People are confused by Assange apparently attacking one US political party and then switching to attack the other party.

What's missing is an understanding of his underlying motivations. This piece hints at it, but it doesn't quite get there.

Assange sees the existing power structure as a connected graph that requires secrecy to function.

His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by exposing secrets.

  Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every
  conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though
  all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy,
  others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others
  still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between
  important sections or groupings of the conspiracy.

  If all conspirators are assassinated or all the links between
  them are destroyed, then a conspiracy no longer exists. This
  usually requires more resources than we can deploy, so we ask our
  first question: What is the minimum number of links that must be
  cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number?
  (divide and conquer).

  When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see
  a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose
  blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied;
  unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its
  environment.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/con...

>> His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by exposing secrets.

Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

The funny thing is people misconstrue the emails as an attempt to influence our election instead of actually looking at the fact that it exposed the idea that the DNC was already in the bag for Hilary long before the primaries even started.

If you want a conspiracy, you should look at how incredibly slanted the DNC was in favor of electing Clinton. All the emails did was confirm what a lot of people had long suspected was already going on.

>> Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

This seems to have a baseline assumption of competence that I don't think is warranted. There's shockingly little relationship between privacy intentions and privacy actions. Presumably "let's attack Sanders for being Jewish" isn't something the DNC wanted to see on the front page of a newspaper, no matter how clumsy they were about protecting it.

More broadly, what you describe in the other two paragraphs is exactly what Assange has been pulling for. Elsewhere, he's talked about raising the difficulty of secret dealings until powerful organizations have the choice of being ethical or inefficient. If transparent dealings are enough easier than opaque ones, opaque and anti-public-interest dealings should become rarer.

There are a bunch of criticisms here, some of which are quite reasonable. Assange nominally respects personal privacy while opposing institutional privacy, but revealing institutional behavior after the fact almost always compromises some personal information. And anti-public-interest is not 1-to-1 with opaque; plenty of groups do incredibly harmful things based on deniability or sheer boringness instead of secrecy.

Even so, I think things like "showing the DNC was in Clinton's pocket" are exactly in Assange's wheelhouse. If the DNC was neutral (as their bylaws required), there would have been no problem. If it had been an open pro-Clinton PAC it would have been non-notable. As is, he's hopefully raised the difficulty of screwing the public as a nominally-neutral organization.

> If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

Don't you think this vastly overestimates the technical competence and infosec understanding/awareness of the organization in question? It seems obvious that they presumed that their unencrypted emails were not going to become public information.

I found this article eye-opening as to infosec wrt the DNC email server:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clint...

What was particularly interesting was how behind-the-times White House IT was.

> Don't you think this vastly overestimates the technical competence and infosec understanding/awareness of the organization in question?

It vastly overestimating the technical competence of every organization. That the DNC presumed their unencrypted emails were not going to become public is the default stance of pretty much everyone.

The people talking about the emails influencing the election are talking about the Podesta emails that were dribbled out long after the D primary had concluded.

Sure. But they undermined the legitimacy of the DNC primary process, which undermined the legitimacy of Hillary as the candidate produced by that process. That has (at least potentially) the ability to influence pro-Democratic turnout in the general election.

His actions do not suggest such noble goals. I don't really care what he claims.

On iq.org he lists j u l i e n @ post.harvard.edu as one of his email addresses but people from Harvard, if Quora answers are to be believed, cannot confirm he ever was at Harvard in any capacity. Maybe a joke or smoke and mirrors?

What does Assange want to replace the conspiracy with? A true democracy. There is no such thing. Have you seen the Game of Thrones. That's how the world is without a super power. All that this will end up doing is cause the US to lose its place as a super power. Which will enable other powers play more freely. Which will in the end cause different types of chaos in the world rather than that which the US causes. These things don't go away. Problems are not solved, they just move, wiggle, and multiply.

That goes against everything sensible and is FUD(tbh, I don't watch Game of Thrones, I don't care much for fiction and prefer reality, history, etc). I'd like to see you make this offer with a straight face to all that have been affected by the imperialist policies. We don't even need to go too far, to the other side of the Atlantic, we can start with Mexico, central America, Honduras and Latin America.

The best painfully-funny bit I've seen recently is "Foreign power undermines election to install right-wing authoritarian; CIA outraged".

I'd challenge that poster to tell anyone from South America, East Asia, or the Middle East (or North Africa, or Eastern Europe, or...) that superpowers are a way to preserve effective democracy.

Well it's not to bash the person individually, but obviously it you think this through there's clearly double standards. Anyway, there's no morality here, it's all about power and control, I don't delude myself. But yeah, the US could at least own up to it, or be coherent with the values it says it defends(I guess it's too late for that tho). The hipocrisy is getting uglier with each passing day :/

They are not a way to preserve effective democracy. That's not what I was getting at. I was getting at the fact that it would be someone else who would install dictators instead. It would be Russia or China. The outcome will be different, but the problems will not get solved. In fact it may be worse. When you have many people playing, then the jockey for position and cause even more chaos.

Maybe a better democracy would do? Even if the US maintains its status as a world order keeper (which I'm not entirely opposed to, despite all criticism they've played the role remarkably well), we can/should all wish for more transparency from the government. Prevent another WMD fiasco, maybe?

His objective is to reduce their power of nuisance. Trump can't do anything on the international level because of ... Trump. On the other hand Clinton would be terrible in his logic because she is backed by everyone. The problems don't disappear but they can't grow much in those type of conditions. I'm just explaining the idea and not approving it.

But I watched Game of Thrones, and chaos was a ladder...

You do know Game of Thrones is fiction written by someone who has no experience in international politics, right?

Centralizing power insures that all are dominated by the most brutal. When power is decentralized, abuses are quarantined.

That's a bit naive. If you look at World War 1, you see a series of decentralized conflicts and power struggles that snowballed into a global conflict killing millions.

It snowballed because of treaties - many secret - that linked the nations into huge sides. It was a series of "conspiracies" which were mostly not democratically decided. If Austria-Hungary had gone to war with Serbia and maybe Bulgaria, it would have been terrible but it wouldn't have been WWI.

I think you're discounting the the interest the general public in Great Britain, Russia, and Turkey(Ottoman Empire) for score settling and imperial expansion. Treaties were only part of the issue. The power vacuum was a large driving force.

If you look at World War II you'd maybe see the point that was trying to be made.

A bit out of topic but quite interesting the last minute transcript of the last wikileaks PR on periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/WikiLeaks/1YpKkqmkDkmJj?t=4250

"Tomorrow I will give an ‘ask me anything’ on reddit where I’ll talk about why it is that many people came to believe that I was dead or missing or kidnapped, quite interesting story, not just an organic phenomenon but people placing deliberately false file report to say that I was dead and then for wikileaks could not be trusted and no one should give us leaks or information."

This is Wikileaks own fault for three reasons:

1) Julian disappeared completely after the internet to the Ecuadorean embassy was cut in October 2016

2) Wikileaks inexplicably changed their policy for insurance file hashes, publishing the hash of the decrypted files instead of the encrypted ones. This meant the hash of the insurance files didn't match the .AES files, giving the impression that they had been altered

3) Wikileaks stopped issuing verifiable proof of life for Assange. A simple PGP signed message would have sufficed.

With all that was going on, it was actually very believable that Assange had been abducted/killed during the internet blackout, and that Wikileaks was now being run as a black-ops site for a three letter agency.

I'm excited for the AMA to see if any of this is touched on. There was a whole string of unforced errors enabling these theories, and what's stranger is that none of them were abrupt choices under pressure. There was plenty of room to offer some kind of proof of life after these theories started circulating, and I'd love to know what drove the decision to not, say, have Assange walk up to the embassy window.

I hope they do address it, but they've been squirrelly about this topic in the past.

If I had to speculate, it is a calculated decision on WL's part to try and shift the organization's integrity away from Assange. Currently all trust in WL rests on Assange's existence which isn't good for the longevity of the org if/when he decides to retire (or meets his untimely demise).

That would make some sense, yes. (And I don't much expect an answer either.)

WL has certainly been in a weird spot over the last few years, with nowhere near the straightforward anti-establishment reputation they pulled off in their Collateral Murder days. Assange's charges and sanctuary issues, Snowden's failure to partner with WL, the Appelbaum revelations, bizarre arguably-anti-Semitic tweets, and a suddenly-bipartisan-and-effective effort to cast them as anti-American.

I wouldn't be at all shocked if there's an attempt underway to quiet things down a bit and change focus. Without getting into the validity of any of the things pressing on them, there's certainly a lot of evidence that they're short on reputation and resources, and struggling to run successful PR, redact releases, etc. Moving away from Assange's centrality, and perhaps from the American focus, might give them some leeway to become a longer-term-player. Maybe.

> Wikileaks stopped issuing verifiable proof of life for Assange. A simple PGP signed message would have sufficed.

Wouldn't that just prove that someone knows the private key of the signer? That's not sufficient to prove that the signer is alive.

So you think he's not alive and that the press conference of today was a fake?

Shouldn't we wait for the explaination he may come up with tomorrow on reddit? I just don't know on which channel this AMA will happen.

What? No. I'm explaining how the whole theory that he was dead started and has been raging for the past 4 months.

On Periscope he implied that it was done maliciously to discredit Wikileaks, I'm explaining how it was completely avoidable for them.

He implied it happened along with the organic phenomenon i'm intrigued as well why we haven't heard about this from him before as well, I'm looking forward this ama.

As a result, I believe that Assange intended for people to believe that he may have been captured or killed.

Antonio Gramsci, in "The Modern Prince," observes that Machiavelli himself was not at all "machiavellian". The information conveyed in "The Prince" was already well-known by those in power. The purpose of "The Prince" was, rather, to give the knowledge of how political power is wielded to the masses.

Interesting parallels with Assange's project.

This is simply fake news. No "election hacking" happened; the integrity of the vote was never compromised.

What we have here is a bunch of media organizations throwing a tantrum because they were no longer the primary influencers of the election.

The article actually discusses the DNC email hack, and nowhere in the article does it allege that any election systems were compromised.

The lexical ambiguity in the headline is not optimal, true, especially when allegations of the latter sort are being tossed around. But "fake news" (another term that has IMO become pretty loaded) is a rather uncharitable term for this article, which is largely a historical look at Wikileaks' vision in the context of the DNC leaks.

I disagree, there is no lexical ambiguity about the title. Those two words have a very exact meaning, and it simply is not true, per your own statement.

If the title was simply the second half, and the facts were not begrudgingly acknowledged in the article, I'd feel differently about an otherwise interesting opinion piece.

If you can make up terms like growth hacking (formerly known as marketing) then it seems to me you can make up the term election hacking (formerly known as political advocacy) by the exact same mechanism.

The person who is the subject of this article claims that it was not a hack at all though, but instead a leak. That seems like something significant that the NYTimes should at least mention.

This feels a lot like equivocating between "site X hacked" and "site X DDOS'd", except on a more urgent topic. There's a lot of FUD achieved by failing to clarify when digital attacks are known-and-inescapable risks (leaks, legal harassment, site takedowns) and when they're actual system-level attacks.

"Election hacking" is a general term that exceeds your definition of it. Please accept that as a given, regardless of your own tendency to interpret it in a limited way.

Oh come on. "Election hacking" is not a general term. Unless "general term" is a general term you're redefining - which I wouldn't rule out at this point.

If such general term exists, it would be more appropriately used to describe the DNC's unconventional relationship with media employees. But please, for the sake of everyone's sanity, let us not randomly redefine english words - even if regurgitated by your favorite media news outlet.

Revealing truth that power wants to keep secret is not hacking; it's called "Journalism". Of course, I don't expect people under the age of about 40 to understand that because in their lifetimes, with a few notable exceptions, "journalist" has been redefined to mean something more like "spokesperson".

"Hacking" was redefined a long time ago. Growth hacking, life hacking, etc. Used in this way, "hacking" is a fairly general term.

But those are obviously non-literal uses of the word. Growth hacking would never be used to describe someone's legs getting chopped off.

OP used the word "fake news" and got downvoted to oblivion, but it's truly a wonderful demonstration of how subjective terms are used to manufacture narratives. Down with the hyperbole, man.

Personally, I feel that the "fake news" verbiage was too strong of a denunciation for a headline wording choice. Especially since:

A) "Election hacking" has become a common shorthand of the event in multiple media sources (whether this reflects a "manufactured narrative", I cannot say, but I've seen "election hacking" as shorthand all over the place), and

B) The article did contain a detailed description of the event, in a way I think accurately reflects the current state ("major data breaches of the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton adviser John Podesta, committed, allegedly, by Russian-sponsored hackers and fed to the world via WikiLeaks".)

I do agree that this portion of the headline is inaccurate at face value, and that there are much better shorthands for this event, but calling an article "fake news" just for a bad headline is too harsh.

> whether this reflects a "manufactured narrative", I cannot say

Based on what you know about the human primate, what do you think the truth is?

Too harsh or not harsh enough, who knows. All I know is "fake news" will be used to describe news you don't agree with, for whatever reason you like. Let's at least be honest with ourselves.

Want my opinion?

I see the general term "election hacking" or variations thereof on news sites that are conservative as well, such as the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/articles/congressional-calls-grow-for-a-p...) and Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/01/07/was-fridays-declas...).

So I have trouble accepting the narrative that this term itself is a tantrum being thrown by media that "lost", if some of the media that lean on the side that won are also using the term.

And, yes, you are right, I do suspect that the OP probably used the term "fake news" because he or she did not agree that there was an election hack, or at least believes that the source reporting is too biased in some way. With no further argument other than the "fake news" term, I found that post rather weak.

Regardless of the voracity of your definition, 'Campaign Hack' would have been a much clearer, less ambiguous, and more precise term, especially given that this is an ongoing story with which most readers are already familiar.

In a perfect world, the headline would be intended to provide unambiguous information. In that, it demonstrably fails as evidenced by this thread. In the real world, it must convey information, but also hook eyeballs. So while the term 'election hacking' may not be explicitly wrong, and while I do not fault the Times for going with it, it is at best ambiguous and quite probably meant to grab attention more than convey information.

I don't believe he exceeded the definition at all. It's naive to think at this point that the media isn't using the term "election hacking" (in a headline), as a means to push the false narrative that "the election was hacked". I think its limited to think that it was simply an unfortunate title, when put into context with 99% of the other headlines they put out. As OP stated, they are throwing a hissy fit because they didn't control the election.

so Hillary and Trump each "hacked" the election by posting negative campaign ads ? how come this pejorative term, "hacking", wasn't used against either of them ?

"Actual computer hacking" in the sense that someone exposed the truth hidden on DNC servers and Podesta''s IMAP server?

Or "actual computer hacking" in the sense that someone downloaded Trump''s tax returns from the IRS servers and passed them to the NYT?

Because negative campaign ads are a conventional, authorized method of affecting an election. For the same reason, getting a job and going to work every day is not considered a "life hack".

just like pay-to-play is a "conventional, authorized method" of converting power to cash ?

You could call bribery "governance hacking" or something if you wanted to, I guess.

Because this is about actual computer hacking.

+1 - the election was an 18 month+ campaign. Constraining it to just the casting of a vote seems too narrow.

wouldnt we call that campaign hacking ? Isnt there a difference between the campaign and the election? I had to check the dictionary to be sure.

The title is indeed inaccurate (as far as we know) and I suspect that's due to the strange habit of newspapers having different people write the article and the headline.

> and nowhere in the article does it allege that any election systems were compromised.

Apparently you didn't check the headline

Is "Election Cracking" perhaps the way you interpreted the title here?