- You'd assume that Wikileaks the organization will continue to work even without Assange having internet access so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
edit: another comment here suggests the reason may be because his extradition is imminent.
The actual article states that the BBC tried to contact the embassy by phone, but the staff there are not authorised to comment. They have thus far been unable to raise the ambassador by email. People have been down there by foot, and there is apparently nothing to see.
Catch 22. People showed up at the embassy clerk today, but they told them you need a prior appointment with Julian. Which is only possible via internet. So nada.
On the other hand, "state actor" could certainly refer to Ecuador deciding to turn off Assange's access. WikiLeaks tends to be fairly economical with the truth about its own operations, so being purposefully ambiguous isn't anything new for them.
And, while Ecuador hasn't had to deal with meaningful diplomatic repercussions from sheltering Assange, the high-profile role WL is taking in the 2016 elections, and specifically the partisan and selective nature of their leaks, means that Ecuador is dealing with a very different qualitative situation than when WL was acting as an impartial if indiscriminate journalistic source.
In other words, Quito may very well be looking at the situation and deciding that being implicated in attempts to manipulate the US election is way more trouble than it's worth.
I don't think Assange is a partisan. He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election. I think he is releasing info on Hillary because that is what he has and is timing the release for maximum public exposure. If he had similar info on Trump, I firmly believe he would be doing the same thing.
It's pretty well known that Assange has a vendetta against Hillary Clinton. Just searching for Assange Clinton on Google brings up lots of articles on the subject.
But a little further checking showed that despite this being tweeted in August this year with a headline and hashtag suggesting a link to the leaked emails, this video is actually from 2010, moreover from my exhaustive five minute search (it wasn't exhaustive really) I couldn't find any evidence of a link to Clinton's campaign, in fact according to Wikipedia the last campaign this strange chap worked on was Walter Mondale's in 1984.
It looks like the True Pundit article (linked above) is the original source for this claim, which is sourced as "according to State Department sources". Then there was a wikileaks email (https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1099) which has the subject "an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks", but which doesn't actually mention the strategies and only says "The result is the attached memo, which has one interesting legal approach and I think some very good suggestions about how to handle our public diplomacy". The attachment is not provided as far as I can tell.
I agree that it sounded like a joke. However the article says she pushed ahead discussing it after the laughter ended. Given that the source didn't want to be identified it makes it rather hard to verify.
She didn't deny it, but said “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don't recall that.” I say that indicates she likely said it, although maybe jokingly.
Speaking for myself I know I would never say that, so the response would be "No, I never said that."
When your entire life is recorded, you never know what soundbite is floating around out there that will contradict your position. If you say something as a joke or that could be taken out of context, and then later claim to have never said it, suddenly you are a liar even though you didn't actually do anything wrong. It's possible that she just didn't want to get contradicted by some frustrated exclamation she had made years previously.
and yet, it's exactly this same person who will strengthen the NSA security apparatus that slurps up domestic communication wholesale, and saves it for all eternity. I hope you don't end up on the wrong end of a powerful person's anger, because you will go down the exact same way.
This election is trending beyond being too much too keep up with. I think we'll see more bullheaded decision making in the this same vein as we get closer to the date.
yeah, but everything she and WJC say has to be filtered through the lawyer lens... depending on what the definition of is is. She's good at that - almost anything she says can be spun multiple ways.
Aside from the "can't we just drone this guy" comment that Clinton doesn't remember saying and if she did it was a joke, etc. the closest I can find:
I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.
No, it's pretty well known that Assange claims to have a vendetta against HRC. The details of that vendetta don't make much sense. It's clearly easier for him and his supporters to claim that they're acting out of enmity towards Clinton --- a minor figure in virtually all of Assange's dealings with the US --- than to simply cop to the fact that they are aggressively and overly supporting Donald Trump.
Nerddom and the left (and I'm somewhere in the overlapping circles on that Venn diagram) have a powerful rooting interest in Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who many of us see as a vanguard of an effort to disrupt politics and the media, both of whom we as a demographic have little respect for. The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. But that's very hard for us to admit, regardless of the amount of evidence we're confronted with.
You're entitled to think whatever you want, but I am entitled to remind you that 2 + 2 = 4. We have an "A vs B mentality" because that's the design of our political system: it is structured to favor two dominant parties, which are themselves coalitions of interests.
Assange is many things, but "stupid" isn't one of them. Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump has the obvious impact of helping Trump, which is why the Trump campaign claims to coordinate with him.
That is really dangerous way to view people. I hope we have more common sense when we view security researchers that publish security vulnerabilities, rather than see them as campaigning for the competitor. Every published security vulnerability for windows is not an advertisement for apple, or vice versa. "If you are not in favor of Microsoft, you are in favor or Apple" is unhealthy way to view the world.
And it's not because I think security experts are stupid and don't realize the obvious commercial impact that a security vulnerability has.
I mean, you've made it clear how you feel, but not so much what that feeling has to do with the facts of this election. The choices are Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. To oppose Clinton is to support Trump. It is a zero-sum contest. If Assange wishes a pox on both parties, he could stay out of the election altogether. But of course, that's not what he's doing.
Your choices are Clinton + Kaine (Dem), Trump + Pence (Rep), Johnson + Weld (Lib), and maybe Stein + Baraka (Grn). No one else could win without deadlocking the electoral college.
To oppose Clinton is little more than calling a turd sandwich a turd sandwich. One does not also need to point out that her douche opponent is a douche.
While the US elections systems virtually guarantee a two-party system, it does not mean the two on top always have to be the same parties. If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I do wish a pox on both houses--along with a hemorrhagic fever, parasitic worm infection, and some kind of blotchy skin rash. I am not staying out of the election. I think Clinton would competently lead the country in the wrong direction, and I think Trump would be a national embarrassment on multiple fronts. Strategically, the best strategy I could follow would be to bash the presumptive front-runner, whomever it may be, to keep the two major candidates as close as possible, and hope that the minor candidates can somehow win enough states to deadlock the electoral college.
Note that it is unlikely that is the primary motivation for Wikileaks. But it does show that this game is not a zero-sum either-or.
> If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I think it's far more likely that if the Republicans fall apart, a large component will pivot and eat up one or more of those other parties to retain a Republican designation with slightly different values. It's a mistake to think of either of the two major parties as static.
This. An extremely important thing to understand about the American political system, and also the exact reason why the Trump campaign is failing (the belief that the Republican party is a single ideological force and not a coalition of different interests).
I learned this from The West Wing, along with most of my knowledge of how federal politics works. There are conservative Democrats, and liberal Republicans. Being a bleeding heart liberal in a swing state isn't going to win you the a seat.
This is in strong contrast to Westminster parliaments, where political parties are for the most part a monolith, only occasionally allowed a "conscience vote" (that's not to say there isn't infighting). To vote against the party is a very good way to get booted from the party, which as far as I'm aware is practically impossible in Congress, the closest you have is being expelled from a caucus.
Unless your argument is that HRC would be equivalently as bad for the US as Trump, this argument does not make sense. Neither Stein nor Johnson can win this election; neither has a chance materially better than that of Joe Exotic Speaks For America 2016.
I have no expectation that Johnson or Stein could win, except in a strictly mathematical-theoretical sense. They are both on enough ballots that they could win a majority in the electoral college, if and only if enough people voted for them.
But they do not have those votes--largely because many people who share your general opinion keep hammering home the message that if you do not vote for one of the top two candidates, then at best your vote does not matter, and at worst it destroys America.
My concerns are that Trump is a misogynistic sleaze who will undermine US diplomatic prestige, be generally ineffective as a government executive trying to act like a business executive, and will damage international trade; and that Clinton is a corrupt politician who will undermine US liberty, continue indefinitely the harmful policies of Bush II and Obama, and will damage the rule of law. The fact that those third-party candidates have a statistically zero chance of winning actually makes me more comfortable in voting for one of them.
On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place. And on the even more remote chance that the Democrats self-destruct, I want the Greens to be big enough to step into their shoes. Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power.
They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
> On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place.
Don't kid yourself about some other party ever taking the place of the Democrats or Republicans. The best you can hope for is that the libertarians gain more influence than they currently have through the larger Republican party consuming them. Whether you view this as a needed shift in the right direction for the Republicans or not enough of a shift and at the cost of any power the libertarians had likely depends on how far you lean libertarian. Same with the Democrats and Green Party.
Our two party system hasn't survived for as long as it has because each party innately catered to it's constituents needs from the beginning. Each party has shifted greatly over time to track what their constituents cared about.
> Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power. ... They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
They are never going to die, period. But that's okay. They don't need to die, they just need to change, and there's plenty of precedent for that.
Just to amplify the comments nearby: politics is more than presidential elections.
In presidential elections, because of the US political system, you really do have just two choices. You may lament this - I have! But it's the world we live in. Saying you'll vote for a third party candidate to "register your complaint" is a null gesture.
If you really care about politics, you'd have to work to push the party of your choice in the direction you want. This is long, hard work, and happens outside the presidential cycle. You have to march with signs, attend boring meetings, and persuade people you just met.
Complaining about the broken system every four years is neither mature nor effective.
I am moved to write this because, for multiple election cycles, I was that guy, until I realized my folly.
In a election that has the lowest ever recorded public opinion of the two candidates, my feeling of the election is this. The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.
If I was to favor the majority opinion, to oppose both Trump and Clinton is to campaign for democracy. If I had to guess what motivities Assange, if Clinton win people won't trust the government and if trump win people will fear the government. It is possible that the later will slightly produce more Snowden's.
"Public opinion of the candidates" doesn't mean anything. Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie Sanders, beating him by ten times the number of votes Obama beat HRC with in 2008. Similarly, Trump demolished his Republican opponents in the GOP primary. The voters made a clear choice.
Douglas Adams joked about this phenomenon by describing that people will vote for lizards they hate so long it means that the wrong lizard won't win. In a zero-sum game, that result is a Nash equilibrium.
It is still a lizard that get voted into office at the end of the day.
None of this is responsive to my comment. Hillary Clinton did not win in a squeaker over Sanders; she crushed him. The voters made a clear choice, and it wasn't for "the right kind of lizard". This is the Democratic primary we're talking about, and it wasn't a "lesser of two evils" race there.
If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion. Popularity opinion is shared between the left and right while same can't be said when talking about the vote for party candidates.
Some would point to the political events that the dc leaks talked about.
> If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion.
In favorability or approval (whatever that means in the context of a nominee) ratings? They mean different things, and aren't always directly related[1]. I could definitely see how Sanders would be liked more, but people would believe he's less likely to do a good job.
To suggest an explanation myself, voting where majority vote win has a different result that voting where highest ranking wins. When there is extreme high and extreme low opinion about choices, there is commonly a third option which is rated higher in average.
Say I rated taco, pizza and Italian salad as 10, 8, and 2, and you rated them as 2, 8, and 10, we can easily see that pizza wins even if neither of us has it as our primary pick. pizza in this case has highest opinion rating while the other two choices are quite far behind.
I don't dispute that, but it's not what I was referring to. Some polls ask what people think of the president (favorability ratings), and some are more specifically geared to asking about the job the president is doing (approval ratings). The article I linked to from Gallup points to situations where they do not always correlate as you would expect. For example, Bill Clinton in 1993 and 2000. In 1993 he had 59% favorability and 49% approval,and that just about reverse by 2000 when he had 60% approval, but only 46% favorability. People disliked him after the scandal, but they also conceded he was doing a good job.
So, what I wonder is what questions are actually asked regarding candidates? There isn't any data on them doing the job itself yet (unless they are an incumbent, which none are this cycle), so are they asking about how much they like the person, like the policies, or how confident they are the candidate can perform well? The answer to that question may lead to different likely reasons for the question at hand. Sanders is a likable guy. I like him. I'm also not convinced his policies, as expressed on the campaign trail, are feasible. Conversely, Hillary Clinton isn't very likable. I don't really like her. I do agree with many (but not all) of her policies, but most importantly I think her policies are feasible and have a chance of being implemented if she's elected. I am, in fact, the exact sort of person that might have expressed a favorable opinion for Sanders but voted for Hillary.
> The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.
Says right in the article, it was Russian hackers aiming to undermine the US democratic system. They saw this beautifully pristine, perfect and fair democratic system and said to themselves "let's undermine the fuck out of this thing".
Surely if it was already undermined to the point of being utterly broken they wouldn't have to bother, right?
Imagine a lake of piss, next to it, a mountain of shit.
Now I dump a whole bunch of garbage onto one of them.
Which am I supporting?
Or maybe you can explain this bit from the article that really mystified me: "[Russian hackers did something] with the aim of undermining the US democratic process". We've all seen what this democratic process looks like on TV, so what does it actually still mean, to undermine this democratic process?
Most Americans, do not really want to support Clinton over Trump or vice versa, they're angry and disappointed that from a nation of several hundred million people, apparently these two are the choices given to them by "the democratic process".
And apparently this is the way it is, because the election system makes it that way. It's probably the same causes that make just about every US election for as long as I remember end up just about this close to 50/50. Which, if you know anything about voting systems theory, is the number one failure mode of majority voting. But nobody finds this cultural either/or winner/loser fixation alarming at all, apparently. So again, what's left to undermine, really?
It's just like accusing someone of trying to undermine freedom of speech in China.
Suppose someone decides whether he wants to join the military or not. Isn't it important for him to know, that either a moron or a psychopath will decide where to deploy him? That he'll be deployed either because a foreign leader said something mean about the president on twitter or because someone bribed the president?
Are those the only choices? Or could the nation undergo a transformation about how money & politics are entwined and rethink the presidential elections?
Citation please. I haven't heard anything about that.
> Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump
Wikileaks can only leak what they've been given. Maybe people are feeding them more info about Hillary, but I would respect Wikileaks far less if they withheld information during an election year to protect a candidate.
The voters deserve to know everything there is to know about their candidates. It's an assault against the voters to withhold negative information about a candidate because you don't want their opponent to win.
Why would Assange, a confirmed Anarchist, support conservative, capitalist Republicans? That doesn't make any sense.
If anything, Assange would want the third party libertarian to win since he is the only guy advocating to stop the wars and reduce American involvement overseas, which is what Assange wants. He sees America as a menace and wants to stop the brutality of American "peace" in countries they have no business being in.
Assange doesn't support Trump or the Republicans. He supports Hillary Clinton not becoming President, because of his personal vendetta against her. It just happens that his efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign help Trump.
As an anarchist, Assange probably wouldn't care about the libertarians more than any other candidate, since any candidate would only futher the existence and legitimacy of a state which he would rather see destroyed. If he did support Trump, it would be because he believes a Trump Presidency would only hasten America's demise.
Assange/Wikileaks nemesis is secrecy and corruption, not HRC specifically. Now if they view her as the most corrupt, they would naturally be against her, and inevitably that supports Trump. But that is not the same as the rabid right wing supporter of Trump.
Assange is savvy enough to know their position inevitably supports Trump, but there isn't any reason to think if they viewed Trump as more corrupt they would be against him. So it is possible they take a principled position while wrongly accused of having a preference in who wins the election.
This argument depends on Trump being "less corrupt" than HRC. If you believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate, you can plausibly argue that Assange is somehow justified in supporting a candidate who is calling for the death penalty for leakers. It won't be a strong argument, but it'll be coherent.
But very few observers of US politics believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. A more widely held belief is that he's the most corrupt major party nominee in the history of US politics.
It depends what you consider to be corruption. I don't have any confidence that they will enact the policies they describe. Trump is a well-known charlatan and liar. Clinton, however, comes closer to corruption via corporate interests and wealthy friends.
Disclosure: I support neither candidate and will probably vote the Party for Socialism and Liberation this cycle.
I hear people saying the 'most corrupt candidate ever!' about both candidates. More about HRC than Trump though. For some reason I doubt both assertions.
Look, if you're a Trump supporter, I exempt you from criticism about support for Wikileaks. As a Trump supporter, your support for Wikileaks is totally coherent.
Trump's corruption and naked greed is overt and out-in-the-open. He's even proud of it.
Clinton's happens in secret and is masked by insincerity, lies, etc.
I think there's a brain glitch at play here -- corruption in the style of Clinton feels more corrupt because it's secretive, even if the out-in-the-open corruption is just as bad or worse.
You write as if Trump is just as dirty as Clinton and Assange is simply choosing to not release that information. It is possible that Clinton is, as Trump says, the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics. She's been hit with scandal after scandal. And before you say those scandals are a result of partisan witch-hunting, Obama never had these scandals that Hillary did.
>And before you say those scandals are a result of partisan witch-hunting, Obama never had these scandals that Hillary did.
Um, are you just blanking 2004 out of your head? This is just the same stuff all over again. All of the screaming and shouting about birth certificates and generally shady connections? His ultimate Muslim agenda to bring down the Great Satan that is America?
Absolutely nothing of worth is coming from the leaked documents, despite all hell being raised about a smoking gun (that no one can point to) in them. It literally is a witch hunt. If these past 4 elections aren't going to kill the GOP in general, I don't know if anything will. It should be disgusting the out right lies and propaganda that they employ, with a complete lack of integrity and standards. But people still buy into the juicy conspiracy theories and the generally "known and accepted" unknowns.
If HRC is the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics, then then last 4 decades of investigations and general obstructionism were undertaken by the most incompetent politicians in the history of politics. Not just one, a whole collection of individuals (senators, house members, governors) from one party who despite their best efforts continually fails at proving claims they have no problem repeating until people start to believe them.
The Republicans have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars investigating Hillary and so far, nothing has stuck. She may actually be the cleanest candidate in the history of politics.
Nothing sticking on her doesn’t have to mean she is the cleanest. It could also mean she has the best spin-doctors or very influential friends that help steer the public discourse.
There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms.
There really are people who believe that.
In fact, depending on where you get your news, you might also believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actual literal demons, who smell of sulfur.
I don't believe I made any outrageous claims. I literally linked to a CNN article (which is usually considered middle to slightly left leaning) regarding a top clinton donor being appointed to a security committee.
I definitely don't think you should disregard others opinions just because,
"There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms."
The article you linked to does not make the claim you did. Why is your spin more credible than the claim that Clinton is a sulfurous demon who is motivated only by a hatred of Christianity?
But, again! This is an unproductive political argument. If you support Trump, your support for Wikileaks is entirely coherent. I'm not here to argue that people shouldn't support Trump (I hope those arguments are self-evident). I'm here to point out that people who oppose Trump should recognize the role Wikileaks is playing.
The article did make the claim, it was pointing out how one of the largest clinton foundation donors, as well as straight political donors was given a seat on the state departments Intel board, despite not being qualified. Eventually, they had to step down.
Again, what you said has no bearing on what I said... I wasn't even discussing wikileaks - I was responding to the parent, mentioning how nothing sticks.
As for political ideology, again I made no comment. It's fair to call Hilary corrupt because she is, there's no political leaning involved in my comment. She clearly did a bunch of stuff on the edge of what was moral/legal. She clearly makes deals to gain favors - that's basically what politics is. I made zero comments on trump.
Finally, I am not a supporter of either candidate - they both suck and both aren't representative of my views. Nor are either going to improve my quality of life or increase my personal (or family) security.
There are also people who believe exactly what you do politically, but also believe in alien abductions, crop cirles, homeopathy and what have you. You can be sure of it.
Pointing to fringes to discredit the mainstream of said fringe is just a cheap tactic, not something worth doing out of concern for the truth.
I wouldn't say "cleanest". A lot of the stuff she's been investigated for is completely true, but for whatever reason hasn't stuck. We know for a fact the whole emails thing was completely true. She sent state secrets over a private email server using non-secured devices, and those emails were leaked to foreign governments. Doesn't sound "clean" to me.
An aside - it's been mentioned many times in recent years that the rules regarding email for adminstration officials were never so clearly defined as to preclude someone from running their own email server and the Bush administration employed many non governmental email accounts and servers. They even 'lost' Up To 22 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
I'm honestly curious as to why that was never investigated with the same level of intensity.
The simplest explanation is that the Democrats were only briefly in power in Congress and going after the Bush administration didn't make political sense — Obama rather famously called to move forward rather than fight over the past.
In contrast, a wide range of right-wing people have spent three decades and many millions of dollars going after both Clintons, with considerable personal demonization over that time. When Obama was elected, the GOP's goal was to limit him to one term. That means a bunch of people had angles to exploit anything remotely plausible: it kept the base riled up and voting accordingly, it helped attack the sitting president by association, and maybe damage his most likely successor. The entire email story was only discovered as part of the endless attempts to trump up a scandal from the Benghazi attack, by which time the pattern of relentlessly litigating everything was just the assumed default.
There just isn't an equivalent on the Democratic side. Yes, there are people who don't like Bush (or now Trump) but there aren't rich people pushing to scrutinize his private life and the members of Congress don't seem to think that's a good use of their time.
We in fact do not know that. Moreover, during the time period Clinton was using her personal mail server --- a thing she discussed at length with Colin Powell, her predecessor --- the State Department's own email server was comprehensively owned up by (wait for it) Russian hackers.
It is not only possible but actually somewhat likely that her mails were safer on her own server.
The "msm echochamber" thing is an especially funny trope, as it amounts to saying, "source on that claim, apart from all of the journalists who actually investigate claims like this".
There's evidence in the leaked emails that parts of the media take orders from political entities or politically interested parent companies. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a source that isn't essentially a known liar.
Trump is much dirtier, and most of that, including outright bribery illegally using charity fund, had come out without needing anything like WikiLeaks.
Interesting. I was under the impression that it was mostly a vendetta against Clinton, not support of Trump. I don't pay that much attention to Assange or Wikileaks to be honest, I personally find quite a lot of what they do distasteful.
Could you link to statements where Assange is given praise to Trump and encouraging people to vote for Trump, you know like quality comments do that make assertion about peoples intentions. It would be a nice change to the many political opinions being thrown around here that assume that people can't just hate both political figures and view them both as corrupt and harmful.
This is one of those weird arguments I hear all the time from WL supporters that I don't understand why I'm supposed to even take it seriously; it's gaslighty in the same way Mike Pence's claim that Trump hadn't said those things about Syria and Russia are.
Obviously, he doesn't have to say anything positive about Trump at all to support him, and in fact the kind of support he's offering (a drip-drip feed of the products of Russian hacking calculated to create an "October Surprise") is far more valuable than any verbal support he could give Trump directly.
I mean here to be dismissive without being too disrespectful. But I'll be candid: people who say Assange isn't supporting Trump sound pretty silly. Like, the claim says more about them than it does about the election.
You're asserting that Assange supports Trump because of the fact he's opposing HRC on the basis of "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality.
Believing that sort of dichotomy is "pretty silly" and says plenty about you.
I entertain many ideas, though I don't see that one as particularly likely. I was just pointing to an unstated assumption, not one that I saw as likely to be false.
To be equally candid, I find people silly who proclaim that every time someone say a negative about something they are promoting something else.
Through I must say, it does making viewing news more interesting. Someone say a negative about a product, I wonder which competitor paid them? Someone released a security vulnerability, I wonder what competing product they are trying to sell.
It basically makes all negative statements into a conspiracy, which honestly is silly, but fun thought experiment.
There actually is what I believe a credible alternate explanation to Wikileaks supporting Trump, and it's that Wikileaks (or perhaps just Assange) is fighting for relevance, and is willing to be the obvious pawn of others to keep that relevance. What if it's not Wikileaks that's drip-feeding the information, but the source itself? One would think Assange would be smart enough to not promise what he hasn't already gotten hold of, but perhaps he agreed to a release schedule before getting all the information, and is following through on his promise. Not that I think that excuses being a pawn for what is most likely a state actor trying to meddle in the national election of another country.
Neither case really paints a good picture of Wikileaks as an impartial journalistic organization.
Assange is an Anarchist who was to end America's constant war with the rest of the world. Trump and Clinton are the last people he would want to see in the Whitehouse. You know who make perfect sense for Assange to Support? Gary Johnson, the only anti-war candidate and Libertarian. But continue on with your mental gymnastics to turn the anti-war Assange into a capitalist, warhawk republican.
And I'm sure, were his sources to give him a cache of (ostensibly) damaging documents about Trump, he'd drip-drip it out along with teasers and editorialized (and falsely contextualized) snippets, too.
Of course, that's not what's going to happen, because Wikileaks is in effect if not design a propaganda organ of the Russian Federation.
This is completely tangential to the OP, but what do the "means of production" mean nowadays? It's more and more about intelligence, intelligence property, knowledge and brain power. The latter is clearly owned by the workers who have brains; how do you socialize or nationalize them? And how do you nationalize IPR?
It means power -- power to the people in the interest of constitutional equality and liberty, not a tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, or bad democracy.
Aristotle said there are 6 kinds of government, 3 good ones and 3 bad ones.
The bad ones are where the ruler rules in their own interest. The good ones are where the ruler rules in the public interest.
How many people rule:
In Tyranny - 1 person rules in their own interest
Monarchy - 1 person rules in the public interest (a good tyrant is a monarch)
Aristocracy - a few people rule in the public interest
Oligarchy - a few people rule in their own interest
Democracy - all people rule in the public interest
Bad Democracy - all people rule in the interest of the majority and oppress the minority
>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” Mr. Assange said on Fox News. “I mean, from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second of the day.”
Assange is stuck in an embassy in the UK. Any normal, rational person would want to leave that situation.
Hillary has made it quite clear that would never happen however Trump has been far more supportive of Assange especially since Wikileaks has been his biggest asset.
Secondly, and with a little more convoluted reasoning: it seems to be a truism that Republican/Conservative presidencies are harder economically for people living in poverty. Republicans are less socialist, in other words. I think it's pretty clear that Assange would like to see a revolution in the US, and revolutions tend to happen when the people don't have enough to eat. Hoping for Trump to win could be seen as hoping for a revolution in that light.
No, Trump hasn't joked about drone-striking Assange. He has joked about torturing suspected terrorists and stated his intention to see Edward Snowden executed. But he didn't make a tasteless drone joke, that's true.
Right. Trump hasn't attacked Assange personally. If I had read a news article alleging that HRC had said, "Can't we just drone this guy?" about me, I would be pretty terrified to leave my flat as well. Even more so if it appeared that she was about to become the CEO of the US military.
If I could, I would encourage Julian Assange to stopfearingfor his life, and startliving it, whatever precious little (or lot) of it he might have left. Unfortunately, if he can't access the internet, he can't read this comment.
It's true that the whole world is watching this, and a lot of us in the US care not only for the fate of Assange, but also for the fate of our nation, how these two have become intertwined, and what it will mean if Assange does indeed come to harm as a result of his journalistic actions.
If I were Julian, I would use right now as the perfect opportunity to walk out, and face the charges in Sweden. At least then I could serve actual time (if necessary), and have an end to my imprisonment within sight.
Above all, this is certainly an excellent opportunity for Hillary to show that she can resolve a crisis diplomatically. If she could just tone things down a bit, she could assure Julian (and the world) that she does not actually mean him any harm. Of anyone, I would think that Hillary could be quite good at projecting soft power globally.
Besides, can you imagine what it would be like if they killed him now? The Hollywood trailer of his biopic would have to start with, "First, they cut your internet access ..." ;)
He could imagine (perhaps justifiably) that by serving as Putin's pawn and supporting Trump he could secure a better venue to seek asylum from Swedish rape charges than the Ecuadoran embassy, whether at the hands of Putin or Trump.
>Sarah Harrison, a British journalist and a longtime WikiLeaks editor, says that the organization would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them.
The bloomberg article also quoted someone from reddit as evidence that the right wing was 'shivering in anticipation' of leaks damaging to clinton. It's not great journalism and seems biased but it doesn't seem there is any evidence that assange is pro trump.
The Guardian one is slightly better. I don't think there is real evidence, and Assange isn't so stupid as to publicly say he supports Trump (even if he does, for whatever reason).
But if there is no agenda, it does make one wonder why the Wikileaks of late have focused on Clinton in the run up to the election
Occams Razor says that they've only received credible leaks about the HRC campaign.
Seems to me like anyone with credible evidence against Trump can sell it to the highest bidding mainstream media org and be sure it will get national attention. Why would a Trump leaker need wikileaks?
There is Assange's alleged Russian sponsorship [1]. The lack of Wikileaks activity critical of Russia and the attribution of some of its content to Russian intelligence operations [2] supports that.
> He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election.
He's in sanctuary, in part, because of fear of extradition to the US. So yeah, he does have a stake.
If Clinton wins she has no motivation to stop an extradition, since she figures in WL and other leaks.
If Trump wins, and Assange/WL is seen to have implicitly supported him, there is a hope for Assange that President Trump could prohibit his DoJ from extraditing, and his DoD from rendering. Not from gratitude, but because Trump is vindictive and that would be a way to stick it to ... to ... The Global Media/Banking/Government/NotWhite Conspiracy.
I'm kind of amazed that WL or someone else hasn't hacked and released Trump data. Do they just not use computers?
That's the thing. Rather than being a neutral clearinghouse, that it pretends to be, it's more and more selectively his mouthpiece, used to release information on people Assange dislikes, threaten others, and withhold release for groups he approves of.
i think it is pretty silly to say he has no stake in the election. almost everyone on in the world has a stake in who the american president is. even if it didn't have a direct effect on him, he is extremely idealogical and sees it as himself fighting against the global elite.
Assange and Ecuadorian ambassador (crawling under desk in office):
Assange: "Unplug it and plug it back in"
Ambassador: "I did"
Assange: "Are the lights blinking?"
Ambassador: "Some of them..."
Assange: "Which ones..."
Ambassador: "Why am I doing this?"
Assange: "Which lights?"
Ambassador: "All of them..."
Yup. No explanation from @Wikileaks either
(a two day delay after the original enigmatic tweet and kludging yet another reference to Hillary Clinton Goldman Sachs emails - hardly likely to be Ecuador's main concern - into the followup suggests that whoever is managing the Twitter account is more worried about managing the US election news cycle than anything else...)
There goes whatever credibility they had left. Ecuador shut him off, but they deliberately word the original announcement to make it sound like it was the US or the U.K. Good going, guys.
> They can't possibly isolate it to just Assange, so it must be the whole embassy.
Maybe not specifically to Assange, but they might be able to get close to that. An embassy probably wants to have separate, isolated networks to keep various classes of users apart. The top diplomats and officials who deal with the most important, most secret stuff on one. Another for lower level officials who deal with secret, but more routine stuff. A third that provides wifi for people visiting the embassy to use its services. Maybe a fourth for foreign diplomats attending meetings.
I could see them going beyond just building one physical network and then using firewalls to segment it into separate isolated logical networks and actually having separate physical connections for some of the networks, such as the one for visitors seeking services, and the one for foreign diplomats.
If they do have multiple physical networks, I'd expect they have Assange on one of the ones that is not important to the normal functioning of the embassy, such as one mostly used by people visiting to apply for visas and things like that. A large fraction of such visitors will have cellular internet on their phones and won't even notice that the embassy public wifi is broken.
I believe he's staying in some sort of separate guest house on the embassy grounds...of course forcing him to walk across the lawn to the main building hardly seems like a worthwhile op.
I have no direct evidence. My bet is based on the simple fact that 1) the claim of access being cut off by a state actor is pretty huge and completely unsubstantiated, and 2) random internet outages are not uncommon.
Whoever runs the Wikileaks twitter has posted anti-Semitic tweets and wild conspiracy theories. You're also assuming that whoever posts to the Wikileaks twitter account doesn't want people to believe the most sympathetic, conspiratorial possibility.
> Whoever runs the Wikileaks twitter has posted anti-Semitic tweets
I was surprised by your claim that wikileaks posted something antisemitic, so I googled for it.
Is http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil... what you're talking about? I don't agree that's antisemetic in any honest sense of that word (ie "hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews"). Like, the article's explanation of why it's anti-semitic starts off with "this might be a little hard to follow" -- not something you'd expect in an article throwing around serious accusations.
Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed. --reputation[Slate];
> and wild conspiracy theories
Interesting, any you'd care to link?
> You're also assuming that whoever posts to the Wikileaks twitter account doesn't want people to believe the most sympathetic, conspiratorial possibility.
I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
>I don't agree that's antisemetic in any honest sense of that word (ie "hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews").
It's using the clearly anti-Semitic (((echo))) format, and linking those people to a mysterious cabal working against them. That is an incredibly standard anti-Semitic view. In what way is that not prejudiced against Jews?
>Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed.
What is Hanlon's razor for including an anti-Semitic key in their tweet? I'm honestly asking what the simpler explanation is for them including that, and then going on to link (((those people))) to an international conspiracy, something people have accused Jews of for centuries.
>I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...
Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did. Posting a wild conspiracy theory in this case would be openly accusing a specific person or group of people of murder with no evidence.
I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
> Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.
They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause -- aka a lot of cost with no benefit. Seems surprisingly stupid/pointless/shortsighted.
Then why use it? You're saying it's more likely they hadn't heard of it, but used it anyway? You've never heard of it, have you ever surrounded a reference to people you don't like and are accusing of nefarious deeds with triple parentheses? What about the additional part about a shadowy cabal that you ignored?
>Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did.
If I offer a reward for proof that aliens abducted Elvis, you don't consider that lending credence to a conspiracy theory?
>I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.
Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
>They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause
No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
> Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.
Leaks of significance are of course worth more. Soliciting leaks is absolutely something they do (and should do).
> No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.
Well, except that denying hard evidence doesn't usually work (#include those who have been leak subjects). Also people all over the web are having conversations like this one, so the situation degenerating into a head-said/she-said situation would have a cost. Which as I pointed out before was an obvious outcome of their tweet.
I think that it is just one of those random down times that Virgin Media have on their super-fast optical internets. When this happens to me I curse my housemate for not paying the bill - why else would it be off for days at a time? Then it comes back on, unannounced with my housemate not to blame.
I guess that if you are living in a state of fear, expecting storm troopers through the door at any moment, then you could reasonably presume that the CIA are to blame for one's lack of wifi.
To be honest, I wish it was newsworthy when I spent a day or two offline. But it isn't.
I don't get why everyone is so willing to believe this claim, based on nothing but what Wikileaks says.
I mean, what would be the goal? They go to all this trouble, and risk an international incident, for what? It's not like they'd actually be able to prevent Assange from communicating. At best they'd inconvenience him slightly until he figures out an alternate means of communication.
Even if the embassy was shut down surely just a cheap smart phone would rectify the situation and get him back online. Are they somehow blocking mobile signals as well?
Yes, but Assange cannot step out of the embassy to buy one himself, and he's fairly paranoid. There are probably only very few people in the world from whom he would accept a phone to enter all of his precious passwords, if he is willing to use a phone for that at all.
It's probably all the same to him. Assange is likely clever enough to assume all his traffic is combed through by smart people, no matter which data transport he uses.
It would be a fun hackathon project to build such a thing out of the components you could find in typical office equipment, and I wouldn't expect it to take a competent EE more than a few hours (if you'll allow continuous wave Morse code as a transport layer).
But based on where the embassy is, it's probably easier to stand near a window and get on the WiFi from Pret a Manger next door.
So wouldn't many other people be able to confirm this? How many other people visit or work in said embassy, and how many officially assigned to the embassy work there??
All your theories rest on the assumption that someone deliberately and maliciously 'cut' his internet access. There's no evidence of that or even that his access has been 'cut', whatever that means.
It's certainly a lot easier to conceive how announcement that state level actors had interfered with his internet access benefits Assange than how a deliberate, malicious and above all temporary and ineffective cut in his internet access on this particular day benefits state actors.
On the one hand we have a guy with the big cache of emails he really wants people to pay more attention to before November 9th, and a police interview originally scheduled for today that he might want to find a reason to postpone for more than a month next time. On the other hand, I'm really struggling to see what forcing Assange to wait a few hours or change computers achieves, or what the motivation for shutting him off today rather than November 8th is?
To me, the simplest and obvious explanation, barring any new evidence from independent sources, is that Wikileaks (the only source so far) is simply trying to generate attention and stay in the news cycle. It's not like these email releases have produced anything mildly interesting, let alone scandalous.
There is a caveat to the legality of classified materials, usually you must have been "entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of". Which alludes to the fact that you would first have to have been read in, or taken the material that you knew was classified.
There is also a "requirement" to "knowingly" cause harm. I put these in quotes because the wording and the enforcement of that requirement has been in flux and selective. Also relevant is that gross negligence would also meet the requirement.
I guess a creative prosecutor could challenge that visiting wikileaks would be knowingly removing the material from the server, but it would probably be beyond difficult to meet all of the guidelines for prosecution.
That being said. If you do currently hold a clearance, visiting Wikileaks is a violation of your NDA/ReadIn, Employment Agreement, and the UCMJ for service members.
> That being said. If you do currently hold a clearance, visiting Wikileaks is a violation of your NDA/ReadIn, Employment Agreement, and the UCMJ for service members.
In order to access classified information, you must posses two things:
1) the appropriate clearance level (confidential, secret, top secret)
2) a need to know
So even possessing the appropriate clearance level doesn't give you the right to just start reading anything that interests you on a classified network. You're supposed to have a "need to know" in case you're questioned about it.
We always get stuff here (contractor on AFB) about "don't read this or that" or else you could be in trouble. But I've never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble.
I never saw anything in writing, but after the Bradley Manning leaks we got a SHIT TON of briefs about not visiting WL, no looking at the leaked docs, and a whole lot of other "don'ts". Never heard of anyone visiting the site after that, and never heard of any shit rolling down from people violating the orders.
Insert meme about protection from DD214 blanket...
Jokes aside, I found myself on the site for the first time ever last week... Didn't want to fuck with that shit during my service or while holding a clearance.
But question... While I no longer have a clearance, I am still eligible for a clearance if I need it within the next few years... Should I be concerned?
IANAL, but the primary concern for service members is the UCMJ and violation of a lawful order as it is far more black and white legally. That being said, I would be cautious if you were interested in anything that included a CI or Full Scope Poly requirement.
Congress cannot prohibit speech or press. If it has been written down or spoken, then the US Constitution provides absolute legal justification for viewing it, copying it, and discussing it, without any restriction.
I am not a lawyer but I'd say this is a legal gray area.
The leaker probably broke a law. E.g., hacking Podesta's private emails would have been illegal under computer fraud and abuse. It's alternately possible that the leaker had legal access but breached contract to release the data publicly.
Now that the information has been leaked, it's hard to say that it's clearly illegal for John Q. Public to access what Wikileaks has made publicly available. The anchor is unable to point to a specific statute in his tweet above and also mentions that it hasn't been tested in court to his knowledge.
A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity. This HN comment has curated some links to primary evidence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722664 . Take a quick perusal and you'll be about as informed as anyone on the answer to your question.
>A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity.
This is a nice bit of propaganda you've put forth here.
Here's a Harvard study into the majority of the 2016 election coverage including primaries which shows a demonstrably strong bias in the media pro-Trump and anti-Clinton and demonstrates that Clinton has received a FAR more harsh relationship with the major press.
It demonstrates that coverage of Clinton was on average negative about her for the entirety of 2015.
It demonstrates that Trump enjoyed a very positive and cushy relationship with newsmedia who combined to give him hundreds of millions USD of free exposure.
I would argue that Clinton has had mostly negative coverage up until the end of September 2016.
Yes, it's almost as if Trump's positive media attention in late 2015 was coordinated somehow. Like they were instructed to take him seriously or something...
I hope you are rational enough to see the hilarious doublespeak being engaged in here:
* Positive coverage of hillary is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
* Positive coverage of her opponent, is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
Come on man. I hope readers of this particular site are rational enough to apply occam's razor and think critically.
I also find it extremely telling that Donald Trump, Mr Reality TV and the "hyper-successful" media and real estate man isn't responsible for his own success, but rather it's his opponent which is apparently so powerful that every single event occurring is by her design...?
How feckless Trump appears in your "everything good or bad happening to both candidates was preordained in a conspiracy" viewpoint!
Not everything is a conspiracy, I hope you're capable of rational thought.
There's a dimension/axis of time involved in the pattern. At least some (substantial?) positive coverage of Trump before Republican nomination is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media.
I, for one, am also comfortable blaming the Republican electorate for allowing the three pied pipers, including Trump, to have been elevated.
Wait, so because a political opponent identified him (and 2 others) as the weakest and most unpalatable candidates, that means media outlets were "instructed" to prop him up?
It seems like his tweet defends the possibility of it being illegal, but not the idea that somehow it could possibly be legal for CNN & "the media" while still illegal for everyone else, which seems like the most absurd part to me.
I guess he never explicitly said it was legal for CNN -- maybe he was claiming that CNN is generously taking on all that legal risk so the rest of us don't have to?
Funny too because the argument is that Hillary wasn't negligent with classified data, thus why would Podesta emails be unlawful to read? Either information is classified and Hillary was criminally negligent or it's not and therefore nothing 'unlawful' about WikiLeaks.
More interesting that CNN thinks they can read them but the public can not. Media organizations have no security clearances and thus are subject to the same access as anyone else.
Well to be fair, media organizations like CNN have legal departments staffed with experts ready to fight on this type of stuff. You and I probably do not.
There is also the famous Pentagon Papers case, which to my knowledge rests on the "freedom of the press" language in the First Amendment.
That said, this was a stupid thing for the CNN anchor to say. Regardless of the law, no federal prosecutor is going to waste their time trying to find and prosecute every U.S. citizen who visits the Wikileaks website.
Technical question: assuming no targeted malware, is it possible for an actor outside of the embassy network to cut internet access to Assange's devices while leaving the other devices in the network unaffected?
The ISP could do it in theory with filtering based on traffic patterns. The use of cryptography in the embassy plus where the normal traffic was going would determine how effective it was in terms of just hitting him.
Seems totally unnecessary, considering he could just be handed someone else's laptop, right? I'd imagine it would have to be the entire embassy, or else the network that he has access to in his space.
What I'm saying is that most of the embassy connections are probably not going to Tor, Wikileaks, known proxies, etc. They could filter just that to give him lots of headaches. Plus look at and block every site they connect to. They probably already have a team dedicated to him anyway.
He might work around it but it's an option. I don't know about whether it's legal under UK law but their surveillance organizations seem to get away with a lot.
> I don't know about whether it's legal under UK law but their surveillance organizations seem to get away with a lot.
If GCHQ are involved with any such interference, their actions are fairly unconstrained by law. Paraphrasing Intelligence Services Act 1994, s.(3)[1]:
> [GCHQ shall] monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions [...] in the interests of national security, [or] in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands [or] in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.
As far as I know, there is nothing in statute that constrains how they go about that (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 adds a couple of hurdles in regards to interception). Any oversight comes from various Parliamentary committees.
> so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
When a system is failing it enters a death spiral where the pool from which it can hire people gets shallower and shallower (less people are interested in working for the government) until the only persons left are either morons or sociopaths (who want power)
We're in the middle of some crazy propaganda war right now, and it's been this way for quite a while. It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Ever since the DNC leaks and the subsequent accusations against Russia, it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former. Since the RNC, Trump's campaign has been entirely pushing "Don't believe their lies", and the gaslighting from both sides seems to be hitting a nadir at this moment. It's becoming far more difficult to find reality in the fog.
Wikileaks announced for weeks when they were releasing the emails. It was a pre-planned event that the entire world was waiting for.
The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point, since the very emails they are trying to distract us from, detail instance after instance after instance of such collusion.
I share your concern that we'll ever get honest reporting from the media again, and I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
I'd like to suggest a more significant conclusion.
The trust I have had in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ABC/NBC/CBS, Democratic and Republican parties has been irreparably damaged.
I've been a cord cutter for over a decade. This year I graduated to pitying people who repeat the latest front page story as naive fear-junkies. Everything is suspect. Why burn processing cycles reading stories that on their face are actually stupid with conclusions that are unsupported by verifiable facts? (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cia-prepping-possible-cy...)
Between the Sponsored Content, Native Ads and all of the investigative journalists who (according to DNC emails) are labeled as "friends," I have no choice but to say "I quit." They are pretty lies that don't nourish!
I could be as much skeptic as you and I can draw my own conclusions for why this particular story might have been published now and not before, and for what purpose, but this doesn't stop me from enjoying reading it and absorbing its juicy details and knowledge.
I'm still thankful for NYT for dedicating time and effort to expose this person as a fraud and hypocrite and I'm looking forward to reading more of these in the future for other despicable figures.
I read this and my first instinct was "what PR team pitched this story?"
Maybe none. But one way the times could re establish credibility with me is to be transparent about how much the writer engaged with pr reps or communications teams in each story. It doesn't have to be exhaustive.
A PR/fluff piece that he bought a $500 mln yacht on a whim while calling for austerity in his own country cutting govt employees salaries and benefits?
That would be the worst PR piece you could ask for, unless you mean that you suspect that his political foes were the ones behind this story which is not unlikely but again not a deal-breaker and what's only important to me is the question, were the details listed in the piece factual or not?
I've been there for a while. I only trust a few people who thanklessly go through materials and study issues in detail. If I want to verify further I can only then trust primary sources and direct evidence.
For a long time now, all forms of traditional media have had a bent. It's just gotten very monied and politicized as of late.
One option of course, which as a European who had to live with media-government collusion his whole life, is to triangulate: Read foreign media, read political opponents views on the same topic as the mainstream media, read (if available) conflicting mainstream media stories. Take it all in, and triangulate. Very often the BS from one side cancels out the BS from the other side and you are not closer to reality. But very often it's the scrutiny from either side on an opposing paradigm, that gets you closer to what actually happened. Finally, draw your own conclusions based on history/education/philosophy.
Yes, this was something explicitly taught in political science. It's important to understand the paper and writer bias, by reading multiple sources it's possible to unwind the ideology to a fairly good degree - and triangulate.
> One option of course, which as a European who had to live with media-government collusion his whole life, is to triangulate
That's what's really depressing about this: it is absurdly easy to get to the bottom of whether a fricking blender is worth buying, but important events happening in the world? Get your researchin' shoes on.
By the way, thank you very much for your input - your experience in that arena is unique and very valuable to the discussion.
It saddens me greatly to hear this sentiment reflected here at Hacker News. To reject the entire institution of journalism is a radical position, and not justified by fact. Manipulating the timing of release is a common tool used by literally every public figure and institution. To characterize timing manipulation as collusion and to imply that it means no-one can be trusted is a critical mistake.
Given my position, I think it's useful to state what would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. It's actually really simple: if it persistently reports incidents for which there is no proof, or if it reports incidents in such a way that obscures the facts themselves (spin). Any institution that regularly confuses editorializing for journalism losses its credibility. By these rules there are many institutions that are not trustworthy (e.g. Fox) but there are many institutions that are (the NYT).
Behavior such as these from CNN: [1] and [2] has been par for the course for the mainstream media as far as I have seen this year. Scare, divert, suppress, collude, whatever it takes to avoid the public getting to the truth if it will hurt their candidate.
I just can't understand how this does not scare people. How is this different from the state run media in third-world countries we used to laugh at as kids?
It may be working out for your team _this_time_, but the same behavior will almost certainly be used against you in the future.
I can say that the media took a sharp turn around 2000-2001 era, especially after 9/11. The rise of 24x7 news outlets and the internet (which has killed journalism in newspapers financially) turned it into basically a PR agency for the government and powerful interests. "Scare, divert, suppress, collude" have been tactics that have gone on at least for the past 16 years.
In fact, I think they were going on in the 15 years before that as well, though they were less pronounced, less obvious and less extreme. The media has probably always been a bit of a propaganda organ... it's just that the voices were a lot more diverse.
The really alarming thing we've seen this year is Google, Facebook and Reddit starting to use algorithms to suppress some voices and amplify others. Combine that with "Correct The Record" (the army of paid hillary shills who have taken over at least reddit) and the internet is no longer the alternative where you can have a reasonable discussion.
Why participate when your opponent is most likely a hired troll?
Tried t quote you, but my mobile browser does not work well here.
Your <s>'tinfoil hat conspiracy theory'</s> is anything but. Balanced, objective reporting in the US died in 1987, the very day it was no longer required by law:
I'm skeptical of my own opinions, especially in any case where I do not have access to unfiltered direct evidence. IMHO to not be skeptical of opinions derived from Nth hand data is insane.
How is the NYT trustworthy. The front page contains a dozen or so anti-Trump stories and zero about anything in the email leaks. I want to trust the NYTimes but it's hard to take seriously a paper that ignores something important. The same would be true if it had ignored Trump's leaked tax docs.
I'm using this example as an internet community that curates information critical to Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party campaigns. In that list are several that discuss content within the email leaks in a fashion critical to Hillary Clinton.
Publications should be permitted to publish stories critical of both major political parties.
Many of these are old and do not address the content of the emails. There are perhaps 100 significant stories that could have been written based on the information leaked in the past 10 days. We got zero.
The paper has also declined to collaborate with Assange to release stories about many other leaks. The NYT is America's Pravda.
By the establishment and for the establishment... the definition of conservative.
To think of all those who undertook personal risk over the years to build a great news organization! Too much competition from buzzfeed seems to have left the paper toothless and officious.
Historians will likely view the gutting of the adversarial, investigative press as the factor that accelerated our civilization's return to authoritarianism.
> Many of these are old and do not address the content of the emails. There are perhaps 100 significant stories that could have been written based on the information leaked in the past 10 days. We got zero.
The Post has three stories based on emails in the last 48 hours:
The "State pressuring FBI" story is an example of the press doing their best to make news out of nothing.
Inter-agency conflict and negotiation happens all the time within the federal government. It's not corruption because both sides are career civil service. For there to be a serious story here, the Post would need to have some evidence that Clinton asked Kennedy to do this, which they don't.
The ratio of repeated stories about Trump's lewd remarks to stories about the content of the emails is still quite skewed.
The NYT has not run any stories about the content of the emails on its front page in the last ten days. The stories people have linked are buried deep behind the paywall.
Where's the story about the machinations to deliberately harm the Sanders campaign? Where's the interview with Sanders asking what he'd have done if the emails had been leaked a few weeks earlier? Where is the headline "DNC corruption widespread", etc.
The purpose of an adversarial press (and press freedom in general) is to ask the very tough questions. The NYT has been derelict in its failure to do this when it comes to the leaked emails.
Yes, we all knew the likely content of the Goldman speeches. But the story has to do with how the HRC campaign went to great lengths to please Wall Street while also dealing with the Sanders left which was pretty strongly anti-Wall Street. Is there historical precedent for a politician to speak out of both sides of their mouth to this degree on a fairly important issue (highly likely laws will be passed pertaining to wall street reforms (or lack thereof) during her term in office, in contrast to many other wedge issues where the probability of laws being passed is next to nil)?
There has been a tremendous need for top-tier reporting on the leaked emails. You point out three stories, but there have been stories on less than 30% of the newsworthy items, vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks. Incidentally, the remarks speak for themselves and there is little a "journalist" can do other than quote them and let people be (appropriately) horrified.
Perhaps with respect to the lewd comments, an interactive timeline of each accuser and a status of any legal action pertaining to the claims would be helpful, but is it seriously deserving of 3-4 front page slots on the NYT every day for the past week?
Also, there has been no serious coverage of the third party candidates' positions on key issues. Frankly in spite of the few awkward aspects of each, both of them are far more impressive (and seem significantly more intelligent) making ad-hoc comments about nearly any issue.
There is nothing wrong with a news organization presenting its political opinions -- on the opinion page! The rest should be old fashioned factual reporting intended to enrich the discussion not color it or focus it on a subset of issues.
I brought up Buzzfeed simply because I fear that too much of the NYT focus has become about the number of online views/clicks a story gets, to the point where this has impacted page layout, headline copy, etc.
> but there have been stories on less than 30% of the newsworthy items,
You assume they are newsworthy. Most of what I've seen, from a running tally Politico is doing as they go through them, doesn't seem overly newsworthy. The ones that have been reported seem to be mostly explainable, and look much worse when you assume context rather than put it in context, or allow the Podesta to put it in context.
> vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks.
Many people are very upset about those "lewd remarks". Possibly because they admit to real actions of misconduct. I think there's a false equivalence going on here. One situation is about a staffer for the Clinton campaign with lots of emails that sometimes seem to allege something, but are generally somewhat informal and it's hard to pin down specifics, and the other is about Trump himself admitting to sexual assault on tape, and then saying it was just words and he never would do something like that, and then people coming forward saying he specifically did it to them. For many people, a single true instance of this is enough to immediately discount him as a possible candidate they could vote for. That's a big story, and will get a lot of attention, as much as you might like it not to.
I see two sentences of substance in your bizarre response.
> Many of these are old and do not address the content of the emails. There are perhaps 100 significant stories that could have been written based on the information leaked in the past 10 days. We got zero.
You might find stories buried deep behind the paywall. But the NYT has not run any front page stories in the last 10 days about the content of the email leaks. By contrast there have been 3-5 front page stories about Trump's rude remarks every day. This is basically one story about Trump being repeated in multiple stories, yet hundreds of newsworthy stories deriving from the leaks go unreported.
Buzzfeed's sop to actual journalism neither excuses their deliberate damage to the profession nor demonstrates they are less of a competitor to the New York Times.
For someone ragging on the lack of investigation the press are doing, you're doing a poor job of it yourself. Simply googling 'nyt clinton email' comes up with a handful of stories from the past 10 days (there's also a lot of stories older than 10 days in the search).
There may be some buried beneath the paywall. The NYT has not run any front page stories about the content of the email leaks in the past 10 days, yet each day has run at least three front page stories about the same actual story (Trump lewd remarks and subsequent sexual assault allegations).
I'm no fan of Trump and would never vote for him, but the free and adversarial press is a crucial aspect of democracy which is not doing its job.
That is because the recent email leaks just validated what everyone already knew about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
The fact that the emails were LEAKED OMG is not the newsworthy part. It is what is in them. And largely speaking, there's not much news in them.
IMO a major problem in the U.S. today is that not many people understand how political campaigns or the federal government actually work. So a lot of people can be led to believe that boringly standard practices like revising talking points over email, and getting updates on court hearings, are actually proof of corruption. But they're not.
And what don't we already know about Trump? Even if true, if this is serious journalism, why they keep printing she said he said? Wouldn't it be excellent time to print the stories of the alleged rape victims of Bill Clinton too? Since they publicly admit he and Hillary is a team? If you think media is not one sides, even if sided slightly more sane side, you're out of your mind.
These stories were beaten to death in the 90's. Back then, I hoped that they would impeach Bill just so I wouldn't have to hear about it any more. I don't think you'll find many people that want to do it all over again.
I've not heard anywhere that they were leaked, which suggests a disgruntled insider. The US government claims that they were hacked, and apparently that information was communicate to both Trump and Clinton in their national security briefings.
Assange has not been forthcoming about the source of the emails.
Is a conspiracy by top officials at the DNC to harm a party candidate during the primary a minor deal? To me this is corruption at close to the highest level. Yes, it's a private org, but one that is critical to the functioning of our democracy.
Is a candidate making promises to wall street that directly contradict her campaign promises a minor deal? Well, we can cynically assume all pols are dishonest, or the press can help us simply hold all pols accountable for their promises. I'd like to see fewer promises made and more promises kept. It was frankly a bit shady that HRC refused to release the transcripts, and I think there is a newsworthy story detailing the interest groups she was courting and why they are so influential in American politics.
The DNC Sanders emails were extremely widely covered when they came out earlier this year and led directly to a change in leadership at DNC. Are you trying to suggest those got ignored?
I've looked through the Goldman transcripts, and maybe I'm stupid, but I didn't see her making any promises. If you've got a direct quote, lay it on me.
I'm not holding my breath, though, since so far you only seem interested in vague concern-trolling.
Yes, followed by the person who was forced to step down being immediately re-hired by the HRC campaign. What is troubling about it is what it suggests about HRC -- that she got cronies into powerful positions in the DNC, that they helped subvert the primary process in her favor, and that she re-hired the disgraced DNC leader, signaling to any other cronies that she'd have their back if they got caught, too.
The issue is institutional corruption, and it should be the main story out of the leaked emails. Politics can get ugly, but the purpose of the primary is to vet the candidates that have pledged allegiance to the party by letting party members vote in the primary election.
In my opinion, HRC should have been put on the spot to answer for why the corruption that benefitted her happened, and why she re-hired DWS the next day.
I'm not aligned with either party so I don't care so much who the candidate is, but I do care about the quality of the institutions that are part of our democratic system. We should all care, because the institutions (and their lack of corruption) is more important than who wins any single election (primary or secondary).
When you think about all the idealistic Sanders supporters who donated money and time only to have their trusted DNC leaders try to sabotage their preferred candidate, the amount of harm done to our democracy by this was substantial. Think of the cynicism and frustration it created, all so that HRC would be a few percent more likely to win the nomination, and win it in an unfair way.
Politics is a long term game. Partisans like to tell us it's urgent and that we must act immediately (regardless of the costs) to impact the most important election in history. This fake urgency is the technique GWB used to sell the Iraq war. It's an effective but embarrassingly dishonest propaganda technique.
Beyond that, the NYT actively culls comments that disagree with their political position. Even when this is not happening, they try to shape discourse with the NYT picks.
Even when I do agree with their positions, it is disconcerting to feel like I am being spoonfed political ideology.
EDIT: for context, if you go read the actual emails, what you see are totally bog-standard comments of a PR team reacting to a story once it posted, and again when the NYT updated it, as the NYT (and other papers) often do.
Yes, but they updated it in a fashion to downplay potential misuse of the JVF in Clinton's favor.
Edit: for context "We were able to keep him from including more on the JVF, it has a mention in there, but between us and a conversation he had with Marc Elias he finally backed off from focusing too much on that."
That was in the initial version of the story. As DWS says right in the email, the update added comments from Longabaugh.
This email chain is a total non-story. The NYTimes called the DNC for comment, and the DNC attempted to shape the story. That is basic PR 101.
We know the Sanders campaign did the same thing, because the story includes confidential information from his campaign, and comments from his surrogates. We just don't have Wikileaks access to the emails from his campaign (thank goodness).
I concur with this view. I don't necessarily think the Wikileaks are not valid, but from my point of view, Wikileaks lost all credibility being 100% anti-Hillary, with zero anti-Trump information released. Somehow I don't think the RNC would have much different internal e-mails floating around at this point.
That being said, I read the Goldman transcripts and other things that were supposed to be so damaging, and they really weren't that bad, beyond any other typical politician. Is she corrupt, absolutely. Is there a giant media conspiracy (now including SNL) against Trump? Ridiculous. He makes his own wounds.
In addition, even Mike Pence has now admitted Russia is disseminating information to Wikileaks. So we have a clear connection between Russia / Putin and Trump. I don't believe it's as far as many think with them working together, but clearly someone as thin skinned and easily manipulated as Trump would be a total win for Putin. We can talk about Hillary's collusion, Clinton Foundation corruptness and such, but how the Putin pro Trump position is not as relevant is beyond me, if not the deal breaker considering the state of Russia / American current affairs.
I don't think it's entirely fair to blame this imbalance on Wikileaks; they may not have received any information derogatory to the Trump campaign.
Wikileaks' current agenda appears to be to disrupt Western governments through leaking damaging information. I don't see a clear preference for political parties; the Manning leaks were damaging to the Republican Bush administration.
I believe that the most probable source of the DNC leaks is Russian government units, but not for the purposes of election manipulation. Here is an article that most credibly posits this theory: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-spycraft-how-kre....
While I'm not sure you can entirely fault Wikileaks for the material they receive, I do believe I can fault them for their release policy. I'm not sure of any reason to dole out the leaks slowly over time, leading up to the election. All that does is reduce the time available to get useful information, context and verification about the leaked data. That seems less about journalism informing the public, and more about an activist attempting to influence the public.
I had mixed feeling about Wikileaks before (as I think anyone should, since it's a very complex topic), but any thoughts I had as to him be impartial in any way (as a good journalist should be) are now out the window.
That's an excellent point that I had not considered. The doling out of emails over time, segmenting them into topics (should a leak be editorialized?) and offering up what are essentially promotional teases for more data ... that does seem to move the needle away from "journalists educating the electorate" to "politically motivated guy with a chip on his shoulder".
Honestly, Assange shouldn't have been the face behind the leaks. It should've been the agency's "face", and it should've been dumped all at once, like most of their past releases.
That's a pretty bad strategy though. Even if you were tweeting coupons for your store you'd want to space the tweets out to get more attention.
Also, think of the political dynamic. There isn't much difference between one huge scandal and ten - there's still only so much airtime. Anything leaked as a unit can be responded to as a unit.
Anyone could anonymously create a torrent and paste it in some related thread, the important thing, and why people go to Wikileaks, is getting it read faster than "they" can delete it.
Absolutely Assange has had an anti-Hillary slant; I don't consider Wikileaks and Assange to be the same. Maybe I should (?). I guess I give leaders to have the latitude to have opinions that don't represent their organizations.
One look at Assange's Twitter is all it takes to see the obvious anti-Hillary bias. The shrill "Hillary's got an earpiece!" post is one of the most glaring examples.
Assange is anti-power, and likely feels Trump is not a serious challenger, so there is more to be won from hurting Clinton. It's not really an anti-Hillary bias.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have seen zero information leaked during this election that didn't have an anti-Hillary agenda, content discussion and validity aside. If there is anything critical of Trump, please share. With that being the case, it's clearly beyond a disruption agenda, and a pro-Trump agenda. Again, maybe I just haven't seen anything anti-Trump, but I've looked and found nothing.
Wikileaks and the Russian-state-linked DCLeaks may have zero anti-Trump documents, but the 1995 Trump tax return and the surreptitiously-recorded sexual assault boast tape are examples of leaks exposed in this campaign. I believe the anti-Trump leaks have had significantly more impact than the anti-Hillary leaks so far.
Seth Rich was implied to be the DNC leak. He was a DNC operative who was "robbed" and subsequently murdered. Still unsolved. There is 0 evidence of Russia being the only entity who gained access.
There are multiple access points, some within Federal Government.
The RNC was fairly openly anti-Trump during the primaries, there won't be any evidence of them cheating on his behalf.
Also there's no real need to take anti-Trump info to Wikileaks. The NYT was willing to publish one of Trump's tax returns from the 90s and those are legally protected. You can take anti-trump documents to any major newspaper.
NYT tried to push their Trump sex assault stories, but the stories were just "They said that Trump did something bad many years ago", with no proof, no witnesses, no evidence at all, other than their word.
And then some of the women show up on TV with their lawyer, Gloria Allred, who is in close connection with HRCs campaign(as attested by the Podesta wikileaks) and has vowed her support for HRC to win. And then there is strange behavior from some of the accusers, like begging Trump to visit their restaurant/business, which would be a strange thing to do to someone who sexually assaulted you(not impossible behavior, but all of these things add up)
>> Any institution that regularly confuses editorializing for journalism losses its credibility. By these rules there are many institutions that are not trustworthy (e.g. Fox) but there are many institutions that are (the NYT).
Let's say that, as a hypothetical, 1-2% of the population per year have been experiencing exactly what you describe as credibility-undermining behavior from major publications.
If you are not one of those 1-2%, how would you know about it?
> what would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism
You missed out the most important thing which would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. And it is the the most common one which is the most heavily engaged in. And that is choosing not to report certain stories and facts, even though they are of great significance.
I know it's a rather sad state of affairs when I'm now reading /pol/ on 4chan to get my news nowadays. Once you filter out the noise, there's some intensive research and unbiased news there.
re: the example you give about VP Biden announcing secret cyber attacks against Russia during an NBC News interview, it isnt necessarily a waste to "burn processing cycles" keeping up with such news, when you consider that observing propaganda in action can itself provide information about "what" exactly the "powers that be" want people to believe, leading to further examination of "why".
it is similar to reading financial news or watching CNBC with the mindset of reading between the lines, wondering who and why is interested in propagating such stories.
>The trust I have had in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ABC/NBC/CBS, Democratic and Republican parties has been irreparably damaged.
Why would you trust them? You think they would go through all that shit to give you information and work for you for a few pennies or for free? When they could be working for the rich and powerful to become one of them... all while getting your pennies?
> Wikileaks announced for weeks when they were releasing the emails. It was a pre-planned event that the entire world was waiting for.
Was it actually week(s) plural? I thought they only came out about a week late.
> The Trump tape, which had obviously been saved for a rainy day, was trotted out to distract from the pre-announced Wikileaks release.
I think this is a little much. Some cast and crew from The Apprentice made some noise about how generally unpleasant Donald Trump was, and multiple parties started seeking unused footage from that show. NBC also had the Access Hollywood video and were preparing it for release, but got scooped when someone leaked it to the Washington Post reporter who investigated the Tump Foundation.
No event in the chain happened without precedence and, to be perfectly frank, none of the information that has come out has been a genuine shock. The overwhelming majority of the damage done by the Access Hollywood footage has been because Donald Trump a) did a very poor job in delivering his apology, strategically speaking and b) from a), set himself up to have yet more sunlight disinfect his past.
> This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point
Ooh, me, me, I debate it. This is a dumb thing to say and you should feel dumb for saying it. It makes no sense and is not based on anything.
> I have to wonder how many years (decades?) this has been occurring.
Probably ever since the industry started to consolidate. Just because it happens doesn't mean that it happening means what you think it means, if that makes any sense [1].
>Ooh, me, me, I debate it. This is a dumb thing to say and you should feel dumb for saying it. It makes no sense and is not based on anything.
Insults do not qualify as debate. His claim is based on, or should include, the portions of the Podesta emails that have showed a dismaying amount of coordination with the press. Approving quotes, approving stories, printing talking points. Compare their behavior against the guidelines set out by the Society of Professional Journalists. It's a disgrace.
You and I must understand entirely different things when we read the phrase "premeditated collusion with the media."
Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access.
The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
This isn't happening because journos care about Hillary Clinton. This is an alignment of the incentives of politicians and journalists that ultimately reduces transparency and harms public discourse. The fact that the same thing likely isn't happening with the Trump campaign says more about the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Glenn Thrush, Politco's Chief Political Correspondent, decided to make it crystal clear in the
following email to Podesta back in April 2015 in which he admits that he has "become a hack."
The email below from Thrush was sent to get guidance related to an article he published the
very next day entitled "Hillary's Big-Money Dilemma."
=============
Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u
Please don't share or tell anyone I did this
Tell me if I fucked up anything
But how is that a defense? Surely by that token you have no complaints about anything in the world. Just because a person does something unethical for a reward doesn't mean their actions are justified, just rational.
The whole purpose the press existence is to be an independent check on government and to pose to politicians the questions that the electorate cares about.
edit: Just to be clear, nobody (or nearly so) finds your claim controversial or new. It's flaw isn't that it's incorrect, it's that it isn't useful*.
It's not a defense, but it's not a distinction without a difference. If the problem is collusion on behalf of a particular ideology then the solution is different than if it's a problem caused by current models for monetization of news media being driven by short term consumption habits and an attendant compulsion on the part of journalists to get something, anything, new before their peers do even if it's grade F horse shit and they had to sell out to get it.
The rhetoric I was replying to implied that the politicians and the journalists are on the same team because they have the same goals. That's not the case. I think keeping that in mind is plenty useful.
Of course, as The Center for Public Integrity [1] recently pointed out, "journalists" aren't just
making "in-kind" contributions to the Clinton campaign, they're donating real cash as well.
In fact, according the their review of political contributions made by people working in
various media outlets, 96% were found to go to Hillary while only 4% accrued to the benefit
of the Trump campaign.
I'm not stipulating any of my claims on the lack of lopsidedness in the editorial positions of the journalists in question. A Really Big Number doesn't change what they care about more: being on the same team as the Democrats, or their drip-feeds from campaigns.
They're not mutually exclusive (monetary and ideological motivations), and they're actually both true. Not all the time, not unceasingly, but both still present.
If they were motivated purely by money, they'd all be promoting Trump. He has driven a shocking amount of traffic / wealth to all journalist outlets. Stories they write on him are massively more popular, and he's demonstrated he'll cut off access for their lying. So if it was just money, pussy grabbing would be a good thing.
If they thought that far ahead, they'd fall behind. They live from headline to headline. The fact that Trump is chum right before the election instead of Clinton is partially stochastic and depended far more on the immediate reception to the stories than anything else.
I thought your thesis was that there was no actual collusion between politicians and the media, just aligned incentives. I agree with your point about the incentives, but don't you agree that this email shows that there was in fact actual collusion going on as well? The evidence seems pretty compelling to me.
The politico guy being a self-confessed hack just reeks of the same problems we would expect to arise from a chaotic system driven by short term interests. The notion that the media is cooperating with Clinton's campaign in order to make her win is contraindicated by the attention they paid to the Benghazi hearings and the email server. The Access Hollywood video simply emerged after those things stopped being news. They've taken priority over Podesta's emails because a) sex, and b) if you're not already a Trump supporter or a Bernie-or-Buster, they're mostly a nothing-burger.
They were very silent on the entire email server business. Did they mention it reluctantly a few times? Sure. But they failed to mention a million other things that you probably are ignorant of, if you rely on them for information.
They did not mention that the deleted emails were deleted AFTER the subpoena was issued [1]. They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI. They did not comment on the number of "I don't remember" answers that Clinton gave to the FBI. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to not remember what a "c" meant on documents. They did not comment on the fact that Clinton claimed to have no memory of receiving training on the handling of sensitive documents. I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
Suffice it to say that the media have been complicit in matters dating back years before Podesta emails, not days or weeks. Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
> They did not mention that the deleted emails were deleted AFTER the subpoena was issued
Yet they were requested to be deleted long before the subpoena was issued[1]. Specifically:
In December 2014, after the work-related emails were preserved, Mills told Platte River Networks – which at the time was managing Clinton’s private server – that Clinton “decided she no longer needed access to any of her e-mails older than 60 days.” Mills instructed the PRN employee — who was not identified — “to modify the e-mail retention policy” on Clinton’s server “to reflect this change,” the FBI said.
But the PRN employee mistakenly did not make the retention-policy change and did not delete the old emails until sometime between March 25 and March 31, even though Mills had sent PRN an email on March 9 that mentioned the committee’s request to preserve emails.
The PRN employee who deleted the emails was a recipient of Mills’ message. However, the employee told the FBI that “he had an ‘oh shit’ moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server containing Clinton’s e-mails.”
Read into that whatever you want, but the fact that it's not really true might have something to do with why it isn't being reported on.
> They did not mention that Clinton aides carried hammers with them to destroy phones in case the phones were demanded by the FBI.
That's not what happened[2]. As secretary of defense, she had old phones after she switched destroyed.
> I could go on for pages, but I have work to do.
You could substantiate your statements with sources. You could have done that from the beginning. Perhaps if you looked for less biased and more fact based sources rather than blogs that feature a giant picture of Clinton snapped in an inopportune moment with giant neon green letters saying "LOL!" photoshopped on.
> Your contention that they just aren't reporting the Podesta emails because they're boring (they are not, they are dynamite) is false on it's face.
Well, I've been following and reading reporting on the emails. It's all pretty ho-hum and what I would expect from any campaign so far. Of course, it's easy to taking boring things out of context and imagine salacious components to them. That doesn't make them any more damning in reality though.
Can I just point out as per source 1, that as a public employee, she doesn't just get to decide to destroy records? Further, she claims she wanted them deleted then, but never clarifies if they were deleted at the time of request or when the subpoena arrived.
Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that. Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Either way, I've heard rumors they've been recovered, so disagreements there could be resolved in due time. If not, we can argue then :)
> Can I just point out as per source 1, that as a public employee, she doesn't just get to decide to destroy records?
If they are personal records, she does, because they are her personal property, and are covered under her fourth amendment rights until they are specifically requested by subpoena. I'm not sure if the subpoena requested all email, or work email. The question really being asked usually is whether they were all actually personal emails or not.
I think it's worth noting that her behavior with regard to deleting personal emails is not out of what would be considered normal for someone completely innocent. If I knew I was innocent but was under subpoena for work email and I had personal email that I would really rather not get out, I might delete them as well before turning everything over. Unless specififed not to, there's nothing illegal with doing so, as long as you can whether any flak if people want to cast doubt.
It's worth noting the Podesta emails address this[1]. One of the interesting thing about the Podesta email summaries I've seen is how they don't really corroborate any of the accusations we've seen.
> Further, she claims she wanted them deleted then, but never clarifies if they were deleted at the time of request or when the subpoena arrived.
It seems pretty well covered to me. She specified she wanted them deleted months prior to the subpoena, but the employee did not act on that command until much later (after the subpoena arrived). So, emails were deleted after a subpoena arrived, but the request to do so happened long prior to that.
> Further, she didn't just delete emails, she went and wiped the hard drive. Perhaps just good data practice, but, when it comes to politics and public servants I'm far too cynical to believe that.
It's your right to be cynical. That said, as I mentioned above, unless the subpoena should have covered personal emails, I'm not sure what she did was wrong, even if it does cast doubt on whether we can be sure we got all the work emails.
> Finally, she determined what was considered private and deleted it. Do you really trust that? Do you really think that things that were work related wouldn't get swept up with the personal stuff while they were going about deleting things?
Actually, I believe her lawyers determined that. They didn't actually read all the emails though, they used Subject lines and addresses. That said, while it might have miscategorized some (and some were lost prior to that for reasons explained in that summary), that process is unlikely to have randomly happened to remove all majorly incriminating emails, so you're still left with whether you trust the lawyers tasked with reviewing them or not.
What this all really comes down to is whether you think someone can really get away with criminal activity at this level for decades. My belief is that if there was real evidence in any of the umpteen things she's been investigated for, we'd have seen it. Instead, we have lots of accusations, but nothing ever seems to add up to anything. This lends itself to two conclusions, either the Clintons are masterminds at committing crime and never getting caught, or they have been a favored political target due to their high political profile for an extended period of time. Considering I think even if they originally where complicit in a problem or too long in their past, the return on investment for piddly amounts of money (to them) for what amount to favors seems a stupid trade-off. If you make millions of dollars a year, and are already one of the most powerful people in the world, why would you get caught up in the stupid things she's accused of, like taking a large donation to her charity, which she can't really use, in order to get a meeting? To my sensibilities, it's much more likely that someone donated to one of her charities in hope that it would help (or on bad info that it would help), and maybe it did help, but in the same way that donating to the Red Cross would have, by showing the person was a philanthropist and making a good impression that way.
>You and I must understand entirely different things when we read the phrase "premeditated collusion with the media."
Agreed.
>Those media organizations and those journalists may have editorial and personal opinions on who they would prefer to win the election, but there's one thing they care more about than any of those preferences: access.
The idea that the press wouldn't or shouldn't care about vacuuming up every talking point that a campaign is willing to spit out, no matter how obviously-canned it is, is to fundamentally misunderstand the operations of the 24 hour news cycle.
I was trained as a journalist before I became an engineer. I'd argue I understand this stuff better than most. Perhaps I had the benefit of a journalism program that was better than it had any right to be, but we had ethics drilled into us pretty heavily. I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
Further, if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate. It's supposed to be the role of the press to take an adversarial stance to government and hold them accountable. Clearly this doesn't happen much, but worse still, the Podesta emails reveal that they're actively facilitating the goals of a presidential nominee. That's horrible. If you want an off-topic thing to look into for this, look up Amber Lyons. I had her in the 'maybe she's credible' pile until this came out. Now she's in the 'There's something to her claims' pile.
>the peculiarities of that campaign than it says anything about the same media companies' willingness to play the same game of ball with Generic Q. Republican.
Most news organizations are staffed with people who lean fairly heavily to the left. It sounds like you might be surprised to find out just how much. It used to be the case, and was what I was taught, that you fought your bias as much as possible, did your best to avoid editorializing and didn't let yourself just become a mouth piece. There's a reason why someone picks up the New York Times rather than combing through the press releases from the Clinton & Trump campaigns. Obviously Fox News is the notable dissenter in providing this kind of service to Republican candidates. Still, if you run the numbers it's something like 80% / 20%.
Overall, the thing that has been pretty evident to me during this campaign, even before the Podesta leaks, is that the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton. This even goes back to when she was campaigning against Sanders for the nomination, though to a lesser extent. I think the moment something smelled off to me was when she won the six coin tosses in Iowa (?) to begin the primaries and I didn't see many eyebrows raised in the reporting I looked at. Maybe I missed it, but since then They've held to a pretty consistent pattern of burning bridges to protect her.
You wrote a good post and I apologize in advance if my reply doesn't do it justice. I'm on mobile.
> I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
And programmers get taught to write documentation and not make things work with hacks or produce spaghetti code. The way the sausage gets made not comporting with professional standards is neither unheard of nor is it isolated to journalism.
They're being shameful, yes. But they're doing it because it's a living, not because they have an agenda.
> if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate
Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech, for which I am an irrationally ardent proponent.
We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening. You seem to want to ascribe agency to it. I think that's a mistake, in the aggregate. Maybe I'm just being a cynic, but I don't think so.
> the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton
I'm not a fan of Clinton by any stretch of the imagination. I see how Clinton scandals get significantly less airtime than Trump scandals, but I have a hard time believing that isn't being driven by ratings. Trump has been graded on a heck of a curve at times, in ways that can't be considered "objective."
> I see how Clinton scandals get significantly less airtime than Trump scandals
I'm honestly unsure at this point how to take any specific cry about a Clinton scandal, and it's a problem of the Republicans' (and Trump's) making. You can only cry wolf so many times, so loudly, again and again for the exact same incident even, until people assume you can't be trusted to watch for wolves at all.
No worries about being on mobile. For my part, I've made the mistake of replying to your responses to other people, which is kinda dumb and confuses our conversation. So I'll take the blame if it all unravels. Without further ado:
>And programmers get taught to write documentation
That isn't an ethics issue, it's disingenuous to compare the two (not trying to ascribe malice to you). I do recognize the point you're trying to make in terms of quality being sacrificed to business concerns, and I'll touch on that (a bit indirectly) in a moment.
>Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech
Two things here. 1.) You (presumably) aren't and have never been a journalist or tried to be one. I assure you that this is a thing that sits at the heart of American Journalist philosophy, at least as I experienced it. I probably shouldn't have phrased it in a way that let you have an opinion. Also, sorry for the appeal to authority :) 2.) The first amendment specifically calls out religion, press and assembly. There was a vision for the role of press in government; they aren't within a country mile of living up to that but still enjoy the freedom. 2a.) We can agree on rabid amounts of free speech at least, and despite press failings I don't want to take away their freedom to print whatever.
>We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening.
Yeah, that would just be a diversion. Let's leave it, as I imagine we agree anyway.
>You seem to want to ascribe agency to it
Well, to cheat and be a jerk: All people have agency. To be more honest, I think there's a mix of business concerns and ideology. As I was trying to point out, Trump has made them a shitload of money. He's probably the best thing that's ever happened to print and cable news, at least in the last decade. Even were they to report on him honestly, he would make them a shitload of money. He's controversial without them needing to help.
This might just be something that I will fail to convey to you, but my experience from a (kind of) insider's view, is that most journalists are partisan. Nobody has to love that, it's an acknowledged reality, and uncontroversial (for any journalist with credibility). The trouble is that the effort or even pretense of trying to mitigate bias has gone away, which I don't think you disagree with. Something that might be less known to you is that most credible news outlets try to make it a point to separate the business concerns from editorial concerns for just this reason. At least publicly that is certainly the case. Theoretically there's a publicist and an executive editor, and the two manage their respective departments without consultation. We're probably both cynical enough to realize they're full of shit, but that rule didn't come out of a vacuum and was adhered to in the one paper I wrote for (though I was freelancing / interning so obviously my insight was limited). Additionally, you might be familiar with the idea of an ombudsman. Theoretically, this is a person who is paid by the paper to shit all over it when it fucks up. It's painful but necessary. Clearly these people aren't doing their jobs.
My point is that, at least historically, and recently at that, papers have acknowledged bias and at least made a reasonable effort to counter it. In another comment, maybe from you, business concerns have taken a toll. Consolidation mixed with adopting modern, short-sighted executive level business decisions have had a deleterious effect on quality. C-levels aren't trained in, and don't care about, the ethics training journalists get, and anyone given free reign to indulge their bias is going to struggle to resist that. I guess I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but rather that there's been a decay in journalism (caused by your opinion) that's resulted in the present conditions (caused by my opinion).
This is already so long 90% of people aren't going to read it, so I'll leave it here: Because of my previous passion for journalism, the current failures deeply pain me, and have been more of my focus than the candidates. The failure is not caused just by business concerns, but people gleefully letting their bias loose and enjoying their ethical lapse. We can probably both agree it's a disservice to the country and will hasten the demise of print and cable news. But in the meantime they will reap the seductive gains of short term thinking. I'll save predictions for the future for another time.
I hope you're stuck on a bus or something where this screed is a welcome diversion :)
I'll admit that I'm far enough out of my depth that I can't compete with the level of detail your opinion, informed by your professional experience, espouses. So I'll have to concede that there are clearly things I don't know about bias in journalism and thank you for an excellent distraction :-)
To review, the point of this sub-thread where I posted:
>> This level of premeditated collusion with the media is not even up for debate at this point.
>Ooh, me, me, I debate it. This is a dumb thing to say and you should feel dumb for saying it. It makes no sense and is not based on anything.
To which you respond with a bunch of Trump quotes. How did they address at all the point of media collusion with the Clinton campaign? How is this not just an attempt at ideological bickering used to redirect the conversation to something you presume I'm interested in arguing about rather than focus on something pretty damning?
I find it preposterous that it took this long to hear that Trump bus tape as well as the Stern recordings. If you were connected to either of these shows, wouldn't the first thing you did when Trump started to become a story was go looking through the material you had on him? It's simply not credible that they "just found" the bus tape. Was it lost behind a toilet somewhere? That they had this for a while now and were saving it for maximum impact is far more likely than it being only now discovered.
Some of the Stern recordings were getting play during the primaries, but they weren't slowing Trump down since his opposition was split among so many different candidates.
The bus tape was archival footage. If you're suggesting that every hour of archival audio and video of Mr. Trump should have been sought after as soon as he became the nominee, then, again, you're underestimating just how volatile and fickle the news cycle is.
The plausibility of "the official story" (to reiterate: that the footage became an object of interest for NBC after former cast and crew from The Apprentice came forward to disclose his ill manner on the set of that show) seems pretty plain to me. Occam's razor defeats your conspiratorial thinking without breaking a sweat.
Regarding Stern, CNN had as "BREAKING NEWS!@!" that Trump told Stern it was OK to call Ivanka a piece of ass. Possibly CNN was lying about presenting this as something they just discovered; is that what you are claiming?
Yes, I am suggesting that every show would have stuck someone (more likely, a team) on reviewing their material (prioritizing the outtake material, if anything) on Trump as soon as it turned out he was a big deal. I am not clear as to why you think this would not have occurred; why Occam's razor supports that viewpoint. The bus tape would have been a huge story at any time and would not have required building off interest in other stories to investigate (e.g. "Gee whiz, we should look at the archival footage and see what we have! Why didn't we think of this before!")
A distraction from what? There is nothing incriminating in the released emails. We learned that: DNC personnel liked Hillary Clinton better than Bernie Sanders and that Hillary Clinton was saying to bankers what she is saying in public. Where's the scoop that we are supposedly being distracted from?
Not to mention that Sanders was not a Democrat until he became a candidate for president. Politics is about building coalitions. Maybe if Bernie had nurtured closer relations with the DNC he would have gotten more favorable treatment.
And it's not like the nomination process is sacrosanct. For many years primaries were ignored altogether in favor of smoke filled rooms. That only started changing in 1968. It was made more democratic in 1972, which resulted in the nomination of George McGovern, who got his clock cleaned in the general. Sometimes party elites do know better.
After reading this stuff I now doubt there has been a real election for decades in the US. You see what happens when a guy appears to have a real shot who isn't fully controlled by the elite.
I have no doubt that they will rig the election if the media doesn't get the job done. How else could they let Hillary run? They must be pretty confident that it doesn't matter that most people hate her.
This is not premeditated, this is October Surprise and they had the Trump video in store for that round of the fight, nothing sinister.
Regarding the media, all are culprits in biased news coverage whether those on the right like Breitbart or Fox News or on the left like NYT or Washington Post but this held belief that you should expect nothing less than 100% impartial coverage of the elections when they endorse their favorite candidate publicly is also a bit misplaced.
Directly related to what you are saying, DNC consultants and execs caught on tape explaining how they plant fake Trump supporters at rallies to disrupt them or get negative media coverage. It is pretty interesting from: 1/ a partisan PoV, 2/ a methodological PoV; you are right there is a war for information that is being waged.
Infowars is paying 5k USD for shouting “Bill Clinton is a rapist” on national TV, which has now happed serveral times during Clion campain events. Infowars itself has close ties to the Trump campain, as his surrogate Roger Stone appears often on Alex Jones show.
This is not to mention that they aren't advocating 'free speech' like Alex Jones(not that I agree with him); they are actively fostering division and inciting violence between American citizens(using the mentally ill as their pawns) to manufacture outrage and promote a narrative.
I encourage anyone reading to watch the video, acknowledge it's biased and draw your own conclusions.
> acknowledge it's biased and draw your own conclusions.
I think this is the soundest advice here. The formatting of the video makes it obvious that there is a partisan motivation behind this investigation. However, the video also provides a certain amount of raw and non-processed evidence that can be judged on their own merits.
This is the crux of what is going on in politics now. You can't simply trust your instincts when there is so much work going into manipulating those instincts.
The first question to ask with any James O'Keefe video is "where is the raw video." He has a long and sordid history of fabricating these kinds of storylines.
> As long as you hold Michael Moore to the same standard.
I know you're trying to be dismissive with your glib comment but let me tell you: I do hold him to the same standard and I find him to be a jackass.
That doesn't change the fact that James O'Keefe is a convicted criminal (attempted to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu's office).
It also doesn't change the fact that he heavily edited the ACORN video to skew the story, nor that they were humoring him and reported his nonsense to the police. Conservatives wanted to believe his lies so they did.
I worked for years as a film professional, including screenwriting and editing. It is very easy to lie with footage. The craft of editing is to make the edits disappear so that changes in camera angles and content appear natural and seamless. We employ misdirection to exploit a phenomenon in the brain known as suture, which creates the illusion of continuity.
As a simple example, in a narrative film I'll cut from angle to another when actor A takes a drink from a glass of water. The reason I want to cut is that I have begun to feel bored by shot #1 already for whatever reason - actor A may not be that good looking, or not a great actor, or the scripted dialog may be dull, whatever. It's boring, and that means you the viewer will be bored with it soon too. But I can't just cut away or you'll know what I'm up to. I'll wait until actor A engages in a physical movement and your visual cortex will quietly paper over the transition for me. Hmm, Actor A drank from the glass at different times during different takes, and the action of drinking doesn't line up with the dialog? No problem, I'll just cut briefly to a shot of actor B reacting to actor A (and by exploiting the Kuliekov effect, I can significantly change the meaning of the scene depending on what facial expression I choose to show on actor B) and then I'll cut back to actor A talking again from the new angle.
You would be surprised how many movie scenes depicting two people in a room were shot across 2 different days with the actors never actually meeting in person. Likewise you would be astonished at the number of ways the same footage could be combined to tell radically different stories. I have made edits where I have run pieces of footage backwards and not even the director noticed until I pointed it out. Don't think you can't be fooled by even a semi-skillful editor, your brain has been trained in how to watch TV and movies probably from infancy, and while it is not too hard to break free of that training, nor is it hard for others to manipulate your pre-existing mental reflexes.
I could imagine some sort of manipulation, but for the specific video of the the specific words came out of the mouth those people, can you please explain to me how the video fabricated the whole thing?
You are expressing a possibility that has a low probability of being true.
The hidden video he released today looks incontrovertible. One can only imagine all the other things these dark political operatives do if they were willing to discuss what they did so explictly with people they presumably don't know well.
I agree with everything you said. But I am too curious as to what you think of the posted video. I hardly see how there could be manipulation considering the chunks of raw footage posted are always following a Q/A format.
There doesn't seem to be enough room in everyone's brain to appreciate a new story in the news every day. I'm amazed at the exposing of the game and how it's played. The proliferation of all this information is making it impossible to hide how the narrative is constructed by government and media. The back-scratching is deafening.
I don't see any special brilliance. I see a bunch of people in power running around trying to keep themselves in power, by any means necessary, while screwing up everything around them and then trying to cover it up by telling even more lies. They succeed not because they are so good, but because people let them get away with it, lest the wrong lizard gets in.
I mean, how brilliant you have to be to hire a person that would go to reddit to ask about how to cover up your tracks? Or claim you forgot everything about it when asked, including seeing documents that bear your signature? A five year old could do such performance.
See, but the politicians didn't create the system; they essentially compete to be the top Vogon.
I'd discount some of the paranoia around the FRB, but the modern monetary system appears to be a very very clever way of herding a population; really if you control the banks, you essentially control a population (since loans become the only way to obtain currency). Taxes then for instance would be superfluous were it not necessary to bring a currency into circulation and to avoid inflation (and thus avoid seditious movements).
I've been trying to find mathematics that describes the banking system, but it appears there are none (other than such hand-wavy deductions).
How's this thing incriminating or considered wrongdoing?
This is like in football (soccer) where it's against the rules to grab your opponent inside the box when they're taking a free kick on your goal but everyone is doing it anyway, it becomes pointless to complain and moan about it. The same goes for hand-checking in basketball and I'm sure you could find analogies in American football as well.
I do not want to discuss it is ethical or not. I have an opinion on this but that's not the point here. Instead of judging the morality of this smear/psy-op operation, I take a contemplative approach and use this video as evidence that a war for information is being waged.
Of course, everyone knows that in a presidential race, things get pretty heated up. However, the violence of the conflict between the two campaigns goes well beyond the violence I anticipated. It seems that everything is now fair game.
More importantly, it is clear that there is a huge collusion between the mediatic and political sphere. Again, on a magnitude that goes well beyond what was suspected. Finally, it is quite disturbing - again, from a contemplative PoV - that high-ranking party officials and a candidate themself actually take an active role in this. Before watching this, I would have expected some shady consulting firm running through an ocean of intermediaries and headed by a "special advisor" to some high-ranking DNC official. No, in fact the hierarchy height is much smaller.
Is there something really damaging in Wikileak emails? Even on Fox News they are not able to mention anything that is at the level of Trump tapes. Sure, there is some amusing stuff and quipes by aggressive campaign staff about opponents but nothing that can points to big corruption directly on Clinton's part. The media coverage is unexpectedly very low but I can see why media will want to put these rather boring emails front and center while juicy Trump stuff keeps coming out. If anyone has studied these emails, please feel free to comment.
PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
Usually when people tell me about some of the awful things that were said in the e-mail Wikileaks released I go look at the original e-mail and read it in full. It's almost always the case that if you read these statements in context, they just aren't that offensive.
For instance, the comment about public/private positions is one of the most common ones you hear people complain about (and Clinton was asked about it during the debate). Here's the full statement:
"You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work."
I would encourage everyone to look at the original source anytime someone makes a claim about what was said in the e-mail.
> Is there something really damaging in Wikileak emails?
That's my main problem with all these arguments «false equivalency» in their pursuit of seeming and sounding fair, balanced and impartial, they resort to equate all the horrendous things that Trump said or did with these harmless details that Hillary or her chief of staff said behind closed doors or in private emails.
It's just not right and unfair for Hillary and her campaign.
1. Having read the emails I disagree that there is anything damning in them. Even when campaign staffers suggested bad things they got shot down. The email releases have been one big nothing-burger after another. The media is like a toddler... unless you have something interesting going on their attention wanes quickly.
2. The Trump sexual assault tape is not bad because he had a foul mouth. In some cases focusing on that is a deliberate effort at mis-direction. Trump can swear all he likes and no one except a few pearl-clutching grandmas care. What is gross is Trump boasting that he commits sexual assault against women and they let him get away with it because he's rich and famous. That's what was so offensive about that video.
Definitely agree on #1 - even Assange knew there was nothing in the emails which is why there was no "October surprise."
Now they're releasing the emails in parcels to manipulate the 24 hour news cycle - e.g. "More Hillary Emails leaked!"
There's no smoking gun in those emails, and the majority of the "There's a lot there" statements boil down to examples like this: http://i.imgur.com/eRRc02n.png?1
Yes, semantically speaking, manipulating the 24 hour news cycle does require participating.
If there was any actual news in the emails, released each day, then it wouldn't be manipulation. It would be news, like how WashPo released the Trump sex assault tape the same day they got it.
As it is now, they're withholding empty, hacked information and timing the releases to participate and manipulate headlines during the U.S. election period.
Yes, but it's silly to say that the smallest participant is manipulating the largest. Poor Fox News and CNN, being rick-rolled by that evil Assange... /s
> Having read the emails I disagree that there is anything damning in them.
So you think it was fine for the current head of the DNC to leak questions from CNN to hillary during the primary?
And you think it's fine for the under secretary of state to be trying to bribe the FBI to reduce the classification of emails found on her server? Personally I don't see how that isn't a crime.
A subpoena was already in place for those documents, it's tampering with evidence.
You say that without linking to any real source. Every time I have seen someone link "evidence", it is just a Rorschach test of an email that depending on where you fall on the political spectrum you might view as signs of criminal activity or view as politics as usual.
Trump is the Republican nominee for the 2016 US presidential elections which means that he's as much a politician as Hillary or Obama is and should be held against the same set of standards like every politician does and this notion that since he's novice in this field he deserves to get preferential treatment and be forgiven for all his mistakes and wrongdoings is bit disingenuous.
>Trump is the Republican nominee for the 2016 US presidential elections which means that he's as much a politician as as Hillary or Obama is
I hope you're kidding when you say he's as much a politician as Hilary. He has very limited political experience. She's been doing it for 30+ years.
He's a candidate, but has held precisely zero public offices thus far.
>this notion that since he's novice in this field he deserves to get preferential treatment and be forgiven for all his mistakes and wrongdoings is bit disingenuous.
What preferential treatment are you talking about? Who said anything about "forgiving" him? I'm saying, "what on earth do you expect by nominating a TV personality"? I expect more from my politicians. Apparently you don't. Perhaps that's why your election is a mess?
I am the one here who's advocating for equal and fair treatment for both candidates not the usual prevailing one for Hillary and a more lenient and almost non-existent for Trump because he's a newbie to the world of politics.
This is not a game. This is a real and serious national election for a superpower, and this levity when dealing with these matters is not helpful.
Your position seems to be along those lines above. If not, please clarify.
>usual prevailing one for Hillary and a more lenient and almost non-existent for Trump
Unless your single source of news is the Trump sub-reddit, most of the mainstream media does nothing but rip Trump.
>This is a real and serious national election for a superpower, and this levity when dealing with these matters is not helpful.
Don't lecture me, my country isn't having this issue. You put a bizarre TV personality up for president, not me. Citizens get the government they deserve.
To suggest that Trump has 'very limited' political experience when he's been rubbing shoulders with the country's political elites for a few decades is simply disingenuous.
> Who said anything about "forgiving" him? ... I expect more from my politicians.
gotchange's point is that some people give Trump a lower bar of expectations because he's an 'outsider' or 'new at this' - that difference in expectations is forgiving him to a certain degree. Like a handicap at sport.
gotchange's whole point is about expecting more from politicians, and asking why the expectations are lowered on the Trump side.
>To suggest that Trump has 'very limited' political experience when he's been rubbing shoulders with the country's political elites for a few decades is simply disingenuous.
To argue that he's remotely as experienced as Hilary Clinton is simply disingenuous.
>gotchange's whole point is about expecting more from politicians, and asking why the expectations are lowered on the Trump side.
gotchange's whole point was that somehow, something (not sure what) is biased against Hilary here. Trump is being skewered about this on every channel, on every website. What more do you want? This is a massive scandal, and I'm sure there's more to come.
>gotchange's point is that some people give Trump a lower bar of expectations because he's an 'outsider' or 'new at this'
No, my expectations are lower for Trump because he has a history of being a buffoon. But you do realize there's a difference between "expectation" and "acceptance"?
For what it's worth, I think they are both terrible candidates. I have no idea how Trump got this far, but I don't think there's another candidate that Hilary could have possibly beat.
> To argue that he's remotely as experienced as Hilary Clinton is simply disingenuous.
No-one is saying that. I just said that he's not "very limited".
> Trump is being skewered about this on every channel, on every website. What more do you want? ... my expectations are lower for Trump because ... realize there's a difference between "expectation" and "acceptance"
The fact that despite all his mess, he is still a serious contender in the competition, and that means plenty of people are forgiving him and accepting him, despite the media coverage, and regardless of your personal opinion. It's actually a pretty shameful indictment on the American public, that so many of them support such a candidate.
1. The Goldman Sachs speeches, showing that Hillary has a "public and private position", is still against gay marriage, wants open borders, wants to enact gun bans, and wants to establish a hemispheric common market.
2. John Podesta (Hillary's campaign chair) giving a list of "needy latinos" to call.
3. The DNC planning fake Trump assault scandals
4. Clinton Campaign Discusses Which Emails To "Hold" Hours After Subpoena
...all among many, many other things. We still have another 10k Podesta emails to go.
> 1. The Goldman Sachs speeches, showing that Hillary has a "public and private position", is still against gay marriage, wants open borders, wants to enact gun bans, and wants to establish a hemispheric common market.
With the exception of a common market I must strongly disagree with your assessments.
I'll also point out that everyone has public and private positions and everyone except the most socially inept tries to tailor what they say to their audience to get a better reception. That's half of being a politician: glad-handing and smooth-talking your constituents and colleagues into going along with your plan.
> 2. John Podesta (Hillary's campaign chair) giving a list of "needy latinos" to call.
What's your point? Is that supposed to compare to calling Mexicans rapists, saying more countries should have nuclear weapons, calling for a ban on muslim immigrants, saying you want veto-power over the press, claiming US elections are illegitimate, attacking a Gold Star family, ... I mean I could go on and on and on here.
> 3. The DNC planning fake Trump assault scandals
I haven't seen anything legit on this. Care to elaborate? I know some campaign staffers have occasionally proposed really stupid ideas but they were always shot down. If there is proof that anyone actually carried out such a plan please let us know.
> 4. Clinton Campaign Discusses Which Emails To "Hold" Hours After Subpoena
This is standard practice. It's called a document retention notice and every single company in the US follows this exact procedures. The court orders you to deliver evidence and you must figure out which documents are covered under that order. If you just backed up all your servers and dumped them on the court wholesale you'd be held in contempt.
That's not the point. Is it only left or right in America? Both candidates are rubbish and if you support Hillary you're no better than your average Trump's redneck.
So, wild exaggerated claims are made, they get trivially refuted as bs, and your comment is that's not the point? Really? Get some perspective. Neither candidate is flawless but let's not pretend they're equally so. One is a dangerous megalomaniac, and the other is pretty much a regular standard ass politician.
If you think Hillary is not dangerous you are either clueless about everyday politics or part of her campaign.
But I guess who can use the toilet where is more important than spying on people, taking away their freedom, being habitual liar and hypocrite by taking money from the people who are supposed to be everything you believe in against.
How is Trump any worse? He is just smart enough to think what he's saying, all in all they would make a great team with Hillary.
I'm seeing a lot of people deciding who to vote for by deciding which candidate they dislike less - not which they like more. Is that normal in US presidential elections? This is the first one I've followed.
Sadly yes; it's unusual for an election to have a majority of people voting for rather than against someone for president, but it does sometimes happen.
It hasn't always been this way.. Reagan, JFK, FDR and several others had some overwhelming popularity at their time. Today, I feel that another Eisenhower or Truman would be better for the country, but would be very happy to see another Reagan or JFK take office. Even Bill Clinton was pretty likable, even if I disagree with many of his political points of view.
In the end, I've been voting Libertarian and/or "not the incumbent" for a few years now, and wish more people would do so.
I recently discussed this topic with some U.S. citizens in their sixties. It is their impression, and mine as well, that this is the worst election in our lifetimes in that way. Of course there are always some people that vote according to which candidate they dislike less, but this election does seem to be an extreme case.
The implication is that they "like" neither. Technically, disliking one less means you like them more, but the wording is meant to convey the distaste in the available choices, as opposed to being excited for the new term.
There are really damaging things -- although nothing surprising and that's why I think nobody is talking about it. E.g. in one email HRC talks about how Qatar is funding ISIS, and in the next they're giving Bill Clinton a $1m check for his birthday. The wallstreet stuff would've definitely tilted the balance to Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Finally, the level of involvement with the press is far more than I could've ever imagined (the NYT is sending the HRC campaigns drafts of stories for approval before they come out, and promise complete support).
They didn't give Bill Clinton a check for $1m. They contributed $1m to the Clinton Foundation in honor of his birthday. Contrary to what some alt-right sites maintain, the Clintons derive no personal income from the charitable foundation which takes its name from them.
This is pretty disingenuous for the definition of charity. The Clinton Foundation perhaps redefines what political bribery means in the 21st century, in an attempt to skirt the laws set up to prevent power, via money, government leaders or corporations influencing policy or private citizens.
The Clinton Foundation is the new SuperPAC.
At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "charitable donation" ?
Sure, there's no evidence of pay for play in explicit terms. Doing so would be tantamount for a legal definition of bribery. However, consider the natural progression of the PAC if it were to use the same loophole of charity instead. Would a charity request for money be considered access, at the same level as PAC influence?
At some point, the foundation should be considered a profitable business rather than a charity, given the immense staffing and expenditures of operation in a billion dollar+ charity organization.
It's not trivial to ignore the oddities that abound when it does not operate like any other charity organization. Plane tickets for Hillary and Chelsea, car expenses, six figure living expenses, etc.
The grey area of having ~70 year billionaires running for president is when you see just how they live and work, and how they got there... It's usually disgusting or disappointing. It almost always has to be.
If you disagree, examine what it is you believe is good about the process of allowing, then choosing between the richest of egomaniacs, to lead a nation with a sense of morality or ethical standards. The democratic process is acutely broken by any standard if you believe that PACs and now, "charity organizations" is a net benefit.
Considering all of the organizations affiliated with the Clinton Foundation, he said, CharityWatch concluded about 89 percent of its budget is spent on programs. That’s the amount it spent on charity in 2013, he said.
We looked at the consolidated financial statements (see page 4) and calculated that in 2013, 88.3 percent of spending was designated as going toward program services — $196.6 million out of $222.6 million in reported expenses.
We can’t vouch for the effectiveness of the programming expenses listed in the report, but it is clear that the claim that the Clinton Foundation only steers 6 percent of its donations to charity is wrong, and amounts to a misunderstanding of how public charities work.
> Would a charity request for money be considered access, at the same level as PAC influence?
Is it pay of play in the same way if a donation was made to a completely unaffiliated charity, such as the American Red Cross? What if the donation is made first, and the politician notices and it happens to make them look favorably on a meeting because it bodes well for the character of the person in question?
> At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "charitable donation" ?
It's a gift to you when it's actually to you, and not to a separate organization that spends it on things that aren't for your own benefit.
> At some point, the foundation should be considered a profitable business rather than a charity, given the immense staffing and expenditures of operation in a billion dollar+ charity organization.
I'm not sure you understand how charities work. They are generally rated by how much money donated goes back out in programs, services or donations to other organizations to achieve the same.
> It's not trivial to ignore the oddities that abound when it does not operate like any other charity organization. Plane tickets for Hillary and Chelsea, car expenses, six figure living expenses, etc.
You should substantiate statements like that with references. Preferably to trusted sources.
> The democratic process is acutely broken by any standard if you believe that PACs and now, "charity organizations" is a net benefit.
I don't believe charity organizations working as a PAC is beneficial, but I haven't seen any evidence of that either.
From just some casual readings of the emails, my impression is the same as yours. The most damning things I find are the level of control the Democratic party has on the mainstream media. The emails reveal a relationship very similar to the one between Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese official press. The Democratic party officials basically tell NYT, WoPo etc, what to say and how to say it. The party even decides what byline the writer should be using.
As some one coming to US from mainland China, I find this collusion between the media and the Democratic party familiar, yet the case with US is much more disturbing. Because in China, the relationship between CCP and the press is out in the open, people knew the press is the mouthpiece of the party and treat the information they receive from the press accordingly. Here in US, people do not know. This is truly frightening.
It's not that hard to search Wikileaks. What I did was searching for emails sent by Podesta himself. There are not many of them, so you can easily read through all of them. Many of these emails are him giving instructions or approving drafts from NYT. Go ahead, read them and make up your own mind.
I've searched wikileaks, I've also searched google for stories talking about that. And the best I can find is somebody talking about a story that a journalist asked them for comment on.
DNC collusion with the media is one that stands out to me. Also the acknowledgement that ISIS is funded in part by Saudi Arabia while the Clinton Foundation gets many donations from Saudi Arabia.
If you have some time, scroll through the Wikileaks Twitter. Very little noise, mostly content. https://twitter.com/wikileaks
Sadly, bipartisan support for Saudi Arabia (and by extension its state sponsorship of various Wahhabist groups) has been a thing since way before Bush Snr was president. When the Russians were in Afghanistan it was "useful". Since then - not so much. But hey, oil right?
Why does this canard keep coming up? This isn't 1973. The Middle East does not have the West by the balls with respect to energy anymore. We're invested in Saudi Arabia to keep it from imploding, not for natural resources. Not directly, at least, since oil money is one of the few things keeping it from imploding.
Yes but think of the timeframes and the scope. Increasing energy independence is a relatively recent phenomenon - say the last decade? Geopolitical "investments" aren't traded quickly precisely because they're not supposed to be so transparently viewed as merely an investment in resources. The perception of things is still important which means such support can't be withdrawn in the short term. (Edit: so yes, I do agree, but...)
The US may well be largely energy independent but a large number of significant client states within its sphere of influence are not. The viability of those client states goes directly to the global effectiveness of US hegemony.
This is a perpetuation of the status quo of (at least) 20 years of Washington influence with the Saudi government, though. Which isn't going to change with trump who has some equally deep ties.
That depends on what is damaging. Is evidence of collusion and cooperation between DNC, media (including sending articles for approval, leaking supposedly secret interview questions and creating content at the request of the campaign, to be published as independently created) and Clinton campaign to get Clinton elected damaging? It might be if you value free press and honest election process, or it might be OK for you if you agree that getting Clinton elected is the ultimate goal.[1]
Is evidence of financial ties of Clinton and foundation aides to Russian oligarchy damaging? Depends on whether you think being financially tied to Putin and claiming Trump is in Putin's pocket in the same time is something bad to do or a clever game?
Is evidence of pay-for-play arrangements between State Dept., Clinton foundation and foreign investors - including same persons working for both at the same time - damaging or just a successful charity that nobody has to be ashamed of?
Is revelation that the president knew what he claimed to have no knowledge of damaging or just a clever tactic to defeat attacks?
Is revelation that Supreme Court was (successfully) pressured into making certain decisions by threatening to make it a campaign issue otherwise damaging or just a successful management?
Is calling your voters "needy latinos"[2] and Catholics "amazing bastardization of the faith"[3] damaging or just funny banter?
Is telling "we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry"[4] and complaining "compliance is obviously fading rapidly" damaging or accurate assessment of their electoral strategy?
Slightly orthogonal to your #5: are you in a current job role where you ever bring up the topic of your customers or your clients in casual discussion? Do you ever refer to either group in less-than-stellar terms?
For my part, I do both. I have bitched and kvetched at times about my clients being cripplingly needy, aggressively brain dead, and the like. I certainly wouldn't say it to their faces, and it doesn't mean I don't rely on their dollars to support my business. Nor either does it mean I am producing lesser-quality work for them.
This is a non-issue. People everywhere bitch about the outsiders they have to deal with in language that would never be used in business proper.
It is a massive chasm of difference between calling a group "needy" and categorizing them as illegals, rapists and murderers.
I would never ever use such language in work email. You are always one wrong click away from everything being sent to your clients or to the whole wide world. There's a "New York Times principle" applicable to work emails - don't write anything you couldn't deal with if it were on the front page of the New York Times.
Now, if I were talking one on one with peers over beers, that's a different matter. There is much more freedom and it would allow some things said which are not meant to be heard by anybody not in the audience.
> People everywhere bitch about the outsiders they have to deal with in language that would never be used in business proper.
This is not exactly business - those are people that pretend to be champions of those "needy latinos" and represent them. It's a higher bar than just business transaction - I would have no problem doing business with a person I disagree with on everything and who maybe secretly hates me, as long as the business end is fine I'm fine. But I probably prefer to choose somebody else to represent me and speak for me.
> Is there something really damaging in Wikileak emails?
The most damaging thing at the moment would have to be the attempted bribery from the under secretary to the FBI. Even in their excuse they are kind of admitting they attempted to bribe, but it just failed so we shouldn't worry.
The other part that really gets me is the death penalty question that the head of the DNC smuggled out of CNN when she was working there. I don't know how she hasn't resigned when you have been caught working within the media to manipulate things to benefit your prefered candidate.
And that skips over the whole issue of how the DNC was bias against bernie, it's just pilling on now how rigged the system was against him.
> Even on Fox News they are not able to mention anything that is at the level of Trump tapes.
The Trump tapes? You mean that one 11-year-old video that shows him talking very crudely about sexual escapades?
Sure, that's reprehensible. Is it worse than what past presidents have done while in office? If not, why is it a problem now?
Why is one candidate's personal sex life a bigger problem than collusion with the media during the campaign and using a cabinet-level position to enrich oneself? That is, why is his sex life a bigger problem than her corruption exhibited while in public office, as well as her criminal mishandling of classified material, which directly harmed U.S. interests abroad, when many have been jailed for less (including since Comey's press conference)?
> PS: As far as voting is concerned, I'm still in information collection mode and don't support any candidate at this point.
That's nice. A suggestion: if you really care about who wins, look less at the candidates and more the platforms of them and their parties. The media makes it appear that this election is a contest between two people--but it's actually a contest between two competing worldviews which are vastly different from one another. You could swap any other Democrat for her and any Republican for him (though any actual Republican would differ much more from Trump than any other Democrat would differ from Clinton), and the underlying issues would be the same. The individual candidates are virtually a facade, a distraction from the real issues at stake.
> Why is one candidate's personal sex life a bigger problem than collusion with the media during the campaign
If you're prepared to dismiss allegations of (and supporting boasts about) sexual molestation to simply be "his personal sex life" you have a very screwed up idea of sex and personal space.
Are you kidding? Come on. Both campaigns are turning out women claiming to have been abused years in the past. Even though some of them may have in fact been, it's turning into a circus, a competition of who can turn out the most or worst victims. These are not investigations, these are media circuses. How can you possibly take it seriously a few weeks before the election?
Did you see the Project Veritas stuff? You know, where the Democratic campaign staffers confess to having hired mentally ill people to commit acts of violence at Trump rallies? And to hiring people to vote out-of-state, specifically using their own cars or rentals to avoid the obvious concern that would be generated by busing them in?
So think about this: if you have at least one of the campaigns having confessed to criminal electioneering, why would you believe anything they say? Why would you believe anyone they bring forward to slander the opposing candidate?
I don't support any such boasts. I support healthy skepticism. NBC didn't have any problem with Trump's conduct when he was a TV star raking in millions for them, but now that he's opposing Dear Leader, the evidence must be brought forward.
And you try to turn this around and make it about me? You're clearly not interested in truth of any kind.
>We're in the middle of some crazy propaganda war right now
Agreed. It's like some people somewhere woke up and realized hiring some script kiddies to hack old people that use the same password for all their accounts is a lot cheaper and easier than old-fashioned espionage.
The frenzied pace at which all of this is happening reminds me a child with a new toy.
>gaslighting from both sides
I disagree that Clinton is trying to distort reality. She is more old school - she just stright up lies from time to time. Trump, on the other hand, is quite literally trying to create an alternate reality.
If hundreds of pieces of direct evidence don't suffice, then I'm not sure what does. The Clinton Foundation has done countless extremely illegal and unethical things. Between CTR, the Bernie fiasco, the fake Craigslist ads, the "public and private" positions, I'm not sure how you can say that HRC isn't trying to create an alternate reality.
Every politician has public and private positions. That's just how politics works.
The view the plebs demands often don't align with either the politicians vision for the country, what's possible near or long term, or the people you are indebted to (donors, etc).
In many cases it's acceptable and even advisable, in my opinion.
A head of state has insight into facts and knowledge of others about realities and facts that most will / can / not understand (and SOMETIMES shouldn't even be known publicly).
What's not acceptable is if a politician is a puppet for donors.
The amount of money and network it takes to become president in the US is ridiculous, and basically necessitates being dirty and indebted.
---
Also, Clinton is most likely no worse than most previous presidents. There's just considerably more information about her.
But if you have the choice between that and Trump, I cannot imagine how you could choose the latter.
> But if you have the choice between that and Trump, I cannot imagine how you could choose the latter.
Status quo vs. something different. The status quo is that Obama/Hillary have destabilised countless countries, and are sabre rattling against Russia, possibly leading to an eventual nuclear war.
By contrast, Trump is promising less wars, less interventionism, and otherwise is a relative wildcard with a penchant towards pragmatism and deal-making.
I'm not American, but on paper, it looks like Trump would be an improvement as far as world stability goes, I'd vote for him based on his policy concerning Russia alone.
The Clinton/Bush/Obama dynasties have not made the world a better place, have not contributed to anything positive IMO, and judging by all the leaked emails, they're all corrupt as well.
Given his attitude, Trump seems way more likely to invade other countries and n general sable rattle.
Also, I wouldn't call what Obama did sable rattling. Russia did invade several countries in the last years (Georgia, Ukraine, and maybe I'm missing one more?). If you don't have a good response for that, then how can you be trusted to defend your other allies (Poland, etc.)
Georgia attacked first, after the US-sponsored 'Rose Revolution', and the US also sponsored 2 'revolutions' in Ukraine. Crimea was hardly invaded, it was a region which had tried in the past to separate from Ukraine.
Again, both actions you cite were reactions to US meddling in the region in the first place.
The fact Trump hasn't threatened any new invasions is already an improvement.
PS. Do you know who Mikheil Saakashvili is, what he did, where he is now, and why he's exiled from his own country? And have you seen Victor Yushchenko's face recently, what it looks like? The answers to both of these questions give a lot of insight into US actions in the region.
Right -- the several thousand army and special forces troops that Putin has since openly acknowledged sending there to size buildings and other strategic checkpoints were just out on vacation.
Actually the Russians are relative newcomers, having just arrived in 1783. Before that time it was controlled by the Crimean Tatars (you know, the people Stalin deported en masse in 1944). And before that, by Khazars, Bulgars, Huns, Goths, Scythians, Romans, Greeks (most significantly), and scads of others.
Either way -- the main point is (and presumably you do know this), the leased military base at Sevastopol != the Crimean peninsula.
Trump's tone is abrasive, but do you remember the time he sucker punched someone he was yelling at instead of continuing to debate? Me neither. Despite what we want to infer from his personality, you don't get to his level by being out of control or incredibly impulsive. Besides, he's already started sabre rattling, but the threats are usually for the US to stop doing X, rather than to start doing Y. It creates a whole new set of incentives, and that's really the only way to change the world situation.
The entire world knows that a Clinton presidency would degrade our already weak relationship with Russia. Russia has said this, pretty much every news source (partisan or not) has said this, and Clinton has openly attacked Russia multiple times.
> I'm not American, but on paper, it looks like Trump would be an improvement as far as world stability goes, I'd vote for him based on his policy concerning Russia alone.
I'm struggling to comprehend how you can look at Trump's statements and come out thinking that he'll improve world stability. Trump thinks that NATO is obsolete - he's happy for the US to abandon it and totally change the balance of power in Europe. He has stated that nuclear proliferation is a good thing, even encouraging an Asian nuclear arms race between the DPRK and ROK/Japan. He's asked, "why can't [the US] use nuclear weapons?"
You are very astute, I only wish that my fellow countrymen would wake up to the truth.
I truly believe Trump is a populist reformer, trying to help the Everyman.
But keep in mind that even though the Populares were nominally "for the people", they only used them for their own ends. They were very much as political as the Optimates.
It's a sad state of affairs when a relative madman looks like a saner alternative to a truly sick and twisted authoritarian war-hawk.
But perhaps a madman is needed to tear down this malfunctioning and corrupt system where a few elites benefit at the expense of the common man.
It wouldn't surprise me if this election is the last one we'll ever have.
Scott Adams has noted how Trump's views evolve to the people's, I do agree in thinking he's a populist. Would any of the other GOP candidates have had a gay man speak at the RNC?
Populists can be dangerous, but they can also do a lot of good. It seems worth a chance in the current environment, though ever since I read this passage from http://www.constitution.org/eng/patriarcha.htm I've been wary of those with mass support: "Nero, Heliogabalus, Otho, Vitellius, and such other monsters of nature, were the minions of the multitude and set up by them. Pertinax, Alexander, Severus, Gordianus, Gallus, Emilianus, Quintilius, Aurelianus, Tacitus, Probus, and Numerianus, all of them good emperors in the judgment of all historians, yet murdered by the multitude."
While there are elements of Trump's desire to burn the system to ground that appeal to folks even on the left (like myself), I cannot dissociate the ideas from the man - the very disgusting man.The very thin skinned man who can be easily goaded into self-destructive behavior.
The POTUS can literally end humanity with a few words. That's not an exaggeration. I want change as much as the next guy, but not if it means handing the power to start the apocalypse to a man like Donald Trump.
There is a difference between what you're describing is different from what is occurring -- she campaigns on LGTB rights and freedoms but her private positions is nothing short of abject disdain for LGTBs.
She tries to run on anti-establishment but there is no-one that is more establishment than her.
She tries to run on fighting for women's rights but she is an apologist for her husband's sordid history of sexual abuse towards other women, and not only that but she will readily accept funds from people that are the most misogynistic on the face of the Earth (the Gulf monarchies).
The difference is her stance is opposite from what she campaigns on -- there is a word for this: hypocrite. She clearly has no moral center.
Based on my reading of the emails, their morality is similar to that of members of a college fraternity trying to pull off the biggest prank imaginable, except the prank is not harmless. The absolute delight in being able to do this repeatedly and get away with it is what keeps these people going. It helps them reenforce their feelings of superiority and thus self-justifies their right to do just about anything they want to.
> There is a difference between what you're describing is different from what is occurring -- she campaigns on LGTB rights and freedoms but her private positions is nothing short of abject disdain for LGTBs.
Source?
> She tries to run on anti-establishment but there is no-one that is more establishment than her.
Sure, but that's just marketing, not substance.
> She tries to run on fighting for women's rights but she is an apologist for her husband's sordid history of sexual abuse towards other women, and not only that but she will readily accept funds from people that are the most misogynistic on the face of the Earth (the Gulf monarchies).
It is not clear that Clinton ever sexually abused women. He cheated on his wife, yes. But that is a far cry from 'sexual abuse'.
What is a political opportunist? The Clintons have always operated via the polls. Against gay marriage when being against it was popular, now an ardent supporter.
Your cognitive dissonance is astounding, but perhaps understandable.
You recognize and admit (as you have no choice doing, after the mountain of proof) that the media willingly prostitutes itself to further the cause of the current administration, with no regard for actual truth.
But you allow yourself to be influenced in your opinion of Donald Trump by that same media.
Imagine if a mean girl in your office told everybody that you were a brown-nosing little weasel who stared at her all the time, even though it's not true. Nobody will sit next to you at lunch, and you refuse to sit next to Billy, since that same girl said he picks is nose and eats it. Can't you understand that once you know she's a liar, you can't trust her about Billy either?
Watching a video of one of his rallies or a debate is sufficient to form my own opinion.
He (is)
- lies or distorts the truth almost everytime he opens his mouth
- extremely authoritarian
- very anti free media (at his rallys, media is cordoned off and he gets the crowd to yell at them for minutes. that is if the outlet hasn't been banned for reporting the truth. I wonder why the media is anti Trump...)
- sexist and abusive (enough evidence there, he says so himself)
- racist (again, no more evidence needed, he said it all)
- only cares about his own interests (yay, big tax cuts for the rich are his tax plan)
- very uneducated and uninformed on the actual issues
and just generally a disgusting man (my opinion).
It might very well be that he is not actually racist and that a lot of what he says is just what works with the crowds. That really doesn't matter much, though.
He is a populist par excellence. You can't trust anything he says.
And a very dangerous man to be the head of state in a country where that position holds so much power.
Were I American, I'd have a hard time voting for Clinton too. But that more than 40% would even consider voting for Trump scares me.
>racist (again, no more evidence needed, he said it all)
You're wrong, and I think you know it. Liberals have used the racist word against anybody who was winning an argument with them for too many years. It ends now.
Trump has more support of black and hispanic people than any other Republican presidential nominee. [1] He has that because the ones who speak English (not getting their news only from Univision) understand that he wants to help Americans of all ethnic groups.
The co-opting of minority votes by the democratic machine is legendary, but it's over. Those minority AMERICANS that are getting the message undistorted by the media are understanding that their lives are made worse by liberal policies, not better.
It's not racist to wish to enforce current immigration law. It's not racist to wish to protect the jobs and lives of American citizens. If you're reading HN, I know you actually understand this, but choose to spit venom anyway.
Trump is not doing better than other recent Republicans among blacks or Hispanics according to most polling, which shows him doing far worse than other recent GOP nominees with these groups.
The only way you can defend this kind of claim is cherry picking a high outlier poll against the comparable-time polling consensus (or low outliers) for previous GOP nominees.
Have you not heard any of the criticisms about this poll yet[1]? Also, FYI, it's the same poll in both those links. It's an LA Times tracking poll, which means the same people are asked over and over to track change over time. The TL;DR of the problem is that they "weight" ethnic groups to get a more indicative stance of how that group will vote, and there's a major outlier in this poll that does not correspond to how his ethnic group generally votes, but is weighted very heavily. That has resulted in this poll being ~3-5 points higher for Trump consistently over time.
Okay, I just started reading that link, and so far, the two rabbit holes I've gone down have been fairly crazy webs of partisan blogs reporting on the "findings" of other partisan blogs.
Truthfeed pointed out that NBC/WSJ didn’t mention that the poll was created by a Hillary Super PAC.
The sourced article does not prove that. It proves that the polling organization that did the polling received money. Now, as a rational person, I might think that was money required to actually run a poll, since they aren't free, and cost money to run. Zero consideration was given to this, no follow up was done with the polling organization to ask them what this money was for, nor to ask them if they received money from other organizations (from ones supporting Trump, for example).
A partisan blog is very low journalistic standards sourcing its news from another blog with both low journalistic and low investigative standards should not be your source of news. Seriously, how can you put forward a link like this with a straight face? Did you actually look into this at all, or did you just take what was written on random blogs as de facto truth, and completely suspend all disbelief?
It’s also well known that the Monmouth University poll is run by a Hillary Huckster who recently was caught manipulating a poll and then lied about it.
Already off to a good start! Such unbiased reporting, referring to a "Hillary Huckster". This claim, that they only weighted based on party affiliate, is easily proven false. I downloaded the PDF with the poll results in question[1], located the tables references, and ran some numbers. No weighting is immediately apparent by gender, but the gender breakdown is close to the actual makeup of the country/region, so none may have been needed (or it may have been small enough to be undetectable). There is definitely weighting by age and race, and of course past political affiliation. The claims that only political affiliation were weighted for are provably false. Even by the data shown in the blog, if anyone had bothered to actually look, rather than just take what was said at face value.
With all the liberal distortions and dishonesty we decided to have a small team of actuarial and statistics professionals take a look at a couple of the recent polls to get their take on the reliability of these polls.
Good! That sounds like a good way to investigate this. So who are these actuaries and statisticians? They aren't ever identified. See, this is where a real journalist would be called out for sloppy reporting. Are these actuarial and statistician professionals "self-professed", or are they recognized in their fields? Do they even really exist? We have no way to know for sure, beyond "this blog referenced them".
By selecting more Dems the polls are designed to provide a Dem result.
Actually, that's what the weighting is for. You know, the thing this blog recently calling out as unfair? The whole purpose is to account for random sampling error. If the population was split evenly at 50% Democrat and 50% Republican, but your sample showed of the 100 people you asked a question, 45 were Democrat and 55 were Republican, due purely to chance and the fact you are sampling, not asking every person, how do you propose we would adjust for that to account for how we think it would really break down on election day? We weight the Democrats up to 50%, and the Republicans down to 50%. In reality, it's not obviously not 50%, but that's the point of weighting a poll.
Let me put it very simply. If your news sources refer to Clinton as "Crooked Hillary" or alternatively to Trump as "The Donald", or refers to "The Democrats" or "The Republicans" as a singular force that can be corrupt, or make blanket statements like "Let’s face it NOBODY likes Hillary and NOBODY trusts Hillary" or reference blogs as their source that do any of those things, you can't really trust them to give you an honest, impartial view of anything. You may think the MSM is biased, but usually what I hear as evidence of that assertion is that they aren't reporting on "news" such as this, when it's very cleat this isn't "news", by any journalistic standard. The MSM might be somewhat biased, but I think it's clear they are definitively less biased than the source you referenced, which ranges between referencing other sources that are plain wrong and itself making unsubstantiated statements without evidence.
If you want info on polls to trust, it's not too hard to find people willing to look into them with a more balanced approach[2].
> very anti free media (at his rallys, media is cordoned off and he gets the crowd to yell at them for minutes. that is if the outlet hasn't been banned for reporting the truth. I wonder why the media is anti Trump...)
I guess you haven't been paying attention. Trump was, for many years, a celebrity, making millions of dollars for NBC with his TV shows. Everything about him that they complain about now they happily accepted then, when it suited them.
For example, where was this 11-year-old video during the primaries? Answer that question and you will begin to understand what's going on here.
This "anti-free-media" claim is weird when you compare it to Clinton's campaign. For nearly a year she had zero press conferences--not even giving the media a chance. Now we find that her campaign specifically wanted to avoid answering any questions, to prevent the media from having a chance to question her about inconvenient stories. And we discover that the mainstream media is actively colluding with her campaign, giving them veto power over stories and quotes, etc.
So shouldn't you at least claim that she is as anti-free-media as he is?
> But that more than 40% would even consider voting for Trump scares me.
There is much more at stake here than these two individual people running for the office. The real contest here is between the movements they represent.
One of these two campaigns has been co-opted by a candidate who is not even a member of it. How did this candidate do so? With the help of the media, which vehemently attacked all other candidates during the primaries.
Now that same media is trying to destroy that candidate. That candidate is virtually a strawman candidate, set up for the sake of being torn down.
So, what does that tell you? Based on that, which candidate--which movement--should one vote for?
> And we discover that the mainstream media is actively colluding with her campaign, giving them veto power over stories and quotes, etc.
Seriously, can you provide references to back up some of this? The only thing I've heard about it so far is that in a profile piece, a portion was talked about off the record, and the reporter requested the use of some of the off the record material, and gave them a chance to review what could be used, since it was at their discretion it be used at all. The same reporter explained that there was a portion of his profile of Trump earlier he didn't use because it was off the record as well. The reporter is on record explaining this[1].
If there are other instances, please explain them, otherwise people are going to assume you are referring to this, which I think is pretty well explained. This is the reason people keep asking for sources. Without sources, it's just hearsay.
> Seriously, can you provide references to back up some of this?
How about Jake Tapper of CNN describing one of the events described in the emails about a question being leaked to the clinton campaign as "Journalistically it’s horrifying"?
Whether a single person passed along information they shouldn't have to the Clinton campaign, for unknown reasons (in the hopes of garnering favor? Because of opposition to Trump? We don't know) does not constitute "the mainstream media" actively colluding with her campaign. It constitutes a single person possibly colluding with her campaign. Even then, Brazile says it wasn't about the presidential debate (and that she didn't have access to questions for that)[1], but about a separate panel she was participating on:
A Democratic Party official suggested the question was actually prep for a panel Brazile was set to appear on, saying Brazile normally checked with both Democratic candidates for their positions. The day after the email was sent, Brazile appeared on ABC's "This Week" as a panelist.
Now, this isn't the best excuse, so I'm not sure I believe it, but I'm also not sure what I'm supposed to expect the Clinton campaign to have done. Loudly proclaim they got a town hall question beforehand when Brazile may have been misinterpreted, or wrong? Denounce her afterwards when they had already benefited from the knowledge, so people would vilify them anyway? If this was as bad as it looks, I'm still left concluding it was, until proven otherwise, and isolated incident, and one in which I think the campaign may have benefited, but ultimately didn't act in any way I wouldn't have expected them to (barring further information, such as them pumping her for more info). I also don't harbor any fantasies that the Trump campaign would have acted any differently.
Finally, I agree, it is journalistically horrifying. That's because journalism has it's own standards and ethics to consider. It was horrible for a journalist. But Clinton and her staff aren't journalists, they are politicians, and while it would be great if it wasn't true, we expect less from them. That's why journalism is so important and why it's protected under the first amendment, because it keeps politicians in check.
>But you allow yourself to be influenced in your opinion of Donald Trump by that same media.
This is absolutely ridiculous, trump has been a public figure for 30+(?) years. Even if you ignore the smearing that's been happening for the past year in the media, there's plenty of reasons to think this guy is the last person you'd want as president
The "smearing" in the last year consists largely of repeating the reporting of facts of what Trump has done and said in the period in which he has been a public celebrity.
> What's not acceptable is if a politician is a puppet for donors.
Absolutely! I agree wholeheartedly.
> The amount of money and network it takes to become president in the US is ridiculous, and basically necessitates being dirty and indebted.
I thought we just agreed that politicians should not be puppets? And now they must be dirty and indebted? The situation is definitely ridiculous!
> Also, Clinton is most likely no worse than most previous presidents. There's just considerably more information about her.
That is certainly a rational outlook on the matter. We are definitely in a period where we have more information available.
But something else has changed (some 60 years and just 10 presidents past) - politicians are now evaluated largely according to TV performance, and costs have spiralled out of control. Perhaps when it was much less costly to become president, you didn't need to be dirty and indebted?
> But if you have the choice between that and Trump, I cannot imagine how you could choose the latter.
Only this convoluted bit of logic could possibly suffice: I think Clinton would make an acceptable President, and would continue the status quo. There would be little reform-instead, things would just get a little bit worse. Trump would be awful. However, I think that I (and my son, who will not be 18 in this presidency) could probably survive with only moderate loss of personal resources. As a result of that... experiment, I expect that in coming years the DNC and the country in general would institute various reforms that would be good for the long-term health of the country.
Not sure I entirely buy this, Charity Watch gives the Clinton Foundation high marks. [1] You might be able to make some arguments for crossing some ethical lines, but to say they have done "countless extremely illegal and unethical things" is pushing the conspiratorial line.
Page 18 and 19. Out of a budget of $217 million, they spent $34 million on direct program expenditures. That's about 16%, not 88% as your link would lead us to believe.
Additionally, what is this money spent on?
Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton Presidential Center, Clinton Development Initiative, Clinton Health Matters Initiative, Clinton Giustra Sustaninable Growth Initiative
A little self-serving, don't you think? And what percentage of the money going to those initiatives do you think are spent on directly charitable causes?
No one should be under the illusion that the Clinton Foundation is a charity. It isn't. It's a slush fund for political purposes. Look at how mismanaged the billions of dollars for Haiti has been if you want to see how charitable the Clintons are (spoiler: nearly none of the money has actually been spent on Haiti, and virtually none of it on direct relief).
If you read Dylan Matthews' investigation [1] a major takeaway is that the foundation's impact comes primarily from influencing corporations and governments. For example, to make AIDS drugs cheaper they convinced the manufacturers to accept much lower prices in exchange for much larger volume, and they convinced governments to make very large orders.
If the foundation were trying to fight AIDS by directly funding the distribution of treatments the numbers in the report would be pretty bad, but that's not the picture here.
The headline quote being "The key question on the Clinton Foundation is whether it saved lives. The answer is clearly yes." is laughable. The Clintons do not give a flying fuck about saving lives. What has the cost of life been in the Middle East due to the US invasion that HRC voted for and wants to perpetuate? Literally tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of women and children, depending on which watchdog reports you believe.
HRC is the same woman that literally laughed and bragged on a television interview about killing Gaddafi. As shitty as he was, he was a real person. A living human, and she laughs about killing him. It's fine to have pride in protecting your country, but killing someone (much less a head of state) should never be a laughing matter.
> If you read Dylan Matthews' investigation [1] a major takeaway is that the foundation's impact comes primarily from influencing corporations and governments. For example, to make AIDS drugs cheaper they convinced the manufacturers to accept much lower prices in exchange for much larger volume, and they convinced governments to make very large orders.
I find it a bit troubling that in the article he makes passing mention of the drug company the CGI was working with but no mention of how they got into huge trouble for not actually passing many drugs, including the AIDS vaccine through QA.
You really have to wonder the about effects of pushing down the margins of a drug company who wasn't even following safety standards at the time.
Why are you excluding the salaries and benefits paid to people working on programs and services? Paying someone to do something like provide training or administer vaccines is reasonable to describe as a program and service expense, it's not overhead.
It's easy to imagine situations where that money is not being spent 100% efficiently, but it also seems unlikely that it is being spent perfectly inefficiently.
It's really a pointless argument, because the overhead on a non-charitable non-profit doesn't really matter. But you do have a point when looking at traditional charities.
And Trump uses his charity to pay off his businesses legal settlements.
Every time we get a new accusation from Trump (Clinton Foundation is a slush fund!!!) it turns out that Trump is actually the one doing it.
It's classic mis-direction. Accuse your opponent first to put them on the defensive, then when evidence if your own wrongdoing comes out you can muddy the waters and say no one has clean hands.
The Clintons used their personal connections and foundation money to lobby drug companies to give massive discounts on AIDs drugs to poor people. They've literally saved thousands of lives.
Trump's charity has done nothing charitable. He hasn't even donated to it in many years.
>uses his charity to pay off his businesses legal settlements
This is unproductive and dishonest hyperbole and I'm not going to waste my breath explaining the obvious.
>It's classic mis-direction
So is your post. "Just look at how bad Trump is!".
>to lobby drug companies to give massive discounts on AIDs drugs to poor people
What they've actually done is lobby drug companies into business dealings that make money for everyone. Do you think the drug companies are just giving shit out for free because Hillary and Bill asked nicely? Of course not. This would be like Trump saying he's saved lives by providing employment with health benefits.
>Trump's charity has done nothing charitable
It's funny that you try to say this in the same post as "Trump uses his charity to pay off his businesses legal settlements" because that pay-off was actually a donation to a charity for veterans (something the city of Palm Beach agreed to).
I am so glad the charity is doing something good, but does that justify HOW it got its money [1], and does some good mean the entire organization is built for good?
- Hillary and her team deliberately trying to trick the FBI by giving them a "slightly broader" set of emails [1]:
"What that means specifically is that they are going to turn over all the Blumenthal emails to the Committee that they hav along with some other HRC emails that include a slightly broader set of search terms than the original batch. That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that HRC didn't, which will make clear to them that she didn't have them in the first place, deleted them, or didn't turn them over."
- Purposefully witholding all emails that were between HRC and POTUS [2]:
"Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That's the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I seems like they will."
- Evidence that the DNC purchased craigslist ads in attempt to frame Trump [3]
"We’re proud to maintain a “fun” and “friendly work environment, where the boss is always available to meet with his employees. Like it or not, he may greet you with a kiss on the lips or grope you under the meeting table. Interested applicants should send resume, cover letter, and headshot to
jobs@trump.com<mailto:jobs@trump.com>"
- Clinton Foundation accepting $1 million from Qatar for Bill's birthday. [4]
Is this post satirical? I think I am being trolled, but at the risk of making myself look like a fool for falling for it:
How is your reading comprehension this bad?
1. Your understanding of the comment here is miserable given the point you are trying to make. If you should find anything suspicious, it is that the 2nd set of e-mails, with a broader search, included e-mails that should have been turned over previously but weren't. If you want to go down that angle, you think the Benghazi committee would sit on those e-mails and not say anything if there was anything particularly salient in them?
2. You have an issue that State is considering whether releasing POTUS e-mails are subject to executive privilege and should be cleared first?
3. Really? I'll parrot the guys that give out free comedy show tickets - "you don't like to laugh? you don't like humor?"
4. Please point me to the illegal or unethical behavior here.
> 4. Please point me to the illegal or unethical behavior here.
Well to start, Qatar is funding ISIS according to other emails so maybe don't accept money from states that sponsor terrorism?
I mean we could go into how they stone gays for being themselves and women for having the gaul to think they can drive but we all know that's totally ethical.
You said "The Clinton Foundation has done countless extremely illegal and unethical things", and yet only one of those items has anything to do with that organization, and "charitable organization accepts charitable donation from Qatar" is perhaps shady at best, barring any important context.
"...disregard for protocol" is not illegal activity. Any indictments, for example? Anything to back up the claim of illegal activity that could lead to a conviction? Again, outside of wikileaks hacked emails.
I must agree with the parent post - Trump and HRC operate in entirely different way. HRC is basically the avatar of corruption, if corruption were personified it would look and act like her. She doesn't need alternative reality, the current reality of the government is completely fine, she feels in it like fish in the water. She knows all the levers, and she knows how to abuse the system and how get away with things. Of course, this requires lying, violating laws and so on - but it's all accounted for in the corrupt system, and all is already part of what they are doing. The only worry is that not too much is publicly revealed and enough power is there to make what is revealed go away. So far it worked fine.
For Trump, it's completely different. His strategy is built on two pillars - exposing the existence of the corrupt system and presenting himself as somebody who can fix it. The second part, unfortunately, is completely false and that's where alternative reality comes in - he needs to paint himself as somebody capable of doing a thing he has no idea how to do and no capability to do. That's why he always proposes over the top things - to capture one's imagination and paint himself as somebody who can do things. The proposal itself does not matter, neither the facts he claims to base it on - what matters is the image of somebody who knows how to do things, and has the guts to do them. Since the reality of his capabilities is rather modest, constant stream of fiction is required to keep this idea alive.
I agree with your assessment. HRC represents the "devil you know" to many people vs. "the one you don't" (Trump). A lot of how people feel is fueled by our hyperbolic, news-as-entertainment industry, but not all of it.
It's not irrational paranoia to believe your government operates as a separate entity, one that is not subject to the rule of law. From the Iraq war, to torture, to retroactively legal bulk collection, to immunity granted to telecoms for doing illegal surveillance, to no one going to jail in response to 2008, the list goes on and on.
We have a government all too happy to throw millions of us in jail for the most minor of offenses, yet the same rules don't appear to apply to the people constantly on our TV screens or ones that aren't with enough connections.
HRC is not the devil, but she represents something deeply unsavory to a lot of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum.
Trump is an obvious mad man. The fact that so many people are willing to give such a man the ability to unilaterally destroy humanity speaks volumes about where western civilization is at right now.
Nobody gives anybody ability to destroy humanity, no need for histrionics. We don't have elections for God or Emperor, just President, whose powers are large but limited. This is what the whole idea of limited government with independent branches is about. The same idea the current President is working so hard to destroy.
While there is a chain of command that could potentially stop a rogue president from unilaterally ordering a nuclear strike, at the end of the day the POTUS has an immense power in his ability to order a nuclear strike.
This whole nuclear strike thing is a canard, nobody is going to nuclear strike anybody. Yes, there's a chain of command, and also Trump is not some Hollywood supervillain. He is a real estate developer, a conman and a blowhard, not a Doctor Evil. So we need to stop discussing Hollywood scenarios and start discussing real issues the country is facing.
> I disagree that Clinton is trying to distort reality. She is more old school - she just stright up lies from time to time. Trump, on the other hand, is quite literally trying to create an alternate reality.
The magnitude of the falseness of this equivalence tells you everything you need to know about Wikileaks role in this election.
Implied in it is the idea that the Clinton campaign had an obligation to release their opposition research on Trump as soon as they had it. But of course, they have no such obligation: they're not journalists!
On the other hand, Wikileaks clearly is structuring their releases to draw out the impact on the Clinton campaign and (vainly) to blunt the impact of Trump's own behavior (mostly, Clinton has won the news cycles despite these attempts).
But Wikileaks is not supposed to be an organ of the Trump campaign. Unlike the HRC campaign, Wikileaks ostensibly does have an obligation to serve the public interest. It clearly does not honor that obligation; instead, it's transparently servicing the Trump campaign.
Exactly. These weren't excavated as part of the next horrible Raiders of the Lost Arc reboots. They're recorded convos on the Howard stern show. Anyone could have found it.
Better way of looking at it is: what would the effect be of the media letting a psychopath through until the late stages, letting the election get close, and then and only then actually educating the voting public on some of the most unsavory parts of his past?
The answer, if it isn't clear, is in the 50% bump in debate viewers over the 2008 election.
People keep saying that. It is the single most common rebuttal given to this argument. But I can't understand how it makes any sense at all.
It's a two-person race. It's zero-sum. To materially oppose one candidate is to materially support the other. That is, i assume, why Trump's campaign keeps claiming they coordinate directly with Assange through an intermediary.
Can someone (calmly) explain why anyone should take seriously the idea that Assange can singlehandedly run virtually the entire opposition research campaign against Hillary Clinton and not be supporting Trump?
Let me take on that question, as someone who would willingly attack Hillary while simultaneously refusing to support Trump.
If I want to be internally consistent as a supporter of truth/justice/liberty/all those tasty things, I MUST NOT hesitate to release damaging information along those lines for the sake of a "lesser of two evils" justification. Your statement of zero-sum two person race is also a principle I believe one must sacrifice a "lesser of two evils" discussion to rally against, I believe that accepting we are in a two person race is part and parcel with the level of polarization/group-think we're seeing nowadays. The first steps to a better world in my eyes are to question EVERYTHING and become as vehemently anti-tribal as possible, and that means not withholding things that my moral code would demand I act on, even if it might harm the horse I'm rooting for. (quite to the opposite actually, if I saw that my main candidate had flaws and wasn't getting called out on them, I would see it as my obligation to do so even MORE so, since to whitewash in that direction to my eyes weakens what would otherwise be a valid stance. e.g., all things have negatives, even perhaps a positive choice, but to ignore them is duplicitous.)
tl;dr, my goals in this are not "this election" or "this candidate"; it's "getting people to question more"; "getting people to realize it doesn't NEED to be a zero-sum game". One may say this is idealistic/drop in the ocean etc; but I cannot reconcile with my personal philosophy giving up, because if I did, then there is no justification for ANYONE ELSE to push for these "impossible" goals, and thus the status quo/tragedy of the commons continues.
To believe that's what Assange is trying to do, you'd have to explain away the drip-drip scheduling of the releases and the (often false) editorializing he does with decontextualized snippets from the email leaks. It's not simply that Assange is exclusively leaking stolen emails from Democrats, but the manner in which he's doing it.
That's a fair point, I can't say I'm as tuned into the drama as tightly as I should (or shouldn't, for my mental sanity?) be. I was more addressing the general case of your question; can his local actions of seeming uniformly opposing one party occur out of any incentive other than being in the pocket of that party, and additionally your statement re: zero-sum-game given that being an argument I find frustrating. Taking into account broader context should adjust your prior, for sure.
Yeah, I completely agree! that there is a way for a "leak broker" trying to serve the same role as WL to responsibly publish leaked email dumps from Russian hackers, even if those hackers are only sourcing from the Democrats and not the Republicans. It is not my argument that third parties can't publish unfavorable things about Clinton without implicitly supporting Trump!
The problem is that what Wikileaks is doing is much worse than that.
I think Assange doesn't care that much who is elected, as long as it's not Hillary (because of the things she did against him and the things she promised to do). In this case his only choice is Trump, but it could have been others.
To believe that Assange is motivated by a vendetta against HRC, you not only have to conjure up a plausible motive for that vendetta despite Clinton's marginal role in any of the US's dealings with Wikileaks, but also rationalize his efforts to put into power someone who has promised to put Edward Snowden to death.
The person who wrote this article is obviously engaging in high level mental gymnastics.
She explicitly asked to have Assange assassinated -> people laughed -> until they realised she was serious because she offers arguments why it would be better to kill him.
My 2 cents: Assange is anti establishment and that's why he helps Trump.
It doesn't take gymnastics to reach the conclusion that the Secretary of State of the United States of America is not seriously advocating for a military strike on the Ecuadorian embassy in the largest city of our closest ally. The notion that Clinton wants to "drone" Assange is about as credible as the notion that she and Podesta discussed murdering Antonin Scalia in a "Wetworks" operation.
Wasn't this supposed drone quote said before Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy? The quote was in 2010, but Assange wasn't at the embassy until 2012. Not to say I believe that Clinton was seriously considering assassinating Assange, but I don't think that not wanting a drone strike in the middle of London is a valid argument against it.
The level of evidence for this claim is "I heard from someone that Clinton said it once, I won't tell you who that person is or provide any evidence I talked to them. But there is supporting evidence because she often jokes about drone striking troublesome adversaries."
This is a really good point. HRC isn't necessarily good for Wikileaks, but Trump would conceivably be a lot, lot worse.
Perhaps the idea is that they might get off easier if Trump feels Wikileaks gave him an election present, but I find that to be a high risk gamble, especially at this point. That said, the argument could perhaps just as easily be made if they leaked a bunch of Trump stuff too.
I don't think anyone can really determine motives at this point with the current base of information.
We're not required to unspool Assange's weird motives to acknowledge that he is essentially functioning as an arm of the Trump campaign, and must know that he's doing so.
I don't see any evidence that he is providing any electoral even fit to Trump; I think he is more, in effect, serving as an arm of the Russian regime acting to undermine trust in the US leadership and government regardless of the election results than he is acting to improve Trump's electoral prospects.
As a non-American, I don't really care about US domestic politics, but I do care a very great deal about there not being a shooting war with Russia. Hillary wants to force the Russians out of Syria. So it's perfectly possible to simultaneously believe that Trump will be a terrible President, but that that's better for everyone outside the US than Hillary.
In a two horse race, throwing stones in front of one horse has an obvious and calculated effect.
There was a time when I believed in Wikileaks.
But collusion, orchestrated or not, with Putin and Trump crosses a clear line.
When you sell your services or align your actions with fascists, you are not longer serving the public interest, merely your own.
Let's not equivocate. Trump is an opportunistic fascist, apparently with aspirations to become America's analog to Putin the authoritarian fascist thug.
The cynic in me wonders what Putin has on Assange.
So for the record, I'm not really trying to cast 'blame' on one side or the other. But here's the issue. Neither of us really know who the aggressive actor is.
I can't read Hillary Clinton's mind. I can't realtalk with Julian Assange. I can't read Trump's emails. I'm not part of any intelligence community.
Was the announcement of the video timed to preempt the Wikileaks Podesta emails, or were the emails released as a direct reaction to the video? Is Wikileaks a puppet or the media? Nobody has the relevant meta-information to discern this. We're getting bombarded with scandalous new information against both candidates on a daily basis, so much so that it's nearly impossible to meaningfully judge their weight and discern who the bad actors really are.
What happens from this is we in our Trump or Hillary bubbles, or whatever bubble we may be in, with full-time jobs and a family to feed don't have the time to invest in these issues. This is really the logical conclusion of the problem with Internet/information bubbles.
The US is in a post-fact world where people get their opinions from the media rather than facts (though to some extent it's always been that way). When Wikileaks, a supposed bastion of free information appears to be biased or compromised, perhaps from possible grudges by Assange or international influence, we lose another source of that meta-information.
> Implied in it is the idea that the Clinton campaign had an obligation to release their opposition research on Trump as soon as they had it. But of course, they have no such obligation: they're not journalists!
But these women are coming out on their own because of cooper's question? I don't understand.
If you believe you are an isolated incident, it may be harder to come forth and level charges. You are working against whatever reputation, money and prestige that person may have. Once there is an indication that it is not an isolated incident, and you may be able to face it in unity with someone else, that may spur you to take the leap. Even then, you may hold back with the hope that the other person may succeed and you don't need to involve yourself.
In this case, we had Trump attempting to cast the video as entirely just talk, with no action involved. I think it's entirely within expectations that someone that had experienced this behavior may have had their hopes of justice which had risen during this incident dashed (given there wasn't an actual person to respond, just the video), and decided that was the straw that broke the camels back.
We saw this with Cosby as well, or do you think he's innocent? If you think he's not innocent, how do you explain all the people that only really spoke up loudly after the main report? We see this all the time. Coming forward is a risk, and until the perceived risk is lowered, you may not see many (or any people).
Now, it is possible that the people coming forward are making it all up, as it's always a possibility, but given the video and Trump's very affirmative statements on the video (of a 60 year old man, mind you. He should have learned long ago what is and is not okay with regard to sexual advances), I think it's far more likely that at least some of the women coming forward are telling the truth.
> It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Wikileaks notified of an incoming set of documents dangerous to the DNC well before those Trump videos arose.
They released on-schedule; they filter through the data they receive to avoid releasing information that can endanger individuals. This takes time, and they made it clear that it would be completed close to the election.
That is incorrect on both counts. They promised releases several weeks in a row before they actually released anything. And they also released social security numbers, names and addresses for hundreds/thousands of people, so they're obviously not that concerned with protecting people. Hell, the put out the information on almost all women voters in Turkey, putting them in danger: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...
> They promised releases several weeks in a row before they actually released anything.
So they promised releases well in advance and then released them.
> And they also released social security numbers, names and addresses for hundreds/thousands of people, so they're obviously not that concerned with protecting people.
That wasn't Wikileaks, it was Michael Best. Did you read the update at the top of the article you linked?
From Michael Best himself:
> @WikiLeaks didn't upload the #AKP files with the private info on Turkish women - I did (and they've been removed)
>So they promised releases well in advance and then released them.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? They promised releases to occur each week, until eventually weeks later an actual leak came out.
>That wasn't Wikileaks, it was Michael Best. Did you read the update at the top of the article you linked?
Yes, did you? It shows that he passed the data to Wikileaks, who didn't do the protection of information you say they do, and just released the information. And then never took responsibility. I mean, look at their own responses to that tweet. They're denying that anything they did was even bad.
I notice you also completely ignored the part about them releasing the private information of DNC donors.
>Stop reading the Huffington Post; it's a rag.
Stop complaining about sources when you are getting basic facts incorrect.
>Because that's not the example you used. I wasn't aware you were refering to DNC donors with your accusation.
This is what I said
>And they also released social security numbers, names and addresses for hundreds/thousands of people, so they're obviously not that concerned with protecting people.
Email isn't assured to remain on trusted servers while in transit over the 'net.
Moreover, if you had a stack of printouts containing your customer's credit card information sitting on your counter while you left your front door wide open, and _that_ was stolen, I would consider that you had improperly cared for the private information of your customers.
>Email isn't assured to remain on trusted servers while in transit over the 'net.
Nothing is assured to remain safe.
>Moreover, if you had a stack of printouts containing your customer's credit card information sitting on your counter while you left your front door wide open, and _that_ was stolen, I would consider that you had improperly cared for the private information of your customers.
You have stopped trying to defend WikiLeaks and put all the blame on the DNC. Even if I grant you all of this, that still doesn't abdicate the responsibility of the people who took the data, or the people releasing the data. Taking someone else's private data, even if they made it easy for you to do, and broadcasting it to the world, putting people at risk and exposing their private information unrelated to any government transparency goal you may have, is irresponsible and dangerous.
I made it fairly clear that I see nothing in this thread for which Wikileaks need be defended.
The DNC put its donors at risk by engaging in ludicrously unsafe storage practices for their private information. Someone, who was not Wikileaks, made off with that information as a result.
Wikileaks provided the information when it received it; but in no way can the donors be certain that Wikileaks is the only party who received the stolen information.
Wikileaks did those donors a favour by declaring to the world that their private information was stored and transferred irresponsibly by the DNC.
Every one of those donors should now immediately contact the proper authorities to protect themselves from credit card and identity fraud. That agony is upon them as a direct result of the irresponsible practices of the DNC, and it is only because of the actions of Wikileaks that they are now aware that they are at risk.
>I made it fairly clear that I see nothing in this thread for which Wikileaks need be defended.
And I have pointed out that they actively put people at risk. Of course, you deflect it onto the DNC, as evidence by:
>The DNC put its donors at risk by engaging in ludicrously unsafe storage practices for their private information. Someone, who was not Wikileaks, made off with that information as a result.
And WikiLeaks made that information publicly available, without any effort made to protect individuals. That is dangerous and irresponsible. If I leave my wallet on the sidewalk, whatever claims of negligence you want to level at me it's still morally wrong (and illegal) for you to take it and use it to steal my identity.
>Wikileaks did those donors a favour by declaring to the world that their private information was stored and transferred irresponsibly by the DNC.
We're on Hacker News, so I'm hoping you're at least somewhat familiar with the term Responsible Disclosure? If someone discovers a vulnerability in a banking website, you think the best way to help their customers is to make the vulnerability immediately available to the whole world? They "helped" these donors by making their private information public? That's just straight up delusional, to completely flip reality on it's head just to support a group you like.
>That agony is upon them as a direct result of the irresponsible practices of the DNC
Wikileaks did not steal anyone's identity. To use another one of your tortured metaphors, it's a bit like if Wikileaks found your wallet and pinned your credit card and driver's license to the nearest telephone pole.
I don't agree with most concepts of responsible disclosure; most would have Wikileaks contact the DNC, who would then likely attempt to hide their mistake. I am in favour of informing those harmed by the negligent actions of those they trusted; and so the right thing to do is to expose the donor list, as well as what data was present.
Personally, I would have replaced credit card numbers with Xs, but as the CC values could no longer be considered secure I fail to see the egregious additional injury caused by revealing them. It's unkind, but not particularly beyond the harm that the DNC had already done by failing to properly secure them. Who knows who has had them, and for how long? Not the DNC, and not Wikileaks.
>Wikileaks did not steal anyone's identity. To use another one of your tortured metaphors, it's a bit like if Wikileaks found your wallet and pinned your credit card and driver's license to the nearest telephone pole.
Not at all. They broadcast it to the world. They are an accessory.
>I don't agree with most concepts of responsible disclosure; most would have Wikileaks contact the DNC, who would then likely attempt to hide their mistake. I am in favour of informing those harmed by the negligent actions of those they trusted; and so the right thing to do is to expose the donor list, as well as what data was present.
That's... just ridiculous. You could get the same result by just redacting all the private info except names. Then everyone knows but no one is put at risk. But they didn't even bother to do that.
>Personally, I would have replaced credit card numbers with Xs, but as the CC values could no longer be considered secure I fail to see the egregious additional injury caused by revealing them
What you personally consider to be secure has no bearing. They took private sensitive data that was not public and made it public. Just because you think that maybe it probably was already at risk is irrelevant.
>but not particularly beyond the harm that the DNC had already done by failing to properly secure them
How can you even try to make this point? It makes no sense. If I know your credit card info, all I have to do is assume that other people already have it so it's fine if I publish it?
>Who knows who has had them, and for how long? Not the DNC, and not Wikileaks.
EXACTLY. Who knows? Not you, so it's irresponsible and damaging for them to release them when it's possible no one had them.
That's not fair. I even gave you a valid scenario of exposure. But there is such a thing as irresponsible exposure that endangers people. They could easily have exposed the issues you're talking about without endangering the people and their information that is totally irrelevant to the information WikiLeaks is trying to get out.
Most of the stories of planned releases were either misdirection or outright lies by bloggers and other media sources looking to make Assange seem like the boy that cried wolf. If you look at Assange/Wikileaks' proposed release dates, they mostly are on schedule.
Wikileaks's foundational theory was there were bad organizations and good organizations, and random leaks would impose a 'secrecy tax' on the bad ones, forcing them to take extreme opsec measures which would make them less effective, and this would gradually bend the moral arc of the universe towards goodness.
But be may be seeing another outcome: the greatest tax is on the organizations where its supporters care about what's right and wrong and true and false, while organizations that spew empty invective and bullshit have no tax. Perhaps what we ended up with is an 'intellectual honesty' tax.
I've read many of the emails. There just isn't much to them. It's almost all boring day-to-day crap. Even the release of Clinton's speech transcripts is about as mild and inoffensive as you can get.
The other thing is we have no idea if they are all authentic. It would be trivial to slip a few extra sentences in here or there. Everyone just seems to take it as given that they're legit but Assange didn't hack anyone to get them. We know nothing about who actually did, so we don't even have a flimsy "reputation" pretense to rely on.
For any one email, it's easy to check and dispute a discrepancy.
Checking thousands of emails takes time but you have to take that time to avoid the chance of validating a forgery. During that time, they're in the news a lot and someone may confirm a legitimate email in the dump, which will be taken by many as proof that the entire thing is valid. Many people will never change their memory of that. If you do find anything tampered with, it may be hard or impossible to prove to a level which will satisfy critics. It doesn't need to be provable to the level needed for a court case to be damaging politically – just look at how much mileage the GOP got from birtherism based on repetition and incredibly clumsy forgeries even with contradictory evidence available.
So if you compromise a political target's account, you could get the most damage from real dirt but you can get almost as much from a clever forgery among all of the normal office chatter as long as you don't do something like adding a Russian name to the Office metadata or claim something happened when it was unquestionably impossible (e.g. claiming a secret meeting when someone was giving a speech nowhere near the purported location).
Your implication is that I haven't thought about it in depth. I have. I care a lot, about my community, the country and our world.
Wikileaks has a 100% accuracy rating(meaning they have not once pushed a falsified leak).
You showing other falsifications by other corrupt organizations isn't enough for me to throw away evidence as 'false' when there is no reason to do so. Again, if there was an individual falsification why wouldn't DNC officials call it out? Can you provide me a rational explanation.
In the context of a leak dropped a day before the election with no chance to fact check, sure, I could entertain the possibility there might be forgeries to control the election results.
Weeks ahead? What is stopping any forgeries from being called out? Where is _your_ proof these are false emails?
Just to start with, remember when Wikileaks doxed millions of ordinary Turkish citizens falsely claiming they were secret documents about the ruling party?
Whatever you may believe about their actions in the past, they don't appear to be checking before publishing much now and that means it's on the reader to look for confirmation rather than credulously assuming nobody would lie about matters of political importance.
In this case, we've already seen that cycle with the Guccifer documents being heavily cross-promoted by Russian state media and Wikileaks but showing many signs of modification and misrepresentation (e.g. the alleged Clinton Foundation documents which didn't hold up to non-casual examination).
That doesn't mean that Wikileaks might not have real data but it definitely shows that anyone who isn't just looking for propaganda should take time to investigate rather than assuming they're legitimate or correctly summarized.
I completely agree with your analysis. To add to this, I've been watching US media closely over the past few months and have never seen them so biased in any matter before, including past elections. It appears to me that there is not a single news source in the US that does not entirely follow some political agenda. There seem to be no dissenters or cautious writers left.
Most of them are biased against Trump, of course, and follow a fairly obvious strategy: "Hillary is extremely unpopular, we cannot make her more popular, so let's make Trump even less popular."
It works very well. Just to make this clear, I'm a European left-wing liberal democratic socialist, not a Trump or Hillary supporter of any kind. But I've seen many US elections and it was never like that before. It's as if all US media and news organizations have sold out to the highest bidder at once. (To be fair, I don't follow that many of them, just a few newspaper sites like L.A. times, NY times, TV channels like CNN, Fox, nbc and a few social media sites.)
I think the answer is simpler than some grand conspiracy of the global media elite (insert your preferred shadowy cabal here), the sort of people who work in news agencies simply are not alienated enough from the current system to see trump as anything other than a danger to the current system of representative gov. and they also don't like being demonised and slandered by Trump, this requires no conspiracy, just that media people value the status quo (which trump threatens in so many ways to destroy and disrupt from within).
Agreed. I also think this is generally quite often true: what people perceive to be conspiracies are often as not instead emergent behaviors, rooted in the independent self-interested actions of a large number of individuals, acting with very loose or no coordination at all.
Conspiracies, when they happen, seem to rather often fail; those requiring secrecy are in particular prone to failure. But people act according to their own interests all the time, and when their interests are even slightly aligned the outcome can certainly resemble or even be indistinguishable from an actively-managed conspiracy.
I agree with both of you and am a bit bewildered that I came a cross as a "grand" conspiracy theorist. The is a very simple reason why the press hates Trump so much. He has not only threatened to sue journalists very often but has also hinted at times that he would limit the possibilities of journalists if he was elected.
That being said, don't underestimate the amount of ordinary collusion and the work of spin doctors during election times. My point is that this is massive this time, definitely more than in past elections.
Finally, although I generally agree, a little warning about your last comment: Since we only see failed conspiracies, we lack the data to adequately assess the question of how much real conspiracy there is. ("conspiracy theories" on the other hand, are easy to debunk, but that's another issue.)
Ok so lets take your version of events. So when this climate leads to situations were the media then starts working hand in hand with the DNC to leaks questions and give one candidate a leg up, at what point is that not a conspiracy?
At a certain point there is evidence to show people in the media coordinating in private to try and reach a common outcome. If a bunch of people in the media working together to distort the truth isn't a conspiracy then I'm not sure what is.
Such an apologist.
NY Times sent stories to Hillary for pre-approval.
I worked in journalism. In my time, this was a scarlet-letter offense. The conspirators should be black-balled from journalism.
The bias is off the rails online as well. Many places that used to claim a pretense of balance is now 100% dedicated to hating on Trump. Look at /r/politics, you'd think there is no political news outside of Trump is the next Stalin. At least it's avoidable though.
What really bothers me is not being able to watch any national news coverage without a constant stream of Democratic narrative. I'm genuinely curious about what other issues or political offices are going to be on the ballot, but I'm going to have to take it upon myself to research any of it. Maybe that's a good side-effect though.
Nope, you nailed it. You've read enough of our prostitutes to correctly identify the state of US journalism. Fortunately, they should be completely ineffectual very soon thanks to efforts of my write-in presidential candidate Wik I. Leaks
Releasing what people said and wrote is not propaganda, it's leaking. Choosing to release only things that make one candidate look bad is propaganda-ish, but to label leaks propaganda is to say it's bad to leak bad things the candidates have said or written, which I completely disagree with.
I want to know the dirt on our candidates because they will LIE LIE LIE as Trump put it.
If this is the case (and I think it is), then what is the underlying motive? It seems to me that if things are coming to a head like this it's because there is an underlying Issue (capital-I) that is also coming to a head or will be soon. I get a sense of near desperation from some of this.
My totally off the cuff hypothesis:
We are approaching a tipping point where new energy technologies (solar+batteries, etc.) will get cheap enough to "go exponential" vs. fossil fuels. This has huge geopolitical implications.
A more or less permanent crash in fossil fuel prices could completely realign the world. The biggest winners would probably be the USA, EU, and China since these are net energy importers and have economies based on high tech, manufacturing, finance, and services. The biggest losers would be Russia and the Middle Eastern petro-states, but certain regions within the USA and Canada would also lose substantially vs. others. More importantly you'd have a major crash in the value of certain corporations vs. others. Apple being briefly worth more than Exxon Mobil is perhaps a preview.
I've heard the view before that WWI and WWII were really about dominance of the emerging petroleum age. If that age is now ending, what happens next? WWIII?
Edit: Second hypothesis:
The world economy is about to crash again hard, and when that happens there will be a great window to enact all kinds of changes. Various parties are struggling to make sure they are in power for that window.
its also abundantly transparent now that "fact checking" services have lost all credibility, ie. "DT claimed HRC server was acid-washed: FALSE", "DT claimed HRC laughed at an 11-year-old rape victim: FALSE".
Never mind the info war how about DNC co-ordinating with paid agitators to start violence at Trump rallies
6m50s > "The thing that we have to watch is making sure there is a double blind between the campaign and the actual DNC and what we're doing. There's a double blind there. So they can plausibly deny that they knew anything about it."
9m35s > Aaron Black, DNC Rapid Response Coordinator, boasts about coordinating a Chicago protest at a Trump event. Two Chicago police reporters were injured and this event got a lot of news coverage.
> It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Personally, I don't understand the brouhaha about all the Trump tapes. If you had even a remote inkling of fact about the man NONE OF THIS IS A SURPRISE.
While I'm definitely in the opposing camp, I have zero respect for those who are now abandoning Trump. You stuck with him on superficial grounds and now you are leaving on superficial grounds. Nothing about the man has changed.
> Personally, I don't understand the brouhaha about all the Trump tapes. If you had even a remote inkling of fact about the man NONE OF THIS IS A SURPRISE.
I think it points towards people fooling themselves as to his character so they could continue to support him in good conscience. Once presented with hard evidence, that's harder to do. If something definitive came out tomorrow about Clinton accepting cash for favors (not donations to a charitable foundation for meetings, which is what is poorly alleged now), then I think a lot of Clinton supporters would have a similar crisis of conscience.
> We're in the middle of some crazy propaganda war right now, and it's been this way for quite a while. It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.
Huh? I remember the leaks coming out first then the video? I remember because I had fox news live on in the background, they started talking about the email dump and when they came back from break it was pussygate.
Regardless of what you believe about Wikileaks, it doesn't follow to think they're in league with the provider of the leaks. If you know anything about how Wikileaks solicits material, you'd know such isn't the case...
It does suck that they're timing their release with political motives, and Assange appears to be a gaping asshole (though not a rapist), but none of this is even remotely novel for Wikileaks.
> it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former.
correct. you saw the exact same defamation routine a few years ago with the iraq leaks, and again (not as strongly) with the diplomatic cable leaks. the only twist this time is the attempt to conflate russia-us geopolitical tensions with wikileaks involvement.
does the source of the information matter, if the information is legitimate? no. the dems live in fear of wikileaks and the endless dirt on hillary.
it's clear that russia does view assange as an asset, however-- the whole RT show a few years ago spelled that out for me. what is also clear is that unhappy facts are more effective propaganda than mere rhetoric. assange seems content to be a participant in russia's propaganda schemes, so long as he is actually releasing documents whose beef was agnostic to the context of geopolitical rivalry.
in other words: i want the dirt, too. i don't care if russia helps assange, we need all the help we can get against our own government at this point.
I'm constantly amazed at how some ordinary citizens can be mad at Snowden or Assange for releasing information. Wouldn't you want to know? Even just for interest sake I like to know what government and politicians around the world are up to.
I think many (most?) people are OK with the mantra "ignorance is bliss".
HN readership doesn't really represent the average citizen. So while you may want the info that likely doesn't hold for a lot of folks who really only care about a very minor set of immediate concerns (food, shelter, children).
I've actually asked people about this, and the prevailing attitude is "it puts lives in danger" or "sacrifices national security". While I don't agree with those opinions , the opposing viewpoint seems to view Snowden as a "snitch".
Might sound silly, but I think more adjectives equals less trustworthy. So when I see words like 'powerful, emotional, hateful' I tend to dismiss the article as rubbish. Try it sometime.
To be fair, this is just a reasonable strategy on the part of the Clinton campaign. To my knowledge there hasn't yet been anything particularly damaging found in these emails. If I were them, i'd have done the same thing with respect to timing though, it just makes sense when you have a pre-commitment from an adversary to release on a particular date.
I mean, I guess it's a little bit underhanded, but only just barely. If there were something significant in the emails then it still would have been reported on, but as far as I can tell, there wasn't.
I'm a bit confused by all the comments here spinning off down conspiracy theories, but not much on facts.
"State actor" can only really mean UK or Ecuadorian government - or at the very least one of those two must be pulling the trigger.
If it's Ecuador that makes some sense, they control the connections to the outside world - they could just change some passwords and internet is cut. But that would be very obviously what had happened so why not just name them.
Alternatively the UK could cut the connection from outside the embassy. I don't see how that could be done without cutting off the internet for the whole embassy. That would possibly be in breach of the Vienna Convention [0] but at the very least I can't imagine it happening without creating a gigantic diplomatic stink.
Neither of those options sound that plausible. Is there a third I've missed? Somehow know it's Assange browsing and kill all his packets in flight?
Also, this is central London - the internet floats freely through the air. Contingency measure is tethering?
That's because there are no facts. We don't even know if the internet was cut in the first place. (One wonders how they managed to post to Twitter without internet access.) The "state actor" part is completely unsubstantiated.
The third option you've missed is "this is all bullshit." Either because it's not happening at all, or because the embassy's internet is down due to some routine outage.
I meant in this particular case it would be weird, because it would mean that the perpetrators are somehow blocking mobile data but neglected to block SMS.
I think a state actor could filter at will, since they could MITM the connection and pass stuff through selectively. Not that I can see why they would bother. Although I can't see why they would take this action at all, which is why I don't believe the story in the first place.
"(One wonders how they managed to post to Twitter without internet access.)"
I don't think Assange runs the wikileaks twitter account. So probably he messages them every day and when they don't get a message they know something is wrong.
> "State actor" can only really mean UK or Ecuadorian government - or at the very least one of those two must be pulling the trigger.
Not necessarily. Russia could think that it's best interest is that Wikileaks' dead man switch goes off. They could be pressuring Ecuador or actually have cut the connection themselves.
> Also, this is central London - the internet floats freely through the air. Contingency measure is tethering?
Cellphone signals can be easily jammed, as shown at DEFCON and other events. No one has reported on whether or not they can get signal at the Ecuadorian embassy AFAIK.
EDIT: Some people streamed Periscope from the embassy, so no cellphone jamming. If Ecuador is involved, of course, they could just take away all of Assange's devices.
Right, but if Russia is cutting it off that will be a snip the cable type job, killing internet for the whole embassy (or even building). Something you'd expect to be noticed pretty widely. And it would be fixable by phoning BT.
As for signal jamming. Not an area I know a lot about, but I assume it is achieved by flooding an area with noise. Pretty detectable is what I'm saying - anyone nipped down to see if that's actually happening? Would be quite a scoop.
Another possibility: For whatever reason, JA exclusively uses GSM for access (independent of whatever connection the embassy uses) and this was cut off at the behest of some state actor.
In any case, this is all speculation until we get some kind of evidence of some kind.
If recreations of Julian Assange's room in the embassy (from memory; photographs are not allowed due to embassy rules) are correct, then Assange uses a wireless router just like the rest of us.
Instead of jumping on this as a giant conspiracy, it might be worth considering that it's just that his internet went down.
I mean, until there is actual evidence that Hillary Clinton[1] deployed a highly trained collection of seals (the animal, not the US military contingent) to cut through his tube wires in the death of the night and then pelt across hide park and hide in the serpentine, perhaps we should just consider that public services in the UK are incompetent.
My internet went down last week, you don't see me reaching for the anti-seal spray.
[1] Well, the robot that replaced Hillary Clinton obviously, as we all know she's been dead for 20 years
1/ Unless you have dumped massive datasets of classified USG data I fail to see how your situation is similar to Assange's. What might be coincidental for you is not when it comes to JA.
2/ Since you post on HN I guess you sure understand that there is no need to alter the physical layer if you want to ostracize a subnetwork from the Internet.
Yea with this being the case it's a little confusing. If they were going to extradite, though, wouldn't that start with officially taking custody? Aka sort of an arrest meaning taking personal devices/access away? I'm sure it's super complicated...
I mean, Wikileaks doesn't host their servers inside the Ecuadorian embassy. They could just time the release of the data in advance, so that they don't need Assange's ongoing internet capabilities to do anything... right?
I do find myself confused by Assange's motivation when taken in context of his circumstances.
If he has and holds evidence of something so damaging that a tweet of the supposed hash of the file is enough to be a threat to a person in power, then why has he allowed himself to live under effectively self-imposed house-arrest for the past 4 years?
I can't imagine that the Wikileaks apparatus doesn't have sufficient op-sec and op-capability to ensure that whatever they're holding gets released effectively should they choose for it to be, so I find myself erring towards this being an over-played hand for the most part.
It's akin to a nuclear exchange. You can only use it once. It's MAD.
So you hold onto it to protect a high value asset - your life. Assume that you want charges dropped unto you - and you get that granted. Then you want something more annoying to the powers you control - maybe that would be granted. But at a certain point the cost to grant you wishes is going to be on the same level as the threat you hold over me, and then I may decide to take the fallout, and be done with it.
I suspect we're on the verge of this - Assange has something so damning that the fallout of having him taken out in broad daylight becomes something you contemplate. If this is so, at this point if Assange goes public with what he knows, he's a dead man anyway.
Or they don't have anything of value that they haven't released. The idea that's he's sitting on something valuable to protect himself seems questionable to me considering he's pretty much a prisoner in an embassy for the forseeable future. I suspect Assange's ego is way to big for him to sit on anything 'juicy' for very long. He needs to keep himself and wikileaks relevant.
Also they have the ability to spread information as they see fit. See his various leaks for example. Assange isn't hosting an ftp for everyone at the embassy. This stuff goes out via torrents, mailed drives to journalists, and via Assange's army of helpers.
He could be tortured or pressure could be put on his contacts.
In the former case he might fear he releases the secret to stop the Dead Man's Switch, in the latter case his contacts might avoid him or be tortured themselves just to pressure JA, so it doesn't sound like a free life either.
It suits Assange's narrative to say its a "state actor", just as it suited Yahoo's board to claim "state actors" as they disclosed their latest breach.
Assange's ego really dilutes the wikileaks original goals and its no surprise that the actual doers in the organisation upped and left in 2010.
I had a neutral opinion of Assange until he posted (and then deleted) a tweet with echo parentheses. That made it pretty obvious he's not really in it for any noble purpose.
Anti-Semitism is rising. Everywhere. We are going high-profile.
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and General Flynn this week have tweeted openly anti-Semitic tweets.
I'm anything but a fan of Assange, but it's possible his tweet was misinterpreted. To me, it looks like he was referring to people who put (((echoes))) around their own twitter handles, which is not uncommonly done in solidarity by non-Jewish Twitter users.
The echo was quickly co-opted. I.e by the time of the tweet most of Wikileaks critics were running the Spartacus defense on the bigots who started the echo.
The "horrible" idea is that maybe who ever made the Wikileaks tweet was running Coincidence Detector, IGNORING that for weeks the echo had been exposed and co-opted.
We're talking about a news organization responsible for leaking US secrets, with it's head using the asylum of an embassy to prevent extradition on crimes he says are politically motivated, releasing hacked emails in an attempt to disrupt a presidential candidacy. This was using the official twitter channel for Wikileaks. I'm not sure what part of that lends itself to joking, and even if it did, an anti-semitic one isn't what I would consider appropriate for a organization such as that, and would need to be addressed specifically. Even on twitter.
Also, how it that funny? Using Jewish stereotypes and anti-semitic labeling to imply your critics are Jews trying to climb the social ladder? Is that supposed to pass for humor? Maybe next he'll make some comment about a group of people with no jobs, having great tans, and that just love to eat fried chicken and watermelon. What a comedian, that guy.
I have no opinion on Assange either way, but at this point is it so fantastic even to suggest that there might be state actors behind this? Or are you suggesting that blocking internet connection is probably not a worthwhile exercise enough for state actors? I can understand that argument.
Either the internet is out due to a routine failure, or it was shut down intentionally. The same number of assumptions are made in either case, so Occam's Razor doesn't apply.
Rodger Stone (who may have back-channel communications with Wikileaks staff [0]) shared two tweets suggesting that this might be US backed action. Note these tweets are still unconfirmed. At time of writing I have not yet seen this information corroborated elsewhere.
1) "John Kerry has threatened the Ecuadorian President with "grave consequences for Equador" if Assange is not silenced @StoneColdTruth" [1]
2) "Reports the Brits storm the Ecuadorian Embassy tonite while Kerry demands the UK revoke their diplomatic status so Assange can be seized" [2]
It really does make me wonder what documents Wikileaks might have that could make US diplomats so riled up.
Roger Stone is a so called ratfucker (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ratfucking). He posts a lot of inane garbage in the hopes that it will help Trump and discredit his opposition. He started the completely false rumor that Ted Cruz had several affairs to help Trump win the Republican election. His words are not worth anything.
What could he really do with advance warning and no communications? Assange can't really run anywhere so the most he can really do it bunker down in a safe room or something, which he's probably ready to do anyways at a moment's notice any ways.
Given that cutting off internet before means he can't do any new live data releases ("Maybe he screwed up setting up his dead man's switch?" unlikely but possible at this point) and means that during a raid there'd be no heroic live stream from inside the safe room "resisting the oppressive dogs of the US government come to silence him."
I don't really see what there is to gain from a raid to seize him now though. Presumably wikileaks is capable of trickling out whatever 'damning' emails/cables/files they already have without him so it's probably not the goal.
It is not clear whether Assange is tweeting or a third-party is. For all we know, they could have stormed and the only information available to the person maintaining the Wikileaks twitter account is that Assange cannot be reached. The situation is not clear atm.
Seriously? Here's the Ecuadorian Embassy: https://goo.gl/maps/gtwjXtGrv9p Note that it's not in the middle of nowhere, it's right behind Harrods (ie 100 yards away from one of the busiest shopping streets in one of the world's largest and most diverse cities, with 1000s of people walking by every minute carrying cellphones).
Do you honestly think anyone could storm such an embassy and not have a massive media footprint? When the Iranian embassy was stormed there was wall-to-wall coverage on the news, and that was in the 1980s, before every second person on the street had a cellphone and twitter.
1. Calm down. No one is saying this is what happened. No need to get on your high horses.
2. At the time the Internet got cut-off it was 6:40am in the UK. Pretty early.
3. The British government has the power to issue DA-notice to media outlets.
4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
5. "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating. If you have up-to-date information, feel free to share.
Many people have their internet service go down from time to time (I know I do) and most of the time it isn't caused by state-sponsored action/governments storming their place of residence.
I've already said why I think such a storming would provide evidence that even state-sponsored actors would not be able to suppress. The Brompton Road and Sloane street both have plenty of pedestrians and vehicular traffic at 6:40am (I'm speaking as someone who used to bicycle down them every day around that time).
Given no evidence to the contrary, a much better hypothesis that fits the known facts is that there was some sort of standard ISP snafu or similar tech problem.
> 3. The British government has the power to issue DA-notice to media outlets.
Surely they can suppress all blogs and all of twitter and facebook at the same time. Oh, hold - why didn't they suppress the tweet we're discussing.
> 4. "Storming" the Ecuadorian embassy would not take a lot of manpower. This isn't a raid of a Mexican cartel. There is no resistance to expect, the adversarial repercussions would be diplomatic.
It require a little more than a bobby walking up to the door and asking politely. It's fairly likely that this would get noticed by someone passing by - mind you: That's not somewhere in the woods, it's central London.
> "For all we know" - means that this is an hypothesis. We are speculating.
No. You are speculating. The null hypothesis is that nothing of that sort happened. Apart from handwaving speculation you haven't offered anything that would even resemble proof or supporting evidence.
Firstly D-notices are only advisory, while the media tend to comply with them they are in no way legally enforceable.
Secondly central London has rather good wifi and 4G coverage. Presumably the "appropriate contingency plans" are to switch his phone's personal hotspot on and carry on as normal. Though there might be a nasty phone bill coming down the line.
I'd be surprised if the police or military couldn't dig out a jammer from somewhere if they wanted to - or just turn off the local cell towers for a while. Wouldn't be the first time.
And there'd be no report on the Internet that cell coverage around the Ecuadorian embassy mysteriously failed? They'd have to compel every person in the area to keep quiet or to not leave the area.
The Ecuadorian embassy in London stormed without as much as a trace on the internet? Come on - I like a good conspiracy theory, but that's going a little far, isn't it? It would require the Ecuadorian government to hold tight and then storming the embassy wouldn't make sense - they could just have kicked Assange out and called the local police who'd happily pick him up.
Though it might be something: a guy claiming to be a CIA intelligence analyst says that Assange is about to get extradited. We will know in the coming hours for sure. If this is true it is pretty damaging to the sexual assault accusations he was facing in Sweden. That would confirm that it was indeed the end-goal of getting him transferred to Sweden.
It was posted a few hours before everything unravelled and so far the anonymous poster was right. Of course, he could just be lucky and trolling for replies. At such an early stage it is interesting to share anyway.
What it would confirm is that Assange has made himself more trouble than he is worth the the Ecuadorian's and they have decided to simply kick him out of their embassy. They have no moral obligation to continue providing shelter for someone who thinks their protection is some untouchable perch from which to play political games and are simply asking them to leave. Assange is that guy you once knew from high school who you let crash on your couch for 'a few days' and find still there a year later trying to run a mail-order scam out of your kitchen. He is being shown the door.
The fact that once he leaves the long-delayed wheels of justice start turning is merely a side-effect. The end-goal is not getting him transferred to Sweden, it is for Assange to be able to show the world that he was right all along by defending himself against the charges against him and not hiding until he could run out the clock.
I think if this election cycle has taught us anything, it's that allegations of the worst kind can be created for political reasons. Surely Bill Clinton AND Donald Trump AND Julian Assange AND Anthony Weiner can't all be rapists, right? What kind of a world do we live in if they all are?!
Why not? Considering that not too long ago it was deemed legal to rape your wife? It's not too long ago that rape wasn't exactly treated as the crime it is now. Without wanting to apologize any of the behavior, it's less than my lifetime ago that the man who took a woman against her will wasn't considered a rapist but rather a role model in large chunks of the population. So yes, it's quite well possible that all of them are rapists. That's the kind of world we live in.
Wow, just because a protagonist does something in a piece of literature or theater doesn't mean that the author, much less society, approves of the deed in question (rape, in this case), or considered the one responsible for the deed a "role model".
I mean, didn't you read and discuss "Native Son" in high school? Do you think that the fact that its protagonist committed murder means that Richard Wright or society at the time approved of murder?
And by the way, when "The Fountainhead" and "Streetcar Named Desire" came out, those rape scenes were just about as controversial as the publication of "Native Son".
In many ways, for better or worse, the early Bond movies mixed the 'suave, debonaire spy' with the reality of the books:
That Bond was a lonely, bitter, alcoholic (beyond "vodka martini, shaken not stirred", but in many of the books Bond would often find himself alone at the bottom of a bottle of liquor), misogynist with a short temper.
So certainly they could, and in many cases, that would have been the underlying premise - not that he was (just) a ladies' man who would have women falling over themselves.
A patriarchy where powerful men are essentially unaccountable for abuse of women. Or, in other words, exactly the same world we've been living in for centuries. (Not saying all the allegations are true, just that even if they were, it wouldn't fundamentally alert the nature of the world, which is one of the reasons they spread so easily--they are quite consistent with the way the world is observed to work.)
People in positions of power often feel like they can get away with sexually aggressive behaviour. Just like Trump unequivocally stated on tape. And you have selectively chosen a handful there but there a lot of politicians e.g. Obama, Bernie, Biden, Ryan, Romney etc who haven't had charges of rape labelled against them.
And remember there are many successful leaders, visionaries and pillars of society with fatal personality flaws. You only have to look at Trump using the argument that "she was ugly" to dispute a rape charge as an example of this.
I doubt the USG is involved in this. They have a pretty solid track record of both respecting human rights and due process. Keep in mind the US government is the most ethical government in the world. Assange, on the other hand, is a rapist and a Russian puppet trying to hijack the US election. He probably is a Trump supporter in disguise and a closeted systemd committer. If that wasn't enough, there are multiple reports claiming that Assange does not respect PEP8 in his code. This last thing was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
Im on my first coffee of the day, and it did not click :) I wish people could add a /s or we could add a new voting button to mark something as sarcasm / a joke?
I'm still processing this information, and holding out to form a full opinion until more details become available/confirmed.
In the meantime, I'm curious, for people who are angry about this: suppose it is actually true that Assange is working together with Russian hackers in an attempt to influence a US election. Do you believe there is any point at which governments should intervene to protect national sovereignty and integrity of the political process?
If WikiLeaks was releasing dirt on both candidates I would feel much differently.
There is no evidence Russia is involved. Given what was apparently Podesta's password coupled with a lack of two factor authentication, these leaks wouldn't have exactly required a team of elite hackers. But even if it was Russia. No, you cannot justify a hot war as a result of cyber crime. That is absolutely insane and Clinton is flat out dangerously wrong on that point.
The releases expose corruption, it isn't necessarily partisan. Wikileaks used to release documents about George W Bush, and Putin as well.
> Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that they are confident that senior-level Russian officials were involved in the hacks.
>Are you implying that the DNC intentionally leaked the emails to wikileaks and are colluding with the FBI to blame Russia?
Nope. He's just implying that FBI and DNC are working together.
What is more likely though is: DNC was hacked, Wikileaks is doing what it has done for 10 years i.e. releasing information so that it makes maximum impact and Clintons are trying to damage-control by implying that Russia is involved... all while telling their Russian friends to pretend as if they support Trump (who has never worked with anything Russian ever... unlike the Clintons).
Except the FBI cyber crime division, independent of the Clintons or the DNC, is the one accusing the Russians of making the hack. The FBI, whose sole purpose is to protect the U.S. against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats.
> Trump (who has never worked with anything Russian ever... unlike the Clintons)
I can't tell if this is satire. Trump's campaign manager was responsible for installing 2 Pro-Putin dictators [1]. Also considering that Assange works for RT [2] (Russia's international Propos machine [3] which is all pro-Trump ATM), I think it's more likely that the FBI isn't fabricating facts here when they say the hack was related to Russia.
Why would anyone bother releasing dirt on Trump? The man is a walking dumpster of filth. Every other word out of his mouth offends one demographic or another. Doesn't seem to have much effect on his supporters. And anyone who isn't pro-Trump already has plenty of reasons to be against him.
>If WikiLeaks was releasing dirt on both candidates I would feel much differently.
Ever wondered if there is no dirt, there is nothing to release? Unlike the mainstream media which takes command from the Clintons, Wikileaks doesn't fabricate their releases... so it is not possible to release dirt on Trump.
Extradition is a process that involves an extradition court and a right of appeal. There is absolutely no way they are bundling Assange onto a plane without Wikileaks screaming blue murder. This is highly unlikely to be credible.
Are you joking? This is beyond rule of law. If Ecuador caves Assange will be(or already was) transported unconscious (if not dead) in a black bag by same rendition team that organized and operated concentration camps in Poland, Romania and Ukraine.
Difficult to imagine this being "influenced" by Clinton. It feels like it would be to Trump's significant advantage if this happens. It plays directly into his narrative.
yes please link me to an article that actually says that
:shows truepundit article:
seems flimsy, doesn't really contain any actual sources other than "sources said". can you cite any other articles that don't use truepundit as the source?
:crickets:
yes. one article on an arguably either satire or hard-right website is the source of all the "drone him" talk
Respectable organizations don't copy text from unsourced articles on partisan blogs, change the font to Courier to make it look like a cable, and then screenshot the result.
Hmm, that's actually a good point, I didn't realize the primary source was so sketchy. Thanks for correcting me, seems I was too quick in my judgement. I'd like to edit/delete my comments, but I don't see the interface. Are HN comments immutable?
Not necessarily. If she is fearful of very damaging leaks in the pipeline, Clinton would want to make sure that, at the very least, they don't come out through Wikileaks, which has a 100% track record of real leaks and can't be denied.
Don't twist my words. I said that they have never leaked fake documents. They clearly have an agenda in what they select for publishing.
================================================
In response to mejari (both of his replies) below, I'm rate-limited:
================================================
Did you even read that article? That's not what it says. They just didn't publish the documents. What it does say is that the hackers that stole the documents were joking about editing them before sending them to wikileaks.
They faked the documents by editing their contents to remove data they didn't want released. How is that twisting your words to show that your claim they've never leaked fake documents is false?
The part where you said that your problem with wikileaks was that they chose to not release some of the info they have.
You didn't say that they released fake data. You implied that all the data that they DID release was true and accurate, but there was some other true data that they didn't release.
The fact that they explicitly removed data from their release is faking their release. It's not like there was even an entire release they chose not to do, they did the release but selectively removed a small part of it, seemingly in support of Russia. Then they presented their leak as the entire leak. That is false, they presented a false picture.
They leaked falsified documents. Either through receiving falsified documents and releasing them or through falsifying them themselves. Either way your claim is false.
No, I don't believe it, but it is a possibility I had not thought of and the fact that Assange's internet access has been shut off lends at least a little bit of credibility to the comments (note how that post was made already 8 hours ago).
also, why would I believe some anonymous HN'er about anything. Information is either true or false, the source isn't really relevant, all that matters are the facts.
>Information is either true or false, the source isn't really relevant, all that matters are the facts.
Absurd. Of course your sources matter. A credible source is more believable than an incredible source. Ever heard of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? Looking only at the material presented and not at the presenter of the material is only giving you part of the picture.
Yes, sources matter if all you do is to look at the information and it's source. But if you look at the information and you can find independent verification of rejection of the information then you can form a conclusion that is a lot stronger than just speculation based on info+source.
Possible facts:
Assange has had his internet access shut down (probably true)
Assange has been extradited (status unknown at this point, you seem to want to discredit it based on the source I simply withhold my judgment until there is more information about this)
> Assange has had his internet access shut down (probably true)
What basis do you have for the (probably true) rating?
The man literally told people he rescheduled his election-changing news conference from a balcony to a middle-of-the-night webcast, because he thought a sniper was going to kill him on the balcony. As if this was likely. Then it turned out his election-changing news conference was an advert for his book.
Because he could easily prove his internet access wasn't shut down by sending out a message to the contrary. Also the Ecuadorian embassy could deny it.
Absent any proof that he actually has access I'm going on the assumption that he does not because that is what they claim.
Now whether or not it really is a state actor (could be Ecuador!), Assange's laptop frying the network card or some other reason why he hasn't got access (didn't pay the phone bill?) is up for grabs.
1. Because it makes him seem like a martyr to the cause without him actually having to do anything, just like when he implied he couldn't give a speech on the embassy balcony because Clinton's forces were about to kill him with a sniper rifle. (http://www.angrypatriotmovement.com/wikileaks-huge-hillary-a...) ...so he had his followers tune into a 3AM webcast instead, which ended up just being a promo sales pitch for his book. He is excellent at marketing.
2. The truth will not "come out regardless" if he was lying. It's very hard to prove a negative. Even if the embassy puts out an announcement saying "As far as we know, his internet is fine," Wikileaks can just say "The embassy is in cahoots with the Americans," or "It was cut earlier, and sources told me it was the gubbment." No one will care much at that point, his martyrdom point will have been made.
Time will tell. You could be right, you could be not. I believe that if Assange says something that is not truthful that reflects bad on Ecuador (one possible explanation is that Ecuador blocked his access) that they would make a statement if what he said was incorrect. And I'd believe them over Assange if that's what it came to.
How can you tell if a piece of information is independently verified if you don't know the source? If you're ignoring who presents the facts and who presents the verification, how do you determine whether or not the reporter of the verification is independent from the reporter of the fact? Sources matter.
And there is no such thing as a "probably true possible fact". There are facts and there are allegations.
> How can you tell if a piece of information is independently verified if you don't know the source?
By your reckoning no anonymous source can ever be credible. Some pretty interesting stuff has come out over the years from anonymous sources and turned out - retrospectively - to have been accurate and likely to have been a leak by an insider. Given that nobody is ever (Snowden excepted) to go on the record about an imminent operation from inside some government agency the only way such information could ever come out is through anonymous sources.
An anonymous source is vetted by the news agency which reports on the story. You're trusting the news agency to do their due diligence and think critically about the information they are given. The source is rarely completely anonymous as their identity is known by the news agency.
If the NYT says they got a tip from an anonymous source about Assange, it means more to me than if my neighbor Steve says HE got a tip from an anonymous source.
Whether you like it or not, the world has moved on and sources are now able to post stuff directly without having to go through intermediaries like the established press.
This causes all kinds of havoc and requires more skepticism on the part of the consumer but that does not diminish the fact that it might be true and that the timing is interesting.
Now chances are better than even (a lot better) that this is false, but so far it fits the facts as good (and in some cases better) than most other theories about why this is happening other than the one about today being the day of the 'interview' with the Swedish representatives.
Multiple accounts, particularly ones which are 1) detailed and 2) generally support one another, are a good start. Even if you don't know who the individual reporters are.
As an example, the UNHCR follows a similar protocol when investigating reports of atrocities. The individual reporters, while not fully anonymous, frequently have no previous basis to assess credibility. If their stories generally correspond, you've got an indication of truth. If the stories differ on material points, there are problems.
The story of Susannah from the Book of Daniel (Bible or Torah) has an excellent early exemplar of this: the stories of two claimed witnesses differed materially in the description of a crucial tree, impeaching their credibility.
There was another poster this summer who claimed to be an FBI insider. He spilled a lot of info about their corrupt investigation into the Clinton emails. He made a lot of predictions that ended up being true. So I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility; 4chan is a known safe place for anonymity online.
You don't need to be an intelligence anything or work for any 3 letter agency to make a prediction like "HC will not suffer any consequences", which is essentially what it all boiled down to.
Well, 12 hours have passed and no one is dead or imprisoned, so more 4chan lolz here it seems. No one in their right mind working for an intelligence agency would leak on such a public forum. The risk would be too great.
I immediately thought the 12h are strange, no half-insider would know the exact time schedule, yet it's also plausible to just exaggerate from "soon" to "within 12h".
My understanding is that we do not have any proofs of life from Assange. It could be many things: assassination, deal with Ecuador, extradition by Ecuador or someone else, simply an internet censorship, a PR stunt by Assange.
All is possible. This guy lives a fucking dystopian nightmare.
Unlikely, there are clearly moves being made today against Russian-backed and allegedly Russian-backed propaganda outfits. RT just had its bank accounts frozen in the UK as well. Also, have you ever heard of LTE?
It's "unlikely"? No, you're right, clearly the most obvious motive is conspiracy.
Also, other people have reported, and it's pretty common in a lot of embassies, not just the Ecuadorian, that cell phones are either actively jammed or the embassy is built as a Faraday cage. I had no cell service in the US embassy in Sydney, despite being in the middle of a capital city within 10 ft of a window.
From a Swedish perspective the Julian Assange case is particular close to the heart since it really shows how corrupt even our courts and politicians are. Sweden is rated as one of the countries with the lowest corruption but still 6 years have passed without even interviewing him for the pathetic accusations.
The entire case is a joke and whatever the US-election result is, it's bad for the entire world since our corrupt politicians will do whatever American corrupt politicians say.
I guess you missed the part about how Sweden was going to interview him today and then magically Assange's lawyer wasn't available so they (Assange and the Ecuadorian embassy) postponed the interview a month.
In a legal system, the accused doesn't get to negotiate the details of his interview. Assange, being the narcissistic idiot that he is, chose to imprison himself because for him, being imprisoned in an embassy at least feels a bit like a spy novel instead of just a case of him getting a bit too rapey.
And how is this supposed to be "corrupt". Are you implying a vast conspiracy were the CIA is orchestrating everyone from a random prosecutor up to the highest courts of Sweden (Not that that would even be corruption as it's traditionally defined)?
It is not worth trying to put the blame on Assange here, no matter if and in that case what sort of personality (disorder) he has. The simple fact is that the Swedish justice department acted in very strange ways in this case. I can not find blame for the first round of the case, he'd been accused of rape and those accusations need to be taken seriously. The accusations were investigated after which the prosecutor decided there was no case. This would and should have been the end, were it not that a new prosecutor (Marianne Ny) took up the investigation again and decided to prosecute, lack of case notwithstanding. She refused to hear him in the UK, refused to hear him in Sweden with a guarantee not to be extradited to the US. She refused and waited and drew out the case for such a long time that most of the charges went past the statute of limitations. The details of the case have been discussed far and wide [1] so there is no need to dig into them here, if you're interested just read a few sources (preferably from all sides of the political spectrum to get something resembling the truth).
According to https://justice4assange.com Sweden regularly questions people within the EU yet they have refused to question Julian Assange even though they are free to interrogate him inside the embassy whenever they want.
Sweden refuses to interview him there even though in the 4 years that he's been holed up in the embassy Swedish authorities have interviewed 44 other people in the UK. They also refused to promise to not extradite him to the USA where he would most likely be convicted of espionage and possibly executed.
If you were in his shoes do you think you would step outside given the circumstances? The UK has also stated that even if the Swedish investigation was closed they would still arrest Assange the minute he steps outside. Why wouldn't the UK extradite Assange to the USA if given the opportunity?
It's possible they refuse to interview him there because that's possibly the first step to an international incident. As it is now, they can claim they he's providing barriers to an interview. If they actually interviewed him and decided he needed to be taken unto custody, they would then actually have to address that he's under asylum in an embassy, and possibly come under local pressure to pressure Ecuador to release him. If they refuse, it escalates back and forth until someone backs down and loses face. If they've already received confirmation that Ecuador will not give him up, I can see not interviewing him as what they see as the best option to prevent that situation.
What government cheerfully accepts the precedent that you can dodge legitimate exercise of government authority like this? I mean, the U.S. Post Office will send armed officers after someone for mail fraud in even small amounts – not because it costs less than the crime but to serve as a deterrent for anyone else who might try it in the future.
He's repeatedly offered to be interviewed in the UK (before he was jailed in the embassy), and Ecuador has offered (at least publicly) for him to be allowed to be interviewed in the embassy.
If there's a warrant for your arrest, and law enforcement knows that you're in a location, do they a) wait for your departure of the location (when they can't, as in the case of an embassy, obtain a warrant to forcibly enter), or b) shrug their shoulders and wander off, and say "I guess you beat us this time", a la crossing the County line in the Dukes of Hazzard?
Now, I will absolutely grant you that the amount of manpower and money spent on such monitoring is ridiculous.
But to act as though the government is imprisoning him against his will by attempting to enforce a legal warrant is ... disingenuous.
He went ever further than that. He proposed to go to Sweden if he could be provided with a document promising he would not get deported to US. It was refused.
It's an absurd request. No country could issue such a document. For one thing, it would establish a precedent that the government could arbitrarily decide to overall any future decisions of the judiciary. For another, it would probably violate Sweden's treaty obligations.
He has in fact more protections against extradition in Sweden than he does in the UK, both because the UK has a friendlier bilateral extradition agreement with the US and because the ECHR would require the consent of both the UK and Sweden at this point for him to be extradited.
I can't actually find any examples of extrajudicial extraordinary rendition originating from the UK. The best I can find is that some of the CIA flights refueled in a UK territory.
Doesn't being in the Ecuadorean embassy mean he is technically/politically residing in Ecuador? Or is that an oversimplification when it comes to how embassies work?
It's an oversimplification. The embassy is not Ecuadorian soil. But the embassy itself is inviolable, and while that privilege is not absolute (it has been routinely broken by countries around the world), violating it is a big deal, which is why the UK hasn't simply hauled Assange out.
But no, Ecuador does not have a vote in whether Assange can be extradited. The UK and Sweden do because they are both parties to a treaty that says they do.
That doesn't really mean anything. If Assange was arrested in the embassy, or, like, by a helicopter when he's out on the balcony, he would very much end up subject to the UK judicial process.
The thing protecting Assange right now isn't the judicial process, but rather the inviolability of embassies. The UK police are adhering to the norm that they can't enter the embassy without permission. That norm is routinely violated in other places, but I think everyone involved is comfortable with Assange's self-inflicted house arrest.
Assange cannot be arrested in the Ecuadorian embassy without the permission of the Ecuadorian ambassador. The British police can't enter the embassy without permission. The balcony makes no difference.
> That norm is routinely violated in other places
No, it isn't. That would severely damage relationships between the two countries. It's more than a "norm", it's a fundamental principle of diplomacy going back millennia.
It's a fundamental principle of diplomacy going back 55 years, and if you'd like to put money on my inability to cite you an example of a country not respecting the inviolability of a diplomatic mission on their own soil, I invite you to name a number.
At any rate: we agree: it's the Vienna Accords that keep the UK from simply lassoing Assange and hauling him out of the building. It has nothing to do with whether he's on Ecuadorian soil (he is not).
The Vienna Convention is only the current basis for international law. The concept of diplomatic immunity is at least as hold as history itself. Yes it gets violated occasionally, like nearly every law and custom we've ever created. That's generally treated as an act of war though. You're the only one in this thread that said anything about Ecuadorian soil.
Similar to "diplomatic immunity". It's not like Lethal Weapon where you can openly deal drugs and assassinate people and upon your imminent arrest, waive your diplomatic credentials and walk off.
Whilst subject to use and abuse, most countries have agreements that while certain officials may not be prosecuted (oftentimes, this is only "for offenses related to their official capacity") in the guest country, that they will be, in their home state.
Even general principles around arrest or detainment have "reasonable constraints" for self-defense, public safety or for the prevention of a serious criminal act/felony.
It's not possible within the limits of the Swedish constitution, as has been endlessly explained by now.
Presidential pardons are irrelevant as Sweden is not the USA, but in any case, the President cannot preemptively pardon people for future offenses for which they may or may not be convicted.
>And they could preemptively refuse to allow him to be extradited for the leaks by stating definitively that it was not a crime by their laws.
Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority to override the courts and declare that someone isn't guilty of a crime in the absence of any proper legal process?
No, as has been explained before, that's just apologist rhetoric. Yes, their government is different than the USA but it's ridiculous to think that the leader of a free country couldn't figure out a way to make it work.
They could push the courts to issue a declaratory judgement on the issue of leaks, for instance. Or pass a new law making whistleblowing specifically legal and give retroactive immunity. Or investigate the prosecutor for misconduct because of their persecution and unwillingness to advance the investigation. Or allow the courts to try the case remotely.
Or they could simply throw the paperwork away, making prosecution impossible. It might not be legal, but you're living under a rock if you think that much of what your government does would be legal in the courts.
> Who's "they"? Who is the person in Sweden who has the authority
Nobody cares. That question is the sole point of blame-diffusion systems. All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
Bush didn't have the authority to do much of what he did, but he had the ability and by the time we could point out the difference it was a done deal and now he's not prosecuted so I guess he did have the authority...
The rules work differently at that level. But, even if they didn't, better the leader of a country sits in a country-club prison for doing the right thing than yet another innocent is illegally kidnapped and tortured.
>They could push the courts to issue a declaratory judgement on the issue of leaks, for instance. Or pass a new law making whistleblowing specifically legal and give retroactive immunity. Or investigate the prosecutor for misconduct because of their persecution and unwillingness to advance the investigation. Or allow the courts to try the case remotely. Or they could simply throw the paperwork away, making prosecution impossible. It might not be legal, but you're living under a rock if you think that much of what your government does would be legal in the courts.
None of these suggestions makes any sense.
(i) A declaratory judgment on the issue of leaks, whatever that means, would have no bearing on Assange's arrest warrant for rape.
(ii) Assange is not being charged with whistleblowing; he is being charged with rape.
(iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
(v) I'd be wary of throwing legal niceties aside. It's only those that are preventing the UK government from entering the embassy and arresting him there.
>All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
This is false as far as anyone can tell. If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate.
> (ii) Assange is not being charged with whistleblowing
Nicely numbered, but not well thought out.
Assange is avoiding going to Sweden because he rightfully expects a high chance of being rended to USA custody. A program the Swedish government embraced. Eliminating one of the main legal avenues for this is precisely the point.
> (iii) "The government" cannot just "investigate" a prosecutor, and there's no evidence of misconduct
Totally untrue. The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
The organizations I work with have rules for automatic investigations of people who deviate from the norm in suspicious circumstances. If there's any question, there's an investigating. Perhaps it's nothing, but if there was an investigation which found no unjust influence from the political side of the equation it would greatly increase public trust in the outcome of the trial.
It makes no sense to turn yourself in to the law when you have good reason to assume you will NOT get a fair trial, and all indicators point to corruption.
(iv) There would be no point in trying the case remotely as this would make it impossible to punish Assange if he were convicted.
That's not true. There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
Also, tough. They had custody and let him go. Why do they deserve infinite do-overs? They could try him and ban him from entering Sweden if they were serious, as that would also serve the goal of making Swedish people safer.
>> All that matters is that there are many people there with the ability.
> This is false as far as anyone can tell.
No, you just need to use your imagination. Picture your mother being arrested on a fabricated charge. Think of all the points along the way that you could ruin the government's case through interference if you were the court clerk, a beat cop, etc. Vastly many people have to do just the right things for a arrest/trial/charge to be valid. Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process. Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
This in fact is your moral responsibility. If you join an organization its crimes are on your shoulders unless you take an effort to correct them.
> If you know something that the rest of us don't, then please elaborate
Start by reading the wiki article. Fix that if you think it doesn't match the citations. Then come back and ask about anything you still don't understand.
Consider also reading the article about Civil Disobedience.
> A program the Swedish government embraced. Eliminating one of the main legal avenues for this is precisely the point.
It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
> The prosecutor has deviated from standard procedures many times, and slandered Assange as a fugitive from justice despite that he cooperated with all their requests in the beginning.
None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
>There are many options here including serving the sentence in a country less likely to render the prisoner to a third jurisdiction. He's essentially serving a sentence in Ecuador already.
How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
>Any one of them can act according to their own morality and take an action that while illegal, serves the greater good from their PoV. Yes, it may result in their arrest and charges, but it saves the victim.
>Therefore vastly many people have the chance to sabotage an unjust process
The hypocrisy of this part of your comment is quite astonishing. You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
> None of this is true. You don't say anything in support of it, so I can't say much in response.
It's well documented. He was interviewed in Sweden and left weeks later after notifying the police. That means he isn't a fugitive.
Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return, showing that they can if they want to. This means they are choosing not to advance the case while loudly declaring otherwise. That's the process deviation.
> It's not clear what "making whistleblowing specifically legal" would mean, or how it would achieve this.
A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
> Plus, you know for sure that if they convicted Assange in absentia, he'd then start complaining that the verdict was invalid because he couldn't attend the trial!
Just because you would lie doesn't mean Assange would. I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
> How would they get him out of the embassy to make him serve the sentence?
Assuming he didn't comply willingly, I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons. But even if not, house-arrest has proven successful so far.
> You complain (falsely, I think) that the prosecutor hasn't followed "standard procedure", and yet you are urging others to ignore the law completely.
Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice. Humanity 101.
I'm pointing out the deviations of the prosecutor to explain the irregularities that people would be calling to have investigated. It's not a baseless fishing trip.
>It's well documented. He was interviewed in Sweden and left weeks later after notifying the police. That means he isn't a fugitive.
EAW.
"Fugitive" isn't a precisely defined term, but he is subject to an arrest warrant and isn't complying with it.
>Sweden has also conducted interviews with suspects in foreign countries during the period of time they've been trying to make Assange return,
As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions, and according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
> A declaratory judgement that Assange's alleged actions pertaining to leaks would not be against Swedish law even if committed on their soil. With that there would be no legal basis for extradition.
I doubt that this is possible. At least, you appear to be the only person who has suggested it. Has anyone with the relevant legal expertise indicated that this is a possibility?
>I think that if they asked him to appear remotely via video, with the world watching, and serve a fair sentence in an Ecudorean prison if found guilty, that he would abide by the results.
I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW. Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
> I'm sure if they asked Ecuador nicely, with a well-respected judicial result in hand, that Ecuador would transfer him to one of their prisons.
How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
>Of course I'm urging people to deviate - when to follow the procedure would cause a greater injustice.
You already accept that Sweden can try Assange. Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
> "Fugitive" isn't a precisely defined term, but he is subject to an arrest warrant and isn't complying with it.
Color me a traditionalist, but only valid warrants count.
> As has been repeatedly said, the investigation has reached the point where the prosecutor wants to charge Assange, not merely ask him questions
Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
> according to Swedish law he must be in custody before they can do that.
Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
> I don't see any reason to think so, given that he is already ignoring the EAW.
He's not ignoring them, he's refusing to comply with non-legal orders.
You have no reason to think he wouldn't comply with legal orders, because he has always complied before. This isn't wikipedia, but Assume Good Faith.
> Why should Sweden take his word for it? They're not under any obligation to conduct the investigation in accordance with Assange's wishes.
Right, and he's not under any obligation to do with them to participate in the sham.
> How on Earth can you be "sure" of that? Are you on intimate terms with the Ecuadorian authorities?
I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
> You already accept that Sweden can try Assange.
It's their courthouse, they can try Kermit the Frog if they want. It's the legitimacy of the trial that's in question.
> Why would it be more unjust to do so with him present at the trial than it would be in his absence?
Because one requires extraordinary rendition. If it's legal for me to eat an icecream cone, why is it illegal for me to kidnap you, lock you in a box, and transport you to a foreign country, then eat an icecream cone? (Hint, the kidnapping and rendition...)
>Color me a traditionalist, but only valid warrants count.
The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
>Nope. They issued the arrest warrant to compel him to return for questioning.
No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him. This was explained repeatedly at the time. See e.g. paragraph 140 of the high court judgment:
In our view, the terms of the EAW read as a whole made clear that not only was the EAW issued for the purpose of Mr Assange being prosecuted for the offence, but that he was required for the purposes of being tried after being identified as the perpetrator of specific criminal offences. He was therefore accused of the offences specified in the EAW. Nothing in the EAW suggested he was wanted for questioning as a suspect.
Or, directly from the Swedish prosecutor (paragraph 142):
It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries.
>Sweden is willing to question others in foreign jurisdiction so that obviously not true.
He is not wanted merely for questioning.
>I'm surer of that, with more evidence, than you are that they would not comply. You first.
I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities would do under hypothetical circumstances. If you have some inside knowledge, please share it. (I thought wikileaks supporters, of all people, would believe in transparency?)
>Because one requires extraordinary rendition.
What on Earth are you talking about? Assange could go to Sweden today and the trial could be held there. No extraordinary rendition required.
> What on Earth are you talking about? Assange could go to Sweden today and the trial could be held there. No extraordinary rendition required.
Why on earth would he be that stupid though? They clearly aren't prosecuting the case properly so why would he believe he'd get a fair trial?
The only way they'll get him there is if they or the brits abduct him at gunpoint. Extraordinary rendition.
> No, they issued it because he needs to be in their custody before they can charge him.
They can say it all they want but that doesn't make it true. They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely. The reason they don't is that it's not about the case, with its likely short sentence, it's about capturing and controlling him. If they tried him remotely he would serve his sentence in a foreign (Ecuadorean likely) prison and they wouldn't have achieved their goal.
> This was explained repeatedly at the time.
Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
> He is not wanted merely for questioning.
Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
> I don't claim to know what the Ecuadorian authorities
You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement. You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist so you have the burden of proof.
> The warrant is legally valid. I don't think even Assange denies this!
No, valid means it's not a setup. The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
>The only way they'll get him there is if they or the brits abduct him at gunpoint. Extraordinary rendition.
That wouldn't be extraordinary rendition, assuming he was being arrested by the British police. (It would be a violation of various diplomatic protocols, which is why the UK hasn't done it.)
>They want him in custody so that they can jail him after the sham trial.
You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
>Sweden can choose to charge him, and to try him, remotely
They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.) But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
>Nope. They changed their story multiple times. At one point they claimed he fled Sweden.
>Right, not anymore. When one tactic failed they moved on.
They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up. Whether they always wanted to do this is irrelevant. (Although, that being said, your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.)
>You claim to know to know that Assange wouldn't comply with a valid judgement.
I may have used the word "know", but of course I admit that this is merely what I suspect. Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia. But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
>You're accusing someone of being an unrepentant rapist
I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
>The paper it's written on, the stamp on the paper, and the name signed on the bottom, are just trappings you've started to confuse with legitimacy.
It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
> That wouldn't be extraordinary rendition, assuming he was being arrested by the British police. (It would be a violation of various diplomatic protocols, which is why the UK hasn't done it.)
If he's arrested on trumped up charges, then yes, it would be. (I'm sure the CIA printed up some sort of receipt (err, warrant) for the people it had smuggled out of the country. Paperwork doesn't make things right.)
> You're conceding the key point here. I.e., they do want to prosecute him and not just question him.
Right, and they always have. But their lies around that, and framing him for fleeing, etc, have rendered that moot. Any legitimacy the trial may have had is up in smoke. If he can't get fair treatment pre-trial why would we think he'd get a fair trial?
> They can't, actually, as the prosecutor explained in the submission to the high court. (You really should read the judgment -- it's very informative.)
That directly contradicts the text of the law. Trials in absentia are possible - there are merely rules for notification, etc.
Also, they've lied before so the default position is that they're lying this time too.
> But even if they could do this, why should they? Why does Assange deserve special treatment that no-one else gets?
Because it's their fault, not his. Their fuckups and their lies. Anyone in his position deserves proper treatment.
> They want to charge him and prosecute him now, and they have an EAW to back this up.
A warrant they wrote themselves. Not very convincing. Prosecutorial misconduct is not justice and they can't pretend that it is by doubling down.
> But we can make an educated guess based on his continuing attempts to evade justice.
To achieve justice.
> I did not say that anyone was a rapist. I don't prejudge the result of any future trial.
No, but you're sure he'll get convicted and that he wouldn't report for jail. That means: rapist, and unrepentant. You didn't say it out right, and now you're walking it back to "strongly suspect"...
> It was a acquired through the usual process for acquiring an EAW. If you have some more general problem with EAWs then that is a separate discussion.
You're saying the usual process involves lies and slander? I doubt that. And no, I don't have a general problem with EAWs...
> Neither of us knows what Assange would do if he was found guilty in absentia.
If he was convicted in absentia, by a clown court, I imagine he'd thumb his nose at Sweden. I would. But if he was given the chance to participate in a real trial, remotely, that would be vastly different.
> your claims here are unsourced, and I do not believe they are true.
The UN working group on arbitrary detention didn't idly side with him. If the charges appeared to have merit they wouldn't have come out in support. I think they're read both sets of sources...
"""Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange. [...] The Working Group also considered that the detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation."""
> but in any case, the President cannot preemptively pardon people for future offenses for which they may or may not be convicted.
Well, in Assange's case, those would be past offences for which they may or may not be convicted. And I think that would be the same situation as Nixon when Ford pardoned him - he'd already done the deed, but hadn't been convicted yet.
edit: Though, since we're speculating already - does it even make sense for an American president to pardon an Australian citizen?
Ok, you are correct that the US President can in fact pardon people preemptively (though it is very rare). But no such power is available to anyone within the Swedish government or judiciary, so far as I am aware, and to pardon Assange preemptively would in any case violate Sweden's treaty obligations.
It's not that simple. They had to find a procedure that is acceptable to Swedish, Ecuadorian and British courts. These negotiations have only recently been completed and a meeting has tentatively been booked for the end of October.
Yes, I'm sure that there was no way this could have been done faster and that the statue of limitations in Sweden running out had nothing to do with it. /s
Last time I heard (about 2-3 months ago) the Ecuadorians had accepted that the swedish prosecutors were present when the hearing took place. They should not be allowed to ask any questions. Questions had to be sent in first and asked by the Ecuadorians.
I dont think its that simple as "Just go there and have the hearing".
In my (Western European!) country, a women was just arrested after being convicted in 2000. I don't know the Swedish legal system, but it doesn't surprise me that such a thorny issue takes a long time.
Some allegations remain (the most serious ones, obviously) some have run out or are running out. It would make good sense to try to get those in before they expire.
Seems to me like whichever "state party" this was didn't consider the implications behind their actions. Wikileaks has released insurance files in the past, and I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't, automatically or not, trigger a dead man's switch for more leaks.
If you're a state party trying to prevent leaks, silencing Julian is probably the worst way to go about it. It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
So long as we're all speculating, perhaps the state actor who leaked the documents to Wikileaks in the first place didn't agree with Assange's schedule and wants to trigger the dead man's switch.
That sounds sensible, they say it's over 500GB of Documents. The release of such a flood of files would swamp all "public intelligence capacity" until after the election.
If you looked at how long it took to find the gold nuggets in the Podesta mails it sounds reasonable willing to force their hand.
I think that any intelligence community that couldn't digest 500GB in full text / keyword searching (keywords that are likely already configured/known) between now and the election would be a pretty sad intelligence community.
Apropos of the keyword list, dissecting the corpus could be done in a few hours with a promo-code worth of AWS time.
I think "Public Intelligence Capacity" was referring to the ability for use regular members of society to find and verify meaningful information from the leaks.
Yes, i thought more of "people on 4chan" than actually any Intelligence Service of any nation state. I'm pretty sure they are mining it, but there would be political fallout from publishing their findings.
> It would be arcane not to think of this scenario and plan for it.
And following on from this line of thought, it is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that they did think of this scenario, but feel that the risk of calling Assange's bluff (see the speculation that the insurance files are just random data meant to seed misinformation) is less than the risk of whatever they think he knows about them being leaked.
Which makes you wonder, what are they afraid of to consider such action?
Or there's no insurance files and Assange is bluffing. He won't sit on some scoop harming the United States for long, his ego and power trip would force his hand.
I speculate that these are only SHA256 hashes of keys or documents that will be released in the future. It's pre-commitment. I didn't try decrypting one of the files with a key yet, though. I'm busy with other things (like browsing HN, aaah).
"Bluffing." It takes zero effort to distribute a a few hundred gigabytes of encrypted random data, relative to the amount of investigation and speculation as to what if anything is in those files. They are called "insurance." Assange/Wikileaks wanted to deter actions being taken against him.
Seems to me as likely as not that there is nothing really there.
> I don't know why they would put out a few hundred gigabytes of fake files.
The same reason a stick-up man might put their hand in their pocket to mimic the shape of a gun. If you have no weapon, it's still often useful to make people think you have one.
There was a link on HN not too long ago to a quote from Assange, stating that part of the strategy is to sow uncertainty and doubt among the players to increase the secrecy tax. A multigig encrypted dump could have that effect.
That said he can't really play that card too often.
Seems overblown. Do they really have enough data to dead man switch? I'm unconvinced. Sure they may have something but if it was that good they would have released it by now. Even if whatever they have (if anything) is actually good I would imagine risking it leaking is much better than leaving Julian in position to constantly leak things for a lifetime.
Ecuadorian president Correa is outgoing, not running for another term. There will be a new president in a few months and it is almost inconceivable that a new president could be nearly as accomodating as Correa towards Assange.
Something is going to happen in the next few months. Question is, how much agency does Assange really have left?
When Assange accesses the internet, I am guessing that state actors would be trying to see what his traffic contains. How would a person in such a situation access the internet and be sure that his traffic cannot be decrypted and/or there is no man in the middle modification of his traffic. For the sake of discussion, assume he has a brand new laptop with Debain/tails or another FOSS OS. The general consensus seems to be to avoid MacOS and Windows in cases where your life is on the line.
which would require infecting the VPN machines themselves? Just wiretapping isn't sufficient because of public key encryption
Assuming the nodes themselves are not compromised (big ask) and identity can be confirmed(like via key exchange), state actors can listen as much as they want to the wires, they won't be getting much.
Please explain, I was under the impression that the above could not reasonably be claimed anymore with any kind of certainty [1][2][3]. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something important here or the 'Happy Dance!!' slide [4] made me paranoid.
in the slides, check Slide 28. There's a bunch of useful software for wiretapping, but they need access to things like the Pre-Shared Key, or to be using an easily-exploitable connection mechanism like PPTP.
Of course router/firmware exploits cannot be prevented in the general case, so NSA-likes could figure out a way get in. But the null hypothesis is still that the NSA cannot crack strong encryption without some sort of pre-built backdoor IMO.
Based off of the leaks, NSA gets into things via two ways:
- poisoning the encryption methods
- social engineering/legal coercion to get keys
I am getting so damn sick of all of the corruption we're seeing in governments all around the world, including the US/UK. Makes me want to vote for Trump and take the whole crooked system down (unfortunately, that would cause a LOT of pain for good everyday people).
Hey, it would work! But you're right - it's an irrational response to a very frustrating situation of feeling powerless to fix things that are so obviously wrong.
What do you mean, "who knows"? Seriously, I have no idea how you can listen to anything Trump says and come away with the idea that he represents positive change.
Granted, most of Trump's output is not even properly formed sentences, so maybe he's doing a malformed data denial-of-service attack on voters' senses?
The general idea is Trump will be so negative that everyone will swing so far away from that brand of politics that even Hillary Clinton will be toxic to support. That everyone will wake up and see that xenophobia isn't a joke, our foreign policy isn't as productive as it could be, and that we've been wrong all along.
If Clinton gets elected, nothing will change. If Trump gets elected, the hope is that it will dip negative for a few months, he gets impeached and removed from office, and at the next election we vote in Jill Stein or something.
"We've been wrong all along" -- does a nation ever just wake up like that, except perhaps Japan after Hiroshima?
The Weimar Republic was broken in many ways, and many Germans essentially voted against it in the 1933 elections... That example of "creative destruction of a democracy using its own tools" didn't work out great.
Australia had a mass shooting with 35 people dead in the mid 90s and basically the very next day they all handed over their guns and went almost completely gun-free.
One example of a nation deciding overnight that the way they've done things in the past was not the way they wanted to continue.
He seems to be interested more in internal issues. Less wars abroad and de-escalation of tensions with Russia.
He also seems to be quite anti-globalization, anti-TPP etc. Slapping Wall St banks would be cherry on top.
In any case a change of "elites" (if not economical, at least political) would be welcome. Probably won't be less corruption, but different corruption instead.
Re: Trump's speeches - mostly non-sensical, yes, but at least he's not pretending to be truthful. Personally, I don't have any trust in what Hillary says either - even though her lies are much more sophisticated and eloquent.
He seems to be interested more in internal issues.
It seems extremely generous to characterize Trump as being interested in anything at all except himself. All accounts suggest that he doesn't read. On his private plane he watches his own TV appearances. He has put his name on a hundred products, but he's not an entrepreneur and doesn't care at all about developing the actual products.
Trump claims to be an expert on taxes, at least... But his former accountant Jack Mitnick says he did all the work, and when Trump visited once a year, his wife was actually asking more questions than Trump himself.
Really the best-case scenario for a Trump presidency is that his quantum-sized attention span moves to something else and he leaves the United States to run itself, like he did with the Trump University. That means Vice President Mike Pence would be the effective president, supported by a Republican Congress... And you can look at Pence's track record to see whose interests he represents: ultraconservative fundamentalist Christian Republicans. Pence is as much part of the establishment as Clinton. Is that really the change America needs?
Trump's speeches - mostly non-sensical, yes, but at least he's not pretending to be truthful.
What do you mean by that? He is definitely pretending to tell the truth. For example, since last week he has been saying that the election is rigged against him and there will be widespread vote fraud. There is not a shred of evidence of this. Republicans all over the country are actively countering the notion that the election is somehow being rigged. Yet Trump persists. That's not a harmless white lie -- no candidate has questioned the legitimacy of US elections since before the Civil War.
> Less wars abroad and de-escalation of tensions with Russia.
Pretty certain Trump called for US troops to be used in both Syria and Libya. He's also called for an escalation of bombing of ISIS, and supported torture. And he's made intemperate remarks about reacting to provocation - Russian planes shot down for flying over US ships, Iranian ships shot at if the crew make rude gestures. I would say it's at least arguable to say there will be fewer wars under Trump. Personally I find it quite difficult to follow that line of argument. I'd expect Clinton to be more hawkish than Obama, but Obama has been one of the US Presidents most keen on diplomacy and de-escalation for decades.
Trump is just a different kind of corruption. Voting in a millionaire business man from a rich family and many years in the media isn't really the populist choice.
In the short term, i.e. for this election, yes. In the longer term, it is a signal to the parties that they are leaving votes on the table, that maybe they could pick up by altering which policies they support.
It really depends how you weight this election vs others coming up. But if you're in, say, California, your vote for President will not swing the state at all -- it's locked in for Hillary. If (and it's a big if) some other party is closer to your preferred policies, feel free to vote for them without a trace of guilt about making your side weaker for this election.
True. The major party partisans will try to tell us that each election might as well be the last election in human history and that we should all hold the major party to a very low standard.
Most voters live in states that are essentially a lock-up for one of the two candidates. Arguably about 10 states might swing, but third party candidates could easily get 10+ percent of the popular vote nationally and largely influence the direction of the major parties if the voting public understood the electoral college and the multi-election game theory of it.
Does your link discuss that if a third party candidate gets 5% of the vote they will receive federal funding next election? If so how can they claim a vote for a third party diminishes voter power?
Tell me where the reform party is today? The major parties don't even take federal funding because it's a joke.
In a First Past the Post voting system like the one in America, a vote for a third-party is, and always will be a vote against your preferences. Rank-choice is a far superior system (though it has its own downsides as well), but that isn't what we have in America. The lesser of two evils is still the better of two options. You want "better" candidates, get involved in party politics and vote in the primaries.
>The major parties don't even take federal funding because it's a joke.
And I don't collect welfare because it's such a small paycheck compared to my salary. But for people who could really use that money, it's a huge help.
Right, if you want to shift power to alternatives, fund them, volunteer for them, and advocate for them (and for electoral changes that negate the incentive to tactical voting) between general elections so that they can be a reasonable choice (either by displacing a major party or by competing under rules which no longer make voting for the least-bad major party the clearly best choice in a general election.)
Given that sooner or later US voters will recognize that only one candidate is electable, Jill Stein, her percentages will rise. Maybe even to Ross Perot levels.
Another crook, Clinton, for the next years is survivable, but long term a strong third party has to invade this broken system, sooner or later.
Initially I hoped Trump will tear the GOP apart, but he made it impossible with his latest stupidities.
Our current crop of "leaders" are content to play a game of chicken, pushing the limit further and further to see how much we will stand. Trump is nuts enough to knock the whole house of cards over.
I have sympathy with where Doug is coming from, let's just get it over and done with already.
The more I look at this, the more it seems like a brilliant move by Assange to force the media to report more on Wikileaks and the Podesta emails, not just Trumps locker-room antics.
Perhaps this is this election cycle's "October Surprise"?
If this is Clinton attempting to seal-the-deal on the election, I'm officially not voting. Anyone that uses the power of the state (read: the power of the gun) to silence speech is a non-starter in my book.
I don't feel comfortable telling anyone who to vote for - a personal decision that is no one else's business. I will say that for myself, when I was filling out my early mail-in ballot yesterday, it was an easy decision voting for Jill Stein. Our political system is corrupt and when lots of people (in the many millions) vote for 3rd party candidates, that at least makes it harder for the establishment to maintain the misdirection that our two party system gives voters any real choice.
EDIT: you may have noticed the establishment propaganda instruments like MSNBC and Fox News have a real campaign to discredit all 3rd party candidates in all elections. Chuck Todd did a particularly shameless review of many 3rd party candidates, mocking them, and mocking people who would vote for any 3rd party candidates. What an asshole, and what un-American behavior. Everyone's opinion should be respected.
>Our political system is corrupt and when lots of people (in the many millions) vote for 3rd party candidates, that at least makes it harder for the establishment to maintain the misdirection that our two party system gives voters any real choice.
So you're saying that voting 3rd party makes it harder for "the establishment" to fool people into thinking they had a choice to begin with? That voting makes it harder for the media to fool you into thinking your vote matters? That drinking the Kool-aid makes it harder for Big Brother to trick you into drinking the Kool-aid?
I don't think I am being fooled, but most people would say that. I totally support friends and family who are voting for Trump and Clinton, even if I like neither of them.
It says pre-commitment so it looks like a dead man switch. If something really bad happens to Assange and someone releases documents about Kerry/Ecuador/FCO we can look at the hashes and see if they match. That way we know it's not some fake leak by an opportunist.
If that is assassination-insurance should those bytestrings be keys to decrypt files that are already in the wild?
Anyhow, I find the tweets very interesting. But I lack the context to know what they mean. Were those tweeted before the blackout? After?
The UK FOC thing is particularly interesting. This might sound silly, but perhaps somebody at MI5 was not happy the possibility of Foreign Office correspondence being leaked and decided to something, anything, to stop it from happening.
They were tweeted just before announcing the blackout. My guess is that when the blackout happened they tweeted the pre-comitment as soon as they could just in case.
They are not the keys because nothing that terrible happened yet. All they say is that they have files on those topics, and if someone in the future releases keys to some files, and those decrypted files' signature is as it says on the tweet, then they must come from Wikileaks, since they posted that signature.
From that location you have Base station's covering all 4 major UK mobile networks and I'd guess a large number of wi-fi hotspots.
So to "cut off" internet access, you've got to cut all BT lines in and out of the building, block all 3/4G signals all round the building and block each and every wi-fi band around that area, without smegging up all the frequencies in a very central part of london, right next to large shopping areas like Harrods.
you cant' just cut off devices known to belong to Assange, as anyone can buy a 4G router with cash from a shop in London which isn't easily attributable to him.
oh yeah and I forgot there's the satellite internet bit they'd need to block too.
You are reading too much into "internet cut off." There is no indication that mobile or satellite connectivity is blocked. Hell there is no real reason to believe that the fiber was actually cut off.
That's a view, I thought I was explaining why "Internet cut off" was likely not the case (or at least not the only case). Wikileaks are suggesting that he's been cut off by a state actor. I'm pointing out why that's pretty unlikely.
Sure the embassy can just lock him in a room with no devices, that's easy . what's not practical is to cut the ecuadorian embassy building off all together
Whatever action was taken (and I'd bet that it was the UK acting on behalf of the US government) was almost certainly done with the Ecuadorean government's "permission" -- although that permission might have been obtained somewhat coercively.
A bit of an interesting dilemma in the spirit of transparency. Given an N-way race, do you just reveal secrets pertaining to one participant (since this may be all you have) or do you with-hold until you can reveal secrets from all participants?
I mean, the point of the DNC leaks is that they (the party) helped a specific candidate (Hillary) - even before she was elected a nominee - so they in essence acted undemocratically.
Unless you're speculating that the GOP was secretly sheming for Trump - something which I find extremely unlikely - then it's more than possible that any GOP leaks would in fact help Trump, as well!
The GOP may be divided on Trump but am sure there is private information that could help the HRC team. It doesn't have to be incriminating as planned strategy could be of value. Unsure how this is different from, say, an (american) football team playbook being revealed to the opponent.
Wikileaks is NOT helping Trump. They're merely releasing information that would make impact in the election. Assange doesn't even support Trump. He supports Jill Stein.
They'd be more than happy to release any information on Trump. Unfortunately, they don't hack the information themselves. Someone else has to send it to them.
Here is what Assange had to say about Trump: "I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day". Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/08/26/assange-trumps-ever...
I've been struggling with this a lot. Granted it's pretty much all speculation, but if it is a state actor that is giving Wikileaks this information, and if said state actor was trying to influence the election, I question the responsibility of Wikileaks. It could also be (and I'm aware of this) simply that they're exposing information on "my" candidate, in which case maybe I'd feel differently if was the other way around.
I'm glad this was posted on HN, because I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) more informed discourse than I found on Reddit.
Given that most of the leaks are emails from a single party, when said party was known to use a weak email server, which was known to have been hacked at one point, my guess is that it could be anyone, and doesn't need to be a 'state actor'.
PS. Have you seen the Podesta emails? They range from hilarious to pretty disturbing.
I've poked a bit at the Wikileaks emails. My conclusion is that the email release is designed not to understand the emails in any sort of context but rather to be selectively quote-mined. The use of Courier can obscure the fact that the message is a quadruple-forwarded quote, as well as hide what was highlighted in the original HTML versions of emails. The lack of any attempt to reconstruct threading makes this worse than even the new IETF mailing list archive for trying to read email archives--and that is a bar I didn't think could be cleared.
What choice do you have? You can only release what you have and you have no way of knowing what you don't have. He's not trying to reveal all of the facts in the world. He's trying to reveal the facts that he has.
"There was no way to immediately verify if he had been knocked offline, and if so, how a state actor was suspected."
As far as I can tell, no one has verified any of this. Given JA's recent bizarre state of mind, I'm not sure where all of this breathless HN commentary is coming from.
Ecuador's Foreign Minister Guillaume Long recently noted [1] that the embassy has problems with internet connection and telephone and that it was their belief the connection was being interfered with (hacked).
It is very likely Assange knows the difference between an internet connection that is just suffering an outage, and an internet connection that has been deliberately cut. If the "outage" only affects the embassy, and no other clients on the same fibre, and if the ISP is unable to give information due to "security issues", that would for example, be a big red flag, I would imagine (I have no insight into what the situation really is, I'm just giving a for instance).
Wikileaks also seems to be a broadly decentralised organisation, from what little they've given away in past press releases about how they operate. I'm sure I remember they once boasted about their crypto phones, etc. So it is unlikely Assange has lost contact with the world, or that he personally is maintaining their Twitter feed. The issue here is more what this portends, rather than what it might do to Wikileaks.
This story only states that Assange told them this along with his suspicion that he's been targeted by some state, not e.g. a tree falling or a jackhammer mis-jackhammering.
BBC has not verified any of those claims, and they went and reported it despite the fact that part of it either isn't clear or doesn't make sense -- what does it even mean to have his internet "cut"?
This story could just as well turn out to be of a tree or a jackhammer.
What are the odds that Donald Trump has reached out to Assange and made a deal with him? I don't think it would be outside the realm of possibility that Trump would say if he won he'd push for the US to drop charges against Assange (although that doesn't clear him of the charges brought by other countries) in return for Assange releasing whatever information he has on Hillary leading up to the election.
People who say "You should trust what I say, because I said it. And not trust them, because I said it." holds little credence with me, regardless of who says it (activist, government, individual) - it's an appeal to authority or sympathy.
How much persecution are these people facing, these WikiLeaks activists, day to day?
Point being: 1/ Not all statements are falsifiable 2/ Not all statements's proof can be verified in a reasonable time by an isolated individual 3/ You need heuristics if your objective is to obtain truth while spending an amount of energy/resources below a threshold x 4/ To compute a statement credibility, you take as input the past history of the source and their obedience to their own moral standards, what vested interest do they have in misdirecting you and the plausibility of said assertion to be true within the current context.
The USG does not score well on any of those metrics I am afraid.
Assange has been scheduled to be interrogated by Sweden today (October 17th) since at least mid-September [1]. Both the internet outage and the pre-commitments are likely related to that. For more analysis (and the evaluate the evidence yourself), follow along at https://www.opensynthesis.org/boards/14/who-cut-wikileaks-fo...
How sure are we that this isn't just a stunt by Assange? He can have visitors in the embassy. All that's required is for someone to hand the guy a burner phone and poof: twitter access!
So either he's in custody, or faking the whole thing IMHO. Surely his buddies in London should be able to verify the former, and if they can't they'd surely be screaming like hell that "We can't find Julian!".
The fact that everyone is radio silent tells me this is a stunt, honestly.
Given current trends with Wikileaks-distributed Russian intel dumps, the upcoming 'surprise' will be another big fat nothing-burger. Most likely case is that Assange went a step too far in using the Ecuadorian's hospitality just to become a Russian cut-out and at some point his ongoing attempts to influence the election (and failing miserably at that) reminded the Ecuadorians that they were gaining nothing by hosting him and now were looking at another four years of fallout. TBH I don't think anyone really cared too much about Assange, but his desperate need for attention ended up leading him to play with fire.
Has there been any evidence of this yet? I trust the government and main stream media to accurately report the geographic source of technical transactions about as much as I trust Facebook with privacy.
There is no hard evidence that Russia is involved. Representatives of well-known internet security firms have stated that they believe the attack comes from the Russian government, but have nothing to provide other than their professional opinion (which is not based on specific data afaik).
The Russia myth comes from everyone repeating each other and pretending like it's fact. I don't really think Americans think of Russia as the big boogeyman anymore so that whole propaganda spiel is of dubious advisability.
Read the statement very carefully. At no point do they actually say, or directly suggest that Russia is behind the Podesta and DNC leaks.
The media and some politicians are full force memeing this, saying USG blames Russia for the hack and leaks. The statement does not say this in the slightest.
>Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
There are weasel words if you are led to believe they are referring to the DNC/Podesta hacks. Again read carefully. To which activity are they referring to in that sentence?
Yeah, the unifying theory here is that they're all taking orders from the administration and pushing the baseless narrative that Russia is the source of everything anti-Clinton to try to discredit all of the dirt that's out there on her. It's no surprise that the government is following its own orders.
I think they also do this because they don't want people to know how simple it is to conduct this kind of cyberattack. If they tell everyone you have to have your own KGB to do it, there will be less people looking into it. I believe this same strategy is why North Korea was blamed for the Sony Pictures leak.
We very quickly went from Representatives of well-known internet security firms have stated that they believe the attack comes from the Russian government, but have nothing to provide other than their professional opinion to a giant, airtight conspiracy.
Originally it was a flat out denial IIRC. The sudden recent mention of who cares is what raised a red flag for me, it didn't seem consistent with the original statement at all.
I could be wrong, but honestly, "who cares who did it" is a fishy enough govenrment response that it's hardly any wonder the Russians are being looked at funny.
Please provide evidence that the leaks are from Russia.
Also, many people care a lot about Assange. Millions of people care about Assange and WikiLeaks. It is absolutely absurd (and almost un-humanitarian) to try to downplay the work that he has done.
U.S. intelligence services and the Obama administration have explicitly accused Russia of the leaks and assessed that this must have been orchestrated from high in the Russian government. That's a pretty bold statement in politics. Of course we can point to cases where U.S. administrations have lied, but it still should count as evidence, at least on a probabilistic level.
Also, regarding Assange, I believe evgen meant to say that the administration was happy with where he was holed up until he started stirring up the pot.
Also note that the U.S. government did not implicate any foreign governments in cases of cablegate or NSA leaks, and these were as big as they get. Obama administration does not seem to throw such accusations lightly.
I do agree that the Obama administration doesn't seem to throw such accusations lightly. But Obama and the entire Democratic party didn't necessarily have their ass on the line when the NSA leaks happened.
There's certainly first time for everything. However, I assume when Snowden backed out from his path to martyrdom and landed in Russian asylum, the temptation to label him as a foreign agent must have been great. Being penetrated by a spy is perceived differently than suffering from gross incompetence, and quite a few high ranking asses in NSA and elsewhere could be saved.
> "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations."
> "We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Normally, I agree with some of the stuff you said.
Wikileaks tends to talk big talk without actually delivering.
This time though seems a bit different. If they have anything, anything at all left, I think they are going to be leaking it tomorrow, with how much they are hyping this up.
If tomorrow the leaks are just a bunch of nothing, well that means they probably don't have anything at all of significance. We will surely see.
If it really was the Russians then it would be pointless to attack Assange in the embassy or cut off Internet access as the leaks would come regardlessly.
Well, so far we've had shocking revelations -- like the fact that the Clinton campaign pays attention to polls and tries to craft advertising and messaging campaigns to match what likely voters want.
I'm astonished she's still a viable candidate after such unbelievable information was disclosed.
You're right, there's nothing wrong at all in any of those emails. Sure is strange why so many people in the democratic national committee resigned over them.
I think we should modify the Geneva convention to make cutting internet access illegal. I think everybody should have the freedom to express their ideology, even if jailed. It has always been legal to write letters from prison, it should be a fundamental right to express dissent, particularly when it's political.
That sounds like the ramblings of someone unhinged.
"Thermal imagery" - in the middle of the day.
"I wanted to take pictures but a policeman told me I'd be prosecuted, and in any case, they are digitally obfuscating all pictures" "All I know is I can't upload photos and all my camera images don't work" - huh, what? Which is it, you wanted to take pictures, but were told not to, or you did, but they didn't work, or ...
"Military surrounding the entire blocks aiming guns at people." - and no word of this on ... anywhere
"... so I went and had a coffee." - "Oh man, I just saw a military operation to grab Assange. We had guns pointed at us and they're messing with our phones and cameras so we can't even take a picture without it being corrupted, so I'm gonna go get me some Starbucks, and post on The_Donald about it..."
"D-notice so media won't report" but apparently the block / street shutdown was so close to the embassy that anyone in the area could watch the whole operation...
I'm going to call BS, like the sibling says, you could make millions selling tinfoil to /r/The_Donald subscribers
Don't forget this is the subreddit that has believed every bizarre, alt-right conspiracy theory under the sun. You do nothing but make yourself look ridiculous posting that nonsense.
Wow...I can understand that not everyone would agree with this comment, but how can this end up in the grey?? Have people actually visited /r/the_donald lately?
Yeah, that subreddit is terrifying. I'm more afraid of the people in there than any other terrorist group. E.g. another comment on the same thread says very matter-of-factly: "Let's just say by now you should have already bought multiple guns."
I had began archiving the /news and /newest because a lot of the Wikileak threads I was upvoting were disappearing into the ether. Seems they were getting mass-flagged/killed, this one survived. Also seems there has been discussion earlier today but the threads were mass-flagged off the front page.
No, not that I've ever seen. Though they do have a habit of burying/flagging topics pertaining to the release of documents when they concern a particular party. First few times could be brushed off as coincidence but over the last few months topics from DCLeaks, Guccifer and Wikileaks have been targeted
The problem with this story as I see it is it instantly connects with the shitshow of the American presidential cycle, and thus has attracted a wide variety of low quality (speculative / rumor mill) type of commentary unfortunately.
The only sure conclusion I've personally reached in this election cycle is that no one sane would want to run for American president, or even be a part of any American political system (beyond the local level where things seem a bit more level headed)....
How much is a 4G dataplan in London? Even when he uses 100GB that should be payable by them. Is that blocked as well? Then they have to block out that area, and that won't go unnoticed.
Aaaaaand like all of Wikileaks' dumps, this one turns out to be completely overblown BS. Boots on the ground confirm that absolutely NOTHING is happening at the embassy, no one is breaking in and the report out of London is the standard Monday morning complaint about the morning rain and the annoying signal failure on the Central line that is messing with commutes.
If Assange did lose internet access it is because the Ecuadorians changed the wifi password and didn't tell him. I am absolutely sure that we will be getting a mea culpa from Roger Stone any minute now...
Sorry, this is all old news to us in London who have been listening to the echo chamber freak itself out for 12 hours over a bit fat nothing. Here is a quick pointer to a similar query that went out to /r/London when the first tweets were sent: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/57w670/amy_truth_th... and people on the scene confirmed that contra the Roger Stone claims there was no 'assault' on the embassy. For chuckles I actually went by this afternoon and there was absolutely nothing to see. Verizon (who provides a lot of business connectivity in London) has been having problems in some places for most of the day, and it is a somewhat wet Monday so it is possible some lines shorted, but so far there is no confirmation that Assange has lost internet access and no indication from the outside that this is anything other than another day here in rainy London.
HN was particularly skilled at seeing through the FUD around the FBI iPhone crack, and this forum has also held a healthy skepticism for the way in which the FBI was able to break Tor and find DPR of Silk Road. I don't think it's an outrageous claim to say that in general, a sizable portion of this website (though perhaps still a minority) believes that the FBI has historically held-back information to the point of it being dishonest-- particularly with regards to statements they make around technology. Is that fair to say?
In the interest of full disclosure, I tend to lean more conservative than most people, especially relative to HN. So maybe I have my partisan goggles on here, but why are so many people buying into the idea that there is solid evidence that Russia is actually behind these leaks?
Details are incredibly hard to come by. Try doing a Google search and look for yourself. You'll find dozens of articles that rehash the joint DHS and FBI statement (dare I link to submarine.html?), and after a couple pages you'll find their statement itself, but none of these articles or statements contain actual details for why they believe what they believe around these more recent hacks, which, to me, is indicative of a huge problem in and of itself with our media-- not (necessarily) bias like the Trump camp is saying, but simply a lack of basic technical intuition to question a basic premise. It happened with the iPhone, it happened (to a lesser degree) with Silk Road, and I think it's happening here, too.
Pew research from 2014 said there was a little bit under 4MM people working in the tech sector in the US. For comparison, a quick Google suggests suggests there are roughly 1.25MM lawyers in this country. And yet, when a controversial court decision is made and journalists are expected to write on it, the press generally is able to grok the arguments made and summarize it in some form. If a presser is held, they are capable of asking relevant questions and challenging things. I don't think that's the case when it comes to anything related to computers, and I think that's indicative that our liberal arts colleges are failing to stay up-to-date. They are creating well-rounded individuals that are prepared for life in the 1990's. If you go to J-School, you get a short but sweet background in political science and maybe some philosophy and maybe even logic... But as far as I'm aware, if you don't graduate with a degree in CS, everything that you understand about computers is done on your own time, and that's not hyperbole.
Anyway, as I understand it, the DHS and FBI believed that the DNC leaks came from Russia entirely because some tools were left behind on a couple vulnerable machines, and these tools were used before by Russian state actors. I think I read somewhere that there was an IP embedded within these tools that had been used by Russia before... So the narrative is basically that these professional state-backed hackers did not try to mask their identity whatsoever, and left a card saying, "Russia wuz h3r3, lel!". And to be clear, maybe that's 100% what happened. I don't know! But the point I'm trying to make is that I don't think anyone can say that they "know" who was behind these hacks with any kind of confidence.
And I can understand why that would be good enough for journalists who don't know better. And with the media reporting this so widely, I can understand how this would permeate into the general population. But I think a lot of Hillary supporters around here are subduing their skepticism to avoid cognitive dissonance, and I think that sucks.
> In the interest of full disclosure, I tend to lean more conservative than most people, especially relative to HN. So maybe I have my partisan goggles on here, but why are so many people buying into the idea that there is solid evidence that Russia is actually behind these leaks?
Among other reasons, because cybersecurity experts who, insofar as they have partisan political bias that they might act on would be more likely to oppose Clinton and the Democrats than aid them, were the first to confidently attribute the hacks to specific threat actors tied to specific components of the Russian intelligence apparatus. (DHS and NSA much later jointly announced the same conclusion that private cybersecurity experts had previously reached.)
Crowdstrike et al are more likely to support Clinton. They benefit from having neoconservatives (who unanimously oppose Trump) in charge at State/DoD, because their business depends directly on tense relations with Russia and China. They're just another part of the MIC at this point.
> For comparison, a quick Google suggests suggests there are roughly 1.25MM lawyers in this country. And yet, when a controversial court decision is made and journalists are expected to write on it, the press generally is able to grok the arguments made and summarize it in some form. If a presser is held, they are capable of asking relevant questions and challenging things. I don't think that's the case when it comes to anything related to computers, and I think that's indicative that our liberal arts colleges are failing to stay up-to-date.
It's very unlikely that Russia is behind this,
it is very likely that the DNC wants Russia be behind it and William Binney stated some time ago that it is almost impossible that Russia was behind that, and very likely a disgruntled US intelligence officer. Or just your average script kiddie.
Assange rape is an allegation only. Current U.S. administration ignores U.S. constitution. This smells of support for Hillary Clinton, not justice for Assange.
Sweden has hunted Assange for 6 years for the 'crime' of being promiscuous with the wrong women. Oh, and he did not use a condom, but the 'rape victim' still did not mind having dinner with him afterwards. Only later when those two women who thought they'd scored a celebrity found out he'd been rather generous in dealing out his celebrity amongst those who offered him hospitality did they come with a claim of rape. Should he have used a condom? Yes, if only to protect both himself as well as his partners from whatever they managed to share amongst them. Does this constitute rape? Given the fact that they'd had intercourse several times before during the same night I don't the claim would stick.
Meanwhile 5 rape suspects were released without even being indicted because the rape victim - a 33yo physically handicapped (wheelchair-bound) Swedish woman - did not 'resist enough' for the allegations of rape to stick, according to the prosecutor [1]. Might it be so that a physically handicapped woman has problems 'resisting enough' due to her handicap and the position in which she was placed - in the toilet, out of reach of her wheelchair?
So, Sweden, please define rape for us uninformed bystanders. If forcing a handicapped woman to have sexual intercourse with up to 6 men (5 of whom were arrested, the sixth was never taken) is NOT rape but having more sex with a willing partner who was fine with having sex before IS rape we do need some guidance to know what is right and what is wrong there. It would be good to know given that I live in Sweden, maybe I'm guilty of something I did not realise before?
>the 'rape victim' still did not mind having dinner with him afterwards
>the fact that they'd had intercourse several times before
I don't care what you think about this specific case, but statements like these show a great deal of ignorance about how most sex crimes happen and the relationship between the abuser and the victim.
By that logic, a guy who had completely consensual sex may be unable prove it wasn't rape. There has to be a limit on what you can call rape or men will have no protection from false accusations.
Er, if you have a justice system that requires proof of innocence rather than proof of guilt, that is a bigger problem than any line-drawing around the boundaries of rape.
If there is not consent (or capacity for consent) at the time of the act, it's rape. In any reasonable justice system, the proof problems that come up, in certain situations, with that clear definition weigh in favor of the accused, since they make it difficult to prove that sex occurred without consent.
I don't see anything ignorant about expecting that the burden of proof in cases of rape requires more evidence than a statement from the victim, specially when all the circumstantial evidence goes directly against said statement.
"Rape can happen under complex emotional mechanics, therefore the word of the victim is sufficient to prosecute and jail the accused, as this overrides any other objective evidence" isn't a position likely to be enshrined into law any time soon.
You are disagreeing with an argument I didn't make. The burden of proof is always on the accuser/state. That is what makes sex crimes so hard to prosecute. I never made any statement regarding that or suggested anything should change with sex crimes compared to other crimes.
I simply stated that the ideas someone can't be raped if they have previously had consensual sex with their rapist or that they must immediately end contact with their rapist are ignorant ideas.
> You are disagreeing with an argument I didn't make.
> I simply stated that the ideas someone can't be raped if they have previously had consensual sex with their rapist or that they must immediately end contact with their rapist are ignorant ideas.
Agreed. Luckily the commenter you were calling "ignorant" never claimed anything of the sort, so I'm afraid you're the one that started this particular straw man (perhaps unknowingly)
>Sweden has hunted Assange for 6 years for the 'crime' of being promiscuous with the wrong women. Oh, and he did not use a condom, but the 'rape victim' still did not mind having dinner with him afterwards... Given the fact that they'd had intercourse several times before during the same night I don't the claim would stick.
I mean OP put both crime and rape victim in scare quotes and their first argument as to why is she "still did not mind having dinner with him afterwards." They then say that they don't think the claims would stick because "they'd had intercourse several times before during the same night". I'm not sure how to take those statements any other way. Am I missing something here?
I definitely see your point about the wording, and I'm also not in love with it.
I guess I was approaching the situation from the known information of the case, which is fairly clearly a very crude attempt at finding a crime of rape where one doesn't exist (even the supposed "victims" deny there was rape).
I could see how the parent's wording is off putting, but notice how I've also put "victims" in between quotes. None of the evidence of the case points at them being victims. Therefore, there is no evidence (not just strong evidence, but any evidence) that a crime was committed. I think that's a fair use for quotes, and no more or less dishonest than calling them "scare quotes". If an accusation of a crime stands on a very flimsy foundation of made up evidence, I think it is fair to call it a "crime".
Maybe if you read the comment as coming from someone who has ill feelings against the government of Sweden for doing this (rather than any ill will against the alleged victims) you will see that it's not so cut and clear that the parent is a misogynist or ignorant with regards to rape or whatever other first impression you may have received from the comment.
Right on the mark. Those 'scare quotes' do not indicate misogyny but lack of substance to the accusations. Would a true misogynist care about the discrepancy between Swedish justice against Assange and that against the 33yo woman on Gotland who got gang-raped?
Don't be too quick in assuming misogyny when confronted with a differing opinion in a discussion related to a rape accusation. The same goes for any of the other 'touchy' subjects like racism, (gender) discrimination and whatever-phobia. The world is not black and white so it is not sensible to claim than anyone who does not support your version of 'the truth' (between quotes because 'truth' is sometimes hard to define, what is 'true' for the one can be 'false' for the other on equally valid grounds) is wholly opposed to whatever position you hold related to that subject - gender, religion, race, etc.
Well, most of the countries you're not guilty before proven... Right now I'm not sure. Because of all these stupid false allegations the meaning of raping someone has devalued in the eyes of society.
You also forgot the part where Assange victims said they DON'T want him prosecuted, and only asked the government for help because they wanted a STD test.
So basically Assange is prosecuted for rape against two women that claim they weren't actually raped, while doesn't prosecute rape of someone that DID complained of being raped.
This cross outright into the non-sensical law land.
Not that I believe the rape allegations against him are necessarily true, but just because she consented before doesn't mean she consented then. That's a dangerous assumption to make in any situation.
These cases are not related to each other, so skip the Whataboutism.
While this Assange case for sure is controversial, Sweden has done more for the rights of women than most other countries. And that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Whether Assange is guilty of anything or not, I have no idea. But you don't have that, either.
Whataboutism is papering over your own deficiencies by claiming that others are the same or worse. It's not whataboutism to point out logical inconsistencies in the same legal system.
It was not fully investigated at all since the prosecutor decided by himself the case was not worth prosecuting. That prosecutor has now been dismissed from the case which leaves an opening for a new procedure to be started. As the suspects - which they still are, no matter what this prosecutor says - have not been prosecuted yet there is still an opportunity for justice to be served. I can only hope this will happen as this case has put a severe dent in the trust people have in the justice department - let alone the trust the rape victim has.
The Twitter thread got buried mostly by flags and the flamewar detector, and though we usually override those penalties when it's clear that another discussion will just take its place, sometimes we're sleeping off another political controversy.
We'll avoid marking this one as a duplicate and try to merge the discussions as best we can.
To anyone thinking of voting for HRC... I get it, she's ostensibly better than Trump.
But she's still horrible. We have serious problems, problems that will destroy all faith in Government, if left unchecked -- and problems HRC won't address because she's too busy exploiting and expanding them.
She prefers 0 transparency -- this runs in total contradiction to democratic values. Anyone who opposed the levels of secrecy under Bush / Cheney should also oppose HRC.
The choice isn't Trump or HRC, the choice is to vote your conscience.
I wish I could help Assange. This guy deserves a medal, and barely any country has enough morals to host him. Here we have a presidential candidate seriously saying "Can't we just drone this guy?" (Hillary Clinton, obviously) and barely anyone stands up for him. People get extradited because otherwise there will be economic embargos. Trade your morals for a 4K TV. Disgusting.
For the average population of the US, just say someone's actions increase the possibility of a terrorist attack, and you will have majority backing to throw them to the wolves (and I mean literally). There's nothing I can do as an American. Swedes, you have more power per capita, you should fight to get these ridiculous rape charges dropped so he can make safe passage to Ecuador.
Amazing how Bob Woodward was a journalist hero who went onto have unprecedented access to future Presidents for his books and yet this is Assange's fate. It's disgusting.
Shutting down internet is far from 'killing at will' tbf. They could already do that, it's just an embassy in a country with a decent military. Of course, the political backlash would be rather severe, not nearly as much as 'just' some hacking which doesn't cause direct loss of life and which is often conveniently untraceable.
“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Blood, Sweat and Tears
"Do you want terrorist groups? Because this is how you get terrorist groups."
Or, another way, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. What option are citizens left with when state collusion to deny people their basic rights occurs in broad daylight?
Which is exactly why I deplore the term "terrorist". The U.S. throws the term terrorist around with reckless abandon while proudly parading its strategy of "Shock and Awe"[1] and weapons like the "Daisy Cutter"[2] around on CNN. How are those two examples anything other than naked attempts to instill terror in it's enemies???
In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, [my working group was asked] to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities.
If we applied the laws we used to prosecute the Nazis at Nuremberg, every single post WWII US President/government would be considered to have committed war crimes.
I find it interesting that the Nuremberg Trials are continually held up, often by people who ought to know better, as a shining example of "International Law" and not a fairly straightforward example of the victors of a war taking the opportunity to polish off a few key enemies they missed. Which is a time-honored and not especially surprising practice, but hardly laudable, particularly when it involved some ex post facto invention of capital offenses.
Had it occurred in the context of anything but World War II, and was it aimed at anyone other than the Nazis, I think the consensus on it would be much more... nuanced. But because there is a very significant interest (across the US, Germany, Russia, Japan, etc.) in maintaining the Nazis as a singular sort of villain, so abjectly evil as to defy all comparison past or present, special rules apply.
(Plus, I suppose, there's some grading-on-a-curve that happens when the inevitable comparison is made between the Allied handling of the postwar environment and that of the Soviets; the Nuremberg Trials may have had certain jurisprudential imperfections, one could easily argue, but at least they didn't require heavy equipment just to dig the mass graves. Though that seems like damning with faint praise.)
If anything, the Nuremburg trials were overly light.
Both the USA and Germany had the death penalty at the end of WW2.
If you actually applied the law as you would in peacetime (as is reasonable because the gas chambers had no military necessity in the way a PoW camp would) then anyone involved in the process, including bringing supplies to the camp, would have been guilty until proven innocent. Evidence of participation is evidence of guilt, and by civilian standards of the time 90% of Germans in uniform and probably 20% of civilians should have been hung.
The Nuremburg trials were like Rwanda's Peace and Reconciliation process. Something that was knowingly far from completist, but just enough to stop the bloodshed and retribution.
> but at least they didn't require heavy equipment just to dig the mass graves
If you support the right of the state to kill (in War, etc) then what's the problem? Pretty much every Nazi was a criminal and had committed and supported war crimes. Pretty much everyone else was a collaborator.
(fwiw, that's the risk of going to war as a democracy. When you have choice, you have culpability.)
Certainly, there's a number of issues with the Nuremberg Trials. They certainly were guided by many motives, not all of which were pure.
But my point is this: the same allies that came up with these reasons for prosecution, created such offenses, have been (not the only) ones to then go on and breach them, steadily, ever since.
i.e. my intent is not necessarily to hold up Nuremberg as a victory for humanity (though certainly _some_ of the things that came about from it are good), but to also implicate many of the allies and governments to follow as very much "do as I say, not as I do".
Because the laws of war is different when you have civilians as your main targets?
Here is my standard reference about the subject. Note that it is critical of the US -- and that ROE is still followed quite closely. Compare that to [terrorists and non democracies].
(Are you really surprised by the content of this answer..?)
----
Edit: My answer to throwaway98237's deleted follow up comment:
>> a small band of tribes from Afghanistan
>> Also, the "laws of war" have evolved over time.
You went from: Setting an equal sign between terrorists and real armies (which use legal weapons psychological warfare against enemy soldiers, not against civilians).
To: Excusing terrorists because (a) some of them also do guerrilla warfare and (b) because the laws of war were a bit different 50+ years ago?
I deleted my comment because I didn't see a reply from you and wasn't certain my comment was correctly speaking to your points because I just don't get your comment. Since I wasn't certain my response was speaking to the points, I removed it so as not to muddy the conversation.
You started by arguing that following the laws of war is terrorism. That subject of law have been really discussed, there are lots of academic papers. I'd be happy to see references?
And your follow up was just not possible to parse. Please read Byer's article, it taught me a lot on the subject.
Is internet access really a basic right? I would argue no, but then again I grew up in a world without internet access for the most part so I consider it a nice-to-have rather than a necessity.
I would argue that it is on par with a human being's right to be informed (read the news, buy books, etc.) Whether you call those basic human rights it's all up to you. The UN seems to think that it is a basic human right though.
I don't know where you live, but where I live they still print physical books and newspapers. Maybe someday it will only be possible to be informed if you have Internet access, but that day isn't today.
Incidentally, this is exactly what hollywood and other big publishers want. Supporting surveillance is a really cool way for them to take control of the web, undermine it even more and then reap profits without worrying about all those bills like SOPA or PIPA that never seem to pass. Hell, they don't even have to face a backlash anymore!
IMO, pushing bills for changes in laws or copyrighting is probably their second best bet. Their best bet is to push people away from the web -- like they succeeded with physical books by dumbing down ebooks as much as they could.
You've just justified first world countries creating an artificial prison for political reasons. I am not surprised, as so many Americans justify and support Guantanamo Bay (and the holding of prisoners without charges or trial indefinitely).
America has become the Black Mirror reflection of itself and its foundational ideals, and is a terrible world role model.
Funnily, I am not American, though I do live in the US. British, and Australian by birth and heritage.
And I have never once claimed that the US is a role model for the world. In fact, a quick glance at my comment history would show that in many areas, I believe quite the opposite.
The artificial prison was of his own making, not that of any country. He chose to seek asylum, blaming a lurking boogeyman ready to extradite and or execute him, and continued to use this, rebuffing multiple attempts to resolve the issue (and arguably in many ways no other person would be allowed to do, dictating how, when or indeed if he would be allowed to be interviewed).
Certainly, many governments act in appalling ways. But Assange put himself in a predicament where he is now in legal hot water for his _actual_ avoidance of due process for _alleged_ activities.
Not like Guatanamo.
And not like your ad hominem attacks upon me to suit your cause.
As did I. I would argue the advance of tech, code as law (effect of code for most of us), and that imbalance warrant elevating the importance of Internet access.
> Demonstrate their power to kill at will and their willingness to do so.
As history has shown, you cut off the head of one state problem and then you have six problems. Be it Osama, Ulbricht or Assange. Two of those three problems could have been solved permanently by other means (decriminilization and thorough transparency, respectively). Dogma seems to rule our rulers.
Silencing Assange, by whatever means they choose, will most likely backfire.
Are you honestly suggesting that UBL, Ulbricht, and Assange deserve to be treated the same way?
Cause killing THOUSANDS of innocent citizens around the world is the same as leaking state secrets.
I'll refrain from commenting ill about Ulbricht on this site...
> Are you honestly suggesting that UBL, Ulbricht, and Assange deserve to be treated the same way?
I specifically used language that steered clear of that incinuation. "State problem", not "problem in general." "As history has shown." I was referring only to the similarities regarding the outcome of offing the leaders of those respective communities, as well as how state leadership simply refuses to reflect on their past actions.
I really struggle to find how you drew that conclusion out of what I wrote. There was nothing concerning that subject, never mind a suggestion - in fact it was quite the opposite:
* Ulbricht would have had no market, if drug abuse was treated as a health problem and not a criminal problem.
* Assange would have had nothing to leak, if the state wasn't make shady deals.
* I can't think of any effective solution to terrorism. Making a demonstration is all we have.
Assange has a lot more enemies than the ones you choose to believe. Considering the Panama Papers were pretty much a long expose of Russian and Middle-East corruption, much moreso than the West, I suspect a lot of angry autocrats and dictators would like a piece of him too and they're not shy about war crimes or assassinating journalists.
The leaks he's released target dozens of nations. He has a lot of enemies:
edit: apparantly he didn't do the panama papers, but the above link shows a lot of players who are going to be angry at him, especially his host nation considering he leaked UK Trident nuclear secrets last year.
Oh the irony of Assange being unable to tolerate leaks that make Russia look bad. Its clear what side he's playing for and it ain't for Western democracy and human rights.
I find it amusing that facts about how Russian citizens are being ripped off by their autocratic elites is a "hitjob." What does that word even mean? These documents are verified to be real. Putin's regime is that corrupt. Apparently, Assange and his Russian handlers have a desperate case of being able to dish it out, but not being able to take it.
>Yeah, because killing Assange would re-hide the documents.
Did this stop Putin from murdering x amount of journalists? I suspect chilling speech is the ultimate goal and some petty revenge as well. Also maintaining the perception of being a "strong man" ruler who does whatever he wants.
>There's really only one group large enough to do what they want
I think you're vastly underestimate the intelligence agencies of many countries here. The CIA bogeyman gets you instant upvotes on reddit/HN but the reality is that the top 30 or so nations have impressive intelligence organizations with far reaching abilities. Cutting an internet line at an embassy in London isn't exactly the moon landing here.
Until we hear some technical details of some vast and highly technical attack that only the US can perform, I'll remain skeptical of such claims. The reality is that cutting or DDOS'ing lines is a trivial attack. This isn't Stuxnet and you guys know it.
Pure coincidence I'm sure. It's got nothing to do with protecting Hillary Clinton and claims by many (including Matt Drudge, Milo Yiannopoulos) that today some kind of sex tape (lesbian) of her is going to leak.
What do you mean "pure coincidence"? How could a state actor cutting off Assange's internet be a coincidence with anything? It was done on purpose by someone for some reason. That is by definition not a coincidence.
"Rumors that Pamela Anderson 'fatally poisoned Julian Assange with vegan meal' spread after 'coded' Wikileaks tweets lead to speculation that he triggered 'dead man's switch'"
I don't believe Hillary is involved in this. What possible benefit does it provide to her? He obviously still has communications because he's out on the Internet claiming he has no Internet access.
>He obviously still has communications because he's out on the Internet claiming he has no Internet access.
Dead Man's Switch from another location that checks in.
An internet outage occurs and an internet post can be posted saying you are without internet, because you failed to "check in" and postpone the DMS. I refuse to state my opinion on the other matters. But it is possible to post via third parties in the event one is unable to post themselves.
Obama was recently revealed to be communicating with her personal email server, in a Wikileaks leak. Podesta asked if they should withhold those presidential emails from the FBI.
And then this happened. It could be that Obama is now pressuring them to get Assange, since Wikileaks is covering him. And certainly Obama does have the ability to project power worldwide.
There is, but like all of the other wikileaks 'scandals' there's nothing there when you actually look at the context. She said it as a joke, got the room to laugh, and moved on. Read the sources, there is really nothing to these leaks.
edit2: Notice the colorful language: she "openly inquired" instead of "joked". The laughter "died" when she "kept talking in a terse manner". It's all doublespeak.
I honestly believe this is a routine last-mile internet outage (they happen with some frequency!) that paranoid people are seizing on as some big conspiracy.
Respectable organizations don't copy text from unsourced articles, change the font to Courier to make it look like a cable, and then screenshot the result.
Why did Wikileaks feel the need to do this? Is it because they felt silly just linked to a completely unsourced story on a partisan rag?
And complete denial is even more confirmation, given her track record with lies. Remember when she told about how she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia and the entire thing was pure confabulation and she shook hands with a little girl on arrival?
I thought I was being a slightly cynical, but I had completely forgotten the story you mention. I am now approaching despondency; why would I bother watching a HRC State of the Union speech or press conference, when I don't believe anything she says?
Good question. Well, you can still watch her to draw general conclusions from her behaviour. That's why I watch Clinton, Trump, Putin, etc. It's very interesting how they behave, even if I trust none of them. Sometimes, there are even clear microexpressions and movements that reveal underlying mindsets.
Note that we were actively bombing Serbia at the time. The only error there was bombing the Chinese embassy instead of the Serbian government building that was supposed to be the target. Bombing an embassy in London would be a bit different....
By and large this is the professional standard people are held to in positions of power. So yes, dark humor is "forbidden".
Imagine a CEO "joking" about laying off 20% of the company work force in a downsizing. How would that go for employee moral? "I was obviously joking guys! You're all keeping your jobs!"
A good portion of the employees would be looking for work elsewhere. Because there is no way to be certain the CEO was "actually joking" about possibly laying them off.
It's the professional standard while in public. Behind closed doors, it's not.
I would fully expect a CEO to joke about layoffs and whatever else during meetings with top executives. Doing it in front of the whole company would be horrible.
Plenty of people joke about off color things. But, from my experience, even in private, they generally don't joke about things they could do. So I might joke about drone striking or nuking someone. But who cares, I have no power to do either of those things.
However I don't joke, even in private, about introducing backdoors into my code. The reason why is because it is something I actually can do.
So yes, people take part in dark humor all the time in private. However it's usually about unrealistic things. I don't know exactly how to resolve this with particularly powerful people though, so I would err on the side of giving them a pass.
Seems to me that this joke is on the "unrealistic things" side.
First, the Secretary of State doesn't control the drones. It's not her call to make.
Second, a drone strike in London is not realistic. It may be technically feasible, but it's not politically feasible. It would wreck diplomatic relations with basically the entire world.
>It's the professional standard while in public. Behind closed doors, it's not.
If an email leaked from my CEO with such a joke in a "private email" - I'd be looking for another job. Even if it was "obviously a joke". Just because it was said in private doesn't make it any less bad if the public hears it or change the standard people will judge it upon.
"We're sending a message [to Assange]. We have the capacity to do it He'll know it. It will be at a time of our choosing—under circumstances that have the greatest impact."
^^^
Does Joe Biden saying that make you think the state department are big fans?
Hillary would probably kill him in a heartbeat if she had the means to do it quietly.
Your [to Assange] is completely off base. Watching the interview excerpt (http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/vp-biden-on-russ...) he is clearly talking about Russia there. And he further says that he hopes the public won't know it when it happens, so it clearly wouldn't be referring to assassinating a public figure.
He is, at the instigation of a hostile foreign government, eyeball-deep in criminal activity designed to interfere with a democratic election being conducted by an Ecuadorean ally.
Cut off his wifi? Little toad is lucky they just don't boot him out onto the pavement.
Your description of the situation is of course opinion, as there has been no proof of allegations that Wikileaks is acting on behalf of anyone other than their own interests.
I'm just so over Assange. Good. Cut his damn internet access. He's really starting to remind of that kid who just bugs you so much. Just go away please.
That gigabyte file he's holding onto? Supposed to be a bunch of cat gifs, or so an "insider" told me.
I'm assuming parent is referring to the sexual assault and rape allegations against him. Depending on which side you're on you may believe they're made up charges to get him locked up or you may think he's a criminal hiding from doing said things to multiple women (2 IIRC).
FYI, at the moment the statute of limitations have ended for the sexual assaults and the rape statute ends in 2020.
Assanges version is "The rape charges are fake smokescreen used to extradite me to USA via sweden". Now this fails the Occam'ss razor. If USA cared they would extradite Assange directly from UK, Swedish detour adds nothing of value. Only makes things much more complicated. The relationship between UK and USA spooks have much warmer relation than USA and Sweden, and Sweden would still needs UK's permission to to extradite to USA. Wikileaks is now become all about Assanges inflated ego, where he believes world revolves around him and Hillary is personally targeting drones against him. Meanwhile in real world, if Assange weren't, someone else would be publicizing leaks.
The great irony of it all is that Max penalty Assange faces is 6 years in comfy swedish prison. He chooses instead to lock himself in an embassy for 4 years so far...
You need an actual crime to extradite someone. That's why the rape case is so important.
That's the difference between "rendition" (kidnapping) and legal extradition.
There's no plausible crime to use for a UK extradition because Assange didn't hack into the systems himself, and isn't bound by our laws on the release of classified information.
It's hard to believe the Ecuadorian government is complicit with helping a rapist escape justice. Rape allegations also fall neatly into NSA/GCHQ's playbook for character assassinations.
Seems more likely the reasons for taking political asylum in a non-US alliance embassy, is, political.
For crying out loud. He went to the UK Supreme Court arguing that he shouldn't have to face extradition and that the crimes he was accused of weren't crimes in the UK and didn't warrant extradition. The Supreme Court disagreed vehemently and he jumped bail before he could be extradited to Sweden.
Which doesn't prove guilt only that he wanted to avoid extradition. If he is innocent and believes the allegations were manufactured whose purpose was to eventually extradite him to the U.S. (plausible given their convenient timing), he'd have every reason to want to avoid extradition.
Assange has always been opened to being questioning over the allegations (within the Embassy) and the Swedish prosecutors only recently agreed to allow him to be interviewed within the Embassy, which is strangely set to happen today (17 October 2016).
The “the rape allegations were made up so Sweden can extradite me to the U.S.” line never made sense. The UK is even friendlier with the US than Sweden is, there's no way he couldn't be extradited from the UK.
It is also worth pointing out that the UK has to give permission for onwards extradition from Sweden to the US if a request were to be made. If the ultimate game plan for the US was to engineer his extradition it seems a little odd to not have requested it from the UK alone while he was here, rather than have to throw the Swedish legal system into the mix as well. Both Sweden and the UK are required to not extradite when there is a risk of the death penalty being applied - so that wasn't an issue either.
The whole "but the Swedes won't guarantee not to extradite him" is neatly covered by the whole point the US hasn't requested an extradition, and no legal system can or will get involved with hypothetical situations.
As I understand it, the UK government has to give permission for extradition from Sweden, but extradition from the UK to the US requires the support of both the UK government and the UK courts - and extradition requests from the US are held to a higher standard of evidence than ones from the EU. The UK government is certainly pretty friendly to the US so that's no obstacle, but the UK courts are less predictable.
If he is guilty he also has every reason to avoid extradition - there are plenty of possible motivations. Regardless of what he believes criminal complaints have been made and demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the highest court in the UK, that he has a case to answer in Sweden and that justice is best served by extraditing him. Questioning him in the Embassy does nothing to mean that he would be available to be tried in Sweden, that is a simple enough reason for Sweden to want to question him in Sweden.
To add - the Swedish Supreme Court has also ruled against him last year, and a Swedish court in September ruled against him as well following the UN report. That is an awful lot of court rulings against him...
Yeah honestly I find it hard to find solid information in either direction. As far as I can tell it's not proven either way (he hasn't stood trial) so even if he did it I can't imagine the Ecuadorian government feeling complicit.
Regardless I don't have a dog in this fight; I find both sides pretty polarizing and difficult to get to the facts.
My guess is that the US is applying pressure on Ecuador. They want the leaks to stop.
Ecuador already has incentives to stop helping Trump, as Trump has recently taken a hard line against Latin American strongmen, of which Correa, President of Ecuador, is one. Some assurances from Hillary, and threats from Obama, could have been enough to push him over.
I imagine that one of the currently unspoken fears that the Democrats have with wikileaks is that they've built up immense credibility and could choose to cash it in by dropping a fake leak a day or two before the election. Or they could drop an incredibly damaging REAL leak, which is even scarier for the Democrats. There's no doubt that the Clintons have skeletons in their closet.
What I find extremely disturbing is that Obama was fine with RT and Wikileaks when they were mostly advancing the then-leftist agenda of better relations with Russia and US non-interventionism. Now that things have shifted and they are now undermining Obama's agenda and chosen successor, he's suddenly discovered his inner cold warrior.
The real winner here is Mitt Romney. The Democrats mocked him, nothing short of laughing in his face, when during the 2012 election he said Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat. Obama, around the same time, was caught telling the Russians he could be "more flexible after the election". They took that flexibility and marched all the way into Ukraine, Syria, and (allegedly) DNC and Clinton email servers with it. Obama owes him an apology.
I don't necessarily agree that Obama himself was fine with Wikileaks, but it's certainly true that many on the American left loved the leaks when they revealed ostensibly embarrassing details about things they do not support (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and then suddenly got rather upset when the leaks revealed ostensibly embarrassing details about things they do support (Clinton). Of course the same could be said about many on the right.
It could be said about every one of us. Heck, I found myself being annoyed at Wikileaks during the past days because of the DNC leaks and I don't even support them or Hillary Clinton. Bias is one helluva drug.
- Is there any direct reason for the timing (US elections, attack on Mosul or other current headlines)?
- Was there any imminent release? (last week there was an announcement of a leak but it didn't materialize as far as I know)
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13159914/wikileaks-hillary...
- You'd assume that Wikileaks the organization will continue to work even without Assange having internet access so what exactly will this accomplish other than lending support to Assange's stated reasons for hiding in an embassy to begin with?
edit: another comment here suggests the reason may be because his extradition is imminent.
http://time.com/4532984/wikileaks-julian-assange-theories/