If it's one thing that Bolshevik-style movements of secrecy and thuggery and radicalism hate, it's when their crimes are documented and exposed. They will do anything to lie their way out of them. They hate free-wheeling, open, critical discussion about themselves, they want to control and manage every perception and every comment, and they endlessly insist that critics "have it right" or "better get their facts straight" -- usually by harping on petty or meaningless errors or exaggerating figures' statements out of context.
That's why Julian Assange, founder of the anarchist collective WikiLeaks, is now in overdrive trying to stop the public from examining him critically as a public figure and trying to discredit a film about him about to appear next month which he finds unflattering -- even though its producer shares his cause to some extent.
So true to form, the thugs have hacked The Fifth Estate and published their proprietary script.
And that means of course essentially doxing -- in this case, exposing the script, which is an item of intellectual property that was not released to the public by its author and owner -- through coercive and exploitative hacking to launch another political provocation to distract from WikiLeaks' crimes.
Andy Greenberg picks up the story and instead of picking on Assange's list of lies, he picks on the claims of the producer, Bill Condon, that Assange got a "very, very early" version of the script and is out of syn -- and instead claims that the script doesn't really differ. This will be endlessly parsed when the film actually comes out and more eyes can get on this than those of journalists like Greenberg forced to be chummy with WL to "get the story".
Meanwhile, I want to touch on what I think is the biggest lie in the Big Lie -- which is that people weren't harmed by WikiLeaks.
Of course people are harmed by WikiLeaks, despite the utter nonsense constantly shrieked about this by cheerleaders like Manning's fangirl-in-chief Alexa O'Brien.
It's just that they're not going to line up and publicize their harm to paint targets on their back for more harm, duh.
Most of the people harmed are trying to resume their lives quietly, move to other countries or jobs, or have even gone into hiding -- if they aren't dead. And no, we don't know if they are all dead or not and WikiLeaks would not be a credible source on this, given their propensity to hide themselves and their tracks on every occasion.
Saying there is no harm to the US or its network of sources is an outrageously false claim for anyone who knows any of the cables, the countries, and the incidents involved.
I do -- I wrote about the cables from Central Asia -- and I'm here to say that most definitely there was concrete harm to individuals, I know the cases, and no, they will not be publicized because to do so would bring serious and grave threat to people already in trouble.
Eventually, some of these cases will be published when people are out of harm's way or more research can be done, and WikiLeaks will be revealed for the lying thugs they always are.
And Andy himself knows better, as he has sections in his book in which he describes in detail how the outing of some of the sources caused harm to people. The problem is they are in places like Bulgaria which nobody cares about. In fact, one of the biggest messages of Andy's book, that I think he himself doesn't even realize or wanted to say, is that WikiLeaks is not really about leaking. It's not really about content or cables or torture allegations. That is all secondary, merely fodder for the anarchist propaganda for its ostensible shame value.
Rather, WikiLeaks is about a war for encryption on the Internet, a war over who will get to have strong encryption and how free from governments. It's a war over the nature of the Internet, it's about property and power.
Those people who took the "leaks" concept really seriously like BalkanLeaks in fact are chumps in a way, because they joined a movement out of sincerity and good faith without realizing that the people who made this movement were only exploiting the Somalians or the Kenyans or the Chinese or the Bulgarians who brought them their heart-breaking stories. WikiLeaks is not about leaking. It's about who gets to encrypt files period. Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum don't care about some politicians building apartment buildings and ruining the environment and fixing elections -- that's not what they're about. The only place where Greenberg actually reports on the "leak" movement is where it is really functioning -- in Bulgaria and a few other places like that.
Cablegate was never about leaking for the sake of reform as it never uncovered any wrongdoing; the claims regarding the previous leaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also have not led to any serious work whatsoever anywhere preparing anything remotely like an indictment for war crimes. "Collateral Murder," the propaganda film, would not be such evidence and isn't portryaing a war crime but a tragic case of mistaken identity. You realize the enormity of this reality when you look at these much-less publicized cases of people REALLY doing leaks work in Bulgaria that Greenberg unwittingly explicates for you.
When Andy's new book comes out soon and I get a chance to re-read it, I'll locate those sections and note them here.
Here's my comment on Forbes today:
Basically what this is about is the hacker thugs at WikiLeaks, starting with the thug-in-chief Assange, are telling us that no one can comment on them, make a movie about them, write a book about them, have any discussion about them, without them reserving the "right" to use coercion and force and theft to respond to any criticism they don't like.
So while they insist on maximum privacy for themselves with strong encryption, they believe they are entitled to steal drafts of scripts. You don't address that, Andy, and instead chime in with the thugs by implying that there isn't much difference between the earlier draft as the producer himself said.
The entire propagandistic line that there is "no harm" in WikiLeaks is trotted out here again and should surely get a take-down instead of no comment.
First, the quotes of officials claiming there is no harm are cherry picked and even insignificant to the core issue: that there is still a grand jury that is still to produce an indictment -- or maybe not -- or a policy pronouncement about this still to come.
You yourself in your book show how people were harmed -- in Eastern Europe, for example.
I myself know of cases of real harm and keep pointing out the obvious about this: that such victims are NOT going to come forward and list themselves for Assange so that he can harass and bully and harm them further with doxing, server crashes and everything else these thugs bring us.
Some of these cases are now classified and with good reason, given the "treatment" they'd get from the likes of WikiLeaks.
None of the statements supplied here constitute proof of no harm, or belief by the US government that no damage was done.
WikiLeaks duplicitiously claims that they uncovered hidden cases of torture. But torture was discovered by US human rights organizations and lawyers long before WikiLeaks came on the scene and continues to be addressed by public and credible organizations who don't hide identities, hide information, or hide in embassies evading questioning on criminal charges. Let's drop this specious claim completely because it has no credibility.
WikiLeaks also didn't bring about the Arab Spring. Whatever it's imagined role, real movements of people in these countries and their sacrifices and activism are what the Arab Spring was about, not about a bunch of geeks leaking stuff over the Internet.
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