Julian Assange of WikiLeaks soon to be expelled from Ecuador Embassy

[Flarelaine]

Opinion?

Don't you need proof beyond reasonable doubt?

Only when he reaches court.

[arandomuser]

"Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia's foreign ministry, criticized Assange's arrest.

"The hand of 'democracy' squeezes the throat of freedom," she said in a Facebook post."

yeah unlike russia which has a fucking dictator,

im glad hes going to the US because EU got rid of the death penalty for treason which blows my mind

[Spectral]

Umm, Victor Bout?

Definitely not first.

Huh. Today I learned.

[Nerovar]

This is a yikes from me on all counts. Always funny to see Americans who are out for blood.

[Skroe]

*Chelsea. No need to be a dick and misgender her.

I don't respect Bradley Manning. He's a scumbag. Why would I respect that aspect of them as well? Have we missed the part where we weaponize everything we can against people? You think identity is off limits? It's not. Being a dick IS the point. You think I don't know what I'm doing when I call them a him and Bradley? Of course I do.

Bradley Manning ceased being someone worthy of respect and compassion the second they committed their crime and conspired with a US adversary. He's not some goddamn dumb kid who robbed a 7-Eleven or sold some weed.

This person shouldn't be wearing heals and dresses. They can call themselves whatever they like. The only thing they should be wearing is an orange jump suit.

Also, she actually exposed war crimes the US committed and should have never been locked up.

No. He did not.

(I forgot how much of a jingoist you are. What is a lil bit slaughtering civilians after all in the name of US economic interests?)

I had forgotten how much I missed the ol "War for Oil" line. Hit me with some Haliburton slams, my dude. Let's replay all the greatest hits of last decade.

Man, what are folks going to come up with now that the main US conflict for decades to come is going to be mostly a high-tech air and naval confrontation between the US and China. "No War for Fish"? "The US is going to War to protect US fishing?"

[Beazy]

Damn, he didn't want to go, looked like he was about to start crying.


Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.
Hes going to regret leaking all that classified info and turning it into propaganda.

[roboscorcher]

His name is Bradley... His momma named him Bradley... just because you have your dick removed doesn't make you a woman... it makes you a man without a dick.

Wow what an intelligent argument. All the people who have endured multiple surgeries, ridicule from friends and family, all to become the person they feel they are inside...all they need is to hear this logic and I'm sure they will all change their minds! I can't wait to see them all recant their ways. I'm glad you thought long and hard about their lives, worldviews and struggles.

[Skroe]

Opinion?

Don't you need proof beyond reasonable doubt?

opinion is my word. US intelligence is quite clear in their public statements that the relationship is definitive. That will be presented in court, if and when he is tried.

But let's be clear about something, because it'll be easy to confuse this crucial point. Right now, Wikileaks (the brand) IS Julian Assange and Julian Assange is Wikileaks. It was not always so. Just under a decade ago he had a much larger group who worked with him and built all sorts of infrastructure. That, let's call it "Wikileaks 1.0", is the stuff that got the Bradley Manning dump. But it fell apart, again, about 8 years ago or so, because almost all of those people who worked with Assange found him to be impossible to work with, a sociopath, and just a shit person. They split off and founded their own leaks sites (not sure what happened to those).

Since then, particularly since he locked himself in the Ecuadorean Embassy, "Wikileaks 2.0" has been Assange and a tiny handful of people on the outside helping with administration. That's why Wikileaks has been a slow moving dinosaur in terms of new tech to facilitate leaking and in terms of dumps. Because it's pretty much a one man job. Somewhere along the line, between Wikileaks 1.0 and 2.0, Assange fell in with Russian Intelligence. Probably to stay in the game and stay relevant (is associates describe him as obsessed with being a global figure). The leaks had to come from somewhere, so Russian intelligence grabbed them and gave them to the mostly one-man-show Wikileaks had become, because it was a Western-oriented "brand name".

Consider... what has been the most substantial leak from Wikileaks that did not benefit Russia in the past 8 years? There hasn't been one. But there has been an absolutely major leak agaisnt - the Panama Papers, which Wikileaks had nothing to do with, and even shit talked.

- - - Updated - - -

because he hates trump too. those types tend to just hate anything that has to do with American government. obv i'm wrong here, @Skroe you're like a lasagna, rich in flavor and multi layered

I hate Trump because I'm ardently pro-American.

Trump is the debasement of America. He's an abomination.

[Theodarzna]

One of scant few actual journalists being actually arrested by the State. Interesting age. So the idea that the U.S. government can just extend its reach to any news outlet anywhere in the world and criminalize publication of documents … is extremely interesting.

All of the journalists around the world will surely be supporting one of their fellow journalists who is being arrested for doing journalism. Surely they will. ....right?

[Skroe]

Confirmed:


We're getting him.

[Cizr]

Opinion?

Don't you need proof beyond reasonable doubt?

Nah they dont care about proofs.

Thats why they call him rapist too

[Surreality]

Wow what an intelligent argument. All the people who have endured multiple surgeries, ridicule from friends and family, all to become the person they feel they are inside...all they need is to hear this logic and I'm sure they will all change their minds! I can't wait to see them all recant their ways. I'm glad you thought long and hard about their lives, worldviews and struggles.

His comment had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with trying to "change their minds". It is simply a statement of fact. People can "be" whatever they want to be on the outside, but on the inside, a Y chromosome is still a Y chromosome and a X chromosome is still a X chromosome. That cannot be changed by any kind of surgery. As the man says, "facts don't care about your feelings".

[Skroe]

One of scant few actual journalists being actually arrested by the State. Interesting age. So the idea that the U.S. government can just extend its reach to any news outlet anywhere in the world and criminalize publication of documents … is extremely interesting.

All of the journalists around the world will surely be supporting one of their fellow journalists who is being arrested for doing journalism. Surely they will. ....right?

He's not a journalist. But you know that.

Now by comparison, if Glenn Greenwald were to be arrested, we'd have a serious problem. Greenwald's a scumbag with lots of deep seated personal issues he projects on the world, but is undeniably a journalist.

Assange is essentially an information arsonist, who has been working with Russian Intelligence since some point in the last decade, probably sometime after his original Wikileaks crew decided to mass quit on him.

[Nerovar]

One of scant few actual journalists being actually arrested by the State. Interesting age. So the idea that the U.S. government can just extend its reach to any news outlet anywhere in the world and criminalize publication of documents … is extremely interesting.

All of the journalists around the world will surely be supporting one of their fellow journalists who is being arrested for doing journalism. Surely they will. ....right?

Sure, they surely will do that.

[Sloppynacho]

Don't cry child. Your mind is dominated by the American culture, just look at the American spellings you use haha.

America has you by the balls.

Judging somebody by their spelling just shows how much you need to grow up. Ofcourse my spelling is in influenced by American culture, isn't it globally? What a weak statement. Lets talk about Brexit.

[Theodarzna]

He's not a journalist. But you know that.

Now by comparison, if Glenn Greenwald were to be arrested, we'd have a serious problem. Greenwald's a scumbag with lots of deep seated personal issues he projects on the world, but is undeniably a journalist.

Assange is essentially an information arsonist, who has been working with Russian Intelligence since some point in the last decade, probably sometime after his original Wikileaks crew decided to mass quit on him.

I know, he revealed dirty secrets of the Imperium and your urge to purge a heretic is too great. You got your journalist jailed, learn to smile man.

[Nerovar]

What crime would he be tried for in the U.S.?

[Fargus]

I know, he revealed dirty secrets of the Imperium and your urge to purge a heretic is too great. You got your journalist jailed, learn to smile man.

Yeah, they certainly didn't like Vault 7 being released.

[Theodarzna]

What crime would he be tried for in the U.S.?

Any crime they can come up with.

[Skroe]

I know, he revealed dirty secrets of the Imperium and your urge to purge a heretic is too great. You got your journalist jailed, learn to smile man.

Do you mean the State Department Cables that made the US State Department look... rather good and professional in a world awash in corruption and incompetence?

Or do you mean the Snowden Affair where he he revealed the dirty secret that the US did about 5% shady shit against friends, our own people and 95% perfectly legitimate shit against our adversaries?

This is the real Julian Assange, Russian asset:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17...tial-campaign/

WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign
The leak organization ignored damaging information on the Kremlin to focus on Hillary Clinton and election-related hacks.

In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records.

WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.

The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks’s side of the conversation.

“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.

“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.

(The account is widely believed to be operated solely by Assange, the group’s founder, but in a Twitter message to FP, the organization said it is maintained by “staff.”)

In 2014, the BBC and other news outlets reported on the cache, which revealed details about Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine. However, the information from that hack was less than half the data that later became available in 2016, when Assange turned it down.

“We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services,” the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. “Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse.”

The Russian cache was eventually quietly published online elsewhere, to almost no attention or scrutiny.

In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of potentially damaging emails about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign, information the U.S. intelligence community believes was hacked as part of a Kremlin-directed campaign. Assange’s role in publishing the leaks sparked allegations that he was advancing a Russian-backed agenda.

Back in 2010, Assange vowed to publish documents on any institution that resisted oversight.

WikiLeaks in its early years published a broad scope of information, including emails belonging to Sarah Palin and Scientologists, phone records of Peruvian politicians, and inside information from surveillance companies. “We don’t have targets,” Assange said at the time.

But by 2016, WikiLeaks had switched course, focusing almost exclusively on Clinton and her campaign.

Approached later that year by the same source about data from an American security company, WikiLeaks again turned down the leak. “Is there an election angle? We’re not doing anything until after the election unless its [sic] fast or election related,” WikiLeaks wrote. “We don’t have the resources.”

Anything not connected to the election would be “diversionary,” WikiLeaks wrote.

“WikiLeaks schedules publications to maximize readership and reader engagement,” WikiLeaks wrote in a Twitter message to FP. “During distracting media events such as the Olympics or a high profile election, unrelated publications are sometimes delayed until the distraction passes but never are rejected for this reason.”

WikiLeaks’s relationship with Russia started out as adversarial. In October 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks teased a massive dump of documents that would expose wrongdoing in the Kremlin, teaming up with a Russian news site for the rollout. “We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen,” Assange told a Russian newspaper.

“We will publish these materials soon,” he promised.

“Russians are going to find out a lot of interesting facts about their country,” WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said at the time.

In November 2010, WikiLeaks began to release documents from its cache provided by Chelsea Manning, which included cables from U.S. diplomats around the world, including Russia.

WikiLeaks partnered with the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, but only a handful of stories were published out of almost a quarter of a million files from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Novoya Gazeta paid for exclusive access to the documents, according to John Helmer, a foreign correspondent in Moscow writing for Business Insider.

WikiLeaks says there was no financial aspect to the publishing partnership with Novaya Gazeta, which did not respond to a request for comment. “We do not have insight into the publication decisions of [Novaya Gazeta],” WikiLeaks told FP.

Meanwhile, Assange’s position on Russia was evolving. Assange in 2012 had his own show on the Kremlin-funded news network RT, and that same year, he produced episodes for the network where he interviewed opposition thinkers like Noam Chomsky and so-called “cypherpunks.”

Questions about Assange’s links to Russia were raised last year, when the Daily Dot reported that WikiLeaks failed to publish documents that revealed a 2 billion euro transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank in 2012. Details about the documents appear in leaked court records obtained by the Daily Dot, which were placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court.

A WikiLeaks spokesperson told the Daily Dot that no emails were removed from what the organization published. The spokesperson also suggested the Daily Dot was “pushing the Hillary Clinton campaign’s neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories about critical media.”

Assange believes that U.S. officials hoping to damage his reputation leaked the court records, according to the messages provided to FP.

“There’s a passing claim that the ‘500 pages’ comes from the US government’s investigation into Wikileaks,” one message from WikiLeaks reads. “If true, the US government appears to be leaking data on the Wikileaks investigation, which fabricated or angled to help HRC. Huge story that everyone missed.”

WikiLeaks again told FP that “the story is false” but did not elaborate.

When Novaya Gazeta reported in April 2016 on the 11.5 million documents known as the Panama Papers, which exposed how powerful figures worldwide hide their money overseas, Assange publicly criticized the work. He suggested that reporters had “cherry-picked” the documents to publish for optimal “Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing, etc.” while giving Western figures a pass.

In fact, news outlets involved in publishing leaks reported on a number of Western figures, including then-British Prime Minister David Cameron.

“For me it was a surprise that Mr. Assange was repeating the same excuse that our officials, even back in Soviet days, used to say — that it’s all some conspiracy from abroad,” Roman Shleynov, a Russian investigative reporter, said in an interview with the New York Times.

WikiLeaks says Assange “didn’t” specifically challenge Novaya Gazeta or the other news outlets that worked on the Panama Papers, despite Assange’s public statements to the contrary.

“There should be more leaks from Russia,” Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former German spokesman for WikiLeaks, said in an interview with France 24 in March. He suggested that since WikiLeaks’s readers were mostly English-speaking, there wasn’t enough demand.

By June 2016, Assange had threatened to dump files on Clinton that would be damaging to her campaign prospects. A month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails out of the Democratic National Committee — preceding the massive dumps in October of emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

In late August 2016, when WikiLeaks’s Clinton disclosures were in full swing, Assange said he had information on Trump but that it wasn’t worth publishing. (In a message to FP, WikiLeaks now says the organization “received no original documents on the campaign that did not turn out to be already public.”)

“The problem with the Trump campaign,” Assange said at the time, “is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day.”

The link above has the actual chat logs.

- - - Updated - - -

What crime would he be tried for in the U.S.?

Cybercrimes, theft, espionage.