Wikileaks Quotes

The truth, indeed, is out—but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight.

Freedom of speech has a number.It was the WikiLeaks IP Address.

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power. (Žižek, S. "Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks." London Review of Books 33.2 (2011): 9-10. )

Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.

There is no way that the new WikiLeaks leaks don't leave Hillary Clinton holding the smoking gun. The time for her departure may come next week or next month, but sooner or later, the weakened and humiliated secretary of state will have to pay.

But the crisis we face now is new. Its transnational nature and reliance on non–state actors who can use digital media to override borders—Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a prime example

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.

It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.

You know you have a transparency problem when citizens of a democracy need to rely on WikiLeaks for details on changes to laws.

Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website

in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called “Mendax” (“speaker of lies”)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.

I can support Al-Qaeda, the Ku Klux Klan, buy weapons and drugs and all kinds of porn with my Visa card. There is nobody investigating this, but I cannot support a human rights organisation which is fighting for freedom of expression, - Olafur Sigurvinsson, supporter of wikileaks, taken from article by RT discussing a court battle over freedom to donate money to wikileaks.

He [Edward Snowden] has been careful with his info, doling it out to responsible news organizations — The Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, etc. — and not tossing it up in the air, WikiLeaks style, and echoing the silly mantra “Information wants to be free.” (No. Information, like most of us, wants a home in the Hamptons.)” – Richard Cohen, Washington Post (10/22/2013)

The 2016 cyberattack was not just another case of simple Kompromat - meddling in the political affairs of a satellite nation or an individual dissenter. It was a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years. The attempt was even more brazen due to the apparent belief that Putin assumed that he and his oligarchy could charm, groom and select a candidate, then with the right amount of cybercrime and enough organized propaganda they could actually choose a president of the United States to do their bidding.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in 2011. “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”37 Assange’s

Since September eleventh, the government’s rhetoric has been that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” says Jones with just a hint of righteous anger in his voice. “I say if those are the rules of the game, play them across the board. Show us what goes on.

We don’t yet know the names of the architects who will build the next upgrade to the secret-killing machine. But we’ll know them by their work.

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel. —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Due to their meddling, activities which were considered routine politics in America are now suspect.

In a 2007 cable about Nauru, made public by WikiLeaks, an unnamed U.S. official summed up his government’s analysis of what went wrong on the island: “Nauru simply spent extravagantly, never worrying about tomorrow.” Fair enough, but that diagnosis is hardly unique to Nauru; our entire culture is extravagantly drawing down finite resources, never worrying about tomorrow. For a couple of hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere - because we can’t see them - will have no effect whatsoever. Or if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of whatever mess we have made. And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more “inputs” (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and arm their militias and then wonder why they hate us. We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can’t afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder why no one foresaw that a system built on bad debts would collapse. At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing - a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us.

The 2016 presidential election was already surreal—a former reality TV host fueled by white backlash had completed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party—before the bears emerged.

Imagine two global cyberwars being waged secretly against America and our political establishment incapable of passing a law or allocating funds to stop it because the legislators have already been influenced by a foreign power.

You'll have the right to be angry about Vault 7 only after you boycott dragnet surveillance data providers like Google, Microsoft, Skype, Facebook and LinkedIn. The true threat is coming from the private sector surveillance profiteers.

Vietnam had never been a true civil war. It was a war of conquest, initiated and perpetuated for more than two decades by the United States, fueled by presidential secrecy and lies. It was no catastrophic accident. As Ellsberg wrote, it was simply “a crime.

WikiLeaks told us how keen the Coalition is to exploit the boats. In late 2009, in the dying days of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the Opposition, a “key Liberal party strategist” popped in to the US embassy in Canberra to say how pleased the party was that refugee boats were, once again, making their way to Christmas Island. “The issue was ‘fantastic,’” he said. “And ‘the more boats that come the better.’” But he admitted they had yet to find a way to make the issue work in their favour: “his research indicated only a ‘slight trend’ towards the Coalition.

The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government. This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.

campaign aides came to believe that there was a big and telling difference between the disclosure of DNC e-mails earlier in the summer and the reveal of the Podesta rounds. Rather than a massive, untargeted one-time release, this time there seemed to be greater political sophistication in the slow-burn method of daily releases for the final month of the campaign—and the Podesta e-mails were presented in an easily searchable format. The biggest difference they detected was that WikiLeaks had seemed to acquire a close enough understanding of American domestic politics to time its releases and publish e-mails on days when they would have greater relevance in the news.

Dotcom believes one of the reasons he was targeted was his support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He says he was compelled to reach out to the site after US soldier Bradley Manning leaked documents to it. The infamous video recording of the Apache gunship gunning down a group of Iraqis (some of whom, despite widespread belief to the contrary, were later revealed to have been armed), including two Reuters journalists, was the trigger. “Wow, this is really crazy,” Dotcom recalls thinking, watching the black-and-white footage and hearing the operators of the helicopter chat about firing on the group. He made a €20,000 donation to Wikileaks through Megaupload’s UK account. “That was one of the largest donations they got,” he says. According to Dotcom, the US, at the time, was monitoring Wikileaks and trying better to understand its support base. “My name must have popped right up.” The combination of a leaking culture and a website dedicated to producing leaked material would horrify the US government, he says. A willing leaker and a platform on which to do it was “their biggest enemy and their biggest fear . . . If you are in a corrupt government and you know how much fishy stuff is going on in the background, to you, that is the biggest threat — to have a site where people can anonymously submit documents.” Neil MacBride was appointed to the Wikileaks case, meaning Dotcom shares prosecutors with Assange. “I think the Wikileaks connection got me on the radar.” Dotcom believes the US was most scared of the threat of inspiration Wikileaks posed. He also believes it shows just how many secrets the US has hidden from the public and the rest of the world. “That’s why they are going after that so hard. Only a full transparent government will have no corruption and no back door deals or secret organisations or secret agreements. The US is the complete opposite of that. It is really difficult to get any information in the US, so whistleblowing is the one way you can get to information and provide information to the public.

The Obama administration warned federal employees that materials released by WikiLeaks remained classified—even though they were being published by some of the world’s leading news organizations including the New York Times and the Guardian. Employees were told that accessing the material, whether on WikiLeaks.org or in the New York Times, would amount to a security violation.21 Government agencies such as the Library of Congress, the Commerce Department and the US military blocked access to WikiLeaks materials over their networks. The ban was not limited to the public sector. Employees from the US government warned academic institutions that students hoping to pursue a career in public service should stay clear of material released by WikiLeaks in their research and in their online activity.

Clinton recognized the challenge for the United States. Over a long lunch with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia in Washington in March 2009, she asked him for advice on dealing with China. “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” Clinton said, according to a State Department cable released in December 2010 by WikiLeaks. Rudd, describing himself as a “brutal realist on China,” told Clinton that the United States should adopt a policy of “multilateral engagement with bilateral vigor”—a polite way of saying “Make friends with China’s neighbors and get tough on China.” Whether Rudd knew it or not, he was describing the outlines of a policy already taking shape in the State Department. “China badly misread the United States, believing we were in a downward spiraling decline,” said Kurt Campbell, one of the principal architects of that new approach. “On that first trip, they did not treat Obama as well as they should have.

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.

Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump. We may recall the U.S. intelligence community’s observation that “coincidences take a lot of planning.” The Trump coincidences seemed to bear the hallmarks of the sword and the shield of the FSB.

You can have a lot of political “change” in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone’s bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts? And contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn’t matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a political society, although it is rapidly heading toward a fiscalized society. And other societies, like Egypt, are still heavily politicized. Their rulers really do need to be concerned about what people think, so they expend proportionate efforts on controlling freedom of speech. But I think young people actually innately have fairly good values. Of course it’s a spectrum, but they have fairly good values most of the time and they want to demonstrate them to other people, and you can see this when people first go to university. They become hardened as a result of certain things having a payoff and other things not having a payoff.

OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down. On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there. Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything. “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.” Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.” In breaks between meetings in the coming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis. He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.

The Russian spy agency had been ordered to make a bold move, hack the American elections, and engage in political warfare to elect Donald Trump President. Whether he knew it or not, Trump was the perfect candidate for a political asset. Former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB targeted “Ego-centric people who lack moral principles—who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.

The techniques used by the SAVAK, many borrowed from the Nazis and then passed along to the SAVAK by the CIA,10 were uniquely grisly and terrible. The SAVAK operated much like the Gestapo, entering a person’s home at night, hauling the person away and many times disappearing that person forever. A quite ominous State Department cable (from Wikileaks), dated March 7, 1975, describes such an event: NYMAN INFORMS THAT WHEN ARRESTED MAJID WAS AT HIS FAMILY HOME IN TEHRAN (118 AVENUE GHAANI—FORMERLY TIR). HIS FATHER HADI GHAVAM INFORMED DAUGHTER (MRS. NYMAN) THAT FIVE SAVAK MEN ENTERED HOME AT 10 P.M. AND TOOK AWAY MAJID AND FOUR OF HIS BOOKS. HE HAS NOT BEEN HEARD FROM SINCE. FATHER ALSO SAID FAIRLY LARGE NUMBER OF KARAJ STUDENTS ARRESTED AROUND SAME TIME.11 This is all the cable says. Most likely, Majid was taken to a prison and tortured, and very well could have died under torture as so many Iranians did at the hands of the SAVAK.

Just too bad that he was able to download a report from the file server. He leaked it to WikiLeaks. The report concerned the terrorist attack on September 11, 2012. A group of Islamic terrorists set the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on fire. During the assault were four people killed. Among the victims was the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens. There was not much she could do about it since she couldn’t hack the WikiLeaks website. She knew that WikiLeaks architect, Julian Assange was still at large. Even though U.S. officials began investigating Assange with a view to prosecuting him under the Espionage Act of 1917 since November 2010.

The forces that caught Manning are real and significant: The greatest vulnerability for any leaker remains his or her human connections. But the lesson of Manning’s story for a generation of digital natives will be, above all else, that he nearly got away with it. Use the right cryptographic tools, keep your mouth shut, and you, too, can anonymously, frictionlessly, eviscerate an entire institution’s information.

So what should be secret, then? “Every situation is different,” he (Domscheit-Berg) answers. “Drawing the line is the toughest question in this field.

The barriers to modern megaleakers like Manning have crumbled: They needn’t spend a year photocopying. They needn’t be Eagle Scouts or war heroes who penetrate the government’s most elite layer only to go rogue—just one of the millions of Americans with access to secret government documents or the many, many uncountable millions more with access to secret corporate information. And perhaps most important, they needn’t risk reprisal by exposing their identities to the journalists they hope will amplify their whistleblowing.

This morning Anja handed me a stack of papers. Our very own WikiLeaks!

With all their variation in goals and means, OpenLeaks, IMMI, BalkanLeaks, GlobaLeaks, and even Jones’s OpenWatch smartphone apps are all stepchildren of a movement that stretches back to the cypherpunks two decades earlier and the Pentagon Papers two decades before that. And with its greatest successes in just the last few of those forty years, its work is only starting.

In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions. He claims to be a champion of transparency, but for many years, he’s been helpful to Putin, one of the most repressive and least transparent autocrats in the world. It’s not just that WikiLeaks avoids publishing anything Putin won’t like and instead targets Russia’s adversaries—Assange actually hosted a television show on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, and receives adoring coverage there. And if hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. To avoid facing those charges, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After years of waiting, Sweden eventually said it would no longer try to extradite him, but promised that if Assange came back to the country, the investigation could be reopened.

Surprisingly, Clinton and her advisers believe that the most dramatic day of the campaign, October 7th, the day of the “Access Hollywood” tape, was a disaster for them. Early that day, the director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Homeland Security released a statement concluding that the Russians had been attempting to interfere in the U.S. election process. But when, shortly afterward, the Washington Post released the tape—in which Donald Trump describes how he grabs women by the genitals and moves on them “like a bitch”—the D.H.S. statement was eclipsed. “My heart sank,” Jennifer Palmieri, a top Clinton adviser, recalled. “My first reaction was ‘No! Focus on the intelligence statement!’ The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape was not good for Trump, obviously, but it was more likely to hurt him with the people who were already against him. His supporters had made their peace with his awful behavior.” That evening, a third media vortex formed, as Julian Assange went to work. WikiLeaks began to dole out a new tranche of stolen e-mails. “It seemed clear to us that the Russians were again being guided by our politics,” Clinton said. “Someone was offering very astute political advice about how to weaponize information, how to convey it, how to use the existing Russian outlets, like RT or Sputnik, how to use existing American vehicles, like Facebook.

It’s true, though, that we struggled to stay on message. My advisors had to deal with a candidate—me—who often wanted something new to say, as opposed to just repeating the same stump speech over and over. In addition, more than in any race I can remember, we were constantly buffeted by events: from the email controversy, to WikiLeaks, to mass shootings and terrorist attacks. There was no such thing as a “normal day,” and the press didn’t cover “normal” campaign speeches. What they were interested in was a steady diet of conflict and scandal. As a result, when it came to driving a consistent message, we were fighting an uphill battle.

our 2016 election. It appeared Russian military intelligence hacked into e-mail accounts related to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 2016 and later made public stolen e-mails through various online personas, including a major release by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just before the Democratic National Convention.

The rich enemies of Jehovah and the Bible already knew who my favorite authors were. That's why I am sure that all of my favorite authors must make sure they stop trusting emailed final draft submissions to their publishers. You must vet properly and do as much hand delivery as possible. The spirit(s) claimed that Bill Gates Jr of Microsoft and his Fortune 500 co-horts as well as at least one king of the earth (political ruler) wasted at least $20 billion US dollars on this type of counterfeiting and character assassination and whatever. Please correct me right away if you happen to know I am wrong at all. I appreciate www dot worldcat dot org - and the Freedom of Information Act and the real wikileaks and the real PETA (I just disagree with their violent philosophy and it is impossible for me to be a lifelong vegan).

The Afghans, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis, and the Somalis know what American military forces do. They do not need to read WikiLeaks. It is we who remain ignorant. Our terror is delivered daily to the wretched of the earth with industrial weapons. But to us, it is left behind on city and village streets by our missiles, drones, and fighter jets. We do not listen to the wails and shrieks of parents embracing the shattered bodies of their children. We do not see the survivors of air attacks bury their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We are not conscious of the long night of collective humiliation, repression, and powerlessness that characterizes existence in Israel's occupied territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We do not see the boiling anger that war and injustice turn into a cauldron of hate over time. We are not aware of the very natural lust for revenge against those who carry out or symbolize this oppression. We see only the final pyrotechnics of terror, the shocking moment when the rage erupts into an inchoate fury and the murder of innocents. And willfully uninformed, we do not understand our own complicity. We self-righteously condemn the killers as subhuman savages who deserve more of the violence that created them. This is a recipe for endless terror.

Modern Hoppean-Rothbardians are not only pro-market and anti-state: they are pro-technology, anti-democracy and anti-intellectual property as well. They promote the use of the Internet, smart phones and video cameras, blogging, podcasting, Youtube, social media and phyles, encryption, anonymity, VPNs, open source software and culture, torrents, wikileaking, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, MOOCs, 3D printing and Bitcoin to network, communicate, learn, profit and spread ideas—and to counter, monitor, fight, and circumvent the state. To increasingly render the state irrelevant and to reveal it as retrograde, crude, and antiquated, not to mention inefficient, cold, and evil.

The United States paid large numbers of Iraqis to defect from the Sunni insurgency and instead fight against al-Qaeda, on the promise of receiving regular employment through integration into the Iraqi military. As Jamail argues, the failure of the Maliki government to honor this promise saw huge numbers of US-trained, US-armed, and US-financed—but now unemployed—Sunni militants return to the insurgency, eventually swelling the ranks of the former al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, which in 2014 became known as ISIS, or the “Islamic State.

Assange made Shamir WikiLeaks’ associate in Russia. Shamir gave the KGB in Belarus information it could use when he printed WikiLeaks documents that told the dictatorship there had been conversations between the opposition and the US. Shamir went to Belarus, praised the rigged elections and compared Natalia Koliada and her friends to football hooligans. Whether he handed over a batch of US cables without blacking out the names of Belarusian political activists who had spoken to American officials was an open question.

The cable is evidence of a widespread US policy during the occupation of shooting first and asking questions later, as well as detaining anyone and everyone "suspected" of having any links to attacks on US forces.

Previously framed by the media as the Internet Hate Machine, post–Wikileaks Anonymous has become synonymous with so-called hactivism and is frequently lauded as a progressive force for good. Or if not a force for “good,” then a force for something—that is, some political position or ideal.

At the time of our conversations, Chelsea Manning was 22 years of age - my own age when I made the choice to surrender to federal authorities ... I saw someone very familiar that day, and suddenly felt very old.

Without any question, no matter what side of the aisle one sits on, the simple fact is that the United States was attacked by Russian cyber commandos deployed by Vladimir Putin and organized by his intelligence apparatus, the FSB and GRU. It was a serious act of political warfare.

When asked at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran’s of America’s Commander-in-Chief’s forum about Putin Trump said “Well, he does have an 82 percent approval rating, according to the different pollsters, who, by the way, some of them are based right here.” Trump continued,

he knows the mind of the wrestling-loving, under-educated, authoritarian-admiring white male populous. This

Though we have yet to see an actual disruption that matters in the lives of the average American citizen, one can be sure that it will come at a time when, once recognized, the only alternative to the attack may be a real war.

Attributing culpability for cyberattacks is difficult. Competent spy agencies labor to make it nigh-impossible. But it didn’t take long before Obama administration and congressional leaders started expressing with unusual certainty—off the record, of course—that Russia was behind the assault. A theory emerged. The Russians were putting a digital thumb on the scale of the US election to help the aforementioned reality-TV host—who just happened to be running on the most pro-Russia platform in GOP history.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the KGB became known as the FSB. In the last ten years Russian intelligence melded all of its offensive techniques to create a new kind of war: Hybrid Warfare—a melange of hostile cyber, political, and psychological operations in support of their national objectives, whether during peacetime or in open war. It is now standard operating procedure.

All of the old lessons of identifying Russian mantraps started to come back to me as the stolen DNC data was revealed. It had a pattern that was familiar and that virtually every other intelligence officer could recognize. The pattern showed that someone was playing 3 Dimensional chess with our democracy.

The President received a briefing days before WikiLeaks released the data to the public. The Russian Spy agency had been ordered to make a bold move, hack the American elections, and engage in political warfare to elect Donald Trump President. Whether he knew it or not Trump was the perfect candidate for a political asset. Former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB targeted “Ego-centric people who lack moral principles—who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.

This is a real life spy thriller, happening in real time. It is my hope that The Plot to Hack America will inform the American electorate of how Russia executed a full scale political and cyber war on America, starting with Watergate 2.0, to elect Donald Trump President of the United States.

To some it may come as a surprise that the KGB considered extremist leftists, communists, and so forth, ill-suited to divulge the secrets the KGB wanted, or to gain the highest levels of government clearance. After the 1950s it was KGB policy to always try to recruit the highest level spies from circles that were unexpected; they specifically targeted Westerners from conservative ideological profiles. Bezmenov said: My KGB instructors specifically made a point. Never border with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. Try to get into wide circulation, established conservative media. The rich. Filthy rich movie makers. Intellectuals. So-called academic circles. Cynical egocentric people who can look into your eyes with an angelic expression and tell you a lie.9

Nor are any of the statements or activities of the Trump campaign, no matter how distasteful, the behaviors or actions of clandestine agents of the Russian regime. However, even a cursory glance at the evidence reveals to intelligence professionals that the probability that Vladimir Putin has handled Trump and his associates, doing their bidding without even knowing it, is well within the KGB playbook. These Americans may be not be real agents of the Russian Federation but they may have unwittingly exposed themselves to a massive intelligence manipulation machine that, once involved, may be completely out of their control to extract themselves. The rhetoric election of 2016 reveals that damage has already been done.

The fact that Russia can smile, deny, and at the same time conduct cyber and propaganda operations and still have Donald Trump beg them for cyber espionage assistance to hurt another American is unbelievable. If it reveals anything it proves the old KGB policy that loyalty to one’s country is elastic if the money is right. On

With that said, Operation LUCKY-7 had its cut-out. The FSB’s Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC) would create a false flag source to feed Assange the data taken from the DNC and any subsequent hacks through Guccifer 2.0. Assange was desperate to be relevant and the IWMC was going to create a new era where his own hatreds and agenda could be skillfully manipulated by the FSB’s active measures officers, while the cyber teams would keep him well fed. Assange was primed to do LUCKY-7’s bidding and now only needed the data they had stolen. WikiLeaks was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB and essentially the cyber equivalent of a Laundromat, a Russian laundry —ready to clean and give a white appearance to the dirt.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. —Ian Fleming

The Chaos Computer Club was an important point of social connection for me, and the space where the club met in Berlin was always one of the first addresses I visited whenever I was in the German capital. How can I describe what I liked about the people there? All of them were complete curmudgeons. Very creative, clever, but somewhat gruff individuals who had no time for superficial social niceties. But what they lacked in grace, they compensated for ten times over in loyalty, once they had accepted you into their ranks.

I wish all those involved in the Wikileaks matter in the spirit of truth (rather than as a cheap opportunity to screw with a .gov they dislike) the very best. I hope that they'll bear in mind that truth is not some pure thing that brings light and scatters rose petals wherever it goes. It can hurt people that don't deserve to be hurt. It has thorns. Treat it gently. (From an open letter.)

If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth . . .Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.”14

Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump.

WikiLeaks: Russia’s Intelligence Laundromat

Russia is changing Russia’s face and not towards democracy. Karen Dawisha, a Professor at Miami University, told PBS Frontline that “Instead of seeing Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, see it as an authoritarian system that’s in the process of succeeding.”22 Putin is that authoritarian. For him to succeed at the mission of damaging the United States he will use all tools of the Russian statecraft such as forging alliances, but also including blackmail, propaganda, and cyberwarfare. To Putin, the best of all possible worlds would be an economically crippled America, withdrawn from military adventurism and NATO, and with leadership friendly to Russia. Could he make this happen by backing the right horse? As former director of the KGB, now in control of Russia’s economic, intelligence and nuclear arsenal, he could certainly try.

Ultimately, of course, it was Julian who made the decisions. The rest of us were too indecisive and skittish or simply lacked the resolve to set any limits for him. Julian thus became the autocratic head of WL, accountable to no one and tolerating no challenges to his authority. This had emerged as a problem when Bradley Manning was arrested, and clearly it was going to be a problem in the weeks to come. The investigations in Sweden would prove to be the wedge that finally broke up our team. Within

their own. People who do not shy away from critical questions because they’re afraid of being disappointed. Our society needs individuals who are able to distinguish good information from bad and to make good decisions based on that knowledge, instead of relinquishing all personal responsibility to messiahs, leaders, and alpha wolves. I

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated . . . In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.62

Julian seemed to delight in provoking people as much as possible. He was of the opinion that people liked to get upset. He thought, for instance, that spam was a welcome evil because it gave people an excuse to complain. You were doing them a favor by spamming them. As it happened, he had himself pressed the wrong button on our mailing list at one point so that 350,000 people received repeated e-mails. Our mailing address was put on a number of spam lists, and it wasn’t easy to get off them. Nonetheless, Julian succeeded in putting a positive spin on the mishap by claiming that people were happy when you gave them the chance to get pissed off. Another

When Russia flies relatively obsolete Tu-22m BACKFIRE jet bombers from its military base at Engels in Southern Russia to drop unguided gravity bombs indiscriminately on Aleppo, it meets the strategic goals of impressing its allies, adversaries, and the Russian people. Even if militarily such a strike mission has little to no effect on the war effort except killing innocent civilians, it looks good on Russia Television.

Even back then I thought that his uncompromising judgments and unprompted opinions, which he would simply spit out undiplomatically, would put him at odds with a lot of people. There was so much to plan and discuss. I didn’t ask myself back then whether his behavior was normal or not. I didn’t ask myself whether I could trust Julian or whether he might get me in trouble. On the contrary, I was somewhat flattered that he was interested in working with me. For me, Julian Assange was not only the founder of WL but also the hacker known as Mendax, a member of the International Subversives, one of the greatest hackers in the world, and the coauthor/researcher (with Suelette Dreyfus) of Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier—a highly respected book among connoisseurs. We hit it off right from the start. He

the framework of the conflict between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, angered by U.S. intrusion in his wars in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, the military seizure of Crimea, and pressures on NATO allies Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Putin may be unleashing Trump’s challenge as a way to exact revenge on the United States. Putin

There are entire professions that justify their existence only in terms of fluency in a self-referential system. A person’s actions might be completely banal in reality, but a description of them using these specialized terms would make them sound like high science. It’s no wonder Julian likes jargon. Jargon is a fraudulent form of significance, in which the person who is speaking automatically seems to know what he’s doing. This

With this election, Vladimir Putin, the former director of Russia’s intelligence agency, sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States, damage its economy, as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO. These events, which start with the election of Trump, would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three Superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.

Objective: Candidate Should Damage NATO Alliance and Push for its Realignment

Looking back, I ask myself whether WikiLeaks itself during my last months there had developed into a kind of religious cult. It had become a system that admitted little internal criticism. Anything that went wrong had to be the fault of something on the outside. The guru was untouchable and beyond question. Any external danger encouraged internal cohesion. Anyone who offered too much criticism was punished by being withdrawn from communication or by being threatened with possible consequences. Moreover, WL participants were only allowed to know as much as was absolutely necessary for them to carry out their appointed tasks. In any case, this much can be said: From reading the Scientology documents, and the philosophy and teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, Julian learned only too well how a cult of personality functions.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were staunch advocates of arming the government of Ukraine in their fight with Russian separatists and Putin. During the Republican National Convention, the party platform committee proposed language to the effect that Ukraine needed U.S. weapons and NATO support to defend itself, in support of a long-held Republican position. Carter Page, now on the Trump campaign team, used to work in the Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office, has personal investments in Gazprom, a Russian state oil conglomerate. He told Bloomberg that his investments have been hurt by the sanctions policy against Russia over Ukraine.39 He has characterized the U.S. policy toward Russia as chattel slavery.

All of these were drops in the bucket that could easily have been overlooked, but on August 17, 2016 the London Times released a bombshell report from Ukrainian prosecutors that Manafort had been paid by pro-Russian parties in the Ukraine to organize anti-NATO protests in Crimea, leading to the withdrawal of forces for a planned NATO exercise. The prosecutors wrote,

Julian had his own ideas about how WL should develop. He wanted to release one leak after another, as aggressively as possible, and generate a maximum of conflict. He seemed to have no interest in content or further technological development. Probably he was just not the sort of person who plans for the long-term future. The

Every selection process involves a kind of censorship, and every instance of censorship has a political component. It begins with the people involved agreeing to solicit public attention for a certain topic. And no one would deny anymore that WL attracts public attention. Because one person, Julian Assange, held too many of the strings, WikiLeaks became a global political player—something it was never intended to be. That spelled the end of our pledge to maintain strict neutrality—one of WL’s most important principles. At

Carter Page joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016. In July 2016, Page went to Moscow and delivered a series of speeches on establishing a better relationship with Russia. His recommendations included easing of economic sanctions imposed after the invasion of Crimea in 2014. As the Trump campaign talks about ending TPP and other trade deals, the unelected candidate’s spokespeople are out inviting business with Russian partners especially in industries that are known to have crime bosses and Russian mafia ties.

WikiLeaks documents show that in 2009 her State Department collaborated with sub-contractors for Hanes, Levi's, and Fruit of the Loom to oppose a minimum-wage increase for Haitian workers.

An example of the extent of the FSB and GRU covert cyber collection and exploitation was the exposure of what was most likely a Russian State Security & Navy Intelligence covert operation to monitor, exploit and hack targets within the central United States from Russian merchant ships equipped with advanced hacking hardware and tools. The US Coast guard boarded the merchant ship SS Chem Hydra and in it they found wireless intercept equipment associated with Russian hacking teams. Apparently the vessel had personnel on board who were tasked to collect intelligence on wireless networks and attempt hackings on regional computer networks in the heartland of America.59

Trump gave the New York Times a wide-ranging interview in which he remarked that he saw a major change for the seventy-year old NATO alliance. He said that if Russia attacked any NATO nation, he would first consult and determine if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us” before coming to their aid.13 Trump set forth a policy of extortion never before heard or seen in American politics:

After being turned away by American banks due to bankruptcies, Trump has been getting considerable investments from Russian sources, including many with known criminal ties. At

Always remember: cyber or kinetic, your adversaries prefer your silence, apathy and inaction. Be the consequence, not the victim.” —ANTHONY COUCHENOUR, HOPLITE CYBER SECURITY T

Why all this fear and paranoia around Vault 7 and WikiLeaks? Solve the problem by demanding regulation that centers around Security by Design by technology manufactures, problem solved

But it would not hurt to have a powerful, rich, American blowhard who could inspire the common man in one’s pocket. This

Daphne Caruana Galizia - a one woman WikiLeaks

я был и всегда буду озабочен не облегчением себе жизни, а скорее войнами, идущими по всему миру. Вскоре стало ясно, что WikiLeaks сыграет ключевую роль в освещении истинных обстоятельств этих войн: осенью и зимой 2007 года мы получили ряд документов от источников из самых недр армии США. В ноябре мы опубликовали невероятную базу данных, куда было включено все военное оборудование, зарегистрированное армией США для использования в Ираке, — около 150 тысяч записей. Я проанализировал весь материал и увидел, что он соответствует спискам боевого состава и дислокации войск: там была вся пирамидообразная система планирования с детальной информацией по каждому подразделению, включая его название и имущество, записанное на него, — не расходные материалы вроде пуль, но товары вроде персидских ковров и компьютеров. Я взял этот список и написал программу для его анализа, изучив сайт службы армейских поставок и цены, взятые с него, можно было не только оценить общий объем затрат — они были колоссальны, — но и выделить подразделения, которые финансировались лучше других. Около половины всех закупок оборудования были связаны с импровизированными взрывными устройствами повстанцев (IED), которые также называют дорожными минами. Основная часть денег была потрачена на весьма изощренные устройства для подавления радиосигналов. В общей сложности на борьбу с дорожными минами: детекторы сигнала, глушилки, роботы-саперы, дополнительная броня и прочее — было потрачено около 13 миллиардов долларов. Даже с поправкой на инфляцию это больше, чем потратили на Манхэттенский проект, и, мне кажется, мир вправе об этом знать.

The discussion contains strong and previously uncommunicated descriptions of the philosophy behind WikiLeaks and how technology affects power dynamics and social structures. It includes concepts for how to use decentralized technology to protect revolutionary activity—ideas I would love to see taken and implemented. And at the level of symbolism, the discussion sees two different futures of the internet in conversation with each other: the one, a pervasive internet of centralized corporate governance; and the other, a vibrant, decentralized internet, fit for the emancipation of human history and human beings. When Google Met WikiLeaks is the transcript