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CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

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Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#161

Post by nsajko »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #64
jasonvorhe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss that WikiLeaks met with Trump campaign staff that had close relations with russian secret services and then leaked DNC campaign mails so that right wing actors could make that into a pedophile pizza place conspiracy theory? I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone. They promised leaks on russian oligarchs that never happened. They promised to "bring down" Bank of America. They…

> I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone. Then you've been duped. The prosecution of Assange is based on his work with Chelsea Manning on US war crimes in Iraq. But if the lives of poor brown people far away are not as important as cheap partizanship then the CIA can make you believe anything. Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been c…

> Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture.

The claim of Clinton calling for Assange's assassination seems to be a completely unsubstantiated rumor.

Your "torture" claim is plainly false (even if it were true, what's the point in appealing to the authority of UN?), the "characterization" is by Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture (so he's just something like an independent consultant).

More importantly, basically everything Melzer said about Assange is bullshit. I read the interview of Melzer that seems to be the source for all of the absurd claims; and all of Melzer's claims there are vague, unsubstantiated, unverifiable or nonfalsifiable; except for one:

Turns out that Melzer's only concrete accusation is based on a misreading of evidence at best; the one against the Swedish police, of how they supposedly tampered with (even fabricated) one of the testimonies. The evidence for that is inconclusive, Melzer was possibly confused with the format of the Freedom of Information documents released by the police, but in any case Melzer is making a big fuss out of nothing and downplaying rape with his other comments at the same time.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209868

Also see the comment by one of Assange's alleged victims:

> One of the women interviewed by Melzer later sharply criticised him and demanded his resignation. She said that by defining how a "proper rape-victim" would have to act, Melzer was engaging in victim blaming and that his report was partially "untrue and defamatory"

I think it should be pretty clear that Melzer's word is worth very little.

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#162

Post by davrosthedalek »

e40 wrote: post #145
woodruffw wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm normally loathe to defend any aspect of the US MIC, but I think Pompeo's point is that Wikileaks knowingly publicizes information that has already been processed into Intelligence , and willfully turns a blind eye to its role as a laundromat for hostile powers under the guise of an ideology of totally free data. I, for one, think that all information should be free. I think Pompeo's motivations are suspect and ge…

What is not equal is the asymmetry of the information. In 2016 (2015?) the information was skewed to that provided by Russian intelligence. If there were equal amounts of dirt on every politician, then fine, but there is clearly not. This is what bothers me about the whole thing. It can be manipulated by powerful states, and some of them are more willing to use it than others.

Additionally, the same dirt is damaging to different degrees, depending on the person it's about. See current politics in the US. But I would also think that a US president-approved hit on somebody in, say England, would be treated differently than the hits perpetrated by Russia.

It's a complicated balance act. You want to hold "your" party accountable, and the scale is not "better than the others". At the same time, you don't want to diminish the difference, by just talking about your side's problems. A "we publish everything we get" policy is then not necessarily balanced, if one party plays this game, and the other doesn't.

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#163

Post by secfirstmd »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #89
roywiggins wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no doubt MI5 could be involved, but it's not very strong evidence on its own, is it?

He also doesn't claim that it's strong evidence on its own . That uncertainty is actually part of what the talk is about. The evidence must be taken in combination with other issues, e.g. his claim that the Brits do not even try to hide their surveillance (and therefore have been photographed) and the sophisticated surveillance device he found in his crypto phone.

Counter surveillance training isn't hugely difficult but it takes a certain amount of skill. The idea that the Security Service would want to be seen is a little strange. Their operators are excellent and they would be very very reluctant to expose themselves easily to send a message or bad tradecraft. If they want someone to be clearly seen they send a copper.

There are many other possible options. Basic trained police (some have been exposed before in Wikileaks related stuff) or a military team, foreign actor or quite possibly a corporate intelligence team. Perhaps even criminal elements.

Working to help manage security for NGOs in London/elsewhere often means my organisation works essentially a counter-intelligence role against corporate intelligence (many of whom were often working on behalf of states). They are very prominent in digital and physical surveillance. Many times we identified and exposed very big operations targeted against activists - harrassment, hacking, physical surveillance, bugging etc. It's was one of the reason we built our open source Umbrella App (https://www.secfirst.org) to make it easier for activists and journalists to be able to learn about and manage things like surveillance. Covert method of entry teams in the UK are known as exceptional (you'd have to be working in Northern Ireland for decades), there's pretty much no way they would get stuck by a commercially available key. Also it's highly highly unlikely they would try make an entrance when the person is so near to their home. Especially if it resulted in damage. For such a sophisticated door they would have planned such a thing well in advance. It's plausible of course, maybe they were just lazy or whatever, but there are a number of possible other reasons.

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#164

Post by monocasa »

eli wrote: post #58
thakoppno wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the part that stands out to me is that the Clinton campaign and the media coordinated to elevate the candidacy of Trump, believing that he’d be easier to defeat in a general election

An email said they wanted to elevate Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson. At the time those seemed like the easiest people to beat. That’s the big scandal? I guess that’s newsworthy in a very inside-baseball kind of way but I don’t think it justifies posting someone’s whole inbox online.

The big scandal is the knowledge that third way democrats have moved so far to the right, that they need fascist-lite candidates on the right to contrast themselves with, to the point that they gave material support to the farthest right wing components of the republican party.

The major message for two presidential campaigns has been "we must do everything possible to defeat Trump, and by that we mean not voting for progressives" is BS when the third wayers had a major hand in putting him in the White House to begin with, and their long term strategy more or less requires similar tactics in the future.

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#165

Post by briantakita »

shadowgovt wrote: post #59
briantakita wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all this talk about Democracy is just one big show...

Democratic elections are how we choose between the candidates sponsored by the parties. Hypothetically, there's nothing actually stopping those elections from choosing someone outside the party, but when we're talking in election over a population of 350 million people, even getting an individual's name in front of the voters such that they think to write them in requires a level of organization on par with a nationa…

Given the obvious election fraud caught on camera, forensic evidence, voter roll issues, intimidation of poll watchers, lack of transparency, & the lack actionable oversight that we saw in the 2020 election, is there any hope to reform the corrupt political system or even to ascertain "the consent of the governed"?

If you add a backstop against political outsiers gaining office, only insiders who are under control of entrenched politicrats (who have no interest in reform), corrupt actors & revolving door beurcracats/lobbyists can win a significant political position.

Thats a lot of words to say the whole system is rotten and any narrow window of reform is quickly shut...

As George Carlin said:

It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#166

Post by sudosysgen »

vbtemp wrote: post #132

Honest question, please don't snipe at me. Can someone please point me to significant leaks from out of china, russia, iran on wikileaks? Edit: since it appears no one can actually answer this question with an actual answer, and only down vote and troll, I think that probably means wikileaks does not make significant leaks from the military-industrial complexes of China or Russia.

Wikileaks is an English speaking website. All three of these countries aren't democracies, so whistle-blowers have no incentive to speak up. Finally, if you are from those countries and send info to Wikileaks, you would be sending information to a foreign organization which risks much harsher punishment.

For all of these reasons, it is much much less likely for any leaker out of China, Russia or Iran to leak to Wikileaks instead of someone else.

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#167

Post by drewblaisdell »

seppin wrote: post #151
rmrfstar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary threat to "liberal democracy" is CIA, DHS, MI5, and MI6. It is not SVR or MSS. This has been true since the Cold War. Who did more harm to "liberal democracy", J. Edgar Hoover (who tried to extort MLK into suicide), or KGB?

> Who did more harm to "liberal democracy", J. Edgar Hoover (who tried to extort MLK into suicide), or KGB? I get this is supposed to be a debate, but the FBI never rolled tanks into Poland or Czechoslovakia. The FBI never annexed the peninsula of a foreign country, then set up fraud elections to make it look organic. Most importantly, the US largely ended it's support of anti-democratic forces post-cold war. The KGB…

> the US largely ended it's support of anti-democratic forces post-cold war

Except in Venezuela, Bolivia, the Middle East...

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#168

Post by motohagiography »

I recommend to people who ask my security advice to not have intelligence agencies in their personal threat models because it only encourages them and they need the budget justification. Working in cybersecurity for a couple of decades, lots of people have stories like these. There was even some speculation from one person that they keep people under surveillance just as training targets even when there is no intelligence value. The whole enterprise is pernicious, but apparently it's the price of civilization.

As an antidote to the paranoia for others, consider the sort of person who has to do this kind of thing as a job and whether they are the sort of person whose opinion you value.

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#169

Post by stefantalpalaru »

vbtemp wrote: post #132

Honest question, please don't snipe at me. Can someone please point me to significant leaks from out of china, russia, iran on wikileaks? Edit: since it appears no one can actually answer this question with an actual answer, and only down vote and troll, I think that probably means wikileaks does not make significant leaks from the military-industrial complexes of China or Russia.

> Can someone please point me to significant leaks from out of china, russia, iran on wikileaks?

https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:China

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Iran

Re: CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]

#170

Post by jimmyswimmy »

tyingq wrote: post #24
xvf22 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5th image bottom left you can see a little board with 3 black wires running off of it that doesn't look original. Could be a factory bodge but definitely looks a bit out of place.

Ah, thanks. Though the slides talk about, for example, the Spartan 6, which is on the larger board and seems factory looking. That white connector on the little tap board appears to plug into J4 on this board: http://buggedplanet.info/lost+found/20180323/Images/18.jpg So that larger board would have to be part of the conspiracy. It's the one with the 2 FPGAs, NAND memory, board trace antenna, etc. That board is obvio…

Such a chip would enable the phone to act as a base station for a wireless headset. Snom make several varieties of such headsets. It is not necessarily proof of a "bug," could just be additional, perhaps never implemented, functionality for the phone.
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