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Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#861
post #325
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a neutral opinion of Assange until he posted (and then deleted) a tweet with echo parentheses. That made it pretty obvious he's not really in it for any noble purpose.

Wow. Screenshot? (For those not aware, (((echo parenthesis))) are an anti-semitic symbol used by white supremacists to highlight people who are Jewish.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses Edit: Wow, here it is: http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/wikileaks-echoes-tweet-anti-s... Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. i.e. most of our critics are Jewish. Presuma…

The echo was quickly co-opted. I.e by the time of the tweet most of Wikileaks critics were running the Spartacus defense on the bigots who started the echo.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/echoes-means-twitte...

The "horrible" idea is that maybe who ever made the Wikileaks tweet was running Coincidence Detector, IGNORING that for weeks the echo had been exposed and co-opted.

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't give Bill Clinton a check for $1m. They contributed $1m to the Clinton Foundation in honor of his birthday. Contrary to what some alt-right sites maintain, the Clintons derive no personal income from the charitable foundation which takes its name from them.

This is pretty disingenuous for the definition of charity. The Clinton Foundation perhaps redefines what political bribery means in the 21st century, in an attempt to skirt the laws set up to prevent power, via money, government leaders or corporations influencing policy or private citizens. The Clinton Foundation is the new SuperPAC. At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "cha…

Here's some facts for you: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/06/where-does-clinton-foundati.... Here's the last few paragraphs for your benefit:

Considering all of the organizations affiliated with the Clinton Foundation, he said, CharityWatch concluded about 89 percent of its budget is spent on programs. That’s the amount it spent on charity in 2013, he said.

We looked at the consolidated financial statements (see page 4) and calculated that in 2013, 88.3 percent of spending was designated as going toward program services — $196.6 million out of $222.6 million in reported expenses.

We can’t vouch for the effectiveness of the programming expenses listed in the report, but it is clear that the claim that the Clinton Foundation only steers 6 percent of its donations to charity is wrong, and amounts to a misunderstanding of how public charities work.

> Would a charity request for money be considered access, at the same level as PAC influence?

Is it pay of play in the same way if a donation was made to a completely unaffiliated charity, such as the American Red Cross? What if the donation is made first, and the politician notices and it happens to make them look favorably on a meeting because it bodes well for the character of the person in question?

> At what point is a $1 million birthday gift seen as a gift from a friend? Or a "charitable donation" ?

It's a gift to you when it's actually to you, and not to a separate organization that spends it on things that aren't for your own benefit.

> At some point, the foundation should be considered a profitable business rather than a charity, given the immense staffing and expenditures of operation in a billion dollar+ charity organization.

I'm not sure you understand how charities work. They are generally rated by how much money donated goes back out in programs, services or donations to other organizations to achieve the same.

> It's not trivial to ignore the oddities that abound when it does not operate like any other charity organization. Plane tickets for Hillary and Chelsea, car expenses, six figure living expenses, etc.

You should substantiate statements like that with references. Preferably to trusted sources.

> The democratic process is acutely broken by any standard if you believe that PACs and now, "charity organizations" is a net benefit.

I don't believe charity organizations working as a PAC is beneficial, but I haven't seen any evidence of that either.

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#863
Assange has been scheduled to be interrogated by Sweden today (October 17th) since at least mid-September [1]. Both the internet outage and the pre-commitments are likely related to that. For more analysis (and the evaluate the evidence yourself), follow along at https://www.opensynthesis.org/boards/14/who-cut-wikileaks-fo...

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/11/europe/julian-assange-question...

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#864
post #767
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean, "who knows"? Seriously, I have no idea how you can listen to anything Trump says and come away with the idea that he represents positive change. Granted, most of Trump's output is not even properly formed sentences, so maybe he's doing a malformed data denial-of-service attack on voters' senses?

He seems to be interested more in internal issues. Less wars abroad and de-escalation of tensions with Russia. He also seems to be quite anti-globalization, anti-TPP etc. Slapping Wall St banks would be cherry on top. In any case a change of "elites" (if not economical, at least political) would be welcome. Probably won't be less corruption, but different corruption instead. Re: Trump's speeches - mostly non-sensical…

> Less wars abroad and de-escalation of tensions with Russia.

Pretty certain Trump called for US troops to be used in both Syria and Libya. He's also called for an escalation of bombing of ISIS, and supported torture. And he's made intemperate remarks about reacting to provocation - Russian planes shot down for flying over US ships, Iranian ships shot at if the crew make rude gestures. I would say it's at least arguable to say there will be fewer wars under Trump. Personally I find it quite difficult to follow that line of argument. I'd expect Clinton to be more hawkish than Obama, but Obama has been one of the US Presidents most keen on diplomacy and de-escalation for decades.

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#865
post #847
post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen anything that egregious from the NYT. Can you link to this email, please?

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/leaked-hillary-clinton-email...

That doesn't seem to say anything about collusion with the NYT. Do you have anything that backs that up?

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magnitude of the falseness of this equivalence tells you everything you need to know about Wikileaks role in this election. Implied in it is the idea that the Clinton campaign had an obligation to release their opposition research on Trump as soon as they had it. But of course, they have no such obligation: they're not journalists! On the other hand, Wikileaks clearly is structuring their releases to draw out the…

Exactly. These weren't excavated as part of the next horrible Raiders of the Lost Arc reboots. They're recorded convos on the Howard stern show. Anyone could have found it. Better way of looking at it is: what would the effect be of the media letting a psychopath through until the late stages, letting the election get close, and then and only then actually educating the voting public on some of the most unsavory part…

The debates that didn't run commercials?

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#867
post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are disagreeing with an argument I didn't make. The burden of proof is always on the accuser/state. That is what makes sex crimes so hard to prosecute. I never made any statement regarding that or suggested anything should change with sex crimes compared to other crimes. I simply stated that the ideas someone can't be raped if they have previously had consensual sex with their rapist or that they must immediately…

> You are disagreeing with an argument I didn't make. > I simply stated that the ideas someone can't be raped if they have previously had consensual sex with their rapist or that they must immediately end contact with their rapist are ignorant ideas. Agreed. Luckily the commenter you were calling "ignorant" never claimed anything of the sort, so I'm afraid you're the one that started this particular straw man (perhap…

>Sweden has hunted Assange for 6 years for the 'crime' of being promiscuous with the wrong women. Oh, and he did not use a condom, but the 'rape victim' still did not mind having dinner with him afterwards... Given the fact that they'd had intercourse several times before during the same night I don't the claim would stick.

I mean OP put both crime and rape victim in scare quotes and their first argument as to why is she "still did not mind having dinner with him afterwards." They then say that they don't think the claims would stick because "they'd had intercourse several times before during the same night". I'm not sure how to take those statements any other way. Am I missing something here?

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds sensible, they say it's over 500GB of Documents. The release of such a flood of files would swamp all "public intelligence capacity" until after the election. If you looked at how long it took to find the gold nuggets in the Podesta mails it sounds reasonable willing to force their hand.

I think that any intelligence community that couldn't digest 500GB in full text / keyword searching (keywords that are likely already configured/known) between now and the election would be a pretty sad intelligence community. Apropos of the keyword list, dissecting the corpus could be done in a few hours with a promo-code worth of AWS time.

I think "Public Intelligence Capacity" was referring to the ability for use regular members of society to find and verify meaningful information from the leaks.

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the NYT trustworthy. The front page contains a dozen or so anti-Trump stories and zero about anything in the email leaks. I want to trust the NYTimes but it's hard to take seriously a paper that ignores something important. The same would be true if it had ignored Trump's leaked tax docs.

That is because the recent email leaks just validated what everyone already knew about Hillary Clinton and her campaign. The fact that the emails were LEAKED OMG is not the newsworthy part. It is what is in them. And largely speaking, there's not much news in them. IMO a major problem in the U.S. today is that not many people understand how political campaigns or the federal government actually work. So a lot of peop…

> LEAKED

I've not heard anywhere that they were leaked, which suggests a disgruntled insider. The US government claims that they were hacked, and apparently that information was communicate to both Trump and Clinton in their national security briefings.

Assange has not been forthcoming about the source of the emails.

Re: Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'

#870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given his attitude, Trump seems way more likely to invade other countries and n general sable rattle. Also, I wouldn't call what Obama did sable rattling. Russia did invade several countries in the last years (Georgia, Ukraine, and maybe I'm missing one more?). If you don't have a good response for that, then how can you be trusted to defend your other allies (Poland, etc.)

Georgia attacked first, after the US-sponsored 'Rose Revolution', and the US also sponsored 2 'revolutions' in Ukraine. Crimea was hardly invaded, it was a region which had tried in the past to separate from Ukraine. Again, both actions you cite were reactions to US meddling in the region in the first place. The fact Trump hasn't threatened any new invasions is already an improvement. PS. Do you know who Mikheil Saak…

Crimea was hardly invaded

Right -- the several thousand army and special forces troops that Putin has since openly acknowledged sending there to size buildings and other strategic checkpoints were just out on vacation.

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