Moscow Has Eyes On WikiLeaks, Too 579
mark72005 writes "National-security officials say that the National Security Agency, the US government's eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country's domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders. 'We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it's been frustrating,' a US law-enforcement official tells The Daily Beast. 'The Russians play by different rules.'" Something tells me those rules might be in line with professor Tom Flanagan (an adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper), who openly advocates assassinating Assange. Update: 12/03 00:56 GMT by S : Reader Red Flayer points out that Flanagan later recanted, saying, "It was a thoughtless, glib remark about a serious subject."
Re:Assange (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. I wish he would just release everything he has already. Apparently the next big release will cause scandal and humiliation in major banks, and it's killing me that the release of such information could depend on Assange's life.
Probably his best shot is to send the decryption key for the insurance file [wired.com] as a threat to someone like the state department and let them shut these idiots up about assassinating foreign nationals.
The Irony of Wikileaks (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm still processing this but I think Rubin makes some good points here [tnr.com].
Re:Assange (Score:0, Interesting)
Jullian is a replaceable figurehead. He is a known subversive, an arrogant target. He's also attempted suicide in the past. This may be attempted suicide by foreign intelligence services. Maybe he wants to be a martyr.
Re:Tom Flanagan, Hilarious Idiot (Score:4, Interesting)
And this guy's an adviser to the Canadian PM? What kind of advice does he provide? "Well, sir, I think you should grow wings and save the internet or at least threaten to break its kneecaps if it doesn't shape up."
Former adviser. Media outside of Canada likes to leave that part out, I guess because it makes it seem like our government is reacting to WikiLeaks.
No one in Canada takes him seriously, he just goes on CBC and says outrageous things. It's pretty amusing that he was taken seriously internationally.
Re:Assange (Score:5, Interesting)
When torrent sites go
Hahahahaha, everything you say is true. These clowns cannot even shut down http://thepiratebay.org/ [thepiratebay.org] after years and years of litigation and actually throwing individual people in jail. The media shitstorm around Wikileaks is getting more amusing every hour. Say what you want about Assange, but if his goal was to draw attention to factual info leaked into the wild by US government employees, then he succeeded beyond even his own wildest dreams.
Re:Truth? Let me tell you about TRUTH (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to assume from your comments that you're in the military. If so, then I have a cold, sad truth for you - you haven't done one goddamn thing to defend our freedom or the Constitution. In fact, you provide the muscle to the very people who take away our freedoms and piss on the Constitution. Despite the bullshit you're told in boot camp, you are NOT defending America or "serving your country". You are blindly serving the whims of corrupt politicians, without ever questioning to see if what they're telling you is the right thing to do or not. You are the very enemy you were told you were fighting against, because YOU are the threat the government uses to keep citizens cowed and following orders. Congratulations, you are a terrorist and you never had the good sense to realize it.
I'm well aware I'll probably get modded down since military worship is everywhere, but it doesn't matter. I'm not going to pretend like the armed thugs doing the ill will of corrupt politicians are somehow protecting us. The US Constitution specifically bans a standing army in a time of peace - makes you wonder why ever since WWII the US government has always found some bogus reason to perpetually be at war.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Interesting)
The way I see it. If the documents had been released by "real" journalists (what defines a real journalist anyway?) 10 at a time, there would be no talk about hanging said journalists. When thousands of documents is released at one time, we suddenly call for his head?
Re:subject goes here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, there's something conscious and subconscious going on here, with respect to the vitriolic calls for assassination, and so forth.
The conscious thing is simple: "we want to kill him because he released sensitive shit that's detrimental to us, either personally or strategically".
But I sense an unspoken outrage here, not so much at the content of the cables, but at the disruptive nature of what those in power see as a "flagrant violation of the rules". There have been countless examples of this throughout history...American revolutionaries employing guerrilla tactics against an enemy fighting an old-style war, to name but one.
Ultimately, I think the way this stuff goes down, in the old world, is that news outlets get ahold of a bunch of sensitive shit, and then they schedule lunch with the people on the ass-end of the offensive shit, and they say "look, do some stuff that helps us and we'll release A, B and C, but we'll gloss over D, E and F." And I think this happens largely because media are either for-profit concerns, or else funded by the governments. They can only go so far in exposing the truth.
Wikileaks, in the new world, has basically said "Fuck that. We're not going to play by the old rules. We're releasing all this stuff, but if you want you can help us redact some of it." They can only do that because they have little financial stake in the outcome of their actions. And I think that among the people used to the old system, this is an affront to the assumptions of people well-versed in these well-developed social and cultural mores. And furthermore, I think vast swaths of the public go along with the outrage simply because they really don't want to know "the truth". They'd rather accept some version of the truth that doesn't upset the apple cart, because they have more mundane concerns like putting their kids through school.
The lesson from all this, IMO, is that Wikileaks, basically, is the Internet (metaphorically because of what it represents). It's a game-changer. Since the mid-90's, when we saw this new communications medium emerge, this is what we all envisioned: information in control of the masses, citizen journalism, etc. and so on. It has finally emerged in the form of Wikileaks (and if they are destroyed, it will re-form under a different guise. The implication is this: the way the world works is going to change. This diplomatic cable leak will be remembered as a moment that the old-accepted rules started to be trampled on.
No matter what, it's going to be fascinating how it all shakes out. And, some people might die, lose their jobs, increase or decrease in terms of relevance. But ultimately life will go on. It always does.
One final comment related to the above poster: really, Wikileaks isn't leaking this information at all. The Guardian is. The New York Times is. Der Spiegel is. Le Monde is. Wikileaks just dumped the documents. But it's these news organizations that are making money off packaging all the supposedly damaging information into bite-sized chunks that the average consumer can digest. Yet, I haven't heard any calls for the assassination of the editor in chief of the New York Times.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bradley Manning is acused of downloading the files over a secure military network and transferring them to his personal laptop and then uploading the files to an unnamed site everybody assumes is wikileaks. The downloads over the secure military net was surely logged, there was certainly forensicaly visable traces of the classified files left on his laptop and at least normal logging at the ISP Manning connected to would have how much data he uploaded; so it's really not that hard to connect those dots. All of this would have happened before the wikileaks submission process. When I was in the Army I had lost a classified document and for months the phones I talked on were tapped and I was followed everywhere I went, and they were blatant about it; I sure was glad when I found the document under the bottom drawer of the file cabinet inside the security vault!