Julian Assange fuels conspiracy theories about Democratic …

Posted on June 16, 2017 by admin

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington, D.C., last month had been targeted because the operative was an informant.

In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyber-activist invoked the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the risks of being a source for his organization.

Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which released thousands of internal DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing. Experts and U.S. government officials reportedly believe that hackers linked to the Russian government infiltrated the DNC and gave the email trove to WikiLeaks.

But Assange was apparently interested in hinting about an even darker theory.

Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington, Assange said on Nieuwsuur. BuzzFeed drew more attention to the interview in the U.S.

Somewhat startled, news anchor Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal said, That was just a robbery, I believe wasnt it?

No, theres no finding, Assange responded. Im suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.

Why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington? van Rosenthal asked.

Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States, Assange said, and that our sources face serious risks. Thats why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity.

The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington have not established a motive for the killing but reportedly told the young mans family that he died during a robbery attempt turned tragic. His father, however, told Omaha CBS-affiliate KMTV he did not think it was a robbery because nothing was stolen: his watch, money, credit cards and phone were still with him.

The WikiLeaks founder said that others have suggested that Rich was killed for political reasons and that his organization is investigating the incident.

I think it is a concerning situation. There isnt a conclusion yet. We wouldnt be able to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it, he continued. More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens.

WikiLeaks further fanned the flames of conspiracy by offering a $20,000 reward for anyone with information leading to the conviction of the person responsible for killing Rich.

Rich, who worked in voter outreach for the Democrats, was shot and killed just after 4 a.m. on July 10 a block from his home in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington.

Late last month, WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 emails from DNC employees that exacerbated the tension between Bernie Sanders supporters and the Democratic establishment during the partys national convention in Philadelphia. The emails led to the resignation of several DNC leaders, including Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Snopes has debunked that claim that Rich was killed to prevent him from meeting with the FBI to discuss his plans to testifying against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The Metropolitan Police Department currently offers a reward of up to $25,000 for anyone who can provide information that leads to the conviction of someone for any murders in Washington.

Brad Bauman, a spokesperson for the Rich family, released a statement to Business Insider Wednesday saying that people trying to politicize the death of their loved one are doing more harm than good and preventing police officers from fully doing their jobs.

The family welcomes any and all information that could lead to the identification of the individuals responsible and certainly welcomes contributions that could lead to new avenues of investigation, the statement read.

That said, some are attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy, and in their attempts to do so, are actually causing more harm [than] good and impeding on the ability for law enforcement to properly do their job. For the sake of finding Seths killer, and for the sake of giving the family the space they need at this terrible time, they are asking for the public to refrain from pushing unproven and harmful theories about Seths murder.

Julian Assange – WIRED

Posted on June 16, 2017 by admin

Mark Chew/Fairfax Media/Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Amid a seemingly incessant deluge of leaks and hacks, Washington, DC staffers have learned to imagine how even the most benign email would look a week later on the homepage of a secret-spilling outfit like WikiLeaks or DCLeaks. In many cases, they've stopped emailing altogether, deleted accounts, and reconsidered dumbphones . Julian Assangeor at least, a ten-years-younger and more innocent Assangewould say he's already won.

After another week of Clinton-related emails roiling this election, the political world has been left to scrub their inboxes, watch their private correspondences be picked over in public, and psychoanalyze WikiLeaks' inscrutable founder. Once they're done sterilizing their online lives, they might want to turn to an essay Assange wrote ten years ago, laying out the endgame of his leaking strategy long before he became one of the most controversial figures on the Internet.

In " Conspiracy as Governance ," which Assange posted to his blog in December 2006, the leader of then-new WikiLeaks describes what he considered to be the most effective way to attack a conspiracyincluding, as he puts it, that particular form of conspiracy known as a political party.

"Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondencelet alone the computer systems which manage their [subscribers], donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail campaigns. They would immediately fall into an organisational stupor and lose to the other."

And how to induce that "organisational stupor?" Foment the fear that any correspondence could leak at any time.

"The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive 'secrecy tax') and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation."

WikiLeaks would publish its first leak the same month as that blog post, a communication from a Somalian Islamic cleric calling for political assassinations. Three years later it'd put out the Pentagon and State Department leaks provided by Chelsea Manning, and six years after that, leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton advisor John Podesta would lead to the ousting of DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and shake Hillary Clinton's campaign.

It was a crappy, annoying manifesto. And it was ahead of its time by many years.

Dave Aitel, former NSA analyst

The last decade has shown just how prescient Assange was. Take, for example, the Russian hackers who published private files from the World Anti-Doping Agency after Russia's athletes got banned from the Olympics for doping. "Now a group like WADA has to take everything they say to every person into account. They have to think, this could leak," says Dave Aitel, a former NSA staffer and founder of the security firm Immunity who focuses on cyberwar and information warfare. "The idea is, 'If we can prevent them from having secrets, they have to operate very differently.'"

That move comes straight from Assange. "It was a crappy, annoying manifesto," Aitel says. "And it was ahead of its time by many years."

A spokesperson for WikiLeaks says Assange's essay was a "thought experiment" that the organization still believes to be true. "Organizations have two choices (1) reduce their levels of abuse or dishonesty or (2) pay a heavy 'secrecy tax' in order to engage in inefficient but secretive processes," the spokesperson writes. "As organizations are usually in some form of competitive equilibrium this means that, in the face of WikiLeaks, organizations that are honest will, on average, grow, while those that are dishonest and unjust will decline."

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.

Julian Assange, writing in 2006

Of course, Assange's claim that a political party leaks in direct proportion to its dishonesty looks almost laughable after the last several months. WikiLeaks has published leaks exclusively damaging to Clinton and the Democratic Party, while publishing nothing from Donald Trump or his campaign. (Trump has, of course, faced the leaks of his 1995 tax returns and a damning video where he brags about sexual assault . But mainstream newspapers published both, and neither came from the sort of internal communications Assange wrote about. Trump himself also famously doesn't use email , as good a security measure as anyone could hope for.)

In fact, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have both said that recent WikiLeaks releases originated with Russian state-sponsored hackers seeking to influence US electoral politics. Assange's essay doesn't account for the possibility that a government might exploit or collude with a leak platform like WikiLeaks. (WikiLeaks' spokesperson denied that there has been any "official claim that any documents published by WikiLeaks have come from a state actor," somehow ignoring last week's DHS and ODNI announcement.)

The notion in Assange's essay that only corrupt conspiracies keep secrets is one that Clinton herself has argued againstironically, something we know because she said it in a speech whose partial transcript WikiLeaks leaked last Friday . Speaking to the National Multi-Housing Council in 2013, Clinton cited how President Lincoln secretly promised jobs to lame duck Congressmen of the opposing political party if they agreed to vote for the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery. "If everybody's watching all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least," she said. "So, you need both a public and a private position."

But the other point Assange makesthe "secrecy tax" that organizations pay when they try to avoid leaksrings true. Any organization that has tried to encrypt all its communications, delete them, or throttle, quarantine, and compartmentalize them in the name of secrecy knows the toll that paranoia takes.

"An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.... When we look at a conspiracy as an organic whole, we can see a system of interacting organs, a body with arteries and veins whose blood may be thickened and slowed till it falls, unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment."

Let that be a warning to the Democratic Party and any other organization with secrets to keep. If the leaks don't kill you, the fear of them just might.

See more here:
Julian Assange - WIRED

Inside Julian Assange’s office – CNET

Posted on June 16, 2017 by admin

A room of one's own

This office looks like any other, but it's a scale re-creation of the tiny London room where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been in self-imposed exile for almost five years, since June 19, 2012.