I agree, mostly. I stopped caring about Assange since the incident because selective information feeding is not a whistleblowing move but political manipulation. I don't have doubt that people representing my interests are corrupt to some degree but I don't want them eliminated in favor for people who don't represent my interest and are just as corrupt but protected from expose because the interests of the leaker aligns with them.
Moreover the government had embeds and was in communication with social media and traditional coordinating what to disseminate and what to suppress.
The. You have more dignitaries at the WEF and UN COP saying how wonderful it was that Covid prepared people and provided for better government control…
If you think the government phone-calling people at social media companies flagging specific instances and people for "misinformation" is not a form of intimidation, then you need to familiarize yourself with the legal precedent here.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Bo...
[1]https://libertyjusticecenter.org/media/social-media-censorsh...
I prefer it this way. It's better for people to feel like criminals who whiteboard in backrooms how to manipulate public opinion by laundering prior restraint through putting pressure on the incomes of billionaires. Formalization of this process would just be permanent institutionalization, and the US government has shown throughout the 20c to now that a public board won't prevent abuses, abuses will just be routed around the board.
In summary, there is no link so to speak. There are leaked DM's.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdjQWuJeVqE [video]
Or you mean the fascist warhawk that actually started several wars that ravaged the middle-east and passed the patriot act to give the government untold power over its citizens, both with bipartisan support I might add?
How can Trump be seen with such disdain when at worst he's just a more incompetent version of Obama with a social media addiction and republican slant. The NSA scandal was merely a decade ago, george w bush wasn't that far back either, how short are the memories. If anything his unconditional withdraw of all troops in afghanistan is the biggest anti-fascist action the last 3 presidents have done, although this one action certainly doesn't put him above being one given he wasn't even pulling the breaks on their actions beforehand.
Now if you want to talk about the many times that Democrats and Republicans all had a big lovefest so they could all vote together to invade a country, I'm with you on that, but it's a problem of both parties, as the voting record clearly demonstrates.
What's been happening the last decade or so is another thing entirely.
Funnily enough, so is yours.
What I highlighted pointed towards government becoming increasingly overbearing and ramping up surveillance on its citizens(NSA and patriot act), military extremism(patriot act again and the middle east), paternalism over other cultures(fear that the people would choose the "wrong"side in a country they invaded as an excuse to keep troops or to install proxy governments), and the list goes on.
You're at a point that covering true stories like the hunter biden laptop(that now journalists are verifying its authenticity) have made people like glenn greenwald persona non-grata in mainstream journalism circles, while having the intelligence agencies saying it is false. You have people that risked and are paying with their life to make information known to the public demonized because apparently leaking things about the candidate I like is bad, regardless of it being true. You have people asking for oversight for the contributions to Ukraine being labelled as russian assets(ie:enemy of our great state). You have intelligence agencies being labelled as some all knowing benevolent protectors of the populace not even a decade after the NSA leaks. The only thing that could be disguising it is because as it stands mostly the democrats seem to be on this publically, but make no mistake the moment push comes to shove the republicans will also take such position as they had taken before trump, and with thunderous applause from the "bipartisan" population if the current outlook is something to go by.
Fascism has been acting on the american society for a long time, Trump just coincidentally showed where the allegiances lied once someone that wasn't a career politician took over, luckily for them the man was an incompetent buffoon with his own laundry list of problems who got assimilated into the machine very fast, even if he would say otherwise.
If all of this for you isn't clear signs of fascism and instead trump, who mostly just inherited the actions of his predecessors is(making him just as much as the others I might add), we'll just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Fascism arises from a bad economy and a population who feel that they have no prospects or future. This tends to create a lot of angry young men hanging out in the streets, with nothing but time and cheap beer on their hands - a resource for sociopathic power seekers.
Whether these young men are Germans living under the absurd conditions of the Versailles treaty, lads from the trampled working class in Thatcher's England, or Americans working under late stage capitalism with No Child Left Behind Act schools, the fascist always works from the same playbook: Stoke the anger, and provide a convenient, nearly always racialized scapegoat outsider, then promise to do something about those outsiders with a never-ending reign of power as the actual goal.
One way to spot a fascist is, if they lose legitimate elections, they will attempt things like insurrections where they storm capital buildings. It's like a dark spot on the society's x-ray.
Those putsches don't always succeed, but as far as getting a movement of armed thugs to fight in the streets, the playbook works every time. The Republican party has been showing signs of a willingness to engage in Fascist behavior for decades, ever since they embraced the Southern Strategy, which even [Barry Goldwater](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/777519-mark-my-word-if-and-...) said would be the death of the party. And here we are, living with the GOP that he predicted would come as a result of their doing just that.
You bring up the NSA's surveillance, the Patriot Act, the various foreign wars that everyone except Bernie voted for with a rah rah rah - these all happened under GOP presidents, with a compliant, cooperative Democratic party that got behind the president, supposedly for the safety of the nation. This is the opposite of fascism.
I leave it to you whether you're gonna choose to notice the clear difference between the recent actions of the two parties, and I hope at the very least you can employ the right terminologies. Sometime in the early aughts I got into it with a Bush cheerleader who kept saying things like "You don't understand the philosophy of terrorism. Terrorists make women wear robes that cover their entire bodies and their societies are like, sexist!" That's what your use of the term "Fascism" reads like.
The fairness doctrine meant that when they aired something considered controversial, they had to give equal time to the opposing viewpoint. That didn't mean they had to be fair, since everybody got latitude on what was considered controversial i.e. if they ban you for something on twitter now, it wouldn't have been "controversial" then, it would have been settled, so you'd get no time without at least going to court over it. Also, they could just give some objector 2 minutes to make their case into a camera and play it during the news.
The things that would end up being "controversial" are things that your local Chamber of Commerce or an international fossil fuel lobbying group would find controversial.
Its scary how easy you think it is to dictate actual fairness and impartiality in law, though. The only places that have laws like that are extremely authoritarian and corrupt, like Zimbabwe.
The idea that journalist are not perfect, therefore they are terrible and entirely untrustworthy is much more dangerous than any journalist’s corruption.
The idea that it used to be better a century ago is laughable.
The most bizarre part of this theory is why anyone would think that Trump, a NYC real estate guy who wasn't good at actually building things so turned into a guy who sold his branding to real estate projects, a wrestler, a game show host, would have more or worse skeletons in his closet than H. Clinton, somebody at the center of one of the two ruling parties of the world hegemon for 25 years. We know everything that H. Clinton did (she was proud before she wasn't, like the rest of the New Democrats), so the leaks were literally about her corruption and DNC corruption during the election. The DNC also fired all of their executives over it because they were obviously corrupt. If the DNC were actually concerned about corruption rather than being caught, you'd think they'd celebrate Assange for smoking it out.
I always used to wonder how dictatorships or strikebreakers could call in huge groups of thugs to beat up people at protests, or to show up to rallies for the dictator. A lot of them are paid, of course, but a lot of them just have the mindset that really prioritizes trying to figure out if Trump was misrepresenting his net worth by exaggerating the success of some of his buildings in order to secure financing from new investors, over what H. Clinton did to Haiti. Or Honduras. Or Iraq.
But, you know, I think the Trump Foundation was a way for him to avoid paying taxes on a painting in the lobby of his building. Lock him up.
As far as I can remember, the RNC was openly anti-Trump in 2016. There was no need to leak that, unlike the DNC being anti-Bernie, which wasn't so open.
And any damaging leaks about the RNC would only have helped Trump's anti-establishment campaign. Other Republicans being corrupt was a big part of his message.
So just to be clear, you think information should only be released if it hurts someone you want to hurt? Is that the ethical standard that was touted by Wikileaks?
That accusation falls apart if the accuser can't even think of a plausible scenario in which Assange might have had information that would have hurt Trump. Assange couldn't hold back information he didn't have.
Erdogan is destroying my alma mater, his ridiculous economics are having very bad impact on my parents and friends, kids are sent to religious schools in much larger numbers than before which means social problems in the years to coma and the general totalitarian approach of his is something I don’t like enduring.
That’s one aspect.
>Why Did WikiLeaks Help Dox Most of Turkey’s Adult Female Population?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-he...
Quite a bit of this stuff actually went through both House and Senate during the Obama presidency. The coup d'etat in Turkey happened in July 2016 and the subsequent purge and extra radicalization of Erdogan didn't just suddenly happen with Trump. Things like this are usually planned a while in advance. On top of that Trumps cabinet was a mess and took a while to get started, so it's inconceivable that it started during Trump days.
It doesn't really absolve Trump's administration from anything, but at the same time don't think that Obama's administration and by extension Hillary and Biden didn't have their hand in this crap either.
I'm quite concerned that some of these leaks that are now gone are for example the current CIA directors Burns' warnings about Ukraine when he was still ambassador to Russia back in the days. Or just unrelated things like documentations about Landmark or other cults that were removed from all other parts of the web due to lawsuits.
Do you know that Erdogan today is a nationalist and pro Ataturk(Ataturk himself is not purely right or left wing) right winger? A decade ago he was almost the exact opposite and was targeted harshly by his current coalition partners and his primary rivals were his partner in crime. Go back one more decade and Erdogan was pro-West liberal. He simply navigates the conditions and the US president is one of the major conditions.
Yes presidents are supposed to navigate these situations. But none of the past couple of administrations have. To try to pin it all on Trump is a cop-out.
[1] https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1500782351831662592
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clin...
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11135388/trump-general-election
Up and downvoting to gauge what the mob thinks is the worst invention of the internet.
I was pretty shocked not only at how far right media twisted the contents of the Podesta emails into wild conspiracy theories like PizzaGate etc, but fully disgusted at the sheer volume of people who just ate all that up without a moment of critical thinking.
Even still, no sane person thought that Trump was going to win. Even the couple days before the election, all the polls had Hillary up by a wide margin. I highly doubt that Julian was hoping for a Trump presidency. I think it's much more likely that he was imagining a Clinton presidency, but where people were a lot more critical of her actions.
Nobody cares, though, what he thought he was doing. In social justice circles, we talk about impact being what matters, not intention. There's a lot of impact that he has to answer for.
I don't want to imply that the outcomes don't matter. But at least I prefer living in a justice system where planned murder and fatal accident are not considered as equal offences, although outcomes might be the same.
The correct response to this is more whistleblowing, not less.
Hillary was the secretary of the united states when those charges was written (and leaked). There was also reports about political pressure done by the US government directed at the Sweden and UK, allegedly to influence the legal case around Assange. Accusations was made, long before the election, that Hillary was the person responsible of authorizing and organizing those deeds.
Based on that I find the events of the 2016 elections to be fairly self-explanatory. It is just sad that we will never fully know the full extend of what Hillary role was as the secretary of US during in the aftermath of the cable leaks, or how much real involvement the US had in the Swedish and UK legal cases.
I'll also never forget the leak that proved that she encouraged the media to take Trump seriously and "elevate" him in the GOP primary because she thought a radical would be easier to beat in the general election.
She was not fit to be president. 2016 was the year of two horrible choices.
[citation needed]
[0]: https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-asks-court-for-66-years-to...
Would you like your business laptop subject to FOIA just because the FBI investigated a crime against you?
What if the FBI seized a personal laptop of yours? Should that be subject to FOIA requests by anyone who wants it?
The Fourth Amendment rights against government seizure of your property should also extend to giving that property to random yahoos who can fill a form out.
If we lived in a world where a third party had a fighting chance, fine, but these institutions are literally deciding who we get to vote for.
A standard of "if you're the victim of a crime, your personal info is fair game to anyone who wants it" would be a very, very dangerous precedent to set.
(Not saying that is what is happening here, just a hypothetical.)
Why does the headline make it sound like the FBI wants the documents sealed for 66 years rather than accurately conveying that they'll be release the documents at 500 pages per month, and that therefore it will mathematically take 66 years?
>If Mazzant upholds his order, the FBI wants a lengthy period of time to perform the work—66 years, or 500 pages a month.
Oh, it's the Epoch times... I guess that answers both questions
If I could find any other publication covering this court case I would have provided the link.
Similarly, the FDA has asked a court for 55 years to respond to a FOIA request for COVID vaccine data. Assume you won't object to this source. [0]
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants...
Edit: also, I haven't looked further into this but can almost guarantee you that the FBI was trying to work with the requester to narrow down what they're requesting to something that is slightly more focused than hundreds of thousands of pages that all need review first
(2) I did take the time to attempt to find a legitimate source for this, but unfortunately none exists.
You need to develop a better personal filter for what you're taking in as fact.
The FBI responded that 14 days was an unreasonable amount of time and asked the judge to either specify exactly what it is they want, or give them time to review the data themselves.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23218831/doj-reconsid...
The alt-right media has twisted what the FBI was saying about the time it takes to review documents and trying to paint their rebuttal as 'they want to hide this forever', which is not the case. .. which is why you won't find this "66 years" thing on any reputable website.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is law. The judge was following the law here. 14 days is what the statute provides. Seems unfair to call this a personal agenda by the judge?
> The FBI responded that 14 days was an unreasonable amount of time and asked the judge to either specify exactly what it is they want, or give them time to review the data themselves.
14 days is statutory. The FBI responded with an even less reasonable amount of time (66 years from start to finish). Why is that acceptable but 14 days is not?
> The alt-right media has twisted what the FBI was saying about the time it takes to review documents and trying to paint their rebuttal as 'they want to hide this forever', which is not the case. .. which is why you won't find this "66 years" thing on any reputable website.
The 66 years is how long it will take the FBI to release 396,000 documents at a rate of 500 a month. The individuals involved in this case will likely be deceased by the time they are done, which might as well be forever.
The whole point of FOIA is government transparency. If the public is expected to wait until they are long dead to get access to public records, then that is undermining both the spirit and letter of the law.
Should I be able to make a FOIA request for all of your personal data on all of your devices?
You and this judge are placing your own curiosity above common sense.
What on earth makes you think Seth Rich's private data are considered "public records", that's just nonsense.
If the government is in possession of that data and that data was used as a part of an investigation into a crime: yes.
In fact, it is law. Evidence in a criminal case, at least in the U.S., is a matter of public record. [0]
[0]: https://depositionacademy.com/is-discovery-in-a-criminal-cas...
He wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds (leaks).
Assange is a citizen of the criminal 5-eyes superstate, and in that context has every right to select materials designed to reign in the crimes of that criminal, 5-eyes superstate - especially since it has, as an entity, been responsible for the utter destruction of countless sovereign nations and the mass murder of their innocent civilians - at scales far, far exceeding that of Russia or China.
The moral authority that you claim should have been exercised over Russia and China, simply doesn't exist. 5-eyes states are not 'better' at these things than Russia or China.
By statistics of "murder of innocent people", and "destruction of civilian infrastructure designed to make the target state fail, utterly", the worst criminal state in the world is the USA and its minion lapdogs - by a wide, wide margin.
It is, therefore, entirely appropriate for 5-eyes citizens to focus on the crimes of their own states, and utterly inappropriate for members of war-crime committing, crimes-against-humanity committing states, to be calling for the destruction of any other sovereign nation - while their own war criminals roam free to do whatever continued evil they desire.
Your statistics is a function of how you count it. You could, for example, include "use of rape as a military tactic"[1] or "deliberate genocide"[2, 3] - which might have a bearing on the whole thing.
Not to mention the blatant, veiled whataboutism. Just because "USA bad" doesn't mean that countries such as Russia and China can do anything they want and we shouldn't hold them accountable.
To claim any kind of moral authority "calculation" here is perverse.
____
[1] - https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221014-rape-used-in-...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
[3] - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/why-russias-war-ukrai...
Did the citizens of the 5-eyes superstate vote to invade Iraq? (No: the war legislation in each state was abrogated utterly by the USA's criminal cabal, which decided to invade and destroy Iraq, illegally, on the basis of utter lies.). Were their democracies utterly corrupted in order to refactor the world order according to fundamentally racist, bigoted views, demolish countless other sovereign states, and leave their people in utter ruins? (Yes, and this injustice still goes on.)
Have you moved on from those crimes to focus on other 'whataboutist' situations in order to deflect, demur from oversight and degrade any attempt at addressing our own war crimes? (Yes, because Americans/5-eyes'ers are incapable of finding the courage to jail our own war criminals and would rather run to stir up the mob at the next house fire.) Is Russia/Ukraine more important to you now than the suffering of the Iraqi people? The Yemeni people? The Somalian, Libyan and Afghani people?
Why is that, exactly?
Yes, it is a criminal superstate, inasmuch as it doesn't have legitimacy and has been committing crimes against humanity with impunity. The member states of the 5-/9-eyes superstate are no longer sovereign, as their civilians' rights have been utterly abrogated by the construct. You are correct in pointing out it isn't really a "superstate" - it is factually a criminal cabal.
Such a cabal has no moral authority over any other state in the world. Period. The 5-eyes states violate the human rights of far, far more human beings on the planet than any other, including Russia and China combined.
>"we shouldn't hold them accountable."
You can't expect a mass murdering, baby-raping, house-fire starting criminal to have the moral authority to do anything about other murderers in the neighborhood, except maybe steal their spoils and reduce their competition over further criminal enterprises.
This is an utterly fallacious leap to make and speaks more to your own personal complete lack of understanding of ethics than anything else, which I agree is perverse to an extreme.
The USA and its 5-eyes minions do not have the Right nor the Moral Authority to do anything other than jail our own war criminals, and only then will the rest of the innocent world accept our oversight of Russian and Chinese crimes.
Unless of course you consider the USA and the 5-eyes superstate to be somehow morally more superior to any other state?
>"USA Bad"
The superiority you claim that belongs only to the USA and its 5-eyes minion 'allies' belies your heavy investment in the fallacy that the USA isn't the worlds worst actor when it comes to crimes against humanity and war crimes - perhaps on the basis of blind nationalism?
34 million refugees from our wars would like a word. The souls of the missing 5% of Iraqs' population, murdered by "our side", are also standing in line. The Syrian people would like their nations' wealth back. Yemen wants to return the American-made bombs that have been used to genocide their children. Libya would like to close the slave markets and send the CIA a bill for the infrastructure rebuild.
You might find it easy to ignore these 5-eyes crimes, but the rest of the world is not so cowardly.
Fix the heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by your own state, and only then will you have the moral authority to do anything, effective, about the crimes of other states.
In fact, that's an extremely evil thing to push, because - who holds USA accountable? Surely not Russia or China. So nobody is held accountable. Well done!
And being Ukrainian I have enough moral authority to call out Russia at least.
The US has no moral authority when it comes to illegal invasions and murdering innocent people. Period.
If you want to do something effective about criminal, illegal wars - jail your own war criminals. Ukraine has plenty of them, even prior to Febuary 23rd. You did nothing effective about them, and thus the mess you are in.
Anything less is hypocricy and moral grandstanding.
You are blaming Russias invasion of Ukraine, on Ukrainians?.
If you are unaware of this, and just swallowing the agitprop designed to sell more weapons into the region, then I'm sure you have nothing more productive to add to the conversation.
Do you have a credible source for this?, id be interested to see one if you do.
This is not a logical statement. A person can, of course, absolutely call out the crimes of Russia and China, while also calling out the crimes of people in their own country. You are fabricating a moral restriction without basis.
Until the USA prosecutes its war criminals it should not be allowed to start any futher wars, fund terror groups, or further involve its intelligence apparatus in the destruction of any additional sovereign states. The fires started by American war criminals are far, far more destructive to the peace of the free world than anything Russia or China are up to. The imperative is to put out the greater fire: American war crimes.
If you truly think that Americans should have the moral authority to call out Russians for their war crimes, to the point that the nation is being prepared for war conditions against Russia in the immediate future, then Americans should not be committing war crimes every twenty minutes. They should be better than the Russians on this subject.
The trouble is, they are really not better. They are worse. America kills more innocent people, on a more regular basis - for the last twenty years - on the basis of lies and falsehoods, than Russia and China combined.
Americans, and indeed the willing Western coalition which supports the war crime-committing aparatus at the core of the US' economy, simply don't have the moral authority to challenge any other nation on this issue. It is the height of hypocricy, and will simply never work.
Want to do something effective about Russia or China? Set your own example. At the moment, the world is following America's lead in starting aggressive wars, it isn't following America's lead on peaceful activities.
You set the precedent by allowing the illegal invasion and subsequent murder of 5% of Iraq's population. Russia isn't doing in Ukraine anything that the USA and its criminal allies haven't already done in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc...
Clean that up and you might have a valid point about Russia and China. Ignore it all, and the world simply sees you as the pathetic nation of cowardly hypocrites that you are.
Neither do Ukrainians. Nor Russians, or indeed, Chinese.
He scuttled an entire country over his personal grudge, if I'm reading you correctly. Sounds like he's exactly where he needs to be.
You are saying you wanted your crooks to be the winner instead of someone else's crooks?
And say what you will but the Democrats wanted Trump to be on the ticket.
And you think that everything was great in the US before the 2016 election? There were no big bank bail outs, no wars? You all are delusional.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/mar/02/how-can-berni...
"So how does Sanders qualify to run in the Democratic primary when he's an independent in the Senate?
The bottom line is that he's done everything the Democratic National Committee has asked him to do in order to prove his support for the party."
and...
https://www.newsweek.com/clinton-robbed-sanders-dnc-brazile-...
Since you're very concerned about Bernie, that means you're totally 100% about Medicare For All and Free Tuition and a Federal law guaranteeing access to free, safe abortions by real doctors, right?
Cause if you're just using him as a cudgel, that says more about you than it does about anyone else.
Seriously, have you people no human compassion?
If he had done the same to make sure Clinton won he would have lost credibility as a trustworthy source too.
You can in fact lie with facts, especially without context. You can arrange and frame them so as to paint a biased or outright false picture.
If the GRU manipulated him that just shows as well how foolish it is to think amateurs can play spy games with the pros. It’s like having your local street ball league go up against a pro basketball team.
I wonder if his television deal with Putin compromised his “radical transparency”.
This conclusion can only be made on the basis of nationalistic pride and blind faith in the spooks running the country.
On that basis, it should be entirely ignored, since those spooks are also war criminals who are running from justice.
Evidence?
It does not really matter. You cannot pretend to be all about freedom of speech and exposing government misbehaviour without taking sides and play these partisan games.
I was supportive of the whole Wikileaks thing before his role as a pawn for totalitarians became really visible.
The fact was that at that point disrupting the election meant acting for a Trump presidency, and I cannot see how any properly-calibrated moral compass would want that. The most charitable interpretation is that he was played and a useful idiot.
> I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
Yes. It also does not make Assange any less of an arsehole. Your enemy being immoral does not give you the moral high ground.
It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.
The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.
I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(2016_film)