Saturday, January 07, 2017

The faucets are dripping....


When Wikileaks does it, it's legitimate.  When NBC does it, it's not:



In their defense, Wikileaks insists the leak was authorized:



If you go to the Twitter thread, you'll see Wikileaks never supports this claim with any evidence.  However, it was reported earlier that three versions of this report would be published:  one for public consumption, one for classified clearance, and one for the highest clearance.  For the latter version, reportedly even people who supplied information for that report would not be cleared to read it.

Which one was leaked?  The one to be made public soon anyway?  Or the one that was classified.  Does Wikileaks know?  Or are they just made something got leaked in violation of laws they themselves freely violate?  Jealous of poaching on their turf?  Or supporting Trump?


Enquiring minds want to know!

And the answer is:  distraction!

Citing anonymous senior U.S. officials, Reuters reported that a soon-to-be-made-public report on Russian interference in the 2016 election affirms that Russian officials coordinated the leak of hacked emails to WikiLeaks at the direction of Vladimir Putin. It is unclear from the Reuters story whether the report names those officials.

The upcoming report, the anonymous officials told Reuters, concluded that the Russian government sought to discredit the electoral process and assist Donald Trump. President Barack Obama saw the report Thursday morning, and the President-elect is scheduled to be briefed on it Friday afternoon.

And of course, now that the publicly released report is out; what was Wikileaks complaining about, again?  Maybe this bit from that now-made-public report:

Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 US presidential election represented a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations aimed at US elections. We assess the 2016 influence campaign reflected the Kremlin’s recognition of the worldwide effects that mass disclosures of US Government and other private data—such as those conducted by WikiLeaks and others—have achieved in recent years, and their understanding of the value of orchestrating such disclosures to maximize the impact of compromising information.  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used intelligence officers, influence agents, forgeries, and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin, according
to a former KGB archivist. 
Guilty dog barks first.

3 comments:

  1. Got to say, I was never a fan of Assange but this years activities by Wikileaks has convinced me that all such stuff is more likely to be in the control of creeps and criminals than not.

    There was a time I wouldn't have favored Assange being extradited to the United States to face espionage charges, that time is long past.

    That it is the Putin government that has become the primary pusher of right-wing governments in the world has also opened my eyes to the consequences of Marxism wider than they were. That and the nature of the Chinese government now that even the Communists aren't pretending that communism is anything but an alternative form of fascism.

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  2. Got into it with two commenters at Salon, that Assange didn't violate US law because Wikileaks is not on American soil, and all it did was publish.

    Never got an explanation as to why Assange was still in the embassy in London, if that was the state of the law.

    And Putin is just a Czar employing some hackers. Nothing has really changed, there.

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  3. What's absolutely stupefying to me is that my most reliably leftist and antiwar friends are out there defending Russia, defending WikiLeaks, and proudly saying they"d vote against Hillary all over again if given the chance - despite the dismantling of our institutions and democratic safeguards that has already begun in plain view around them. The fact that Obama and Clinton were not able to create peace in the Middle East and attempted to combat terrorism with drone warfare has enraged them to the point of madness. On the one hand it's like Trump doesn't even exist for them. And on the other, I can't help but infer that they are silently hoping that he'll tear the country down around us as penance for our sins.

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