Wikileaks had the public backing of, and was composed of, people who had proved the painful way that they weren't working for governments or other established interests.
Merely getting access to flashy hacks will never win DDoSecrets that.
Assange paid a huge price for being the organization's public face, but it wasn't for nothing. It could never have worked as well as it did unless someone was willing to play that role.
The obvious answer is that you end up as a useful idiot for the United States's enemies. Yes, the Podesta leaks were probably largely true, but this one-sided airing of dirty laundry in the lead up to the 2016 election obvious impacted the result. So if you endorse this, aren't you just opening the door for every election cycle whereby the US's enemies get to wade in and strategically release information that they've obtained through espionage? And don't you also therefore, start to create a dynamic in the election that candidates have to attempt to appease foreign adversaries in order to avoid damaging their election hopes?
What if Hilary had come out in February of 2016 and said "Hey, Putin's not so bad, he's got legitimate interests in Ukraine and I think we should leave Europe to stand on it's own" - do you think the campaign of leaking hacked material to wikileaks would've happened? Or do you think maybe Trump's tax returns might have come out instead?
And what is stopping those patriotic principled leakers from leaking things to just about anyone else? If the republican party e-mails were leaked for example I can guarantee you'd have a huge amount of journalists willing to publish them, even if in the theoretical wikileaks wouldn't do it.
At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the same as some supposed FSB spy.
Expecting anyone to be impartial is a big mistake, especially when you can conveniently persecute and try to kill said person and with that pretty much force them to cease being being "impartial" at the very least in the public perception. Under the circumstances laid out all it takes to discredit someone as an "useful idiot" is to persecute and corner them into "enemy territory".
Also let's take a step back and differentiate between something being of interest to exclusively US enemies, that would be a detriment to the US directly, or a matter of international policy, which is the case of the Ukraine position you cited. The Ukraine position is not a threat to the US either way, it's just a position in foreign policy.
There's a big difference between principled citizens who choose to leak information, and foreign adversaries of the US. I would have thought this was obvious but it's down to US citizens to decide the US election, and external interference should be met as the attack on the US that it is.
>At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the
Absolutely, they could, this weird whataboutism doesn't help your position. Either what I'm saying is correct - and you concede that, in which case we can talk about the US capabilities - which we can view in the correct context of capabilities operated under a free accountable democratic society. Or you don't agree, in which case your whatabouttery is moot, since you think it's fine, and therefore the US intelligence could just intervene to get their way. As you say, they probably have more capabilities.
>There's a big difference between principled citizens who choose to leak information, and foreign adversaries of the US. I would have thought this was obvious but it's down to US citizens to decide the US election, and external interference should be met as the attack on the US that it is.
I can't agree with that, the election was decided by the US citizens, they saw the information and made their choice. Unless you're arguing that said leaks are fake as far as I'm concerned information is information, if the candidate did something the voter base wouldn't approve of and it was unveiled the source is completely irrelevant. Under those pretenses any kind of leak can be trivially attributed to some enemy and now its discredited, call those who report on it pawns of the $enemy_state and there you go. You can see this being attempted in real time in US politics, thankfully with waning success.
My point about the capabilities of the US espionage comes in when you factor counterintel and exposing falsehoods, as I said before my position is that information is information and the only thing that can be argued against information is whether it was fabricated or not. For an example, as far as I'm concerned the entire hunter laptop scandal being completely pushed under the rug by intel agents[0] is far closer to actual manipulation than the DNC e-mail leaks, because it was a lie that it wasn't real and conveniently no journalist wanted to fact check it, just to come out now 2 years later after the election is done and walk back on it. I'm citing this to try and make clear that the veracity is far more important than the source.
I do concede the point that arguing that just because the US can do the same supposed leaking of documents to another country doesn't change much, although assuming they're actual leaks i'd like them to.
> So if you endorse this, aren't you just opening the door for every election cycle whereby the US's enemies get to wade in and strategically release information that they've obtained through espionage?
If there's no dirty laundry to air, this strategy doesn't work. Clean up your act at home and your enemies will have no ammunition. Guess what's the first step to do that...
Even if this was a Russian ploy, you should be thanking them.
My politicians ideally shouldn't. And absolutely should lose elections when their dirty laundry is aired if that's what the voters think when seeing the truth.
"one-sided airing of dirty laundry in the lead up to the 2016 election"
Are you talking about the mainstream media here? They leaked every scrap of dirty laundry about Trump that they could find (not all of which were true), yet Wikileaks was the only one willing to leak the DNC leaks.
Ok, if your position is that you want ideological purity at the cost of all practical considerations, then fine, you'll end up with whoever Russia/Saudi Arabia etc wants you to have. I don't think that's a good practical trade off, but it's one you're welcome to make.
Practical considerations? Hm, if I consider it practically I feel like Europe shouldn't consider the US an ally. (And before someone assumes something wrong: nor should it consider Russia, China or Saudi Arabia an ally.)
It's game of thrones in the truest sense and I personally don't think the track record of the US is much better for Europe in the last 7 decades, so...
When it comes to meddling with elections I think nobody has as much experience in doing so than the US.
So part of me was quite happy that this super power could have a taste of their own medicine at some point.
While at the same time I wish all the people in the world the best, including the US and Russia :)
What an absurdly stupid position. Fine, you openly want to encourage foreign adversaries to determine the outcome of US elections. Fine. That's a position you advertise widely, because it makes you look absurd.
Yeah Assange was directly working with Russian intelligence, Trump was directly working with Russian intelligence, Elon Musk is directly working with Russian intelligence and Kanye West is also directly working with Russian intelligence.
That's like seeing a weird shaped airplane and saying it's UFO's instead of the obvious explanation that a 3 year old can come up with: "maybe they just believe what they say and the corruption in the government is both real and bad".
"Russian intelligence" at this point is liberal Pizzagate. The organization that can't even spy on its neighbor's openly operating military cannot subvert the world.
Give the parent credit (as the HN rules ask you to do): the poster said nothing about people who aren’t assange.
Second, it’s possible to believe that statement and still follow Occam’s razor: if Assange says something convenient for Russia, it makes sense for Russia to offer its support. It also follows that over time, Russia could “convert” Assange.
I never liked Assange, but someone with a similar story that I did like is Snowden. I am under no belief that he was a Russian spy “all along” as implied by many conspiracy theories, and I have a huge amount of respect for him (even now…).
But it only takes a glance at his Twitter feed to realise that in his time being hosted by Russia (who likely just offered its help to someone convenient for them to help), the guy got turned. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
In other words, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
> It also follows that over time, Russia could “convert” Assange.
It does not. Do you truly not understand that people can be principled?
Assange has a long history of anti war and anti establishment activism. He is dying in jail for his convictions as we speak. He was arrested within days of publishing evidence of war crimes, and hasn't been a free man since. And he knew exactly what he was getting into, too.
If you think a man like that can be "turned" by extending a little sympathy and server space, well, it says a lot about what kind of person YOU are.
And Snowden was prepared to sacrifice everything too, except that Assange, who Snowden didn't even trust at the time, set heaven and hell in motion to save his life and get him to Latin America. (The US preferred to strand him in Russia, which should tell you a lot about what they really feared.)
Occam’s razor says that the simplest explanation is usually the right one.
The simple explanation is that these people had no idea about each other, since identifying and coordinating that effort would be tantamount to a grand conspiracy theory; and I don't buy that people are so extremely competent as to have working apparatus to catch this.
That it was politically convenient for Russia doesn't necessarily mean there was any collusion and I think it's odd to jump directly to that conclusion.
There are lots of things that are politically convenient for Russia, like the way the wind is blowing in Ukraine right now. -- that does not mean the wind is colluding with Russia.
This nonsense narrative is merely designed to deflect from the very real, heinously evil, war crimes that Americans commit on the regular, every twenty minutes, for the last twenty years - for which there is a lot of evidence you Americans choose to ignore in the rush to maintain pride in yourselves...
Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Turks, Chinese, Bri'ish, Kenyans, Iranians... Pick any national origin, and you will see a fraction of them commit war crimes. So why focus on one nation, when those crimes are commited by individuals, and often ordered by entrenched unelected bureaucratic government interests?
Why blame all Americans, all Chinese, for the crimes of a few of them?
All Chinese didn't force Uighurs into organ harvesting camps. All Turks didn't genocide Armenians, All Americans don't commit war crimes every 20 minutes, although some gangs in Chicago come close if you loosen your definition of "war crimes".
Americans are responsible for the crimes of their state. As are Russians responsible for the crimes of their state. Such is the nature of citizenship.
Are you American? Then fix the crimes of your state. Are you not-Russian? You can do nothing about Russia for as long as you are unable to jail your own war criminals.
Americans* are literally extorted by their state, democratic accountability is a myth, as the bureaucracy remains, and the results are imposed even if you refuse to participate. Courts take years and decades, and do not judge against themselves. A more direct method of accountability, has, every time, been used to expand the surveillance state and the militarization of police.
The only remaining effective option is to identify the source of the problem, and shift public opinion to recognize it; With further draconian measures, more people notice the corruption and overextension of the state, and with enough people alternate means of accountability become viable. Until then you're mushed crabs dispersing amongst the waves and cliffs.
Then your nation is a farce and you should be rioting. The fact you aren't is due to the decadence that the military-industrial complex provides. Too bad its dependent on the death of innocent people around the world.
Or, just perhaps, you should hold yourselves accountable, and resist the anti-Wikileaks agitprop that is clearly coming from the very war criminals, themselves, in order to escape justice from public oversight.
>Where have I claimed moral authority?
Justifying American war crimes and crimes against humanity, whatabout-ma'-Russia, is a particular type of posturing designed to elevate the moral authority to commit those crimes over any other nation. The USA is not a moral nation, by any stretch of the imagination - it does not take care of its own people, even, and is murdering innocent people, on average, every twenty minutes ..
If that is not the #1 priority for your political mind to address, then you do not have any moral authority to address the Russia situation.
How would rioting benefit? So far it has only played right into their hands.
Again; Where have I claimed moral authority?
I have listed various nations not to compare them and declare one to be better than others "because of muh morals". I was merely pointing out how war crimes are commited by all nations, and hinting at the fact that war in itself is a crime, only possible by the extortion of the populace. Saying Americans are "muh evil", is guilt by association, and does not identify the root cause. How effective has it been to get Americans to effect change by calling them evil? Otherizing whole swaths of the world population based on the actions of their local slave masters, is not going to ingrain trust in your judgment, instead is more likely to have them reject and ignore you as some radical blowhard.
Also, you are the one who has mentioned Russia, not me. You and I both know the Motherland is the only nation where the people truely pay their taxes voluntarily, government actually works to support the people and not some corporations, war is a myth, and milk and honey flows. I would never speak up against the Motherland, Tovarisch.
Your deployment of the "ma' Russia" narrative belies a glib understanding of the issues in the region.
The USA kill innocent people every twenty minutes, and is the #1 funder of terrorism and calamity across the globe. This is only possible because of ignorant bootlickers choosing to cowardly ignore the crimes and engage in distraction.
Put out the bigger fire: the US' funding of terror across the globe in order to foment conditions for further weapons sales.
Thank you for conceding the point. I too condemn the USA for being one of the globalist funders of terrorism, closely followed by the French- and British-governments, etc.
That is just a lie pushed by western intelligence agencies, popular because it deflects blame for a well-known electoral defeat.
But I did not say they were above politics. On the contrary, they had very strong anti war, anti establishment politics, which they were credible about from their long public history as non-anonymous actors. (Which is also why we laugh at your unsubstantiated accusations that he worked for Putin.)
DdoSecrets will never have that. God knows what they actually believe. They don't think it's important that you know, at least we know that.
Bullshit. Unlike Wikileaks, of which the 'Russian intelligence' smear has never been substantiated, DDoSecrets works with organizations that are indirectly and directly financed by intelligence agencies and smears those outside of this information complex. Namely, Wikileaks.
They work with the OCCRP, which is made up directly of intelligence shills like Radio Free Europe, and groups funded by the NED. That's the agency the CIA used to finance armed groups in Nicuragua after the Iran-Contra affair. This is not an independent organization.
Seymour Hersch came to similar conclusions, and was pilloried for it.
By Bellingcat, the Western intelligence services' pet wikileaks.
Assange did 'citizen journalism' wrong, and he has been deprived of normal human freedoms for more than a decade because of it, while never being charged of any crime.
Even now he resides in quasi-solitary confinement in one of the UK's most notorious prisons, still he has never been charged with a crime.
The treatment of Assange is, with Guantanomo Bay, an obvious and continuously damaging rebuke to the West's posturing about human rights and freedoms. In retrospect we should not have been surprised by the EU's blanket censorship of Russian media and 24/7 pro Ukrainian propaganda.
What is happening to Assange is a warning to all of us. If we choose to pettifog about the definition of a journalist, or complain about political partisanship, we are missing the larger point completely.
Seymour Hersch, who has published 0 evidence for his claim about Syria chemical attack and also just happens to be defending Russia any chance he gets?[1]
No wonder people would 'pilloried' him, because someone as well respected journalist as him should know better than just throw out conspiracies.
Sorry but Assange treatment or mistreatment in jail has nothing to do with the credibility of WikiLeaks.
And how this somehow has something to do with the Russian media and Ukrainian media is relevant, how exactly?
The irony is that comments that are like this is most similar to that of propaganda, lose references, emotional appeal and creating a smokescreen to redirect people away.
Rubbish, not when DDOS hacked GoFundMe, exposing Freedom Convoy donors in order to help Justin Turdeau's irresponsible government shut down public dissent in Canada.
That put them squarely in the far-left, antidemocratic, not to mention criminal activist category. As if we didn't know that already
Yeah, they installed mediawiki or something similar IIRC in the first years, but did they ever enabled public contributions through it? I recall the Assange committee have always tried to get the leaks through other means, the anonymous/encrypted version du jour of "send a letter to the newsroom".
UPD Another news story from 2022: https://therecord.media/how-ddosecrets-built-the-go-to-home-...