CNet and The Guardian are both reporting on a WikiLeaks tweet calling for Trump’s tax returns to be submitted to them – as if it is a new story!

They aren’t the only ones making themselves look silly. The Huffington Post were at it too, initially posting the completely false headline “WikiLeaks Suddenly Wants Trump’s Secret Tax Returns”

Media have long been trying to blame WikiLeaks for Trump being elected and their insinuation is that WikiLeaks have only just now decided to go after Trump. But the reality couldn’t be further from the truth:

WikiLeaks has been asking for the tax returns for nearly six months, if not longer.

But even Vice News fell for the line that this is a new thing.

It’s a hard lesson to consumers that sometimes what you read in the news isn’t news at all. Just conveniently timed, targeted information that media elites seized an opportunity to put their spin on.

WikiLeaks did send out a call for a whistleblower to submit the returns so that they can be released to the public. But it was not the first time WikiLeaks had made such a request, or even the second.

Yet many wrongly assumed that interest in Trump’s tax returns was a shift in position for Wikileaks when it has in fact been after them all along.

The New York Times took this moment to advertise its anonymous, confidential tip service, using “SecureDrop,” software developed for journalists to securely receive information from sources via encrypted file transfer.

A better idea: https://t.co/yk2jd7YrY3

— Patrick LaForge (@palafo) January 22, 2017

Of course they completely failed to mention that the SecureDrop concept was engineered and championed by WikiLeaks itself, who were the first media organisation in the world to use technology of that kind to protect their sources.

Ironic considering when the New York Times recently launched their installation of the platform, many commenters suggested to them that sources would be better off going to WikiLeaks!

Some were even less kind, making it clear that they consider the New York Times to be a part of the fake news club:

Clearly a lot of people really are concerned about Trump’s tax returns.

Hopefully they will also be concerned by having yet again been pedalled fake news by media giants capitalising on any possible opportunity to discredit WikiLeaks – a publisher who has consistently outstripped the mainstream in achievements, social media saturation and popularity.

The post Media Caught Publishing Fake News About WikiLeaks’ Position On Trump Tax Returns appeared first on We Are Change.

Assange answered that question and many more, in a live Periscope audio press conference last Thursday.

“The answer is I don’t know. Normally, as an analyst of political affairs we don’t look at things in terms of personal grudges, we think it has usually poor explanatory power… But John Brennan, in his testimony before Congress Thursday before last, at the John McCain put together in the Senate, he does act a little unusually when he is asked the question about me personally. In fact, he almost spits. It’s possibly related to, that we published materials allegedly from a 16-year-old hacker, up in the North Midlands of England, which was his private security clearance application form and a review from the CIA and the Auditor-General… if you’re hacked by a 16-year-old kid and you’re the head of the CIA and what is published is quite embarrassing to your prestige then perhaps you take it personally.” – Julian Assange

The size and significance of the US Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks is without precedent. No one really knows how many WikiLeaks journalists, supporters, funders and partners are also on the line.

Well-known WikiLeaks associate Renata Avila, a Human Rights lawyer from Guatemala, submitted a question about exactly that via social media on the hashtag #AskWL.

She asked: “How many journalists are under investigation for their collaboration in Cablegate publications and spheres?”

“It’s a very interesting question. The answer is unknown. That is part of the problem with the U.S. case against WikiLeaks and me which was erected by the Department of Justice. With the Grand Jury being in Alexandria, Virginia. The National Security Division of the Department of Justice and the Criminal Division have been running that case since the middle of 2010. They maintain, as of this year, that it continues. It’s something that has affected many people… around half a dozen individuals have gone into exile… There has been many attempts by the press in the United States and our lawyers and Chelsea Manning’s lawyers and EPIC – the Electronic Privacy and Information Centre – and EFF, to get hold of some of the status of that investigation, who its affected, what possibly illegal investigative techniques have been used… They maintain, in court filings this year, that to reveal any substantial information about that case would be to negatively effect the pending prosecution. What we have as a result is, process as punishment… It really is a large case. There’s not only that we can see this by people being pulled into the Grand Jury and so on and those other activities, but statements made by the US government officially to Australian diplomats who reported those cables back to the Australian government maintained that the United States government said that it was of unprecedented scale and nature.” – Julian Assange

Since Assange first made the public offer last November to accept extradition to the United States if Chelsea Manning received clemency, there has been a huge amount of speculation in the press on whether this would go ahead. What is stopping this occurring? Well, it turns out that the United States and the United Kingdom refuse to own up to whether or not there even is an extradition request.

“This is exactly the problem… As of this year, 2017, they maintain, the DOJ Criminal Division, National Security Division, that the case proceeds, but what is the purpose of it? It doesn’t make sense to keep it going for 7 years unless you have a sealed indictment that you’re waiting to serve on people. Now, our lawyers have asked the United Kingdom, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to tell us, have they received a US extradition request for me yet and the response by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is that they refuse to confirm or deny whether they have received such a request… just today, the L’Espresso reporter Stefania Maurizi has got a response back from the UK Crown Prosecution Service saying once again, that it refuses to confirm or deny whether there is an extradition request live in the United Kingdom from the United States.” – Julian Assange

Understandably, Assange expressed great satisfaction with the clemency of Manning and deferred to the Obama administration’s claim that they had not made the decision to free Manning based on Assange’s offer.

“We are very, very happy that Manning has received clemency. It is a major strategic victory to have achieved that, both for Chelsea Manning and everything that she has had to suffer over the last 7 years. It was a terrible case, Barack Obama should have granted her clemency at the least in his first term, there was no need to wait for such a long period to do it… Now, interestingly, the Obama White House in order to, well maybe it’s the truth but perhaps in order to look tough, has distanced itself and it says that they didn’t give Chelsea Manning clemency because of my offer in September and later on. So it’s not something that can be taken away, the clemency, politically at least, because the Obama administration says it is not dependent on anything that I do. But I’ve always been willing to go to the United States provided that my rights are respected because this is a case that should never have occurred. It is fundamentally unjust in relation to my staff, in relation to WikiLeaks as a publisher, in relation to the terrible precedents that it will set under the 1st Amendment.” – Julian Assange

Assange’s remarks on the current state of journalism and of public information systems as a whole, were enlightening. He spoke first to mass media censorship and shortsightedness, and later to the present outlook for journalism as a whole. He warned the establishment press that if they cheer his downfall, that they would inevitably be empowering or emboldening political enemies of transparency to make other journalists the targets of the future.

“In some ways right now is a golden age of journalism in English. Because it’s becoming so cheap to become a publisher so there’s a lot more variety in publishers that are cropping up. Each one has their different interests and different angles, each one has their different loyalties and this clash of voices is more likely to reveal the truth… there is a lot of bad journalists, it’s true. Not accurate and who are not loyal to protecting the basic interests of the press, the American people and people globally which is the right to speak and to publish and to communicate to each other… There’s been a type of frankly disturbing glee trying to decontextualise some of my remarks, hoping or lusting it even seems, for my extradition to the United States for an entirely bogus case which would set a very deleterious precedent for people’s rights to publish across the board. So, come on guys, what are you doing? You’re going to take yourselves out just like that if you keep carrying on jumping after every ball the administration throws.” – Julian Assange

Of course, one of the questions on everyone’s lips is whether WikiLeaks will be as critical of Trump’s administration.

“Yes! It’s a very interesting time… From a security publisher point of view who specialises a lot in national security issues, this conflict which has developed between the embryonic Trump administration and the Central Intelligence Agency… we think will lead to dissidents and sources in both camps coming forward. We’ve already seen that on the CIA side from the Obama administration… so, you know, we’re looking forward to that conflict and other conflicts to occur among this new administration. There has been Cabinet members amongst this new administration which have said appalling things in the past about the rights of the press, the bona fide rights of the press and WikiLeaks and myself personally so we are under no illusions that there are people in that Cabinet that are of significant concern to WikiLeaks and should be of significant concern to those concerned with press freedoms in general.” – Julian Assange

Apparently the DOJ persecution of WikiLeaks includes warrants for charges that effectively equate publishing with terrorism.

“There has been a 7-year long attempt to build a prosecution against WikiLeaks and… it’s active and ongoing. Now the warrants have five charge types. They have the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Section 1A which was defined by the Patriot Act as electronic terrorism. What the hell is going on trying to say that publishing is electronic terrorism?” – Julian Assange

The misnomer that WikiLeaks goes after the United States specifically was raised, and quickly debunked.

“It doesn’t. It’s absolute nonsense. In the last months we have published hundreds of thousands of documents about other countries, Germany and Turkey included, in fact in total volume, way more than we published during the US election cycle. People of a particular culture, or of a particular language group, they are interested in their culture and their language group so there is a selection bias that people read about things that are connected to them and when we publish in a different language or about a different culture, people are not aware of it.” – Julian Assange

WikiLeaks has enjoyed massive growth in reach and popularity as a result of the DNC and Podesta emails, particularly among US citizens. In response to a query about how people could contribute or assist with future releases, Assange gave fans some advice for how they can assist WikiLeaks and step up for freedom of information in general.

“Go to WikiLeaks.org and make sure we’re really cashed up for the conflict ahead… Either you have time or you have a skill or financial resources. If you have financial resources then you should give them to those organisations which seem to be quite efficient in what they are doing in promoting the freedom of the press. Obviously that’s WikiLeaks, organizations like Courage, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States, Wau Holland Foundation in Germany, Amnesty International Spain has done a really good job with the Manning case, with the Manning clemency, or if you have a skill then you can… use that skill directly to volunteer for some of these organisations or do something on your own, start your own thing. If you just have time and no skills and no money then use that time in the public debate to correct factual inaccuracies for example, or to amplify those people who are doing good work.” – Julian Assange

One person wanted to know how WikiLeaks staff keep motivated under the massive pressures on them and the trials and tribulations that they face. The answer? Empathy.

“That’s an interesting question. At different times of the year there might be different views on what the morale is like… I guess part of how I maintain morale is everyone goes well, goddamnit, if Julian can do it in that situation, then I can do it in the situation that I’m in. For myself, well I love what we’re doing. I like to think—well who wouldn’t like to do the sort of stuff that WikiLeaks does? We help understand the world in a way which was never done before, we have published more than 10 million documents that never appeared in the public record before. That’s a kind of rebel library of Alexandria, a great intellectual fruit that has contributed to justice all around the world, releasing innocent people from prison, taking their place in a variety of elections, leading to all sorts of reforms… we’re involved in the conflict of defending it, defending our rights to publish and encompassing within that the rights of others to also publish and secure information in the way that we do.” – Julian Assange

RiseUp.net, a popular ISP/email provider for activists and dissidents around the world, may have been served with a gag order by US federal authorities. Assange explained in some depth what the implications of RiseUp possibly having received such an order are and what a “warrant canary” is—the method by which organizations at risk of receiving one can get around the requirement to not disclose it.

“This concerns something interesting which is a technique developed in response to gag orders principally in the United States but also extending to other countries as well… a technique was developed called a canary which is to say, every three months, you say that you haven’t received a gag order and handed over information. That’s the normal course of business. Then if you don’t do that one month, then the effective statement is that you have received a gag order… there’s a quite well-known organisation called Rise Up… It was perhaps late with its warranted canary statement… WikiLeaks doesn’t use any particular email provider and we assume that email itself is compromised. So it’s not something that affects us. Rise Up on their behalf have said none of their information is affected. There’s clearly something like an attempted subpoena or something like that for Rise Up which is why they’re saying that they needed legal advice but can’t talk about it…” – Julian Assange

WikiLeaks have stated several times that 2017 is going to be an absolutely huge year for them, which is almost unfathomable considering the astronomical significance and impact they had in both the political and media spheres in 2016. Assange dished a few more details on what is yet to come.

“We have a lot of material to get through, it takes time… We do have a perfect record for accurate vetting of what we’ve published, going back for 10 years… But I’m very excited, it’s, you know, information that concerns everyone. Some information for some countries, big corporations, government behaviour etcetera. You know, I like doing this, I’m in love with the publications that we have coming.” – Julian Assange

There was a query about whether WikiLeaks would be doing any releases related to the upcoming 2017 election in Germany. Assange pointed out that WikiLeaks have already been pretty consistently releasing information of importance to German citizens. He also pointed out that allegations of Russian hacking had also been made by Germany in response to WikiLeaks publications, and had been disproven.

“We have published more than 60,000 pages of material about the BND NSA inquiry in the German parliament. So after the Snowden revelations in 2013 the Bundestag set up an inquiry panel to look into whether the BND had been illicitly passing information to the National Security Agency and there’s several findings out already which, the answer is yes they had. They were also engaged in a number of unlawful domestic programs, at least a dozen… So we published those and the response was interesting. The first response was that it was thought that this was probably a Parliamentary insider. The second response came out through Focus magazine and Focus magazine is a magazine that is notorious at least within WikiLeaks as having a very close relationship with the BND. In fact, we exposed them in 2009 as having met more than 54 times, just one of their journalists, with a BND handler and they were involved in hunting down the sources of other journalists. So Focus magazine put out a statement from a government security official, pretty clearly a BND official, claiming that it was likely or that they assessed that it was likely that this material that we had published from the German Parliament actually came from Russian hackers. Now, so clearly resonating with certain attacks on us by some members of the US press. And just two weeks later, the Commission of Inquiry into the leak, a formal prosecutor was appointed by the Parliament to investigate. They came out and said no, actually we think this must have come from the German Parliament. They gave a simple argument for example, they say that some Russian hack they had had back in 2015 had taken 30 megabytes or 50 megabytes of data but we had published 90. So it was literally impossible that it could have been the Russians. But there is that environment now where you can see the incentives. So whatever propaganda Russia may be putting out through RT or elsewhere, and it certainly has its angle on things, you can see the incentive for incumbents like Merkel, just as we could see with Clinton, to try and hype up an issue about potential Russian involvement… that’s something we’re going to see I assume in the German election and in the French election regardless of what the Russians are doing or not doing.” – Julian Assange

Assange was also asked if he had any insight into Obama’s high approval rating and respectively, Trump’s low one.

“Trump is not a politician. He’s a beginning politician. So he says things that are confrontational or easy to take out of context, or offend people. So that would be a prime reason and Obama’s rather slick. But similarly, it’s true that the majority of the media, perhaps with the exception of Fox News, was fully in the tank for Clinton during this election cycle and kind of whipped up a class hysteria about what they were saying was effectively that the leader of the white trash was going to take over and it would all be a terrible disaster and that everyone in their class had to rally together to prevent this from happening. I’m not defending Trump or his policies… but by the same token I don’t think I’m saying anything new by saying that there was a deeply partisinised atmosphere in this election… the behaviour in the press on both sides but the majority was on the Clinton side, was terrible, in terms of accuracy, absolutely terrible…  respect for the press is at a record low in the United States.” – Julian Assange

Yet another question about the matter of extradition was raised – that of whether he should simply go to Sweden, where there is an outstanding arrest warrant, although there are still no charges.

“…I was granted asylum at this Embassy because of the persecution involved in the US case… a lot has happened in this case in the United States, with people being hauled into the Grand Jury, forced to testify, warrants being spewed out all over the place for information, planeloads of FBI agents illicitly engaged in activities, interrogating people in other countries etcetera so there’s a lot going on. In relation to Sweden, let’s be clear, I have never been charged at any stage, I have already been previously cleared by the Chief Prosecutor in Stockholm in relation to exactly the same allegation and the United Nations twice last year has formally found that I am being illegally detained in relation to it. Despite all that, I have asked and my lawyers have asked and the state of Ecuador have asked that Sweden simply give a guarantee that I will not be extradited to the United States and they refuse to do so, absolutely refuse and instead this enormous fuss and expense and diplomatic costs.” – Julian Assange

Another predictable question was asked by a viewer, that has been the subject of much speculation. Will Trump go any easier on WikiLeaks than his predecessors?

“It remains to be seen… A publisher has the duty to publish. That’s its number one duty. That’s what its function is in society… and I’m an Australian citizen publishing from Europe. What the hell is going on with this jurisdictional overreach, trying to apply US law, which shouldn’t be applied to publishers even in the United States because of the First Amendment… This is an absurd overreach which chills the climates for publishers to scrutinise and help the public understand what is going on with the most powerful organizations in our state and why is it important for the most powerful organisations to be scrutinised? Well, because when they get it wrong, when they act badly or incompetently, it is that power, that military intelligence or governmental of the enormous corporation like Google, it is that power that can cause widespread systematic damage and loss of life, as it has done, as we have seen in Syria and Iraq and in Libya.” – Julian Assange

The Podesta emails revealed that Obama’s Cabinet was already picked prior to his inauguration and that corporate interests were right in the thick of making those decisions. Assange was asked if we can expect the same thing from Trump.

“One of my favourite emails from the Podesta emails that we published is correspondence with John Podesta and a Citibank official. Now that Citibank official seemed to be the primary person putting together the Obama cabinet back in 2008. Now, those people who remember that period will remember that Obama was big with the banks. He got a lot of cash from the banks and it seems to have translated into this senior Citibank executive being absolutely central… more than 50 percent of the people [appointed] according to an article in the New Republic which analyzed it, were on the Citibank list. It would be interesting to think what the equivalent is in the Trump Cabinet selection… we do see three ex-Goldman Sachs people in the Trump Cabinet.” – Julian Assange

One really smart question was about why none of WikiLeaks partners in printing the Afghan and Iraq War Logs and Cablegate appear to be being equally persecuted as WikiLeaks is. Assange shed a lot of light on this—it seems to be the result of a strategic decision by the DOJ.

“I’d just say that of course the DOJ has a political technique, it has a theory, about how its going to separate the herd, to take WikiLeaks off to the side for a beating and perhaps leave the New York Times and the other partners alone… It’s theory seems to be, based on the warrants and some statements that it has made, that WikiLeaks is different. Why is WikiLeaks different? Because WikiLeaks dealt with the source. WikiLeaks, if you like, brought in the fish that we then published and we shared with others in the media in order to get more eyeballs and better analysis and therefore WikiLeaks is different in this way. While that may be of some salve to The Guardian and Le Monde and more than 100 other publishing partners that we have, it shouldn’t be, because it’s not just about who is swept up into this particular prosecution. This prosecution will set precedents. It will set precedents about what is tolerable behaviour by the DOJ and if it is tolerable behaviour in law and politically for the administration to go after publishers and go after their sources and say that every interaction between a national security journalist and their source is a conspiracy, in general, and a conspiracy to commit espionage, and the passing of electronic information falls under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Section 1A, electronic terrorism, if national security journalism is electronic terrorism and espionage then that is the end of national security journalism in the United States and we like to joke that if that happens, well all sources will just have to come to WikiLeaks.” – Julian Assange

There has been both curiosity and conjecture about what WikiLeaks publications for 2017 contain. Assange had previously mentioned that Google was at least one subject on which new revelations would be coming. As usual, Assange deftly avoided giving too much away. However, he did make the point that he isn’t actually in charge of the scheduling of what comes out when.

“You can expect a nice publication on Google in 2017. We have a lot of upcoming publications, I don’t want to say which one’s first. Actually, it might surprise some of you but even I don’t know which one we’re going to do first. It does depend on what’s in the news and what’s taking up the news cycle or is there a company or government department prominent for some other reason.” – Julian Assange

Some speculate that there is a growing hostility between the European Union and Trump. It is true that, like most of the world, the EU was prepared for a Clinton victory. Trump’s installation as President of the United States was, to put it mildly, a surprise.

Assange did not give a particular position on whether conflict between the parties was likely, but did point out that the intensity of the current geopolitical situation was fascinating from WikiLeaks’ perspective.

“I think, from a journalistic perspective, its very interesting. Because those kinds of conflicts, say between Merkel and Trump, allow you to examine, they create a market, they create an audience that is receptive for information about Merkel in the United States and an audience in Germany that is receptive to information about Trump. The general phenomena is quite, I’m not saying it’s good government or good diplomacy but from WikiLeaks perspective we like to see this kind of churn and invigoration and everything being reconsidered.” – Julian Assange

There has been an infinite number of breaches of due process in the handling of Assange’s case, by a variety of state parties, tracking back years. Assange gave a very enlightening description of how and why the rule of law is suspended in high profile political situations like his.

“There was a very unusual statement by the Crown Prosecution Service in 2011, to their counterparts in Sweden, which was ‘don’t worry, we’re not treating his extradition like a normal extradition case.’ Well there’s quite a lot of material actually, you should go to Justice4Assange.com, and you can read all about that. When you’re involved in a situation like this yourself, what you see is that when the politics becomes significant enough then everything becomes political. In terms of political philosophy, it makes perfect sense. Which is that various institutions within a state such as the judiciary, are functions of the state and the state is the result of two things, a political process and a security process. That is what constructs and maintains the state in the first place. So if the security aspect becomes too high or the political aspect becomes too high then the rule of law starts to become too rubbery and can eventually be swept aside. Now that’s I suppose, in a positive sense, with the Chelsea Manning clemency. But it does happen frequently in the negative sense and that’s the case for me.” – Julian Assange

Unfortunately, like many exiles, Assange has been all but outright abandoned by his own government, who have refused to advocate on his behalf or to aid him in seeking redress for the breaches of his rights under international law. In fact, they have gone so far as to openly collaborate with his persecutors. Assange was philosophical about this but also hopeful that there may be some change to their stance in the future.

“Australia is… a colonial country, population just over 20 million, speaks English and is in the middle of nowhere. So the result is that it’s not near its close friends culturally. It’s in the Five Eyes alliance with the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the white, English-speaking countries and unfortunately it doesn’t have an independent foreign policy. Its foreign policy cues are taken from the United States and from the United Kingdom with which it is deeply integrated in terms of its military and intelligence services. Anyway, it’s something that’s affected not just me, it’s affected a number of Australians who have been imprisoned overseas in say the United States but also in other states that the Australian government wants to have a security relationship with. It essentially abandons them. It has done so in this case. In fact, the Australian intelligence services gave information to the United States, they looked into cancelling my passport, the then-Prime Minister said that I was engaged in illegal acts, and all of that was found to be untrue. So the Australian investigation found that I had broken no Australian law and I have won the peak journalism prize in Australia which is the Walkley. Although there’s popular support in Australia and support in the press and a lot of support in the legal community the government so far has done nothing. But there might be some change. There’s a little bit of talk in Parliament that perhaps things should change.” – Julian Assange

A question about Facebook’s involvement in creating systems to supposedly fight fake news saw Assange really open up. He talked about how the ways we share information are changing and the impacts of that, specifically from the perspective of governments and the ruling elites, who traditionally rely on the ability to control the ways in which information is communicated in order to control their populaces.

For me, this was by far the most intriguing portion of the press conference and a great note to finish on.

“You know they’re talking about the ecosystem of information flow in a modern civilisation that Facebook forms an important part of and Facebook as it became rich has integrated… with the US establishment, so other large companies who are dealing with the State Department etcetera… I guess Peter Thiel is an exception on the Facebook board, but it was more or less in the tank for Clinton, as far as Facebook ownership and management was concerned. So of course they didn’t like to see that Facebook was spreading a lot of stories critical of the candidate that they had backed. Now some of those were genuinely fake stories… but I assume the majority was true, then there was our information which was definitely true. So there’s a breaking of one of the most important control structures in a democracy and that is who controls the media and the effects that the media has on people reading it… if you don’t want to use a truncheon to keep people in line, you need to use their perceptions to keep them in line. So what is involved in managing people’s perceptions? Well, traditionally that’s who controls publishing and broadcasts and now organizations like Facebook are permitting many, many people to publish, billions, at the click of a button. So that is obviously breaking down the control structure. Now the control structure is there for bad reasons and it is there for good reasons. The bad reasons are principally to keep whatever the ruling class in any particular country in rule and the good reasons are well maybe some of those rules are for good reasons. So the control structure is breaking down and Facebook’s traditional position is of being quite frightened of being accused of manipulating the priorities of what you see for reasons other than you paying the money, has resulted in… more or less fair distribution of what people think, to each other. But when you have more or less fair distribution of what people think to each other, that is a new circumstance in a democracy. So something else must change because the structures of a democracy, the relative powers of different institutions and cultural norms exist in an equilibrium which is mediated by information flow structures. So when the information flow structures change, the other parts of society must also change to enter into a new equilibrium. But before the new equilibrium is established, there is a disequilibrium and part of the election of Donald Trump is that phenomena taking place.” – Julian Assange

The aware and the learned will find the above to be brilliant. But there are some people who fail to grasp philosophy or reason, who don’t care to analyze or aspire to influence great power, who can’t be reached through education or through history, or sociopolitical and geopolitical narrative.

But all is not lost. Because we can always get to them through pictures of cats!

The living proof of this is Julian Assange’s pet kitten, @EmbassyCat, who became an instant viral hit in 2016.

But there has been a “paws” in Embassy Cat’s publishing schedule.

“I’m not going to lie, it’s a tough situation to be illegally kept in an Embassy for four and a half years despite the UN saying that you’re unlawfully detained, it’s tough on me, it’s tough on my young children, I have a family under the age of 10, and so they were concerned about me and so they got me a cat. It’s a bit pathetic, it’s not a replacement for your family but interestingly, psychologically, actually it’s quite good. It’s why you give long-term prisoners cats. If they’re lifers for example and all the staff that come in the Embassy in the day, they all dote on the cat etcetera. But we have a Twitter account for the cat. With, ah, kind of publication intensity over the last few months, Ecuador cutting off the internet briefly, etcetera, there’s a lot of other stuff going on so we haven’t had the time to take and publish as many cat photos as we’d like.” – Julian Assange

We live in remarkable times of deep fluctuating change. Few could imagine what the last 10 years would have been like without WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and EmbassyCat!

If the world’s citizenry continues to unite around them, we won’t have to.

It has been said that all wars end. Even the Hundred Years War, came to its inevitable conclusion.

The sooner the War on Whistleblowers and the War on Journalism ends, the better. For all of us.

The post Assange Talks Brennan, CIA and the Future of Journalism appeared first on We Are Change.

In the latest attack on what is without doubt the most significant media organization in the world—WikiLeaks—a far less consequential publisher—The Daily Kos—has managed to squeeze an entire article out of one Twitter rant by what they describe as a “quasi-official Anonymous Twitter account” – @YourAnonCentral, also known as YAC.

In doing so, The Daily Kos is the latest to demonstrate that there is nothing more intellectually insubstantial than the recent trend of quasi-journalists slapping together an entire quasi-article about someone having had a moan on Twitter.

Poorly-investigated and deficiently-sourced, their article fails to dig any deeper than the surface contents of the singular thread, trusting that it contains sufficient reference points that no one will invest the time or effort to look into the matter any further.

Unfortunately for them, we have.

The 25-tweet diatribe their article is based off can be read here and is dissected tweet by tweet at the bottom of this page. But first, let’s look a little deeper into the opinions and attitudes espoused by @YourAnonCentral, and give you the story that The Daily Kos didn’t.

YAC doesn’t just hate Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He also has it in for Edward Snowden.

The animosity isn’t restricted to silly memes or playing favorites among whistleblowers. It extends to pronouncements that blatantly violate the basic principles and beliefs of the Anonymous movement.

The idea that an Anonymous account would be openly calling for the prosecution of a whistleblower and advocating that they be subjected to “law and punishment” with “no exceptions” is not only contrary to the ideological premise of the collective, but is frankly extreme in its audacity and hypocrisy.

For an account claiming to be a part of a movement whose members have been aggressively hunted by law enforcement agencies, to advocate throwing a whistleblower to the dogs, is flabbergasting.

But their vitriol doesn’t end there. Since July 2014, YAC has been waging an unrelenting smear campaign against the pillars of the activism community.

Major Anonymous accounts like @AnonymousVideo, tweeting content from Thomas Drake to YAC, go without amplification or acknowledgement.

Other old school Anonymous accounts like @AnonSwedeninfo get acidic responses from YAC…

Or are completely ignored when they attempt to share relevant content with them:

Sputnik News noted the disparity between the positions of @YourAnonNews and YAC, on Snowden:

YAC’s smears against Snowden are completely baseless. Even the most cursory knowledge of his revelations and activity easily dispels them. Take for example, the following tweet:

In their desperation to discredit him and hoping that any mud will stick, Snowden’s detractors routinely contradict each other’s narratives. While some deride him for having spoken out about NSA spying on Chinese university students while still in Hong Kong, YAC audaciously claim that he has never cared about non-US citizens. Yet by the time of their above tweet, in October 2015, Snowden had spoken via video conference in a whole host of non-US countries, about revelations specific to those citizens, including but not limited to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and others.

Of course, if you wanted further proof of how far YAC have been barking up the wrong tree, you need only look at their own historical tweets, which disprove their more recent ones:

Time and time again, YAC stumbles over its own opinion and contradicts its own messaging. For example, they cast aspersions on radical leftists and Russian-based media organisations, despite having a long history of sharing information from precisely those sources.

At various times they accuse Snowden of being both aligned with US government and the Russians. Likewise, with WikiLeaks.

They accused WikiLeaks of being beholden to other foreign governments:

…yet make bizarre attempts to associate WikiLeaks staff with being pro-US government – specifically claiming that they have “ties to the US military and intelligence”:

The attempt to portray WikiLeaks as being an agent of the US military-industrial complex is followed by, three months later, a switch of course to complain that WikiLeaks only exposes US war crimes:

In aggregate, it seems that they don’t care who WikiLeaks or Snowden is or isn’t working for, they are only trying to cause the maximum possible damage to their reputations, as seen by the posting of skewed opinion polls such as the following, which do not provide any dissenting option.

Glenn Greenwald is another frequent victim of attempts to detract from those doing the most significant and visible work to circulate revelations from the Snowden archives.

Accusations that The Intercept has not released enough documents, or with the speed that many would like, are commonplace. However, YAC chose the precise day that Greenwald and The Intercept had just come out with further major revelations, in order to attack them about it. Ultimately serving as a distraction from the information that had just hit the public arena.

Rather than analyzing and amplifying the documents that they claimed to be so eager to see released, YAC just tore chunks out of those doing the actual work instead.

Things didn’t always used to be this way. A trip down memory lane reveals that at a certain point, there was a seismic shift in YAC’s position.

Going back through YAC’s tweets in reverse-chronological order, there was a clear delineation between the original stances of the account, with its reversed positions and open hostility.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the old YAC:

So what happened? How did YAC go from an account covering Occupy-related media and sharing pro-whistleblower content and leaks, in neatly laid out well-sourced tweets, to what appears to be an angry and aggressively anti-Snowden/WikiLeaks admin?

In the course of investigating this story I discovered the below tweet from fellow ex-Occupier and WRC journalist, Cassandra Fairbanks.

Suddenly, it all clicked. The concise news-style presentation of the early YAC tweets is likely attributable to Cassandra’s efforts. I reached out to her and asked for her take on what happened.

We Are Change: “Cassandra, the @YourAnonCentral account shared a lot of great work throughout the Occupy movement and had a really effective tweet style with a focus on info-sharing, up until June of 2014. Since then it devolved into what appears to be one person’s endless rant against pillars of the activism world like Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. Can you tell us how this occurred?”

Cassandra Fairbanks: “That’s about when I left YAC. I had been using it to promote WikiLeaks and Snowden stuff, but we had massive internal disagreements so I quit. The main person running the account was using it as a tool to promote the person they were dating (@georgieBC) who had personal issues with Wikileaks even though she had previously ran WikiLeaks Central, which was essentially a fan site.”

YAC’s anti-Snowden tweets have very little uptake and the threads routinely feature dissenting opinions by readers that are puzzled by the maliciousness on display. Likewise, the malevolent nature of the specific accusations leveled at WikiLeaks by YAC that were picked up by the Daily Kos, did not escape notice.

So let’s break down the 25 YAC tweets, referenced by The Daily Kos in the article “Anonymous Squeals On WikiLeaks and Julian Assange”

Tweets 1-2/25: YAC tweets at @Khannoiseur, an anti-Trump, anti-WikiLeaks journalist, that they find his conspiracy theory that Julian Assange is being blackmailed by Putin “fascinating and quite in line with reality” and “would like to touch on the subject, given that we have somewhat of an insight into the matter.”

Tweet 3/25: YAC describes Julian Assange as a “fascist ideologue“, without any reference or source.

Tweets 4-5/25: YAC says that the attributes commonly associated with WikiLeaks including supporting “human rights, gov’t transparency, and open government” are “not in line with Assange’s politics”.

YAC then sets about trying to ascribe those qualities to people who have ceased working for WikiLeaks in the past, in an attempt to effectively strip WikiLeaks of its identity.

Tweets 6-7/25: YAC claims that WikiLeaks ability to receive leaks was dependent upon someone who had departed the organization. YAC says “the software developer behind it (leak platform) left the project. We assume he is still writing software.”

The “software developer” in question may be Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who volunteered full-time for WikiLeaks in 2009. In this annotated transcript of the film “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” an unauthorized biography by filmmaker Alex Gibney, WikiLeaks points out that

“…in 2007 WikiLeaks uncovered billions of dollars’ worth of corruption in Kenya, a leak that made front pages around the world, and is widely viewed to have changed the results of the Kenyan 2007 Presidential Election. In 2008 WikiLeaks defeated the largest private Swiss bank in US courts after revealing its Cayman Islands trusts, costing the bank hundreds of millions as it cancelled its scheduled US IPO. However these leaks pre-date Domscheit-Berg’s substantive involvement.”

If the leaks pre-date Domscheit-Berg’s involvement, the idea that Domscheit-Berg was the sole engineer of the WikiLeaks platform—or so crucial that his departure crippled the technological functioning of the organization—is counter-intuitive. Meaning that in fact, the claims made by YAC in these tweets are demonstrably false.

But in fact, they are worse than merely slanders of WikiLeaks. They are an attempt to form a revisionist history that seeks to raise the profile of someone—Domscheit-Berg—who was not merely a disgruntled former volunteer. He was without doubt, a saboteur.

Here is why I can say that with such confidence: Domscheit-Berg didn’t merely beef with WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. He didn’t merely sell-out by writing a book slamming them and selling the movie rights to Dreamworks. He did much, much worse. By all accounts, he deliberately destroyed evidence of war crimes and other corporate transgressions and withheld documented proof of such that were entrusted to him.

From this open letter by Guatemalan Human Rights lawyer Renata Avila:

“I gave WikiLeaks some documents detailing proof of torture and government abuse of a Latin America country. The documents were only in hard copy. I entrusted those valuable documents – the only copy available – to Wikileaks because of the expertise of the people running it, their procedures and the mechanisms they used to maximize impact when published. I did not intend to give such material to Mr. Domscheit-Berg personally, as was made clear to him by me at the time. My intention was to give it to the platform I trusted and contributed to; to WikiLeaks. The material has not been published and I am disturbed to read public statements by Mr. Domscheit-Berg in which he states that he has not returned such documents to WikiLeaks.” – Renata Avila

Avila describes being present at Domscheit-Berg’s home when he was toasting journalist Heather Brooke with champagne. Brooke later stated: ““one of [Assange’s] disaffected colleagues gave me a full set of the US diplomatic cables that Assange was planning to use in his next publication.”

These were, of course, files supplied to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning. Of Domscheit-Berg’s attitude towards Manning, Renata Avila notes:

“After the arrest of Bradley Manning became public, I asked Mr. Domscheit-Berg how I could help the young soldier, but he did not appear to be interested. He was on holiday. I sent him contact details of human rights workers I thought would be able to support Manning, which he said he forwarded on to someone else. He never followed it up. I was under the impression that he didn’t care or that someone else must have the situation well in hand. It was only after he was suspended from WikiLeaks that he became outspoken about Manning.” – Renata Avila

The comments section on Avila’s post is well worth reading, to begin to understand the full extent of the betrayals by Domscheit-Berg, referred to as DDB.

OpenLeaks, DDB’s project to springboard off WikiLeaks, was a spectacular failure that resulted in his temporary expulsion from the Chaos Computer Club.

Slashdot sums it up:

Then of course, there’s another tiny problem with the theory of DDB being the technical brains behind the WikiLeaks leaks submission platform.

It turns out he wasn’t actually a developer, a programmer, a computer scientist or a software architect. Nor did he invent, design, build or maintain the platform. He just did a really effective job of sabotaging and temporarily compromising it.

WikiLeaks also confirmed that Domscheit-Berg made off with the “internals” of up to 20 neo-Nazi organizations.

Tweets 8-9/25: YAC alleged that WikiLeaks “copied the publish everything leak platform” concept from Cryptome.org‘s John Young. Then YAC alleges that Cryptome “left” WikiLeaks but still adheres to the principle. According to Young, Cryptome curate their content and do not simply publish everything. Nor do they guarantee the authenticity of the documents they publish or offer any protection to their sources. According to the Wikipedia page for Cryptome, Young says their organisation does not believe in “context“, “verification, authentication” or “background“. Additionally, unlike WikiLeaks, they have complied with official requests for removal of content.

Cryptome has a long established history of obscuring events related to the security of their website with conflicting statements.

Given the massive disparities between the two organizations, not the least of which is their core modus operandi, it is hard to decipher precisely what it is YAC now accuse WikiLeaks of copying from them. The function of receiving documents? That’s what journalists do. Cryptome might have been an early influence for WikiLeaks but they did not invent journalism.

Of WikiLeaks, Young said in a 2010 interview with The Observer:

So after joining WikiLeaks in 2006, publicly trashing it in 2007, printing its internal communications and then doing mainstream media interviews about the project he had abandoned after discovering years later that it had become successful regardless, John Young is a WikiLeaks “member”, “insider”, “devotee” and “critic”.  Take from that what you will.

This is, of course, the same John Young who claimed to Vocative in July 2014 that Cryptome would be imminently publishing the Snowden documents that had been withheld from the public. He described the leak of the full archive as inevitable. It has yet to eventuate.

Tweets 10-11/25:  These tweets are virtually meaningless. YAC says that WikiLeaks postures itself as anti-war and then attributes that stance to Chelsea Manning. Then anomalously states that Chelsea still holds these beliefs. As if WikiLeaks prior to 2010 wasn’t anti-war, when it clearly was, or as if WikiLeaks is somehow pro-war. The assertion is such a lame duck that it’s not even worth taking the time to debunk. Look at what they were releasing prior to 2010, and what they have since, and the writing is on the wall.

Tweets 12-13/25: YAC’s attempts to insinuate that WikiLeaks is usurping the achievements of others, with a complete lack of context, continues. Swiftly moving on to Iceland, invoking the terms ‘open government‘ and ‘transparency‘ then raising the IMMI (Icelandic Modern Media Initiative), brainchild of Iceland’s Pirate Party leader Birgitta Jonsdottir. What YAC fails to mention is how events in Iceland came to the head that they did. The tide of public dissent that the Pirate Party was able to ride to prominence came about from leaks published by WikiLeaks, exposing gross corruption on the part of Icelandic bankers.

Their supposition that WikiLeaks was not involved in IMMI at a fundamental level is also factually incorrect. In the original video of Birgitta and Julian Assange speaking about IMMI at the 2010 Logan Symposium, the truth couldn’t be any more clear, or any more different than YAC portrayed it.

“The reason why I am here is that early this year me and a group of people including WikiLeaks started to work on a proposal for the Icelandic Parliament tasking the Icelandic government to create sort of a reversal ideology of a tax haven, where they pick good legislation around the world to create secrecy, we want to pick the best possible legislation from around the world to create transparency…

…when I heard this idea, originally the idea about IMMI was introduced by Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt at a conference in Iceland in December last year, where I was also speaking. Coming from a background of being an activist, a journalist and a writer and a pioneer on the internet, I immediately understood the importance of this.” – Birgitta Jonsdottir

The video is well worth the watch so here it is:

Tweets 14-16/25: YAC says that WikiLeaks only “supported human rights, horizontal governance and was a megaphone for those at risk… based on their (@wikileaks) Twitter feed from 2010 to 2012. News tweeted by @Wikileaks then was based on work of @GeorgieBC.” Once again, this is a ridiculous statement. WikiLeaks interest in human rights both pre and post dates Georgie’s admittedly excellent work on @WLCentral, which for a time was a brilliant and regularly lauded contribution to the WikiLeaks platform.

WikiLeaks’ most significant achievement in acting as “a megaphone for those at risk” has been in the establishment and undertakings of the Courage Foundation, which is a unique, groundbreaking organization acting to defend, promote and represent the best interests of some of the world’s most high-risk, high-profile and fiercely persecuted whistleblowers and journalists. Courage was established long after WLCentral was discontinued.

Therefore the idea that their interest in either of the aforementioned principles was somehow bestowed upon them by a departed third party is frankly, disingenuous.

With regards to horizontal governance, it is true that GeorgieBC has done some really innovative, thorough and challenging thinking and writing on that topic and made many proposals through her personal blog and elsewhere. However, YAC is clearly no expert on how WikiLeaks currently operates or is structured behind the scenes.

The proof is in the pudding really and whatever WikiLeaks are doing, they are doing it right. The stats are long since in – they were the most impactful and significant media organisation on social media during the recent U.S. election. They sport an unblemished record of relentless publishing. It is simply sour grapes to deny them the credit they are due for having achieved so much, in such dire and drastic circumstances as having intelligence agencies, particularly those of the West, set against their success and continued livelihood at every turn. Yet they have triumphed regardless.

Tweets 17-18/25: YAC bizarrely suggests that Jeremy Hammond having leaked the GIFiles from Stratfor was the sum total of WikiLeaks work against ‘corporate tyranny’. But their established record of publishing huge leaks on (not to mention confronting in court and winning against) corporates goes back to 2007 and stretches to the current day. As a campaigner against the TPPA I can tell you that WikiLeaks consistent publishing and analysis of the TPPA, TISA and TTIP texts was hugely consequential in helping to grow the movements against those ‘trade’ agreements – which were not trade agreements at all, but corporate coup d’etat undermining national sovereignty for the benefit of the bottom lines of giant transnational conglomerates – and that is just the most recent example. To swing the pendulum all the way back, it was 2007-2008 when WikiLeaks first took on banks and won.

Tweet 19/25: “People thought @Wikileaks wanted to support the weak against the powerful. That was #Anonymous, not Julian Assange.” What else is there to do but shake one’s head at this inanity? Compared to the entire might of the Western Empire and its military-industrial complex, WikiLeaks *was* the weak. They are quite literally David vs Goliath and they have delivered time and time again. The false dichotomy between Anonymous and Julian Assange is a deliberate attempt at divide and conquer. The vast majority of Anonymous supports WikiLeaks and Assange and always has. Their genesis is from the same community. They cannot be separated just by someone with a Twitter account who desperately hopes they can be. When Assange’s internet was cut by Ecuador in 2016, what happened? Vast swathes of the connectivity of the East Coast of America (and elsewhere) was taken down in retaliation. No matter how much B.S. YAC circulates to the contrary, YAC cannot break solidarity between hackers just because they wish it were so.

Tweet 20-25/25: Bereft of any actual evidence and not having posted a single source link in the entire 25-tweet diatribe, YAC resorts to ad hominems. Assange is this, Assange is that. It is well known that The WikiLeaks Party was infiltrated, just as its parent organisation had been repeatedly in the past, and then smeared for supporting neo-Nazis, just as Anonymous itself was once smeared as supporting neo-Nazis. Just as Occupy was smeared as supporting neo-Nazis, just as any significant activism movement or group supporting any kind of radical change is hauled into the exact same smear because it is a known tactic of the state to do so. According to YAC, somehow Julian’s support of the First Amendment of the US Constitution is also bad – despite Birgitta Jonsdottir having expressed exactly the same admiration for it in the above video.

“None of the people who have ever been involved in @Wikileaks have changed…”

Well, the people involved in @YourAnonCentral have definitely changed and it sure as hell wasn’t an improvement.

By Suzie Dawson

The post Smearing Snowden and WikiLeaks In The Name Of Anonymous appeared first on We Are Change.

In a Reddit Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on Wednesday, Assange appeared in live video on Twitch, where he answered questions from Reddit users. He also replied to some others via text.

The Assange-is-dead theory is not a new one. Questions as to his whereabouts have arisen periodically, ostensibly circulated by concerned fans. But the larger implications of it casting a shadow of doubt over the integrity of WikiLeaks’ operations is hard to ignore.

Meanwhile, Assange has in fact made several video appearances in recent months, and close friends and family members confirmed having met with him in person.

In a transcript of his AMA answers, Assange addressed exactly this, describing it as ‘social proof‘:

“…in relation to whether I’m alive or kidnapped. If you look at people like John Pilger, for example, long-term friend of mine, runs my defense fund, is a famously brave investigative reporter, my lawyers, close friends, people like Lauri Love, the Ecuadorian government. If you think about the number of people who would actually have to conspire and the amount of work that would have to be done to produce these false images is too many. That’s a social proof.” – Julian Assange

Yet seemingly no standard of proof is sufficient for the most ardent proof-of-life conspiracists, who even today made ridiculous assertions such as that the scarf Assange was wearing was a CGI depiction.

The conspiracy theories being circulated have been described as ‘black propaganda’ designed to undermine the organisation and distract from its work.

WikiLeaks supporters have been equally frustrated by the outlandish theories.

Courage beneficiary Lauri Love has similar advice for supporters:

Here lies the crux of the issue: what Assange is actually being put through always seems to fall by the wayside for the proof-of-lifers who claim to be concerned for him.

For this is the world we live in: one where the world’s most accomplished publisher can be subjected to, as the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled, “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” and all we are supposed to do is sit around on Reddit arguing about whether he is dead or not.

While our heroes suffer in public, the provably corrupt are holding lavish dinner parties, unimpeded.

Reddit is, of course, the famous progeny of another revered figure – The Internet’s Own Boy, Aaron Swartz. While vast swathes of the conjecture that abounds there, particularly since its corporate buy-out, both bore and exasperate, if not outright obfuscate, there is still a few gems:

All jokes aside, Assange is alive, still has refuge, is still working, contributing and surviving to fight another day.

This is one instance where I’m really pleased to be able to say: “I told you so!”

By Suzie Dawson

The post Proof of Life: Julian Assange Hosts Live Video Reddit AMA To Silence His Critics appeared first on We Are Change.

In August 2016, The Intercept published it’s second bulk release of files from the Snowden archives, 263 documents from SIDtoday, the newsletter of the Signals Intelligence Directorate of the National Security Agency.

It is an internal publication of bite size proportions, averaging just over a page per article. Predictably upbeat and celebratory in nature, the general themes are news bulletins on:

• HR: awards, promotions and vacancies
• Compliance & oversight
• Theatres of NSA operations and “customers” (other agencies)
• Employee safety including mental health
• Events, meetings, trainings and employee profiles

The following is a set of unique findings from analysing the second batch of SIDtoday files.

1. Rather than it being strange, as many suggested, that Snowden moved from CIA to the NSA, the exchange of human resources between the agencies seems common.

In fact, the SIDtoday files lay waste to the theory that the CIA and NSA are in competition with each other, or that they aspire to usurp each other’s roles and resources. The documents consistently depict the agencies working in partnership as the left and right hands of the executive.

One specialises in collecting the information and the other specialises in acting on it.

Multiple documents announce appointments from senior executives on down to analysts moving between one agency and the other. As revealed in the last part of this series, the CIA even gave service awards to over 100 NSA employees.

This document refers to “a retired NSA senior executive with significant CIA experience” and details NSA staff members attending classes at the CIA which the then Director of the CIA participated in.

“The tone of the class was set on the first full day of presentations with a discussion led by the Honorable George J. Tenet, DCI.”

2. Bloated overstatement over the historical significance of the Iraq War effort is rife in SIDtoday.

In a document titled “Driving History“, the NSA likens its participation in the Iraq War to the cracking of the Enigma code in World War II.

The publication claims that history will see the “role of NSA in the global war on terrorism… in a similar light” to the cryptographic breakthrough that SIDtoday says won World War II for the Allies.

Several documents assert how great it is that ‘democracy’ has been brought to Iraq. Thirteen years on it is clear that the actual historical record on the conflict is a far cry from what the NSA had predicted it would be. The Iraqi ‘theater’ remains, of course, an unmitigated disaster.

3. “Analysts want to see data the way the user saw it“, says one document, explaining the concept of a “native view” of data being viewed in the same environment as the target experienced it, as if through their eyes. It states a need to enhance this view with easy access to analytical tools.

4. Multiple documents in the cache brag about NSA’s contributions to ‘capture-and-kill’ operations in Iraq.

This document in particular states that NSA analysts on the ground in Baghdad “witnessed the importance of ‘translating’ SIGINT for the tactical commanders to help them understand how the SIGINT could serve as the basis for military operations.”

It continues: “in the last six months, tactical units have captured, killed, or wounded tens of thousands of insurgent forces in Iraq..”

The documents are littered with references to analysts being spread out in various locations around the world and the agency aspires to “evolve into an expeditionary SIGINT force.”

5. Post-Patriot Act Intelligence-sharing hubs known as Fusion Centers have existed on American soil since at least 2006.

If you type “Fusion Center” into Wikipedia, the search result in the drop-down has a blurb which reads: “Fusion Centers are owned and operated by state and local entities. They are not a product of, or under the control of the Federal Government.”

However, this SIDtoday document reveals that there are in fact fusion centres operated by the military, specifically the NSA. There is a specific reference to one being in Baghdad.

More, there is another reference to a mobile Fusion Center being established at the Olympics and partially staffed by an (expeditionary) 8-man NSA team.

This raises hugely significant questions. Such as:

• Did the very concept of Fusion Centers come from the military?
• Why does Wikipedia insist in its description of them that Fusion Centres operating on U.S. soil are non-military and not Federal entities if the very concept is from the military, as is a portion of the data?
• Is this because it is illegal for the military to operate on US soil? If so, are they not in fact participating in the ventures anyway, by feeding them information collected at military facilities by military resources?

6. There is perhaps no greater insight into the psyche of an ‘expeditionary’ NSA staff member than that found within this document. It was authored by a female NSA staffer who was deployed to Iraq:

“I’m in the military, we kill people and blow things up. It’s our job.”

7. When friends are enemies and enemies are friends: in the days of Obama’s ‘Pivot To Asia’ it’s hard to imagine that Chinese military officers would be hanging out in the halls of the Pentagon but according to this Snowden document, they were in 2003.

8. Many companies are hesitant to hire spouses or family members of existing employees. The NSA is apparently the opposite. In this document, a second-generation NSA employee tells a story of a co-worker having three parents (mother, father, step-father) and a sibling all working at the agency.

This article is part of a series so keep an eye out for more fascinating insights from the Snowden docs. To read Part One please click here.

This series would not be possible without the obviously immense amount of work invested by staff at The Intercept in preparing the Snowden files for release – you can read their report on the May 2016 SIDtoday files by clicking on this link.

Thanks to the awesome Twitter account @HelpSnowden for creating the header graphic used in this article.

By Suzie Dawson

The post Hidden Gems In The Snowden Files: Part Two appeared first on We Are Change.

Last May, The Intercept published it’s first bulk release of files from the Snowden archives, 166 documents from SIDtoday, the newsletter of the Signals Intelligence Directorate of the National Security Agency.

It is an internal publication of bite size proportions, averaging just over a page per article. Predictably upbeat and celebratory in nature, the general theme is news bulletins on:

• HR: awards, promotions and vacancies
• Compliance & oversight
• Theatres of NSA operations and “customers” (other agencies)
• Employee safety including mental health
• Events, meetings, trainings and employee profiles

Some of the reference terms inspire deeper digging. An early but unexplained reference to the ‘Target Office of Primary Interest (TOPI)’ led me to search the term. According to an extremely edifying article on Electrospaces.net:

So these are the people who were famously revealed to have been spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s cellphone, among others.

There are other interesting references that appear in the SIDtoday files, which are from 2003.

The NSA was already perturbed about the consequences of ‘today’s information overload‘, suggesting that analysts already had more data than they knew what to do with. However this doesn’t appear to have put a damper on the ‘Collect It All‘ mentality on display a decade later.

The following is a set of unique findings from analysis of the first batch of SIDtoday files.

1. There is an oblique reference to ‘Transformation 2.0‘ which in the context it is placed in, reads as if it is some kind of NSA strategic directive or change management program.

It is followed by talk of allowing people in other agencies with ‘unique expertise‘ to access data that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to, by having them ‘swim upstream‘.

2. The Director of Central Intelligence gives out ‘Denial and Deception Awards‘. Over 100 NSA employees were on the awards list.

3. As far back as 2003, the U.S. relationship with Turkey was ‘seriously weakened‘ and the U.S. was ‘unlikely to champion Turkey’s cause with Europe‘.

4. The files show an obsession with controlling the flow of information to congressional overseers and adherance to established protocols for responding to requests from them. These seem to be largely budget related. In a document titled ‘SIDs Interactions With Congress: Setting The Budget‘ there is a reference to a 761-page ‘Congressional Budget Justification Book’ for the 2004 fiscal year, and an explanation of budget ‘markups‘.

In a document titled ‘SIDs Interactions With Congress: Communications‘ there is a reference to opportunities ‘to influence the markups‘ in the budget and it is stressed that Congress should hear both ‘good news as well as bad news…from us before they read it in the paper’. Bad news includes ‘power outages that have resulted in degradation of service or security breaches at field stations‘ which in theory means that Congressional overseers learned about the Snowden leaks before reading them in the Washington Post or The Guardian.

5. In ‘Profile: SIGINT Legislative Affairs‘ this is expanded upon. The writer states that the Signals Intelligence Directorate must be ‘proactive with Congress‘ in ‘providing notifications‘ and that the Legislative Affairs office will advise ‘affected offices‘ of any ‘funding impacts‘ and ‘will assist you with preparing reclamas to adverse funding language‘. Reclamas are, to paraphrase Merriam Webster, requests for reconsideration of a policy directive or decision. Use of the term is prevalent within military circles and related organisations.

The document says that all communications with Congressional overseers should adhere to ‘The 5 c’s‘, namely ‘candid, complete, correct, consistent, corporate‘.

6. In ‘Crisis Support For Employees‘ SIDtoday incongruously states in back-to-back sentences that employees can seek help with obtaining weapons training and with potential employee suicides, from the same department.

7. As early as November of 2003, SIDtoday was announcing that ‘elements of‘ the exit strategy for Iraq (referred to in the document as ‘phase IV’) were ‘already underway‘. In the document titled ‘Post-War Iraq Plan‘ key responsibilities mentioned include ‘maintaining domestic security’, ‘watching for efforts to undermine the nascent Iraqi government’, and ‘uncovering war criminals’. These tasks are stated to have been ‘complicated by much broader international participation’.

8. Sometimes it is easy to forget just how far back this type of spying goes. In a document titled ‘SID Support To POW Rescue‘, particularly, that of Jessica Lynch, there is a reference to SIGINT reporting (on the location of an Iraqi General Hospital) dating back to 1979. Of course, the history of the NSA goes back even further – formally, to 1952 but in its historical forefather was in its earliest incarnation established in 1917.

This article is part of a series so keep an eye out for more fascinating insights from the Snowden docs.

This series would not be possible without the obviously immense amount of work invested by staff at The Intercept in preparing the Snowden files for release – you can read their report on the May 2016 SIDtoday files by clicking on this link.

Thanks to the awesome Twitter account @HelpSnowden for creating the header graphic used in this article.

By Suzie Dawson

The post Hidden Gems In The Snowden Files: Part One appeared first on We Are Change.

The Pentagon has confirmed that a U.S. underwater drone surveying in the South China Sea was seized by a Chinese navy ship on Friday.

Irate American officials declared the vessel “stolen” and demanded its immediate return. They claim the drone was engaging in innocuous oceanographic survey of water temperatures and salinity in international waters.

Regardless of the purpose of the drone mission, its close proximity to Chinese defence installations in the South China Sea and to China itself, likely provoked the response.

Other than the initial acknowledgement, Chinese diplomats have made no further comment. Given the changing US political climate post-election and the highly controversial geopolitics of that particular part of the Pacific, it is unlikely that the US will get the drone back anytime soon.

The future of the Obama administration’s ‘Pivot To Asia’ foreign policy, which saw exponentially increased US military activity in the Pacific Rim as well as significant build-up of the military and naval resources of US allies in the region, lies in ruination with no guarantee that the incumbent administration will continue the policy.

This is due to the abject failure (indeed, seemingly the total collapse) of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which President-elect Donald Trump has promised to scrap on his first day in office and which Fareed Zakaria once described as being “at the heart of” the Pivot To Asia.

The deeply unpopular trade agreement, along with its European and South American counterparts, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trade In Services Agreement respectively, had been the subject of worldwide protest actions over a number of years.

This has left the door open to China’s alternative trade grouping known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Meaning that the balance of global power is regaining some equilibrium both in economic terms and militarily.

Despite its many perceived shortcomings in domestic policy, the new US administration appears to be reticent to continue waging endless global conflicts, and China can afford to simply snub their nose at American disgruntlement over the seizing of the underwater vessel.

While drone technologies have increasingly entered the public consciousness in recent times, little is known about the various types of underwater drones.

They come in all manner of shapes and sizes and scale from commercially available models priced at less than USD$1000, to behemoth military constructions valued into the millions.

Rutgers University have developed an underwater drone that can both swim and fly.

The ‘Ghost Swimmer’, known as ‘Silent Nemo’ seen in this video released by the US Office of Naval Research, is shaped like an overweight, metal hybrid dolphin replete with dorsal fin and tail.Making it abundantly obvious that underwater drones are being developed for both overt and covert means, and when weaponised, could become a serious threat to any world power.

The chances of the US allowing a foreign power to operate underwater drones anywhere near its territorial waters or naval defences are minimal.

Its expectation to take such a liberty itself, without there being immediate military and diplomatic ramifications, has clearly overstepped the mark.

In the video below, Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange breaks down what happened, why it happened and the inevitable clash between these two major super powers.

By Suzie Dawson

The post South China Sea Drama: U.S. Underwater Drone Seized By Chinese Navy appeared first on We Are Change.