Ten years ago today, the pseudonymous programmer (or programmers) Satoshi Nakamoto logged into the forum bitcointalk.org one last time, and left the Bitcoin community for good. The day prior Nakamoto wrote a final message to the crypto community by offering a quick build and telling developers that theres more work to be done on denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

When Satoshi Nakamoto was around, Bitcoins inventor was a mysterious enigma and often led developers in the right direction from 2008 to 2010. Bitcoins creator also left a final message to the community when he/she or they added to the thread on bitcointalk.org called: Added some DoS limits, removed safe mode. The message was written over a decade ago on December 12, 2010, and Nakamoto stressed that theres more work to do.

Theres more work to do on DoS, but Im doing a quick build of what I have so far in case its needed, before venturing into more complex ideas, Nakamoto said at the time. The build for this is version 0.3.19. Added some DoS controls. As Gavin and I have said clearly before, the software is not at all resistant to DoS attack. This is one improvement, but there are still more ways to attack than I can count. Im leaving the -limitfreerelay part as a switch for now and its there if you need it. Removed safe mode alerts, safe mode alerts was a temporary measure after the 0.3.9 overflow bug, Bitcoins creator added.

Nakamoto further wrote:

We can say all we want that users can just run with -disablesafemode, but its better just not to have it for the sake of appearances. It was never intended as a long term feature. Safe mode can still be triggered by seeing a longer (greater total PoW) invalid block chain.

While bitcoin (BTC) was swapping for $0.20 per coin, Nakamoto left a great number of technical replies on the forum that month, which addressed the current Bitcoin build at the time. In fact, during the first two weeks of December 2010, Nakamoto was very active on the forum.

No one knows why the inventor left so abruptly, but Nakamoto had shown he was a bit upset the day before his very last bitcointalk.org forum message. This was because bitcoin was mentioned in a viral pcworld.com article called: Could the Wikileaks Scandal Lead to New Virtual Currency?

At the time, Wikileaks was blocked by a U.S. financial blockade and because Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa stopped servicing the nonprofit whistleblowers, Wikileaks leveraged bitcoin donations.

From Nakamotos responses to the Wikileaks subject, one can assume the crypto inventor was very annoyed by the attention the small little network was getting at the time.

It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context, Nakamoto stressed. Wikileaks has kicked the hornets nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.

Bitcoin was changing fast, and Nakamoto seemed to know that he was steadily losing some of the control and people were making up their own minds on how the cryptocurrency should be back then. The same day the Wikileaks article from pcworld.com published, Nakamoto also thanked Hal Finney in a post called: minimalistic bitcoin client on D language?

Six days prior to Nakamoto speaking about the pcworld.com editorial, he responded to someone who said bring it on, after hearing that Wikileaks was considering cryptocurrency acceptance. Again, Nakamoto seemed flustered and wasnt a big fan of onboarding the nonprofit whistleblowing organization led by Julian Assange.

No, dont bring it on, Nakamoto insisted. The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to Wikileaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage, the inventor added.

Nakamotos appeal did not sway Wikileaks and soon after, the nonprofit began accepting bitcoin donations. Bitcoins inventor has not been heard from in over a decade, but there are a number of ostensible emails and messages from the creator that many assume stem from his legitimate accounts. For instance, when Newsweek published a story about Dorian Nakamoto being Bitcoins creator, a post published to p2pfoundation.ning.com on March 7, 2014 says: I am not Dorian Nakamoto.

Moreover, ever since Nakamoto left, there have been many self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamotos and even clues and messages that have been widely debunked. There are tales from individuals like Craig Wright, a man who has claimed to be Bitcoins inventor for the last five years. Although, Wrights stories have been widely dismissed and debunked by the greater cryptocurrency community.

There was also that time when Bloomberg columnist, Matthew Leising, told people about a so-called Satoshi and published an alleged tell-all about the nakamotofamilyfoundation.org and an individual dubbed: Duality. The patent holder and Hawaiian resident named Ronald Keala Kua Maria said he is Satoshi on a variety of website domains bearing the name Bitcoin and Satoshi.

A man with intense hair like Fabio believes he is Satoshi Nakamoto, but nobody believed Jrg Molts absurd story. In mid-August 2019, a PR firm called Ivy McLemore and the Pakastani Bilal Khalid said he was Bitcoins inventor. Of course, Khalids story was considered ridiculously unfathomable as well. A Belgium native called Debo Jurgen Etienne Guido has told the crypto community he is Satoshi Nakamoto on numerous occasions.

It has also been said that the 47-year-old cartel boss Paul Le Roux could have been Satoshi as well. Still, none of these suspects and self-proclaimed individuals have ever provided a smoking gun pointing in their direction and have always failed to sway the greater crypto community.

As far as recorded history is concerned, Satoshi Nakamoto left the Bitcoin community ten years ago on December 12, 2010, with his final message about adding some DoS controls. Almost everything else from that point forward has been suspect and lacking evidence of legitimacy.

After Bitcoins inventor published the post, the creator must have been curious about the responses and may have been prepared to write one last message. Nakamoto logged into bitcointalk.org on December 13, 2010, logged off, and has not been seen on the forum since then.

What do you think about the last message Satoshi Nakamoto wrote? Let us know what you think about this story in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, p2pfoundation, bitcointalk.org, pcworld.com,

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

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Ten Years Ago Satoshi Nakamoto Logged Off - The Final Message from Bitcoin's Inventor | Featured - Bitcoin News

from the times-past dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2015, the confluence of the Paris attack, the San Bernardino attack, and the rise of ISIS created a perfect storm for the anti-encryption, pro-surveillance crowd. President Obama was hinting at asking Silicon Valley to magically block terrorists from using tech products, while Hillary Clinton was doubling down on her attacks on the tech industry and mocking free speech online in the exact same way Donald Trump was while Mitch McConnell was promising to offer up whatever bill the president wanted to ban encryption, Dianne Feinstein was bringing back a bill that would force internet providers to report on "suspicious" behavior by customers and teaming up with James Comey to mislead people about encryption, and Michael McCaul was proposing a commission to "force" encryption backdoors. Even a former FCC commissioner was getting in the game, idiotically claiming that net neutrality helps ISIS. In France, law enforcement released a "wish list" of draconian measures including banning open WiFi, which got at least a tiny bit of pushback from the Prime Minister while Spain brought in a new law allowing widespread surveillance, and Kazakhstan was breaking the internet with an all-out war on encryption.

Ten Years Ago

Today there's a lot of controversy around Visa and MasterCard blocking Pornhub, but this same week in 2010 the exact same conversation was going on around Wikileaks. The week kicked off with PayPal cutting off payments, a Swiss bank found a technicality that allowed it to freeze the site's bank account, then Mastercard blocked any payment systems that work with Wikileaks, and were soon joined by Visa (I wonder if that had anything to do with its most recent leak). But attempts to kill Wikileaks were just contributing to its spread, and the government was contradicting itself in its panicked attempts to internally block the site, or just doing really dumb things like blocking any site with Wikileaks in the title, and making extremely silly requests like the State Department asking Wikileaks to "return" the leaked cables (ironically around the same time it was hosting World Press Freedom Day).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2005, big telcos were doing their usual thing and freaking out about competition, even going so far as to punish New Orleans for offering free wifi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, or just completely contradicting themselves on fiber optic broadband, which they hate when municipalities try to offer it but which they are happy to sell themselves. Sony's DRM woes were far from over, with yet another security vulnerability found in one of their products, as well as a vulnerability in the patch the company issued to fix it. The recording industry was showing it would never be happy no matter what Kazaa did, and really going hard on its new obsession unauthorized song lyrics by attacking an app that displays them and even calling for people who host them to be thrown in jail.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyones attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

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Filed Under: history, look back

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This Week In Techdirt History: December 6th - 12th - Techdirt

Mia Armitage

The father of detained WikiLeaks founder and Australian journalist Julian Assange is touring the Northern Rivers this week.

The Assange family has had close ties to the region for decades, with Mr Assange having studied part of his primary education in the Northern Rivers hinterland.

Mr Shipton spoke last year in Mullumbimby to a sell-out crowd of around three hundred and says it feels like coming homewhen he visits the area.

The father of the famous detained WikiLeaks founder and Australian journalist has recently returned from Europe, where he has spent the year campaigning for his sons freedom.

Psychological torture of Australian journalist continues

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, defines Mr Assanges detention as psychological torture.

Mr Assange has been locked inside Londons high-security Belmarsh Prison for more than eighteen months while the United States government continues to fight for his extradition.

Mr Shipton says COVID-19 has infected the jail, including the cellmate next-door to Mr Assange, who has a high-risk vulnerability to the virus strain.

Charges against the WikiLeaks founder were revised this year, not long before hearings in the extradition case started.

The journalist is now officially accused of spying in a case described by Assange advocates as a show trial.

Legal heavyweights, federal MPs back Assange

One of the Australian lawyers advising Mr Assanges campaign is the high-profile Greg Barns SC.

Mr Barns says the Australian government has no excuse for failing to demand Mr Assanges return to Australia, especially since it recently negotiated the release of Australian political prisoner Kylie Moore Gilbert from Iran.

Twenty-four federal politicians have joined a cross-parliamentary group in support of bringing Mr Assange home and locally, the Byron Shire Council voted earlier this year to support the movement.

Mr Shipton spoke in the Nimbin Town Hall Tuesday evening alongside long-time democracy advocate Ciaron OReilly.

The pair are due to speak in a Bay FM presented forum in the Mullumbimby Civic Hall this Friday night from 7.30 pm, with former New South Wales magistrate David Heilpern joining the panel.

A smaller event is to happen Sunday afternoon from 4pm in Byron Bays Marvel Hall, with former ABC journalist Mick ORegan assisting Bay FMs Community Newsroom in facilitating questions.

Tickets are strictly limited due to public health order limits and are available via turningpointtalks.com, with any money left over after tour costs are paid to go to Bay FM community radio.

This weeks tour is supported by Echo Publications, North Coast Events and Northern Rivers NSW 4 Assange.

You can hear past interviews with Mr Shipton via Bay FMs Community Newsroom at bayfm.org.

Mia Armitage is a Bay FM member

Keeping the community together and the community voice loud and clear is what The Echo is about. More than ever we need your help to keep this voice alive and thriving in the community.

Like all businesses we are struggling to keep food on the table of all our local and hard working journalists, artists, sales, delivery and drudges who keep the news coming out to you both in the newspaper and online. If you can spare a few dollars a week or maybe more we would appreciate all the support you are able to give to keep the voice of independent, local journalism alive.

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Julian Assange's father to speak out in Byron Shire Echonetdaily - Echonetdaily

Pardons are all the rage these days but the system has been broken for years. President Trump, even if he pardons everyone in his administration, is still way behind other presidents who exercised their broad but constitutional power to pardon someone of a federal crime. Here are the facts, Trump has granted clemency/pardons to 44 people during the past four years ... compare that to his predecessors;

Barack Obama: 1,927

George W. Bush:200

Bill Clinton:459

One pardon that is not so controversial .... the lucky Thanksgiving turkey

Pardons are often controversial. In 1868,President Andrew Johnsonspardon of Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, was perhaps the most controversial ever in our countrys history. President Barack Obama gave clemency to Chelsea Manning, the leaker of information to Julian Assange, after Manning served 7 years of a 35 year sentence. Manning was in prison for releasing classified information to Wikileaks Julian Assange ... who could find himself on trial in the U.S. in the near future ... unless Trump grants him a pardon as a thank you for some emails.

What is most interesting about Trumps pardons/clemencies are that they are highly political and they are motivated by emotion to right something that he views as a personal wrong that has been done. Trumps clemency of Roger Stone and pardon of Michael Flynn were both preceded by Tweets expressing government prosecutors handling, mishandling, of the cases.

As Trump considers pardons / commutations in his remaining days in office, look for him to continue to get personal about who he pardons and the reasons behind his decisions. Look for Trump to consider one out of the Southern District of New York that involves media, a rogue FBI agent and a prosecution brought by the former SDNY US Attorney Preet Bharara.

Billy Walters, the legendary sports bettor, was convicted of insider trading charges in 2017 in a case marked by admitted government misconduct. While Walters is continuing to serve his five-year sentence on home confinement, he hasnt been quiet about calling out the wrongdoing in his case, something that usually rattles the cage of the Trump administration.

In October, Walters filed a lawsuit against Preet Bharara, the CNN senior legal analyst and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, other federal prosecutors and former FBI Supervisory Agent David Chaves for violating his constitutional rights when it was revealed that Chaves had communications with both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times NYT . Court documents in Walters case show that Chaves, believing that the insider trading case against Walters was dormant, began leaking secret grand-jury testimony to the media in an attempt to pressure Walters and others to talk.

When Walters raised questions about the illegal leaks with a federal judge, Bhararas office filed court papers calling the claimsbaseless accusations and a fishing expedition. Those papers were filed with the court two years after Bharara had first become aware of the FBI leaks. Last month, Walters also filed Bar complaints against both Bharara and Chaves in Massachusetts and New York. His attorneys also formally requested that U.S. Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray investigate and disclose whether Bharara, Chaves or any of their cohorts have received any disciplinary sanctions related to their actions.

Walters is a successful businessman with holdings in real estate, auto dealerships and golf courses. Hes a millionaire many times over, so he can afford to fight. From his actions of the past month, it certainly appears that Walters will keep raising hell until someone addresses his complaints. Regarding Trump, this is the kind of case he usually pokes his head into with the intention of embarrassing, exposing, someone in authority ... especially his adversaries, like Bharara.

Bharara, who regularly appears on CNN to defend the rule of law in the Trump era and attack the U.S. Department of Justice, has been mum about Walters since the lawsuit was filed.Bharara, interestingly, is being mentioned for a high-level appointment in a Biden administration, possibly as head of the Department of Justice or Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviewed Walters case, found the leaking of confidential grand jury testimony to the press amounted to serious misconduct and, indeed, likely criminal and in some respects more egregious than anything Walters did. However, no indictments have resulted from those leaks ... yet.

Walters has every right to be furious. Were in a time of hyper-partisanship in this country, but theres one principle everyone can agree on:The people who enforce the law should not be above the law.

Maybe Trump will weigh in on this one.

Originally posted here:

Trump And Pardons ... Heres A Case That Might Interest Him - Forbes

As a Biden administration reimagines national security, it will need to address not only conceptual challenges but also a set of practical problems, namely, that todays security issues require developing and implementing whole-of-government approaches. We dont do that very well. Even though the United States is the richest, most powerful country in history, with the best technology and some of the biggest brains, our government has difficulty getting out in front of problems and bringing to bear all elements of state power to confront national security challenges. Why? What is it about existing structures and policies that leaves us reactive rather than proactive, siloed rather than unified?

The 9/11 Commission famously noted that the government lacked sufficient imagination to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps. But most senior national security officials are busy, not stupid. Confronted with 12-hour days necessary to run large organizations, they are time-pressed and bandwidth-constrained. And as security challenges increasingly cross particular department and agency lines, the government lacks the integrative mechanisms to identify, tease out, and raise issues to an informed decision-making level.

The problem does not arise with obvious high-priority issues. The National Security Council, for instance, will continue to bring together the full range of national security departments and agencies to work on Iran policy, or North Korean nuclear weapons, or Russian election interference. Anything on the front page of the New York Times will get whole-of-government consideration. We might still get the policy wrong, but the issues are considered broadly and in an integrated manner.

Unfortunately, there is an entire class of second-tier issues that dont receive proper attention until they manifest themselves as significant failures. How do our leaders in government give themselves a fighting chance at identifying and addressing non-obvious issues that implicate multiple department and agency equities before they become screw-ups? This is not simply an academic question, but rather has been symptomatic of the most significant government-wide failures of the past two decades.

This article provides three illustrative vignettes. It then offers fixes that wouldnt involve the heavy lift associated with fundamentally remaking the executive branch but would advance good government in more modest ways: by enabling proactive, whole-of-government efforts to address significant, if not (yet) headline-grabbing, national security threats.

September 11. As the 9/11 Commission noted, al-Qaedas attacks were a shock but not a surprise. The U.S. Intelligence Community had provided senior government officials with warnings that this type of attack could be coming, but two of the hijackers, previously identified as known or suspected terrorists, were able to acquire multiple entry visas, enter the United States, remain undetected during traffic stops, and eventually get on airplanesall under their real names. Despite multiple screening opportunities, they were never discovered. It was only after the fact that we realized that we had a business process or plumbing problem when it came to watchlisting, screening, and border security: too many non-interoperable databases. An individual could be screened against any single agencys database, but there was no integrated border security system that would make use of all data readily available to different parts of the government. The results were catastrophic. Why was no person or organization responsible, before the fact, for identifying these shortcomings, much less advancing solutions? Spoiler alert: this problem is reemerging, and we are not ready.

Wikileaks and Snowden. In 2010, Wikileaks burst on the scene. For twenty years the government had been building technical architectures and pushing electrons as the way to convey information. Need to share had become the mantra after 9/11. But when Julian Assange obtained an entire State Department database from a Defense Department network and then leaked it, we who worked on sensitive information management scratched our collective heads, only belatedly realizing that we didnt understand fully where data was going or who had access to it. And when we fashioned an executive order to remedy the situation, the governance regime consisted of an interagency committee because no one office had cognizance over all relevant networks. Predictably, with no one accountable, attention waned. Follow-through was inadequate. Other pressing issues came to the fore; and four years later Snowden executed a far more serious breach. Why was no person or organization responsible before the fact for evaluating the competing legal, policy, privacy, and operational equities of sharing and protecting information? Here, too, the problem is now reemerging as we struggle with finding the right balance between protecting and sharing the most sensitive information.

COVID. As with 9/11, COVID was a shock but not a surprise. The Intelligence Community had warned of potential pandemics. The U.S. Government had developed plans and conducted interagency exercises. The Obama administration created an office in the National Security Council dedicated to addressing the pandemic threat. The Trump Administration retained part of the function, but it was subordinated to a counter-proliferation office. Executive branch leadership shortfalls made COVID far worse than it needed to be; but, irrespective of management failures, we simply werent prepared. Why? Despite years of planning, why, as one example, were we understocked in personal protective equipment? More importantly, from the earliest days of the crisis, professionals inside and outside the government recognized that our testing regime, our surveillance, and our tracing were all inadequate. Other countries had thought the issue through, but not the United States. Why hadnt the basic approach and requirements for pandemic testing, tracking, and tracing been on the agenda? And who should have been identifying and advancing the issue?

The Government Whole: Less than the Sum of its Parts

These three vignettes, these three failures, all stemmed from underlying issues that crossed department and agency boundaries and simply didnt get highlighted or addressed in a timely manner. That we have a problem is not revelatory. Concerns about interagency performance have been around for decades. In the 1990s, presidential directives sought to improve government performance in complex contingencies and interagency operations. They were followed by calls for a statutory restructuring for the interagency comparable to the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Department Reorganization Act, the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and ultimately the stillborn Project on National Security Reform (PNSR). The critiques have, over time, been remarkably similar:

The 9/11 Commission finding: It is hard to break down stovepipes where there are so many stoves that are legally and politically entitled to have cast-iron pipes of their own.

PNSRs finding: [T]he basic deficiency of the current national security system is that parochial departmental and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze interagency cooperation even as the variety, speed and complexity of emerging security issues prevent the White House from effectively controlling the system .

There is an entire class of second-tier issues that dont receive proper attention until they manifest themselves as significant failures

More recently, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates characterized U.S. whole-of-government efforts as smoke and mirrors. His critique goes so far as to conclude that the National Security Act of 1947 has outlived its usefulness. Many with senior interagency experience would probably agree. However, his proposal to resolve the lack of coordination by empowering the State Department to serve as the hub for managing nonmilitary resources to address national security problems could have massive implications. How far would that approach extend? Imagine the changes required if the State Department was to be empowered to tell other departments and agencies how to spend their appropriated funds.

Pursuing fundamental change in departmental authorities may well be the correct long-term answer. But a legislative overhaul of government operations would be daunting, involving a bureaucratic bloodbath. And like any major transition, it would be very tricky to implement. The evolution of the Defense Department, eventually culminating in the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1987, took four decades and then another 15 years for the dust to settle. And that was just to achieve whole-of-Department unity for the Defense Department itself.

We dont have the luxury of waiting decades for change. We are 20 years into the twenty-first century and we keep proving that this complicated government cant successfully navigate this complicated world. We need near-term change and, consequently, will need to play some variant of the hand weve got. Fortunately, better use of existing mechanisms could partially mitigate our bureaucratic pathologies.

Achieving Whole of Government: The Art of the Doable

Simply stated, we lack effective cross-governmental integrative mechanisms. The Trump administrations answer was to move most issues out of the White House and back to departments and agencies for them to handle on their own, or coordinate with one another as they saw fit. Superficially attractive, perhaps for issues that dont implicate multiple department or agency equities. But there simply arent many such security issues of any consequence. The better answer would be to improve on existing integrative mechanisms to anticipate and address complex security problems.

The Role and Size of the National Security Council

The NSC seems to be everyones bogeyman. The general critique of the NSC in recent years has been that it needs to shrink because it micromanages the operations of departments and agencies. Invariably, the point of reference is the size of the NSC 20 to 30 years ago. And there is no question that its size has expanded substantially; thats due, in part, to increases in the size of the White House Situation Room, the growth in mission support activities (such as legal, administration, information technology, and records management), and the amalgamation of the Homeland Security Council.

More importantly, though, expansion was driven by a vastly more complicated security environment. Instructively, the same was true of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon; it grew (substantially) because achieving jointness among the military services across the entire spectrum of military operations grew increasingly complicated. NSC substantive portfolios similarly needed to grow in hopes of improving government-wide coordination in a globalized world. Perhaps there have been legitimate micromanagement concerns. And, if so, the National Security Advisor needs to rein in such micromanagement. But my own experienceserving two Senior Director-level tours during the Obama Administrationwas different. Departments and agencies came to me to help referee issues that had important, but competing, equities. If the NSC doesnt help to resolve such problems, how exactly do they get resolved? And note the role of the NSC even when it gets involved: it does not manage operations but rather identifies and tees up issues for consideration by the Deputies and Principles of the departments and agencies themselves.

As a rule of thumb, there should be at least one Senior Directorsomeone authorized to assemble the interagency at the Assistant Secretary-levelfor every major national security issue not falling overwhelmingly within the purview of a particular department or agency. These Senior Directors must be recognized experts in their respective fields and well versed in the operations of the government, able to reach out to appropriate individuals and offices across the interagency. In my experience, this is the level at which innovative thinking occurs on the NSC, as regional and functional expertise can be brought to bear to identify otherwise non-obvious issues. Any higher, and the portfolio is so broad and the demands so great that there is little time to identify new issues. Any lower, and there is insufficient bureaucratic weight to get the governments attention and to bring it together at the necessary level of seniority.

This, for instance, is why it mattered that the NSC pandemic office stood up during the Obama Administration was, during the Trump Administration, whittled down in scope and subordinated to a counterproliferation office. If the NSC office responsible for an issue doesnt have a deeply substantive Senior Director, supported by a critical mass of Directors (and, depending on the complexity of the portfolio, this may be the level at which an argument could be made for selective cuts), there is virtually no chance of being out in front of a problem. Its a matter of bandwidth, expertise, and bureaucratic heft. That is a simple reality of Washington.

Lessons Learned from Counterterrorism and the Creation of the National Counterterrorism Center

But even assuming the NSC returns to its rootsnot a parallel planning shop, not a political extension of the White House, but rather a robust staff that works with the interagency to bring issues to the attention of seniorsa robust NSC alone wont be sufficient to tackle some security challenges. Some functional problems are so broad and so complicated that they require an interagency effort below the level of the White House to handle a problem that demands attention 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Counterterrorism provides a template for how to proceed for these kinds of issues.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), created after 9/11, was a first tentative step toward a Goldwater-Nichols reform for the interagency at least as applied to counterterrorism. This interagency joint venture, staffed primarily by individuals detailed (or loaned) from departments and agencies, had both intelligence and operational planning responsibilities. The intelligence side was intended to address a raft of problems highlighted by 9/11: inadequate information sharing and access, the governments difficulty in addressing the blurring of foreign and domestic matters, the existence of non-interoperable databases, and the inefficient utilization/redundancy of analytic resources. Mind-numbing issues, perhaps; but addressing them remains a prerequisite to achieving an effective counterterrorism strategy.[1]

In addition, the 9/11 Commission and the Congress recognized that a true whole-of-government effort against terrorism required far more than a small counterterrorism staff at the NSC. NCTCs Directorate for Strategic and Operational Planning (DSOP) was intended to supplement the work of the NSC and, moreover, to provide critical mass to evaluate progress against terrorism, identifying gaps, assessing risk, and working with the interagency to tee up issues for NSC-led consideration. Importantly, though, it would not interfere with department and agency operations. Some administrations have made better use of DSOP than others; and, given a lack of organic and broader statutory authority, the Directorate will succeed only if the White House makes clear that it values the integrative function. Unfortunately the Trump administration substantially undervalued and diminished NCTCs role in part by severely under-utilizing DSOP.

The DSOP model could provide a mechanism for the government to get beyond departmental stovepipes; but that would require a willingness to invest in the greater good consciously thinking beyond narrow departmental and agency equities. Such an approach could be applicable far beyond counterterrorism. For instance, the U.S. governments efforts against transnational organized crime (TOC) would be a perfect candidate for a TOC Center, which could improve on a currently balkanized approach by bringing together analysts and data on the intelligence side and also creating a Strategic Operational Planning effort to support and help coordinate (but not interfere with) the various operational efforts within FBI, DEA, and DHS elements.[2]

In the case of other transnational threatscyber, counterintelligence, proliferation, and morethere is a semblance of interagency fusion, but it is simply inadequate. No cookie-cutter Center approach will work for all of these diverse threats. Individual roles, missions, and overall effectiveness need to be examined for each threat as was the case with the recent Cyberspace Solarium Commission as it grappled with how to unify U.S. government efforts against varied cyber-enabled threats. We need to think broadly and grapple systematically with how the government should relate to the private sector in the face of cyber-enabled and counterterrorism threats, for example. Indeed, even more limited efforts by NCTC leadership to bring private sector representatives into the Center faltered on legal constraints. Increasingly, whole-of-government is proving to be insufficient, and we need to bring whole-of-society to bear.[3]

Conclusion

For those who remain unconvinced and still theoretically support shrinking the NSC and deemphasizing NCTC, test your hypothesis. Where exactly in todays complicated government, at a moment when all issues of any importance cross departmental boundaries, are critical second-tier interagency problems going to be systematically identified, examined, and ultimately teed up to senior leaders before they manifest themselves as government-wide failures? History teaches us that the answer is: nowhere. Thats nowhere, unless interagency entities like the NSC and NCTC provide sites for that work to get done.

No organizational construct will ever compensate for inadequate political leadership. But even the most competent political leadership wont be able to cope with the nature of todays globally integrated problems without a better integrated government. As described above, there are art of the doable fixes for the short term. But make no mistake: if they arent implemented, it will be dj vu all over again as we are forced to respond to more failures like 9/11, Wikileaks and Snowden, and COVID.

[1] While NCTC played an integral part in addressing many of these issues, the last 20 years have highlighted yet another integration problem the Intelligence Community itself remains largely a confederation of independent actors. Post-9/11 legislation and the creation of the DNI did little to fix this problem. The reimagining of national security will require the government to reimagine the Intelligence Community. That work is both essential and exceedingly difficult.

[2] When I was Acting Director of NCTC, the leadership of DHS turned to me at a senior meeting and evinced a desire for an NCTC for TOC. It was never pursued because of Center fatigue; but the sentiment was completely understandable. This NSC, like its predecessors, has attempted to cover TOC a transnational threat that is vastly more complicated than terrorismwith only one or two officers. And, with the myriad departments and agencies that operate in the TOC space, the problem set cries out for a more integrated effort.

[3] The National Cyber Forensic and Training Alliance is an interesting, innovative approach. A 501(C)3 created in 2002, this nonprofit focuses on information sharing to identify, mitigate, and neutralize cyber threats. It is staffed by government, private sector industry, and academics and is a model that should be evaluated for broader application.

See more here:

Addressing Our Whole-of-Government Deficit in National Security - Just Security

2. Act normal

If you are a high-risk source, avoid saying anything or doing anything after submitting which might promote suspicion. In particular, you should try to stick to your normal routine and behaviour.

If you are a high-risk source and the computer you prepared your submission on, or uploaded it from, could subsequently be audited in an investigation, we recommend that you format and dispose of the computer hard drive and any other storage media you used.

In particular, hard drives retain data after formatting which may be visible to a digital forensics team and flash media (USB sticks, memory cards and SSD drives) retain data even after a secure erasure. If you used flash media to store sensitive data, it is important to destroy the media.

If you do this and are a high-risk source you should make sure there are no traces of the clean-up, since such traces themselves may draw suspicion.

If a legal action is brought against you as a result of your submission, there are organisations that may help you. The Courage Foundation is an international organisation dedicated to the protection of journalistic sources. You can find more details at https://www.couragefound.org.

Link:
WikiLeaks - Search the DNC email database

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took to Twitter today to ask US President Donald Trump to pardon Wikileaks founder Julian Assange during his last days in office.

"Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange. You alone can save his life," Snowdentweeted.

Assange, who has gained international fame for founding the WikiLeaks portal, is currently in custody in London, UK.

He wasarrested in April 2019for breaking pre-trial release conditions in a 2012 UK case.

At the time, Assange absconded and requested political asylum in the Ecuador embassy in London, where he lived until his arrest in 2019 when Ecuadorian officials withdrew the WikiLeaks founder's asylum status.

US authoritiesformally charged Assangefor conspiring to leak US classified materials a month after his arrest. The indictment was updated a month later to include accusations that Assangetried to recruit famous hacker groupslike Anonymous and LulzSec to carry out hacks on his behalf and steal sensitive files to publish on WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks founder has been fighting the extradition case ever since his arrest, but a first ruling is expectedon January 4, 2021.

Assange has repeatedly threatened to commit suicide if extradited to the US, threats that his lawyers have been using as the central piece of their defense case and the reason why Snowden mentioned that a pardon from Trump would save Assange's life.

Trump previously also considered pardoning bothSnowdenandAssange.

Last week, Tulsi Gabbard, a House representative for the state of Hawaii, also asked Trump topardon both Assange and Snowden. In October, Gabbard also introduced a bill to have the2013 legal case against Edward Snowden droppedand allow the former NSA threat analyst to return to the US.

However, the pardon requests may come at a bad time for Trump, recently embroiled in abribery-for-pardon scheme.

Read more here:
Edward Snowden asks Trump to pardon Wikileaks founder Julian Assange - ZDNet

A man holds a sign calling for the release of Julian Assange as people march and rally on May 1, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.

Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

When Joe Biden becomes president of the United States on January 20, a historic opportunity awaits him to demonstrate Americas commitment to the First Amendment. He can, in a stroke, reverse four years of White House persecution of journalism by withdrawing the application to extradite Julian Assange from Britain to the U.S. This would be in line with the departures from Trump policies Biden is proposing on health care, environmental protection, and tax fairness. Assanges liberty represents the liberty of all journalists and publishers whose job is to expose government and corporate criminality without fear of prosecution. We need and deserve to be protected against government control of the press.

By removing the 1917 Espionage Act charges against Assange, Biden would be adhering to the precedent established by the administration in which he served for eight years as vice president. President Barack Obamas Department of Justice investigated Assange and WikiLeaks for three years until 2013 before deciding, in the words of University of Maryland journalism professor Mark Feldstein, to follow established precedent and not bring charges against Assange or any of the newspapers that published the documents. Equal application of the law would have required the DOJ to prosecute media outlets, including the New York Times, that had as large a hand in publicizing war crimes as did Assange himself. If prosecutors put all the editors, publishers, and scholars who disseminated WikiLeaks materials in the dock, there would not be a courtroom anywhere in America big enough to hold the trial. Obama decided against it, knowing it would represent an unprecedented assault on freedoms Americans hold dear.

President Barack Obamas January 2017 decision to commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the source for WikiLeakss revelation that American forces in Iraq were involved in murder and torture, is another indication that the Trump Justice Departments prosecution of Assange was an aberration and not an irreversible policy to threaten journalists and whistleblowers everywhere.

Although the Obama administration prosecuted more journalists under the Espionage Act than all its predecessors combined, it pulled its punches in cases that would not withstand scrutiny. The DOJ investigated and wiretapped Fox News journalist James Rosen for publishing information on North Korean nuclear policy in 2013 from State Department security adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, but it avoided a contentious and high-profile trial by declining to prosecute him. Kim pleaded guilty and received a 13-year sentence.

Biden has signaled his intention to return the U.S. to international cooperation, revoking Trumps withdrawal from the World Health Organization, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to control Irans nuclear program. Americas return to the community of law-abiding nations would be enhanced further by adhering to judgements from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights calling for Assanges immediate release. Exonerating Assange would also underscore American dedication to Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among whose drafters was American former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. (Italics mine.) Assange and WikiLeaks received and imparted information vital to the public interest, as hundreds of media outlets, legal experts, and human rights advocates have attested.

It will take courage for Biden to retract the allegation he made on Meet the Press in 2010: I would argue it [WikiLeaks] is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers. Yet voters chose him over Donald Trump this month in the hope that he would show courage. Biden also said in 2010 that the WikiLeaks revelations had endangered the lives of intelligence sources. When WikiLeaks released the Iraq War logs and video of an American helicopter crew gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, Defense Secretary Robert Gates conceded, Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest. The source who provided the Pentagon Papers on Americas war in Vietnam to the New York Times and Washington Post, Daniel Ellsberg, recently stated that government officials have not been able to identify a single person at risk of death, incarceration or physical harm.

When the Nixon administration prosecuted Ellsberg for espionage in 1973, Judge William Byrne dismissed the case with prejudice against the government for infringing Ellsbergs right to confidential communication with his psychiatrist. The Trump administration has illegally obtained Assanges privileged discussions with his doctors and lawyers, tainting its case as much as Nixons against Ellsberg. Whether Trump-appointed justices will defend the law as scrupulously as Byrne need not be put to the test.

If extradited, Assange risks a 175-year sentence in the Alcatraz of the Rockies, otherwise known as the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado. Its harsh regime would see him in permanent solitary confinement in a concrete box cell with a window four inches wide, with six bed checks a day and one hour of exercise in an outdoor cage. His fellow inmates would be Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon bomberDzhokhar Tsarnaev, FBI-agent-turned-Russian-spy Robert Hanssen, Oklahoma City co-bomber Terry Nichols, and Mexican drug baron Joaqun El Chapo Guzmn Loera.

Trump may contend that journalists and publishers are no different from terrorists, serial killers, and narcotics traffickers. Biden is free to take another view. Does he want to begin his term of office carrying the burden of that Trump legacy? Assange stands in the tradition of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward during Watergate, Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers, Seymour Hersh over the My Lai massacre, Sydney Schanberg on Americas massive bombardment of Cambodia, plus hundreds of others who, vilified at the time, have been vindicated by the judgment of history.

Does Biden want to begin his term of office carrying the burden of that Trump legacy?

Those who insist Assange must pay for his actions can be satisfied that he has already suffered severe punishment. He has spent the past 10 years under confinement: first under house arrest, then as a political refugee in Ecuadors embassy in London, and for the past year and a half in Belmarsh, a high-security prison outside of London, under conditions that U.N. Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer called psychological torture. Assanges health has deteriorated to the point that 117 physicians wrote to British medical journal The Lancet lastFebruary that he is suffering psychological torture and medical neglect. Expert medical witnesses who have examined Assange at Belmarsh testified at his extradition hearing in September that, if extradition proceeds, his suicide is inevitable.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and other defenders of free expression have repeatedly called for Assanges immediate release. Ellsberg issued a warning to journalists and publishers about Assange: If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last.

Bidens choice on January 20 is between the opposite courses taken by his two immediate predecessors, Obama and Trump. His conscience should tell him which to follow.

Correction: December 2, 2020

A previous version of this article referred to President Barack Obamas 2017 commutation of Chelsea Mannings sentence as a pardon, and stated that Julian Assange risks a 170-year sentence if extradited to the U.S. and convicted. In fact, he risks a 175-year sentence.

Read more:

Biden's Choice on Julian Assange and the First Amendment - The Intercept

There is this idea about language that they used to torture us students with in the West.

All meaning, the air-wank explanation went, is a case of absence. We only know what a word signifies by knowing that it does not signify something else.

Cat is only cat, they would say while I calculated how many schooners the change in my pocket would buy at the Union bar, because it is not bat. So, you see, said Mrs Derrida, what were really saying is nothing at all.

When I had asked for a beer, which was only a beer because it was not a deer or a bear or an onion, I would sometimes bother to think about this stuff. Frankly, I did not, and do not, believe that meaning is something produced by friction between the clouds.

Meaning rises first from the ground beneath our feet; only those who can afford to live in high places believe that it does not. But I did think that this language theory could help me search for certain things that just seemed missing a case that I made to my tutor when my essay on semiotics went, mysteriously, undelivered.

I failed this course, I think. But every so often, the bits I had remembered from 20th century nonsense came back. There were times where you could only declare what a thing was by describing it in the terms of what it wasnt. When the phrase un-Australian made it into popular use, I remembered those seminars a lot.

It was, I think, around the time of the late 1990s that un-Australian was first non-mockingly said. This was a time when mean conditions hit here, and the feet beneath the ground of many Australians forced them up to produce foul words in angry clouds. Un-Australian has always been, to my ears at least, a joke of solidarity; blokes would say it to other blokes on my dads building site to gently chide them for working at too efficient a pace. To be un-Australian meant to please the boss.

Then, suddenly, it meant obedience to an unspoken ideal.

Australia, never clearly defined as a thing, became known within its borders for what it was not. You can say this of any place, I guess. It is only sketched in the terms of the things that surround it. But, this is so particularly true of our nation-state, which is a place founded so very recently on such a fragile, thieving lie.

No one knows what a right-wing politician means when they say un-Australian in the present, least of all the politician saying it. It is not even a negation, but blanker than that. It reduces the meaning of Australian-ness down to whatever might, or might not, live inside the unconscious borders of the speaker at that particular time. This is so postmodern, I thought, the first time I heard one of the crazies say it, and I could almost smell the stale Union beer.

I had heard Julian Assange, a man who holds an Australian passport, called un-Australian by these crazies. They have conveniently revised their opinion in recent times you know, now that WikiLeaks is perceived, wrongly and by nearly everyone, as a servant of nostalgic right-wing order.

Now, some of the crazies, so persistent in describing their nation by its lack, think of him and of WikiLeaks as very Australian or Strayan, to be phonetically faithful, for the un-Australian reader. It was in 2016 that one of our most despicable politicians made the case for this Australians return.

While local crazies have embraced the thing they once excluded, the reverse is true for our nations liberals. Such people are, of course, too finely educated to ever take the refuge of patriotism. The new liberal, like the movement of trade she admires, is global.

Assange and WikiLeaks were seen as global at the time of their major public debut. Assange was a mysterious international good guy conceived in the liberal political unconscious as halfway between, I dont know, a figure in a le Carr novel and one of those twits from Silicon Valley. A real disruptor, our Julian. But caring, you know. Like a younger, much poorer, more promiscuous Bill Gates.

To be honest, I wasnt paying much attention to WikiLeaks at the time. I figured that others were doing that for me when, in 2010, a guy that helped me reverse a robot checkout mistake at the Elsternwick Coles joked, WikiLeaks has hacked your chicken thighs.

WikiLeaks seemed to be doing good work in what I now knew was a terrible era, but they didnt need my help. Besides, I always felt uneasy with the postmodern local liberals who were always mystifying the mans global posture. Global, as far as I was concerned, had come to conceal a dysphoria made otherwise plain in a cruel utterance like un-Australian.

The years passed and the robots got smarter. The liberals, though, got dumber when their own systems started to fail. The crazies sniffed a glitch or a feature as they say in Silicon Valley and they began to wrest control.

What this meant in the Australian perception of Assange was interesting, even if it was frustrating. The liberals, who had once offered him their most uncritical support, no longer thought of their countryman as global, a great ambassador, as they had it, for their international trade ideals.

They began to find a way to signify him that would not misrepresent their own noble goals. They certainly couldnt call him un-Australian, even if they no longer thought of him as a younger, global Gates. They couldnt say he was Australian either, because that speech act might ease his passage home.

They came up with a good compromise: They began to call him Russian.

I am just the right age to find this very funny. I am just the right age to find this un-fking-believable. When I was at school, in that po-mo dust kicked up by the fall of the Berlin Wall, we joked, much in the way the guys on my dads building site had, that you should Just go and live in Russia. This was a reference to the newly ended Soviet experiment, which we, being affectionately post-communist postmodernists, thought hilarious. If someone didnt hand their essay in on time, they were charged with the defunct idea of being Russian.

Look, I know we thought it was funny. You probably had to be there. Remember, this was the time of maximum Foucault, and our gags were all about diffuse power and, ergo, very bad.

So, I, being around the same age as Assange, have the sense of Russia as something that once was a true threat to liberal order, and now as a place with a GDP roughly equivalent to that of Italy.

Sensitive reader, this doesnt mean I disrespect the place in recent times, I find myself drawn in unnatural affection to the idea of it. It just means that I see it, as many realist foreign policy thinkers see it, as a nation that we dont really have to worry about; well, not until it starts having cosy conversations with Iran and China.

This dead menace. This grey state. This failed rejoinder to all of our Western declarations is the thing to which they now compare Assange. Look, I dont know the guy and I know no WikiLeaks business beyond the use of the share button, I have never given it a moment of my labour.

Maybe these liberals have intuited something that will turn out to be true, however much I doubt this, and we will find that the slightly Slavic-looking man has a Cold War microfilm lodged between his arse cheeks.

I dont know, I dont care. The only thing I do care to know from WikiLeaks is how to use its search button better. Man, those Podesta emails. It will take me another six months to read them all, and another few years to make journalistic sense of the truths, both cynical and naive, the language of the powerful has come to conceal.

This is the code I want to crack. This is the secret, before me in plain sight. When I decipher the soft language shared between the Citigroup c-suite and the White House, between Goldman Sachs and a presidential nominee, Ill let you know. I might even let Mrs Derrida know. But for the minute, I am searching in the absences.

I wish I could do this in some sort of peace. Every so often, I publish an article based on my hours in the inbox of John Podesta, preparing for the time Ill write that one big thing. I offer a look at a particular turn of phrase, a particularly polite way a company director has recommended cabinet appointments with clear connections to Wall Street by claiming that these are diverse. It is difficult to read through the mystification, and I really wish Id paid more attention in school. But I really wish my liberal peers would shut the f up with their nonsense that Julian Assange is Russian and that I, therefore, am his useful Russian idiot. Too stupid, too Slavic, to know shes being fooled.

I do not always know, Ill own, when I am being fooled. It takes time for mystification to fall away. I know that I have written, way back when, in mild support not so much of President Obamas policies, but for the sheer idea of what he promised. It would be a lie to tell you that I wont get fooled again. But, it is a lie to tell those of us, looking for absence in the search bar, that what we are doing is foolish.

To keep looking through the last documents of an era is not, I sense, especially foolish. Its possibly even a little bit wise. I do not expect this reading to reveal that One Weird Trick that will explain power, end liberalism or restore the Soviet experiment to a more viable stage. What WikiLeaks gives us is not an easy hack. What WikiLeaks gives us is something like the hazy feeling I had back in the 1990s. That language and its clouded meaning was important, sure, but that its interaction with the ground was the real story.

Because I did go to school at a time when people said ridiculous postmodern things, I can never believe that there is a story that is entirely real. There is no post-truth. There is no fake news. These rely on an imaginary precondition of pure truth and fact and news; a liberal nostalgia as noxious as that held by the hard right and its invented golden age.

This is not the post-fact age more than any other. There are still facts, but many new ways to conceal them. How did they disguise that fact with the language? What language can we use to describe the fact of this new disguise?

What WikiLeaks gives us is the chance to find those means of concealment. What WikiLeaks gives us is the same frustrating answer history always has: Look for the truth and dare yourself to describe it.

If the truth turns out to be that Assange is Russian, that hes utterly un-Australian or as Australian as snake bite and savoury pies, I dont care. Its an easy truth to tell, an easy one to refute, and, either way, tells us little, if nothing, about the nature of power.

Mrs Derrida would probably be quite pleased to see me suffer at WikiLeaks.org, challenging me at every turn with its interplay of truth and meaning. Me, defying her, reading between the lines for the interweaving of the cloud of ideas with the ground. Her reminding me that what I am looking for are things that are not there, as much as I am looking for things that are present. Me, asking the 1990s, that orgy of liberalism, to please get out of my head.

We only know what WikiLeaks means by knowing what it is not, she tells me. I agree. What it is not is in any way knowable. What it is not is a Russian nested doll set with a single truth at its centre. What it will not be defined by, at any point, are its enemies or its friends.

And it is not un-Australian, in the old sense of that absurd and wonderful compliment. WikiLeaks will rarely please the boss.

Helen Razer is a broadcaster and writer whose work also appears in The Saturday Paper, The Age, SBS online, and The Big Issue.

This is an edited extract fromA Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks exposs,edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau, available December 1 fromMonash University Publishing.

Continued here:

Revealed by the Wikileaks expose: The fragile, thieving 'un-Australian' lie - The New Daily

Justice Brereton has just handed down his report into war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan by Australias SAS soldiers. Crimes that may not have seen the light of day without the work of journalists.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the report is disturbing and distressing; that the war crime allegations must be dealt with by the justice system; that any prosecutions must adhere to the presumption of innocence.

Morrison fails to recognise the role of journalists in revealing the killings, and instead warns against trial by media. And the journalist who first revealed evidence of war crimes in Afghanistan, Julian Assange, should, according to Morrison, be left to face the music. Assange is fighting what is seen as a largely political US extradition request that could see him jailed for 175 years yet Australia has done little to help.

A country that will not fight for its citizens when facing a hugely questionable prosecution erodes its own sovereign rights.

Through Assange and Wikileaks we have learnt much about the relationship between the US and Australia and its security agreement, the ANZUS treaty. But it is the Australian governments treatment of Assange that reveals more than a library of leaked documents could ever do about how power is exercised in this relationship.

The lies were obvious from the beginning. In 2010, when Assange, working with the Guardian newspaper in the UK, began publishing reports from the Cablegate cache of leaked documents, the Iraq War Logs, and the Afghan War Diary. The US government immediately complained that the revelations put lives at risk.

But that was all part of a ploy:

A congressional official said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.

In truth, internal US government reviews had determined that the leaks had caused only limited damage to US interests abroad.

Yet, in lock-step with the US administration, the then Australian prime minister Julia Gillard echoed the White Houses public statements by declaring that Assange had broken the law.

I absolutely condemn the placement of this information on the WikiLeaks website. It is a grossly irresponsible thing to do and an illegal thing to do.

In fact it was nothing of the sort. A Federal Police investigation found that Assange had broken no laws. Yet Gillard did not retract her allegation. The Government went further, giving several organisations, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), greater powers and widened the area of activities deemed illegal to include strategic and diplomatic relations.

The then attorney-general, Senator Robert McClelland, weighed in saying that Australian authorities would do all they could to help the US investigation into WikiLeaks. Without revealing what advice he was basing his decision on, McClelland even threatened to revoke Assanges Australian passport.

The only government voice providing any support was foreign minister Kevin Rudd, who had taken Gillard and McClelland to task when they had attacked Assanges activities. Rudd declared the need to recognise the principle that Assange was innocent before proven guilty. He also told the attorney-general he did not have the power to revoke Assanges passport.

It is possible Gillard thought being pro-American would play well with the public. It didnt. Assanges biggest support base is in Australia, where opinion polls said that 60% of the people agreed with the work he had done. More surprising was the support he received from news outlets.

In an unprecedented move, representatives from all the major outlets bar The Australiansigned a letter criticising Gillard:

To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press.

When GetUp! launched a campaign, thousands filled the streets in Sydney and Melbourne. Assange told the crowd by video: It is interesting how some politicians single out my staff and myself for attack while saying nothing about the slaughter of thousands by the US military or other dictatorships. It is cowardly to bully a small media organisation, but that is what is happening.

Clearly the government thought it was a price worth paying for what it believed was its special relationship with Washington. In the final days of a wet Australian spring in 2011, then US president Barack Obama landed in Canberra to address the Australian Parliament.

It was the 60th anniversary of the founding document of the ANZUS treaty. Obamas presence produced what were described as scenes of nauseating adoration from politicians of both the major parties. When he addressed parliament, Obama spoke eloquently of the rule of law, transparent institutions and equal administration of justice.

However, it was becoming increasingly obvious that when it came to Assange the US and Australian governments were playing by other rules. Assange was receiving only minimum consular support from the Australian High Commission in London.

His political support came almost exclusively from the Greens. Scott Ludlam told the Senate that Assange was recognised as a journalist by the High Court in the UK. WikiLeaks was a publisher, and Assange had broken no law, just as the people who put his material on the front page of The Age and the New York Times have broken no law.

In the US public calls were made for Assanges execution as an enemy combatant. Joe Biden called him a high-tech terrorist. In any other case involving an Australian citizen, its hard to believe there wouldnt have been an outcry from Australias leaders. Drug runners had received more sympathetic treatment. There was little defence of Assange and he was fast becoming a man without a country.

Gillards role has often been reported through the prism of Australias grovelling support of America, fearful of confronting its powerful ally.

But she also had a personal issue with Assange, and a score to settle: the release of the Cablegate documents, which later so embarrassed her and unmasked the ALP plotters who had planned the coup against then prime minister Rudd.

One leaked US cable reported:

Don Farrell, the right-wing union powerbroker from South Australia, told us Gillard is campaigning for the leadership and at this point is the front-runner to succeed Rudd.

The US Embassy in Canberra also reported that the PMs brother Greg [Rudd] told us that Rudd wants to ensure that there are viable alternatives to Gillard within the Labor Party to forestall a challenge. The cable added that protected source Senator Mark Arbib (another Labor powerbroker) once told us a similar story.

Even though the cables were published well after Gillard made her attack on Assange, the US had provided well in advance full knowledge of the contents, because the US very early on had determined which cables Chelsea Manning had leaked.

Yet it was more than Gillard and McClellands behaviour that highlighted the federal governments hostile attitude towards Assange and WikiLeaks.

The government repeatedly delayed responding to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, and the then foreign minister Bob Carr skirted the question when asked whether Assange was a journalist, undercutting his primary defence.

Carr also referred to the amorality of WikiLeaks revelations but did not elaborate. It was a strange comment from a foreign minister whose job it is to represent Australian citizens in trouble overseas, although he has since spoken out against Assanges extradition to the US.

Australia now a surveillance state with journalists as Persons of Interest under ASIO Act

The limited information released under the FoI Act revealed that instead of seeking assurances that Assange would be treated fairly if he were ever extradited to the US, the Australian Embassy in Washington was more focused on the possible political fallout in Canberra. The embassy was in fact seeking advance warning, a heads up, of when any action against Assange or WikiLeaks may take place.

For Assange, the final evidence that he had been abandoned came when Nicola Roxon, McClellands replacement as attorney general, wrote to Assanges lawyers just before he sought asylum in Londons Ecuadorean Embassy, saying:

Australia would not expect to be a party to any extradition discussions that may take place between the United States and the United Kingdom or the United States and Sweden, as extradition is a matter of bilateral law enforcement co-operation.

In other words, the Australian government had abrogated its responsibility to defend one of its citizens.

What is more difficult to understand is the indifference to Assanges plight often shown by other journalists, including from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and the ABC, who are just as vulnerable to extradition to the US for what they have published from the WikiLeaks documents. Many remain silent or give only half-hearted support.

Others have argued a line straight out of the US State Department that Assange is not a journalist at all, thus stripping him of his best defence and putting other journalists at risk.

It would be comforting to think they are simply misguided, but the military intelligence establishment has always found willing recruits in the media, and now is almost certainly no different.

This edited extract is reproduced from A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks Exposs, edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau, Monash University Publishing, December 2020.

Read more from the original source:

Sovereignty eroded: Wiki cables show both Labor and Coalition culpable in Assange persecution - Michael West News