Wikileaks and Western "Intelligence": What was it all about?

The world has changed.

[Part of the footer from Wikileaks’ homepage.]

Published: 2024-06-27

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So, What Was it All About?

Wikileaks' first success was in 2006 in Kenya where, with their release of government documents, they provided crucial assistance in the opposition overthrowing the government in an election.

Wikileaks' and co-founder Assange's stardom was made in 2010 with the Collateral Murder video, soon to be followed by the Afghan and Iraqi War Logs. We all have Chelsea Manning to thank for these truths. Let us not forget her bravery and principles.

Wikileaks, under Assange's leadership, partnered with local newspapers to maximize the effect of their releases. This very clever strategy was based upon the understanding that whistleblowers take extreme risks when providing classified information. Their bravery demands a maximization of the impact. This was a moral choice. The cleverness was in sucking the leading Western media into the operation. Before long the NYT, WaPo, Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel and the rest were all publishing the material which Wikileaks was receiving. This created an immense political problem for the powers that shouldn't be to stamp out this intrusion into their dirty affairs. That challenge was known as the "New York Times problem". How does one prosecute Wikileaks and not the rest?

Assange understood at the outset that Wikileaks, and he as its intellectual leader, would be a target and that to bring all of its state force to bear the US would want him on its territory, within its jurisdiction. So began the character assassination and attempted extradition to Sweden. At the time everyone laughed at Assange's piercingly accurate assessment that Sweden was nothing more than a US vehicle. Current UK Labour leader Keir Starmer goaded the Swedes to continue their extradition request to keep the whole persecution running, as discovered by Italian journalist Stephania Maurizi via FOI requests.

As the US establishment was trying to understand how to deal with the problem, the US State Department cables were released. This was so embarrassing that vendettas were created, not the least by Hillary Clinton who was devastated to have her "pay to play" money-laundering Foundation's dirty laundry strung across international newspapers' headlines.

The US tried to shut down Wikileaks via financial blockade with MasterCard and PayPall fencing off donations. Funnily enough this forced Wikileaks into seeking donations via BitCoin which turned out to be a wonderful investment.

Meanwhile, the extradition to Sweden caper continued until Assange had to seek asylum, following which the British changed their law to never again listen to a "Red Notice" which was not signed by a judge, as was with the case with Sweden's. In the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the UK spent inordinate amounts of money policing the street to confine Assange to arbitrary detention and surveil his visitors. The CIA got in on the act co-opting UC Global to spy on Assange, and all visitors (lawyers and doctors included), imaging their mobile phones and setting up secret microphones everywhere, including the ladies’ lavatory.

Wikileaks continued exposing wrong doing all over the place, from Russia to South America. But, the vendettas, the revenge had to be delivered and far more importantly a precedent needed to be stamped out.

The FBI demanded access to Iceland and got involved in their foul play seducing a pedophile and convicted fraudster to lay the all important "hacking" charge which solved the "NYT problem". Once Ecuador's President had been bribed with a $4 billion USD IMF loan, both asylum and astonishingly, citizenship, were denied to Assange without legal recourse. To add a jaw-dropping moment to the corruption and illegality, the Ecuadorian government invited the London Metropolitan Police into their embassy to drag the journalist and publisher onto the street, straight to a court. There, the magistrate declared Assange a narcissist and threw him in the UK's "Guantanamo Bay" for a bail violation to suffer what became 5 years of solitary confinement.

This denied Julian and Stella's two boys having a father for their childhood. The evil in this is ghastly.

Why? Why all this trouble and blatant illegality?

Because Assange through Wikileaks did something which the "intelligence" agencies could not control.

Long forgotten in this saga is Aaron Swartz. Also rather forgotten is Julian Assange's purpose behind Wikileaks: to create a true version of history based upon official documentation. His mission with Wikileaks was to give to the world the documents which describe the intentions and actions of the powerful.

Swartz was a gifted young man who invented RSS and Creative Commons, among other technologies. He was induced to commit suicide by the rapacious threat of prosecution from Massachusetts Public Prosecutor Carmen Ortiz who refused against all request from MIT and academic journal publishers to drop the case against him. Swartz' idea was to use the access he had at MIT to download a vast volume of academic material to then be published to help the developing world who are locked into their undeveloped state because they are denied the results of science because of the exorbitant paywalls which the publishers place in front of it.

The two, Swartz and Assange, were approaching information freedom from different perspectives. They had both studied cryptography, a study brought out of the dark world of military intelligence in the 1960s. It was revolutionized in 1976 by Diffie and Helman's paper "New Directions in Cryptography" the core of which is still used today to secure the Internet.

Another of Aaron's creations was SecureDrop. It was a web hosted tool which allowed people to connect to the service and upload material to it in a manner which denied anybody knowing who had done the uploading or where they were. Assange at Wikileaks took this tool and with some modifications built the submission mechanism which fueled Wikileaks. SecureDrop is built on Tor. Both are examples of the kinds of things which can be done with cryptography and the Internet.

This was a threat to the military intelligence agencies. Information which they are meant to be able to control could move from places where it is meant to be controlled to places where it cannot be controlled. Nothing has changed in this realm. It is still entirely possible. In fact, the practice for how to do this has been improved.

The same major Western news publishers who profited from Wikileaks' material have all established "SecureDrop" type services. The good thing, for the intelligence services, is that they are inside these organisations and can thus control what happens with this data. This is one of the reasons why we have not seen any significant exposés by these publishers using their "SecureDrop" services. The other is that nobody trusts them for this exact reason.

Another approach to the problem was demonstrated during the Snowden revelations. Pierre Omidyar funded FirstLook Media, of which The Intercept was its publication. It swallowed the Snowden data. It also swallowed the Panama Papers. It is a sacrificial anode, designed to be a place where leaks can be delivered and then controlled. The Intercept's record of protecting their sources is pitiful, which indicates how close they are, willingly or unwittingly, to military intelligence.

The cat is out of the bag with cryptography and anonymity networks. The military intelligence organisations cannot fight a swarm of Wikileakses. Their goal, apart from exacting revenge for jilted criminals, was to prevent this swarm. The persecution of Assange is how they demonstrated their intent.

Assange's crime was not just the publication of the colossal amount of truthful information revealing the evil of despots, worldwide, but the demonstration of the mechanism, anonymous submission, which enabled the publishing. If this took off, the problem would be uncontrollable.

This is why he was relentlessly persecuted and so much damage had to be done to legal institutions in the process.

The all powerful military intelligence institutions were defeated by a few clever, determined people with next to no money. The reason for the defeat, irrespective of the technology, also remains. Vast institutions have to document what they do. As Assange reasoned, it doesn't take much of a percentage of principled people, when 2 million have top security clearances, for a few to want to reveal criminal behaviour.

All they need are outlets which equal their bravery to reveal the crimes.

Assange was one such brave journalist and publisher. Others may come.

The Field Has Changed

While the potential and the technology still exist, notwithstanding the expected brutal treatment expected to be meted out, the world does not need another Wikileaks. Both the voluminous revelations which it, and others like Snowden, gave, and the treatment these organisations and individuals received, has lifted the veil for the public on the systemic abuse of power which is at the heart of Western governments and their covert institutions and media.

What is the difference between watching Collateral Murder and learning that the US has just attacked children on a beach with cluster munitions? Or, the difference between learning of the Clinton Foundation's political access business and the EU signing a deal with Ukraine to keep funding its administration and the NATO war for years?

The cat is totally out of the bag. The legacy media keep lying to the people, publishing propaganda, hearsay, establishment talking points and injected soundbites. Real journalism has been forced to move. It is struggling to survive on "crowd funding". But, survive it does, with the old hands keeping their pens busy and new young, energetic journalists finding their places in this challenging new environment.

If you want to sustain investigative journalism, to keep holding the powerful to account, look for it, read/watch/listen to it and most importantly, share it.

or support this work via Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon.

Sources

Aaron Swartz Death: US Attorney Carmen Ortiz defends handling of case that ended with activist's suicide, Julia Dahl, CBS News, 2013-01-17

Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, YesXorNo, 2022-11-08

About Tor: What, Why, How and Who is Tor?, YesXorNo, 2022-04-09

Controlling the Narrative, YesXorNo, 2021-07-17

Power is not to be fought, but feared, YesXorNo, 2021-06-21

WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder (Iraq, 2007), People Over Politics, uploaded 2012-08-08

• If Alphabet Inc. are still age-gating this, that should tell you something.

• I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: yt-dlp <cut-paste URL>

The Internet's Own Boy (The Story of Aaron Swartz), uploaded by Maria Villarreal, 2016-08-03

Amb.Craig Murray: Stop the Genocide!, Napolitano with Murray, Judging Freedom, 2024-06-27

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