“The Fix Is In” – Barrett Brown, the FBI and Stratfor

Barrett Brown,Hammond and the Irish Connect

the sting that stung and other assorted FBI faggotory 

 

http://cryptome.org/2013/02/bb-13-0204.htm

       This article is designed in a way to start a journey for the reader into a case of dirty pool. Well, to put it more accurately, entrapment.

The Players

The FBI, along with an at best mediocre Private Intelligence Agency, a drug dealing, hacker, Credit Card stealing, twitter troll and a genuinely talented individual, published author slash activist.

The Thread

The thread is long and intertwined, but with careful analysis and common sense the conclusion is reached that all three of Barrett Brown indictments, Jeremy Hammond and the Donncha Cearrbhail complaint (Palladium/Anoasco)….they are all… 100%…. contrived from false data, dead credit card numbers, and staged phone conversations.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/84134910/Cearrbhail-Donncha-Complaint

http://www.scribd.com/doc/84134934/Hammond-Jeremy-Complaint

Faggory Daggory Do!

The FBI and the drug dealing, credit card stealing snitch, who, for want of a better name we shall call ‘Sabu’ aka ‘CW’ trolled the twitter sphere and Anonymous IRC chat rooms purposefully and with prejudice to entrap digital activists.

Bit Player

This was done in tandem with payed internet trolls, denounced by Anonymous, cast out, exiled…memes on the run.

It always seemed funny, (..like brain damage..?), how Law Enforcement Agencies payed tax payers monies to an internet meme troll who had absolutely zero credibility along with an IQ to match.

Lets look back and see what Barrett had to say about this back on 2nd April 2011 - yPvN5TFL

“I’ve recently had conversations with two of Backtrace Security’s esteemed members, Ashura (Jennifer Emick) and a guy named Zud, at 2600.net, where they have been in the habit of hanging out at #jester for the purpose of sharing information with AnonymousDown pursuant to their common goal of getting participants sent to prison. Although AnonymousDown promised to me as well as several concerned #jester chanops that he would no longer involve himself in those sorts of activities – which have included threats to dox my ex-girlfriend and her sixteen-year-old daughter on Twitter – Backtrace seems pretty emotionally invested in attacking a great number of people, even those who are only associated with Anonymous via our efforts to assist North Africans and the like.”

However, I digress….

#FreeBarrettBrown, #FreeHammond and #FreeBB have carved a niche in the eggshell mind collective that is the #Anonymous hashed  twitter-sphere and some people are asking,..”what is this all about?”

Barrett, possibly more than any other person is asking that exact question, eighteen of the twenty four hours a day he spends at a Federal Corrections Centre, no bail, since his online arrest September 12th 2012.

Barrett’s in jail..?? WTF???

Just to give you an idea of the depth of consciousness, or lack of it, the hashed twitter sphere can have; Barrett’s girlfriend spent the next two days arguing with trolls that Barrett had faked the whole episode.

The sound of multiple agents pounding in the door , throwing Barrett to the ground….was all faked….right?

Just like the time Commander X announced his move to Canada….that was fake as well….right?

However I digress….again

So where to start?

The beginning? well it’s sort of a bit irrelevant…but perhaps should be mentioned , if only for the fact that it makes a particular Intelligence Agency look pretty stupid.

Getting snagged on a story about Mexican Zetas and suitcases full of money… they just could n’t let go… even as it drew them into a myriad of massive security issues.

when originally uploaded the video had more than 700K views…..Stratfor DMCA’d the channel

also….

http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/

just for your own amusement enter Barrett Brown into the search engine

and check this out…

http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-10-26-03-the-activities-of-barrett-brown.html

In retaliation the FBI systematically then set about targeting digital activists

In this article I would like to focus on one of Barrett’s indictments. Jeremy Hammond’s case is an almost a  mirror of Barrett Brown’s example, as is the Donncha Cearrbhail Complaint, the Irish Connect.

This one indictment in particular that I’d like to point out.

18 USC § 1028(a)(2), (b)(1)(B), and (c)(3)(A) TRAFFIC IN STOLEN AUTHENTICATION FEATURES; 18 USC § 2 AID AND ABET (1)
18 USC § 1029(a)(3) and (c)(1)(A)(i) ACCESS DEVICE FRAUD; 18 USC § 2 AID AND ABET (2)
18 USC § 1028A(a)(1) AGGRAVATED IDENTITY THEFT; 18 USC § 2 AID AND ABET (3-12)

How can it be  trafficking when the FBI themselves promoted the paste which included the torrents on the twitter sphere?

HEY LOOK -> HERE’S THE PASTE (26th Dec 2011)

========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================

1.   _____
2.   /     \   __________________ ___.__.
3.  /  \ /  \_/ __ \_  __ \_  __ <   |  |
4. /    Y    \  ___/|  | \/|  | \/\___  |
5. \____|__  /\___  |__|   |__|   / ____|
6.         \/     \/              \/
8. .____          .__         ____  ___
9. |    |    __ __|  | _______\   \/  / _____ _____    ______
10. |    |   |  |  |  | \___   /\     / /     \\__  \  /  ___/
11. |    |___|  |  |  |__/    / /     \|  Y Y  \/ __ \_\___ \
12. |_______ |____/|____/_____ /___/\  |__|_|  (____  /____  >
13.         \/                \/     \_/     \/     \/     \/
16.                                                                       #AntiSec
18. Greetings Global Pirates,
20. We truly hope that you’ve been enjoying the Lulzxmas festivities so far. The gifts that AnonSanta left under the LulzXmas tree are just the beginning. As we speak, his little helpers at the North Pole are readying his battle sleigh of lulz with more goodies to bring you LulzXmas joy all week long. Joy in the form of over $500,000 being expropriated from the bigshot clients of Stratfor. You didn’t think we’d let 2011 end without a BANG, did you?
22. However, if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of customers of STRATFOR Global [Un]Intelligence, you probably woke up Christmas morning to find heaps of burning coal in your stocking. But don’t fret. Take comfort in the fact that at least you’re not George Friedman or any of the STRATFOR IT guys right now.
24. We create chaos. We create mayhem. We curb stomp companies that play fast and loose with their customers’ private and sensitive information. We bring pain to greedy whitehats willing to flip for a dime on government payrolls. And don’t worry—there’s plenty more havoc in store for the rest of the week. So throw a log on the fire, grab some hot chocolate and settle in for a long week of lulz.
26. Did you have fun looting and plundering from the pocketbooks of the rich and powerful? How about laughing at the reaction of some of their butthurt customers. We LOL’d hard when poor little Cody Sultenfuss, ranch owner and DHS employee, who asked “Why me?” and when Allen Barr, just retired from the Texas Dept. of Banking, exclaimed, “It made me feel terrible. It made my wife feel terrible.” Let us not forget dear old Victor Gebilaguin, who posted the following on STRATFOR’s Facebook wall in defense of the company: “The hackers ought to be shot then hanged upside down in public.” Well since you feel so strongly about it Victor, we went ahead and ran your card up a bit. Hope you don’t mind. Really guys, cry us a river. Then go and fill out our all-purpose Butthurt Form, so we can get back to you promptly. Your feedback is important to us. Thanks.
28. Interestingly, one thing we noticed in the fallout of this catastrophic hack was that STRATFOR hired not one, but two outside consultants to try to bail their sorry asses out of the hellhole of a grave we dug them. Top identity theft protection? Professional security consultant? We’ll see how that works out for you, if you ever dare to put your servers back online again. Until then, we’ll be watching and waiting. And laughing, of course.
30. By the way, now that you have notified your customers of this massive security breach, we might have to pick up the pace of releasing peoples’ credit card information.
32. Accordingly, we’ll start the day after Christmas off right by dropping a third of the damn alphabet. How does a drop of 30,000 additional names, credit cards, addresses, phone numbers, and md5 hashed passwords sound? Sounds like a financial calamity to us. And just as the markets in the US are opening after the holiday weekend? Might be trouble.
34. But wait! That’s not all folks. 0h hell n0. Tomorrow, we will be dropping another enormous dump on our next target: the entire customer database from an online military and law enforcement supply store. Bring the pain? Shit, we brought the motherfuckin’ ruckus. You really trying to step this this?
36. Of course, this could all be averted. Have you given our comrade Bradley Manning his holiday feast yet, at a fancy restaurant of his choosing? Better make it happen, captain.
38. We’ll end today’s LulzXmas festivities by throwing in 25,000 tickets from the it.STRATFOR.com online support database. It’s probably not as controversial as the contents of their private mail spools that we’ll be dropping later, but perhaps it will shed some light on just how clueless this company really is when it comes to database security.
40. Stay tuned …
42. ###
44. ttp://ibhg35kgdvnb7jvw.onion/lulzxmas/STRATFOR_full_d_m.txt.gz
45. ttps://rapidshare.com/#!download|44tl6|2444489251|STRATFOR_full_d_m.txt.gz|3255|R~7B8842ED6343CEAE67A23C094E131679|0|0
46. ttp://depositfiles.com/files/t0hkk2wif
47. ttp://www.wupload.com/file/262598610
48. ttp://www.verzend.be/kx1n5oixnqn1/STRATFOR_full_d_m.txt.gz.html
50. ttp://ibhg35kgdvnb7jvw.onion/lulzxmas/it.tar.gz
51. ttp://www.verzend.be/s8v8ccig12hp/it.tar.gz.html
52. ttp://www.wupload.com/file/2626086337
53. ttp://depositfiles.com/files/ifnw3s34a
54. ttps://rapidshare.com/#!download|418l34|3218055206|it.tar.gz|416|R~0|0|0|You%20need%20RapidPro%20to%20download%20more%20files%20from%20your%20IP%20address.%20%288d5611a9%29
56. ##
58. SPECIAL NOTICE: We are aware that there has been some confusion as to whether the STRATFOR hack is an “official” Anonymous operation, due to a ridiculous “Emergency Anonymous Press Statement” being circulated, undermining our work while also making baseless accusations that we frequently see perpetrated by agent provocateurs. Whether this is the work of malicious counter-intelligence,, some butthurt pacifists, or stratfor employees themselves is unknown. Unfortunately, some main stream news agencies have picked up on this statement, looking for any reason to highlight and exploit any potential “inner divisions” within Anonymous. However, there has been no such squabble or infighting regarding the STRATFOR target, or any other LulzXmas target for that matter. Anyone can claim to be Anonymous, but because of the inherent decentralized nature of Anonymous, without central top-down leadership, no individual is in a place to speak to the legitimacy of another individual or group’s operation. Furthermore, our history of owning high profile targets as Anonymous has been well documented at the #antisec embassy (http://ibhg35kgdvnb7jvw.onion/) and is well known and respected within all Anon communities. Case closed.

===========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================

“failure on our part to encrypt the credit card details“

George Friedman CEO Stratfor 10th January 2012

http://pastebin.com/f7jYf5Wd

but whats this for?

 27th December 2011 other documents appeared. One set of four imgurs appeared which showed receipts from credit card purchases (online) for books and other sundries from Stratfor employees.

>…. 27th December 2011….<

Back to the paste…

So…as you can see the paste is date 26th December 2012…it also appeared again on the 29th December 2011 as  > http://pastebin.com/f7jYf5Wd

Both of these paste contained torrent links with Credit Card details leaked by the FBI.

who writes shit like that?….and why is it titled “legit”….?

The interesting thing is in the January 10th 2012 video from Stratfor, George Friedman explains that the FBI were involved and knew about the credit cards being compromised on the 17th December 2011

then this happened….

12th Jan 2012

and lets chuck the Xmas defacement in ….

The Stratfor Donations – are they fake?…was this released in imgurs and tweeted trying to show that even after 17th Dec 2011 the cards are still live…in other words…even though the cards were cancelled 17th Dec…is the FBI is making it seem as though they are still live…to see who would take the bait…plausibility?

Then this pastebin was released 16th Jan 2012  http://pastebin.com/YwazdGRZ

this was a “teaser” of the emails yet to be released.

George himself is seen in one news clip with his wallet open looking inside it with a long lost look…pathetic.

All the while the FBI were right behind the honeypot as it rolled along with slime lubricant supplied by the resident maggot snitch.

http://cryptome.org/2013/02/usa-v-monsegur-11-0805.htm

In a nutshell Barrett Brown has been arrested and indicted on bullshit.

The credit card information that appears in the 26th - 29th December 2011 paste and torrents are worthless digits on a spreadsheet.

The imgur images of receipts from the 27th December 2011 are also 100% bullshit.

The FBI recorded call from February 3rd 2012 is a staged event.

The same can be said for Jeremy Hammond and Donncha Cearrbhai and the list continues..

I hope this wakes some of the more able bloggers to look into these cases and make some noise

also George…..

u mad?

YOU SHOULD BE!

other links of interest

Sabu’s twitter timeline

http://www.scribd.com/doc/85351496/Timeline-of-ANTISEC-as-Created-and-Operated-Under-FBI-Supervision

15th August 2011

http://www.scribd.com/doc/84490160/Sabu-guilty-plea-hearing-Aug-15-2011

http://cryptome.org/2013/02/usa-v-monsegur-11-0805.htm

Another trap?

Sabu’s strange conversation with Havittaja ‏

http://pastie.org/6647091

http://pastebin.com/pqimeV3n

http://www.scribd.com/doc/84134934/Hammond-Jeremy-Complaint

http://www.scribd.com/doc/84134910/Cearrbhail-Donncha-Complaint

the Irish Connect

#FreeBB

The Ballad of Barrett Brown

Updates

http://cryptome.org/2013/04/brown-047.pdf

http://freebarrettbrown.org/bb_docket-apr15.pdf

http://freebarrettbrown.org/WBDL_prohacvice.pdf

http://cryptome.org/2013/02/bb-13-0204.htm

http://cryptome.org/2013/04/cloudfare-logs.htm

https://sebaprovost.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/cloudflare-subpoena

(since removed)

http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/04/17/cyberhysteria-obama-criminalises-research-project-and-crikey/

http://cryptome.org/2013/04/brown-050.pdf

http://kennethlipp.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/update-on-the-motion-to-quash-the-subpoena-to-cloudflare-re-projectpm/

http://www.reddit.com/r/anonymous/comments/1cnucl/cloudflare_is_now_giving_up_on_fighting_the_us/c9ihena

http://freebarrettbrown.org

Resistance From a Cage: Julian Assange Speaks to Norwegian Journalist Eirik Vold

03/01/2013

This is an exclusive English translation of an interview published Saturday, February 16, 2013, in the Norwegian news outlet Dagens Næringsliv.

Julian Assange is the itinerant hacker from the Australian Outback who gave the world the biggest leak of secret documents in history. Seven months into his embassy asylum, the cyber crusade for transparency goes on.

This is not the first time that WikiLeaks has come under attack, Assange tells me.

“We had been through a couple of fights. With a commander at the Guantanamo base. We were sued by a Swiss bank. One of my cryptographer friends was ambushed by intelligence agents in a parking lot in Luxembourg. They tried to make him tell them things about WikiLeaks.”

A cryptographer friend? Does that sound a bit like having a “hobbit friend” to you? Then let this be a warning: If you are not used to a modern Internet vocabulary, the story of Julian Assange is full of characters that may seem like they are out of a science fiction novel: cryptographer friends with vital secrets looking over their shoulders in order not to get caught; eccentric professors about to conjure up a quantum mechanics machine with the power to destroy all of cyberspace if it falls into the wrong hands; tiny torrent files, floating around in abstract space, unintelligible and meaningless when separated, but powerful information packages able to knock down governments if sewn together the right way and delivered to the masses. And they are all real and alive. Just as real and alive as the Swedish prosecutors and their extradition request for Assange or the CIA agents on a mission to stop WikiLeaks from leaking – as real as the heavy wooden door I just opened on my way into the Ecuadorian embassy in London and then shut carefully behind me. Aside from the will of a controversial South American president, that door is now the only barrier between Julian Assange and me on the inside, and the police officer from Scotland Yard (London Metropolitan Police) waiting patiently on the outside with handcuffs, a gun and orders to arrest and deport my interviewee.

Travelers in the Australian Outback

“I do what I do because I saw the opportunity,” Assange says. “Because I was born in a Western country, with the necessary education and material resources. And because I care about these issues.”

Don’t even bother to ask if he became the world’s most famous leaker and the West’s number-one dissident because of his special family background and childhood in the Australian Outback.

“I really don’t like that approach,” he says.

But Assange does have a special background. He was born on July 3, 1971, in the medium-sized town of Townsville on the tropical northern coast of Australia. The French-sounding surname, Assange, is said to be an Anglification of the Chinese name Ah Sang. A Taiwanese pirate, it is said, brought that surname to Australia. Assange grew up with his mother. They lived in hiding for about five years due to a conflict over the custody of Julian’s half brother and moved about 30 times before Julian was 14.

Some describe Assange as a distrustful person, at times bordering on paranoid. Is that why he started the interview by asking me questions about my Spanish, as he heard me make small talk with someone who I thought was an Ecuadorian embassy employee?

“Where did you learn your Spanish? Why do you speak with a Cuban accent?”

His voice and body language, however, reveal curiosity rather than distrust. Assange has always asked questions – and was always willing to go all the way to get the answers.

Meet Mendax

It was during his youth that Assange started to take advantage of the opportunities that come from growing up in a First World country: literacy, sufficient money to buy a computer, and access to the Internet. Meet Mendax, the online pseudonym of the 16-year-old hacker Julian Assange. Today Assange is seen by many as the world’s first great “ethical hacker.” His hacker team, called “the international subversives” had strict rules for their activities: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.” Others believe the pseudonym Mendax, which is Latin for “deceitful,” is the most precise way of describing Assange’s personality. Everyone, however, seems to agree that he was an extremely talented hacker.

In 2002, Assange entered the university. With his restless nature, he went through two different universities and jumped between natural sciences, philosophy and neuroscience. The grades he obtained were rather mediocre, but one particular experience proved decisive.

“I became critical of the academy. Mathematics in the university was financed by the US government and military establishment. We had to work with mathematical models that were used to make military bulldozers, such as were deployed in Iraq and employed by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes. There were quantum mechanical models that could be used for mass espionage on the Internet.”

No academic title came out of Assange’s university studies in Canberra and Melbourne. But the typical hacker outlook – rebellious, but apolitical – went through a deep metamorphosis. Faced with what Assange calls “the ivory tower’s connections to economic power relations on the ground” and global geopolitics, Mendax merged with the political consciousness of Assange the university student.

The result was WikiLeaks.

In 2006, a year after Assange strolled out of campus for the last time, WikiLeaks was founded in the capital of Iceland, Reykjavik. During WikiLeaks’ first years, Assange traveled between international conferences with geeky names like Chaos Communications Congress. WikiLeaks arranged meetings and Assange would talk to the journalists who bothered to listen. Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks staff silently stretched its probing tentacles through cyberspace in its search for secrets. Big secrets.

The Rebel Library

January 8, 2010 – the WikiLeaks Twitter account posts a request for help in decrypting a video about a “U.S. bomb strike on civilians ” Three months later, the world witnessed a pristine video recording from 2007 of two Apache artillery helicopters attacking a group of defenseless Iraqis, among them two Reuters press photographers, with 30 millimeter anti-armor ammunition.

“The Collateral Murder video became the iconic video of the Iraq war,” says Assange proudly.

But we had seen nothing yet. During 2010, WikiLeaks released three more enormous leaks: The Afghan War Diary, in which US military servicemen provide the naked truth about NATO’s killing of Afghan civilians, lies, secrecy and support for a corrupt undemocratic Afghan regime; a similar package from Iraq, called the Iraq War Logs, and finally, Cablegate, a collection of cables sent between Washington and US embassies in 274 countries, dating from 1966 to 2010.

Assange explained how US foreign policy was exposed as violent and dishonest, how the revelations made the ground shake beneath corrupt and oppressive regimes and corporations all over the world and stimulated revolutions, as in Tunisia, and reformist movements in Ghana and Kenya.

WikiLeaks is “a rebel library of Alexandria,” Assange declares, making a parallel to the largest known library of classical antiquity.

“With Cablegate, we have provided the largest geopolitical encyclopedia of how the world actually works that ever existed. It’s really hard to think of anything in modern times that comes close to this.”

Assange paints in grandiose words, but insistently backs them up with numbers. All together, the three releases contain more than 700,000 documents. With its 251,276,536 words, Cablegate alone constitutes the greatest package of classified material ever released.

Has he read all the documents?

“No, but I’ve read thousands, many thousands.”

“It’s too much; it’s impossible to read it all, or get the full overview of all the revelations. But the impact all over the world is enormous. Every single one of our releases causes thousands of reactions, and they always give people more insight,” he says.

The chase begins. Assange has still not revealed how WikiLeaks got the Collateral Murder video decrypted. Presumably, one of his cryptographer friends had something to do with it. But in the Pentagon, eyes turned to a young American soldier on duty in Iraq. On May 26, 2010, Private Bradley Manning was arrested.

“We started to realize that the heat was really coming down on us,” Assange says. And it certainly was.

“We were tipped off that we were being followed. Journalists reported about US pressure on different countries – Germany and Australia – to make them prosecute us legally. There were public calls for my assassination from leading American politicians; proposals for laws that WikiLeaks be declared a terrorist organization. The Pentagon announced that it had put together a task force of 120 defense and intelligence personnel. The CIA and the FBI had theirs, too,” he says.

In the United States, WikiLeaks’ domain name in California was shut down. Bank of America announced that all transactions dealing with WikiLeaks would be blocked. Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Western Union and Amazon followed. German tax authorities started to investigate WikiLeaks.

“Friends of mine were stopped and interrogated in airports. People who only had remote connections to WikiLeaks started to lose jobs and contracts,” he says.

But the FBI may have been closer than Assange imagined. In 2011, the Bureau sent a group of agents in a private jet to Iceland. Without the knowledge of the government of Iceland, the FBI agents hunted down suspected WikiLeaks allies and brought them to the US embassy in Reykjavik for interrogation.

They Can’t Stop Us

During the two-and-a-half hour interview, only once did Assange display his characteristic impatience when he thinks a journalist says something stupid. The occasion was my interruption of a long argument about how powerful elites trick potential opponents into passivity by giving the impression that they have a greater capacity to harm than they actually have. “But you are afraid,” I ask – or, rather, I state.

“That’s a silly statement,” Assange responds.

A short awkward silence follows.

“So you believe that those who are after you exaggerate their ability to harm you?”

“Those who want to harm WikiLeaks constantly exaggerate their ability to harm us. They are mostly incompetent people.”

Is this the cocky Mendax, talking about helpless old policemen in their clumsy hunt for an agile young hacker in cyberspace? Has Assange forgotten that he’s entering his seventh month holed up in a 50-square-meter embassy out of fear of ending up like Bradley Manning?

“This isn’t about me. What happens to me is not important, beyond the practical difficulties it might create for WikiLeaks.”

Assange goes back to a televised Pentagon press conference from 2010 to explain what he means.

“They demanded that WikiLeaks hand over all the documents, eliminate all the copies and cut off all contact with whistleblowers in the US military. Or else they would, and I quote, ‘compel us to do so.’”

But WikiLeaks didn’t obey.

“Yes, they put great pressure on us, financial and legal measures that are still ongoing. But we haven’t removed a single thing,” says Assange.

He thinks the Pentagon has lost face, that their threats are degraded after WikiLeaks ignored their demands and continued publishing.

“The first time we took it seriously, but when they repeated the same demand afterwards, we just laughed about it.

They might be able to take revenge on WikiLeaks, but they couldn’t stop us.”

The WikiLeaks Philosophy

“The left? The left is still stuck in the 1960s,” Assange states drily. Ideologically, he is closer to the free market, even though he says markets always tend to evolve into monopolies unless they are forced to work freely.

Assange might not be afraid, but he is clearly taking a huge personal risk with his disclosure activities. There must be a driving force within him, and it is definitely not a political ideology.

Assange takes a deep breath.

“I can answer long and theoretically, or short, depending on your audience.”

Assange is service-oriented now. Or just very eager to be correctly understood when he is about to answer why a world full of freely competing news media, political movements and research institutions really needs publishers of secret material like him. Assange wants to make a deeper point. WikiLeaks, he says, is about more than just scandalous revelations and splashy headlines.

“In the same way that the ability to solve physical problems is limited by our understanding of physical laws, the ability to solve societal problems depends on our insight into human institutions. All political theories on how the world is and how it should be are built on such an understanding.”

By “institutions” Assange means governments, private companies and other networks of power groups. The problem, he explains, is that while institutions constantly change as they absorb new technology and make old theories outdated, the information about how they actually work is concealed, kept secret.

“Much of what we are being presented, and upon which we build our understanding of the world, is designed to make these institutions palatable for the outside world.”

“This is why only by knowing the internal communications of these institutions can we understand how they really work. So, if we want to make the world more just, if we want humanity to reach its heights and not its lows, then the first step is to get access to that information,” he says.

“And then there’s the media.”

Mainstream Media Disappoints

From high theoretical spheres, Assange brings the discussion down to earth again. Or rather down into the mud, to what was to become a dirty conflict between WikiLeaks and the mainstream media.

But it started as a sweet tango. WikiLeaks did the initial work; The New York Times, Der Spiegel and other leading news publications provided their best writers and huge readerships, maximizing the global impact of the revelations.

“I was quite impressed by their work and what we achieved together in the beginning,” Assange admits.

Then it all went downhill.

Assange speaks with indignation about Western news media turning an American document about an Iranian missile purchase into “fear propaganda” by censoring the expert assessment in the same document which showed that the purchase did not constitute any threat, about Der Spiegel choosing not to publish information that shed some unfortunate light on Angela Merkel, about the terrible accounts of Task Force 373 and their killing of innocent Afghans – which The New York Times refused to publish – and about what Assange considers an intentional personal smear that reached its low point in August last year, when The New York Times wrote that he refused to flush the toilet.

“Media organizations start off small. But when they grow, they are invited to sit down with the powerful. Then they become part of the same powerful elite that they are supposed to be critically monitoring,” he explains.

“It’s shameful,” Assange says, “that a handful of activists in WikiLeaks have published more secret documents than the entire establishment press, with all its billion-dollar budgets, technical competence and human resources, all together.”

A South American Savior

June 19, 2012: Ecuador’s government announced that Assange had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and requested political asylum in Ecuador. Swedish prosecutors want him extradited to Sweden to question him about sexual assault allegations from two Swedish women. Both said they had voluntary sex with Assange in August 2010, but one claim, among other things, is that Assange ripped off a condom and continued intercourse without consent. So far, the closest prosecutors have come to presenting evidence in the cases is a torn-up condom that later turned out not to have any trace DNA from Assange.[1] Assange has offered to answer questions by telephone, or to go to Sweden, provided that that country guarantees that he will not be extradited to the United States, where alleged whistleblower Manning has been held under conditions that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture deemed “cruel and inhuman.” The Swedes rejected the offer.

So, why did Assange choose to apply for political asylum in a country popularly known as the “banana republic” par excellence of South America?

“Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa is really a special person,” Assange says, his voice filled with admiration.

“He belongs to a new generation of leaders. People like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela have also achieved impressive things, but he is still a military leader. Correa is a US-educated PhD economist. A nationalist in the good sense of the word and a social reformer. This is a very interesting combination.”

On August 15 last year, however, a lot of people doubted that this lifeline would be enough to save Assange. In response to Ecuador’s granting political asylum to Assange the day before, the British government sent a letter wherein it threatened to revoke the diplomatic immunity of the embassy and go in to arrest Assange. International media described warnings about economic sanctions with catastrophic consequences for Ecuador if Assange was not sacrificed. Most analysts seemed to believe Ecuador would give in. Correa reacted by gathering the entire South American continent behind a declaration that unanimously condemned the threat and scared the British government into a humiliating retreat.

Assange smiles when asked what happened to the pale, hunched up and morally defeated refugee that I had read about in the British press lately. Life as a persecuted person may be rough, but Assange also has a lot of friends. The British movie director Ken Loach donated a running machine, and a former British intelligence agent gives Assange martial arts training at the embassy.

“I’m improving my boxing too, now,” Assange says.

The mysterious boxing trainer – Assange does not provide his name – is not the only former intelligence agent who has sided with the Australian “rebel librarian.” A recent letter to the British newspaper The Guardian in support of Assange was signed by an impressive list of former CIA agents and former colleagues from other agencies. On January 25, the CIA officer John Kiriakou was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for blowing the whistle on waterboarding torture by the US military, while the torturers continue to go free. These are hard times for talkative military and intelligence personnel in the US, and many see Assange and WikiLeaks as their voice.

In addition, a broad spectrum of intellectuals, musicians, politicians from the left and right, hackers and even celebrity feminist Naomi Klein have thrown their support behind Assange and demand that he get free passage to Ecuador. The EU parliament voted against the US-imposed banking blockade against WikiLeaks. Last week, Iceland’s interior minister Ogmundur Jonasson revealed that he told the FBI agents to get out of Iceland when he found out about the illegal interrogations in the US embassy.

“We have support from all over the world. But the level of support is found in countries that have toppled bad governments in the past, and where the internal archives of the fallen regimes have been central elements in the public debate afterward,” Assange explains, pointing to countries like the former apartheid regime of South Africa and former East Germany.

But the rape allegations, whether rooted in reality or not, have stuck to Assange’s name now, it seems, and have undermined his support in some parts of Europe.

“You are not very popular in Sweden, are you?”

“Not in the media, but polls show that I have the support of about 55 percent of the Swedish people. That is right in the middle compared to other countries, and better than in the US and Great Britain,” he says.

A Way Out

A lady whom I had first thought was an Ecuadorian embassy employee turns out to be part of the team of the world’s possibly most famous judge, Baltazar Garzón, who has taken on the task of leading Assange’s legal defense.

Garzón has already confronted Great Britain in another high-profile extradition case in the past. In 1998, the former military dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London on the orders of Interpol. Garzón wanted him extradited to Spain to have him prosecuted for murder, torture and kidnappings committed during his 17-year dictatorship. TheBritish government, however, released Pinochet and let him return to Chile as a free man. Now Garzón is trying to convince the British government that Assange is innocent and does not deserve a harsher treatment – so far, in vain.

Nevertheless, Assange is still optimistic.

“We are many people working hard to make the US drop persecution of WikiLeaks,” he says, and seems to believe that the accusations from Sweden will also disappear if the US gives up its goal of crushing WikiLeaks.

“But right now, it does not really seem that the cases against you and WikiLeaks are about to disappear. Don’t you have another plan to get out of here?”

I ask the question while peeking out from the tiny gap between the old-fashioned curtains in the room. It is no more than two meters from the window to the ground beneath, and it looks dark and abandoned. Earlier speculations had it that the Ecuadorians would attempt to smuggle Assange out in a diplomatic bag and into a speed boat waiting in the river Thames a good kilometer south of the embassy, and then into international waters.

Assange has a different escape route planned. It goes via the upcoming parliamentary elections in Australia. He will be a candidate for the newly founded WikiLeaks party.

“25 percent of the electorate says it will vote for me. I have supporters from the social democrats, the conservatives and the Green Party. And the support is uniform all over the country,” says Assange.

And the election campaign has not even started. The Australian police has said Assange’s legal problems abroad do not impede him from being a candidate in Australia.

Still, escape “in a British police car” is the option with the lowest odds, only 1.38, at the Irish bookmaker site Paddy Power, which takes bets on how the celebrity refugee will leave the embassy in the end. A seat in the Australian senate stands at 3.5.

As the bets keep rolling in, Assange makes the best out of life on 50 square meters. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks continues pumping out secret documents. In spite of mutual distrust, smearing and accusations of censorship, WikiLeaks and the establishment media hold on tight to each other. It still takes two to tango. WikiLeaks needs access to the public and newspapers need splashy headlines. According to Assange’s most recent numbers, there is a WikiLeaks-based article in almost every second issue of The New York Times. The tones might have soured, but neither can afford to stop dancing.

Via Truthout

Sequester May Slow Pentagon Response to WikiLeaks

Howard Stern and Jesse Ventura discuss politics, WikiLeaks, Monsanto and other interesting topics.

02/27/2013

The across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration that are expected to take effect on March 1 could impede the government’s ability to respond to WikiLeaks and to rectify the flaws in information security that it exposed, a Pentagon official told Congress recently.

Zachary J. Lemnios, the assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, was asked by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to describe the “most significant” impacts on cybersecurity that could follow from the anticipated cuts to the Pentagon’s budget.

Mr. Lemnios replied that “cuts under sequestration could hurt efforts to fight cyber threats, including [...] improving the security of our classified Federal networks and addressing WikiLeaks.”

The sequester could also interfere with the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative that began under President Bush, he said, and could hold up plans to “initiat[e] continuous monitoring of unclassified networks at all Federal agencies.”

Mr. Lemnios’ response to Sen. Portman’s question for the record (which had not specifically mentioned WikiLeaks) followed a March 2012 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Emerging Threats and Capabilities that was published in December 2012 (at page 42).

Generally speaking, computer security within the military is a daunting problem, Mr. Lemnios told the Committee, particularly since “The Department operates over 15,000 networks and 7 million computing devices across hundreds of installations in dozens of countries around the globe.”

The challenge of cybersecurity cannot be fully described in public, said Dr. Kaigham J. Gabriel of DARPA. “The complete picture requires a discussion at the special access level.” But he told the Committee last year that several basic points can be openly acknowledged:

“Attackers can penetrate our networks: In just 3 days and at a cost of only $18,000, the Host-Based Security System” — the Pentagon’s baseline computer security system — “was penetrated.”

“User authentication is a weak link: 53,000 passwords were provided to teams at Defcon; within 48 hours, 38,000 were cracked.”

“The Defense supply chain is at risk: More than two-thirds of electronics in U.S. advanced fighter aircraft are fabricated in off-shore foundries.”

“Physical systems are at risk: A smartphone hundreds of miles away took control of a car’s drive system through an exploit in a wireless interface.”

“The United States continues to spend on cybersecurity with limited increase in security: The Federal Government expended billions of dollars in 2010, but the number of malicious cyber intrusions has increased.”

Though it was presumably not intentional, the WikiLeaks project galvanized government information security programs and accelerated efforts to devise “insider threat” detection mechanisms, along with intensified surveillance of classified and unclassified government computer networks.

“New classes of anomaly detection methods have been developed and are based on aggregating events across time and multiple sources to identify network and host-based behavior that might be malicious,” James S. Peery of Sandia National Laboratories told the Senate Armed Services Committee at last year’s hearing. “These approaches and behavioral-based methods have been successful in finding previously undiscovered malware.”

“One drawback of this technology, though, is that it has a very high false positive rate,” he said.

One Response to “Sequester May Slow Pentagon Response to WikiLeaks”

Anonymous Says:

The Pentagon’s cybersecurity issue is not about money, and how to develop the technology to prevent these attacks. It’s much deeper. Hackers, I think, have a certain tendency to question authority and that tendency doesn’t fit well in a military environment. That means that the human talent needed to tackle the cybersecurity issues won’t even work for the Pentagon and its cybersecurity divisions.

Also, there is this huge link between the Defense Department’s black eavesdropping initiatives and a vision of a different Internet, that is somewhat less open and less anonymous, and certainly less subversive. That, I think, makes the hackers side with the Average Joe on his desktop (the hacker was just an Average Joe, too) instead of with the huge Big Brother being built in the basement of the NSA that seeks to control everything that goes through the Internet. It’s a lost cause for the Pentagon.

Via SecrecyNews

America must not “dictate” to world, new defense chief says

02/27/2013

Decorated Vietnam veteran Chuck Hagel was sworn in as U.S. defense secretary on Wednesday after a bruising Senate confirmation battle, and promised to renew old U.S. alliances and forge new ones without attempting to “dictate” to the world.

Addressing Pentagon employees shortly after a small, closed-door swearing-in ceremony, Hagel spoke optimistically, if vaguely, about global challenges ahead and the importance of American leadership abroad.

“We can’t dictate to the world. But we must engage the world. We must lead with our allies,” Hagel said in what appeared to be unscripted remarks.

“No nation, as great as America is, can do any of this alone.”

He also plainly acknowledged the prospect of looming automatic budget cuts, known as the sequester, saying flatly: “That’s a reality. We need to figure this out. You are doing that.”

“We need to deal with this reality,” he added, as hopes dim in Washington that Congress might act in time to forestall $46 billion in Pentagon cuts, due to kick in on March 1.

Hagel, a former two-term Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, broke from his party during the administration of George W. Bush to become a fierce critic of the Iraq war.

Many Republicans opposed to Hagel’s nomination scorned him over Iraq and raised questions about whether he was sufficiently supportive of Israel, tough enough on Iran or truly committed to maintaining a robust nuclear deterrent.

The 58-41 Senate vote to confirm him late on Tuesday was the closest vote ever to approve a defense secretary, with only four Republicans supporting him.

AMERICA MUST USE POWER “WISELY”

Hagel did not acknowledge any Republican criticisms or reveal any personal concerns about working with Congress during his remarks on Wednesday. But he did articulate his views about the need for caution when America flexes its muscle abroad.

“We have great power and how we apply our power is particularly important,” Hagel said.

“That engagement in the world should be done wisely. And the resources that we employ on behalf of our country and our allies should always be applied wisely.”

Hagel’s views of war and the limits of American military power were shaped in part by his experiences in Vietnam, where he fought as an infantryman alongside his brother and was awarded two Purple Hearts, the medal given to troops wounded in battle.

Hagel still carries the shrapnel from one of his injuries and he is the first Vietnam veteran to lead the Pentagon.

Introducing Hagel in the Pentagon auditorium, an Army infantryman with two tours in Afghanistan said Hagel “knows the very real cost of war” and was guided by principals to use force only when necessary.

Among his first tasks, Hagel will start weighing in on crucial decisions about the Afghan war, notably the size and scope of the American force that President Barack Obama will leave behind in the country once NATO declares its combat mission over at the end of 2014.

Leaving fewer troops than U.S. commanders recommend could create tension with the military, and become a lightening-rod issue with Republicans.

Hagel’s predecessor, former defense secretary Leon Panetta, discussed with NATO allies in Brussels last week keeping a NATO force of between 8,000 and 12,000 troops. A senior NATO official said last month that the United States expects other NATO allies to contribute between a third and half the number of troops Washington provides.

Via Reuters

Army Forced to Release Documents Related to Secretive Bradley Manning Case

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02/27/2013

After over one-thousand days of secretive legal proceedings, the United States government has released a small portion of the thousands of pages of courtroom documents from the case against alleged WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning, a 25-year-old Army intelligence specialist, was arrested in May 2010 and accused of passing hundreds of thousands of sensitive military documents to the anti-secrecy whistleblower site while working as an intelligence officer in Iraq. The soldier is scheduled to be formally court-martialed beginning this June and could be sentenced to life in prison for his role in providing WikiLeaks with privileged material. Since details from the pre-trial motion hearings have been scarce, however, little has been known publically about the government’s prosecution until now.

On Wednesday, the Military District of Washington informed members of the press that 84 judicial orders and rulings from the pre-trial hearings have been reviewed, redacted and uploaded to a military-run website where they can be viewed “In response to various Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and inquiries from news agencies.” The trove so far includes minor legal rulings regarding Pfc. Manning’s proposed plea, court orders sent to mental health professionals and other rulings made by the judge.

The Army says that the seven-dozen documents published on Wednesday make up just a small sampling of the more than 500 files that have already been either filed by attorneys for both sides in the matter or the military judge presiding over the case, Col. Denise Lind. In all, those documents total more than 30,000 pages, and the Army says materials will be continuously published online as they are prepared for release. They warn the media, however, that “due to the voluminous nature of these documents,” it could be a long time coming before the rest of the papers are vetted appropriately for publication.

The statement from the military comes just one day after Col. Lind ruled that although Pfc. Manning has been detained for over 1,000 days, the government did not violate the speedy trial statute in the military’s Rules for Courts-Martial. Lind admitted to the court that delays in the case have occurred in part due to the continuous efforts the government has undertaken to audit the trove of documents relevant to the case, but said the defense was not hindered by the slow-moving trial. David Coombs, the civilian defense attorney for Pfc. Manning, had unsuccessfully asked the judge to dismiss all charges against his client due to the lingering, nearly three-year process.

Previously, Coombs implored the court to free Pfc. Manning by arguing that the treatment his client endured while detained in a military brig after being captured was tantamount to torture. Lind agreed, in part, and said 112 days will be subtracted off of any sentence handed to the officer. When Coomb’s latest request was declined, however, journalist Ed Pilkington wrote for The Guardian that the government’s absurd quest for total secrecy has left Manning to stand trial in an “Alice-in-Wonderland world.”

“Lind spent an hour and a half without pause reading out a judgment that must have stretched to 50 pages, at a rate that rendered accurate reporting of it diabolically difficult,” he said of Lind’s response to Coomb’s last unsuccessful appeal. “No copy of the ruling has – then or now – been made available to the public, presumably on grounds of national security, even though every word of the document had been read out to the very public that was now being withheld its publication.”

“This prosecution, as it is currently conceived, could have a chilling effect on public accountability that goes far beyond the relatively rarefied world of WikiLeaks,” Pilkington wrote. Only hours later, the Army said they would start releasing courtroom filings.

Last May, the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the US government over the lack of transparency in the Manning trial. “Public scrutiny plays a vital role in government accountability. Media access to the Manning trial proceedings and documents is critical for the transparency on which democratic government and faith in our justice system rests,” CCR Legal Director Baher Azmy said in a statement when the petition against the Army Court of Criminal Appeals was filed. Additionally, a legal brief urging the government to release documents was filed last September and endorsed by The Associated Press, Atlantic Media, Dow Jones, Gannett, Hearst, CNN, McClatchy, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Reuters, the Washington Post and other media outlets.

Pfc. Manning is expected to testify on Thursday this week when he is scheduled to formally offer a plea. He may avoid a life sentencing by pleading guilty to lesser charges.

Via RT