It's been nearly three years since the WikiLeaks grand jury opened -- well, when will it end?
It's funny how it never reaches closure -- evidently because it's hard to parse the 1917 Espionage Act and apply it to foreigners especially, and yet WikiLeaks' Julian Assange was instrumental -- vital -- in setting up another huge assault on our national security and credibility with the Edward Snowden defection.
The authorities know full well that there are Supreme Court decisions (i.e. on the Pentagon Papers) that mandate that journalists reporting on leaks themselves can't answer for this crime. And Glenn Greenwald and company know this, too, which is why they are scrurrying to turn everyone involved in the theft, delivery, encryption, storage and distribution of these secret files into a "journalist," even Greenwald's husband David Miranda, who served as a mule for the files and was stopped in London's Heathrow Airport after picking them up from Laura Poitras and/or Jacob Appelbaum -- who remain in Germany precisely because they're worried about this grand jury, and have been stopped at borders and searched and had gadgets confiscated precisely because of their relationship to it.
That relationship is not strictly one of reporting, given that Appelbaum in particular, a Tor developer, appears to have assisted WikiLeaks and Snowden in more than just "reporting". That's my conviction.
You can read all about this grand jury on the website of Alexa O'Brien, one of the main fans of Chelsea Manning and chronicler of her trial. No, I don't call her a journalist because she isn't a journalist -- not only are her blogs tendentious and biased; once I saw a video of her debating Eli Lake that clinched it for me -- she was nearly hysterical in trying to minimize and ultimately remove any concerns of harm done by WikiLeaks, claiming there was no people killed in Afghanistan just because no official report exists of any.
Then there's the David House story -- remember him, friend of Manning? Oh, and Aaron Swartz, too.
There's this compilation which tries to make the case for something "nefarious" to be in the Stratfor leaked emails which talks about the sealed indictment and the grand jury. I don't think analysts kicking around hypotheticals and trying to piece together what a secretive government is doing constitute conspirators up to no good. Stratfor has no relationship to the grand jury and WikiLeaks hasn't been able to show any.
Then there's the law-farers at EFF, of course, who make much of the fact that some members of congress want to prosecute Assange and others related to WikiLeaks. And why not? It was an assault on a liberal democratic state that brought no demonstrable good but only harm.
Here's the story that supposedly the WikiLeaks grand jury was watching the Manning trial.
A wired story about a year ago on the ongoing probe -- remember three WikiLeaks people had their email and social media requested by the feds -- and Twitter resisted this and finally lost the case. Jacob Appelbaum was one.
NPR's take -- is there ever anyhing else?!
So...come on, guys. Why is it taking so long? Do you realize that because you were unable to have a court case and trial showing right from wrong and law from crime that the Snowden case happened? You're part of enabling the Snowden case to happen.
I realize it's hard. Can't ding those journalists! But you see now they are getting more and more activist, more and more thuggish, more and more cunning and duplicitous. Where will it end?
I started to realize it might be a bit more tangled than it seemed when I followed the whole relationship between Jacob Appelbaum and Tor and the Navy and the Department of Defense, who funds Tor to this day.
Then I saw How the US Government Inadvertently Created WikiLeaks on Pando Daily describing Julian Assange's one-time relationship with the US government, where it turns out he had a grant from DARPA and the NSA (yes, that NSA) to do encryption -- in fact his rubberhouse code.
That lovely-sounding name was just what it sounds like -- how to make encryption that wouldn't induce the authorities to torture you to get the key out of you, but would enable the peel-off of one innocent layer and revelation of enough files to keep them happy and not torture you.
Except...as everyone figured out (including the bad guys watching), no one would believe you only had one layer once that notion leaked out. So then there was the self-destroying code that would delete its key and disappear and you could honestly say you couldn't get at it anymore....unless they didn't believe you then, either.
I don't recall the fact of the US government supporting Assange with a grant before ever coming out. But I'm not a really close student of WikiLeaks as some are.
But as the Pando article by Zatko says, it could account for his vendetta -- and the USG's reluctance to pursue him for fear of revealing more about secret programs or something. What happened is they classified research he thought should have been open, i.e. available for him to keep calling his own and working for -- he didn't accept the "work for hire" concept:
Julian told me his graduate work had been funded by a US government grant, specifically NSA and DARPA money, which was supposed to be used for fundamental security research. It was a time when the Bush Administration and Department of Defense were seen to be classifying a great deal of fundamental research and pulling back on university funds. These universities were getting the message that they could no longer work on the research they had been conducting, and what they had already done was classified. In a Joseph Heller-like twist, they weren’t even allowed to know what it was they had already discovered.
According to Julian, the US government cast such a wide net that even general scientific research, whose output had always been published openly, was swept up in America’s secrecy nets. As you can imagine this did not sit well with Julian, because his work had also been funded by one of these fundamental research funding lines and yanked.
So here you have a non-US citizen at a foreign university doing graduate work studies, and the United States government came barreling in and not only snuffed out the funding and killed his studies, it also barred him from knowing what it was he had been funded to research.
Gosh, that sounds like Richard Stallman, eh? Remember, he sells code to a company then can't get it back because it's close and proprietary, and that sets up a lifetime of trying to rip open code everywhere because "information wants to be free". Mitch Kapor also suffered from that same grudge, although he made his first millions first, and had patent lawsuits, before he began fighting for open source software...
I had seen reference to Zatko in a conspiratorial book called Deconstructing WikiLeaks with an indication that Appelbaum was in touch with him. And also Andy Greenberg's book, where he describes the debates about rubberhose between Assange and Mudge (Zatko's nickname when he was a hacker in the wild), who later works for the government. There's this sort of nostalgic bit where they are all hackers together, going to the Chaos Computer Club camps, hanging out, making a loft to code in and be crazy in, but then some of them go don suits and dies and work for th Man in the end...
Here's his bio:
Peiter Zatko (.mudge) is a researcher at Google for Motorola Mobility’s Advanced Technology & Projects (ATAP) group. Formerly, he was a founder of The L0pht, a hacker group whose members testified before Congress, a division scientist at government contractor BBN, and program manager at DARPA. Follow him on Twitter: @dotmudge.
Ah, Google now. No longer at the USG. And in case you're wondering which side he's on with the whole NSA thing, he writes of Assange's response when he was told he couldn't keep his code open:
It was at that moment Julian told me, that he decided he would devote himself to exposing organizations that attempted to keep secrets and withhold information in an effort keep the masses ignorant and disadvantaged.
I'll tell you where I feel ignorant and disadvantaged -- not about the claims of Snowden, but where Snowden is now -- and why this grand jury has not issued an indictment.
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