ST official Cablegate thread

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: ravishekhawat

It's all very disgusting. Freedom...................justice? West is no better than China.

People openly calling for assassination................condom malfunction termed as rape.......................and interpol red alert for that (aren't u laughing)................website sabotage...................serivice providers kneeling to the government.......................what next?

someone please explain.quote>

OK.  It is all very clear.  Oxen have been gored, and the vengeful have their pitchforks out and sharp.

It is comical, and not tragic unless some real injury results.  The Bard of Avon would have laughed and laughed, then made a comedy out of it.  Something like The Taming of the Few. (Phew?, Poo?)

It seems that the bucolic product is hitting the fan when officialdom doesn't know enough to leave it in the pile.  These are people that are being trusted to govern, and the feet of clay are turning out to be hip-high at the very least.  I am not surprised, and I don't think anyone should be anything but amused by all the squirming caused by incautious words filed by insecure poltroons.  The clay is thixotropic, by the way.

Madame Defarge says "Guillotine, Guillotine!"

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I have made many jokes about French Justice and Guillotines. I even used a guillotine emoticon in a thread about legality regarding Monte Cristo Entertainment.

I believe this one is it:

But this is Swedish Justice, not French.

[Wrightguy0 40]

I think Assange has lost sight of his goal, i mean the last few releases seem less like whistle blowing and more like an attempt to embarrass world leaders, it's taking on all the makings of a personal vendetta, and i think he's becoming more and more unstable due to stress, at least from the trend these releases seem to be taking. the last one in particular, releasing a list of sites that are not only Vital to US Security, but to the vast network of global trade and energy transportation and medical research, The Nadym gas pipeline junction in western Siberia, for example, probably relies on it's remote nature as part of it's broader security, and that has been pointed out by the US ans the most important gas facility on earth.

Whistle blowing is to report on government wrongdoing and mismanagement, this list of important sites is secret for a very good reason, because if the true importance of these sites are known, then their value as targets goes up, and an attack on any of these locations could cripple more than a dozen nations. now i think that Mr. Assange had a noble cause, with pure aims, but whatever his goals were, have transformed into something else, his determination, truth at all costs, is going to put a lot of people in danger

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Reported this morning that Assange was arrested in London.  The scape goat has been collared.

[GMT 389]

just taking a look at the timeline makes toast on secret service:

After A.A. and S.W. got to know each other and that they both had sexual contact with him and some problems concerning the rubber, they went to the police and despite A.A. (ironically enough this woman is known to be on the ultra-feminist side and once published a 7 step program to bust men on her block, which, surprise surprise, vanished after the story popped up) only wanted to accompany S.W. both raised charges of sexual assault and rape.

August 20th, the warrant popped up for above mentioned charges.

just 1 day later, the warrant, concerning rape, has been revoked as the attorney claimed not to see any reason to follow this (because the 2 ladies appearently never charged him with rape)

Then, 2 weeks later, all of a sudden and with a new attorney, a new warrant concerning 1 matter of particularly serious rape and 1 matter of sexual assault came up and another 2 weeks later, an international warrant was filed (as this is the only way to get hands on an alleged criminal sitting outside the state holding a warrant)

so far so good, 6 days later the rape charge was reclassified as "normal" rape. (still, keep in mind the 2 ladies never raised any rape charges, in fact it was all about some darn condoms and the cops found this story to be suspicious)

now, on november 30th, Assange complained about the entire plot and tried to get the rape warrant revoked.

Yet another funny day later, Interpol comes up with a Red Notice, forcing it's contracting states to prosecute Assange.

Another day later, Scotland Yard gives "no comment" on the fact that Sweden screwed up it's forwarding paperwork to Interpol and that this is the reason that nobody arrested Assange.

Leading to the third day in a row, as Sweden forwarded another, correct warrant to the Brits.

And this morning, the boy get's arrested and all effort not to be handed (well knowing that this eventually leads to a transatlantic oneway trip as Assange is consideres a puplic enemy of the US) to Sweden failed.

We got us webside that blows any whistle available to show the truth behind the political world of today, the US that all to often comes into focus because of this whistle-blowing and most definitely would press the dislike button on facebook (if it would exist that is) and furthermore declare the website founder a public enemy, a well known ultra-feminist who invited Assange (and disappeared after the story turned public) and her friend that both claimed to had sexual contact and some rubber problems with the very man responsible for the above mentioned website, some cops that allegedly found the condomstory to be suspicious and made a rape charge where no rape has been reported, an attorney who hits the brake on the latter and another attorney who cuts the brake hose (allegedly on behalf of an anonymous swedish politian) and Interpol forcing an arrest.

sounds rather suspicious to me.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Can you spell F-R-A-M-E?

"It was managed by a job

"And a good job too

"It was managed by a job

"And a good job too

"Though all my law be fudge

"I will never, never budge

"It was managed by a job

"And a good job too!"

W.S. Gilbert - Trial by Jury

 

[mightygoose 92]

Julian Assange Captured by World's Dating Police

Dear Interpol:

As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating.

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims' complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women's apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, 'reading stories about himself online' in the cab.

Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That's what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

Thank you again, Interpol. I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the US alone -- there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately. I also have firsthand information that John Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, went to a stag party -- with strippers! -- that his girlfriend wanted him to skip, and that Mark Levinson in Corvallis, Oregon, did not notice that his girlfriend got a really cute new haircut -- even though it was THREE INCHES SHORTER.

Terrorists. Go get 'em, Interpol!

Yours gratefully,

Naomi Wolf

incidentally America are hosting the world press freedom day in 2011... the irony is delicious.

[morriswalters 16]

Had he been less interested in women and more interested in staying out of jail, he wouldn't have this particular problem.  You can't be accused of what he is accused of if you aren't doing it at all, casual womanizing that is.  I'll reserve my sympathy for the young man who will spend most of the rest of his life in prison.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: morriswalters

Had he been less interested in women and more interested in staying out of jail, he wouldn't have this particular problem.  You can't be accused of what he is accused of if you aren't doing it at all, casual womanizing that is.  I'll reserve my sympathy for the young man who will spend most of the rest of his life in prison.

quote>

He has a zipper problem, and it seems to be universal, mostly affecting his fly and his mouth.

[mightygoose 92]

WikiLeaks supporters disrupt Visa and MasterCard sites in 'Operation Payback'

It is, according to one breathless blogger, "the first great cyber war", or as those behind it put it more prosaically: "The major *****storm has begun."

The technological and commercial skirmishes over WikiLeaks escalated into a full-blown online assault today when, in a serious breach of internet security, a concerted online attack by activist supporters of WikiLeaks succeeded in disrupting MasterCard and Visa.

The acts were explicitly in "revenge" for the credit card companies' recent decisions to freeze all payments to the site, blaming illegal activity. Though it initially would acknowledge no more than "heavy traffic on its external corporate website", MasterCard was forced to admit tonight that it had experienced "a service disruption to the MasterCard directory server", which banking sources said meant disruption throughout its global business.

Later, Visa's website was also inaccessible. A spokeswoman for Visa said the site was "experiencing heavier than normal traffic" and repeated attempts to load the Visa.com site was met without success.

MasterCard said its systems had not been compromised by the "concentrated effort" to flood its corporate website with "traffic and slow access". "We are working to restore normal service levels," it said in a statement. "There is no impact on our cardholders' ability to use their cards for secure transactions globally."

In an attack referred to as Operation Payback, a group of online activists calling themselves Anonymous said they had orchestrated a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on the site, and issued threats against other businesses which have restricted WikiLeaks' dealings.

Also targeted in a dramatic day of internet activity was the website of the Swedish prosecution authority, which is currently seeking to extradite the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, on sex assault charges, and that of the Stockholm lawyer who represents them. The sites of the US senator Joe Lieberman and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, both vocal critics of Assange, were also attacked and disrupted, according to observers. Palin last night told ABC news that her site had been hacked. "No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics," Palin emailed ABC. "This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."

An online statement from activists said: "We will fire at anything or anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks, including multibillion-dollar companies such as PayPal … Twitter, you're next for censoring #WikiLeaks discussion. The major *****storm has begun." Twitter has denied censoring the hashtag, saying confusion had arisen over its "trending" facility.

Though DDoS attacks are not uncommon by groups of motivated activists, the scale and intensity of the online assault, and the powerful commercial and political critics of WikiLeaks ranged in opposition to the hackers, make this a high-stakes enterprise that could lead to uncharted territory in the internet age.

A spokesman for the group, a 22-year-old from London who called himself Coldblood, told the Guardian it was acting for the "chaotic good" in defence of internet freedom of speech. It has been distributing software tools to allow anyone with a computer and an internet connection to join in the attacks.

The group has already succeeded this week in bringing down the site of the Swiss bank PostFinance, which was successfully attacked on Monday after it shut down one of WikiLeaks' key bank accounts, accusing Assange of lying. A PostFinance spokesman, Alex Josty, told Associated Press the website had buckled under a barrage of traffic. "It was very, very difficult, then things improved overnight, but it's still not entirely back to normal."

Other possible targets include Amazon, which removed WikiLeaks' content from its EC2 cloud on 1 December, EveryDNS.net, which suspended dealings with the site two days later, and Visa, which announced on Tuesday that it would cease processing payments to WikiLeaks.

PayPal has also been the subject of a number of DDoS attacks – which often involve flooding the target site with requests so that it cannot cope with legitimate communication – since it suspended all payments to WikiLeaks last week. A PayPal spokesman told the Guardian that while a site called ThePayPalBlog.com had been successfully silenced for a few hours, attempts to crash its online payment facilities had been unsuccessful.

The site, which is owned by eBay, appeared to suggest today its decision to freeze payments had been taken after it became aware of the US state department's letter saying that the WikiLeaks activities were deemed illegal in the US.

Tonight PayPal said that it was releasing the money held in the WikiLeaks account, although it said the account remains restricted to new payments.

A statement from PayPal's general counsel, John Muller, sought to "set the record straight". He said that the company was required to comply with laws around the world and that the WikiLeaks account was reviewed after "the US department of state publicised a letter to WikiLeaks on November 27, stating that WikiLeaks may be in possession of documents that were provided in violation of US law. PayPal was not contacted by any government organisation in the US or abroad. We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review. Ultimately, our difficult decision was based on a belief that the WikiLeaks website was encouraging sources to release classified material, which is likely a violation of law by the source.

"While the account will remain restricted, PayPal will release all remaining funds in the account to the foundation that was raising funds for WikiLeaks. We understand that PayPal's decision has become part of a broader story involving political, legal and free speech debates surrounding WikiLeaks' activities. None of these concerns factored into our decision. Our only consideration was whether or not the account associated with WikiLeaks violated our Acceptable Use Policy and regulations required of us as a global payment company. Our actions in this matter are consistent with any account found to be in violation of our policies."

There have been accusations that WikiLeaks is being targeted for political reasons, a criticism repeated today after it emerged that Visa had forced a small IT firm which facilitates transfers made by credit cards including Visa and MasterCard, and has processed payments to WikiLeaks, to suspend all of its transactions – even those involving other payees. Visa had already cut off all donations being made through the firm to WikiLeaks.

DataCell, based in Iceland, said it would take "immediate legal action" and warned that the powerful "duopoly" of Visa and MasterCard could spell "the end of the credit card business worldwide". Andreas Fink, its chief executive, said: "Putting all payments on hold for seven days or more is one thing, but rejecting all further attempts to donate is making the donations impossible.

"This does clearly create massive financial losses to WikiLeaks, which seems to be the only purpose of this suspension. This is not about the brand of Visa, this is about politics and Visa should not be involved in this … It is obvious that Visa is under political pressure to close us down."

Operation Payback, which refers to itself "an anonymous, decentralised movement that fights against censorship and copywrong", argues that the actions taken by Visa, MasterCard and others "are long strides closer to a world where we cannot say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas. We cannot let this happen. This is why our intention is to find out who is responsible for this failed attempt at censorship. This is why we intend to utilise our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."

The MasterCard action was confirmed on Twitter at 9.39am by user @Anon_Operation, who later tweeted: "We are glad to tell you that

http://www.mastercard.com/

is down and it's confirmed! #ddos #WikiLeaks Operation: Payback (is a *****!) #PAYBACK"

The group, Coldblood said, is about 1,000-strong. While most of its members are teenagers who are "trying to make an impact on what happens with the limited knowledge they have", others include parents and IT professionals, he said.

Anonymous was born out of the influential internet messageboard ***** in 2003, a forum popular with hackers and gamers. The group's name is a tribute to *****'s early days, when any posting to its forums where no name was given was ascribed to "Anonymous".

But the ephemeral group, which picks up causes "whenever it feels like it", has now "gone beyond ***** into something bigger", its spokesman said. There is no real command structure; membership of the group has been described as being "like a flock of birds" – the only way you can identify members is by what they are doing together. Essentially, once enough people on the ***** message boards decide some cause is worth pursuing in large enough numbers, it becomes an "Anonymous" cause.

"We're against corporations and government interfering on the internet," Coldblood said. "We believe it should be open and free for everyone. Governments shouldn't try to censor because they don't agree with it. Anonymous is supporting WikiLeaks not because we agree or disagree with the data that is being sent out, but we disagree with any from of censorship on the internet.

Last night WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: "Anonymous ... is not affiliated with WikiLeaks. There has been no contact between any WikiLeaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets."

it seems anonymous have entered the fray.

[Easy Bakes 253]

Now its officialy overblown.

[Duke87 1,070]

You knew it was only a matter of time before they got involved....

[EyeofMobius 27]

Persecuting people for their sexual habits that are within the law whether by public or by official processes is an awful habit of the world at large. If you are still in high school and think the teen angst drama will stop then you are sadly mistaken. It is usually better when you don't run with the flock at every turn but seems inescapable in its entirety.

I vehemently disagree with opinions that label wikileaks as anti government; anti-establishment; anti american; anti etc. etc. The only thing I get a sense of wikileaks being against is BS starting at the highest levels of power.

Our own politicians are seeming to do nothing but seem like a throng of shifty little liars who are unworthy of any kind of trust.

[morriswalters 16]

My comment was more about Assange staying out of jail then any concern for his sexual habits.  I could care less about that.  It's about trust.  I don't walk in dark alleys if I don't want to get robbed.  If I don't want to open myself to sex charges, particularly if I'm unpopular with some Governments, than I would be very picky about who I cohabited with.  Now he's pinned in a British Jail.  How do you think that is working for him?

[mightygoose 92]

[linkie]

Amazon are selling the wikileaks cables, you can pay via paypal, mastercard or visa; now that is hypocrisy!

[Barbarossa 51]

.

  Edited September 8, 2012 by Barbarossa  

[psander5 198]

Yes, it seems hypocritical that Amazon should be selling something with Wikileaks in the title, but if you look closely it has nothing to do with Wikileaks and has little to do with Amazon.  The author is clearly an unskilled, amateur hack.  Check out some of his other 'work'... "Discovering Asian Women", "Right Honorable PM David Cameron", "Zinedine Zidane 'The Best Player ever in History'", "Wherever You Go There You Are.  Christian Philosophy".  The last one is my favourite! 

With over 300 publications of what must be dubious quality and of such a wide range of fields, this guy is clearly some kind of spammer/scammer.  I didn't know Amazon let this kind of thing happen on their service... that's the biggest crime!  

Judging by the reviews on the 'product' you linked to, my guess is that Amazon will take it down eventually.  I doubt they pre-moderated it. 

I hope Assange doesn't 'go missing' on his way to Sweden.  I doubt the charges against him would stand up in a normal case - if he were an anonymous male - but with the US government so strongly wishing he would go away I fear he won't get a fair hearing, even in a neutral country like Sweden. I really hope the Swedish authorities make the rest of the free world proud by dealing with this whole situation fairly, and not bow to the pressure of the overbearing elements that are gunning for the man. 

Don't forget too that Wikileaks is more than just one man.  Putting Assange away would only be a short term PR victory for Wikileaks' opponents.  Even then, I'm sure most reasonable people would just protest louder about how he has been treated.  It will make him a martyr!

Whether you agree with Wikileaks or not, I think it would be better for the US (and anyone else embarrassed by the cables... including my own country) to sit back and take what's coming.  It'll happen anyway, so it's better to deal with it head on, with honesty and dignity, rather than trying to suppress it in dubious fashion.  Even if they and their allies managed to silence Assange, the documents he has hold of aren't just in his hands.  They will get out! The world is different these days. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The whole affair is still, IMHO, a tempest in a teapot.

If you didn't know that most politicians are members of the slime-mold class, you do now.  While they seem to be able to stick to the veriest, highest flakes of the upper crust, it they were ever really noticed, someone would spray them with Febreze and they would simply disappear.

As most of you get past your thirtieth birthdays, you will discover that Isaiah is right.  Spend a little time with the first section of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and you will get the whole picture.  While the old testament may have been superceded ethically by the new, there is still a lot of good philosophy and wisdom in there.  As a general work on human nature and the philosophy of right-doing, the Bible is not bad at all.  I don't much care for the Bowdlerized current versions, and, while I am Roman Catholic by upbringing, I cling to the language of the King James Version.  It is a work that easily rivals Shakespeare in its poesy.

The Hobbits have the right of it, the age of majority is 33.

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" Ecclesiastes 1:1

[Duke87 1,070]

Originally posted by: EyeofMobius

I vehemently disagree with opinions that label wikileaks as anti government; anti-establishment; anti american; anti etc. etc. The only thing I get a sense of wikileaks being against is BS starting at the highest levels of power.quote>

Meh. Any attempt to paint Assange as anti-anything is misguided, methinks. The man is no different than your average sociopathic hacker. All he's aiming to do is cause mayhem. Because he can.

[mightygoose 92]

some metered rationality....

DNS Provider Mistakenly Caught in WikiLeaks Saga Now Supports the Group

A DNS provider that suffered backlash last week after it was wrongly identified as supplying and then dropping DNS service to WikiLeaks has decided to support the secret-spilling site, offering DNS service to two domains distributing WikiLeaks content.

EasyDNS, a Canadian firm, was attacked last Friday after media outlets mistakenly reported it had terminated its service for WikiLeaks. The company sent an e-mail to customers Thursday morning letting them know that it had begun providing DNS service for WikiLeaks.ch and WikiLeaks.nl, two of the primary domain names WikiLeaks relocated to after WikiLeaks.org stopped resolving.

“We’ve already done the time, we might as well do the crime,” Mark Jeftovic, president and CEO of EasyDNS, told Threat Level about his decision.

DNS service providers translate human-friendly domain names to IP addresses, so when someone types www.Amazon.com into their browser, for example, they’re properly connected to 72.21.211.176, the address of the host.

It was actually EveryDNS, a competitor of EasyDNS, that had been providing this service to WikiLeaks.org for free. EveryDNS terminated this service last week after WikiLeaks was hit by prolonged denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by people opposed to the group publishing classified U.S. State Department cables. The company said the denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks threatened the stability of service for other EveryDNS customers.

In reporting this announcement, bloggers misidentified the DNS provider as EasyDNS, a mistake that was repeated in news stories. EasyDNS was subsequently caught in a firestorm. WikiLeaks supporters attacked it on Twitter. Jeftovic said he also got calls from customers saying, “We can’t believe you’ve taken down WikiLeaks, we’re out of here.”

Jeftovic posted a note to the company blog at the time,

musing about the mishap

and the fact that his company was now put in the precarious position of deciding what it would do if WikiLeaks

did

want to become a customer. Would EasyDNS then be attacked if it turned the organization away?

“So after the big clusterf*** with easyDNS being falsely blamed for taking down WikiLeaks,” he wrote, “somebody posts the inevitable question ‘Would easyDNS take wikileaks DNS’? and from there makes what I think is a dubious extension: by

not

taking them we’re doing the same thing as ‘taking them down.’”

Two days later he was faced with precisely this dilemma when people behind two WikiLeaks mirror sites that have become the defacto WikiLeaks content providers contacted him about becoming customers.

One of the correspondents, based in Switzerland, controls the Swiss-based

WikiLeaks.ch

domain, which became one of two main domains for accessing the U.S. State Department cables after WikiLeaks stopped using WikiLeaks.org. EasyDNS began providing DNS service for the domain Sunday evening, using 14 name servers. Jeftovic was subsequently contacted by someone who controls

WikiLeaks.nl

in the Netherlands, and began providing service to that address on Monday.

Jeftovic said he was also in line to take over service for the WikiLeaks.org domain, but that fell through after there was confusion about who exactly controls the domain. He said he’s willing to take that one on as well, if the details are worked out.

Jeftovic agreed to provide the service on condition that resolution for the domains would be provided by dedicated, battle-hardened servers separate from other customers so that any attacks directed against them would not disturb other clients.

Although he says his company is pro-transparency, Jeftovic didn’t go so far as to say he philosophically supports WikiLeaks.

“But I do not believe WikiLeaks is aiding terrorists,” he said. “I think there’s so much hyperbole around it.”

His main reason for agreeing to provide access to WikiLeaks content was practical.

“We were dragged into this,” he said. “The alternatives were we do nothing and get dragged through the mud again, or we just basically do the one thing that really shuts everybody up.”

He said the result has been a “groundswell” of support among the company’s 50,000 customers.

“There is a minority of people who are not happy with this, but by far the majority is extremely supportive,” he said. “Forty percent of our member base is in the U.S., and a lot of our U.S. customers are really on side with this and happy with it.”

He acknowledged that his assistance to WikiLeaks could be terminated if his company were served with an injunction.

But one of the lessons demonstrated by the recent attacks on WikiLeaks is that a popular website can survive even without DNS, thanks to Google. The top search result for WikiLeaks on Thursday is a link to the site’s Internet IP address, 213.251.145.96. WikiLeaks is strong enough now that it can survive as a number.

and some astute commentary from the author of Dilbert.

Sweden

 

Here's a list of three things that you are unlikely to do, at least in this order:

1.       Watch a Swedish movie called

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2.       Read about the Swedish sex charges against Julian Assange

3.       Book a vacation to Sweden

I am always amused by the strange impact of unintended consequences. Julian Assange simply wanted to release some embarrassing information, have hot sex with a Swedish babe then have hot sex with an acquaintance of that same babe one day later. That's just one example of why the Swedish language has 400 words that all mean "and your cute friend is next."

But things didn't turn out as Assange hoped.  The unintended consequence of his actions is that he managed to make Sweden look like a country that's governed by congenital idiots and populated with nothing but crazy sluts and lawyers. And don't get me started about the quality of their condoms.

To be fair, I don't know if Assange's alleged broken condom is because the product was defective. We have good evidence that Assange has the world's biggest set of nuts, so assuming some degree of proportionality, he'd put a strain on any brand of condom that didn't have rebar ribs.

Assange had a lot of help making Sweden look like the last place on Earth that you would want to take your penis. The aforementioned megahit movie,

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

, makes the place look like a snow-filled ass cave that Jeffrey Dahmer lived in before he got a raise. (It's a good movie otherwise.)

If you haven't read any background about the so-called rape charges against Assange, you really should. Apparently Swedish laws are unique.  If you have a penis, you're half a rapist before you even get through customs. And if your condom breaks, that's jail time. What I'm saying is that the Club Med in Sweden is a nervous place.

I was having a hard time making up my mind about Assange. On one hand, he might be hurting the interests of my country and putting people in danger. Death to him! On the other hand, a little extra government transparency might prevent more problems than it causes.  Hero!  It was a toss-up. Then Sweden turned Assange from a man-whore publicity hound into Gandhi.  Advantage: Assange.

The one thing I know for sure is that I'm a fan of the hackers who are dispensing vigilante justice. Here's another unintended consequence: The hackers could end up organizing over this issue and ultimately forming a shadow government of their own, if they haven't already.  I welcome my hacker overlords.

Prediction: The governments of the world can't let Assange become a martyr. He would be too powerful. They'll pressure Sweden to release him on some sort of technicality.

 

[Easy Bakes 253]

I just saw an add for the CIA. they are hireing for the dept of clandestine affairs.

[Larks2242 251]

Gotta love google ads, it only takes one post and they are are advertising for that.

[mightygoose 92]

there are now rumours of a US Indictment under the espionage act.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: mightygoose

there are now rumours of a US Indictment under the espionage act.quote>

Of whom?  Assange can't be indicted, he didn't do anything on American soil, continental or otherwise.  Whoever is talking about this in some attorney general's office is asking for a black eye like the one the judge in Illinois got when she railroaded Conrad Black.  "It was managed by a job" -- see my earlier post for full text of this.

Kangaroo courts and show trials.  I thought that ended with the crash of international communism.  But on the other hand, the U.S. is pretty good a drumhead courts martial.  Just ask the guys incarcerated in the Guantanamo oubliette.

The U.S. shouln't be talking indictment, they should be quietly cleaning house.

[morriswalters 16]

Interesting legal opinion.  I suspect that they are quietly trying to tighten things up.  However you run the risk of doing what Julian Assange wishes them to do, which is choke the flow of information so badly it's useless.  And in the atmosphere since 9/11 any politician who defends him risks his career.  They rather be embarrassed by failing than hung for not trying.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: morriswalters

Interesting legal opinion.  I suspect that they are quietly trying to tighten things up.  However you run the risk of doing what Julian Assange wishes them to do, which is choke the flow of information so badly it's useless.  And in the atmosphere since 9/11 any politician who defends him risks his career.  They rather be embarrassed by failing than hung for not trying.

quote>

I've been around long enough to see what happens to silly attorneys who rush to judgement with frivolous indictments.  They usually get set down hard by the first law master it gets in front of, or (horrors!) a jury.  And if not, it is a long row to hoe to get to the final court of appeal.

I don't know that you have read Assange's intent correctly.  I think he is just being a gadfly, and these are needed.  If the security of the Americans needs tightening, so be it.

Any politician that touches this had better use a long barge pole.  Getting involved in this in any way  could taint them for a long time.

Meanwhile, the Brits are extraditing Julian to Sweden.  Now the Swedes are a sensible people, but their hands are tied by the media.  They would dearly love to give this the "Man who wasn't there" treatment.

For those who don't get that reference:

"There was a man upon the stair.

"The little man who wasn't there.

"He wasn't there again today.

"Gee, I wish he'd go away."

Anonymous

 

[morriswalters 16]

I'll let him speak with hie own words.  There is a link in the article to the PDF file quoted.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Link

According to this, we are are all indictable under this century-old law.  Dragging up an old statute like this reminds me that we also have such things on our books.  Rather than fighting over tax cuts, the Congress should be thinking about fixing this to bring it in line with modern activity.  Even talking about a news article could get you in trouble if this report is correct.  We all know the NSA monitors the Internet.  (Hi. guys!)

So, if the WikiLeaks group hasn't done anything else, it has exposed this for scrutiny.  Maybe the house and senate judiciary committees or whoever reviews old laws, needs to think about this one.  It is a knee-jerk left over from the early 1900's, and is probably quite similar to the knee-jerk legislation that produced the Homeland Security goons and closed the longest undefended border in the world.

Sometimes, the stupidity of our various legislatures amazes me.  It seems to know no bounds (or boundaries).

[mightygoose 92]

well it seems that they are going to go for it.

U.S. Tries to Build Case for Conspiracy by WikiLeaks

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information. Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.

He said the special server’s purpose was to allow Private Manning’s submissions to “be bumped to the top of the queue for review.” By Mr. Lamo’s account, Private Manning bragged about this “as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks.”

Wired magazine has published excerpts from logs of online chats between Mr. Lamo and Private Manning. But the sections in which Private Manning is said to detail contacts with Mr. Assange are not among them. Mr. Lamo described them from memory in an interview with The Times, but he said he could not provide the full chat transcript because the F.B.I. had taken his hard drive, on which it was saved.

Since WikiLeaks began making public large caches of classified United States government documents this year, Justice Department officials have been struggling to come up with a way to charge Mr. Assange with a crime. Among other things, they have studied several statutes that criminalize the dissemination of restricted information under certain circumstances, including the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

But while prosecutors have used such laws to go after leakers and hackers, they have never successfully prosecuted recipients of leaked information for passing it on to others — an activity that can fall under the First Amendment’s strong protections of speech and press freedoms.

Last week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said he had just authorized investigators to take “significant” steps, declining to specify them. This week, one of Mr. Assange’s lawyers in Britain said they had “heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly impaneled grand jury” in northern Virginia.

Justice Department officials have declined to discuss any grand jury activity. But in interviews, people familiar with the case said the department appeared to be attracted to the possibility of prosecuting Mr. Assange as a co-conspirator to the leaking because it is under intense pressure to make an example of him as a deterrent to further mass leaking of electronic documents over the Internet.

By bringing a case against Mr. Assange as a conspirator to Private Manning’s leak, the government would not have to confront awkward questions about why it is not also prosecuting traditional news organizations or investigative journalists who also disclose information the government says should be kept secret — including The New York Times, which also published some documents originally obtained by WikiLeaks.

“I suspect there is a real desire on the part of the government to avoid pursuing the publication aspect if it can pursue the leak aspect,” said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia law professor and former federal prosecutor. “It would be so much neater and raise fewer constitutional issues.”

It has been known that investigators were looking for evidence that one or more people in Boston served as an intermediary between Private Manning and WikiLeaks, taking a disc of files he had copied from a computer while deployed in Iraq and somehow delivering it to the Web site.

But Mr. Lamo said Private Manning also sometimes uploaded information directly to Mr. Assange, whom he had initially sought out online. The soldier sent a “test leak” of a single State Department cable from Iceland to see if Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks were who they claimed to be, Mr. Lamo said.

“At some point, he became satisfied that he was actually talking to Assange and not some unknown third party posing as Assange, and based on that he began sending in smaller amounts of data from his computer,” Mr. Lamo said. “Because of the nature of his Internet connection, he wasn’t able to send large data files easily. He was using a satellite connection, so he was limited until he did an actual physical drop-off when he was back in the United States in January of this year.”

Still, prosecutors would most likely need more than a chat transcript laying out such claims to implicate Mr. Assange, Professor Richman said. Even if prosecutors could prove that it was Private Manning writing the messages to Mr. Lamo, a court might deem the whole discussion as inadmissible hearsay evidence.

Prosecutors could overcome that hurdle if they obtain other evidence about any early contacts — especially if they could persuade Private Manning to testify against Mr. Assange. But two members of a support network set up to raise money for his legal defense, Jeff Paterson and David House, said Private Manning had declined to cooperate with investigators since his arrest in May.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks is taking steps to distance itself from the suggestion that it actively encourages people to send in classified material. It has changed how it describes itself on its submissions page. “WikiLeaks accepts a range of material, but we do not solicit it,” its Web site now says.

It also deleted the word “classified” from a description of the kinds of material it accepts. And it dropped an assertion that “Submitting confidential material to WikiLeaks is safe, easy and protected by law,” now saying instead: “Submitting documents to our journalists is protected by law in better democracies.”

WikiLeaks is also taking steps to position itself more squarely as a news organization, which would it easier to invoke the First Amendment as a shield. Where its old submissions page made few references to journalism, it now uses “journalist” and forms of the word “news” 23 times.

Another new sentence portrays its primary work as filtering and analyzing documents, not just posting them raw. It says its “journalists write news stories based on the material, and then provide a link to the supporting documentation to prove our stories are true.”

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Fine.  Another show trial in the U.S. to cover up the hips of clay. 

Meanwhile Assange is out on bail.  I suppose they've taken his passport, but that doesn't really stop anyone in the U.K. from getting over to the continent, for example, on the Orient Express.  So, unless they plan to escort him everywhere, including to the loo, he should be away soon.

Now if the young person accused of being the source of the leaks really did it, or for that matter if he is completely innocent, the real job is cleaning up the security establishment in the U.S. diplomatic corps and wherever else this has touched.  Plain language texts such as have been seen in the press should never be seen.  Anything like that should have found the daily burn bag.  Secrets written in plain language on paper are no secrets at all.  Any of us who have ever been involved in security know that.  One wonders what they actually say to people who agree to sign their official secrets act.  I have signed ours, and I would never, ever, even hint at some of the stuff that has passed by me.

One of the biggest problems the U.S. has is too many agencies.  It is time to stop all the in-fighting and urinating in the soup and have a properly integrated security set up.  There should only be, at most, two agencies: the military one and the civilian one, and these should fall under some overseeing umbrella that not only oversees what they classify, but how they do it.  It should be fairly easy to attach a security agent to each outpost, since they are already there in many cases.  It is just a case of retraining and emphasis on the penalties of messing up.