@GGreenwald @johnjcook We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 19, 2014
There's been a certain amount of uproar about WikiLeaks latest tick-tock "time running out for humanity hourglass" sensation, in which they gave 72 hours for a small country to get on the lam before its name was leaked.
The script kiddies instantly counted the character spaces on blacked-out slides and guessed "Afghanistan," and then today, a slide with "Afghanistan" listed among the five was leaked somehow "by accident".
But WikiLeaks itself -- an account said to be run by Assange (and no doubt controlled, if not actually run every minute by Assange) -- postponed their deadline "due to the news cycle". They had originally given 72 hours at 5:00 pm or so on May 19 -- and it elapsed.
The Dead Man's Switch sort of threat made people think of insurance files again, and other threats in the past, including by Assange and Greenwald, and also made John Cook, the editor of the Omidyar-funded First Look/Intercept, get into a Twit fight with WikiLeaks, along with Greenwald.
The Twitfight led to the threat.
But the real news here isn't the tick-tock or Afghanistan -- as if we required a drama like this to figure out that US intelligence must try to get what they can out of this war zone's mobile phone calls, and for good reason, given that the overwhelming number of civilians killed there are killed not by American troops, but by the Taliban, who also have killed our soldiers as well.
And none of these outlets seemed to pick up the larger backstory to all this, although I tweeted it to some of them. I guess it's because it's too complicated as I've explained in the past. I've also written about the implications of the 30c3 speech in the past.
The real problem is Jacob Appelbaum -- and anyone else in WikiLeaks starting with Assange (and remember, Appelbaum's the American representative of WikiLeaks, and never left that role, despite his self-imposed exile in German; he is still very close to Assange.)
Here's what we have to remember, which I wrote about in my book Privacy for Thee and Not for Me.
1. Appelbaum helped Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald with the encryptioned communications with Snowden - and likely the encryption, forward, and storage in vaults (he may have done that for Manning, too, or been related to those who did). That means at any time, Appelbaum could have helped himself to a copy of anything or everything. Poitras is on the record explaining his role for the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere; Greenwald now has airbrushed Appelbaum's name out of history, at least history according to his latest book. That's significant -- Greenwald likely fears showing any relationship to him and his involvement in moving files from the NSA.
2. Aside from what may be surreptious copying of the Snowden Operation stash -- or a private channel with Snowden's blessing as a "plan B" if his "plan A" to work with journalists didn't work -- it is known that Appelbaum has had a set of certain documents that he has leaked through Der Spiegel with Holger Stark and other Der Spiegel journalists. These are some of the more sensational and damning and destructive documents - and some have suspected that Greenwald prudently let them take the heat on this so that he and his associates didn't have to face prosecution over these leaks ruining national security and international security.
3. Appelbaum may have other documents -- from Snowden or not, it's not clear -- that are the most devastating at all. At the 30c3, or 30th annual Chaos Computer Conference in December 2013, Appelbaum gave a speech wildly popular among the crypto kids, called "Protect and Infect" -- a big slam on the NSA, and leak of their gadgets catalogue, which is kind of a Sears catalogue of all their best hacking tools. Naturally Appelbaum tried to portray these as "infect them all" although as always, the story is really about pursuing targets -- and legitimate targets.
4. Greenwald at first endorsed and recommended Appelbaum's talk in a tweet, then confessed in a follow-up Twitter conversation that he didn't know how Appelbaum got this information and even that it was "not a Snowden" document. In the talk, Appelbaum said baldly that he had his own NSA source, i.e. implying it was in addition to Snowden. Greenwald further implicitly praised Appelbaum's constraint by referring in a tweet to a specific place in the talk where Appelbaum speaks of the need for legal reasons, i.e. to avoid Der Spiegel and himself getting arrested for espionage and/or terrorism
5. Appelbaum reluctantly complied with these constraints, but like the murderous ominopotent child in "It's a Good Life," let it be known that at any moment, that might change. Why? Because he doesn't believe the US government is legitimate. It is criminal, in his view. Therefore force and seemingly criminal actions can be used against it "for a higher cause". He even compares the NSA surveillance to "British writs of assistance" and says "we killed the British over this" -- implying it was okay to kill US government agents.
6. Appelbaum is close to Assange -- he introduced him lovingly on the big screen at 30c3, where he was beamed in, although with Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks operative who spent four months with Snowden in Moscow being going into self-imposed exile herself in -- where else -- Germany. So if Appelbaum has Snowden documents, or NSA documents, that means WikiLeaks has them, i.e. Assange has them.
And that means the "prudence" or "constraint" that Greenwald or Poitras or Bart Gellman show with this stuff -- which is a very relative concept and a thin membrane at best -- could be thrown aside at any moment.
All of this is very bad, and simply got ignored. That is, it was thrilling for hacker wannabees to read and share with each other, but no officials responded to it, keeping to the Obama Administration's low-key (i.e. wimply and useless) approach of "policing" hackers or terrorists instead of "warring" against them -- regardless of whether they war on us.
Of course, they are warring on us, and if you haven't been paying attention, read my book as to how far this war goes back, and, well, just read Assange's December 2012 manifesto against the "crypto state," right when Appelbaum was preparing another anti-NSA speech for 29c3, that time recruiting NSA agents to come over to the hacker movement -- and as we know now, Snowden was holding a Crypto Party -- which was likely just a cover for stage-managing the Tor-assisted war on the NSA we've seen since then -- including in pre-figurement from William Binney, who is a kind of John the Baptist to Snowden's Jesus, if you will, although I hate using analogies of any good figure with these evil types.
Greenwald -- in that same Twitfight last year -- made two additional sarcastic points -- one was that, geez, you think only Snowden leaks documents? Well, guess what, there's another leaker, and Appelbaum is publishing him! The other was, gosh, you're really helping Snowden here and following his instruction (not!).
Because Greenwald prides himself in following an agreement in which Snowden did not dump all the documents to WikiLeaks, but gave them to journalists -- essentially so they could behave as PR agents for the materials, and promote it for "the movement" strategically, especially tied to important world events where the US and its allies could be greatly harmed. Snowden realized that when Assange and then Manning dumped all their past US war and diplomatic documents, they got ignored. There were too many. Even on search sites, they were hard to navigate. Who had the time to study them and provide context? It needed specialists (as I can tell you, as one of the few people who has actually written about some of the cables in a consistent way, on Central Asia, trying to provide interpretation -- most newspapers just covered the scandal aspect of it).
So, no dumping -- and we're supposed to see Snowden as brave and intelligent in doing this.
Well, except, we don't know if he changed tactics, especially as he continues to be stuck in Russia, and we don't know who else got to his communications -- Tor is full of holes -- and we don't know whether -- like the separatists who fight each other in the Donetsk People's Republics over who gets to cause more mayhem in southeast Ukraine -- the hackers are fighting each other because of the PayPal 14 issue (all of them really belong in jail AND with fines, it's terrible that they are left with a fine any rich man can pay off for them) for which they blame Omidyar and Greenwald as elites -- and their overall issue of thinking everything should be dumped regardless, so no one can profit from them (Greenwald now has a movie deal, in addition to his best-selling book).
Even if WikiLeaks names the country, it's not likely to cause any more damage or less damage than if they haven't, and many have probably guessed it right.
But the larger question of what else do they have and how do they have it remains.
And there are the agents' names possessed by Appelbaum, or so he claims. At any minute, he could unleash those, and have no compunction in doing so, even if others entreat him not to do it -- because he will be caught up in the folie a deux of the moment with Assange.
These people don't want transparency or accountability; they want power over others. They've had it, for sure, as everyone has essentially been at their mercy for a year in the Snowden caper.
But it's never enough, and they might be willing to deal more damage now for various reasons of their own -- perhaps Assange wants safe passage somewhere and immunity, because he's sick of being holed up in the Ecuador Embassy. Perhaps Appelbaum and Harrison want the same. And of course, Snowden himself.
Perhaps they all want to be on one of those free and autonomous world-islands that Peter Thiel makes (the Paypal founder) whose Oslo Forum had Appelbaum speak at it last year (yes, awful, I know).
Snowden is a radical extremist and an abstract visionary and megalomaniac -- he thinks he's the state -- the Congress, the courts, everything rolled into one. He's actually no Constitutionalist, as he wants encryption to bind man, not the Constitution, in a perversion of Thomas Jeffersion. Snowden is at least "rational" in a relative kind of way, as much as anyone who has caused so much petulant destruction could be said to be rational.
But neither Assange or Appelbaum are rational. These are people suffering from more than radical politics or megalomania -- they are unhinged. Assange in particular is a full-blown case and Appelbaum exhibits all kinds of emotional disturbances.
What that means is that unlike Snowden, who has a reform agenda (get rid of metadata collection, get rid of this, get rid of that, make the NSA a neutered fluffy puppy dog), these two don't really have a list of demands other than "destruction for the sake of destruction" in the "propaganda of the deed" of the anarchist.
Law enforcement should move against these people sooner rather than later because of their threat of releasing agents' names, which will really lead to the threat of their actual deaths at the hands of either intelligence agencies in despotic states or angry mobs or opportunistic terrorists.
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