Wikileaks and Julian Assange Mega-thread

[Journeyman]

Evil, but brilliant.

Let's go back to "catastrophic but not serious."

In the short-term, computer security may be tightened and people will be more pissed-off at the extra steps required for banking because of hackers messing with Visa/Mastercard. Within two years though, this will be a minor footnote....except to the people who think The Matrix is a documentary and their conspiracy theory-driven fellow travellers.

 

[vonGarvin]

In this case, then, make it clear that any person releasing this stuff will face legal consequences, encryption key or not.  Assange is a little man with "issues" and though it's clear he has his fans (including some on this very site), they are nothing more than rabble.  They may think that they are above the law or that what they are doing is noble, but in the end, they are trying to employ possession of information as power.  Show them that their threats are meaningless, and that means making an example out of Assange.


As an aside, if any person in this thread thinks that the accusations against him in Sweden are "trivial": think again.  "No means No", and I'm fairly certain that it applies here in Canada.  But since it's Saint Julian, well, we can forgive him, after all, the same people who did 9/11 are doing this. :

 

[observor 69]

In this case, then, make it clear that any person releasing this stuff will face legal consequences, encryption key or not.  Assange is a little man with "issues" and though it's clear he has his fans (including some on this very site), they are nothing more than rabble.  They may think that they are above the law or that what they are doing is noble, but in the end, they are trying to employ possession of information as power.  Show them that their threats are meaningless, and that means making an example out of Assange.


As an aside, if any person in this thread thinks that the accusations against him in Sweden are "trivial": think again.  "No means No", and I'm fairly certain that it applies here in Canada.  But since it's Saint Julian, well, we can forgive him, after all, the same people who did 9/11 are doing this. :

Innocent until found guilty in a court of law.

 

[ekpiper]

I have followed this thread of events with only half-arsed enthusiasm.

Given that the majority of us on this site actually have real responsibilities or at least a basic responsibility to national security, most of us completely understand the need for secrecy.  There are things that need to happen behind closed doors for the purposes of safety and security.  While it may indeed be interesting to hear all of these messages, and to get some pretty good insight into a lot of US foreign relations, those who are spouting off about freedom of information, and a right to know are clearly trying to be self-righteous and have deluded themselves with thinking that everything should be known by everyone, merely because it is about the United States.  If there was no secrecy, you can guarantee that MANY more attacks would happen.

"And in news today, the FBI is tracking Muhammad Hussain, expected to be trying to gather materials for a bomb.  The FBI says that they are imitating an arms trader named Fazid el-Shief, hoping to give him a fake weapon to expose himself."

I am of the firm belief that a huge number of people no longer know what is best for themselves.  The bottom line is that the world is not a perfect place.  In a perfect world, we wouldn't need secrets, we wouldn't need a military, and we could all be intimately involved in the dealings of our governments.  The world is not perfect.  There truly are people out to harm us, and as a result, we must take precautions.  Not every Canadian can be trusted, and neither can every American.  I expect some people will never understand this, and some will claim it is for the greater good.  But only if ALL other nations are just as free about the information as they are claiming we should be would it be feasible to do so.  Until then, things are as they are, and they must stay that way.

I can understand calls for Mr. Assange's "untimely death" IF he were the one who released the information, or he were the only one involved in WikiLeaks.  The bottom line is that with all the publicity now given to them, if you take him down, surely others will take his place.  He is a fool, and is cloaking his hatred in self-righteousness, and he should be imprisoned if it were possible.

Bottom line: We may not like secrets, but they're necessary.  Freedom of speech concerns stating your own opinion, not releasing important classified documents.  The world isn't perfect.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Innocent until found guilty in a court of law.

Which is why he is a pathetic little man,.....he won't go face that court.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Dutch teen arrested, confesses to attacks on Visa, MasterCard sites - Google translation of NLD's National Prosecution Service news release in Dutch:

Commissioned by the National Prosecutor, the High Tech Crime Team of the National Investigation in The Hague last night a 16-year-old boy arrested, presumably involved in the digital attacks by sympathizers WikiLleaks to include the websites of Mastercard and Paypal.

Wikileaks sympathizers after the arrest of Juilian Assange in England, proceeded to computer attacks on the websites of the Swedish public prosecutors, the Swiss postal banking, credit card companies Visa and MasterCard payment site Paypal.  Immediately after it became clear that these cyber attacks from the Netherlands were given the Team of the National High Tech Crime Investigation initiated an investigation.

Here are probably thousands of Web enabled computers to shut down. Wikileaks supporters of their computers could volunteer to be part of these attacks.

The cyber attacks quickly led yesterday to identify the suspect. When the boy was seized computers and digital data carriers. The boy is now in police custody and interrogated by detectives from the High Tech Crime Team. He has a confession about attacks on MasterCard and Visa. The boy is probably part of a larger group of hackers, to which the investigation continues. He was arraigned Friday on the judge in Rotterdam.

The actions of the Wikileaks sympathizers are conducted under the name Operation Payback.  Wikileaks recently published confidential documents from the U.S. government.

 

[vonGarvin]

Innocent until found guilty in a court of law.

That only works so far.  Common sense has to prevail.  Shut them down (which isn't a judicial punishment), but irrespective of presumption of innocence (which is a nice catch phrase, by the way, but why then do we keep people in jail if we presume then innocent?  Anyway, I digress...), find them to bring them forward and try them.

 

[vonGarvin]

Dutch teen arrested, confesses to attacks on Visa, MasterCard sites

One down, thousands to go, but the first bite of the elephant has been taken.  Make an example of him, and show those others out there that there are real consequences for such actions.

 

[George Wallace]

ekpiper

Well said.  Unfortunately, once again, this is "preaching to the choir".  On a whole Canadians are very naive of Security matters.

 

[ModlrMike]

Dutch teen arrested, confesses to attacks on Visa, MasterCard sites

Which proves that DDOS attacks are not the internet WMD of the past. That, and there's really no true anonymity on the web. Whatever you do leaves tracks. Tracks that someone else can follow to find you.

 

[George Wallace]

One down, thousands to go, but the first bite of the elephant has been taken.  Make an example of him, and show those others out there that there are real consequences for such actions.

With the dependency on technology by the youth of today, a suitable punishment would be doing time without access to technology.  Could you imagine this kid being sentenced to ten years, without access to any form of technology?  He would go stir-crazy within a few minutes of confinement.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I don't know about the legality of being anywhere along the path of making a state's guarded information accessible to its enemies, but as a point of morality the people involved with Wikileaks are in the wrong.  Not everyone is entitled to all information.  Some people, organizations, and states will use information to do harm.  If the producers and guardians of that information deemed it worth protecting, the aforementioned parties have no right to it.

I am surprised Assange and the other key members are still alive, now that many of the powerful nations of the world have some sort of motive.  Anyone else could blame the US; the US could reasonably argue that it did nothing after the first set of leaks or knowing the second was imminent, and claim anyone else did it.

 

[Redeye]

Two points:

In this case, then, make it clear that any person releasing this stuff will face legal consequences, encryption key or not.

I fail to see how this could be possible.  Someone possessing or transmitting the encrypted file without the key is passing along a bunch of gibberish.  If Assange doesn't release the key, then there'd be no way for any court anywhere to have it proven to them beyond reasonable doubt that the contents of the encryption are what they are claimed to be.

The Swedish story is just bizarre, it seems rather odd that neither of the aggrieved parties bothered to talk to police for quite a while, doesn't it?  I also find it bizarre (and frankly, a little disturbing) that never mind the presumption of innocence, someone can be arrested and held for extradition when they haven't even been charged with an offence.  It's not simply a matter of innocent until proven guilty, but no charge has even been laid.

 

[ArmyRick]

For all these clowns who are supporting Julian Assange, how many are older than 23, not living in Mom's basement, have a job and god forbid a freaking life.
My points

1. People are not entitled to know everything going on. Some things are none of their business. Some things are state secrets and some things are opinions and not neccessarrly accurate information.

2. The claim to being transparency for any info being denied for release reminds me of how they conducted the witch hunts 300 years ago. If you hid anything at all, you could easily be accused of witchcraft and burned for it.

3. Even these documents being illegally released, who vouches for the accuracy?

Personally, I hope Julian Assange gets imprisoned for life in some third world hell hole. I still love his double standard. Is there a web site where we can harrass him and release every detail of his life? True or not, won't matter, we will claim we are just being transparent.

Just a thought.

 

[57Chevy]

I wonder.  Has Nadim Kobeissi also posted his home address, phone number, email address, and photos of all his personal property of value?  Did he post his birth date and place of birth and info of all his immediate family on his site as well?  We do want to know whom we are dealing with, do we not?  After all, we do have the RIGHT to know.

Well......lets see. He was born Sept 1990 in Beirut Lebanon.
Now....I wonder just how much wacky leaking there is about Lebanon and when exactly were they leaked.
Pretty easy to find out eh! (wikileaks lebanon in the search engine)

Quote from article reply #151:

"The internet has an unprecedented potential to be a place where censorship is impossible, where freedom of speech is an imperative.' —Nadim Kobeissi, computer science student
That's why Kobeissi says he decided to host a mirror site."

I think not

Just the fact that he finds it necessary to add that particular statement when there are already 1200+ mirror
sites out there only proves IMO the posbility of some sort of twisted hidden agenda.

 

[old medic]

Swedish Government Websites forced offline.
Other sites hijacked and rerouted.
http://www.thelocal.se/30718/20101209/

The name of Sweden's justice minister Beatrice Ask has been hijacked on the internet, with a website featuring her name in the address now linking to WikiLeaks.

Web users who visit the site "beatricask.se" will instead find themselves visiting the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

The minister's spokesperson, Martin Valfridsson, told AFP that Ask had not previously used that domain name.

Hackers also forced the Swedish government's website offline for several hours on Thursday as cyber attacks in support of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange gathered pace.

The Aftonbladet daily said the government's official website, www.regeringen.se, was offline for a few hours overnight to Thursday, publishing a screen shot which showed the server could not be reached.

The site was working normally again later in the day.

It remains unclear who is behind the Beatrice Ask website and the attack on the government website, both of which come online the day after hackers attacked websites for the Swedish Prosecution Authority (Åklagarmyndigheten) and the law offices of Claes Borgström, the attorney representing the two women who allege they were sexually molested by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange back in August.

A group of internet activists operating under the name "Operation Payback" has claimed credit for the attacks on the Borgström and the Prosecution Authority.

The two attacks were part of a wider effort, "Operation Avenge Assange," directed at organisations deemed by the group to be opposed to WikiLeaks.

Credit card companies Visa and MasterCard as well as online payment service PayPal were also targeted by the group for the companies' decisions to stop processing payments to WikiLeaks.

"It's the wild west out on the internet right now," IT expert Joakim von Braun told the newspaper.

Government spokeswoman Mari Ternbo told AFP the government did not comment security matters and could not confirm the cyber attack had taken place.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, is being detained in London pending a hearing on extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over rape allegations.

The website of the Swedish prosecutor's office pursuing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came under cyber attack on Tuesday in the latest salvo in a campaign by online supporters who have also struck PayPal and the Swiss Post Office bank.

"Our website was overloaded on Tuesday night and our hosting company then decided to shut it down. We don't know the cause of the overload, but are now looking into it," Karin Rosander, a spokesperson for the Swedish Prosecution Authority (Åklagarmyndigheten) told the TT news agency.

She added that she had not yet received confirmation that the site outage was caused by a hacker attack.

PandaLabs, the malware detection laboratory for computer security firm Panda Security, said the prosecutor's website, aklagare.se, was brought down by members of the loose "cyber hacktivist" group called "Anonymous."

 

[Nemo888]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/09/julian-assange-nobel-peace-prize

Julian Assange should be awarded Nobel peace prize, suggests Russia

Russia urges Assange nomination in calculated dig at the US over WikiLeaks founder's detention

Russia has suggested that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize, in an unexpected show of support from Moscow for the jailed WikiLeaks founder.

In what appears to be a calculated dig at the US, the Kremlin urged non-governmental organisations to think seriously about "nominating Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate".

"Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him," the source from inside president Dmitry Medvedev's office told Russian news agencies. Speaking in Brussels, where Medvedev was attending a Russia-EU summit yesterday , the source went on: "Maybe, nominate him as a Nobel Prize laureate."

Russia's reflexively suspicious leadership appears to have come round to WikiLeaks, having decided that the ongoing torrent of disclosures are ultimately far more damaging and disastrous to America's long-term geopolitical interests than they are to Russia's.

The Kremlin's initial reaction to stories dubbing Russia a corrupt "mafia state" and kleptocracy was, predictably, negative. Last week Medvedev's spokesman dubbed the revelations "not worthy of comment" while Putin raged that a US diplomatic cable comparing him to Batman and Medvedev to Robin was "arrogant" and "unethical". State TV ignored the claims.

Subsequent disclosures, however, that Nato had secretly prepared a plan in case Russia invaded its Baltic neighbours have left the Kremlin smarting. Today Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Nato had to explain why it privately considered Russia an enemy while publicly describing it warmly as a "strategic partner" and ally.

Nato should make clear its position on WikiLeaks cables published by the Guardian alleging that the alliance had devised plans to defend Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia against Russia, Lavrov said.

"With one hand, Nato seeks agreement with us on joint partnership, and with the other, it makes a decision that it needs to defend. So when is Nato more sincere?" Lavrov asked today. "We have asked these questions and are expecting answers to them. We think we are entitled to that."

Lavrov said his attitude towards the leaked US state department cables was "philosophical". "It is interesting to read, including what ambassadors write to provide a stream of information to their capitals," he admitted.

Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's hardline ultra-nationalist ambassador to Nato, also today voiced his support for the embattled Assange. He tweeted that Assange's arrest and incarceration on Monday at the City of Westminster magistrates' court demonstrated that there was "no media freedom" in the west. Assange's "fate" amounted to "political persecution" and a lack of human rights, the ambassador said.

In London, meanwhile, Russia's chargé d'affaires and acting ambassador in the UK, Alexander Sternik, said relations with Britain had improved since the coalition came to power. He complained, however, about the hostile reaction in the British media after Fifa's executive committee voted that Russia – and not England – should host the 2018 World Cup.

In a briefing to journalists this morning, Sternik said: "While the English bid was technically a strong one, the Russian bid was in line with the well-known Fifa philosophy of opening new frontiers for world football. The vote result was therefore quite logical, and while the disappointment of many in England is understandable, the media outrage was a step too far. It's not cricket, as the English say."

In accordance with Fair Dealing provisions of Canadian Copyright

I know this is a serious topic, but this article made me laugh out loud.

 

[57Chevy]

As if the Russian Federation had no idea of what the Starship Enterprise does in the neutral zone. ;D

Quote from Putin Defends Russia Against WikiLeaks Corruption Allegations (article)

"These revelations that are already being published out of these cables are showing that government leaders are saying one thing publicly and another privately."

What have they been paying their spies to find out ?
also from the same article;
quote:
"Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexei Sazonov said Thursday that there is nothing new or unexpected for Russia in the cables. He said Russia is committed to its relationship with the U.S."

        (quotes are reproduced in accordance with the fair dealings provisions of the Copyright Act)

 

[GK .Dundas]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/09/julian-assange-nobel-peace-prize

In accordance with Fair Dealing provisions of Canadian Copyright

I know this is a serious topic, but this article made me laugh out loud.

I wonder how'd they 'd feel if he'd gone after them as well as the US ? Not he's ever likely to after anyone but the US.

 

[The Bread Guy]

I wonder how'd they 'd feel if he'd gone after them as well as the US ? Not he's ever likely to after anyone but the US.

Oh, one never knows....

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted to expose China's and Russia's secrets as much as those of the US, and believes Hillary Clinton should resign if she ordered diplomats to engage in espionage.

"[Clinton] should resign if it could be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage of UN activities, in violation of the international covenants to which the US signed up," he said in an interview with Time magazine, published yesterday following the leak of secret US diplomatic cables that have caused huge embarrassment for the country.

Assange gave the interview via Skype from an undisclosed location after a warrant was issued by Interpol following rape allegations in Sweden, which his lawyer said amounted to persecution and a smear campaign.

While Assange has been accused by former members of the WikiLeaks project of obsessively focusing on the US, he said countries with less transparency, such as China and Russia, had the most potential to be reformed by whistleblowers.

"We believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential," he said. Assange said that while parts of the Chinese government and security services "appear terrified of free speech" he believed it was "an optimistic sign because it means speech can still cause reform."

He added: "Journalism and writing is capable of achieving change which is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it."

Assange argued that countries like China could be easier to reform than countries like the US and the UK, which "have been so heavily fiscalised through contractual obligations that political change doesn't seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn't result in change."

While secrecy was important, Assange said, in keeping the identity of sources hidden, secrecy "shouldn't be used to cover up abuses." ....

Based on Russia's track record of dealing with opposition and whistleblowing, methinks even the Ass(ange)-meister isn't dumb enough to really consider this.