer says the congressman presented a "win win solution which could allow JA to leave the embassy and get on with his life."Ben Lewis@benlewismediaAssange QC notes that Mr Rohrabacher has denied saying he was acting on President Trump's behalf when offering a pardon in exchange for identifying the source of the 2016 DNC leaks.
Samantha Hawley@samanthahawleyEdward Fitzgerald on alleged pardon offer to Assange and President Trumps denial of it “well he would say that wouldn’t he.”

Hugh Whitfeld@hughwhitfeld#Assange court is told US congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Charles Johnson discussed a ‘pre-emptive’ pardon in exchange today ‘personal assistance’ to President Trump in August 2017.... if Assange revealed source of DNC leak/hack.
Ben Lewis@benlewismedia
Replying to @benlewismediaAs for President Trump's denial- "well he would say that, wouldn't he."

Ben Lewis@benlewismediaWhy is this all important? Assange's legal team will argue this is a political prosecution, not driven by justice, so extradition should not go ahead.

Ben Quinn@BenQuinn75Assange lawyer expanding on claims US Repub congressman offered Trump pardon in exchange for saying Russia not involved in leaking DNC emailsDana Rohrabacher said to have described it as "win win" situation.. Assange could get out of Ecuadorian embassy and get on with life"
Kevin Gosztola@kgosztola · 3hReplying to @kgosztolaDefense goes over Rohrabacher and Charle Johnson meeting with Assange in 2017. They represented they were there to offer pardon on behalf of Trump. #AssangeKevin Gosztola@kgosztolaDefense: “Whole pardon business shows that just as prosecution was initiated in December 2017 so after this meeting for political purposes. So too did Trump administration use the threat of prosecution as a means of extortion to obtain personal political advantage from Assange.”<h3 class="hed" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px 0px 0.5rem; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/02/julian-assange-and-roger-stone-are-perfect-examples-of-how-trump-uses-his-pardon-power/" title="Permalink to Julian Assange and Roger Stone Are Perfect Examples of How Trump Uses His Pardon Power" rel="bookmark" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; background-position: 0px 90%; background-image: none;">Julian Assange and Roger Stone Are Perfect Examples of How Trump Uses His Pardon Power</a></h3><p class="byline" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.2em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-variant-numeric: normal !important; font-variant-east-asian: normal !important; font-weight: bold !important; font-stretch: normal !important; line-height: 1.3 !important;"><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/author/dan-friedman/" title="Posts by Dan Friedman" rel="author" style="box-sizing: inherit; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; background-position: 0px 90%; letter-spacing: 0.2em; background-image: none;">DAN FRIEDMAN</a>=OMGno lnx
Julian Assange was promised a Trump pardon if he would lie about Russia’s DNC hacking: lawyer
Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 19, 2020President Donald Trump offered Julian Assange a pardon if he covered up Russia’s hacking of the DNC’s server, attorneys for the Wikileaks founder say, The Daily Beast reports.Assange’s lawyers “said Dana Rohrabacher, a former Republican congressman, had brought the message to London from Trump.” The attorneys are arguing that Assange should not be extradited to the U.S., claiming the case was political and not criminal.“Mr Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange… said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks,” Edward Fitzgerald, Assange’s lawyer, told the court, relaying a statement produced by another Assange’s attorney.The case, however, is not political.Assange, were he to be extradited to the U.S., reportedly could face 175 years in jail if charged and convicted on 18 charges including conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.Rohrabacher, who claims he does not believe Russia interfered in the 2016 election, had earned the nickname “Putin’s favorite Congressman.”The FBI in 2012 had to warn him the Kremlin considers him a valuable information asset – complete with a Russian code name.In 2016 Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and other Republicans were speaking about Russia and Ukraine. McCarthy told the group, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”<div>
</div><h3 class="magcat-titlte entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/julian-assange-claims-he-was-promised-a-trump-pardon-if-he-would-lie-about-russias-dnc-hacking/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;">Julian Assange was promised a Trump pardon if he would lie about Russia’s DNC hacking: lawyer</a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/julian-assange-claims-he-was-promised-a-trump-pardon-if-he-would-lie-about-russias-dnc-hacking/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;">
</a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/julian-assange-claims-he-was-promised-a-trump-pardon-if-he-would-lie-about-russias-dnc-hacking/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;"></a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/david-badash/" title="Posts by David Badash" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-align: right; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">David Badash</a> / <a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/the-new-civil-rights-movement/" title="Posts by The New Civil Rights Movement" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-align: right; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The New Civil Rights Movement</a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/julian-assange-claims-he-was-promised-a-trump-pardon-if-he-would-lie-about-russias-dnc-hacking/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;">
</a></h3>new<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/united-nations-expert-says-julian-assanges-life-is-at-risk">https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/united-nations-expert-says-julian-assanges-life-is-at-risk</a>no lnx
United Nations expert says Julian Assange’s life is at risk
Written by Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams November 3, 2019The United Nations special rapporteur on torture reiterated Friday a warning that Julian Assange’s life is at risk and said the WikiLeaks founder must not be extradited to the United States as a consequence of  “exposing serious governmental misconduct.”
“While the U.S. government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity,” said special rapporteur Nils Melzer in a new statement.
Free press advocates see Assange as victim of an unprecedented assault on journalism because the WikiLeaks publisher faces 18 charges in the U.S. under the Espionage Act—making Assange the first publisher to face charges under that law. Currently in London’s Belmarsh prison for skipping bail seven years ago when he first took refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange last month lost a bid to postpone his U.S. extradition hearing in February.
Melzer’s new comments come five months after he visited Assange in prison and said Assange exhibited “all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture.” But warnings about Assange’s treatment, the U.N. expert said, went unheeded.
The U.K. government has shown “outright contempt for Mr. Assange’s rights and integrity,” said Melzer, and failed to take “any measures of investigation, prevention, and redress required under international law.”
Assange has also not been given his right to prepare his defense, Melzer said, because his “access to legal counsel and documents has been severely obstructed.”
“In a cursory response sent nearly five months after my visit, the U.K. government flatly rejected my findings, without indicating any willingness to consider my recommendations, let alone to implement them, or even provide the additional information requested,” said Melzer.
“He continues to be detained under oppressive conditions of isolation and surveillance, not justified by his detention status,” Melzer said of Assange.
The driving force behind the harsh treatment and potential life behind bars appears evident to Melzer.
“In my view, this case has never been about Mr. Assange’s guilt or innocence, but about making him pay the price for exposing serious governmental misconduct, including alleged war crimes and corruption,” Melzer said. “Unless the U.K. urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr. Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.”
Assange’s case, argue WikiLeaks and whistleblowing researchers Felicity Ruby and Naomi Colvin, deserves the world’s attention.
“The indictments for which Assange is now imprisoned have nothing to do with Sweden, Russia, Trump, or his cat,” Ruby and Colvin wrote at New Internationalist. “They are a straightforward attempt to prosecute a publisher for committing acts of journalism: specifically the releases of 2010-11 on Guantanamo Bay, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Cablegate. These are the most significant series of public-interest disclosures of our times.”
“For this journalism, he is held, alone for more than 20 hours a day in a cell on the health ward of Belmarsh, only just able to receive documents from his lawyers. Years of unsympathetic and hostile treatment from his peers have left him almost as alone in the public realm as he is now in Belmarsh,” wrote Ruby and Colvin. “And yet it is on this man, resilient but much weakened after a decade of unrelenting pressure that the future of the freedom to report, and to read, rests.”<div>
</div>mint press 819?<h1 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: -10px 0px 0px; line-height: 20px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-blackout-imprisonment-espionage-act-julian-assange/261510/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: 0px 0px; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">Breaking The Media Blackout on the Imprisonment of Julian Assange</a></h1><h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 100; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The same media that has spent years dragging Assange’s name through the mud is now engaging in a blackout on his treatment. If you are waiting for corporate media pundits to defend freedom of the press, you’re going to be disappointed.</h2>new<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/beware-the-thought-police-are-coming">https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/beware-the-thought-police-are-coming</a>
 Beware: The thought police are comingwritten by Chris Hedges, Mr. Fish / Truthdig June 12, 2019Chris Hedges gave this talk Tuesday, June 11, at an event held in London in support of Julian Assange.Chris Hedges gave this talk Tuesday, June 11, at an event held in London in support of Julian Assange.
Ask the Iraqi parents of Sabiha Hamed Salih, aged 15, and Ashwaq Hamed Salih, aged 16, who were killed by shrapnel in Baghdad on July 31, 2004, what they think of Julian Assange.
Ask the man and his two young daughters who saw their wife and mother shot to death and were themselves wounded in a car fired upon by U.S. Marines in Fallujah on July 22, 2005, what they think of Julian Assange.
Ask the parents of Huda Haleem, an 18-year-old girl, and Raghad Muhamad Haleem, a 5-year-old boy, shot dead by U.S. soldiers on June 2, 2006, in Iraq’s Diyala province what they think of Julian Assange.
Ask the parents of the 15-year-old boy choked with a wire and then shot to death by U.S. Marines in Ramadi on Aug. 10, 2006, what they think of Julian Assange.
Ask the relatives of Ahmed Salam Mohammad, who was shot dead on Nov. 27, 2006, when U.S. troops attacked a wedding party near Mosul, an attack that also left four wounded, what they think of Julian Assange.Ask the families of the over one dozen people shot to death with .50-caliber machine guns by bantering U.S. Apache helicopter crews in east Baghdad in July 2007—the crew members can be heard laughing at the “dead bastards” and saying “light ’em up” and “keep shooting, keep shooting”—a massacre that included two journalists for Reuters—Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh—what they think of Julian Assange. Ask the then 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his 5-year-old sister, Doaha, both wounded, whose 43-year-old father, Saleh, was shot to death from the air as he attempted to assist one of the wounded men in the Baghdad street what they think of Julian Assange.
There is nothing like the boot of the oppressor on your neck to give you moral clarity.
None of these war crimes, and hundreds more reported to the U.S. military but never investigated, would have been made public without Julian, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. That is the role of journalists—to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, to hold the powerful to account, to give the forgotten and the demonized justice, to speak the truth....new<a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click1.e.alternet.org/qgmhfjdydbntnfrrtvsddtdrrvtrygpchbdnsmjgwsw_xvgvdcsctdrrsjscpjb.html?a=&b=239&c=21989&d=2" style="">Daniel Ellsberg: Espionage charges against Assange are most significant attack on press in decades</a><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: Georgia, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-style="font-style" italic="italic" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" padding="padding"> As the Justice Department charges WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with…<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/24/exclusive_julian_assange_s_attorney_decries">https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/24/exclusive_julian_assange_s_attorney_decries</a><p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;"> GOODMAN: In an unprecedented move, the Justice Department has indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 17 charges of violating the Espionage Act for his role in publishing U.S. classified military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documents were leaked by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The Espionage Act of 1917 has never been used to prosecute a journalist or media outlet. The new charges come just over a month after British police forcibly removed Assange from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he took asylum in 2012. Initially, the Trump administration indicted Assange on a single count of helping Manning hack a government computer. But Assange faces up to 170 years in prison under the new charges—10 years for each count of violating the Espionage Act.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">Press freedom advocates have denounced the new charges. Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union said, quote, “For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on journalism and a direct assault on the First Amendment.” Joel Simon, the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said, quote, “Press freedom in the United States and around the world is imperiled by this prosecution.” The legendary journalist Seymour Hersh told The New York Times, quote, “Today Assange. Tomorrow, perhaps, The New York Times and other media that published so much of the important news and information Assange provided,” unquote.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">Assange is being held in a British jail but faces extradition to both the United States and Sweden, where authorities have reopened an investigation into sexual assault charges.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">Later in the broadcast, we’ll be joined by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who was charged under the Espionage [Act] in 1973, and the award-winning national security journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. But first we go to London, where we’re joined by Jennifer Robinson, an attorney for Julian Assange.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">First, Jen, can you start off by talking about these new charges, the possibility that if Julian Assange were extradited to the United States, he could face 170 years in jail?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: As you said, these are unprecedented charges. Since 2010, we’ve been warning about this very possibility. The Obama administration opened this criminal investigation in 2010, and we’ve been warning since then that any prosecution under the Espionage Act would be a direct attack on the First Amendment and all media organizations, in a precedent that could be used against journalists and publishers everywhere. Since the Trump administration came to power, they’ve been more aggressively pursuing the investigation, and the outcome is this indictment overnight.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">It is a grave threat to press freedom and should be cause for concern for journalists and publishers everywhere, because, of course, Julian Assange is not American. Everything that he did was outside of the United States. So this is a concern for all journalists and publishers anywhere in the world who are publishing truthful information about the United States.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: The United States has the death penalty. What does this mean for Assange? And what agreement did the Ecuadorean government make with the British authorities, who removed Julian Assange from the embassy, where he had political asylum for the last almost seven years?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: Of course, the reason Julian went into the embassy in the first place was to protect himself from extradition to the United States to face prosecution, not in relation to the death penalty. But the asylum that was granted was to protect him from this very outcome. Publishers, for publishing truthful information, should not be facing criminal prosecution at all.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">The U.K. government has given an assurance against extradition to the death penalty. The U.K. does not typically extradite to the death penalty in any event. But that assurance does not cover off his extradition to the United States. And that’s what we’ve been asking for, for a long time. It is not right or appropriate that a publisher should face criminal prosecution in this way. And 170 years, certainly a very long time in prison, is, for a publisher who has won journalism awards—he’s won the Sydney Peace Prize, journalism awards the world over—for having revealed government wrongdoing, human rights abuse, war crimes—this is a direct attack on the press and democracy itself.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what espionage means, what exactly Julian Assange faces?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: Well, if you look at the indictment, while it is the Espionage Act, it’s publishing classified information damaging to the United States. But if you look at the indictment and the way in which it’s been described, effectively what this is, is a journalist and a publisher having conversations with a source about what information is available, and discussing with that source publishing the information. This is what journalists do, investigative journalists do, all the time. It is criminalizing the investigative journalism process and will place a massive chill on national security journalism in the United States and elsewhere around the world.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the late Michael Ratner, who served for many years as an attorney for Julian Assange. He was the former head of the Center for Constitutional Rights. This was Michael <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2012/2/29/leaked_stratfor_email_suggests_secret_us" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px;">speaking</a> to Democracy Now! in 2012 about the Espionage Act.<blockquote helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243);">MICHAEL RATNER: I think there’s a serious question whether someone like Julian Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen, can be indicted under the Espionage Act. What duty does Julian Assange owe the United States vis-à-vis the Espionage Act? If I, tomorrow, surface documents that had to do with the Soviet Union, or Russia, rather, and what it’s doing in Chechnya, that were classified, could Russia actually get my extradition from the United States because I put out classified documents belonging to Russia? I don’t think so. But that would be—if they actually have an indictment and if they go after Julian Assange in the way that so far they’ve indicated they want to, that will certainly be an important issue. What duty did Julian Assange owe to the United States?</blockquote><p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to an <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/29/exclusive_julian_assange_on_wikileaks_bradley" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px;">interview</a> I did with Julian Assange in 2012. I visited him in the Ecuadorean Embassy—oh, this is when he was speaking on Skype to us, when he talked, himself, about the Espionage Act.<blockquote helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding-left: 30px; border-left: 3px solid rgb(241, 242, 243);">JULIAN ASSANGE: The new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States, and not only the United States, because the Pentagon is trying to apply this extraterritorially. Why would it be the end of national security journalism? Because the interpretation is that if any document that the U.S. government claims to be classified is given to a journalist, who then makes any part of it public, that journalist has committed espionage, and the person who gave them the material has committed the crime, communicating with the enemy.</blockquote><p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Julian Assange speaking to us a few years ago. This is John Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, briefing reporters on Thursday about the new charges against Julian Assange. He said, quote, “Some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune from prosecution for these actions. The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it. It is not and has never been the department’s policy to target them for reporting. But Julian Assange is no journalist,” he said. Your response, Jennifer Robinson?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: If the Department of Justice is concerned about journalism, then they ought to be concerned about the precedent this sets and the impact it will have on all American journalists. Michael Ratner was absolutely correct in making the points that he made, and I think that is the concern. It’s not even just a concern about journalists in the United States, but what this precedent says about the Department of Justice exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction over journalists and publishers outside of the country for having published this information. As Michael rightly pointed out, what would it mean if Russia or China was starting to seek the extradition of American journalists for having published Chinese or Russian secrets? This is an incredibly serious precedent. And for the Department of Justice to suggest that this won’t be used by the Trump administration against other media organizations and journalists, I think, is naive at best.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Jennifer Robinson, Ecuador has seized some of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s possessions, left behind when the British authorities took him out of the embassy. WikiLeaks says that Ecuador is allowing U.S. prosecutors to help themselves to Assange’s belongings. Is this the case?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: Ecuador did receive a request from the United States to seize control over WikiLeaks property that was inside the embassy and Julian’s property inside the embassy. Ecuador has provided that. We are very concerned, both about the fact that Ecuador has allowed their embassy staff to be questioned by U.S. prosecutors and now handing over this material. In circumstances where there is no chain of custody, we don’t know who has been into the embassy and who has accessed that room, accessed the belongings. So, it raises serious concerns about our ability to defend ourselves and defend him in this case, and serious concerns about the nature of the evidence and the process by which it was obtained.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Now, what about Sweden also reviving, reopening their case, their allegations of rape against Julian Assange, when they had dropped all of the charges, both of sexual assault and rape before? What does this mean, Sweden calling for the extradition also of Julian Assange?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: First, of course, he’s never been charged in Sweden. And this is the third time that a different prosecutor has reopened this investigation, after it has been closed. It was first closed in 2010 because the first prosecutor said there wasn’t evidence of any crime. It was reopened again by a prosecutor who dragged it out for years despite our offers to cooperate. After finally questioning Julian inside the embassy, that case was dropped. The entire matter was dropped again. And now we have, now that he’s in prison here, a third prosecutor reopening the case, over a decade. This is, by any stretch, an abuse of process. He has always been willing to answer those allegations. He has given his testimony. And it’s time that that matter is determined once and for all.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">Of course, now there is a serious question that will arise here in the U.K. as to which of the requests, if Sweden does seek his extradition—they’ve only reopened the criminal investigation and will have to make a decision about whether to seek his extradition. But if they do, it raises questions about which extradition request will take precedence. As you can see, Julian Assange is going to be in a—is in a very difficult position with respect to both extradition requests.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: And which one takes precedence, U.S. or Sweden? And if Sweden were to extradite him—and again, you just said he actually has never officially been charged, even now, with rape or sexual assault. They are reopening the investigation, and that’s been going on for years. If he were extradited to Sweden, his original concern was that he would then be extradited to the United States. Do you still fear this?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: Of course. That was the reason he sought asylum in the first place, is that we were seeking assurances from Sweden that if he were to return to Sweden to face any potential process there with respect to those allegations, that he would not be sent to the United States. Sweden refused to give that assurance. The Australian government—he’s an Australian citizen—refused to request that assurance. The Ecuadorean government, once he got asylum inside the embassy, also sought that assurance from Sweden, and they refused to give it.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">Now we’re in a situation where we have an indictment on the record from the United States, and it will be a matter for the home secretary here to determine, if Sweden also requests his extradition, which of those two cases will take precedence. We are, of course, concerned about the risk that he will face if he goes back to the United States. And it will raise massive free speech questions, irrespective of whether he goes to Sweden first or not.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Jennifer Robinson, how is Julian doing in prison? He was in the Ecuadorean Embassy for almost seven years, taken out by British authorities. Where is he currently jailed, and how is he?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: He’s currently imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison in South East London, which is a high-security prison here in the U.K. We were very concerned about his health at the time he was forcibly removed from the embassy. He had been denied medical treatment for more than seven years. We are concerned it’s had a permanent impact upon his health. We’ve recently had a visit from the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, who came with medical experts to assess his health inside the prison. And I am very concerned about the ongoing health issues that he has and whether he’s getting adequate medical treatment here within the British prison system. He’s finding it very difficult. He’s very isolated.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">And I think the prospect of a very long extradition fight and potential extradition to the United States is a real concern. But, of course, he is resolved to fight this, as he said at his first extradition hearing. He refused to consent to extradition to the United States, because he would not be extradited for doing journalism. And this case raises—as we’ve seen from the free speech groups that have come out overnight, this case raises fundamental questions of free speech, which is why he is resolved to absolutely fighting this extradition.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Finally, as we speak today, it’s just been a few hours since the British Prime Minister Theresa May announced she is resigning. Will that make a difference in Julian’s case?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: It remains to be seen who will become the prime minister after Theresa May’s resignation. We’ve already seen, from the leader of the opposition here, Jeremy Corbyn, say that the British government should not extradite Julian to the United States to face prosecution for having revealed war crimes. So I think there would need to be a change of government here to see the British government positions change, because the Conservative government has made very clear their position on this and that it’s a matter for the British courts, but have not said that they would prevent any extradition if it were ultimately ordered. So, really, it depends what happens. And we’ve still got a very long extradition fight ahead of us.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Do you think if Jeremy Corbyn were to ascend to the prime ministership, that he could free Julian Assange?<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: Of course, it is a matter for the courts, but the British government retains the discretion, ultimately, about whether to extradite a person or not. And if Jeremy Corbyn came to power, he has already said, made clear, in a public statement and through the the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, that Julian Assange ought not be extradited to the U.S. for publishing truthful information and for revealing war crimes. So, it remains to be seen what would happen if he came to power and where Julian was in the extradition process at that time, but it is a possibility.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: And finally, explain the sentence he is now serving and what will happen after that sentence.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: He has been convicted of a bail offense for having sought asylum when he did, going into the embassy. He was given a sentence of 50 weeks, which he’s currently serving in Belmarsh Prison. And the extradition process will carry on shortly. The U.S. issued a provisional warrant back in April, when he was first arrested. Now that there’s an additional indictment, we are expecting a new extradition request that will include those additional charges. And the extradition process will begin. Fighting extradition with respect to the United States can take anywhere between one and three years. So, this is the beginning of, like I said, what will be quite a long process.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that U.S. press has come out strongly enough? Today, The New York Times, in an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/julian-assange-wikileaks.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px;">editorial</a>, said, “It is a marked escalation in the effort to prosecute Mr. Assange, one that could have a chilling effect on American journalism as it has been practiced for generations. It is aimed straight at the heart of the First Amendment.”<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">JENNIFER ROBINSON: I think it’s very important that The New York Times and other major media organizations come forward and speak about this principle and stand against this prosecution, because, as you’ve rightly pointed out, this will have a chilling impact on all media organizations and is a cause for concern that the precedent that is being set by the Trump administration could be used against The New York Times and other media organizations. We’ve been saying, since 2010, that the media needs to get behind WikiLeaks, and they need to acknowledge that any prosecution would set that precedent and cause them risk. Finally, we’re seeing an acknowledgment of that. And I hope that we will see that continue as this fight goes on.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">AMY GOODMAN: Jennifer Robinson, we want to thank you for being with us, human rights attorney who’s been advising Julian Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010.<p helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 30px 0px;">When we come back, the legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. He faced over a hundred years in jail for espionage<ul class="multipart_items" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: none;"><li helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" color="color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin: 22px 10px 22px 0px;"><a class="highlighted" data-ga-action="Multipart Interview: Next Story" href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/24/exclusive_julian_assange_s_attorney_decries" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px; pointer-events: none;">Part 1: Exclusive: Julian Assange’s Attorney Decries Espionage Charges as “Grave Threat to Press Freedom”</a></li><li helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" color="color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin: 22px 10px 22px 0px;"><a class="" data-ga-action="Multipart Interview: Next Story" href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/24/daniel_ellsberg_espionage_charges_against_assange" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px;">Part 2: Daniel Ellsberg: Espionage Charges Against Assange Are Most Significant Attack on Press in Decades</a></li><li helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" color="color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; margin: 22px 10px 22px 0px;"><a class="" data-ga-action="Multipart Interview: Next Story" href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/24/jeremy_scahill_new_indictment_of_assange" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; border: 0px;">Part 3: Jeremy Scahill: New Indictment of Assange Is Part of a Broader War on Journalism & Whistleblowers</a></li></ul>chris hedges and many othersarrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives=1/19 roger charged, house raided<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">TRMS wonders why big risk to lie on credito sp vs corsi, why does it matter?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">pbs gop guy wonders why use corsi to connect to russians if direct channel (a cutout?)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">AN on Hannity picks up hillary sick story</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Kurt Eichenwald</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">?</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">@kurteichenwald</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">2...is August 2, 2016, when Corsi sent an email to Stone. In that email, Corsi says that Assange is planning a document dump on October 2 to cause the most damage possible. (Do you Wikileaks fans FINALLY understand what this fraud is?) In preparation of that, Corsi says that....</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">..'That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke – neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus..." We do not need any further evidence of collusion - THIS is it. These bastards are....</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Kurt Eichenwald</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">?</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">@kurteichenwald</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">4...willing to undermine democracy with lies. Drudge picks it up in a few days. Then, EIGHT days after this conspiracy involving Corsi, Stone, Russian hackers, Assange, frigging @seanhannity jumps into the mix. Hillary makes a goofy head movement when someone shoves a mike in....</div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div>Stone, veteran Republican Party operative and a long-time confidant of President Donald Trump, has been indicted on seven felony charges in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Around 5 a.m. EST today, a group of well-armed FBI agents showed up at the 66-year-old Stone’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with an arrest warrant. And the charges include five counts of making false statements, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of witness tampering.Here are some of the most shocking revelations in the indictment and arrest of Trump’s long-time ally. Stone’s arrest was completely unannounced
Although journalists who have been reporting on Mueller’s probe have been predicting that Stone would be arrested at some point, the way in which he was arrested this morning nonetheless comes as somewhat of a shock. Other Trump associates who have faced felony charges in connection with Russiagate moreless turned themselves in at their convenience; the FBI didn’t show up unannounced in the wee hours. But Stone was the target of the type of pre-dawn arrest that occurs when FBI agents fear that valuable evidence could be destroyed. This was the type of arrest that takes place when the FBI wants to surprise suspects and catch them off guard.Stone is accused of obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigationMueller’s team aren’t the only ones who have been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; the House Intelligence Committee and the FBI, among others, have investigated the matter as well—in fact, they were doing so before Mueller launched his investigation in 2017. And Stone, in the indictment, is accused of obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation. The indictment notes, “After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (“HPSCI”), the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (“SSCI”), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) opened or announced their respective investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which included investigating STONE’s claims of contact with Organization 1.”
Organization 1 in the indictment is believed to be WikiLeaksThe indictment of Stone specifically mentions an organization that is identified as “Organization 1,” and Organization is widely believed to be WikiLeaks—a major target of Mueller’s probe. In 2016, a hacker who went by Guccifer 2.0 stole the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and those stolen e-mails were published online by WikiLeaks. Stone is suspected of knowing, in 2016, that the hacking had occurred and that the Democratic e-mails would be published online. Although Mueller believes that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian intelligence official based in Moscow, Stone has claimed that there is no proof that Guccifer was part of the Russian government.
The indictment of Stone states, “By in or around May 2016, the Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (“DCCC”) became aware that their computer systems had been compromised by unauthorized intrusions and hired a security company (“Company 1”) to identify the extent of the intrusions…. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC—through Company 1—publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.”Stone is accused of discussing WikiLeaks’ activities with ‘senior Trump campaign officials’ in 2016The indictment of Stone states, “During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about Organization 1 and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organization 1…. By in or around early August 2016, STONE was claiming both publicly and privately to have communicated with Organization 1.”
The head of ‘Organization 1’ is believed to be Julian Assange
The person described as the head of “Organization 1” in the indictment is widely believed to be WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The indictment states, “By in or around June and July 2016, STONE informed senior Trump Campaign officials that he had information indicating Organization 1 had documents whose release would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The head of Organization 1 was located at all relevant times at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, United Kingdom.”
London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, of course, is where Assange has been seeking refuge. The indictment of Stone goes on to allege that in 2016, “STONE also corresponded with associates about contacting Organization 1 in order to obtain additional e-mails damaging to the Clinton Campaign.”= primary on russian dccc hackassange warrant, 7/18 might leave emb?  <a href="https://www.alternet.org/julian-assanges-departure-ecuador-embassy-london-imminent">https://www.alternet.org/julian-assanges-departure-ecuador-embassy-london-imminent</a>neglected? see collusion=
 <div>hosted climategate stolen emails</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/climategate-wikileaks-russia-trump-hacking/">https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/climategate-wikileaks-russia-trump-hacking/</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>many lnx graf docs</div><div>
</div><div>7 Years Before Russia Hacked the Election, Someone Did the Same Thing to Climate Scientists</div><div>
</div><div>“Why does this story sound so darned familiar?”</div><div>REBECCA LEBER AND AJ VICENSJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE</div><div> </div><div>
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</div><div>The Heads of State</div><div>One Saturday morning in June, two days after the president had announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, Michael Mann was tweeting about Donald Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>Mann, a Penn State professor who is one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, was thinking about the daily barrage of revelations surrounding Russia’s efforts to help Trump win the previous year’s election. The hacked Democratic documents posted on WikiLeaks. The media craze over private emails that had been ripped out of context. Smear campaigns circulating on social media.</div><div>
</div><div>“#Russia #Wikileaks #HackedEmails #Sabotaged #ClimateAgreements,” tweeted Mann. “Why does this story sound so darned familiar?”</div><div>
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</div><div>Seven years earlier, Trump was riffing on a very different set of hacked emails. The real estate mogul had called into Fox News after a blizzard to declare that climate change was a hoax. Trump claimed that “one of the leaders of global warming” had recently admitted in a private email that years of scientific research were nothing but “a con.”</div><div>
</div><div>Trump was referring to the 2009 Climategate scandal, in which emails from climate scientists were hacked and disseminated across the internet. Climate change deniers claimed the messages showed scientists engaging in misconduct and fabricating a warming pattern that didn’t really exist. Multiple investigations ultimately exonerated the researchers, but not before a media firestorm undercut public confidence in the science—just as world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, to attempt to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.</div><div>
</div><div>In hindsight, the Climategate hack, clearly timed to disrupt the Copenhagen negotiations, looks like a precursor to the hack that helped shape the outcome of the 2016 election. That’s how John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman whose stolen emails were posted on WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the campaign, sees it. The parallels go beyond the hacks themselves. “I think it was the intentionality of influencing the public debate,” he says.</div><div>
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</div><div>Stolen Emails. Wikileaks. White Supremacists. Donald Trump. It All Happened in 2009.  The Heads of State</div><div>
</div><div>At its core, Climategate was a story about emails—some admittedly embarrassing or poorly phrased—that were dumped online with the intent of altering a crucial global event. WikiLeaks republished the scientists’ emails. Talk radio and Fox News had a field day. Politicians soon followed. Mainstream reporters amplified out-of-context quotes. And the victims of the hack—especially Mann and the University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones—were not prepared for the deluge of investigations, personal attacks, and even death threats that followed.</div><div>
</div><div>At the time, some observers openly wondered whether Russia might have orchestrated the Climategate hack. Investigators and other experts haven’t found much to support that hypothesis—the true culprit remains a mystery. Mann himself has pointed to the incident’s “curious connections” to Russia and WikiLeaks, but he, too, notes there’s no specific evidence that Moscow was to blame. Still, Mann sees other ways in which the episode was similar to what Hillary Clinton experienced in 2016. Both hacks, he notes, were “intended to impact the global political scene in a significant manner.”</div><div>
</div><div>Podesta, a leading advocate of climate action during the Obama years, describes Climategate as an early example of hackers conspiring “to take the fruits of illegal behavior, weaponize them, then use them in a political context.” And though the emails contained no evidence of scientific misconduct, Podesta notes, climate change deniers successfully used them to “change public perception and increase skepticism about the need for action at a pivotal moment.”</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate began in the fall of 2009, when someone accessed thousands of emails and other documents stored on a backup server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit—a prestigious institution in Norwich, England, that is one of the leading centers of global warming research. It wasn’t just CRU employees who were caught up in the hack; their communications with dozens of scientists around the world, including Mann, were stolen as well.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 17 of that year, links to a zip file containing the stolen material—labeled “FOIA.zip”—began appearing in the comments sections of blogs run by climate change skeptics. The file name had a clear meaning: Skeptics had been engaged in a long-running battle with the university to gain access to scientists’ raw data and communications using the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act. The file itself was stored on a server in Russia, though that server space could have been used by anyone in the world.</div><div>
</div><div>The hacker also broke into RealClimate—a website run by a group of climate scientists—and drafted a post promoting the emails. NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt found the hacker’s post before it was published; it still sits in RealClimate‘s content management system today.</div><div>
</div><div>Within days, WikiLeaks published the emails. Its founder, Julian Assange, told PBS that the university had been trying “to suppress information from the Freedom of Information Act.” (At the time, Assange was considered an advocate of radical transparency. After WikiLeaks’ role in publishing Democratic documents hacked by the Russians and corresponding with the Trump campaign, his motives seem far more suspect.)</div><div>
</div><div>The emails in no way altered the well-established fact that humans are changing the climate. Still, skeptics zeroed in on a 1999 message sent by CRU’s Jones, in which he mentioned Mann’s research and also used the phrase “hide the decline.” Given that Mann was best known for the “hockey stick” chart showing the dramatic increase in global temperatures, the wording sounded nefarious. But it turned out that Jones wasn’t describing an attempt to conceal a decline in temperatures. (The world was warming rapidly, after all.) Instead, he was referring to a scientific method for dealing with complications in tree-ring data.</div><div>
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</div><div>Michael Mann’s groundbreaking “hockey stick” chart—named after the steep rise in global temperatures it depicts—has been validated by numerous independent studies since its publication two decades ago. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change</div><div>A series of independent inquiries would later conclude that while the University of East Anglia had improperly dodged open records requests, none of the scientists had engaged in any type of academic misconduct or fabrication. But that wasn’t the story taking shape on the news networks and in major papers.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 20, a New York Times front-page story opened by noting that skeptics “say [the emails] show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.” The Washington Post quoted climate skeptic Myron Ebell—who would later run Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team—as saying the emails exposed an “alarmist political agenda.” The Post even ran an op-ed by Sarah Palin, who claimed that scientists had “manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures.”</div><div>
</div><div>Television coverage was even worse. NBC told viewers that “those who doubt that man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate say these emails…show climate scientists massaging data.” ABC inaccurately claimed that “one of the most damning email exchanges credits Mann with a trick to hide the decline in temperatures.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mann quickly became a central target for climate change deniers. Right-wing groups and Republican politicians called for the federal government to revoke his research funding and for his university to investigate him. He received an envelope in the mail containing white powder; it turned out to be cornstarch. “You and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families,” declared one emailer. Along with other climate experts, Mann was featured in an anti-Semitic post on the white supremacist website Stormfront—an ominous foreshadowing of 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>“I could easily brush off many of the attacks,” Mann would later write in his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, which discusses the right’s assault on his research. “But to the extent that the industry-funded disinformation machine was taking direct aim not just at me—my livelihood, my reputation, my safety—but even my family, I was becoming incensed.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mann was cleared of wrongdoing by multiple subsequent investigations, including by Penn State. But the personal attacks would continue for years. In a 2012 blog post for the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg called the university investigation a “whitewash” and compared Mann to Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State assistant football coach convicted of sexually abusing children. “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Simberg, “except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.” (CEI later removed that comparison from the post. Mann is suing CEI and Simberg over the incident.)</div><div>
</div><div>Other climate scientists experienced similar harassment. Jones, who was the target of much of the media scrutiny and online abuse, was eventually cleared of wrongdoing by his university and has since returned to work. He doesn’t want to speculate on who was behind the hack. “I’ve tried to move on from that,” he told Mother Jones.</div><div>
</div><div>After three weeks of relentless Climategate coverage, the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, which was intended to lay the groundwork for an international agreement to slash emissions, began. It was supposed to be an inflection point, in which the world would move past debating long-settled science and take serious steps to solve the problem. In the lead-up to the talks, even Trump signed on to a full-page ad in the Times calling on President Barack Obama and other leaders to take bold action to combat climate change. Instead, the negotiations broke down—a diplomatic failure that set climate action back years.</div><div>
</div><div>For Julian Gregory, the Norfolk, England, detective in charge of investigating the hack, the timing was obvious. The Climategate emails “were selectively taken and portrayed in a way…intended to undermine the scientists and therefore the validity of their science,” he later told Climatewire, after a second batch of stolen emails was released shortly before another round of climate talks. “The conclusion you are led to is that it was done with the intention of influencing the outcome of those conferences.”</div><div>
</div><div>The hack probably wasn’t the primary reason the Copenhagen talks collapsed. Even before the emails surfaced, there were warning signs that diplomats could be headed for an impasse. Former US officials who participated say they don’t remember Climategate coming up during negotiations. Instead, the Obama administration and other governments simply hadn’t done enough to bridge the divides between the United States, China, and the developing world.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>But the scandal provided a convenient talking point for those seeking to block climate action. Days before the conference began, Mohammad al-Sabban, the lead negotiator from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, told the BBC that the emails would have a “huge impact” on the talks. “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he said. James Inhofe, the Senate’s leading climate denier, traveled to Copenhagen, where he told throngs of reporters that Climategate was proof of what he’d been saying all along: Global warming was a hoax.</div><div>
</div><div>The most obvious fallout was in the United States, where the emails played an outsize role in the media’s coverage of climate change. According to a study by Matthew Nisbet, then a professor at American University, more than 20 percent of the news and opinion stories about climate change published by five major outlets in December 2009 mentioned the hacked emails.</div><div>
</div><div>Perhaps even more significantly, the scandal seemed to have a big impact on US public opinion, helping climate change denial and obstructionism become even more entrenched on the right. After Climategate, notes Podesta, “you see attitudinal change [in] people’s willingness to believe the scientific community that climate change is happening.” It’s no coincidence that Trump publicly reversed his own views on the issue just three months later, when he joked that Al Gore’s Nobel Prize should be rescinded and cited the stolen emails. He’s been an outspoken denier ever since.</div><div>
</div><div>Public trust in the science was already on the decline in the months before the emails came to light. But according to a study by researchers at Yale and George Mason University, Climategate appears to have “deepened and perhaps solidified” Americans’ growing skepticism. That was especially true on the right. Fully 80 percent of conservatives who followed the scandal said they had less trust in scientists as a result. Seventy-three percent said it made them more certain that global warming wasn’t happening. A whopping 69 percent of all respondents who followed the story, and 94 percent of conservatives, agreed with the statement that “scientists changed their results to make global warming appear worse than it is”—an allegation later proved to be unequivocally false.</div><div>
</div><div>Another study found a similar effect among a particularly influential group of media figures, noting that Climategate had “eroded global warming belief certainty among a large minority of TV meteorologists, at least temporarily.”</div><div>
</div><div>Sound familiar? Russian intelligence agents followed a strikingly similar blueprint in 2016 after they hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Podesta’s personal Gmail account.</div><div>
</div><div>“If you were a Russian operative [and] pitching influence ops for the DNC, and somebody’s like, ‘Eh, I don’t know about that,’ literally you just turn around and go, ‘Look at how well it worked [with Climategate],'” says Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert and former analyst at the National Security Agency. “I wouldn’t necessarily say one influenced the other, but certainly it’s good proof that that’s a technique that works.”</div><div>
</div><div>To access Podesta’s emails, the hackers used a targeted phishing attack that led his office to inadvertently turn over his login credentials. The DNC was hacked by two groups associated with Russian intelligence—one starting in 2015 and another in 2016—also via targeted phishing attacks. Tens of thousands of emails were eventually made public, along with Democratic fundraising reports and other planning materials. Batches of the stolen documents were given to individual news outlets, while other chunks were published directly to the blog of Guccifer 2.0—an online persona thought to be a front for Russian intelligence.</div><div>
</div><div>By far the most damage was done via WikiLeaks, which published the DNC emails days before the Democratic National Convention. And when the Trump campaign was thrown into chaos after the Washington Post unearthed a 2005 video of Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks began publishing the Podesta emails less than an hour later. WikiLeaks then rolled out new batches of emails on a near-daily basis in the month leading up to the election. Once again, the timing was clearly designed for maximum impact.</div><div>
</div><div>Mann had been compared to a child molester; Podesta was actually accused of child molestation.</div><div>
</div><div>The emails exposed Democrats’ dirty laundry and fueled the impression that the DNC had helped Clinton defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders in the hotly contested Democratic primary. They also revealed excerpts from paid speeches that Clinton had given to big banks—transcripts that she had refused to release earlier and that seemed to contradict her public rhetoric. “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” Clinton said in one excerpt that was repeatedly highlighted by Trump. Another email revealed that Clinton had assured union officials that she would defend fracking—a disclosure that angered some environmentalists.</div><div>
</div><div>But as with Climategate, what made the 2016 Russian hacks particularly successful was the obsessive—and often inaccurate—coverage of the emails in the media. “The hacking is only one half of the story,” Podesta says. “It’s a media story, too, because it’s the voyeurism of reading the emails, whether there is much serious in them or not, that is captivating to the media. [It] throws them into high relief, sensationalizes little bits of them. And then at the end of the day when people go back and look at the whole story, they say, ‘Well, what was that about?'”</div><div>
</div><div>Political jargon was misinterpreted, and innocuous phrases were presented out of context. Years-old private emails were dumped into the public sphere. Benign interactions between reporters and their sources were twisted to imply collusion between the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media. In one particularly absurd example highlighted by the liberal group Media Matters for America, Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives breathlessly reported that Podesta had “admitted” that Clinton hated “everyday Americans.” Podesta had actually meant that Clinton hated the phrase “everyday Americans”—a slogan that her campaign frequently used at the time.</div><div>
</div><div>The 2016 hacks had devastating personal consequences for their targets. Mann had been compared to a child molester; Podesta was actually accused of child molestation by conspiracy theorists who declared they had detected code words in his emails designed to conceal a child sex ring supposedly operating out of a DC pizzeria. Every piece of the so-called Pizzagate scandal was a lie, but that didn’t stop restaurant staffers from receiving hundreds of death threats. In December 2016, a North Carolina man who claimed to be investigating Pizzagate fired an assault rifle inside the restaurant. Luckily, no one was injured.</div><div>
</div><div>We still know very little about “Mr. FOIA”—the online persona who claimed to be behind Climategate. His own words suggest he was a lone individual with no government or corporate backing. (Guccifer 2.0 also claimed to have no connection to Russian intelligence, an assertion that US intelligence agencies say is false.)</div><div>
</div><div>“It was me or nobody, now or never,” wrote Mr. FOIA. “The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”</div><div>“It was me or nobody, now or never,” Mr. FOIA wrote in 2013. “Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future. The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”</div><div>
</div><div>A November 2009 memo from the University of East Anglia’s IT department, obtained through a public information request, tells us more about the hack itself. This probably wasn’t phishing, like Podesta experienced. Instead the hacker seems to have obtained the files by breaking into the university’s backup servers through a compromised account—CRU’s servers were illegally accessed at least three times in September and October 2009 using stolen or cracked passwords. Once inside, the attacker was able to retrieve the files.</div><div>
</div><div>Steve Lord, a British cybersecurity expert who reviewed the university memo on the incident, told Mother Jones that the methods used to steal the climate emails, at least according to materials provided by the university, showed “no real sophistication.”</div><div>
</div><div>“It’s not a particularly complicated setup,” said Lord. “It’s not clear how they got in, but once they’re in, from the information we do have, this is not rocket science.” (You can read the university memo below.)</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Mr. FOIA has reemerged twice since 2009. In November 2011—just days before the start of another UN climate conference—a new batch of more than 5,000 emails, part of the original set stolen from CRU, was, as before, posted on a Russian server and uploaded to the comments sections of several prominent climate skeptics’ blogs.</div><div>
</div><div>Theories still abound about who Mr. FOIA was. “The hypothesis, unfortunately, remains today where it started,” Gregory, the local detective, told the BBC in 2012 as the statute of limitations on the crime ran out and investigators dropped the case. “It ranges from a lone individual through to commercial or governmental interests…It could have been anyone on that spectrum. We can’t say.” The Norfolk police declined to discuss the investigation with Mother Jones, and Gregory, who has since left the force, didn’t return requests for comment.</div><div>
</div><div>The US Justice Department appears to have gotten involved after the second email leak in 2011, though it’s unclear what became of that inquiry. The DOJ, the FBI, and the National Crime Agency, the United Kingdom’s top law enforcement body, would not comment on the existence of investigations.</div><div>
</div><div>In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, Gregory said his inquiry spanned “most continents”—which likely means computer proxy servers around the world were used to mask the hacker’s true identity. The perpetrator, Gregory said, tried to “leave a false trail” to throw off investigators.</div><div>
</div><div>Some have speculated that Russia or another petrostate was behind the hack—an idea that gained new currency in the wake of the 2016 election. Vladimir Putin, after all, has periodically flirted with climate change denial, and Russia—which recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading crude oil producer—is highly dependent on fossil fuel extraction.</div><div>
</div><div>But Gregory told the BBC that he’d found no specific information indicating that a government was behind the hack. Other experts agree: With the evidence at hand, it would be “a stretch” to point the finger at Russian hackers, says Lord.</div><div>
</div><div>Another theory, popular among climate change skeptics, was that a University of East Anglia insider, frustrated by scientists’ resistance to freedom-of-information requests, released the documents and made it look like an outsider had taken them. But according to Gregory, investigators were confident this wasn’t the case.</div><div>
</div><div>In March 2013, when Mr. FOIA released a third tranche of hacked documents and announced himself in a note published on climate-skeptic blogs, he mocked the idea that the hack had been funded by energy industry groups. “I wasn’t aware of the arrangement but warmly welcome their decision to support my project,” Mr. FOIA wrote, adding that he’d opened a bitcoin wallet to accept online donations. The wallet remains active, and nine payments have been made to the account over the past five years. The value, as of mid-November, was roughly $37,400.</div><div>
</div><div>“That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil,” Mr. FOIA wrote. “The Republicans didn’t plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.”</div><div>
</div><div>It wasn’t until December 2015 that the Obama administration was finally able to piece together a global climate agreement in Paris. Podesta, who had briefly joined the Obama White House the previous year, helped lay the groundwork for the deal. It was immediately denounced by much of the Republican presidential field. One of those critics, of course, was Trump, who on the campaign trail called US involvement in the Paris talks “ridiculous” and promised to pull out of the deal.</div><div>
</div><div>Just seven months after Russian hackers helped him win the presidency, Trump began to follow through on his pledge.</div></div><div>
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 <div><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html</a></div><div>
</div><div>nyt</div><div>...By midsummer 2016, the Russian contacts sounded alarms inside the F.B.I., where agents had received a tip about Mr. Papadopoulos and puzzled over Mr. Page’s Moscow visit. The bureau sent a trusted informant to help understand what was happening: Stefan Halper, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and professor at Cambridge University, reached out to Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos under false pretenses.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">American officials have defended Professor Halper’s work, saying the use of such a confidential informant is routine in a counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the media have called him something different: a “spy” sent by the Obama administration to infiltrate the campaign.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Eventually, Mr. Trump would use such episodes as a foundation for his view that America’s law enforcement agencies had been aligned against him from the beginning — ammunition for a looming war with the “deep state.” This idea would consume Mr. Trump after he became president, feeding his sense of grievance that the legitimacy of his victory was under attack and shaping his decisions as he tried to blunt the widening Russia investigation.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">The long-promised “dirt” the Russians had on Mrs. Clinton would soon be made public. Three days after the Trump Tower meeting, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, appeared on a British Sunday television show.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">He said that his website would soon be publishing a raft of emails related to Mrs. Clinton. And he said something at once ominous and prescient: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Guccifer’s Game</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Using a hacker persona, Russian military intelligence officers began to reveal documents stolen from the Democrats.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">A website made its splashy debut three days later, presenting a jaunty hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0. He had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, Guccifer said, offering as proof a selection of purloined documents.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into the DNC’s network,” Guccifer wrote on June 15. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks,” he added — which seemed to explain Mr. Assange’s boast.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Russian intelligence had worked fast. Just the day before, D.N.C. officials and their cybersecurity contractor, CrowdStrike, had announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the committee’s computer network.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Overnight, Russian military intelligence officers set up the website and created the Guccifer persona to counter the D.N.C. accusations. Guccifer — a name borrowed from a real Romanian hacker — was presented as a jovial Romanian, a “lone hacker,” who in his posts wanted to make one thing very clear: He had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC,” he wrote, “would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun.”</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In fact, beyond the conclusions of CrowdStrike and the F.B.I., there were clues from the start that Guccifer’s posts came from Moscow: The name of the founder of the Soviet secret police was embedded in Guccifer’s documents, written using a Russian version of Microsoft Word.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Yet the Guccifer gambit would prove remarkably effective at creating doubt about Russia’s responsibility for the hack. Republican operatives working on congressional campaigns emailed “Guccifer” and received hacked documents relevant to their races. For journalists, the claims of the supposed “lone hacker” made the role of Russian intelligence seem to be a disputed allegation rather than a proven fact.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats’ networks and even their Google searches.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">See the timeline of hacking that led to the indictment.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The agency, now called the Main Directorate but often referred to by its former abbreviation, the G.R.U., proved agile, brazen and not terribly discreet — the same pattern it would show two years later in the nerve-agent poisoning in England of its former officer, the defector Sergei V. Skripal.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The hacking might have drawn little attention had the G.R.U. stopped there, simply stealing emails to peruse for intelligence clues. But the Russians’ decision to leak the emails to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was a huge escalation.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The Russian officers’ political skills proved equal to their hacking expertise. They deftly manipulated a long list of Americans and Europeans, many of whom embraced Guccifer’s tall tale and took seriously the claim that the other Russian false front, DCLeaks.com, was run by American “hacktivists.”</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“Guccifer 2.0” addressed a cybersecurity conference in London via messages to one of the organizers. The purported Romanian jousted with a suspicious reporter for Motherboard, insisting: “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia.” When Twitter suspended the DCLeaks account, the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs accused the company of “Leftist Fascism.” The account was swiftly reinstated.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">But the Russians’ masterstroke was to enlist, via the Guccifer persona, the help of WikiLeaks. Neither of the Russians’ websites, Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.com, had much reach. But WikiLeaks had a large global audience. Its editor, Mr. Assange, shared Mr. Putin’s hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Mr. Assange assisted with the subterfuge. He repeatedly denied that he’d received the documents from Russia; whether he was really taken in by the “Guccifer” ruse is uncertain.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Video</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Fox News via YouTubePublished OnSept. 17, 2018]</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">But he also obscured the Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he knew to be false. He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder in Washington of Seth Rich, a young D.N.C. staffer shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Trump supporters were suggesting Mr. Rich had leaked the D.N.C. emails and been killed in retaliation, and Mr. Assange played along.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In a discussion about WikiLeaks’ sources on Dutch television in August 2016, Mr. Assange suddenly brought up Mr. Rich’s killing.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?” the interviewer said. “What are you suggesting?”</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” Mr. Assange said — and then declined to say if Mr. Rich was a source.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Such misleading interviews helped camouflage the Russian origin of the leak, and WikiLeaks’ adept timing gave the emails big impact. After some technical problems, according to Mr. Mueller’s indictment, “Guccifer” passed the entire archive of D.N.C. emails to WikiLeaks. The website published 19,252 of them on July 22, 2016 — three days before the Democratic National Convention.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The Russians’ work detonated with powerful political effect. The emails’ exposure of D.N.C. staffers’ support for Mrs. Clinton and scorn for Senator Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, forced the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. The resentment of the Sanders delegates deepened, leaving the party even more bitterly divided as it turned to the general election.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Unknown to the feuding Democratic delegates, a cyberdrama had been playing out in secret for weeks, as CrowdStrike experts tried to root out the Russian hackers who had penetrated the D.N.C. and its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Robert S. Johnston, a lead investigator for CrowdStrike, said the Russian hackers, uniformed officers of military intelligence, were “like a thunderstorm moving through the system — very, very noisy.”</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">CrowdStrike had begun watching the Russians in April, asking D.N.C. staffers to keep quiet about the intrusion. “We only talked over Signal,” an encrypted text and call service, said Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and veteran of the United States Cyber Command who is now chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Adlumin. Only by following the hackers for several weeks could CrowdStrike be certain it had found the Russians’ tools and blocked their access.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">But somehow, possibly by intercepting communications inside the D.N.C. or the F.B.I., which was investigating the breach, the G.R.U. officers learned they had been spotted. On May 31, two weeks before the public disclosure of the hack, Ivan Yermakov, a G.R.U. hacker who had used American-sounding online personas — “Kate S. Milton,” “James McMorgans” and “Karen W. Millen” — suddenly began searching online for information about CrowdStrike. He sought to find out what the cybersleuths knew about the Russians’ main tool, a nasty piece of malware called X-Agent, the indictment noted.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">After that, the spy-versus-spy contest escalated. “We knew it was the Russians, and they knew we knew,” Mr. Johnston said. “I would say it was the cyber equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.”</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Video</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">...</div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/julian-assange-lawyer-justice-department-wikileaks">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/julian-assange-lawyer-justice-department-wikileaks</a><div class="headline" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="node-title" style="line-height: 52px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; clear: both;">Assange's lawyer blasts Justice Department as 'irresponsible' for doing exactly what WikiLeaks does</h1></div><div class="teaser" style="margin-bottom: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">It is unclear what the charges are against Assange or whether the Justice Department will move forward.</div></div></div></div>=the Wall Street Journal has doggedly pursued a strand of the Russa investigation that has largely flown under the radar as other avenues of investigation such as President Donald Trump's financial ties to Moscow and Paul Manafort's dealings in Ukraine garnered more attention. But a new <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-probes-wikileaks-contacts-with-conservative-activists-1539978208" style="text-decoration-line: none;">report</a> from the paper on Friday reveals that it not only the Journal that's been paying attention — Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has zeroed in on the curious case of GOP operative Peter Smith as well.Smith, who died shortly before the Journal first began reporting on his actions in 2017, was conducting a wide-ranging effort in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to track down Hillary Clinton's emails. Along the way, he developed a relationship with disgraced Trump campaign aide and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. And now, the Journal says there is evidence that could tie Smith to WikiLeaks' dispersal of stolen emails from Hillary Clinton's Campaign Chair John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee."Investigators also have evidence that the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/late-gop-activist-peter-w-smith-met-with-former-trump-adviser-michael-flynn-in-2015-sources-say-1539196064?mod=article_inline" style="text-decoration-line: none;">late GOP activist Peter W. Smith</a> may have had advance knowledge of details about the release of emails from a top Hillary Clinton campaign official by WikiLeaks, one person familiar with the matter said," the Journal wrote.The article also says that the investigators have pursued related lines of inquiry, including examining Trump ally Roger Stone's and conservative pundit Jerome Corsi's connections with WikiLeaks.New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/michael-flynn-peter-w-smith-collusion-trump-russia.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">explained</a> the significance of these potential connections:<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cjnghbixh000p3g60wyx8lyus@published" data-word-count="38" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">If true, this would mean that Smith wasn’t merely attempting to get ahold of stolen Clinton emails. He got through to WikiLeaks and was, in some form, a channel of collusion between the hackers and the Trump campaign.<p data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cjnghbixq000r3g60sv6mh9vd@published" data-word-count="28" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;">Flynn long ago started cooperating with Robert Mueller. So if Flynn discussed any of this information with Trump during the campaign, the special counsel probably knows about it.</blockquote>https://YYY.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/21/julian-assange-russia-ecuador-embassy-london-secret-escape-plangr grreenwald has a piece up at the Intercept declaring that Julian Assange’s tenure at Ecuador’s London embassy may be coming to an end very soon.
 Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno traveled to London on Friday for the ostensible purpose of speaking at the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit(Moreno has been confined to a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery attempt). The concealed, actual purpose of the President’s trip is to meet with British officials to finalize an agreement under which Ecuador will withdraw its asylum protection of Julian Assange, in place since 2012, eject him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and then hand over the WikiLeaks founder to British authorities.
 Now it is Glenn Greenwald, so take it with an appropriately large grain of salt, but apparently this has been in the works for some time.  A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the President’s office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to the Intercept that Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement to hand over Assange to the UK within the next several weeks. The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into such an agreement.=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/meet-12-russians-us-government-indicted-last-week" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/meet-12-russians-us-government-indicted-last-week</a>...12 Russian officials who were indicted by the Grand Jury of the District of Columbia. It is the fact that these people were indicted that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to insist that American President Donald Trump turn over Americans like one of our former ambassadors, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/07/20/salon-interview-michael-mcfaul-and-bill-browder-vladimir-putins-most-wanted-men/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Michael McFaul</a>, over to his government in order to be interrogated.The key difference, of course, is that Putin is fabricating charges against McFaul and others like whistleblower Bill Browder, while the accusations against the 12 Russian officials are rooted in serious investigative work. Yet who are these dozen Russians that have been identified by Robert Mueller's investigation?According to the <a href="https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/80-netyksho-et-al-indictment/ba0521c1eef869deecbe/optimized/full.pdf?action=click&module=Intentional&pgtype=Article" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">indictment</a>, the Russian officials singled out by the government were Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov and Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov. With the exception of Kovalev, the indictment describes all of these individuals as "GRU officers who knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the 'Conspirators'), to gain unauthorized access (to 'hack') into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election."The  indictment claims that these individuals hacked the email accounts of staffers and volunteers at Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign by at least March 2016, hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee by at least April 2016 and began releasing tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents by at least June 2016, continuing to do so through the month of the presidential election.And who are they specifically?According to the indictment, Netyksho is a Russian military officer whose unit (Unit 26165) "had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC, as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Antonov was assigned to that same unit and oversaw a department within it that was "dedicated to targeting military, political, governmental, and non-governmental organizations with spearphishing emails and other computer intrusion activity." Antonov is accused of having "supervised other co-conspirators who targeted the DCCC, DNC, and individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Badin held the title of "Assistant Head of Department" in that unit and supervised various attacks on the Democratic and Clinton-related targets chosen by the Russian government.Then there is Yermakov, who the indictment claims was a master of aliases, using "various online personas" in order to engage in a number of hacking operations. These names included "Kate S. Milton," "James McMorgans" and "Karen W. Millen." Lukashev was a senior lieutenant in the Russian military and, like Yermakov, used a number of online pseudonyms, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." Lukashev "sent spearphishing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign." Morgachev, by contrast, was in charge of a department at the unit that developed and managed malware, including one hacking tool called "X-Agent," and is charged with supervising the agents who implanted the X-Agent malware on DCCC and DNC computers and then monitored it.<a href="https://goo.gl/FAVt8c" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">READ MORE: Donald Trump, Brexit and the Russians: A dangerous turning point in "World War IV"</a>Kozachek is described in the indictment as a lieutenant captain who had been assigned to Morgachev's department within Unit 26165 and employed pseudonyms like "kazak" and "blablabla1234565" in order to do his job. He also "developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016." Yershov, meanwhile, is accused of having "assisted Kozachek and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use." Malyshev, on the other hand, was a second lieutenant whose work for Morgachev's department involved monitoring X-Agent malware that had been implanted on Democratic Party machines. He used pseudonyms like "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." Osadchuk is a Russian colonel and the commanding officer of Unit 74455, which "assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU." Meanwhile Potemkin was a Russian military officer assigned to Unit 74455 who supervised a department "responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by Potemkin's department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas." Throughout the document, considerable detail is given about how various email accounts owned by either the Clinton campaign or other Democratic Party bodies were deliberately targeted by individuals or groups of individuals on this list. It explains how they hacked into these accounts and what they ultimately gained from doing so. Kovalev specifically is accused, among other things, of hacking the website of a state board of elections and stealing information about roughly 500,000 voters "including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers." He is also accused of hacking into the computers of a company that supplied voter registration verification software, targeting "state and county offices responsible for administering the 2016 US. elections" and visiting the websites of counties in states like Florida, Georgia and Iowa in order to find vulnerabilities.It is worth reminding the reader, at this point, of what McFaul told Salon earlier in the week — namely, that Putin is trying to create a false equivalency between the crimes he ordered committed by Russian officials and the fabricated charges he has created against McFaul and Browder."But let's be clear: What Putin was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin," <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/07/20/salon-interview-michael-mcfaul-and-bill-browder-vladimir-putins-most-wanted-men/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">McFaul told Salon</a>. "To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America's national interest, from my point of view."
 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html</a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rod-rosenstein-expected-to-announce-new-indictment-by-mueller/2018/07/13">https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rod-rosenstein-expected-to-announce-new-indictment-by-mueller/2018/07/13</a>/bc565582-86a9-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.htmlno lnx
 A dozen Russian military intelligence officers were indicted Friday on charges they hacked Democrats’ computers, stole their data and published those files to disrupt the 2016 election — the clearest connection to the Kremlin established so far by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of interference in the presidential campaign.
 The indictment against members of the Russian military agency known as the GRU marks the first time Mueller has taken direct aim at the Russian government, accusing specific military units and their named officers of a sophisticated, sustained effort to hack the computer networks of Democratic organizations and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
 Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced the charges at a midday news conference. Mueller, as has been his practice, did not attend the announcement. Court records show that a grand jury that Mueller has been using returned an indictment Friday morning.
 
 The suspects “covertly monitored the computers, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code, and stole emails and other documents,” Rosenstein said. “The goal of the conspirators was to have an impact on the election. What impact they may have had .?.?. is a matter of speculation; that’s not our responsibility.”
 The indictment comes days before President Trump is due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland. Rosenstein said he briefed Trump earlier this week on the charges.
 Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Twitter that the indictments “are good news for all Americans. The Russians are nailed. No Americans are involved.” He then called on Mueller “to end this pursuit of the president and say President Trump is completely innocent.”
  Who has been charged in Russia probe and why VIEW GRAPHIC The 11-count, 29-page indictment describes in granular detail a carefully planned and executed attack on the information security of Democrats, as Russian government hackers implanted hundreds of malware files on Democrats’ computer systems to steal information. The hackers then laundered the pilfered material through fake personas called DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0, as well as others, to try to influence voters.
 One of their conduits, identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1,” was WikiLeaks, the global anti-secrecy group led by Julian Assange, according to people familiar with the case. The indictment describes WikiLeaks communicating with Guccifer 2.0 to obtain material.
 On July 6, 2016, according to the indictment, WikiLeaks wrote, “if you have anything Hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after,” referring to Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). WikiLeaks explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary .?.?. so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails on the eve of the convention later that month, providing an embarrassing look at party operations and attitudes toward the Sanders campaign.[Read the indictment of 12 Russians charged with hacking Democrats]
  2:43Rod Rosenstein announces indictment of 12 Russian agentsThe deputy attorney general announces the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents in connection with hacking during the 2016 election. (The Washington Post)
 A former Justice Department official who was previously involved in the Russia probe said the charges should serve as a warning for the United States to buttress its election security as Americans prepare to vote in congressional elections in November.
 “The detailed charges in this indictment make it unmistakably clear that the United States faces an aggressive, sophisticated adversary bent on using cyber means to subvert our democratic processes and institutions,” said David Laufman, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. “Now is the time for unequivocal recognition of this threat by both the executive branch and Congress, and for a unified and well coordinated commitment to confront it.”The indictment offers troubling new accusations about the extent of Russian hacking efforts and interactions with Americans.“On or about August 15, 2016, the conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress,” the indictment states. “The conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” The indictment does not identify the candidate.The indictment also describes an online conversation between the GRU, posing as Guccifer 2.0, and a “person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.”People familiar with the case said that person is longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. In August 2016, the hacker persona wrote: “please tell me if i can help u anyhow .?.?. it would be a great pleasure to me.”Stone’s lawyer Grant Smith said, “It is clear from the indictment issued today that our client, Roger Stone, was not in any way involved with any of the alleged hacking of the 2016 election. As he testified before the House Intelligence Committee under oath, his 24-word exchange with someone on Twitter claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 is benign, based on its content, context and timing.”U.S. officials identified one of the GRU sections that carried out the operations as Unit 26165, which worked out of a building about four miles from the Kremlin. It was responsible for hacking the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to the indictment, which accuses Viktor Netyksho of being the military officer in command of Unit 26165 at the time.Although the DNC was able to partially kick the Russian hackers out of its system in June 2016, the indictment says three months later, the GRU “successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service” which held “test applications related to the DNC’s analytics,” according to the indictment. The hacker stole that data from the DNC, the indictment said.Another group of Russian military officers, Unit 74455, working out of a building that GRU officers referred to as the “Tower,” used fake online personas to spread stolen files, officials charged. The indictment identifies Col. Aleksandr Osadchuk as the commanding officer of that unit.The indictment also notes an interesting development on July 27, 2016 — the day then-candidate Trump gave a press conference declaring his hope that missing Clinton emails would be found and made public, saying: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”The indictment says “on or about” that same day, “the conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.”The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected the indictment’s allegations as lacking evidence and described the charges as a clear effort to derail the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki.“It is unfortunate that distributing false information has become the norm in Washington, and that criminal cases are being initiated based on clearly political motives,” the ministry said. Referring to the Mueller investigation, the statement went on: “The question remains how long this shameful comedy that is embarrassing the United States will go on.”Rosenstein said the hackers interacted with some Americans in the course of their efforts but noted that those people had not been charged with a crime.“When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans. Our response must not depend on who was victimized,” he said. “There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us. So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”Mueller and a team of prosecutors have been working since May 2017 to determine whether any Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. With the new indictment, his office has filed charges against 32 people on crimes including hacking, money laundering and lying to the FBI. Twenty-six of those charged are Russians who are unlikely to ever be put on trial in the United States.In February, Mueller indicted a group of Russian Internet trolls who worked out of the Internet Research Agency, a company based in St. Petersburg and owned by a wealthy associate of Putin.[Russian troll farm, 13 suspects indicted in 2016 election interference]
 Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is in jail in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial this month on financial fraud charges brought by Mueller but stemming from activities that predated the Trump campaign.
 Mueller’s probe has come under sustained attack from Trump and at a press conference in England on Friday before Rosenstein spoke, the president again labeled the investigation a “witch hunt.”
 “I think that we’re being hurt very badly by the — I would call it the witch hunt,” said Trump as he stood beside British Prime Minister Theresa May. “It really hurts our relationship with Russia.”
 Rosenstein said of his decision to brief Trump, “It was important for the president to know what information we’ve uncovered because he’s got to make very important decisions for the country. He needs to understand what evidence we have of foreign election interference.”=<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/19/headlines/former_cia_software_engineer_accused_of_vault_7_leak_indicted">https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/19/headlines/former_cia_software_engineer_accused_of_vault_7_leak_indicted</a>==http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/cambridge-analyticano linx twitCambridge Analytica whistleblower: Russia may have accessed Facebook data of 87M Americansby Leandra BernsteinWednesday, May 16th 2018Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, departs after meeting with House Judiciary Democrats, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
 WASHINGTON (Circa) — Amid reports the data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) is under investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice, a former research director turned whistleblower suggested the company engaged in voter suppression, "black ops" and coordinated its U.S. election operations with Russian government entities.Much has been said about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of millions of Facebook users' data for sophisticated political targeting operations. On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that massive dataset could have been "easily" shared with a Russian intelligence-linked company.According to a Tuesday report by The New York Times, the FBI and Department of Justice appear to be in the "early stages" of an investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Federal investigators are reportedly looking into the company's business practices and financial dealings. Investigations of CA and its parent company, SCL, are currently underway in Britain, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya and India.Christopher Wylie indirectly confirmed the investigation of his former employer, Cambridge Analytica. Asked by reporters if he was cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, he replied, "I have been contacted by the FBI."In his testimony, Wylie again confirmed cooperating with U.S. authorities, saying he had provided relevant documents and information. He added, "It should be made clear, I am not the target of these investigations."Cambridge Analytica was asked to participate in the Wednesday hearing but after announcing bankruptcy and shutting its doors earlier this month declined the invitation.
 View image on Twitter Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of Facebook's privacy scandal is closing. https://bit.ly/2w3WgXK 
 1:45 PM - May 2, 2018
 HOW RUSSIA MAY HAVE ACCESSED THE DATA
 In his testimony Wednesday, Wylie faced questions about Cambridge Analytica's numerous ties to Russian government entities, at one point suggesting the Facebook data of 87 million Americans may have been acquired by the Russians.That massive data transfer may have been facilitated, knowingly or uknowingly by Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL. Nix's London-based company was known for providing "strategic communications" and had defense contracts, commercial engagements and political campaign operations around the globe.VCirca?@Circa Senate panel agrees with US intel that Russia intervened in 2016 election to help Trump. https://bit.ly/2IoWTkc 
 10:55 AM - May 16, 20182See Circa's other TweetsWylie described a "high level of engagement" between CA's executive, Alexander Nix and Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company. Lukoil, which has known ties to Russian intelligence services, was sanctioned in 2017 in connection with the Russian annexation of Crimea.
 According to Wylie's account, Nix was in "close contact" with Lukoil executives and in 2014 gave them a whitepaper written by Wylie outlining Cambridge Analytica's U.S. data mining and voter targeting project, which was reportedly of special interest.
 Asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., if CA's dataset, with information on tens of millions of U.S. Facebook users was also shared with Lukoil, Wylie did not dismiss the possibility. He noted the information could have been "easily acquired" with or without CA's knowledge or consent.
 "I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these datasets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that," Wylie said.CBS News?@CBSNews Feinstein: Do you think it's possible Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica ended up in Russia?  Wylie: "I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these data sets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that."
 7:49 AM - May 16, 2018
 In their conversations with Nix, Lukoil executives were informed of "the scale of the data and the location of the data," Wylie said. "What was made known was that this data could have been easily acquired by something as simple as a keylogger on Dr. [Aleksandr] Kogan's computer when he was visiting Russia," he added.
 Aleksandr Kogan was a researcher at Cambridge University and professor at Russia's St. Petersburg University and responsible for developing the Facebook quiz app that harvested thousands of datapoints from approximately 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users.
 Around 2013, Kogan teamed up with Cambridge Analytica and gained access to the Facebook data. Facebook terminated its contract with Kogan in 2014 and in 2015 sent a letter requesting he delete the harvested data.
 Facebook did not follow up and the user data, shared with Cambridge Analytica, was not deleted. Facebook officially suspended Cambridge Analytica's account in March 2018.
 
 The Guardian?@guardian Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election https://trib.al/uw0yqVr 
 5:48 AM - May 6, 2018
 Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US electionSocial network failed to make firm delete valuable models derived from data until campaign was over
 theguardian.com109WIKILEAKS AND 'BLACK OPS'
 Among Wylie's other concerns about SCL and Cambridge Analytica's tactics included the firm's so-called "black-ops" capabilities, which he said involved hackers breaking into computers to obtain intelligence or compromising material to use against opposition candidates."Some of the targets of these intelligence operations are currently heads of state in various countries," Wylie asserted, saying his former employer hired former members of Russian and Israeli intelligence services for these "special IT services."In addition, CA also recruited at least two individuals who were "closely associated" with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, according to Wylie.
  DNC sues Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks over alleged 2016 election conspiracy. http://bit.ly/2JaN0CC 
 2:38 PM - Apr 20, 2018
 These individuals were reportedly chosen because of their closeness to WikiLeaks, which was deemed a "hostile intelligence service," by former CIA director Mike Pompeo.
 The company has been accused of using a playbook that resembles the WikiLeaks dumping of hacked emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, notably in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election. SCL and Cambridge Analytica denied allegations of hacking.
 VOTER SUPPRESSIONAmong the allegations Wylie made against his former employer is that it used social media data and complex algorithms to try to suppress the vote. The effort was reportedly done under the banner of "voter disengagement," and was cited by Wylie as one of the main reasons he left CA in July 2014.At that time, Cambridge Analytica was a relatively new company. It was set up as a U.S. subsidiary of the London-based SCL.In 2013, SCL's CEO, Alexander Nix, a British citizen, partnered with billionaire conservative donors Robert and Rebecca Mercer and then-Breitbart editor in chief Steve Bannon to set up Cambridge Analytica, or SCL USA. The firm worked on at least 44 congressional campaigns in 2014 and in 2016 managed the data and voter targeting services for President Donald Trump's campaign. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says Bannon wanted "weapons" to fight a "culture war" at the firm http://hill.cm/FRBTlQl 
 
 Wylie suggested this arrangement violated U.S. campaign laws and the U.K.-based parent company to handle "all" of CA's clients. The company reportedly received memos from lawyers warning against using foreign nationals in its U.S. political operations, but it "installed a non-American as its CEO [Nix] and embedded non-U.S. citizens in American campaigns," Wylie said.
 Steve Bannon, who went on to serve as President Trump's chief strategist, was the company's vice president during Wylie's tenure and was reportedly very interested in how social media data could be used to identify, target and "exploit" certain subsets of the population, Wylie reported.Much of Cambridge Analytica's political targeting was informed by the work of Stanford University behavioral researcher Michael Kosinski. Among other things, Kosinski found it was possible to accurately determine a person's sexual orientation, political party and race by analyzing 68 Facebook "likes." Deeper analysis of "likes" resulted in predictive powers that led some to conclude Facebook knows you better than your family.
 
 CNN?@CNN Facebook knows you better than you think:
 • With 10 likes, a computer model fundamentally knows you better than a colleague
 • With 70 likes, it knows you better than a friend or roommate
 • With 300 likes, Big Data knows you better than your spousehttps://cnn.it/2IIWc0Y 
 9:31 PM - Apr 10, 2018
 What you 'like' on Facebook says a lot about youBig Data can analyze your Facebook "likes" to accurately predict your race, religion, sexual orientation and more.
 cnn.com1,3701,377 people are talking about thisTwitter Ads info and privacy
 According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica's targeting operations were "designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases." Before he left the company, there were "the beginnings of discussions" about how to use the profiling data for "voter disengagement," Wylie told lawmakers. This activity, he said, "was intended to focus on African-American voters."
  Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells Sen. @amyklobuchar that he left Cambridge Analytica in part because of the “beginnings of discussions about voter disengagement” with ads intended to suppress African American voters #tictocnews
 Asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., if one of Bannon's goals was "to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the United States from voting," Wylie said that was his understanding. Questioned further about whether "voter suppression" was "a service that U.S. clients could request in their contracts" with the company, Wylie referenced documents indicating clients had made that request.There is room for doubt about the accuracy of Wylie's claims, according to testimony from Eitan Hersh, an expert in civic engagement and voter targeting at Tufts University."Persuasion is very, very hard," Hersh said, asserting CA's claims about its targeting accuracy seem "implausible.""From everything I have seen publicly disclosed about Cambridge Analytica, I am skeptical of the idea that its strategies of voter persuasion were unusually effective or contributed meaningfully to the election outcome," he asserted.It is not yet clear whether Wylie's allegations are being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice. The FBI is reportedly coordinating with British authorities in the U.K. investigation of Cambridge Analytica. According to reports, Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation is looking at Cambridge Analytica's data practices, finances and other activities.bizarre?<p class="slate-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="slate.com/components/slate-paragraph/instances/cjfbx4sn6000lcum3g39jo81u@published" data-word-count="100" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1.2em;">Ecuador’s government <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43573694" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(255, 14, 80); padding: 0px;">announced</a> Wednesday it had pulled the plug on Julian Assange’s internet access at its embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been living since 2012. Ecuador seemed to have had enough of Assange’s provocations online and appears concerned the 46-year-old’s social media conduct could have real-world diplomatic consequences for the South American nation that granted Assange political asylum and citizenship. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/ComunicacionEc/status/979027961411194880?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(255, 14, 80); padding: 0px;">statement</a> Wednesday, the Ecuadorian government said Assange’s social media presence was threatening “the good relations that the country maintains with the United Kingdom, with the rest of the states of the European Union, and other nations.”<p class="slate-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="slate.com/components/slate-paragraph/instances/cjfbxaqr300063i64j10guj1h@published" data-word-count="109" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1.2em;">The government of Ecuador <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/world/europe/julian-assange-internet-ecuador.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(255, 14, 80); padding: 0px;">said</a> Assange had violated “a written commitment made to the government at the end of 2017 not to issue messages that might interfere with other states,” but didn’t specify what about Assange’s social media sparked the clampdown. The timing of the move, however, indicates it is in response to Assange’s recent comments on Twitter questioning the U.K.’s assigning blame to Russia for the recent nerve agent poisoning of Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. Assange also criticized the coordinated expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats by the U.K, the U.S., and other European allies in response to the poisoning.<a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mueller-wikileaks-foundation-russia-case">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mueller-wikileaks-foundation-russia-case</a> Robert Mueller’s emerging focus on Donald Trump’s knowledge of hacked Democratic National Committee emails shows he’s “laid the foundation” for a collusion case against Donald Trump, a former White House lawyer said.Wednesday, NBC News reported Mueller’s team is probing <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/mueller-asking-what-trump-knew-about-hacked-emails-n851941" style="text-decoration-line: none;">how much Trump knew</a> about the stolen DNC emails and whether he was aware the radical transparency organization WikiLeaks planned to publish those exchanges.Andrew Wright, who served for two years as Barack Obama’s associate counsel, told Business Insider that line of questioning is a bad sign for the president.“The one specious thing about Trump’s lawyers’ strategy is that they’re saying there’s no substantive focus on Trump when it comes to the collusion inquiry, that this is all about obstruction of justice, and that Mueller already has everything he needs from other witnesses and documents for the obstruction case,” Wright said, referring to reported attempts by Trump’s attorneys to shield their client from sitting for an interview with the special counsel.“Setting the obstruction case aside, what has happened over the last couple of weeks is that Mueller laid the foundation [for a collusion case] by showing the crimes of the Russians, in at least some form,” Wright continued. “And now we’re seeing his focus on Trump about the hacked emails. At this point, it’s a matter of proving whether Americans were participants in this conspiracy to commit these crimes, and whether they aided or abetted these acts.”WikiLeaks—which the U.S. intelligence community considers an arm of the Russia government—played a pivotal role in the 2016 presidential election, releasing troves of DNC emails during times of peak tumult for then-candidate Trump. As the Atlantic reports, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the organization was in touch</a> with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., from September 2016 to at least July 2017.According to leaked private Twitter messages, longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone also corresponded with WikiLeaks—despite assertions from both parties <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/roger-stone-wikileaks-publicly-denied-communicated-secret-messages-prove-otherwise/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">they’d never communicated during the campaign</a>. Mueller has <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/timeline-emerges-as-mueller-probes-trump-wikileaks-roger-stone-2018-2" style="text-decoration-line: none;">asked witnesses about Trump’s interactions with Stone</a> throughout the campaign, Business Insider reports.Trump, meanwhile, publicly touted the emails leaked by WikiLeaks, using them as proof of his claim former rival Hillary Clinton was “corrupt.”“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said during a July 27, 2016, press conference.Last month, Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three corporations on conspiracy charges for their role in interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Robert Deitz, former general counsel at the National Security Agency, told Business Insider the charges could be a stepping stone in Mueller’s quest to find whether any Americans aided Russia’s effort.“In these kinds of investigations, prosecutors typically move up the food chain,” Deitz said.”I suspect that Mueller, through earlier interviews or documents, finally has sufficient evidence to begin putting a story together that involves Trump.”Deitz told Business Insider Mueller “will continue to fill in the dots until he has enough to seek an interview with [or indictment or] Trump.”Kellyanne Conway got into a heated exchange with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Friday over connections between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.In particular, Camerota asked Conway to comment on the revelations that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, whose company was instrumental in helping Trump’s election victory last November, <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/revealed-trump-backing-data-analytics-boss-asked-julian-assange-to-help-find-hillarys-missing-emails/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">sent out an email to Assange</a> to offer the WikiLeaks founder his company’s help in tracking down emails that were deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private email server.Conway insisted that it wasn’t a big deal that the CEO of a company that the Trump campaign paid $6 million for its services had reached out to a man whom American intelligence services allege runs a propaganda website that is a front for the Russian government.“Are you comfortable that the Trump campaign, through Cambridge Analytica, had a connection to WikiLeaks?” Camerota asked.“They didn’t have a connection to WikiLeaks,” Conway responded.<div id="story-page-embedded-after5-ad" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-google-query-id="CNWUqsP8kNcCFcUQkQodQFsCpQ" id="proper-ad-rawstory_content_1">“They reached out to help with the data,” Camerota shot back.</div></div>“No, not to help with the data,” Conway insisted. “It was something about releasing the e-mails. I was the campaign manager and I couldn’t be bothered with that.”Conway then insisted that reaching out to Assange was completely unnecessary anyway because Hillary Clinton ran such a bad campaign that the Trump campaign didn’t need WikiLeaks’ assistance to beat her.Unprompted, Conway suddenly grew defensive about the fact that she had once again brought up Hillary Clinton as a way to deflect from alleged wrongdoing committed by associates of the Trump campaign.missle and MOAB press cheers; wikileake assange Jeff sessions pompeo ...  https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/21/headlines/cnn_trump_administration_seeks_to_arrest_wikileakss_julian_assangeCNN is reporting the Trump administration has prepared an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. At a Thursday news conference, Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed that the Justice Department is seeking to put Assange in jail.
 Attorney General Jeff Sessions: "We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks. And some of them are quite serious. So, yes, it is a priority. We’ve already begun to step up our efforts. And whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put people in jail."Last week, CIA chief Mike Pompeo blasted WikiLeaks as a "hostile intelligence service," calling Julian Assange and his supporters "demons." That’s despite Pompeo’s praise for WikiLeaks on Twitter last year and despite this comment from Donald Trump on the campaign trail last October.
 Donald Trump: "This just came out. This just came out. WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!" We’ll have more on the Trump administration’s plans to seek the arrest of Julian Assange after headlines. We’ll speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.http://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/01/19/new-york-times-trump-ally-roger-stone-under-investigation-possible-russia-ties/215068
 The New York Times is reporting that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are investigating “intercepted communications” that potentially show ties between longtime Donald Trump ally Roger Stone and Russian officials.The report confirming the ongoing investigation comes after U.S. intelligence agencies <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">concluded</a> that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election by hacking the Democratic National Committee, as well as <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article127231799.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">reports</a> that the FBI and five other intelligence agencies have been investigating whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided Trump’s presidential run.In July, reports surfaced that Trump’s foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe, Carter Page, made almost his <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/07/25/trump-draws-media-criticism-his-connections-russia-after-his-downright-frightening-statements-nato/211871" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">entire fortune</a> off of investments in Russia. Soon after, NBC News <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/15/cbs-and-abc-nightly-news-ignore-trump-campaign-chairman-s-ties-pro-russian-ukrainian-politicians/212421" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">reported</a> on alleged payments to Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from 2007-2012. Roger Stone, a racist, sexist <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/05/09/comprehensive-guide-trump-ally-roger-stone-racist-sexist-conspiracy-theorist/210303" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">conspiracy theorist</a> -- who has previously <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/22/trump-ally-roger-stone-there-s-greater-freedom-press-and-expression-russia-us/212567" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">claimed</a> that there’s “greater freedom of the press” and expression in Russia than in the U.S. -- has now also been implicated as another one of Trump’s associates currently under investigation. Media Matters first exposed Stone in August 2016, after he <a href="https://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/09/roger-stone-confirms-hes-communication-julian-assange/212261" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">claimed</a> to be in contact with Julian Assange regarding an "October Surprise." In early October, Stone <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFesQre7_mc" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">reassured</a> anxious Alex Jones listeners that the "motherload" was coming.The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&r=0" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">report</a>, which will appear in the January 20 edition of The New York Times, confirms that intelligence agencies are investigating “intercepted communications and financial transactions” between Russian officials and Trump allies Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page. The report notes that the “continuing counterintelligence means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him.” From The New York Times:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 25px 30px 10px; margin: 20px 20px 25px; border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgb(204, 204, 204) 0px 6px 0px -4px; clear: both;">American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said.[...]The F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring, and was an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. In August, The Times reported that Mr. Manafort’s name had surfaced in a secret ledger that showed he had been paid millions in undisclosed cash payments.The Associated Press has reported that his work for Ukraine included a secret lobbying effort in Washington aimed at influencing American news organizations and government officials.Mr. Stone, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, said in a speech in Florida last summer that he had communicated with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published the hacked Democratic emails. During the speech, Mr. Stone predicted further leaks of documents, a prediction that came true within weeks.In a brief interview on Thursday, Mr. Stone said he had never visited Russia and had no Russian clients. He said that he had worked in Ukraine for a pro-Western party, but that any assertion that he had ties to Russian intelligence was “nonsense” and “totally false.”</blockquote>evil is perversion on the commons for the self-ish:<div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/new-poll-finds-republicans-have-growing-fondness-russia-vladimir-putin-and-wikileaks">http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/new-poll-finds-republicans-have-growing-fondness-russia-vladimir-putin-and-wikileaks</a></div><div>
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</div><div></div>Thanks to a recent Wikileaks’ leak, certain truly onerous provisions of President Obama’s secret trade deals are no longer secret. As reported this week in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/business/trans-pacific-partnership-seen-as-door-for-foreign-suits-against-us.html?r=1" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s linear 0s; background: transparent;">New York Times</a>, the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) would “grant broad powers to multinational companies operating in North America, South America and Asia. Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings—federal, state or local—before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations.”<a id="recordDisplayLink2Component_20" href="http://discover.sjlibrary.org/iii/encore_sjpl/record/CRb4367555SmachineP0%2C21OrightresultUX6?lang=eng&suite=sjpl" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">This machine kills secrets : how WikiLeakers, cypherpunks, and hacktivists aim to free the world's information</a> <span class="additionalFields customSecondaryText" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">/ Andy Greenberg<div class="dpBibAuthor" style="margin: 2px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a id="authorDisplayLinkComponent_17" href="http://discover.sjlibrary.org/iii/encore_sjpl/search/CSGreenberg%2C%20Andy.Orightresult?lang=eng&suite=sjpl" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">Greenberg, Andy.</a></div><div class="recordDetailValue" style="margin: 4px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><img src="/17acf34f-060c-57a2-bc41-59d77bba658d.gif"/> <span class="itemMediaDescription" id="mediaTypeInsertComponent_20" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: middle;">Book <span class="pipeDivider" style="margin: 0px; padding: 5px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: middle;">| <span class="itemMediaYear" id="searchResultPubYearInsertComponent_20" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: middle;">2012</div><div id="ItemsContainer-b4367555" class="ItemsContainer" style="margin: 3px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="availabilitySummaryArea" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="dpBibHoldingStatement" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="availabilityMessage" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 5px 0px 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="itemsAvailable" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Available at Bascom Nonfiction (<span class="availCallNumber" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: nowrap;">364.168 Greenber) plus 5 more <span class="itemsContainerPopUpTrigger" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: nowrap;"><a style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">see all</a></div></div></div>Created: 24th October, 1pm GMTWikiLeaks has published the biggest leaks in journalistic history. This has triggered aggressive retaliation from powerful groups. Since 7th December 2010 an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade has been imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. The attack has destroyed 95% of our revenue. The blockade came into force within ten days of the launch of Cablegate as part of a concerted US-based, political attack that included vitriol by senior right wing politicians, including assassination calls against WikiLeaks staff. The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency. The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicized US finance companies continues regardless. [vid]As a result, WikiLeaks has been running on cash reserves for the past eleven months. The blockade has cost the organization tens of millions of pounds in lost donations at a time of unprecedented operational costs resulting from publishing alliances in over 50 countries, and their inevitable counter-attacks. Our scarce resources now must focus on fighting the unlawful banking blockade. If this financial attack stands unchallenged, a dangerous, oppressive and undemocratic precedent will have been set, the implications of which go far beyond WikiLeaks and its work. Any organization that falls foul of powerful finance companies or their political allies can expect similar extrajudicial action. Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and other international NGOs that work to expose the wrongdoing of powerful players risk the same fate as WikiLeaks. If publishing the truth about war is enough to warrant such aggressive action by Washington insiders, all newspapers that have published WikiLeaks’ materials are on the verge of having their readers and advertisers blocked from paying for their subscriptions.
 The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has openly criticized the financial blockade against WikiLeaks, as have the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression. The blockade erects a wall between us and our supporters, preventing them from affiliating with and defending the cause of their choice. It violates the competition laws and trade practice legislation of numerous states. It arbitrarily singles out an organization that has not committed any illegal act in any country and cuts it off from its financial lifeline in every country. In Australia, a formal, US triggered investigation into our operations found that WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange have no case to answer. In the US, our publishing is protected by the First Amendment, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by a wide variety of respected legal experts on the US Constitution. In January 2011 the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy C. Geithner, announced that there were no grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks. There are no judgements, or even charges, against WikiLeaks or its staff anywhere in the world.[vid]The most powerful players in the banking industry have shown themselves to be a politicized arm of Washington. This collusion has occurred outside of any judicial or administrative process. The reach of these companies is global and violates the most basic principles of sovereignty. In Europe, VISA and MasterCard together control 97% of the card payment market. Alternatives have been aggressively opposed by VISA and US embassies. The European Central Bank announced plans in 2008 to introduce a European card system. A similar 2010 proposal in Russia together with a bill banning individualized VISA transaction records from going to the US were met with intervention by the US Embassy in Moscow. VISA calls itself the world’s largest currency, but every transaction is controlled by the VISA corporation and the groups that influence it. VISA is a national security problem and a threat to state sovereignty. No state, individual or organization has full economic autonomy or privacy if they rely on VISA. It is able to provide significant intelligence on not only individual behaviour and economic relationships but on large sections of the entire microeconomy and the movement of labour.The Bank of America is one of the principle promoters of the WikiLeaks financial blockade; it is also the creator of VISA, which until 1976 was called the “Bank Americard”. In February this year, it was revealed in detail that the Bank of America had commissioned, through Washington lawyers Hunton & Williams, a consortium of three US intelligence contractors, including HBGary, to propose a systematic US $2 million/month multi-pronged attack to hack and smear WikiLeaks. HBGary was referred to the bank’s lawyers by contacts within the US Department of Justice. The correspondence and proposals, which include plans to target journalists and lawyers supporting WikiLeaks, are now public. An extract from the proposal to sabotage WikiLeaks can be found on page 16 of plan 6:Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions of sabotage or discredit the opposing organizations. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.  Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed not to be secure they are done.  Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.  Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities. Sustain pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt among moderates.In order to ensure our future survival, WikiLeaks is now forced to temporarily suspend its publishing operations and aggressively fundraise in order to fight back against this blockade and its proponents. We have commenced pre-litigation action against the blockade in Iceland, Denmark, the UK, Brussels, the United States and Australia. We have lodged an anti-trust complaint at the European Commission and expect a decision by mid-November as to whether the European Competition Authority will open a full investigation into the wrongdoing of VISA and MasterCard.Financial Blockade: Chronology- 27 November 2010: United States - US State Department intentionally and wrongfully imply (but do not formally state) illegal conduct by WikiLeaks in a letter to lawyers for Julian Assange, which they then immediately leak to the press- 29 November 2010: Global - Cablegate publication starts with New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais & the Guardian, expanding eventually to over 90 publications in over 50 countries.- 29 November 2010 and following days: United States - Assassination calls and declarations of war by US senators, pundits and media against WikiLeaks.- 1 December 2010: United States/Global - Amazon stops hosting WikiLeaks- 2 December 2010: United States/Global - EveryDNS stops wikileaks.org domain service.... = Benkler, A Free Irresponsible Press, forthcoming Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law ReviewA FREE IRRESPONSIBLE PRESS: WIKILEAKS AND THE BATTLE OVER THE SOUL OF THE NETWORKEDFOURTH ESTATEYochai Benkler   <a href="http://benkler.org/Benkler_Wikileaks_current.pdf">http://benkler.org/Benkler_Wikileaks_current.pdf</a> phases of overage/attack .....C. Direct legal action: Espionage Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and conspiracyWithin a week of the initial release of the cables, Democratic Senator and Chairman of theSenate Intelligence Committee Diane Feinstein called for Assange's prosecution under the EspionageAct of 1917.121 The call for using the Espionage Act of 1917 is a remarkable exercise in historicalamnesia. It is consistent, however, with the wording of both the Pentagon’s response in August and theState Department’s letter in November.122 The Act was the primary legal tool developed in what was“one of the most fiercely repressive periods in American history.”123....D. Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?Denial of service attacks by an extralegal public-private partnership1. Technical infrastructure denial of service:Beginning a few hours after the release of the first embassy cables, the Wikileaks site cameunder a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.133 A pattern of denial of service attacks continuedover the next few weeks. It is difficult to pin down whether these attacks came from governmentmastercard etc......3. Organizational power.On December 3, 2010, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum to thevarious departments, emphasizing that the Wikileaks documents were still classified, and access tothem remained subject to all the legal limitations appropriate to their classification.153 As a result, awide range of federal agencies prohibited or technically blocked their employees from reading theWikileaks materials online from their federal computers. ...4. Indirect Legal AssaultThe multisystem attack on Wikileaks employs the legal system on two dimensions which arenot directly aimed at the actions of Wikileaks in leaking the cables. Each attack is likely to put pressureon the continued ability of the organization to function.The first of these is the actual legal action against the soldier who is accused of having leakedthe materials: a 22 year old army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning. As of this writing, littleis known about Manning or his motivations beyond a series of articles in Wired Magazine, based onmaterials provided by the hacker who turned Manning in, Adrian Lamo.160 That Manning can beprosecuted under military or civilian criminal law is certainly true. It is clear, however, from what littleis available here, that Manning was under stress and self-medicating, but was operating at least in partfrom motives that we would normally consider the paradigm case of whistleblowing: moral andpolitical disagreement with the course of action of the state.161 Whether the actions exposed in thedocuments are indeed illegal or immoral in a manner that would justify blowing the whistle is notobvious. After almost a year of revelations from this set of materials, they seem more a broadaffirmation of what is widely believed to be the case than offering any new smoking guns. ...E. Sources of Resilience of the Networked Fourth Estate, and Their LimitsDespite the multi-system assaults it sustained, Wikileaks continued to operate throughout theperiod following release of the cables, and its supporters continued to function and indeed respond tothe attack along many dimensions. Just as the attacks provide insight into the ways in which humanpractice involves action in and through multiple intersecting systems, so too do the responses.Jurisdictional arbitrage. The first and most obvious feature of the operation of Wikileaks is its technical shifts Socio-political framing as journalism. Throughout the events, Assange and Wikileaksemphasized their role as journalists. Inverting the practices of those who sought to analogize Wikileaksto terrorists, some commentators and reporters emphasized the basic argument that Wikileaks is areporting organization, fulfilling a reporting function. In particular, Glenn Greenwald of Salonprovided the most detailed and systematic coverage in support of Wikileaks.182...F. The Response to Wikileaks:Wrap up.The response to Wikileaks was dramatic, extensive, overwrought, and ineffective. If thepurpose was to stop access to the cables, it failed. If the effort was to cast a doubt on the credibility ofthe cables, it failed. If the purpose was to divert attention from the cables, it failed. And if the effortwas to prevent the future availability of decentralized dissemination of leaked documents outside of theconfines of the responsible press, it failed. Indeed, it is possible that, had Secretary Clinton adopted thesame stance as Secretary Gates and shrugged off the events as embarrassing, but not fundamentallydestructive, a measured response to Wikileaks could have significantly advanced the StateDepartment's Internet Freedom agenda by allowing the U.S. to exhibit integrity and congruencebetween its public statements in support of Internet freedom and its actions.196 The actual responsewill create a visible incongruity should the State Department continue to assert Internet freedom as amajor policy agenda.197=  ellsberg ejected for speaking to Manning; lt had insignias ripped off and thrown out kpfa aug 14 Quantico forbidden to do pushups b/c he might hurt himself; stripped at night Jeff patterson guest <a href="http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html">http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html</a>  global intelligence On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.<h2>Bhopal update- 03-03-11</h2>----democ now hammond pleads guilty MICHAEL RATNER: Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, of hacking into a protected computer. That count finishes the case in terms of any other charges. It carries up to a maximum of 10 years in prison. He doesn’t have to get that, and in fact the demand is that he get time served. This is part of the sledgehammer of what the government is doing to people who expose corporate secrets, government secrets, and really the secrets of an empire. And the people who should have been on that trial are the very people who Jeremy admitted to hacking into, which is the Stratfor people who have engaged in corporate spying, along with government cooperation, the public safety people in Arizona, the FBI, etc.  <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/29/julian_assange_stratfor_hacker_jeremy_hammond">http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/29/julian_assange_stratfor_hacker_jeremy_hammond</a>  says pressured banks to prevent wikileaks for getting donation ja claims repeatedly won in icelandic ct  Visa  Free Press Fdn cusak, ellsberg, workaround JPB <a href="http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html">http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html</a> Created: 24th October, 1pm GMT WikiLeaks has published the biggest leaks in journalistic history. This has triggered aggressive retaliation from powerful groups. Since 7th December 2010 an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade has been imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. The attack has destroyed 95% of our revenue. The blockade came into force within ten days of the launch of Cablegate as part of a concerted US-based, political attack that included vitriol by senior right wing politicians, including assassination calls against WikiLeaks staff. The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency. The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicized US finance companies continues regardless.  secret 5 hr mtg w/ google eric schmidt