For those not familiar to Icelandic news this guy has been in it from time to time over the last year or so.
He's under investigation for fraud (more than one) in Iceland and to be honest he needs some medical help. He's burned every bridge he's ever crossed, it seems, and although he tries hard to become some kind of a celeb as much as he can (e.g. showing up with two bodyguards when he went to speak before the parliament)[3] it's not working.
His accomplishments:
Stealing confidential data from Milestone (Icelandic company)[0]
Bugging the Icelandic parliament
Playing nice with the FBI
"Stealing" electronics worth millions of ISK from small shops in Iceland[1]
Taking money for seminars/courses he didn't, and never meant to, hold.[2]
I don't think there is any for what he might have. Specifically, I was struck reading the article and your list how perfectly this dude matches Cleckley's _Mask of Sanity_ profiles of psychopaths - no long-term plan, continuous lying and deception of others without any remorse, confabulated explanations, impulse-driven actions, big risks taken for trivial gains, grandiosity, self-inflicted financial problems... The problem being that for personality disorders, there are no cures or treatments (and for psychopathy there's some troubling results that attempts to treat it just made them more dangerous).
> The fact that Assange let this guy into his inner circle doesn't give one a lot of confidence in WikiLeaks.
If it's psychopathy, well, I would note that they are famous for fooling even people who have read detailed accounts of their personal history. Cleckley is not the only person writing on the topic who notes personal astonishment at how they were manipulated by a patient even after having read the patient's file. If forewarned is not forearmed, I cannot blame Assange or the other Wikileakers too much.
The content here varies from philosophy to poetry to programming to prosaic FAQ. It is everything I felt worth writing for the past few years that didn’t fit somewhere like Wikipedia or was already written - "…I realised that I wanted to read about them what I myself knew. More than this - what only I knew. Deprived of this possibility, I decided to write about them. Hence this book."2 I never expected to write so much, but I discovered that once I had a hammer, nails were everywhere, and that supply creates its own demand3. I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week; to a surprising extent, this has been true. (I have added ~130 documents to this repository over the past 3 years.)
You can find the Cleckley book in question online in various places like http://libgen.info/view.php?id=23550 ; even if you aren't that interested in psychopathy per se or judging how well the OP person fits Cleckley's characteristics, it's still a fascinating & worthwhile read, I think (my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/373031205 ).
Yes, this is the obvious conclusion here. Assange is a dishonest megalomaniac. Snowden is a high school dropout. And Manning is a troubled gay. The leaks be damned.
The leakers have put themselves in positions of enormous power and responsibility. They are deciding which documents the public gets to see. There are potential positive benefits to this but there are also significant risks (for instance, the release of the diplomatic cables and US military logs which included the names of people who talked to American officials could easily put those people at risk). Given the positions of power that Assange, Snowden, Manning, et. al. are putting themselves in, I think that it is completely reasonable to ask questions about their character as it directly relates to whether we trust them to decide what the public gets to know.
I don't understand what you mean by 'whether we trust them to decide what the public gets to know.' That's a question we're supposed to be asking the governments who have withheld this information, not the whistle blowers. Shifting the focus of these leaks to whether or not the whistle blowers should be hung or not is a great way to deflect focus from the actual things that were leaked. You'd think that a threat to the 4th amendment would register higher on people's radar, but the human interest piece is compelling.
Whether the information should have been leaked or not is an interesting question, but ultimately a 'what if' scenario. The important question is what we do with this information. Or, if you're the government, how to get the people to not care.
> the release of the diplomatic cables and US military logs which included the names of people who talked to American officials could easily put those people at risk.
That speculated risk is one which no one has been able to connect to a single actually death or injury. Its not like government PR would not love to bring proof of the dangers of leaks.
The reason why no actually body has been found, is that the included names was mistakes made by the people in the field who mistakably put some in the low security reports. Normally, such names are only added to high level security reports, which mean that the number of names in the low level reports where quite few/limited, and possible already evacuated long before the reports were made public.
High level security reports was sorted out by Wikileaks/leaker before publishing.
Exactly. Although there are some great people who work with/at/for the organization, Assange's character, from my point of view, is damaging their reputation a little. He should step back (not quit but get out of the limelight) and let someone else be the "front" for the organization. Kristinn Hrafnsson would be a good choice IMO.
But they have handled the Snowden case well it seems and that gives me some confidence.
>>>But they have handled the Snowden case well it seems and that gives me some confidence.
I have to give them credit for that. Assange didn't jump in and hog the limelight and for the most part, WikiLeaks has stayed quiet and reserved during this whole ordeal.
Which begs the question: how familiar are you with Assange? Aside from reading articles that try to characterize him, have you read any of his writings or listened to his talks? Have you met him? What basis are you using to judge his character?
I personally am under the impression that he has given much more thought to his policies for releasing information and organizing Wikileaks than you give him credit for.
Unfortunately, the damage is already done. MSM has a much wider reach than WL's twitter, and the net effect of this "FBI press release" picked up and run as journalism will be that fewer people will trust WL to not have internal government moles and be able to protect source identities.
Now that they're helping Snowden, they are whatever the military intelligence equivalent of Scientology's famous "Fair Game" policy is. They can do whatever they want to smear and discredit them, insofar as they don't get caught with their hands dirty. Unfortunately, for these people, the delusional ends justify the underhanded means.
Thordarson reached out to the FBI for "the adventure" and then continued pinging them for cash. I'm not sure if this is a case of "how far the government is willing to go" as much as 'how widely feelings on loyalty can vary'.
How do you get that from this? The FBI is basically an intelligence agency. I would be disappointed if they didn't have tendrils everywhere. That's their job.
Mainly I'm saying that government has made some serious mistakes by violating the rights of US citizens with various programs. Now they are using the fbi and other organizations improperly to try stop the flow of information about those programs.
They are doing this by declaring journalistic and liberty seeking organizations, to be a threat to the US government. This is clearly wrong and they are obviously over-stepping their mission.
"The FBI’s national security mission is to lead and coordinate intelligence efforts that drive actions to protect the United States.
Our goal is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the threats and penetrate national and transnational networks that have a desire and capability to harm us. Such networks include: terrorist organizations, foreign intelligence services, those that seek to proliferate weapons of mass destruction, and criminal enterprises. "
Yes, but they investigate only specific things. Having tendrils literally everywhere (including places outside its jurisdiction) is clearly a very intrusive interpretation of their mandate.
Any good intelligence agency is going to have an information network that spans far beyond the scope of the specific things they are currently investigating, because that network takes time to build.
I actually am not sure whether that violates their mandate. Is it a problem if an agency gathers information outside their jurisdiction? Obviously they cannot make arrests, for example, but can they gather information?
Obviously they cannot make arrests, for example, but can they gather information?
In the USA, it would seem that the public laws say that the FBI can't just gather information. They are supposed to have reasonable cause, as determined by some Court. The laws and traditions demand a little oversight of information gathering, and that the information so gathered is related to a crime.
This is related to the public laws and traditions about suppression of speech, particularly political speech. Speaking freely isn't supposed to be "reasonable cause", and speaking freely isn't supposed to make you an object of surveillance. Doing otherwise "chills" free speech.
I can only conclude that the FBI has become a "rogue" agency, like the CIA has, and is full of people who have no respect for US law and tradition.
And yet they could not stop the Boston bombing. Even after the Russian government had specifically told them that the older brother could be a terrorist. I've lost all respect for them. It tells me that they don't really know what they are doing.
The US Government is warned by a lot of parties about a lot of things.
I'd be very interested in knowing about the signal to noise ratio before I lay down such heavy handed, seemingly uninformed judgement...
Also: If the Boston bombings was the final straw, then WHY ON EARTH wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse of a cock-up than Boston!
I asked in a thread on this topic a while back, and someone came back with the US being given about 100,000 names a year.
This is the fundamental problem with all the "terrorist" stuff. No matter how accurate various techniques and technologies are, the false positives significantly overwhelm the actual bad guys.
For some bizarre reason it has become acceptable to treat the false positives as though they were terrorists, totally ignoring their rights, due process, basic human decency or even evidence. (The no fly list is a good example.)
And then there is a massive expense (time and money) in order to build up the false positives. Consider the amount wasted at airport "security", and how much better that money and time could be spent elsewhere. I'd much rather individuals kept that money and spent it on goods and services which is far better for the economy (and hence jobs etc). And less future money would be needed to pay down debt.
If the "signal to noise ratio" is such a problem in the intelligence field, it seems funny to raise the noise floor as high as possible by spying indiscriminately on millions of random Americans.
Our intelligence and police agencies certainly don't act like they have more data than they know what to do with. They always seem greedy for more, regardless of its quality.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The apparatus has been at work too long and has been too heavy-handed in its operations for us to just blithely pretend that it's telling us the truth. If, with all the resources and rights we've handed over to them, this is the best job they can do, then they're just not very good at it.
...why on earth wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse...
9/11 was a failure of imagination, on the part of the self-appointed security "experts" who told us we should obey without question terrorists' every command, and oh by the way we should leave the cockpit door unlocked because the pilot might have a heart attack and then some M$ Flight Simulator enthusiast could save the day if you happened to be flying to that one airport by the shore of Lake Michigan and also the weather happened to be very pixelated at the time. I scarcely have to point out that the "experts" were quite wrong. "Another 9/11" wouldn't happen today, because we Americans know in our heads what we always knew in our hearts: when some foreign goat enthusiast threatens you with a knife, you pound the shit out of him. You don't wait for the gub'ment to send help. I mean, they might send the ATF or something.
On the other hand, when the Russian FSB calls to identify a known terrorist living in Cambridge Mass, it would be nice if somebody picked up the phone.
>>Also: If the Boston bombings was the final straw, then WHY ON EARTH wasn't 9/11 the final straw? Several orders of magnitude worse of a cock-up than Boston!
They've been supposedly honing their intelligence skills since then. By now they should be way better at this considering all the additional budget they are getting and by the simple fact that they should have a lot more experience at this.
I'm not surprised at this turn of events. It is a common accusation that Assange himself created wikileaks as a tool for self-aggrandizement. I think that's mostly just a smear calculated to discredit wikileaks - it is the other way around: without sufficient ego, Assange would not have preserved long enough to create wikileaks. But I don't think there is any question that an organization like wikileaks will attract people who are motivated purely by self-interest rather than idealogical goals - practically any organization attracts such people, even the non-controversial ones.
I was a little miffed to read that federal prosecutors fly on private jets, although if enough FBI agents were flying with them I suppose that could have been cheaper than a bunch of tickets on a regular airline.
>I'm not surprised at this turn of events. It is a common accusation that Assange himself created wikileaks as a tool for self-aggrandizement.
An accusation made by either government lackeys or idiots.
The character of the man has NO BEARING whatsoever to the work done by the organisation.
In the same way that "good Obama" was proven equal or worse to "bad Bush" -- it's the actual real world action that matters.
People have started rock bands because they love music and others because they would like to get laid much. In the end, it's the songs that decide their worth. And the "get laid" bunch has as much (if not more) good songs than the muso bunch.
This self-aggrandizement thing, that's ego, right?
If we invalidated organisations and achievement because people have big egos, then well, what exactly is left?
I mean, Apple invalidated because of Job's ego? All of the Americas Olympic achievements because of the egos of its athletes? Or even the whole of rap music. What about Tesla cars? Invalid too.
You are quite correct, the self-aggrandizement accusation is a smear, and amazingly selective in its use. I mean, isn't the whole of the US government a result of the sitting president's ego? Isn't a presidential run an act of self-aggrandizement?
I would agree that Assange has quite the ego. WikiLeaks does valuable work and their leader is an ass---both can be true. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
What I find in this article of most interest is the fact that it reveals the FBI's intentions when they went to Iceland. I've missed the source (sorry), but there was a previous article on here that made it sound like the FBI was harassing Wikileaks and showed up in Iceland under false pretenses. In addition, it had quotes with numerous public figures going all "we expelled the FBI since they lied".
This article clearly demonstrates that their intentions were true based on the information available from that video, and really paints a more competent picture of the FBI's counter-computer-crimes division. I, for one, am pleased to see that the surveillance bashing in the un-sourced (since I forgot it) article is done with and we now have real information into the FBI's Icelandic foray.
It turns out the FBI had mislead the local authorities about their purpose on the country. According to a timeline (.pdf) later released by the National Commissioner of the Icelandic Police, the FBI contacted Icelandic law enforcement to report Thorsadson’s embassy walk-in, and ask for permission to fly into the country to follow up. But the bureau had presented the request as an extension of its earlier investigation into Lulzsec, and failed to mention that its real target was WikiLeaks.
If I understood what you were saying this article actually confirms the other article you're referencing.
EDIT: Downvotes? Clearly I need to explain myself better. My point is that an organization built around full transparency is indeed impervious to informants. Take the government, for example. If they had made public that they'd be monitoring our Gmail conversations for our own safety, we may have agreed or disagreed with the policy but there would be nothing to leak.
This is why I'm so critical against informants/whistleblowers (I'm referencing an old Google tax whistleblower...not Snowden or Manning), because most have their own intentions and greed/fame motives.
He deceived wikileak supporters to sell shirts.
Chronicled his "adventure," obviously to source the article.
Attempted to associate with LulzSec and Anon, and did associate with the FBI...for setting up Wikileaks, or ego?
The only thing in this story I like is that the FBI used him and cut him off when he had no more value.
I may be bias here since kpoulsen has done an article on me, but this guy doesn't deserve the attention he'll get...probably use it to sell more shirts
Or speculative even. This would only constitute an implicit threat if there was some realistic expectation that the message would be somehow communicated to the target, imo.
Yes, even with that part. It makes the statement derisive and in bad taste (so perhaps my choice of "neutral" was not the best possible). It does not make the statement a threat.
I've heard Assange call Wikileaks an "intelligence agency", and others call it "the intelligence organization of the people".
Why is anyone surprised when the US government treats it like an intelligence agency, cultivating informants within its ranks and attempting to intimidate its agents [0]? I suspect Wikileaks has, on occasion, been fed false information by the US and other governments. I suspect the US is not the only nation that has informants inside of the Wikileaks inner circle. Calling themselves an "intelligence agency" and doing the sort of work that intelligence agencies do means we should expect other intelligence agencies to be working against them to some degree.
Really interesting thinking. Yes, if one views Wikileaks like an intelligence gathering agency, a lot more makes sense. It doesnt change my support for it, because in that light it becomes an independent intelligence agency acting for every human, world wide. In that context, should it not be protected and even financed by something like the UN?
Equally, it then makes sense that government, especially the paranoid well resourced US government, will treat it as hostile. Worrying and nasty, but very understandable.
Now the problem for me is why did the wikileaks people not defend wikileaks like an intelligence agency? I suppose hindsight...
I would now suggest a new wikileaks be born, campaign for it to become protected under the UN. It should take all the precautions of a nation's intelligence agencies, and act like one. An intelligence agency to inform the people, as opposed to intelligence agencies to secretly inform people with money and power.
I think we need something like that, and we need it now.
Why is it that people always feel the need to ask, "Why is anyone surprised,", when in fact it's not clear that anyone's surprised? Is it just to assert that you're smarter than some group of imaginary surprised people?
Reading the back and forth emails was pretty entertaining. I wonder what caused FBI to go so cold on him for a while -- was it a negotiating tactic, or was there a block due to Sabu or other leads, or was it mostly unrelated bureaucratic stupidity?
It seemed to me like it was mainly just "forth".
Thordarson seemed like he really wanted to be in contact with the FBI, but the FBI agent he emailed didn't seem too interested in what he had to offer. Particularly since it seemed like the FBI could get the data that they wanted without having to deal with people like Thordarson (this citing the seizure of the contents of Snorrason's Gmail account).
But I have to say, Thordarson sending those short emails consisting of semi-trite messages to an FBI agent wererather amusing.
"ok doki"
"Merry Christmas :-)"
"Happy New Year:-)"
Seems rather unserious and informal on Thordarson's part. Not the sort of behavior you'd except from a spy, eh.
He's under investigation for fraud (more than one) in Iceland and to be honest he needs some medical help. He's burned every bridge he's ever crossed, it seems, and although he tries hard to become some kind of a celeb as much as he can (e.g. showing up with two bodyguards when he went to speak before the parliament)[3] it's not working.
His accomplishments:
Stealing confidential data from Milestone (Icelandic company)[0]
Bugging the Icelandic parliament
Playing nice with the FBI
"Stealing" electronics worth millions of ISK from small shops in Iceland[1]
Taking money for seminars/courses he didn't, and never meant to, hold.[2]
[0] http://www.visir.is/grunadur-um-ad-hafa-stolid-gognum-fra-vi...
[1] http://visir.is/-og-bdquo;siggi-hakkari-og-ldquo;-i-gaesluva...
[2] http://www.dv.is/frettir/2013/6/5/sagdur-hafa-haft-fe-af-isl...
[3] http://visir.is/kom-med-lifverdi-a-nefndarsvid-althingis/art...