Imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has been awarded Consortium News 2020 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award for courage in the face of an unprecedented attack on press freedom.

By Joe Lauria Special to Consortium News

Julian Assange, the imprisoned and maligned publisher of WikiLeaks, has been awarded the 2020 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award by the board of the Consortium for Independent Journalism, publishers of Consortium News.

Assange is incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Londonawaiting a hearing later this month on an extradition request by the United States. He has been charged 0n 17 counts under the U.S. Espionage Act of possessing and publishing classified material that revealed prima facie evidence of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For practicing the highest order of journalismrevealing crimes of the stateAssange faces 175 years in a U.S. prisona life sentence for the 48-year old Australian.

Assange, whose life has been endangered in harsh prison conditions, has become an international symbol of the threat to press freedom. He is the first journalist to be charged under the Espionage Act for possession and dissemination of state secrets.

The late Robert Parry.

Robert Parry, the late founder and editor of Consortium News, was a staunch defender of Assanges rights. In 2010, he wrote: Though American journalists may understandably want to find some protective cover by pretending that Julian Assange is not like us, the reality is whether we like it or not we are all Julian Assange.

The award is named after journalist Gary Webb whose life was cut short after the mainstream press vilified him for accurate reports about a CIA operation that flooded urban areas of the U.S. with cocaine from Nicaragua.

Journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, a member of the Consortium News board, said: Having been close to Julian Assange through much of his struggle against corrupt power, I had no hesitation in voting for him for the Gary Webb prize. While Gary was a tragedy at the end, Julian must be a triumph.

A History of Scoops

Assange launched WikiLeaks in Dec. 2006. Among its first revelations were files alleging corruption by former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi; the U.S. Army manual for soldiers at Guantanamo Bay and registers of U.S. military equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In January 2008, WikiLeaks released United Nations Confidential Reports that expose matters from allegations of hundreds of European peace-keepers sexually abusing refugee girls to generals in Peru using Swiss bank accounts to engage in multi-million dollar frauds against the UN.

Chelsea Maning in 2017. (Vimeo)

WikiLeaks first major release came on April 5, 2010 with the publication of the Collateral Murder video,providing evidence of a U.S. war crime in Iraq. It was leaked by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was arrested and charged on May 26, 2010 under the Espionage Act.

With Manning in jail, WikiLeaks published more of her leaked material. The Afghan War Diaries were released on July 25, 2010, which revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict. Assange partnered with The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian in publishing the Afghan leaks.

On Nov. 28, 2010, the first of Mannings U.S. Diplomatic Cables were released. They helped spark a revolt in Tunisia that spread into the so-called Arab Spring, revealed Saudi intentions towards Iran and exposed spying on the UN secretary general and other diplomats.

Over the next few years WikiLeaks revealed embarrassing documents on Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the Sony Corporation, and secret details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

WikiLeaks in 2011 pioneered an anonymous online drop box for whistleblowers to deposit documents without their identities being known, even to WikiLeaks. The organization carefully authenticates every document it receives and has a perfect record of accuracy. Major news organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and CNN have copied WikiLeaks in creating their own anonymous drop boxes.

In 2016, WikiLeaks published leaked emails from the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that exposed DNC efforts to derail the primary candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Hillary Clintons role in the destruction of Libya and a pay-to-play scheme at the Clinton Foundation.

During the Trump administration, WikiLeaks published in March 2017 secret CIA documents that exposed the entire hacking capacity of the CIA, which the agency had lost control of. WikiLeaks avoided the distribution of armed cyberweapons. But the documents it published revealed how the agency can remotely gain control of a citizens television set and showed that the CIA can plant doctored fingerprints into a cyber-attack to falsely blame an adversary. The Vault 7 release led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to label WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service.

Over the past decade, WikiLeaks publications have spurred countless news reports and academic papers around the world, and have been used in numerous court cases promoting human rights.

Assanges Arrest

A month after the Afghan War Diaries were published two women went to the police in Sweden to ask if Assange could be tested for sexually transmitted disease after having unprotected relations with both of them. One of the women later texted that she had been railroaded by police into making a formal complaint about rape and refused to sign her statement. The next day Swedens chief prosecutor dismissed the allegations. She said: I dont think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.

Nils Melzer (UN Photo)

After Swedish authorities told him he was free to go, Assange returned to London when an extradition request was issued by a prosecutor, not a judge, and he was arrested in December 2010. This came after Swedish police had altered and signed the statement of one of the women who had refused to sign, in a way that permitted the case to be re-opened, according to a UN special rapporteurs investigation. Nils Melzer, the rapporteur on torture, said:

I speak fluent Swedish and was thus able to read all of the original documents. I could hardly believe my eyes: According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only that: The womans testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages.

While still in the police station, she wrote a text message to a friend saying that she didnt want to incriminate Assange, that she just wanted him to take an HIV test, but the police were apparently interested in getting their hands on him. The police wrote down her statement and immediately informed public prosecutors. two hours later, a headline appeared on the front page of Expressen, a Swedish tabloid, saying that Julian Assange was suspected of having committed two rapes.

After he exhausted his appeals in British courts to fight extradition to Sweden, Assange sought and received political asylum by the government of Ecuador in its London embassy on June 19, 2012. Assange and his lawyers said at the time they feared onward extradition from Sweden to the U.S. to face charges for publishing classified material.

The former foreign minister of Ecuador on why his country gave Assange asylum:

Assange continued running WikiLeaks from inside the embassy. Despite needing medical care, British authorities said he would be arrested if he left the embassy and re-entered British territory. In February 2016 a UN panel ruled that Assange was a being arbitrarily detained in the embassy.

A change in government in Ecuador in May 2017 led to the eventual revocation of Assanges asylum without due process and in likely violation of Ecuadorian national law and the 1954 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees. The convention stipulates that no asylee can be expelled to a territory where his life or freedom would be threatened.

Assange was eventually dragged out of the embassy by British police on April 11, 2019. His fears of extradition to the U.S. were realized when the U.S. indicted him on 17 charges under the Espionage Act and one charge of computer intrusion. Imprisoned in the high security Belmarsh Prison with terrorists and other violent criminals, Assange has had restricted access to visitors, including with his lawyers. Nils Melzer, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, visited Assange in his cell and reported that he was suffering from psychological torture.

Assange faces an extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court that begins the week of Feb. 24 and will continue in May. (Consortium News will be in London to provide extensive coverage in print and video.)

In a normal case, Assanges indictment would be thrown out after it was revealed that the prosecuting government was spying on Assanges privileged conversations with his attorneys in the Ecuador Embassy.

Police expelling Assange from embassy. (YouTube)

Both U.S. indictments against Assange spell out the exact work of investigative reporting. The indictment on intrusion alleges that Assange helped Manning gain access to a government computer, which the indictment acknowledges Manning had security clearances to legally access.

What the indictment alleges is that Assange egged Manning on for more information and tried to help her, unsuccessfully, to sign in under an administrative user name to help her do what every reporter must do, hide their sources identity. The second indictment likewise accused Assange of practicing journalism by encouraging his source to provide classified documents.

In his 2010 article Parry said in his investigative reporting he did the exact things Assange had done, even encouraging his sources to commit a crime if it could prevent a larger crime from occurring. He wrote:

The process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official to break the law either by turning over classified documents or at least by talking about the secret information. There is almost always some level of conspiracy between reporter and source. In most cases, I played some role either large or small in locating the classified information or convincing some government official to divulge some secrets. More often than not, I was the instigator of these conspiracies.

At the time Parry wrote his article, the Obama administration had empaneled a grand jury to consider charging Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing leaked secrets, which Parry defended as the core work of investigative journalism. Ultimately, then Attorney General Eric Holder decided against indictment, because of what the administration called its New York Times problem.

That was an acknowledgement that Assange was a journalist and that prosecuting him for doing what the Times and other big media also do would open them up to prosecution as well. The First Amendment prevailed until the Trump administration brushed aside the very same problem and charged Assange with espionage.

The 1917 Espionage Act, derived from the 1889 British Official Secrets Act, outlaws any unauthorized possession and/or dissemination of classified information. Journalists have for decades possessed and published state secrets without consequence. This is what makes Assanges case an unprecedented assault on freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Recognition of Threat to the Press

Rachel Maddow.

At the time of his arrest, even long time critics of Assange acknowledged the threat to press freedom it posed. In an editorial, The New York Times wrote:

The new indictment is a marked escalation in the effort to prosecute Mr. Assange, one that could have a chilling effect on American journalism as it has been practiced for generations. It is aimed straight at the heart of the First Amendment.

The new charges focus on receiving and publishing classified material from a government source. That is something journalists do all the time. This is what the First Amendment is designed to protect: the ability of publishers to provide the public with the truth.

The Times praised Assanges work:

Mr. Assange shared much of the material at issue with The New York Times and other news organizations. The resulting stories demonstrated why the protections afforded the press have served the American public so well; they shed important light on the American war effort in Iraq, revealing how the United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict.

The New Yorkers Masha Gessen, wrote: The use of the Espionage Act to prosecute Assange is an attack on the First Amendment. It stands to reason that an Administration that considers the press an enemy of the people would launch this attack. In attacking the media, it is attacking the public.

MSNBCs Rachel Maddow, the Democratic Party booster, who probably had more influence than any commentator in drumming up the Russiagate conspiracy theory and Assanges alleged role in it, launched into an astounding defense of the imprisoned publisher. On her program she said:

The Justice Department today, the Trump administration today, just put every journalistic institution in this country on Julian Assanges side of the ledger. On his side of the fight. Which, I know, is unimaginable. But that is because the government is now trying to assert this brand new right to criminally prosecute people for publishing secret stuff, and newspapers and magazines and investigative journalists and all sorts of different entities publish secret stuff all the time. That is the bread and butter of what we do.

Victim of Disinformation Campaign

Assange has been the victim of an effective, mass disinformation campaign, planned as long ago as March 8, 2008 when a secret, 32-page document from the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessment branch of the Pentagon described in detail the importance of destroying the feeling of trust that is WikiLeaks center of gravity.

The document said: This would be achieved with threats of exposure and criminal prosecution and an unrelenting assault on reputation.

It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech, Pilger said in 2018 (video above).

As a result, a number of falsehoods about Assanges story are deeply entrenched in the media and the public and are resistant to correction with facts.

1. Assange is not a journalist.

Most establishment journalists do not consider Assange to be one of them. First, he is completely a product of the Internet Age, a medium as revolutionary as the printing press, radio and television. His journalism is of a different type than traditional reporting.

Second, WikiLeaks publishes entire documents, rather than reporting extensively on them. In the past newspapers, such as The New York Times, published several pages in print editions of major documents, such as the top secret Pentagon Papers and today provide whole documents online.

Accepting the Freedom of Expression award, 2008 (Index on Censorship)

Assange is not simply a clerk receiving documents and posting them online without studying any of them. He has engaged in their authentication and has a profound understanding of their contents and newsworthiness. Assange has given countless interviews and speeches, authored three books, edited and co-written two others, and written dozens of articles. Throughout he has displayed a deep understanding of geopolitics and the internal affairs of numerous nations.

Most importantly, Assange has had an adversarial relationship with power, something that is waning in establishment media. Because of that increasingly cozy relationship between journalism and power Assange has scooped major media, perhaps engendering a degree of professional jealousy.

His role as a journalist was affirmed by the numerous awards he has won, including The Economists New Media Award (2008); Amnesty Internationals UK Media Award (2009); the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award (2010); the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011, which Parry won in 2017); the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism (2011, Australias Pulitzer Prize), the Voltaire Award for Free Speech (2011), the International Piero Passetti Journalism Prize of the National Union of Italian Journalists (2011), the Jose Couso Press Freedom Award (2011); the Yoko Ono LennonCourage Award for the Arts (2013) and the Galizia Prize for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information (2019).

In 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites that could totally change the news. No less of an authority than the founder of this site, one of Americas best investigative reporters, said, Journalists are all Julian Assange. And Parry gave this warning to establishment journalists: By shunning WikiLeaks as some deviant journalistic hybrid, mainstream U.S. news outlets may breathe easier now but may find themselves caught up in a new legal precedent that could be applied to them later.

Google search results for Assange.

2. Assange was charged with rape. This might be the most frequent falsehood uttered about Assange, even mistakenly by Assange supporters. No rape or any other charges were ever filed by Swedish authorities. The case was dropped three times, but the rape smear persists. Stefania Maurizi, a reporter for La Repubblica in Italy, obtained documents that showed British authorities pressured the Swedish chief prosecutor not to come to London to interview him in the embassy.

In a report on the German ZDF TV network last week documents were produced by Melzer showing the rape allegations were invented by Swedish police. Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed? he recently told the Swiss newspaper Republik. Just imagine being accused of rape for nine-and-a-half years by an entire state apparatus and by the media without ever being given the chance to defend yourself because no charges had ever been filed.

Many persist in believing that Assange is a coward who fled to the Ecuadorian embassy to escape the rape charges when he voluntarily went to the police station in Sweden. His fear was being extradited to the U.S. via Sweden.

3. Assange was charged with endangering U.S. informants.

Much was made in the Espionage Act indictment of Assange allegedly revealing the names of U.S. informants and endangering their lives. At the top of the indictment are all the U.S. statutes prosecutors say Assange violated. Nowhere among them is revealing the identity of informants. Thats because, though it may be unethical, there is no law against it.

In fact, as Australian mainstream journalist Mark Davis revealed in a talk webcast by CN Live! it was Assange and not his mainstream media partners who worked through the night to redact the names of many informants before the Afghan War Diaries were released in July, 2010.

Davis, who was in the bunker at The Guardian in London working on the documents, said it was only when two Guardian journalists in a book published the secret password to the entire trove of documents, endangering informants named in them, that Assange released the full archive to alert those in danger. The Guardian denies this saying WikiLeaks told them the password it used in its book would expire within hours. In any event, there is no evidence that any informant named has been harmed.

4. Assange hacked secret U.S. databases.

Assange was arrested at age 20 for hacking but was released on good behavior. The label hacker has followed him ever since even though Assange is not being charged as a hacker but for helping Manning hide her identity while accessing classified material she had clearance to access, which Parry said is standard journalistic practice.

5. Assange was charged with interfering with the 2016 U.S. election.

One of the most widely mistaken beliefs is that Assange interfered in the U.S. election with Russian help in order to get Donald Trump elected. All of the U.S. charges against Assange stem from 2010 and have nothing to do with the 2016 election, another mistaken belief.

In the 2017 film Risk,by filmmaker Laura Poitras, Assange is filmed on the phone in early 2016 saying WikiLeaks had obtained emails on Hillary Clinton and we hope to get something on Trump. As Maurizi has written for Consortium News, WikiLeaks did obtain Trump documents but discovered they had already been published.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, told CN Live!that had WikiLeaks had damaging information on Trump, they certainly would have published it, especially before an election when voters need to be informed about the candidates.

There is zero evidence that WikiLeaks had material on Trump and suppressed it, another widely believed falsehood. Assange favored neither candidate and before the election said the choice between the candidates was like choosing cholera or gonorrhea.

Special Counsel Robert Muellers report alleges that Assange communicated with Russian GRU defense intelligence agents posing as Guccifer 2.0 to obtain leaked Democratic Party emails. Even if it were true that Guccifer 2.0 was a cover for Russian intelligence, Mueller offers no evidence that Assange would be aware of that.

And even if it were the Russians who provided the material to Assange, the emails were accurate, meaning it is irrelevant who the source of the leak was. The Wall Street Journals and other major medias anonymous drop boxes prove that. They dont need or want to know the source if newsworthy documents are authenticated.

If a foreign power inserted fabricated emails into a U.S. presidential campaign, that would be sabotage through disinformation. But thats not what happened. The emails were information, not disinformation.

What Really Happened

Plague to be presented to Assange. (Made by Roy de Visser in Sydney, Australia)

The truth is that a vindictive U.S. government was exposed with clear evidence of committing war crimes, meddling in other nations internal affairs and spying on adversaries, allies and citizens alike and in response imprisoned and charged the journalist who revealed this wrongdoing. It is an attack on press freedom usually associated with the most aggressive totalitarian regimes, going to the core of how the West defines itself: as a democracy that upholds the right to criticize government or authoritarianism that crushes dissent.

The really horrifying thing about this case is the lawlessness that has developed: The powerful can kill without fear of punishment and journalism is transformed into espionage, said Melzer. It is becoming a crime to tell the truth.

Melzer told the Republik:

Imagine a dark room. Suddenly, someone shines a light on the elephant in the room on war criminals, on corruption. Assange is the man with the spotlight. The governments are briefly in shock, but then they turn the spotlight around with accusations of rape. It is a classic maneuver when it comes to manipulating public opinion. The elephant once again disappears into the darkness, behind the spotlight. And Assange becomes the focus of attention instead, and we start talking about whether Assange is skateboarding in the embassy or whether he is feeding his cat correctly. Suddenly, we all know that he is a rapist, a hacker, a spy and a narcissist. But the abuses and war crimes he uncovered fade into the darkness.

A plaque in honor of Assanges award, reads: For bravery in the face of a grave threat to Freedom of the Press and for journalistic accomplishments in revealing crimes of the state.

The Gary Webb Award is the third prize Assange has won while in prison, and the first from the United States. Recognition of the threat his case poses to press freedom grows.

Past winners of the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award are Sam Parry (2016), who created Consortium News website in 1995, and filmmaker Oliver Stone (2017).

History of the Award

About the origin of the award, Parry wrote: The award is named in honor of investigative reporter Gary Webb who in 1996 courageously revived interest in one of the darkest scandals of the 1980s, the Reagan administrations tolerance of cocaine trafficking by the CIA-organized Nicaraguan Contra rebels who were fighting to overthrow Nicaraguas leftist Sandinista government.

Journalist Gary Webb holding a copy of his Contra-cocaine article in The San Jose Mercury-News.

The Contra-Cocaine scandal was originally exposed by Associated Press reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger in 1985, but the major U.S. newspapers accepted the Reagan administrations denials and treated the story as a conspiracy theory.

So, when Webb revived the story in 1996 for The San Jose Mercury News and described how some of the Contra cocaine fueled the spread of crack across urban America, the major newspapers again rallied to the defense of the Contras and the Reagan administrations legacy.

The assault on Webb was led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times and was so ferocious that Webbs editors at the Mercury News sacrificed him to protect their own careers. Webb found himself cast out from the profession that he loved.

It didnt even matter that an internal CIA investigation by Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed, in 1998, that the CIA was aware of the Contra cocaine trafficking but had put its goal of ousting the Sandinistas ahead of any responsibility to expose the Contra criminality.

See more here:
Julian Assange Wins 2020 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award - Consortium News

Typically, your lawyer is on your side. Which is why it was a little unusual that on the first day of the trial of ex-CIA sysadmin Joshua Schulte accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks that his attorney, Sabrina Shroff, went out of her way to explain what an asshole he is.

When he worked for the CIA, he antagonized almost every single person there, Shroff told jurors [PDF] in New York on Tuesday. He antagonized his colleagues. He antagonized management. He was a difficult employee. He really was a difficult employee.

A few minutes later she was back at it: He was also a pain in the ass to everybody at the CIA, and by the middle of 2016, Mr Schulte became very dissatisfied with his job and his colleagues and his management at the CIA. He had disputes with his colleagues. He didn't like the disputes. He didn't like the colleague. He complained to management.

What makes this character attack that much more peculiar is that it is the same line of argument pushed by the prosecution to explain why Schulte suddenly decided after a lifetime working for the US intelligence services, including the NSA and later the CIA to throw the agency under the bus and release gigabytes of highly classified hacking tools, dubbed Vault 7, to the world.

But before we get to his lawyers logic, Shroff put in one more kick: Now, I've said this before and I'll say it again. Mr Schulte is a difficult man.

Nothing about this case is normal. Joshua Schulte was a sysadmin at the CIAs super-secretive hacking unit, and had superuser access to its innermost software secrets, which comprised more than 20 different tools and exploits to break into electronic systems.

He left the CIA following an internal dispute in which he accused a co-worker of plotting to kill him, and made a formal complaint. The complaint was investigated and management sided with the other employee.

Schulte quit in November 2016. And four months later, WikiLeaks started publishing, week-by-week, no less than 26 highly classified resources, with code-names like Weeping Angel, Scribbles, Archimedes, After Midnight, Assassin, Athena... it was a complete rundown of the spy agency's hacking tools that allowed its agents to install malware on pretty much every modern electronic device.

The CIA admits it had no idea that its security had been compromised until the files started appearing online, and the FBIs CD-6 counter-intelligence unit immediately opened a probe to find out how the information got out. Within a week, Schultes home was repeatedly raided and electronic devices taken away but it wasnt until August, five months later, that he was arrested.

Notably he wasnt collared for the leak of the hacking tools but for child sex abuse images the FBI claimed it had found on a server he ran. It wasnt until May 2018, another nine months after that arrest, that it can became clear the Feds had identified him as the prime suspect in the leak, and the next month he was charged with the theft of classified national defense information. He has been held at a federal facility ever since.

Its important to know that it took more than a year after the leaks for Schulte to be arrested because his entire trial will hinge on whether the US government can persuade the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the man who secretly copied and then uploaded the files to WikiLeaks. Schulte denies he had anything to do with the leak.

The very thing that made Schulte so good at his job is what has made it so difficult to pin the crime on him, the government prosecutor argued at the opening of the trial. He is, after all, an expert on computer security and forensics.

According to the prosecution, Schulte swiped a copy of the hacking tools on the evening of April 20, 2016, after somehow restoring a system backup that reinstated his superuser access. He then, according to the prosecution, painstakingly went through log files and removed all signs of that activity: exactly the sort of clean-up you'd expect agents do when hacking other systems to avoid detection.

This was the explanation given in court: He used a backup copy to take the system back in time to before the CIA tried to lock down the system. Back to a time when Schulte had total administrative control.

"For over an hour, from the computer sitting at his desk at CIA, Schulte was in that system secretly restoring his super access, giving himself back all the control he had before it was taken away. Restoring his access to the backups that stored copies of the entire system.

It goes on: After stealing the backup, Schulte tried to cover his tracks. During that hour on April 20, when he took the system back in time, Schulte started carefully deleting every log file that kept track of what he had done while he was in the system. After destroying that evidence, he unwound the reversion. Schulte restored the system to how it had been just before he hacked in, erasing that hour of time as if it hadn't existed. Trying to cover his tracks, that proved how he stole our nation's secrets.

Readers will note the reference to before the CIA tried to lock down the system and this is where things get even murkier. Part of the reason the CIA suspects Schulte is because it says it caught him giving himself admin access to projects he wasnt supposed to be on and censured him. They told him they knew he had abused his access, and he admitted it, the prosecutor told the court. He even signed a memo agreeing not to do it again. And then the CIA locked him out.

So if he was locked out of the systems, how could he possibly not only get back in and reinstate his superuser privileges, but also download files and then escape unnoticed? The truth is that the CIA doesnt know. And so it alleges that if it was Schulte who stole the information, he must have retained a backdoor into the system.

On the evening of April 20, Schulte used that backdoor, access he knew he wasn't supposed to have, to do something called a reversion. Kind of like restoring a phone. The evidence will prove that Schulte sent that stolen classified backup, a copy of all the sensitive projects of the CIA's programming group, to WikiLeaks.

How exactly is the prosecution going to prove that a man who had been locked out of a system somehow got back in and left no electronic fingerprints while doing so? According to the lead prosecutor, there were digital footprints, despite his best efforts to delete the logs.

Even though Schulte tried to delete any trace of his theft of sensitive, classified information, his footprints were left behind. The FBI's experts found them in the recesses of the computer memory of Schulte's own desktop at the CIA, in spaces where bits of data stayed behind even when Schulte tried to erase them.

Recesses of memory, huh? But wait, theres more.

You'll see the log files from Schulte's own computer showing him sending the commands to take their classified system back in time to get his access back, to delete evidence of what he had done, to undo his reversion to make it seem like it never happened.

We are willing to bet that this log file is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting. Considering Schultes day job, he most likely carries out such commands all the time on the CIA systems. They may well have a log file that shows that he rolled back the system to an earlier backup.

But as the judge made plain at the start of the trial: Mr Schulte does not bear any burden of proof. He does not have to prove to you that he's innocent. It is the government's burden to prove to you, beyond all reasonable doubt, that he is guilty. A backup command aint gonna cut it.

Thats why the case has taken so long to be prosecuted, because the forensics arent enough. Its also why there are a number of other peculiarities in the trial.

Back in April, we reported on the intense frustration of Schultes lawyer Shroff, who complained to the court that everything her client sent her was being vetted through the CIA first. This meant that not only did the process take an unnecessarily long time but that she didnt trust the intelligence officers vetting it to not share all that information with those prosecuting her client.

Shroff also complained that she couldnt be sure that her client-attorney conversations werent being recorded. Which may seem paranoid, but it turns out she had good reason to be worried.

Because, as well as the child sex abuse images charge against Schulte, he is also charged with one count of unlawful disclosure and attempted disclosure of national defense information while he was in the Metropolitan Correction Center, or MCC, a federal detention center.

Thats right: the US government claims it has evidence that Schulte was sending highly confidential information from within his jail cell. How on Earth was that possible? Well, he got hold of a phone inside and, according to the prosecution, used it to communicate with a journalist.

His lawyer doesnt deny it, in large part because the prosecution has video footage of Schulte in his cell using the phone. Yes, thats right, if you piss off the CIA, you can be sure that they are watching your every move, 24/7.

Some of the evidence from that incident doesnt look good. I will look to break up diplomatic relationships, Schulte apparently texted from his cell. Top secret? Fuck your top secret!

So heres what we can safely assume: the CIA is convinced Schulte was responsible for the theft, in large part because of his internal disputes at the super-snoop agency. It has been desperately trying to find the necessary evidence to get him sent down for life.

But that doesnt mean hes guilty. The history of the intelligence services is littered with double-agents that werent discovered until years later, and probes into people that they convinced themselves were responsible for someone elses crimes.

And that is why Schultes own lawyer tried to get ahead of the game in her opening statement, painting her client in what would normally be seen as an extremely damaging light: because she knows that is what the prosecution may rely on to sway the jury.

It looks likely that the prosecution doesnt have a smoking gun but rather lots of small pieces of evidence that it has to draw a complex picture around. Its going to help if it can make Schulte an unlikeable person in the jurys minds.

Shroffs defense is that even if he was a pain in the ass that being a difficult employee does not make you a criminal. A difficult employee does not translate to being a traitor. A difficult employee does not translate to somebody who would sell out their country.

She will argue there is no evidence that he ever communicated with WikiLeaks. And as for his behavior in the jail which, incidentally, is the focus of another strange series of motions that implies Schultes previous federal lawyers gave him knowingly bad advice she argued he was desperate, desperate to prove that he was innocent. He wanted the world to know he wasn't this person, he was not the man who stole the information, he was not the man who released the information to WikiLeaks, he had nothing to do with that theft.

As for the actual CIA IT system known as the DEVLAN system from where the hacking tools were stolen, the prosecution claims it was a digital Fort Knox: impenetrable to all but a very few special people. Schultes lawyer says the whole thing was left wide open to any one of thousands of CIA employees and contractors.

Well be intrigued to hear details around that as the trial progresses. It is expected to last several weeks.

Sponsored: Detecting cyber attacks as a small to medium business

Originally posted here:
Hes a pain in the ASCII to everybody. Now please acquit my sysadmin client over these CIA Vault 7 leaking charges - The Register

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) meets with his US counterpart Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou on September 5, 2016.

Alexei Druzhinin | AFP | Getty Images

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday issued its long-awaited report on how former President Barack Obama handled Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The bipartisan report found that the Obama administration was ill-prepared to handle the novel election interference offensive and recommended that in the future the "public should be informed as soon as possible" if a foreign active measures campaign is detected.

"After discovering the existence, if not the full scope, of Russia's election interference efforts in late-2016, the Obama Administration struggled to determine the appropriate response," the committee's GOP chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, said in a statement.

"Frozen by 'paralysis of analysis,' hamstrung by constraints both real and perceived, Obama officials debated courses of action without truly taking one," he said.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the committee's top Democrat, said that there were "many flaws" with the Obama administration's response but noted that "many of those were due to problems with our own system problems that can and should be corrected."

The report was released one day after President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate of a charge that he abused his power by seeking to pressure the government of Ukraine to open investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden. He was also acquitted of a charge of obstruction of Congress. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

Trump, who spent the first two years of his presidency dogged by a federal investigation into whether he unlawfully conspired with the Russian government in the 2016 election, has criticized Obama for his handling of the situation.

"He did NOTHING, and had no intention of doing anything!" Trump wrote in a post on Twitter last year.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2017 that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign during the 2016 campaign targeting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and that the Russian government had a "clear preference" for Trump.

The attacks included the pilfering of data and emails from Democratic National Committee networks which were then released to outlets including WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy group, in a manner designed to raise doubts about Clinton's viability.

The Senate Intelligence Committee also concluded that the Russian government sought to bolster Trump's 2016 election chances.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the investigation into Trump's campaign, concluded that Trump expected to benefit from Russian interference. Mueller, however, did not establish coordination between Trump's associates and the Russian disinformation campaign.

The Senate report released Thursday is the third, out of an expected five, stemming from the committee's probe into the government's handling of Russian meddling efforts. The investigation began in 2017 and has proceeded on a largely bipartisan basis, in contrast with parallel congressional inquiries.

The committee found that the Obama administration was "not well-postured" to counter the Russian interference campaign and said that while "high-level warnings were delivered to Russian officials, those warnings may or may not have tempered Moscow's activity."

Obama said in 2016 that he confronted Putin over allegations that the Russian leader ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, telling him to "cut it out."

The committee noted that institutional constraints prevented the administration from acting more aggressively. The report documents members of the administration agonizing over the potential that a public statement about the hacking efforts while Obama was actively campaigning for Clinton would be perceived as political.

"Those factors included the highly politicized environment, concern that public warnings would themselves undermine confidence in the election, and a delay in definitive attribution to Russia, among other issues," the report said.

It noted that most administration officials first learned about the Russian hacking efforts from a June 2016 article in The Washington Post. In October of that year, the administration released its first public statement saying that the intelligence community was "confident" that the Russian government directed cyberattacks on American political organizations.

The committee emphasized that in case of future attacks, the public should be notified "as soon as possible with a clear and succinct statement of the threat."

"If the Administration had informed the public of Russian hacking and dumping earlier than October 7, and had there been bipartisan condemnation of these operations, the public and the press may have reacted differently to the WikiLeaks releases," the committee wrote.

"At the least, stories about Democratic emails might have mentioned that their release was part of a Russian influence campaign and that Donald Trump's repeated references to the releases, his stated adoration of WikiLeaks, and his solicitation of Russian assistance were taking place in the context of an ongoing influence campaign to assist him," it said.

The committee will release two more reports on its findings. Those will cover the intelligence community's 2017 assessment of Russian interference and the committee's final counterintelligence findings. The committee did not say when those reports will be released.

A spokesperson for Obama did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Obama response to 2016 Russian election meddling had 'many flaws,' Senate report finds - CNBC

On Friday, February 7, Bola Tinubus media adviser by the name of Tunde Rahman made a statement that attempted to impeach the credibility of a viral, reputationally injurious, pre-2015, anti-Buhari quote attributed to Bola Tinubu.

The quote, which has been making the social media rounds in the past few weeks, goes thus: Muhammadu Buhari is an agent of destabilisation, [an] ethnic bigot, and [a] religious fanatic who if given the chance would ensure the disintegration of the country. His ethnocentrism would jeopardise Nigerias national unity. I have seen slightly different lexical variations of this quote, but the essential sentiment is unchanged.

Some online newspapers in Nigeria reported Rahman to have insisted that the quote is fictitious, describing it as the handiwork of merchants of hate and fake news. So what is the truth? The short answer is that the quote is largely accurate.

Ive never shared the quote even though Ive been familiar with it since 2011, but since Rahman was bold enough to challenge those behind it to mention where Tinubu made the remark, let me offer some help.

Tinubu didnt say those words at a news conference, as some people have inaccurately claimed. He was quoted to have said them in a confidential diplomatic cable that the United States Consul General to Nigeria sent to his bosses back home on Friday February 21, 2003.

We got to know this because, in September 2011, WikiLeaksthe insurgent, whistle-blowing, official-secret-spewing sitedumped a trove of 251,000 such confidential, unredacted cables that US embassy officials sent to the US State Department in Washington D.C. from all over the world.

In the February 21, 2003 confidential cable, which can be found athttps://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/03LAGOS369_a.html, the US Consul General to Nigeria reported Tinubu to have said Buhari was an ethnocentric agent of destabilisation who would strain Nigerias unity if he became president. He also said the Southwest would support Obasanjo against Buhariwhich it didbecause Tinubu and his group didnt want the spread of Sharia, which Buhari supported and which Obasanjo countered, and because even though Obasanjo was unlikeable, he was Yoruba and Buhari wasnt. Looks to me like Tinubu was guilty of the same crime of ethnocentrism he accused Buhari of.

The cable reads: Turning to the presidential contest, Tinubu disclosed that he does not like President Obasanjo because he contributed to the end of democracy in Nigeria during his tenure as a military president and is now benefiting from that history.

That said, Tinubu admitted that he and his party, the Alliance for Democracy, must support Obasanjo. South West Nigeria is Yoruba land and the President is Yoruba. Tinubus [sic] party had no choice since it has not fielded a presidential candidate. Moreover, Obasanjo is the only candidate who stands a chance of blocking his rival, General Muhammadu Buhari, whose ethnocentrism would jeopardise Nigerias [sic] national unity. Buhari and his ilk are agents of destabilisation who would be far worse than Obasanjo.

Tinubu and many other governors are therefore implementing a strategy to re-elect Obasanjo, partly in an effort to prevent Sharia from spreading. Tinubu predicted that the President will follow his own course, if re-elected, since he will not need as many friends the second time around.

Incidentally, Tinubu had really kind words to say about Atiku Abubakar throughout his interactions with the Consul General. Tinubu praised Vice President Atiku Abubakar, whom he has known for many years, the Consul General wrote. Elaborating on his knowledge of the VP, Tinubu said he has known and understood the VP even before his entry into politics. Atiku is a detribalised politician who knows where he is going and how to build bridges to get there.

The Consul General also wrote that, Tinubu credits his going into politics to Atikus personal encouragement. You wont guess that going by the way them and their agents tore at each otheror pretended to in the last presidential election.

Anyway, my search of WikiLeaks archive with the keyword Bola Tinubu turned up several other unflattering characterisations Tinubu made of Buhari to Americans.

For instance, in a September 14, 2005 secret cable, US Consul General Brian L. Browne wrote that Tinubu wanted to be vice president to either Atiku Abubakar or Muhammadu Buhari but was self-conscious of the perception that either option would present the country with a Muslim-Muslim ticket, and reiterated the sentiment that Buharis perception as religious zealot made teaming with him unviable.

While Tinubu did not see this [i.e. being vice presidential candidate] as a big problem with Atiku (due to Atikus noted religious laxity and his pro-Western outlook), it would be a heavy cross to bear for a Buhari-Tinubu ticket because of the perception in many southern Nigerian minds that Buhari is a religious zealot, Browne wrote. Because of this factor, Tinubu asserted he had begun to shift his focus, which had been exclusively on the vice presidency, to see the Senate as a nice place to land upon exiting the governors mansion.

Again, in a confidential cable sent on Thursday April 12, 2007, the Consul General reported Tinubu to have described Buhari as a fascist during an April 9, 2007 meeting. Tinubu stressed he had no qualms about PDP presidential candidate Umaru YarAdua winning the election, the Consul General wrote. Yet, Tinubu was adamantly opposed to ANPP presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari. In a recent news story, Buhari called the PDP government fascist. Tinubu sarcastically mentioned that he would take Buharis ephitet [sic] as being accurate, for who better to identify a fascist than another one.

As I wrote in my September 24, 2011 column titled What the WikiLeaks Controversy Says about Nigerias Leaky-mouthed Elite in the aftermath of WikiLeaks exposes of the diplomatic cables, the willingness of our elites to divulge unsolicited information about the nation to U.S. officials betrays an infantile thirst for a paternal dictatorship.

The United States is seen as that all-knowing, all-sufficient father-figure to whom our elites run when they have troubles. We have learned from the US embassy cables that our Supreme Court judges, Central Bank governors, even vice presidents and governors routinely run to the American embassy like terrified little kids when they have quarrels with each other.

What Ive found particularly instructive, I added, is that our perpetually lying politicians suddenly become truthful, honest, and straight-talking people when they talk to Americans. You would think they were standing before their Creatoror at least before a stern, omniscient, no-nonsense dad who severely punishes his kids for the minutest lie they tell.

After the revelations became public knowledge in 2011 and the embarrassment that attended this Nigerian politicians dismissed them as WikiLeakss beer parlor gossip. Of course, thats intentionally misleading flapdoodle.

As I pointed out at the time, WikiLeaks was not the author of the embarrassing information about them; the uncomfortable bits of information about them, which isnt exclusive to Nigerian politicians, were contained in U.S. diplomats dispatches, which were intended ONLY for the consumption of the US president, the US Secretary of State, and other high-profile government officials but which WikiLeaks exposed to the rest of the world at the cost of tremendous discomfort and embarrassment to the US government and embassy officials.

I dont know what exactly Tinubus media adviser is denying. The truth is that Buharis people are already acutely aware of Tinubus honest opinions of Buhari and find his latter-day pandering to them, in a bid to earn their support for his 2023 presidential ambition, both theatrical and entertaining.

For the rest of us, though, his media aides forceful denial of that which is already archived in the public domain proves English journalist Francis Claud Cockburns famous quip that you should Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.

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Unkind things US diplomatic cables reported Tinubu to have said about Buhari - NIGERIAN TRIBUNE