Julian Assange

100 results back to index

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

worked with CIA agents during her time at the consulting firm McKinsey Julian Assange. “Statement by Julian Assange on the reported destruction of WikiLeaks source material by Daniel Domscheit-Berg,” August 20, 2011. a real problem of methodology and, therefore, of credibility “OPEN LETTER TO WIKILEAKS FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE: ‘A BAD PRECEDENT FOR THE INTERNET’S FUTURE.’” Reporters Without Borders website, August 12, 2010. “We were very, very upset with [the Afghan War release,] and with the way he spoke about it afterwards” John Burns and Ravi Somaiya. “WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed By Notoriety.” The New York Times, October 23, 2010.

…

“Wikileaks denies Tor hacker eavesdropping gave site its start.” TheRegister.co.uk, June 2, 2010. “When they pull, so do we” E-mail from Julian Assange to John Young, January 7, 2007, available at http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm thirty times the size of every text article stored on Wikipedia Wikipedia: Database download, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download “let it flower into something new” Julian Assange to John Young, January 7, 2007, available at http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm spreading free software like a hacker Johnny Appleseed Jacob Appelbaum. “Personal experiences bringing technology and new media to disaster areas.”

…

And they would have remained unreadable if it weren’t for another simple mistake, this one committed by David Leigh, the reporter from The Guardian who first engineered the partnership with WikiLeaks to release the Cablegate files. In January 2011, The Guardian’s reporters published their own tell-all book about their work with WikiLeaks. And there, in the heading to the eleventh chapter, were printed the words that to Julian Assange must have jumped off the page with horrifying significance: “AcollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThePresentDay#—Julian Assange’s 58-character password.” It was the full passphrase to WikiLeaks’ copy of the encrypted, unredacted cables. To a technological muggle like Leigh, the PGP password must have seemed like a harmless historical detail to add intrigue to his cloak-and-dagger story.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

/wikileaks/status/753 0875613. 6 Kevin Charles Redmon, “WikiLeaks Proves Its Worth as a Backstop,” The Atlantic, April 6, 2010, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive /2010/04/ wikileaks-provides-its-worth-as-a-backstop/38517. 7 “Exclusive – Julian Assange Extended Interview,” The Colbert Report, April 12, 2010, www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos /260785/ april-12-2010/exclusive-julian-assange-extended-interview. 8 Raffi Khatchadourian, “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010, www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian. 9 Ibid. 10 @wikileaks, April 7, 2010, http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status /118016 13697. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 190 Noam Cohen, “What Would Ellsberg Do With the Pentagon Papers Today,” The New York Times, April 19, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/ business/media/19link.html.

…

Newsweek, August 26, 2010, www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/2010/08/26/is-wikileakstoo-full-of-itself.print.html. 4 Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, “Unpublished Iraq War Logs Trigger Internal WikiLeaks Revolt,” Wired.com, September 27, 2010, www. wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/wikileaks-revolt. 5 Steven Aftergood, “Wikileaks Fails ‘Due Diligence’ Review,” Secrecy News, June 28, 2010, www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2010/06/wikileaks_review.html. 6 Sarah Ellison, “The Man Who Spilled the Secrets,” Vanity Fair, February 2011, www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102. 7 Alan Rusbridger, “WikiLeaks: The Guardian’s role in the biggest leak in the history of the world,” The Guardian, January 28, 2011, www.guardian. co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/wikileaks-julian-assange-alan-rusbridger and Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, “An Inside Look at Difficult Negotiations with Julian Assange,” Spiegel Online, January 28, 2011, www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,742163,00.html. 8 “Chinese cyber-dissidents launch WikiLeaks, a site for whistleblowers,” Agence France-Presse, January 11, 2007, www.theage.com.au/news/ Technology/Chinese-cyberdissidents-launch-WikiLeaks-a-site-forwhistl eblowers/2007/01/11/1168105082315.html. 9 Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” November 10, 2006, and “Conspiracy as Governance,” December 3, 2006. 10 http://twitter.com/#!

…

SIFRY Notes Chapter 1 1 David Leigh, “Guardian gagged from reporting Parliament,” The Guardian, October 12, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/12/guardiangagged-from-reporting-parliament. 2 Guido Fawkes blog, “Guardian Gagged From Reporting Parliament,” October 12, 2009, http://order-order.com/2009/10/12/guardian-gaggedfrom-reporting-parliament. 3 Minton report secret injunction gagging The Guardian on Trafigura, September 11, 2009, http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/Minton_report_ secret_injunction_gagging_The_Guardian_on_Trafigura,_11_Sep_2009. 4 See http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/wikileak-julian-assange-dontbe-martyr for the video of Assange’s remarks. 5 Noam Cohen and Brian Stelter, “Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site,” The New York Times, April 6, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/ world/07wikileaks.html, and http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/753 0875613. 6 Kevin Charles Redmon, “WikiLeaks Proves Its Worth as a Backstop,” The Atlantic, April 6, 2010, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive /2010/04/ wikileaks-provides-its-worth-as-a-backstop/38517. 7 “Exclusive – Julian Assange Extended Interview,” The Colbert Report, April 12, 2010, www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos /260785/ april-12-2010/exclusive-julian-assange-extended-interview. 8 Raffi Khatchadourian, “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010, www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian. 9 Ibid. 10 @wikileaks, April 7, 2010, http://twitter.com/#!

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Guardian Books Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9GU www.guardianbooks.co.uk A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85265-239-8 CONTENTS Cast of characters Introduction Chapter 1: The Hunt Chapter 2: Bradley Manning Chapter 3: Julian Assange Chapter 4: The rise of WikiLeaks Chapter 5: The Apache video Chapter 6: The Lamo dialogues Chapter 7: The deal Chapter 8: In the bunker Chapter 9: The Afghanistan war logs Chapter 10: The Iraq war logs Chapter 11: The cables Chapter 12: The world’s most famous man Chapter 13: Uneasy partners Chapter 14: Before the deluge Chapter 15: Publication day Chapter 16: The biggest leak in history Chapter 17: The ballad of Wandsworth jail Chapter 18: The future of WikiLeaks Appendix: US Embassy Cables Acknowledgements CAST OF CHARACTERS WikiLeaks MELBOURNE, NAIROBI, REYKJAVIK, BERLIN, LONDON, NORFOLK, STOCKHOLM Julian Assange – WikiLeaks founder/editor Sarah Harrison – aide to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Kristinn Hrafnsson – Icelandic journalist and WikiLeaks supporter James Ball – WikiLeaks data expert Vaughan Smith – former Grenadier Guards captain, founder of the Frontline Club and Assange’s host at Ellingham Hall Jacob Appelbaum – WikiLeaks’ representative in the US Daniel Ellsberg – Vietnam war whistleblower, WikiLeaks supporter Daniel Domscheit-Berg – German programmer and WikiLeaks technical architect (aka Daniel Schmitt) Mikael Viborg – owner of WikiLeaks’ Swedish internet service provider PRQ Ben Laurie – British encryption expert, adviser to Assange on encryption Mwalimu Mati – head of anti-corruption group Mars Group Kenya, source of first major WikiLeaks report Rudolf Elmer – former head of the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank, source of second major WikiLeaks report Smári McCarthy – Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer, Modern Media Initiative (MMI) campaigner Birgitta Jónsdóttir – Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter Rop Gonggrijp – Dutch hacker-businessman, friend of Assange and MMI campaigner Herbert Snorrason – Icelandic MMI campaigner Israel Shamir – WikiLeaks associate Donald Böstrom – Swedish journalist and WikiLeaks’ Stockholm connection The Guardian LONDON Alan Rusbridger – editor-in-chief Nick Davies – investigative reporter David Leigh – investigations editor Ian Katz – deputy editor (news) Ian Traynor – Europe correspondent Harold Frayman – systems editor Declan Walsh – Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Alastair Dant – data visualiser Simon Rogers – data editor Jonathan Steele – former Iraq correspondent James Meek – former Iraq correspondent Rob Evans – investigative journalist Luke Harding – Moscow correspondent Robert Booth – reporter Stuart Millar – news editor, guardian.co.uk Janine Gibson – editor, guardian.co.uk Jonathan Casson – head of production Gill Phillips – in-house head of legal Jan Thompson – managing editor New York Times NEW YORK, LONDON Max Frankel – former executive editor Bill Keller – editor Eric Schmitt – war correspondent John F Burns – London correspondent Ian Fisher – deputy foreign editor Der Spiegel HAMBURG, LONDON Georg Mascolo – editor-in-chief Holger Stark – head of German desk Marcel Rosenbach – journalist John Goetz – journalist El País MADRID, LONDON Javier Moreno – editor-in-chief Vicente Jiménez – deputy editor Other Media Raffi Khatchadourian – New Yorker staffer and author of a major profile of Assange Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen – Reuters news agency employees accidentally killed by US army pilots in 2007 David Schlesinger – Reuters’ editor-in-chief Kevin Poulsen – former hacker, senior editor at Wired Gavin MacFadyen – City University professor and journalist, London host to Assange Stephen Grey – freelance reporter Iain Overton – former TV journalist, head of Bureau of Investigative Journalism Heather Brooke – London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist Bradley Manning Bradley Manning – 23-year-old US army private and alleged WikiLeaks source Rick McCombs – former principal at Crescent high school, Crescent, Oklahoma Brian, Susan, Casey Manning – parents and sister Tom Dyer – school friend Kord Campbell – former manager at Zoto software company Jeff Paterson – steering committee member of the Bradley Manning support network Adrian Lamo – hacker and online confidant Timothy Webster – former US army counter-intelligence special agent Tyler Watkins – former boyfriend David House – former hacker and supporter David Coombs – lawyer Julian Assange Christine Hawkins – mother John Shipton – father Brett Assange – stepfather Keith Hamilton – former partner of Christine Daniel Assange – Julian’s son Paul Galbally – Assange’s lawyer during his 1996 hacking trial Stockholm allegations / extradition “Sonja Braun” – plaintiff; member of Brotherhood movement “Katrin Weiss” – plaintiff; museum worker Claes Borgström – lawyer for both women, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician Marianne Ny – Swedish chief prosecutor and sex crimes specialist Mark Stephens – Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC – Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson – lawyer in Mark Stephens’ office Gemma Lindfield – lawyer acting for the Swedish authorities Howard Riddle – district judge, Westminster magistrates court Mr Justice Ouseley – high court judge, London Government Hillary Clinton – US Secretary of State Louis B Susman – US ambassador in London PJ Crowley – US assistant secretary of state for public affairs Harold Koh – US state department’s legal adviser Robert Gates – US defence secretary Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles – former UK government special representative to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Kabul INTRODUCTION Alan Rusbridger Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange.

…

Manning was even more impressed, because with his specialist knowledge he knew that WikiLeaks must have somehow obtained the messages anonymously from a National Security Agency database. And that made him feel comfortable that he, too, could come forward to WikiLeaks without fear of being identified. His search for a vessel through which to unload his mountain of top-secret material had succeeded. Within days of the WikiLeaks 9/11 spectacular, Manning took the first big step. He made contact with a man whom he described as “a crazy white-haired Aussie who can’t seem to stay in one country very long”. The game was on with Julian Assange. CHAPTER 3 Julian Assange Melbourne, Australia December 2006 “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth” OSCAR WILDE The unusual Australian who wrote up his dating profile for the OKCupid website used the name ‘Harry Harrison’.

…

The journalists were acutely aware that to ignore the fresh controversy that had erupted around their new collaborator could only increase the risk that it might taint the WikiLeaks enterprise as a whole. CHAPTER 13 Uneasy partners Editor’s office, the Guardian, Kings Place, London 1 November 2010 “I’m a combative person” JULIAN ASSANGE, TED CONFERENCE, OXFORD, 2010 The three partner papers decided it was time for a meeting with Julian Assange. Everything was threatening to get rather messy. The embattled WikiLeaks founder now wanted the Americans frozen out of the much-delayed deal to publish the diplomatic cables jointly – a punishment, so it was said, for a recent profile of him, by the New York Times veteran London correspondent John F Burns.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Although there have been no reports of revenge attacks, on 29 July, three days after the biggest leak in military history uncovered hundreds of previously unreported civilian casualties at the hands of NATO forces, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen was still able to accuse Julian Assange of having “blood on his hands”. The story was lapped up by the international press. An editorial in the Washington Post labelled WikiLeaks a criminal, if not a terrorist, enterprise and called for the Obama administration to circumvent international law and “employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.” * * * Like thousands if not millions of people across the world, I was engrossed by these twists and turns in events. The character of Julian Assange as it was gradually painted – by the international press, by political officials, the commentariat, the bloggers and tweeters, the people I met in pubs who discussed WikiLeaks in wide-eyed terms – merged bit-by-bit with the man I met in Berlin until I could no longer be sure which picture was real.

…

It’s day two of the conference, and I’m pretty sure that the talk I’m waiting to watch is the main event this year. It hasn’t got anything to do with GSM, or mobile phones, and it won’t make headlines for a little while yet. But when it does, it will make them all over the world. Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt take to the stage. They’re here as spokespeople for WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website that has published over one million leaked documents since its founding in 2007. In that short time, WikiLeaks has been behind more scoops than the Washington Post has notched up in 30 years. In the UK in 2009, it was at the centre of two major news stories. The first was about the use of libel law to gag reporting about a company who had dumped toxic waste illegally off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire leaving thousands of locals sick and at least a dozen dead.

…

Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo. Flamingo. Knight Lightning. 1989. “German Hackers Break Into Los Alamos and NASA”, Phrack, March 29 http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=25&id=10#article. Levine, Adam. 2010. “Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have ‘blood’ on his hands.” cnn.com, July 29. http://articles.cnn.com/2010-07-29/us/wikileaks.mullen.gates_1_julian-assange-leak-defense-robert-gates?_s=PM:US. Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Anchor Press / Doubleday. ———. 1994. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything.

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

I have sourced the assertion that Assange was “chuckling” to himself from interviews with Topiary, who said that when he was first talking to Assange on IRC, Assange claimed that he and others in WikiLeaks had “laughed” when they heard about the DDoS attack on the CIA. Details about Julian Assange’s state of affairs in June of 2011, including his defense against extradition and the wearing of an electronic tag, were sourced from various press reports, such as “Julian Assange Awaits High Court Ruling on Extradition,” published by the Guardian on November 2, 2011. Details about the IRC discussions within LulzSec (first between Topiary and Sabu, then among other members of the team) were sourced from interviews with Topiary and with one other hacker associated with LulzSec who does not wish to be named.

…

About a month prior, in December 2010, the news media exploded with reports that a large and mysterious group of hackers had started attacking the websites of MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa in retaliation for their having cut funding to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had just released a cache of thousands of secret diplomatic cables, and its founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange, had been arrested in the U.K., ostensibly for sexual misconduct. Hackers was a famously imprecise word. It could mean enthusiastic programmer, it could mean cyber criminal. But people in Anonymous, or Anons, were often dubbed hacktivists—hackers with an activist message.

…

He had no idea that, even though the anticopyright battle was dying, Operation Payback was about to explode with support for a little organization called WikiLeaks. Jake, now as Topiary, explored the AnonOps chat rooms while a former, widely-revered hacker from Australia named Julian Assange was getting ready to drop a bombshell on the American government. Earlier in 2010, a U.S. army private named Bradley Manning had allegedly reached out to Assange and given his whistleblower site, WikiLeaks, 250,000 internal messages, known as cables, that had been sent between American embassies. These diplomatic cables revealed American political maneuverings and confidential diplomatic reports.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

p. 129 “barometer of naughtiness”: Passionflix, Passionflix.com/bon. p. 129 Passionflix acquisition finalized: “First Look Media, Passionflix Strike Streaming Partnership,” MSNBC, Sept. 12, 2019, YouTube. p. 129 Julian Assange eighteen-count indictment: “WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Charged in 18-Count Superseding Indictment,” US Department of Justice, May 23, 2019, justice. gov. p. 130 Jabber singled out in Assange indictment: Glenn Greenwald and Micah Lee, “The US Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom,” Intercept, April 11, 2019. p. 130 Micah Lee comments on Assange indictment: twitter. com/micahflee/status/1116340396643082240?

…

Meanwhile, the presidency of Donald Trump has brought new threats to democracy and transparency in government. Chelsea Manning, whose role in leaking US diplomatic cables made her an inspirational figure to Snowden, has been thrown back in jail, despite having received a pardon by President Barack Obama. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under the Espionage Act and now faces up to 175 years in jail. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing to restore the NSA’s access to Americans’ phone and text records, a practice that was exposed — and then derailed — by the Snowden revelations. As we write this, a new whistleblower has emerged from the intelligence community to reveal a startling abuse of presidential power: Trump pressuring Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

…

Sometimes they temporarily confiscated and photocopied her notebooks. Once, they took away her computer. On April 6, 2012, after we had known each other for about four months, Laura was grilled at Newark Liberty International Airport. She was coming home from London, where she’d been filming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his team for a documentary later titled Risk. As always, following her lawyer’s instructions, she took notes. This time, a federal agent declared her pen was a potential weapon. He threatened to handcuff her if she kept using it. When she offered to write with crayons instead, he said no.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

I wanted people to see what I was seeing.” Zero America was conceived in a time when the legitimacy of the state was assured, unquestioned. But the state’s infrastructure was hard and solid and the sense of legitimacy a mist already burning off. The structure would outlast the faith that built it. Julian Assange established WikiLeaks in 2007. It was a list of links. It was “an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking.” “We’re going to crack the world open,” Assange said. He cited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and compared himself to academics forced to labor in Russian camps. “True belief begins only with a jackboot at the door.

…

* * * — In the SCIF on the basketball court Chelsea Manning opened a CD labeled lady gaga and downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents. She downloaded the video in which men with cameras were taken to be men with guns. While back home on leave, she sent it all to WikiLeaks via the anonymizing tool Tor. Julian Assange was not a legitimate participant. He was not even American. As a young boy he’d lived on a small island off the northeast coast of Australia, among koalas, giant clams, rock wallabies, and hippies who slept on beaches. His mother called the move “going native.” She married a theater director, Brett Assange.

…

The defendant had “traveled to Mexico various times between August 2002 and August 2006,” though she did not point out that between 2002 and 2006, the defendant was a child; she had been there to get cheap braces. Reality perhaps was not herself well financed for travel, but “someone has set up a GoFundMe page for the defendant, which, as of last night, having been up for only two days, had collected $12,415.” Julian Assange himself, “international fugitive and founder of WikiLeaks, has praised the defendant via Twitter.” And there was the trip to Belize. “By herself for only three days,” said Solari. “Nothing criminal about that, Your Honor, but it seems odd to spend the kind of money necessary for a trip all the way to Central America, to go alone, and then to come right back after such a short period of time with very little idea what she did there.”

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

But Sheikh Aweys, years before his Shabaab escapades, surprisingly became the first victim of Julian Assange’s creation, WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks began its campaign for international transparency on December 28, 2006, posting a full English translation of a document allegedly written by Sheikh Aweys on November 9, 2005. The message made less news than the messenger. Julian Assange began his climb to international fame and today, more than a decade later, remains a disruptive force of information warfare. WikiLeaks thought “the crowd,” an open-source army of contributors scattered around the world, would investigate the contents of the alleged Aweys letter and determine collectively whether the document was true to its alleged source.

…

The largest leak of confidential information ever hit the presses on April 3, 2016, when 2.6 terabytes of data, containing 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The leak, referred to internationally as the Panama Papers, dwarfed any previous disclosure by WikiLeaks. The data dump differed from WikiLeaks not only in size but in approach. Rather than post the raw data without context or with Julian Assange’s narrative, ICIJ shared the data with dozens of news outlets around the world familiar with the characters appearing in the documents and how the contents made sense in each country. In just the first eight months after their release, the Panama Papers generated more than 4,000 stories from media outlets and more than 6,500 investigations into companies and people potentially seeking to skirt laws and avoid taxes.30 Not only did the Panama Papers achieve far more transparency than WikiLeaks, but they exposed an authoritarian regime that WikiLeaks initially set out to challenge but mysteriously never touched: Russia.

…

D.C. police believe that Rich’s murder was the result of a robbery gone wrong. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, however, issued a reward for details regarding the murder, suggesting that he may have been the source of the DNC email leak. Alt-right websites and conspiracy theorists on 4chan and Reddit posited the same explanation: Rich knew of DNC corruption, they said, and was a closet Bernie Sanders supporter seeking to air the truth.24 RT and Sputnik continued stirring up these allegations through public news stories, amplifying WikiLeaks’ conspiracies,25 and Russian diplomats joined in this counternarrative as well.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Andrew Lewman, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe and Roger Dingledine, “EPIC, BBC, Tor, and FOIA,” September 10, 2013, https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/email-from-andrew-lewman-to-kelly-deyoe-and-roger-dingledine-epic-bbc-tor-and-foia-10-september-2013.pdf. 78. WikiLeaks, email message sent to John Young, “Martha Stewart pgp,” Cryptome, January 7, 2007, https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm. 79. Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena, and Teresa Smith, “Revealed: Pentagon’s Link to Iraqi Torture Centres,” Guardian, March 6, 2013. 80. Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, November 28, 2010. 81. “Affidavit of Julian Paul Assange,” WikiLeaks, September 2, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/IMG/html/Affidavit_of_Julian_Assange.html. 82. “In late 2010, when Assange seemed to be on the brink of long-term jail awaiting questioning for alleged sex crimes, one WikiLeaks staffer told me he hoped Appelbaum might even be the favored successor to Assange in WikiLeaks’ hierarchy.”

…

.…”77 Appelbaum was energetic and did his best to promote Tor among privacy activists, cryptographers, and, most important of all, the radical cypherpunk movement that dreamed of using encryption to take on the power of governments and liberate the world from centralized control. In 2010, he snagged the support of Julian Assange, a silver-haired hacker who wanted to free the world of secrets. Tor Gets Radical Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange had met in Berlin sometime in 2005, just as the mysterious Australian hacker was getting ready to set WikiLeaks in motion. Assange’s idea for WikiLeaks was simple: government tyranny can only survive in an ecosystem of secrecy. Take away the ability of the powerful to keep secrets, and the whole facade will come crashing down around them.

…

“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from… which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen wrote Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state William Joseph Burns in a 2012 email. 149. As Julian Assange wryly noted in When Google Met WikiLeaks, “If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like [JigSaw], it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.” Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014). 150. Yazan al-Saadi, “StratforLeaks: Google Ideas Director Involved in ‘Regime Change,’” Al-Akhbar English, March 14, 2012; Doug Bolton, “Google Planned to Help Syria Rebels to Bring Down Assad Regime, Leaked Hillary Clinton Emails Claim,” The Independent, March 22, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk /life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-syria-rebels-defection-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks-a6946121.html. 151.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

The other was Clement Walker, a 17th-century Somerset parliamentarian during the English civil war who was eventually locked up and died in the Tower of London. Significantly, verax is also an antonym of mendax. Mendax means ‘deceiving’ and was the handle used by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks when he was a young Australian hacker. WikiLeaks, with their electronic mass-leaking of US army files from Afghanistan, and of State Department diplomatic cables from all over the world, had recently plunged the US administration into uproar. Perhaps Snowden’s allusion was deliberate. Outwardly, his life continued as before.

…

Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of three previous non-fiction books. They are The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, nominated for the Orwell Prize; and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, both written with David Leigh. Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia appeared in 2011. His books have been translated into 13 languages. Luke lives in Hertfordshire with his wife, the freelance journalist Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.

…

Over the ensuing decade, both in America and Britain, there came a new political willingness to invade individual privacy. At the same time, mushrooming technical developments started to make mass eavesdropping much more feasible. The intricate web of the internet secretly became what Julian Assange of WikiLeaks was to call, with only some exaggeration, ‘the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen’. But before the appearance of Edward Snowden, very little of the truth about that had reached the surface. The NSA – the biggest and most secretive of the US intelligence agencies – failed on 9/11 to give advance warning of al-Qaida’s surprise attack against the Twin Towers in New York.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.”1 And so, by April 2010, WikiLeaks had dramatically switched public relations strategies. When they released video footage of a Baghdad air strike, which they called “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks left nothing to chance—packaging the already shocking material in a way that delivered an extra punch. They edited the video for maximum effect and added simple but powerful editorial commentary at the beginning. Julian Assange, the Australian hacker who founded WikiLeaks, was then known in the media as an “international man of mystery.” Now he broke with his previous disavowal of the spotlight.

…

The FBI arrested Manning, ultimately leading to his admission that, as an act of whistle-blowing, he had providing WikiLeaks with not only the video footage seen in “Collateral Murder,” but also the diplomatic cables WikiLeaks would release over the next two years. Manning was sentenced by a military judge to thirty five years in prison, and is now at Fort Leavenworth, having spent almost a year in solitary confinement before he was sentenced.5 At the 2010 HOPE conference, there was palpable tension in the air. Rumors were swirling that Julian Assange was going to give the keynote. In a last-minute switch-up, it was not Assange who stepped out on stage, but the American hacker Jacob Appelbaum.

…

But now, as the revelations kept coming, members of the public discovered their jaws dropping lower and lower by the day, as if they were strapped into some orthodontic-transparency device, hand-cranked by Julian Assange himself. Sarah Palin suggested Assange be hunted down “with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”3 Senator Joe Lieberman declared it “an outrageous, reckless, and despicable action that will undermine the ability of our government and our partners to keep our people safe and to work together to defend our vital interests.”4 Lieberman’s staff reached out to Amazon—not only the world’s largest book retailer but also its largest web host—and asked it to ban WikiLeaks from its servers. It acquiesced. The financial firms that process credit card transactions worldwide followed suit, cutting the umbilical cord between donors and WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Finer, “Iraqi Sunnis Battle to Defend Shiites,” Washington Post, August 14, 2005. 19Department of Defense, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” June 2007, Report to Congress, at defense.gov; Fred Kaplan, “Western Targets: The Iraqi Insurgency Is Still Primarily an Anti-Occupation Effort,” Slate, February 9, 2006. 20International Council on Security and Development, “Eight Years after 9/11 Taliban Now Has a Permanent Presence in 80% of Afghanistan,” press release, September 10, 2009, available at uruknet.info; Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 108–9. 21“Leverage Xenophobia,” Washington Post, April 10, 2006. 22General Sir Richard Dannatt, “Address to the International Institute for Strategic Studies,” September 21, 2007, at mod.uk. 23“King: WikiLeaks Release ‘Worse than Military Attack,’” CBS New York, November 28, 2010, at newyork.cbslocal.com. 24Chris McGreal, “Is WikiLeaks Hi-Tech Terrorism or Hype? Washington can’t decide,” Guardian, February 5, 2011. 25K. T. McFarland, “Yes, WikiLeaks Is a Terrorist Organization and the Time to Act Is NOW,” Fox News, November 30, 2011, at foxnews.com. 26David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (London: Guardian, 2011). 27This phrase is from a chat with Assange, discovered by US authorities. Kim Zetter, “Jolt in WikiLeaks Case: Feds Found Manning-Assange Chat Logs on Laptop,” Wired, December 19, 2011. 28Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning Treated More Harshly than a Terrorist, Lawyer Argues,” Guardian, July 12, 2012; Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning’s Treatment Was Cruel and Inhuman, UN Torture Chief Rules,” Guardian, March 12, 2012. 29See Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning, eds, Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda (Oxford: Routledge, 2009); and Marie Breen-Smyth, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Political Violence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 30Steve Inskeep, “State Department Defends America’s Image Abroad,” National Public Radio, March 27, 2006. 31George W.

…

CHAPTER 3: WAR AND TERRORISM 1Thomas Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999. 2“Business and WikiLeaks: Be Afraid,” Economist, December 9, 2010. 3Andy Greenberg, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets,” Forbes, November 29, 2010. 4https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Minton_report:_Trafigura_toxic_ dumping_along_the_Ivory_Coast_broke_EU_regulations,_14_Sep_2006. 5David Leigh, “Trafigura Hoped to Make a Fortune. Instead They Caused a Tragedy,” Guardian, September 16, 2009. 6“A Gag Too Far,” Index on Censorship, October 14, 2009. 7Mark Sweney, “Bank Drops Lawsuit against Wikileaks,” Guardian, March 6, 2008; “Wikileaks Given Data on Swiss Bank Accounts,” BBC News, January 17, 2011; “WikiLeaks to Target Wealthy Individuals,” Daily Telegraph, January 17, 2011. 8Yochai Benkler, “A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 46 (2011); Lisa Lynch, “‘We’re Going to Crack the World Open’: Wikileaks and the Future of Investigative Reporting,” Journalism Practice 4: 3 (2010)—Special Issue: The Future of Journalism. 9John Vidal, “WikiLeaks: US Targets EU over GM Crops,” Guardian, January 3, 2011. 10See Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths (London/New York/Delhi: Anthem Press, 2013), Kindle loc. 2302–2320; and Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire (London/New York: Verso, 2013), p. 288. 11https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2/pressrelease. 12Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London/New York: Verso, 1999). 13Quoted in Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “Global Capitalism and the American Empire,” Socialist Register 40 (2004). 14Figure cited in Andrew G.

…

The WikiLeaks Files This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 04/01/2016 The WikiLeaks Files The World According to US Empire Introduction by Julian Assange This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 04/01/2016 First published by Verso 2015 The collection © Verso 2015 Contributions © The contributors 2015 Introduction © Julian Assange 2015 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-874-8 (HB) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-271-9 (EXPORT) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-875-5 (UK) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-944-8 (US) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the US by Maple Press This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 04/01/2016 Contents Introduction Julian Assange Part I 1.America and the Dictators 2.Dictators and Human Rights 3.War and Terrorism Part II 4.Indexing the Empire Sarah Harrison 5.US War Crimes and the ICC Linda Pearson 6.Europe Michael Busch 7.Russia Russ Wellen 8.Turkey Conn Hallinan 9.Israel Stephen Zunes and Peter Certo 10.Syria Robert Naiman 11.Iran Gareth Porter 12.Iraq Dahr Jamail 13.Afghanistan Phyllis Bennis 14.East Asia Tim Shorrock 15.Southeast Asia Richard Heydarian 16.South Africa Francis Njubi Nesbitt 17.Latin America and the Caribbean Alexander Main, Jake Johnston, and Dan Beeton 18.Venezuela Dan Beeton, Jake Johnston, and Alexander Main Notes List of Contributors Index This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 04/01/2016 Introduction: WikiLeaks and Empire Julian Assange One day, a monk and two novices found a heavy stone in their path.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Assange shared his two basic arguments on this subject: Julian Assange in discussion with the authors, June 2011. lightning rod, as Assange called himself: Atika Shubert, “WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange Dismisses Reports of Internal Strife,” CNN, October 22, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-22/us/wikileaks.interview_1_julian-assange-wikileaks-afghan-war-diary?_s=PM:US. “Sources speak with their feet”: Julian Assange in discussion with the authors, June 2011. WikiLeaks lost its principal website URL: James Cowie, “WikiLeaks: Moving Target,” Renesys (blog), December 7, 2010, http://www.renesys.com/blog/2010/12/wikileaks-moving-target.shtml.

…

These groups will continue to demand attention from the governments and institutions they attack, and their threats may come to be taken more seriously than one might expect judging from today’s activities, which mostly seem like stunts. The story of WikiLeaks, the secrets-publishing website we discussed earlier, and its sympathetic hacker allies is an illustrative example. The arrest of WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange in December 2010 sparked flurries of outrage around the world, particularly among the many activists, hackers and computer experts who believed his indictment on sexual-assault charges was politically motivated. Shortly thereafter, a series of cyber attacks crippled, among others, the websites for Amazon, which had revoked WikiLeaks’ use of its servers, and MasterCard and PayPal, which had both stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks.

…

Some people will cheer for the end of control that connectivity and data-rich environments engender. They are the people who believe that information wants to be free,2 and that greater transparency in all things will bring about a more just, safe and free world. For a time, WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange was the world’s most visible ambassador for this cause, but supporters of WikiLeaks and the values it champions come in all stripes, including right-wing libertarians, far-left liberals and apolitical technology enthusiasts. While they don’t always agree on tactics, to them, data permanence is a fail-safe for society. Despite some of the known negative consequences of this movement (threats to individual security, ruined reputations and diplomatic chaos), some free-information activists believe the absence of a delete button ultimately strengthens humanity’s progress toward greater equality, productivity and self-determination.

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

The similarities with the Afghan and Iraq wars are striking. 5. Julian Assange, ‘Serious nuclear accident may lay behind Iranian nuke chief’s mystery resignation.’ WikiLeaks, 16 July, 2009. See mirror site: http://mirror.wikileaks. info/wiki/Serious_nuclear_accident_may_lay_behind_Iranian_nuke_chief%27s_mystery_resignation/ The short entry is included in case the mirror disappears: ‘Two weeks ago, a source associated with Iran’s nuclear program confidentially told WikiLeaks of a serious, recent, nuclear accident at Natanz. Natanz is the primary location of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. WikiLeaks had reason to believe the source was credible however contact with this source was lost.

…

This goes back to the earliest definition of a hacker, which doesn’t imply any illegal activity, but, rather, simply reflects someone who can find clever technical solutions to hard problems. It is this kernel of unusual creativity, not their illegal activities, that makes the hackers in Underground so interesting. This kernel carried through to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks revealed the creative application of technology, in the form of secure, anonymous online publishing, to the hard problem of getting governments and corporations to tell the truth. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and I worked on Underground for almost three years. He brought exceptional technical understanding and a detailed knowledge of the computer underground while I brought years of experience as a professional journalist and technology writer.

…

She began work on Underground while completing her PhD. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she runs several major research projects in information systems. Julian Assange is an internet activist, journalist and publisher. Born and raised in Australia, Julian is the founder, spokesperson, and editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that started in 2006. In 2010, WikiLeaks began to publish hundreds of thousands of classified details about American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which created a media storm. At the end of 2010, the site published a series of classified US diplomatic cables, now known as Cablegate.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

voting technology standards: Perlroth, “Hackers Used New Weapons.” internet outage map on Twitter: WikiLeaks (@WikiLeaks), “Mr. Assange is still alive,” Twitter, October 21, 2016, https://twitter.com/WikiLeaks/status/789574436219449345?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw. The map is from DownDetector, a platform that provides information on service issues. See Blumenthal and Wiese, “Hacked Home Devices.” Julian Assange’s internet connection: WikiLeaks claims that Ecuador shut off Assange’s internet after WikiLeaks published Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches on October 16: WikiLeaks (@WikiLeaks), “We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange’s internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speechs,” Twitter, October 17, 2016, https://twitter.com/WikiLeaks/status/788099178832420865.

…

,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/10/19/498444943/how-should-npr-report-on-hacked-wikileaks-emails. See generally, Nieman Reports, “When Is It Ethical to Publish Stolen Data?,” Nieman Reports, https://niemanreports.org/articles/when-is-it-ethical-to-publish-stolen-data/. the next day: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders,” Twitter, July 23, 2016, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/756804886038192128. from Russia: Alex Johnson, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: ‘No Proof’ Hacked DNC Emails Came from Russia,” NBC News, July 25, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/WikiLeaks-julian-assange-no-proof-hacked-dnc-emails-came-russia-n616541.

…

from Russia: Alex Johnson, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: ‘No Proof’ Hacked DNC Emails Came from Russia,” NBC News, July 25, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/WikiLeaks-julian-assange-no-proof-hacked-dnc-emails-came-russia-n616541. inside job: Interview with Amy Goodman, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on Releasing DNC Emails That Ousted Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” July 25, 2016, https://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/25/exclusive_WikiLeaks_julian_assange_on_releasing. “I mean, it could be”: First presidential debate of 2016, CNN, September 26, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1609/26/se.01.html. “Guccifer 2.0”: Roger Stone, “Dear Hillary: DNC Hack Solved, So Now Stop Blaming Russia,” Breitbart.com, August 5, 2016, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/08/05/dear-hillary-dnc-hack-solved-so-now-stop-blaming-russia/.

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Longer passwords that contain many types of symbols, letters, and numbers often have larger entropy because it takes more guesses to figure them out. Julian Assange knew this when he created the following password to the WikiLeaks cables database: AcollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#. It is fifty-eight characters long, with very few symbols, and easy to remember. Of course, the reason we know his password is that the Guardian newspaper published it in a book about WikiLeaks. So, obviously, it wasn’t a secure password in other respects. Entropy is frustratingly difficult to estimate. A long password can have low entropy if it is comprised of simple words and easy grammar.

…

Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That’s how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA.” * * * In some ways, the Cypherpunk movement is coming back to life. Julian Assange, a longtime Cypherpunk, transformed the relationship between journalists and their sources with his 2006 launch of the WikiLeaks encrypted drop box that promised complete anonymity to people who wanted to leak information. Other Cypherpunks focused on building “liberation technology” to help liberate people from oppressive regimes. Moxie Marlinspike in San Francisco built encryption apps—RedPhone and TextSecure—for Android phones.

…

Sadly, salting is not: Paul Wagenseil, “LinkedIn, eHarmony Don’t Take Your Security Seriously,” TechNewsDaily, NBC News, June 8, 2012, http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/linkedin-eharmony-dont-take-your-security-seriously-819858. Jeffrey Goldberg, a password expert at AgileBits: Jeffrey Goldberg, in discussion with author, May 14, 2013. Julian Assange knew this: “Row Between Wikileaks and Guardian over Security Breach,” BBC News, September 1, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14743410. One day I was sitting outside: Dan Wheeler, “Open Source Password Strength Estimator,” April 2012, https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/209/zxcvbn/test/index.html. In 2012, researchers at the University of Cambridge: Joseph Bonneau and Ekaterina Shutova, “Linguistic Properties of Multi-Word Passphrases,” USEC ’12: Workshop on Usable Security, Kralendijk, Bonaire, Netherlands, March 2, 2012, http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BS12-USEC-passphrase_linguistics.pdf.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Terrible news—that and the fact that in October, the Guardian revealed that Alexander himself had reached out to WikiLeaks during the campaign to try to obtain Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails. This had probably been enough to spark Congress’s interest in Cambridge’s relationship with the Trump campaign. Both Alexander Nix and Julian Assange had come out in public saying that the former’s attempt to get Hillary’s emails had been unsuccessful. Assange hadn’t even bothered to respond to him. Neither of these revelations surprised me. As far as I knew, Julian Assange had no reason to help out a man like Alexander Nix, and he wasn’t exactly a man to accept cold calls, either.

…

I had never believed a thing she’d reported because every single thing she’d ever written about me had been so inaccurate and speculative, to say the least. Later that year, Carole would cite an anonymous source stating that I was “funneling” Bitcoin to fund Wikileaks (I guess she’s referring to my student-budget donation in 2011) and had gone to visit Julian Assange to discuss the U.S. elections. Her theory and inference that I could be Guccifer 2.0, the conduit between Russia, the DNC hack, and Wikileaks, was a bit much to take in. Her allegations against me had real collateral damage: I was subpoenaed by Mueller the next day, which she then printed nine months later, conveniently leaving out the date and touting it as though it had just happened, further confusing the world and obfuscating the truth.

…

While Cambridge, she allowed, had never officially worked for Lukoil—Wylie had a copy of that proposal, which I myself had seen in my early days at SCL—Cadwalladr wanted to tie it all together, despite having no causal evidence. This features writer posing as an investigator wanted to connect CA with WikiLeaks, with the downfall of Hillary and the rise of Trump, and she presumed that both Julian Assange and Alexander Nix had been lying when each said that they had not in fact ended up working together when Alexander reached out to WikiLeaks in search of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Carole wanted so desperately to find a smoking gun that she blew smoke everywhere, with larger-than-life characters such as Chris Wylie and villainous companies such as Cambridge Analytica, which she described as deploying psyops and operating much like MI6.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Ibid. 26. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/cyberwar-richard-clarke/ 27. www.youtube.com/watch?v=swHkpHMVt3A 28. Julian Assange, “The Non Linear Effects of Leaks on Unjust Systems of Governance,” WikiLeaks 31 Dec. 2006. Archived from the original on 2 Oct. 2007. 29. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-secret-life-of-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-20100521-w1um.html 30. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/us-embassy-cables-executed-mike-huckabee 31. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8171269/Sarah-Palin-hunt-WikiLeaks-founder-like-al-Qaeda-and-Taliban-leaders.html 32. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-tech-terrorist-biden 33. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/31/pentagon_whistleblower_daniel_ellsberg_julian_assange 34.

…

Consider Bradley Manning and Julian Assange; together they changed diplomacy and, arguably, the governments of several countries—without any exceptional technical knowledge or expertise. Bradley Manning is a computer programmer, but not a technical genius. He was a low-ranking U.S. Army soldier, a private first class, who made use of a fundamental attribute of digital files: They are easily copied and, once copied, easily shared. Manning allegedly had access to the files through the U.S. military’s online data-management tools and copied them to share online on WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, a computer programmer and activist, had been working with a team to build WikiLeaks into a known repository for whistleblowers and a trusted source for journalists.

…

Archived from the original on 2 Oct. 2007. 29. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-secret-life-of-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-20100521-w1um.html 30. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/us-embassy-cables-executed-mike-huckabee 31. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8171269/Sarah-Palin-hunt-WikiLeaks-founder-like-al-Qaeda-and-Taliban-leaders.html 32. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-tech-terrorist-biden 33. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/31/pentagon_whistleblower_daniel_ellsberg_julian_assange 34. Micah L. Sifry and Andrew Rasiej, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011), 14. 35. http://gov20.govfresh.com/samantha-power-transparency-has-gone-global/ 36. http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/06/08TUNIS679.html 37. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044723,00.html; http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/17/world/meast/arab-spring-one-year-later/index.html 38. Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2012), 57. 39.

Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Yet Cryptome pioneered and precipitated a larger cultural shift that would help reawaken active measures with a vengeance. Young met Julian Assange on the cypherpunk list, and Assange described Cryptome as the “spiritual godfather”6 of WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange asked Young to become the public face of WikiLeaks in the United States, and suggested that Young could register WikiLeaks.org in his name.7 The cooperation failed; two eccentric personalities clashed, and the radical-libertarian partnership came to an end. Yet WikiLeaks would soon eclipse Cryptome. In 2010, Chelsea Manning, then a twenty-two-year-old Army private known as Bradley,8 leaked more than a quarter million State Department and Department of Defense documents to WikiLeaks.

…

The New York Post, usually adept at finding what it called “hair-raising data,” concluded there was none in the released opposition research.5 Press attention only picked up somewhat when Donald Trump claimed that the DNC itself “did the ‘hacking.’”6 It would take nearly six weeks before the story finally dominated the news cycle. Next, the GRU recruited the help of WikiLeaks. The Guccifer 2.0 account had claimed, in the first note on the DNC hack, that “the main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks.” The GRU had not yet handed over the treasure trove, but the announcement had caught Julian Assange’s attention, and WikiLeaks immediately but cryptically reacted on Twitter. “DNC ‘hacker’ releases 200+ page internal report on Trump, says gave WikiLeaks all the rest,” Assange posted hours after the first leaks appeared, carefully not acknowledging receipt, and only repeating what the GRU front had claimed in its ominous blog post.7 Events now started to move quickly.

…

By the end of the weekend, on June 12, the DNC’s networks were cleaned up and back online.23 That day, Julian Assange gave an interview to a British news network. He mentioned that a major political leak was forthcoming. “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which are great,” Assange said. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”24 As was often his strategy, Assange was being deliberately cryptic. Later he persistently refused to clarify either from whom or precisely when his organization had received specific leaks. Two days later, on June 14, the GRU, sensing that DCLeaks was a hard sell and not exactly a success, started to reach out to WikiLeaks directly. The @DCleaks_ Twitter account privately messaged Julian Assange’s outfit.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The effect of the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court judgment was that the government would have to demonstrate direct, immediate and irreparable damage to the state before the courts would restrict or prevent publication. 7. Twitter, 29 May 2015, 12.44 p.m.; @wikileaks 8. ‘Ghosting: Julian Assange’, London Review of Books, 6 March 2014; Andrew O’Hagan 9. James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, told Raffi Khatchadourian of the New Yorker: ‘It was done by a cutout, which of course afforded Assange plausible deniability.’ (‘Julian Assange: A Man Without a Country’, New Yorker, 21 August 2017) 10. ‘Julian Assange: A Man Without a Country’, New Yorker, 21 August 2017 11. Interview with Ian Katz, editor of Newsnight, BBC Two, 15 December 2016 12.

…

Horowitz has described Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News as ‘a partner’ (‘They’ve done a phenomenal job of disseminating the videos and my point of view’),5 and they duly picked up on a YouTube video he’d published in December 2016 claiming that ‘rape and violence has exploded across Sweden due it’s [sic] immigration policies’.6 Within 15 seconds of the video, an alert viewer would see what kind of an exercise this was. Horowitz lingers on a BBC headline ‘Sweden’s rape rate under the spotlight’. In fact, that four-year-old, 1,200-word article – pegged to the extradition of WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, rather than immigration – was a nuanced exploration of whether Sweden’s apparently higher rates of rape were mainly down to changes in the way the police record incidents. But that was not how Horowitz used the headline. Horowitz dealt in outrage, entertainment and provocation. It was central to his Unique Selling Point that he told uncomfortable home truths the despised Mainstream Media (MSM) ignored.7 He was not a reliable source for the President of the United States.

…

Official Secrets: The Use and Abuse of the Act. London: Secker & Warburg, 1987. Jarvis, J. Gutenberg the Geek. Kindle Single Edition, 2012. Kueng, L. Going Digital: A Roadmap for Organisation Change. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2017. Leigh, D. and Harding, L. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books, 2010. Levy, D., Aslan, B. and Bironzo, D. UK Press Coverage of the EU Referendum. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2016. Lewis, A. Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment. New York: Random House, 1991. Lichter, R., Lichter, L. and Rothman, A.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

That accelerated after he hooked up with something even bigger than Tor: WikiLeaks. Activist hackers started the site in 2006 and first won wide attention in 2010, when they posted a video called “Collateral Murder” that captured the gunfire from a US helicopter that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, in Iraq. The video disproved US claims that the shooting was part of a battle. The one WikiLeaks founder who would be left standing after years of internal dissension and splits was Australian Julian Assange, who had nearly as bad a childhood as Jake, including hiding with his mother from a vengeful cult.

…

Toward the end, after puzzling as cDc did about what to do with all the attention, Davis announced that LulzSec would revive Antisec, an old campaign against white-hat security professionals. This time, LulzSec would ally with the broader Anonymous and go after government security agencies, banks, and other establishment powers. Julian Assange was tracking events closely, at one point contacting the group for help getting into Icelandic email services that might show that government treating WikiLeaks unfairly. After LulzSec supporter Jeremy Hammond hacked US intelligence consulting firm Stratfor, WikiLeaks published millions of Stratfor emails with clients. Eventually authorities caught almost the entire LulzSec crew. Technological ringleader Hector Monsegur, alias Sabu, flipped and helped put Davis and the others away.

…

Courtesy Danny Dulai German hacker Kemal Akman was a key addition to Laird Brown’s Hacktivismo spinoff from cDc. But then Akman brought in the man who invented FinFisher spyware, still used by repressive regimes against dissidents. Courtesy Declan McCullagh Jacob Appelbaum became one of the last close aides to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom he spoke at a 2011 press conference touting the release of new files. Both would be accused of sexual misconduct. Still from “Wikileaks Press Conference,” uploaded to YouTube December 1, 2011, by Rima Amin Cult of the Dead Cow founders Bill Brown and Kevin Wheeler, known to the outside world as Franken Gibe and Grandmaster Ratte, met as middle-school students in Lubbock, Texas.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

Sophisticated actors with resources can play a fairly long game of whack-a-mole with governments, even in the face of determined foes and international cooperation. Perhaps the WikiLeaks case best illustrates what governments can and can’t do. As we saw in Part II, American politicians reacted with horror to the documents released by the transparency website. Vice President Joe Biden labeled WikiLeaks head Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist,” while others wanted him labeled an “enemy combatant,” to be jailed in Guantánamo Bay prison without traditional due process. Likewise, under pressure from the US government and its allies, a number of private companies began to sever ties with WikiLeaks, hampering its ability to operate. Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, for instance, suspended payments, preventing their customers from supporting the organization through the traditional channels.

…

… (12:26:09 PM) bradass87: lets just say *someone* i know intimately well, has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data like the ones described … and been transferring that data from the classified networks over the “air gap” onto a commercial network computer … sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white haired aussie who can’t seem to stay in one country very long =L … (12:31:43 PM) bradass87: crazy white haired dude = Julian Assange (12:33:05 PM) bradass87: in other words … ive made a huge mess. This exchange on AOL Instant Messenger launched one of the biggest incidents in cyber history. WikiLeaks not only changed the way the world thinks about diplomatic secrets, but also became a focal point for understanding how radically cyberspace has changed our relationship with data and access. In 2006, the website WikiLeaks was launched with the goal of “exposing corruption and abuse around the world.” With an agenda that scholars call “radical transparency,” the concept was to reform powerful actors’ behavior by exposing documented evidence of their wrongdoing online.

…

no one government could seize TorrentFreak, “The Pirate Bay: The Site Is Safe, Even If We Lose in Court,” January 31, 2008, http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-safe-080131/. without traditional due process Ewan MacAskill, “Julian Assange Like a High-Tech Terrorist, Says Joe Biden,” Guardian, December 19, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-tech-terrorist-biden. “enemy combatant” Shane D’Aprile, “Gingrich: Leaks Show Obama Administration ‘Shallow,’ ‘Amateurish,’” Blog Briefing Room (blog), The Hill, December 5, 2010, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/132037-gingrich-blames-obama-on-wikileaks-labels-assange-a-terrorist. traditional channels Ewen MacAskill, “WikiLeaks Website Pulled by Amazon after US Political Pressure,” Guardian, December 1, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

And into the breach comes Julian Assange bearing a single, simple radical promise: total information can provide our salvation. If Julian Assange did not exist, we would have to invent him. With his white hair and lip that curls into something between a smirk and a snarl, his playful but vaguely sinister affect, Assange seems almost too cinematic to be real, as if our collective skepticism and distrust managed to conjure him into being. Founded in 2006 as a secure means by which international whistle-blowers and hackers could anonymously publish secret documents, WikiLeaks’ ethos was grounded in Assange’s worldview, one distrustful, to the point of near paranoia, of any source of authority.

…

The concentration of the media at that moment, in other words, provided activists with an Archimedean point of leverage: They could focus their energies on a relative handful of press outlets and through these outlets broadcast their message to almost every last member of the voting public. In some ways, the story told in The Race Beat bears out Julian Assange’s simple vision: The truth of the nature of segregation was exposed and the truth won. Roberts and Klibanoff quote Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who prophetically observed in his 1944 book that “there is no doubt that a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.”

…

., p. 6. 48 “We’re marching over the cliff”: See interview with Noam Chomsky in “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate,” Videonation, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUmwy0VTnqM&feature=player_embedded, accessed February 22, 2012. 49 “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”: Available at http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf, accessed January 19, 2012. 50 “Institutions are very important”: “Frost Over the World: Julian Assange Interview,” Aljazeera, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/frostovertheworld/2010/12/201012228384924314.html, accessed January 19, 2012. CHAPTER 5. WINNERS 1 “We are the 1%”: See “Board of Trade Has a Message for Occupy Chicago,” Chicagoist, http://chicagoist.com/2011/10/05/board_of_trade_has_a_message_for_oc.php, accessed January 22, 2012. 2 “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory”: See William F.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

The two most powerful gatekeepers of the day were the press barons Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, who stitched up a deal with their fellow proprietors that nothing would be printed (SEE: PROPRIETORS). It was left to an obscure bishop – the Bishop of Bradford – to spill the beans in an address to his clergy. The dam then broke. Our own age has thrown up characters who challenge, subvert and undermine the idea of gatekeepers. In starting Wikileaks, Julian Assange wanted to scatter information around the digital ecosphere – at times in a quite anarchic way (SEE: JOURNALIST). He would occasionally (and generally unhappily) partner with mainstream media organisations in redacting, editing and releasing a small selection of the material he possessed.

…

Although Pilger finds fewer outlets for his written journalism, he continues to make attention-grabbing films, aided now by his loyal fanbase. His last two films have been successfully crowdfunded. His friends include Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd – they have a shared interest in Palestine – and Julian Assange, whom he stands by even though he forfeited his share of the bail money when the Wikileaks founder fled. Pilger’s continuing hard-core appeal is undoubted. His films are rightly critically fêted even when reviewers bemoan a level of Lear-like ranting. In an age when authenticity is a much sought after quality his ‘revolutionary romanticism’ brings him respect.

…

New York: The Bodley Head, 2016. Thurman, Neil, Alessio Cornia and Jessica Kunert. ‘Journalists in the UK’. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2016. <https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/journalists-uk> Tiku, Nitasha. ‘Julian Assange Picks a Media Fight With the Guardian’. New York Magazine, 21 December 2010. <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/12/julian_assange_picks_a_media.html> The Times. ‘The Times view on the press under coronavirus’. 4 April 2020. <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-times-view-on-the-press-under-coronavirus-7cvfk36vl> Timm, Trevor. ‘The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful’.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

As Jaffer pointed out, the NSA has historically, at a president’s request, “used the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist, or human rights activist.” It would be “naive,” he said, to think the agency couldn’t still “use its power that way.” Other documents describe the government’s focus not only on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, but also on what the agency calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” In August 2010 the Obama administration urged several allies to file criminal charges against Assange for the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs. The discussion around pressuring other nations to prosecute Assange appears in an NSA file that the agency calls its “Manhunting Timeline.”

…

One CNN show, Reliable Sources, debated the question while a graphic remained on the screen that read, “Should Glenn Greenwald be prosecuted?” The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus—who spied on US students abroad on behalf of the CIA in the 1960s—wrote a column strongly suggesting that Laura, Snowden, and I were all operating as part of a plot secretly masterminded by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The column was filled with so many factual errors (ones I documented in an open letter to Pincus) that the Post was forced to append an unusually large, three-paragraph, two-hundred-word correction acknowledging multiple mistakes. On his own CNBC show, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin said: I feel like, A, we’ve screwed this up, even letting [Snowden] get to Russia.

…

—Ellsberg understood it clearly: people do not want to be associated with someone who has been discredited or publicly humiliated. The same tactic was used to damage Julian Assange’s reputation well before he was accused of sex crimes by two women in Sweden. Notably, the attacks on Assange were carried out by the same newspapers that had worked with him and had benefited from Chelsea Manning’s disclosures, which Assange and WikiLeaks had enabled. When the New York Times published what it called “The Iraq War Logs,” thousands of classified documents detailing atrocities and other abuses during the war by the US military and its Iraqi allies, the paper featured a front-page article—as prominently as the disclosures themselves—by pro-war reporter John Burns that had no purpose other than to depict Assange as bizarre and paranoid, with little grip on reality.

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Although their charitable foundations, LiveStrong and the Central Asia Institute, did much good, a closer look at the psychology of these men reveals the features of Extreme Narcissism and points toward core shame.9 Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and tireless crusader against the secrecy of entrenched power, for a time appeared to be another hero in our feckless world. Standing up for truth, transparency, and the rights of the individual to access secret government information, Assange at first seemed to be a selfless advocate for the little man. He turned out to be a Grandiose Narcissist more interested in public acclaim and enjoying his “rock star” status than in pursuing the truth. Ghostwriter Andrew O’Hagan spent many months collaborating with Julian Assange on an autobiography and in the process came to know him well.

…

Joseph Burgo, The Hero as Narcissist: How Lance Armstrong and Greg Mortenson Conned a Willing Public (Chapel Hill: New Rise Press, 2013). 10. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting. 11. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all. 12. O’Hagan, Ghosting. 13. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assange-i-am-ndash-like-all-hackers-ndash-a-little-bit-autistic-2358654.html. 14. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website (New York: Crown, 2011). 15. O’Hagan, Ghosting. 16. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 7. “I HAVE SO MUCH TO TELL YOU”: THE KNOW-IT-ALL NARCISSIST 1.

…

He enjoys the experience of thumbing his nose at authority and taking charge himself. With the founding of WikiLeaks, Assange found an even larger stage upon which to express his grandiose sense of self. He surely felt a passionate devotion to his cause—uncovering the government lies that preserve its power over the individual—but as the enterprise gained notoriety and he became a cult hero to millions, he increasingly saw himself as a sort of celebrity guru, often insisting that one person or another was in love with him, or wanted to be him. In his account of their years together at WikiLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg paints a portrait of Assange as a man obsessed with his image, unwilling to share credit with collaborators, hostile to those who didn’t accord him due respect, and contemptuous of even those who supported him.14 He treated his collaborators as if they were his subjects.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

She had grown up in a wealthy area outside of Chicago and attended Phillips Academy, an exclusive private school in Massachusetts (alma mater of both Presidents Bush). She went to the University of Edinburgh and afterward got involved in projects in Libya. Once there, she met a barrister named John Jones who represented not only Saif Qaddafi, Muammar Qaddafi’s son, but also Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Jones was a well-respected member of the British bar. Kaiser started consulting for him and, as a result, became acquainted with Assange. She started working at Cambridge Analytica toward the end of 2014, just as I was leaving. Cambridge Analytica created a two-pronged approach to swaying the Nigerian election.

…

Petersburg. The meeting with Lukoil executives. Sam Patten’s boasts about working with the Russian government. Cambridge Analytica’s internal memos alluding to Russian intelligence. The Putin questions inexplicably inserted into our research. And even Brittany Kaiser’s apparent connection to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. At the time, I had thought these were strange events, each one incidental to the others. But now they began to seem like something more. Trump became the GOP nominee at the Republican National Convention on July 19. If my hunch was correct, Cambridge Analytica was not only using the data tool I had worked on to manipulate American voters into supporting him, it may have been knowingly or unknowingly working with Russians to sway the election.

…

Instead, investigators compile small pieces of information—a fingerprint, a saliva sample, tire tracks, a strand of hair. In this case, Sam Patten worked for CA after working on pro-Russian campaigns in Ukraine; CA tested American attitudes toward Vladimir Putin; SCL’s work for NATO made it a Russian intel target; Brittany Kaiser used to consult for Julian Assange’s legal team; the head psychologist who was collecting Facebook data for CA was making trips to Russia to present lectures about social media profiling, one of which was titled “New Methods of Communication as an Effective Political Instrument”; CA systems were accessed by IP addresses that resolved to Russia and other CIS countries; memos referenced ex–Russian security services; and we have Alexander Nix telling Lukoil about Cambridge Analytica’s U.S. data sets and disinformation capacity.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Today there are hundreds of people like Amir and Miguel working on ingenious ways of keeping online secrets or preventing censorship, often in their own time, and frequently crowdfunded by users sympathetic to the cause. One is Smári McCarthy. Smári is unashamedly geeky: a computer whizz and founding member of the radical Icelandic Pirate Party. He used to work with Julian Assange in the early days of WikiLeaks. Smári isn’t really a cypherpunk – he resists any association with Ayn Rand’s philosophy – but he does believe that privacy online is a fundamental right, and worries about state surveillance of the net. He also believes that crypto is a key part of a political project. He wants you to encrypt all your emails with PGP, even (or especially) those you send to friends and family members.

…

Chapter 3 Into Galt’s Gulch p.74 ‘Millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin . . .’ http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/26/bitcoins-gain-currency-in-berlin (accessed 9 January 2014). p.76 ‘One day in late 1992 . . .’ Manne, R., ‘The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: Julian Assange’ in Making Trouble: Essays Against the New Australian Complacency, Black Inc, p.204. This story is also brilliantly told in Greenberg, A., This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers. I draw on Greenberg’s account throughout. p.76 ‘The all believed that the great political issue . . .’ Levy, S., ‘Crypto-rebels’, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.02/crypto.rebels.html?

…

Chapter 3 Into Galt’s Gulch Greenberg, A., This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers. An invaluable guide to cypherpunk technology and ideology, and the significance of the cypherpunk philosophy to whistleblowers. Levy, S., ‘Crypto-rebels’ in Wired and Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in a Digital Age. ‘Crypto-rebels’ was the first mainstream account of the cypherpunks; while Crypto remains the best account of the movement overall. Manne, R., ‘The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: Julian Assange’, in Making Trouble: Essays Against the New Australian Complacency May, T., Cyphernomicom, Tim May’s book-length essay, providing an excellent insight into the cypherpunk philosophy.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Another NSA database, MYSTIC: Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras (19 May 2014), “Data pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas. Julian Assange (23 May 2014), “WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-statement-on-the-mass.html. The NSA stores telephone metadata: David Kravets (17 Jan 2014), “Obama revamps NSA phone metadata spying program,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/2014/01/obama-nsa. If you use encryption: I do not know whether this includes all encrypted SSL sessions.

…

we know it is doing so: Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras (19 May 2014), “Data pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas. Julian Assange (23 May 2014), “WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-statement-on-the-mass.html. The agency’s 2013 budget: Barton Gellman and Greg Miller (29 Aug 2013), “‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html.

…

Kids do this to each other all the time: forwarding private chats, photos, and messages, or showing each other private postings on social networking sites. One of the reasons apps that delete messages and photos after a few seconds are so popular among teenagers is that they help prevent this sort of thing. Old web pages have a way of sticking around. In 2010, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s old OKCupid dating profile was dug up for public discussion. Even worse are people who use the Internet to shame and harass. Revenge porn—for the most part, ex-boyfriends posting compromising photographs of former girlfriends—is an extreme example. Mug shot extortion sites turn this sort of thing into a business.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them: The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency.

…

It is not easy, but it is possible: witness the peaceful revolutions that preceded the collapse of the USSR, the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa, and the fall of tyrants throughout history, from Hitler to Milosevic to Mubarak. But the crisis we face now is new. Its transnational nature and reliance on non–state actors who can use digital media to override borders—Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a prime example—means it lacks true historic precedent. Climate change is another factor that makes our current crisis distinct from any other. It is doubtful that this group of roving criminals and kleptocrats are the climate skeptics they purport to be. It is far more likely that they are, as Naomi Klein phrases it, “disaster capitalists” who see opportunity in a dying planet, and who will spare no expense in pursuit of their own preservation.16 Throughout this book, I describe how digital media has transformed state repression and citizen protest, and how globalization allowed organized crime to proliferate on an unparalleled scale.

…

I was also not surprised when, over the course of the next few years, officials gradually revealed that Russian hackers had targeted election systems in 2016 in all fifty states.23 The most damning evidence of this was brought forward by NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, a twenty-five-year-old Air Force veteran who anonymously sent proof of the attacks to the website The Intercept. The Intercept then published the leaked information in a way that made Winner easy for officials to identify and then arrest.24 The Intercept is home to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist famous for aiding Kremlin abettor Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who gained asylum in Russia after fleeing the United States with classified documents. In 2018, Winner was jailed under the Espionage Act and was given the longest sentence in US history for her particular offense, totaling sixty-three months.25 She is banned from speaking to the press.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was perfect for the task. First, it had a mission of disclosing confidential documents. Second, its founder, Julian Assange, bore a personal grudge against Clinton, who had been in charge of the US response to the State Department cables the site had released in 2010. Finally, though it’s not clear whether the Russian hackers were aware of this, Assange had an interest in Trump winning the election, believing he would be much likelier to drop any possible prosecution or extradition bid over WikiLeaks’ activities. Later in the race, it emerged that WikiLeaks had been communicating with Donald Trump Jr over its handling of the leaks, even proposing that Trump should suggest Assange for an ambassadorial post.38 No one knows if Assange was aware that the documents he was receiving were the result of Russian state hacking (he has denied that they were), but he was certainly not about to spend too much time asking inconvenient questions of his anonymous source.

…

With hindsight, helping those who stayed on the board, which is to say those for whom life never really got started, and preventing the effect they’d have on the next generation of teens arriving, could have staved off many disasters. In practice, I never really left 4chan for very long. My early jobs as a journalist tended to lean hard on my experience with tech and internet culture – especially hacker culture and Anonymous – not least because for a time I worked for WikiLeaks and lived with its enigmatic founder Julian Assange. As a result, not long after leaving 4chan as a regular user, I was keeping an eye on it as a journalist, and saw it change from something chaotic but fundamentally innocent into something far darker. From mass hoaxing to mass action Even in its early incarnation, 4chan had its dark side.

…

Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh, ‘Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House’, www.theguardian.com, 15 July 2021. 37. Katelyn Polantz and Stephen Collinson, ‘12 Russians indicted in Mueller investigation’, https://edition.cnn.com, 14 July 2018. 38. Michael McGowan, ‘Help make Julian Assange Australia’s US ambassador, WikiLeaks urged Trump Jr’, www.theguardian.com, 14 November 2017. 39. Catherine Herridge and Adam Shaw, ‘State Department report on Clinton emails finds hundreds of violations, dozens of individuals at fault’, www.foxnews.com, 18 October 2019. 40. Weiner had been sending lewd messages to numerous women, including minors: Joanna Walters, ‘Anthony Weiner sent sexually explicit messages to 15-year-old, report says’, www.theguardian.com, 22 September 2016. 41.

In the Flow by Boris Groys

illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Julian Assange, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, WikiLeaks

Kojève understood the path of universal service and administration as a secure one. WikiLeaks and Assange himself have proved that the path of universal service can also involve taking a substantial risk. They became dissidents of universal service, and so invented a new form of risk. Or rather, they thematized this risk and made it explicit by committing themselves to universal service and administration as a form of conspiracy from the very beginning. It is a true historical innovation. And it is to be expected that this innovation will have interesting consequences. ___________________________ 1‘In Conversation with Julian Assange Part I’, WikiLeaks.org, 23 May 2011. 2Ibid.

…

In this sense, the new universality – the universality of Internet clerks – creates a universal image after all. But this image is not a universal idea, project or commitment, but rather a universal event – the fact that the sign flow took this and not that form at a particular moment in time. Julian Assange described eloquently this new, postmodern, posthistorical universalist vision in a recent interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist: There’s a universe of information, and we can imagine a sort of Platonic ideal in which we have an infinite horizon of information. It’s similar to the concept of the Tower of Babel.

…

Thus, the phenomenon of WikiLeaks signals a reintroduction of universalism into politics. This fact alone makes the emergence of WikiLeaks highly significant. We know from history that only universalist projects can lead to real political change. But WikiLeaks signals not only a return of universalism but also the deep transformation that the notion of universalism has undergone during recent decades. WikiLeaks is not a political party. It does not offer any universalist vision of society, political programme or ideology designed to ‘spiritually’ or politically unify mankind. Rather, WikiLeaks offers a sum of technical means that would allow universal access to any specific, particular content.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Deep investigations into questions about what had caused the blowout, the devastation of the local ecosystem and economy, the health risks associated with fuel and dispersants, and the work needed to be done monitoring the four thousand oil platforms and twenty-seven thousand old oil wells, many of them leaking, were well beyond the scope of any individual. Even Julian Assange had been unable to act independently, joining up with major news organizations like the New York Times and the Guardian to release the thousands of cables. WikiLeaks had been organized initially around the premise that the public would sift through and interpret raw data, collaboratively writing necessary analysis, making sense of the issues and evidence without professional censors and meddling middlemen.

…

id=CPT&year=2011. 15. Glenn Greenwald, “Surveillance State Democracy,” Salon, May 6, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/surveillance_state_democracy/singleton/. Also note a similar comment by Julian Assange, who said Google joining the SOPA fight “scared the hell out of me,” because the company was beginning to see itself as a “ ‘political player’ with enormous power over Congress.” Quoted in Julian Assange, Cypher-punks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2012), 83. 16. David Segal, “CISPA Is the New SOPA: Help Kill It This Week,” Huffington Post, April 16, 2012. Segal also discusses this issue at length in the book he coedited with David Moon and Patrick Ruffini, Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2013). 17.

…

.… But once you factor in money spent on schooling, the earnings I’ve received outside of aggregation-oriented writing positions is still in the bloodiest shade of red imaginable. It’s unlikely the numbers will ever even out.”43 4 UNEQUAL UPTAKE Not long after WikiLeaks released its enormous cache of classified diplomatic cables, making the private observations of jaded attachés public for all to see, I spent a Saturday afternoon at a quickly assembled conference trying to make sense of the implications. The conversation hinged on the tangled theme of media, technology, and politics. Does WikiLeaks represent a new kind of transnational investigative journalism? Has the Web made us all reporters? Is transparency an unambiguous good?

The Data Journalism Handbook by Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Liliana Bounegru

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business intelligence, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, eurozone crisis, fail fast, Firefox, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, game design, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Julian Assange, linked data, machine readable, moral hazard, MVC pattern, New Journalism, openstreetmap, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, social graph, Solyndra, SPARQL, text mining, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Going further back, the principle that sits at the foundation of the hyperlinked structure of the Web is the citation principle used in academic works. Quoting and sharing the source materials and the data behind the story is one of the basic ways in which data journalism can improve journalism, what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange calls “scientific journalism.” By enabling anyone to drill down into data sources and find information that is relevant to them, as well as to to verify assertions and challenge commonly received assumptions, data journalism effectively represents the mass democratization of resources, tools, techniques, and methodologies that were previously used by specialists; whether investigative reporters, social scientists, statisticians, analysts, or other experts.

…

What we wanted to do was enable our team of specialist reporters to get great human stories from the information—and we wanted to analyze it to get the big picture, to show how the war really is going. It was central to what we would do quite early on that we would not publish the full database. WikiLeaks was already going to do that and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t reveal the names of informants or unnecessarily endanger NATO troops. At the same time, we needed to make the data easier to use for our team of investigative reporters led by David Leigh and Nick Davies (who had negotiated releasing the data with Julian Assange). We also wanted to make it simpler to access key information, out there in the real world, as clear and open as we could make it.

…

But the game-changer for data journalism happened in spring 2010, beginning with one spreadsheet: 92,201 rows of data, each one containing a detailed breakdown of a military event in Afghanistan. This was the WikiLeaks war logs. Part one, that is. There were to be two more episodes to follow: Iraq and the cables. The official term for the first two parts was SIGACTS: the US military Significant Actions Database. News organizations are all about geography—and proximity to the news desk. If you’re close, it’s easy to suggest stories and become part of the process; conversely, out of sight is literally out of mind. Before WikiLeaks, we were placed on a different floor, with graphics. Since WikiLeaks, we have sat on the same floor, next to the newsdesk.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://archive.wired.com. 92. Kai Eriksson, “Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks,” European Legacy 10, no. 6 (2005): 599–600; Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 92–93. Chapter 3. Subjectivity 1. Babycastles, “JULIAN ASSANGE—When Google Met WikiLeaks Book Release Party,” Facebook, 2014, www.facebook.com. 2. James Camp, “Julian Assange: ‘When You Post to Facebook, You’re Being a Rat,’” Guardian, September 25, 2014, www.theguardian.com. 3. Google, “Google’s Mission Is to Organize the World’s Information and Make It Universally Accessible and Useful,” 2015, www.google.com. 4.

…

Stupid sound and screaming with one voice we leave out everything —Black Eyes, “Letter to Raoul Peck” The RSVP link for Julian Assange’s 2014 book-launch party in New York City was posted on the Facebook page of Manhattan art gallery Babycastles. Although it was met with skeptical comments such as “Is this supposed to be white irony Or this Actually happening?” and “Is this real?,” the guest list filled up weeks before the event.1 Assange, famed for founding WikiLeaks and defamed by sexual assault charges in Sweden, was in de facto detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. But, thanks to broadband video chat, his face was temporarily freed and beamed onto the gallery’s walls for a conversation with those guests who believed enough in the event to RSVP.2 During the party, a discussion sparked by Assange’s book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, highlighted the striking similarity between the mission statements of Google and the U.S.’s National Security Agency.

…

Wood, “Gender, Race, and Authenticity: Celebrity Women Tweeting for the Gaze,” in Feminist Surveillance Studies, ed. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 10. Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); WikiLeaks, The Spy Files, 2011–2014, https://wikileaks.org. 11. Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, introduction to “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 3. Introduction 1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 22. 2.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

(The next five sentences then repeat the oldest and most conventional calls for general well-being through measured oversight.) By comparison Assange's When Google Met Wikileaks is a fascinating, self-contradictory, hyperactive tangle of ideas, accusations, and bizarre rationalizations. Within critical Google discourse it is in a league of its own, for both better or worse. Julian Assange, When Google Met Wikileaks (New York: OR Books, 2014). 64.  See Julian Assange, “The Banality of ‘Don't Be Evil,’” New York Times, June 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html It was later republished in Assange, When WikiLeaks Met Google. 65.  As recently occurred in Turkey, when the AK Party tried to shut down Twitter, and the government also tried to shut off access to Google DNS as well.

…

See Danielle Citron, “Bright Ideas: Anita Allen's Unpopular Privacy,” Concurring Opinions, January 13, 2012, http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/01/bright-ideas-anita-allens-unpopular-privacy.html. 65.  Jacob Applebaum, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann, and Julian Assange, “Episode 8, Part 1,” WikiLeaks World Tomorrow, April 2012, https://worldtomorrow.wikileaks.org/episode-8.html.If you look at it from a market perspective, I'm convinced that there is a market in privacy that has been mostly left unexplored, so maybe there will be an economic drive for companies to develop tools that will give users the in-dividual ability to control their data and communication.

…

See, for example, Nikolai von Kreitor, “The Concept of Grossraum in Carl Schmitt's Jurisprudence: The Historical Necessity of a New Russian Grossraum,” August 7, 1970, http://www.amerika.org/globalism/the-concept-of-grossraum-in-carl-schmitts-jurisprudence-nikolai-von-kreitor/. This is the language of today's Russian Eurasianists, France's Nouvelle Droite, Japanese imperial revisionists, as well, it must be said, of some voices on the European Left. 34.  For a melodramatic but not uninformed account, see Julian Assange, When WikiLeaks Met Google (N.p.: OR Books, 2014). 35.  See, for example, the European Schengen Cloud, or Brazil's proposed “independent Internet”: http://www.itworld.com/article/2705173/networking-hardware/bric-nations-plan-their-own–independent-internet.html. 36.  Chris C. Demchak and Peter J. Dombrowski, “Rise of a Cybered Westphalian Age: The Coming Age,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011): 31–62. 37. 

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

This was termed ‘digilantism’, a reckless version of open-source investigation where scaremongering masqueraded as122 detective work. Others wondered if open-source investigation was what WikiLeaks did. Absolutely not. WikiLeaks was about leaking classified information, while open-source investigators analyse what sits in public. The secrecy of WikiLeaks placed vast power into its hands, which became problematic when Julian Assange exhibited strong political preferences, timing drops to harm those he despised, notably Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.123 Another problem with WikiLeaks is that it is hard to verify huge data dumps of shadowy origin. Are the floods of diplomatic cables legitimate?

…

url=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,23 122 academic.oup.com/bjc/article/57/2/341/2623876 123 Wikileaks had their Twitter group chat logs leaked by a former member in 2018. In those chat logs, the Wikileaks account – perhaps even run by Julian Assange himself – speculated that Britain’s Ministry of Defence funded Bellingcat, a totally false claim. emma.best/2018/07/29/11000-messages-from-private-wikileaks-chat-released/ 2 BECOMING BELLINGCAT 1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ukrainian_aircraft_losses_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis 2 www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-separatist-leader-boasts-downing-plane/25460930.html 3 youtu.be/MiI9s-zWLs4 4 republic.ru/posts/l/1129893 5 rusvesna.su/news/1405676334 6 www.pressgazette.co.uk/russia-today-london-correspondent-resigns-protest-disrespect-facts-over-malaysian-plane-crash www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/russia-today-correspondent-resigns-over-coverage-of-ukranian?

…

But in June 2016, months before the presidential election pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, news reports emerged that a Russian military intelligence cyber-espionage unit, nicknamed Fancy Bear by security experts, had sought to derail Clinton’s election bid. Wikileaks took stolen emails from ‘Guccifer 2.0’ – purportedly a Romanian hacker but actually Russians1 – and counselled this Kremlin front operation on how to have the greatest impact on American voters, according to a US indictment.2 In July 2016, WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of emails before the Democratic National Convention, stirring dissent in the party and undermining Clinton. Cybersecurity companies such as ThreatConnect and CrowdStrike were building a picture of what was going on, explaining how this cyber-espionage unit used fake Google password alerts.3 The poor syntax of a spoof email caught my attention – we had received messages like that, going back more than a year.

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them. So declared WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in May 2011 during an interview with Russian news site RT. A spokesman for Facebook responded to CNET: We don’t respond to pressure, we respond to compulsory legal process . . . There has never been a time we have been pressured to turn over data [and] we fight every time we believe the legal process is insufficient.

…

Anonymouse thinks that the press is asking the wrong questions, claiming that they tend to focus on the illegal hacks rather than the illegal acts that the hackers are able to expose. He says that most of the media coverage belies a “sick” acceptance of HBGary’s activities, using government power to spy on its citizens. He draws parallels to the freedom-fighting actions of Anonymous and those of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, who have also experienced a fair amount of negative press. How about prosecuting the soldiers named in one of the Afghan war diaries as having shot a bunch of unarmed teenagers? The number one response I’ve noticed when I argue about this is “Well this is the real world, corruption happens, deal with it.”

…

Then Anonymous went after the RIAA because it sought legal action against file sharing site Limewire. In December 2010, Amazon, Paypal, Bank of America, PostFinance, MasterCard, and Visa decided to stop processing donations for the global news leak network WikiLeaks, which had recently caused global controversy by posting sensitive internal documents. These payment-processing sites had bowed to political pressure, refusing to work with WikiLeaks. In retaliation, Anonymous launched DDoS attacks against several of these companies, successfully bringing down the websites for MasterCard and Visa. A 16-year-old boy from the Netherlands was arrested in relation to the attack, and the FBI is probably still investigating.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But without clear transparency and accountability about how, when, and under what specific circumstances personal information is being collected and used, citizens have good reason to worry about the growth of the state’s “panoptic” power. WIKILEAKS AND THE FATE OF CONTROVERSIAL SPEECH WikiLeaks and several news organizations that the whistle-blowing organization had chosen as partners published the first batch of classified US diplomatic cables, leaked by disgruntled US Army Private Bradley Manning, in November 2010. Vice President Joseph Biden declared WikiLeaks’ leader, Julian Assange, to be a “digital terrorist.” Senator Joe Lieberman declared that “WikiLeaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world.” Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” website, dedicated to showcasing the leaked diplomatic cables, came under distributed denial of service attacks of unknown origin.

…

Regardless of whether one views the intentions and consequences of WikiLeaks’ release of diplomatic cables favorably, the US government’s response to WikiLeaks highlights a troubling murkiness, opacity, and lack of public accountability in the power relationships between government and Internet-related companies. In a speech in February 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought to distance the State Department—and the US government more generally—from individual politicians and media commentators who called for Julian Assange’s head without any apparent interest in due process. She also made the point that the US government did not pressure private companies such as Amazon and PayPal to sever their ties with WikiLeaks.

…

Two days after Assange moved the Cablegate site to Amazon, Amazon headquarters received a call of complaint from Lieberman’s office. Shortly thereafter, Amazon booted WikiLeaks. The senator responded with a statement: “I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on WikiLeaks’ previous publication of classified material. The company’s decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.” Amazon later insisted that it had acted independently of Lieberman’s phone call. At any rate, legally Amazon was off the hook.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

When overwhelmed, governments have begun to address Anonymous as an equal in negotiation. The government of the Philippines has tried to engage with the group by making concessions and involving it in national cyberstrategy.18 Internet pundits have added to the chaos of international politics. Julian Assange’s online WikiLeaks project exposed diplomatic correspondence and upset many delicately balanced relationships among states and between power brokers. Both Assange and Edward Snowden decided that democracies were the least likely to provide them with just treatment as whistle blowers. The Russians gave Assange an online talk show and have sheltered Snowden.

…

Srđa Popović, the Serb who in 2000 mobilized the resistance to end Slobodan Milošević’s rule, went on in 2003 to train protesters for Georgia’s “Rose Revolution,” Ukraine’s 2005 “Orange Revolution,” and the Maldives’ revolution in 2007, before training activists in Egypt’s April 6 Movement in 2008. Popović’s book Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points has been downloaded thousands of times.19 For the presidents of countries and companies, people like Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange are threats to national security and the corporate bottom line. But in many networks they are heroes. Every few years, hacktivists and whistle blowers turn national security and diplomacy upside down by putting large amounts of previously secret content online. Conservative security analysts and industry pundits often react hostilely to people who play with information technologies and exploit consumer electronics beyond designers’ intent.

…

Symantec, Norton Report 2013: Cost per Cybercrime Victim Up 50 Percent (Mountain View, CA: Symantec, October 2013), accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20131001_01. 28. Luke Harding, “WikiLeaks Cables: Russian Government ‘Using Mafia for Its Dirty Work,’” Guardian, December 1, 2010, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cable-spain-russian-mafia. 29. Homi Kharas and Andrew Rogerson, Horizon 2025: Creative Destruction in the Aid Industry (London: Overseas Development Institute, July 2012), accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.aidmonitor.org.np/reports/horizon%202012.pdf. 30.

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Though not a member himself, he hung out on their chat channels. These were exciting times in the hacking world. Members of Anonymous had been targeting a succession of organisations and declaring their solidarity with WikiLeaks, which was publishing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic communications. When Julian Assange’s whistleblower website was blocked by the payment services PayPal, Mastercard and VISA, cutting off lots of donations to WikiLeaks, Anonymous struck back with a DDoS attack that took out the PayPal and Mastercard websites and inflicted an estimated $5.5 million in losses. One member would ultimately wind up doing eighteen months in prison in England.

…

The latter was the domain of hardcore hackers, of men and women in black T-shirts with sticker-covered MacBooks. As I stood taking it all in, a four-propeller quadcopter, aka a delivery drone, zoomed by on its way to drop off a pizza. I listened to speeches. I watched a video interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in which he talked about a fast-proliferating system of surveillance by corporations and governments trying to control the internet. Assange called the system ‘the national security state’, talking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘It’s hurtling towards a dystopia,’ he predicted, and ‘it is dragging many of us along with it.’

…

Another said, ‘I’d definitely check the cabinets where the cables are hooked up. That’s where you want to be.’ One person informed me that besides being the perfect place from which to eavesdrop, the AMS-IX had also switched early on to hardware made by Glimmerglass, a US-based company. Could that be a lead? While browsing the Spy Files (leaked espionage documents) on WikiLeaks, I ran across a folder about Glimmerglass. It said their equipment was also popular with US intelligence. Bingo! I thought. Until someone else pointed out that having Glimmerglass hardware isn’t significant in itself: what matters is how it’s installed and who has access to it. Which took me right back to square one.

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

Although Nakamoto’s initial posts had described his vision for an absence of regulation, his later posts remained technical and academic until WikiLeaks began to canvass the viability of accepting bitcoin. Nakamoto was adamant that he did not want his creation associated with the whistleblowing site. ‘No, don’t “bring it on”,’ he wrote. ‘I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.’ He seemed more focused on the potential effects on his invention rather than any judgments about Julian Assange and his website. Nakamoto’s only other political statement was unearthed by cryptographers and was embedded in the source code of bitcoin itself, a little Easter egg for determined crypto-sleuths.

…

Articles painting him as a hero and visionary were no longer confined to a few fringe online publications. Forbes started to report regularly on Silk Road and its owner in positive terms. The magazine published a collection of Roberts’ quotes, describing him as a ‘principled libertarian and cypherpunk in the same vein as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’. Although many would be appalled at the notion of a drug dealer as a hero, those who were against prohibition believed Silk Road offered a better, safer way for users to buy the drugs they would acquire anyway. As one member put it, ‘I came for the drugs and stayed for the revolution.’

…

‘Tor’s original design was to give users privacy and anonymity online and that’s still the core of what we do,’ Lewman said. ‘The vast majority of Tor usage is by normal people who are just looking to not give out all their information; who they are, where they are and every website they visit. Of course jerks and criminals do use Tor but frankly they have far better options.’ WikiLeaks is one example of an organisation that took advantage of darknets to maintain the integrity of its submissions, recommending that those who required anonymity when whistleblowing use Tor. Even if a server were to be confiscated, there would be little risk to users of the site, because there would be no IP trail and no typical user traffic trails that led out of the server.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

He was referring, as he had done with me before, to a “dead man’s switch,” a device or arrangement according to which the most sensitive files in his possession would somehow come to light automatically in circumstances he did not specify. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks had made an explicit arrangement like this in 2011, distributing online an encrypted “insurance file” and threatening to release the decryption key if the U.S. government did anything to harm him or shut down WikiLeaks. Snowden never made this kind of threat himself, but Glenn Greenwald did so in a published interview. “Snowden has enough information to cause more harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had,” Greenwald told the Argentinian daily La Nación.

…

The government had never tried to prosecute a journalist or publisher under the Espionage Act of 1917, which is so broadly drafted that it could be read as banning any news story about “national defense information,” whether classified or not. No one knew for certain how such a prosecution would fare under First Amendment analysis. In mid-2019, the Trump administration decided to test the question. In an indictment unsealed against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the Justice Department charged him with sixteen counts of espionage, three of them based entirely on his communication of secrets “to all the world by publishing them on the Internet.” Whether you wish to call Assange a “journalist” or not, the distinction is not important legally.

…

Fourth Amendment does not apply: See “Notes: The Border Search Muddle,” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 8 (June 1, 2019): 2278–92, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/06/the-border-search-muddle/. “The damage is incalculable”: George Cotter, email to author, December 1, 2016. Advocates for radical transparency: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and John Young of the leak website Cryptome often criticized me, along with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, for holding back any documents at all. See, for example, “Snowden Long Drip Pie Charts,” March 14, 2014, at https://perma.cc/FZ9M-ZXPF. trafficking in stolen goods: Publishing information obtained by theft is not trafficking in stolen goods in part because the Supreme Court interprets the National Stolen Property Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2314 and 2315, as limited to tangible “goods, wares, or merchandise.”

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Under this analysis, the National Security Agency and Wikileaks share the same worldview, with differing ends. Both essentially believe that there is some secret at the heart of the world that, if only it can be known, will make everything better. Wikileaks wants transparency for all; the NSA only wants transparency for some – its enemies; but both function according to the same philosophy. Wikileaks’ original intent was not to become a kind of mirror to the NSA, but to break the whole machine. In 2006, in the very early days of Wikileaks, Julian Assange wrote an analysis of conspiratorial systems of government and how they can be attacked, entitled ‘Conspiracy as Governance’.

…

, January 13, 2014, newamerica.org. 35.Jennifer King, Deirdre Mulligan, and Stephen Rafael, ‘CITRIS Report: The San Francisco Community Safety Program’, UC Berkeley, December 17, 2008, available at wired.com. 36.K. Pease, ‘A Review Of Street Lighting Evaluations: Crime Reduction Effects’, Crime Prevention Studies 10 (1999). 37.Stephen Atkins, ‘The Influence Of Street Lighting On Crime And Fear Of Crime’, Crime Prevention Unit Paper 28, UK Home Office, 1991, available at popcenter.org. 38.Julian Assange, ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’, Cryptome, November 10, 2006, cryptome.org. 39.Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005. 40.‘Owners Watched Fort McMurray Home Burn to Ground Over iPhone’, YouTube video, username: Storyful News, May 6, 2016. 8Conspiracy 1.Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. 2.See James Bridle, ‘Planespotting’, blog post, December 18, 2013, booktwo.org, and other reports by the author. 3.For a good overview of the trial, see: Kevin Hall, The ABC Trial (2006), originally published at ukcoldwar.simplenet.com, archived at archive.li/1xfT4. 4.Richard Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, New York: HarperPress, 2010. 5.Duncan Campbell, ‘GCHQ’ (book review), New Statesman, June 28, 2010, newstatesman.com. 6.Chris Blackhurst, ‘Police robbed of millions in plane fraud’, Independent, May 19, 1995, independent.co.uk. 7.US Air Force, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, 1996, csat.au.af.mil. 8.

…

For Assange, all authoritarian systems are conspiracies because their power depends on keeping secrets from their peoples. Leaks undermine their power, not because of what is leaked, but because increased internal fear and paranoia degrades the system’s ability to conspire. What is damaging is the act of leaking itself, not the contents of any specific leak.38 As Wikileaks entered the public eye and Assange himself became an increasingly powerful and arrogant figure, the organisation became involved in a series of feuds with the intelligence agencies – and ultimately a tool for states to attack one another – and this realisation was lost. What replaced it was a mistaken belief in the power of the ‘smoking gun’: the single source or piece of evidence that would bring down authority.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

The hackers sent the news site Gawker the Trump opposition research document, and it published a story on the file that received half a million clicks, robbing the Democrats of the ability to time the release of their Trump dirt. Soon, as promised, WikiLeaks began to publish a steady trickle of the hackers’ stolen data, too; after all, Julian Assange’s secret-spilling group had never been very particular about whether its “leaks” came from whistle-blowers or hackers. The documents, now with WikiLeaks’ stamp of credibility, began to be picked up by news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, BuzzFeed, and The Intercept. The revelations were very real: It turned out the DNC had secretly favored the candidate Hillary Clinton over her opponent Bernie Sanders as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, despite the committee’s purported role as a neutral arbiter for the party.

…

The original Guccifer had been a Romanian amateur hacker named Marcel Lehel Lazăr who had broken into the email accounts of high-profile figures like Colin Powell, the Rockefeller family, and the sister of former president George W. Bush. Guccifer 2.0 took on the persona of a cocky eastern European cyberpunk who idolized figures like the original Guccifer, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. “Personally I think that I’m among the best hackers in the world,” he would write in a FAQ. When CrowdStrike maintained that Guccifer 2.0 was a thin disguise meant to obscure the Russian state hackers behind the DNC intrusion, Guccifer 2.0 shot back with vague denials. “They just fucked up!

…

The site, of course: Raphael Satter, “Inside Story: How Russia Hacked the Democrats’ Email,” Associated Press, Nov. 4, 2017, www.apnews.com. Another seemed to call for “open borders”: “HRC Paid Speeches,” email via WikiLeaks, sent Jan. 25, 2016, wikileaks.org, archived at bit.ly/2RRtcNA. The security firm Secureworks found the link: “Threat Group 4127 Targets Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign,” June 16, 2016, www.secureworks.com, archived at bit.ly/2RecMtu. “I love WikiLeaks!”: Mark Hensch, “Trump: ‘I Love WikiLeaks,’ ” Hill, Oct. 10, 2016, thehill.com. But for the most part, Trump: Andy Greenberg, “A Timeline of Trump’s Strange, Contradictory Statements on Russian Hacking,” Wired, Jan. 4, 2017, www.wired.com.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

It allows people to communicate, browse and transact beyond the reach of government, making it significantly harder for the state to control information, and subsequently, its citizens. This is because of a simple-but-magic rule: due to some arcane properties of prime numbers, it takes far more computing power to decrypt something than to encrypt it.3 It’s like an egg: a lot easier to crack than to put back in its shell. Julian Assange, who was an active contributor to Timothy May’s email list, puts it this way: ‘the universe believes in encryption’. Crypto-anarchy in the UK Over the course of the nineties this remarkable group predicted, developed or helped spread several techniques that are now routinely employed by computer users to protect against various forms of surveillance.

…

Most liberals have been very short-sighted about this, because they want total freedom and equality, without realising that the two are sometimes in tension. This is why the issue of encryption and privacy throws up peculiar political alliances. (The most notable of recent years is surely the idiotic social democratic love affair with crypto-anarchist Julian Assange.) Democracy is about individual liberty of course, but that’s only half the picture. It is also a system of coercion because your liberty must sometimes be taken away too. The state must be able to force you to pay tax, remove your passport, restrict your right to assemble and back it up with the use of force if it needs to by arresting you and throwing you in prison.

…

Thousands of paid content producers pushed out pro-Trump or anti-Hillary content, flooding feeds and overwhelming serious hashtags with nonsense, making them unusable. Russian hackers ran very big Facebook pages, which created the illusion of grassroots support for Trump. They allegedly hacked Hillary Clinton’s private emails and shared them with the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks – who leaked them slowly over the campaign, and to good effect. They also ran an aggressive campaign of paid advertising on Facebook and Google. I won’t tell this story in full here, because it is still unfolding (at the time of writing, the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian Government is ongoing).* But it seems that the purpose was obviously the same as Alamo: to win the information war, shape people’s reality and use the internet to subtly shift opinion in new and hidden ways.

The 99.998271% by Simon Wood

banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, equal pay for equal work, Julian Assange, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Steve Jobs, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

How long will it take before a way is found to limit the internet as well? As soon as it can be shown to be a credible threat to the status quo, how can we be sure it will not be taken out? Anyone who stands up to the empire is swatted down, as can be seen in the hysterical reaction to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who could be extradited to the US where he can be held in indefinite detention. The Occupy Wall Street movement, at first ignored completely by the establishment media, is now feeling the full force of the propaganda mill, with protestors smeared as ‘hippies’ and ‘pot smokers’ with ‘no direction in their lives’ and so on. 41 The author of this book is not a professional journalist, so I hereby request that professional journalists in the media point out to me the part of the course in journalism they studied at college which says that journalists are supposed to criticize, insult, judge and demean the subjects of the stories they cover.

…

These corporations pay workers in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, which is still struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake, extremely low wages to sew clothes in their sweatshops. A Wikileaks cable showed that the corporations lobbied the US State Department, who then had the US ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president. The result? A new minimum wage of 31 cents an hour. This may never have been revealed had it not been released in a Wikileaks cable, demonstrating that the US government acts in secrecy. The justification for secrecy is usually national security interest, but it would be hard for anyone to place this in such a category.

…

Unless this madness is stopped, tragedies like the following will continue to occur: on 15th March 2006, during a house raid in Iraq by US forces, a family and their children were handcuffed and then summarily executed with shots to the head. Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, wrote the following in a letter (exposed by Wikileaks) to the then Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice: “It would appear that when the MNF [Multinational Forces] approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued” before the “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis—though the triumvirate I actually had in mind consisted of Thomas Drake, who disclosed the existence of TRAILBLAZER to journalists, and Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, whose disclosure of The Pentagon Papers helped expose the deceptions of the Vietnam War and bring it to an end. The final name I chose for my correspondence was “Verax,” Latin for “speaker of truth,” in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called “Mendax” (“speaker of lies”)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. You can’t really appreciate how hard it is to stay anonymous online until you’ve tried to operate as if your life depended on it. Most of the communications systems set up in the IC have a single basic aim: the observer of a communication must not be able to discern the identities of those involved, or in any way attribute them to an agency.

…

With this announcement, Correa freed his people from decades of economic serfdom, though he made not a few enemies among the class of financiers who direct much of US foreign policy. Ecuador, at least in 2013, had a hard-earned belief in the institution of political asylum. Most famously, the Ecuadorean embassy in London had become, under Correa, the safe haven and redoubt of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. I had no desire to live in an embassy, perhaps because I’d already worked in one. Still, my Hong Kong lawyers agreed that, given the circumstances, Ecuador seemed to be the most likely country to defend my right to political asylum and the least likely to be cowed by the ire of the hegemon that ruled its hemisphere.

…

It might be hard to remember, or even to imagine, but at the time when I first considered coming forward, the whistleblower’s forum of choice was WikiLeaks. Back then, it operated in many respects like a traditional publisher, albeit one that was radically skeptical of state power. WikiLeaks regularly joined up with leading international publications like the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País to publish the documents provided by its sources. The work that these partner news organizations accomplished over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected sources with journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity. WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, along with US diplomatic cables.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

It does not take a seasoned FBI investigator to realize that the story simply did not add up, especially once one factors in the reality that he was the leaker that provided Kim Dotcom with information from the DNC that proved that Bernie Sanders’ nomination was suppressed by Hillary Clinton and others in the Democratic National Convention.179 This information was sent to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and leads to another story that lacked in substance, but was universally portrayed to be of a legitimate origin: the narrative that Russia hacked the 2016 election. The mainstream media has been polishing that turd for so long that it says more about their lack of actual pull within the establishment political apparatus that despite 24/7 coverage and a unified front by the Democrats and their partners at CNN and MSNBC, they still have not been able to convince the public that Russia actually had any role in Trump’s election victory because it is so plainly obvious to anyone that Hillary Clinton was the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election.

…

There was the alleged robbery and murder of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee analyst that provided proof that the DNC conspired to suppress votes for Bernie Sanders so that Hillary Clinton could be the nominee. He downloaded information to a thumb drive that was given to Kim Dotcom, who in turn made the information available to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. He was murdered in an alleged robbery in a park in Washington D.C., except that the robbers forgot to take his wallet, his watch, his gold necklace, or his cell phone. Sounds like a hit, not a robbery. It is interesting that John Podesta said “I’m definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it.”, and then Seth Rich ends up dead.

…

Censorship is what happens when powerful people get nervous, so the rise in online censorship is both a good thing and a horrible thing. It is good in the sense that those in positions of power are legitimately nervous about the weakening grip they hold on society. The “alternative media” has been making things more difficult for the controllers over the past half-decade, starting with the revelations from Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, both were rewarded with sequestration and isolation in foreign countries for their troubles. It is a horrible thing in the sense that the controllers do have the ability to switch off those voices that dare to stand up to their plan for an Orwellian Ministry of Truth by de-platforming them one at a time, or in the case of Alex Jones, colluding to remove him from multiple platforms all at the exact same time.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

The most obvious and widely used is to attack any website that acts as a broker for leaks. WikiLeaks drew a massive amount of fire and fury for declaring its mission to be a broker for leaks, in 2006, leading to its founder Julian Assange infamously holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, with Hollywood painting him in 2013 as a glory-seeking egomaniac. Threaten the powers that be, and you will pay. While it can be tricky to arrest and disappear a public figure, it is trivial to launch a "distributed denial of service attack," or DDoS, on any troublesome website. One simply tells hundreds of thousands of slave PCs to request the main page of the website, say wikileaks.org, at the same time.

…

Other whistle blowers of note are Annie Machon, Gareth Williams, Russel Tice, Jeffrey Sterling, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, Daniel Ellsberg, and William Binney. We then have the independent media who are willing to report these documents, at personal risk. There is Julian Assange, building wikileaks.org around Manning's leaks, and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, reporting in the Guardian on Edward Snowden's leaks. Again, heroic figures who have changed the course of history. We see academics like Dr Daniele Ganser, who know their history and are immune to this particular Narrative because they have seen so many like it.

…

Big sites need hosting, and that costs money. WikiLeaks was the target of this in 2010, with US credit card processors cutting off all donations to the site. Despite not getting money from US contributors, WikiLeaks survived and got good press from being the victim of clearly abusive conduct by the US government and financial industry. So attacking a site will often just make it stronger. The very fact that authorities target a leaks site promotes its accuracy and importance. It is also technically hard to sustain. In 2011, Bank of America hired three firms to attack Wikileaks. One of the firms, HBGary Federal, was hacked by Anonymous, and the plan was discovered.

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Jóhannesson would essentially be suing himself.14 The media mogul thought about this for a second and acknowledged that Hrafnsson had a point. But three months after the tax haven program aired, Jóhannesson canceled Kompás, citing its high cost. The station’s CEO fired Kristjánsson and Hrafnsson by phone, telling them to gather their belongings and leave the building by day’s end. Hrafnsson went on to serve as a spokesman for Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. Kristjánsson, devastated over the loss of a program into which he’d poured his heart and soul, left journalism to paint buildings in downtown Reykjavík. After a few months, he went back to work for a tabloid. On June 3, 2010, Kristjánsson’s seventeen-year-old daughter died from an overdose of fentanyl, a powerful opioid.

…

Many, if not most, of the people found in the database had committed no crime. There was little public-interest rationale for publishing personal information such as passports, bank account information, and emails filled with intimate details. This explanation was insufficient for WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, was holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London. The organization pounded ICIJ for not releasing the data. “If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition,” the group nonsensically tweeted.24 Matters took a more serious turn, when a television project partner mistakenly aired a Blacklight URL.

…

., September 23, 2003. 67 its principal beneficiary was listed as Imre Barmanbek: Source of Funds/Wealth Declaration, November 5, 2015. 68 how Yalçındağ worked hard to ingratiate himself with Erdoğan: Amberin Zaman, “WikiLeaks Dump Casts Rare Light on Erdogan Inner Circle,” Al-Monitor, December 6, 2016, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/12/erdogan-albayrak-wikileaks.html#ixzz4m5CoQZu. 69 a complete list of Turks and their companies: https://wikileaks.org/berats-box/emailid/27681. EPILOGUE 1 the partners’ original idea was to sell the firm: Author interview with Ramón Fonseca, Panama City, August 2016. 2 the British Virgin Islands fined the firm $440,000: British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission, Enforcement Action, http://www.bvifsc.vg/Publications/EnforcementAction/tabid/378/ctl/EnforcementSummary/mid/1188/actionId/17069/language/en-AU/Default.aspx. 3 Company incorporations in the jurisdiction dropped 30 percent: “British Virgin Islands: Have They Cleaned Up Since the Panama Papers?

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

I doubt that Tunisians cared very much about French and U.S. hypocrisy, which is all that WikiLeaks revealed—nothing that they didn’t know themselves. Talk about the connection between Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. Dan is an old friend. I was involved with him in helping release the Pentagon Papers, which I thought was a quite proper thing to do. I testified at his trial. In the case of Bradley Manning, he’s charged with having released material to Julian Assange, who distributed it on WikiLeaks.18 He’s been in prison now since May 2010, a large part of that in solitary confinement—which is torture.

…

In response to the question, “Name two countries that you think pose the biggest threat to you,” Israel received 88 percent, the United States 77 percent, and Iran 9 percent among those aged thirty-six and over and 11 percent among those thirty-six and under. 2010 Arab Public Opinion Survey. 16. Ian Black, “WikiLeaks Cables: Tunisia Blocks Site Reporting ‘Hatred’ of First Lady,” Guardian (London), 7 December 2010. Ian Black, “Profile: Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali,” Guardian (London), 14 January 2011. See also Amy Davidson, “Tunisia and WikiLeaks,” New Yorker, Close Read blog, 14 January 2011. 17. Steven Erlanger, “French Foreign Minister Urged to Resign,” New York Times, 3 February 2011. 18. Charlie Savage, “Soldier Faces 22 New WikiLeaks Charges,” New York Times, 2 March 2011. 19. Scott Shane, “Court Martial Recommended in WikiLeaks Case,” New York Times, 12 January 2012. 20.

…

The same is true of terror, aggression, torture, human rights, freedom of speech, whatever it might be. So the line that the enormous trove of information that was disseminated through WikiLeaks was somehow compromising U.S. security doesn’t wash. It compromised the security that governments are usually concerned about: their security from inspection by their own populations. I haven’t read everything on WikiLeaks, but I’m sure there are people who are searching very hard to find some case where they can claim there has been a harm to genuine security interests. I couldn’t find any myself. One respect in which the United States is unusually open is in declassifying government documents.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

Another publisher of stolen government documents, Julian Assange, is in serious legal jeopardy for publishing confidential US government materials on his WikiLeaks website in 2010. The materials were stolen by Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst, who was given a lengthy sentence in a military prison for the theft. Should Assange be celebrated along with Greenwald as a journalist who brought important matters to the public, or is he a criminal along with Snowden and Manning? The answer, according to the US prosecutors who unsealed an indictment against Assange in 2019, is obvious: “Julian Assange is no journalist.” Indeed, he deserves up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act.47 Assange is, to put it mildly, an unsavory individual, and his irresponsible release of the information exposed people to danger, but the indictment is still a travesty of press freedom.

…

Adrian Shahbaz, “Freedom on the Net 2018: The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism,” Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2018/rise-digital-authoritarianism. 47. Jon Allsop, “Espionage Charges Against Assange Are a ‘Terrifying’ Threat to Press Freedom,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 24, 2019, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/julian_assange_espionage_act.php?utm_source=CJR+Daily+News. 48. Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S.Ct. 1730 (2017), citing in part Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997). 49. Tim Wu, “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?,” Knight First Amendment Institute, September 1, 2017, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/tim-wu-first-amendment-obsolete. 50.

…

Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 484, https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_government_fabricates_social_media_posts_for_strategic_distraction_not_engaged_argument.pdf. 99. Wu, “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” 100. Zeynep Tufecki, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 231, 241. 101. Zeynep Tufecki, “Wikileaks Isn’t Whistleblowing,” New York Times, November 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes.corn/2016/11/05/opinion/what-were-missing-while-we-obsess-over-john-podestas-email.html. 102. Bobby Allyn, “Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots,” NPR, May 20, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859814085/researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots; Thor Benson, “Trolls and Bots Are Flooding Social Media with Disinformation Encouraging States to End Quarantine,” Business Insider, April 20, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/trolls-bots-flooding-social-media-with-anti-quarantine-disinformation-2020-4. 103.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Joshua Schulte, a CIA employee, was arrested by the FBI in August 2017 and charged with passing over eight thousand pages of highly classified information to Julian Assange, who subsequently posted them publicly on the WikiLeaks website. Assange, an Australian who had taken refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, has been accused by numerous American authorities of acting in cooperation with Russian intelligence. The CIA documents were called Vault 7 by WikiLeaks, and they too revealed numerous zero-day exploits of widely used software, including products of Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung (e.g., allegedly a tool to listen to rooms in which Samsung televisions were installed, even when the television appeared to be turned off).

…

All of those devices had been affected by a malicious bot, a piece of software that guided itself around the world looking for unprotected IoT devices to infect and take over. The bot was given a name by the cybersecurity world. They called it Mirai. Suspicions about who launched Mirai fell on the supporters in North America of the hacker Julian Assange, who has been linked to Russian intelligence and the hacking of the U.S. 2016 election. Word had been spreading that the United States was putting pressure on Ecuador to throw Assange out of their embassy in London, where he had taken refuge after arrest warrants were issued for him. Assange’s organization eventually publicly called on his supporters to “stop taking down the U.S. internet.

…

in the Vault 7 documents: Semantic Security Response, “Longhorn: Tools used by cyberespionage group linked to Vault 7,” Symantec Official Blog, April 10, 2017, www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/longhorn-tools-used-cyberespionage-group-linked-vault-7. groups known as APT 3 and APT 10: Andrew Griffin, “Wikileaks Files Detail CIA ‘Umbrage’ Project, Which Would Allow Spies to Pin Attacks on Other Countries,” Independent, March 8, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/wikileaks-files-cia-umbrage-hacker-secret-spies-explained-countries-donald-trump-russia-a7618661.html. most “reckless and indiscriminate”: This quote is attributed to British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, said at a meeting with U.S.

Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet by Linda Herrera

citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, decentralized internet, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Google Earth, informal economy, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, WikiLeaks

Tunisia’s cyberwars escalated to even greater heights when Anonymous, the decentralized internet group that promotes online freedom, launched Operation Tunisia. During the Tunisian uprising, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released a series of incriminating cables detailing embezzlement and nepotism by the Ben Ali oligarchy, information that further fueled the revolt. When the government tried to block access to the cables, Operation Tunisia used the Twitter hashtag #OpTunisia to inform Tunisians about backdoor ways to access the WikiLeaks cables and protect themselves online. Anonymous also managed to hack and take down high-profile Tunisian governmental websites, including those of the stock exchange, the government Internet Agency, the Office of the President and Prime Minister, the Ministry of Industry, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

…

Abbas contacted YouTube directly to reinstate the videos, but to no avail. He then reached out to the US Embassy in Cairo and requested that they contact Google, which owns YouTube, on his behalf. The details of Abbas’s request to the embassy appear in an embassy cable dated December 2007, which was made public by WikiLeaks. It reads: Prominent Egyptian blogger, human rights activist and winner of the 2007 Knight-Ridder International Journalism Award, Wael Abbas, contacted us November 17 to report that YouTube removed from his website two videos exposing police abuses—one of a Sinai bedouin allegedly shot by police and thrown in a garbage dump during the past week’s violence … and the other of a woman being tortured in a police station.

…

In September 2013, Abbas was one of thirty-five activists, including the founders of the 6th of April Facebook page, named in a complaint to the Egyptian public prosecutor. He was called in for questioning on suspicion of treason and working with a foreign government. The names of the activists were taken from a confidential US embassy memo from 2007 entitled “Outreach to Egyptian Democracy and Human Rights Activists,” made public by WikiLeaks in August 2011. This memo details meetings with Egyptian activists from the blogosphere, civil society, and the opposition press. At the time of writing, the fate of those activists remains unclear. What is certain is that activists often risk their own security, credibility, and public standing when they are on record as working with the US government.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

In the final decade of his life, Garry Davis saw non-state actors such as Al Qaeda force nations to redefine the ways they wage war. Organizations like WikiLeaks and Anonymous challenge these wars with troves upon troves of information. Looming environmental crises reveal the cracks in our system of international governance, and threaten the very existence of many countries as we know them. Davis saw it all coming, and the world was his stage. Before tax-free zones, freeports, and airports became indispensable cogs in the machinery of globalization, Davis found ways to exploit them. It’s essentially the same loophole that has allowed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to seek refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where, as of this writing, he languishes still.

…

_r=0 42human rights organizations had issued tersely worded recommendations: “Without Citizenship: Statelessness, discrimination and repression in Kuwait,” Refugees International and Open Society Justice Initiative. http://refugeesinternational.org/policy/in-depth-report/kuwait-without-citizenship 51there wasn’t a strong, pre-existing sense of unifying Emirati nationalism: “Nationalism in the Gulf States,” by Neil Patrick, October 2009, Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/55257/1/Patrick_2009.pdf 55fewer than 5,000 bidoon: “Arab Spring energises Gulf’s stateless,” by Rania El Gamal and Sylvia Westall, Reuters, Dec. 19, 2012. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/19/gulf-stateless-idUSL5E8NDAGU20121219 56a stateless man doused himself in gasoline: “Immolation in Riyadh exposes plight of Arab stateless in Saudi Arabia,” by Angus McDowall, Reuters, June 26, 2013. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/26/us-saudi-immolation-poverty-idUSBRE95P0RX20130626 57Emirati citizens receive benefits that would make a Scandinavian social democracy blush: “U.A.E.’s Drive for Emirati-Run Economy Is Thwarted by Handouts,” by Matthew Brown, Bloomberg, Oct. 3, 2007. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axmdijbZMi5k 582009 U.S. diplomatic cable: “Kuwait’s Stateless Bidoon: Background and Recent Promising Developments,” WikiLeaks, June 3, 2009. https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09KUWAIT558_a.html 59According to a 1995 Human Rights Watch report: “The Bedoons of Kuwait: Citizens Without Citizenship,” Human Rights Watch, August 1995. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1995/Kuwait.htm 5925 percent of Kuwait’s army of 20,000 were bidoon: ibid. 62“traitor without a nation”: “Arrested UAE Blogger Accused of Possessing Alcohol,” Reuters, April 12, 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/us-emirates-activists-idUSTRE73B2EP20110412 63“waving the country’s flag and clutching pictures of the Emir”: “Kuwait’s Stateless Bidun Demand Greater Rights,” by Simon Atkinson, BBC News, July 19, 2011. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-14185365 63dispensing cash bonuses: “The ‘Arab Spring’ in the Kingdoms,” by Zoltan Barany, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Sept. 2012. http://english.dohainstitute.org/file/get/e02ce87b-f3ab-45d3-bfd8-3f3e97f6a6a9.pdf 63life was good for Emirati citizens: “Why the Arab Spring Never Came to the U.A.E.,” by Angela Shah, Time, July 18, 2011. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2083768,00.html 64stage of the Edinburgh festival: “Comedians and Writers Lead Amnesty Campaign to Free Jailed UAE Activists,” by Severin Carrell, The Guardian, August 7, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/aug/07/amnesty-uae-activists-edinburgh-festival?

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

But on December 4th 2010, under pressure from the US government, PayPal froze the WikiLeaks account. Domain name providers and other payment systems followed suit and refused to handle WikiLeaks’ business. Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks boss, was involved in expensive litigation at the same time. WikiLeaks was starved of funds. And, unbeknownst to most, the organization was crumbling from within due to a falling-out between Daniel Domscheit-Berg, WikiLeaks’ number two, and Assange. One poster at BitcoinTalk thought that Bitcoin would be a means to help WikiLeaks. Others jumped at the idea. ‘Bring it on,’ said one. ‘Let’s encourage WikiLeaks to use Bitcoins and I’m willing to face any risk or fallout from that fact.’

…

Milton Friedman, economist The US Department of Defense called it the ‘largest leak of classified documents in its history’. It’s difficult to overstate how big a threat to the existing world order WikiLeaks was perceived to be in late 2010. There has been revelation after revelation – the Bradley Manning leaks, the video of US soldiers shooting at Reuters cameramen, the ‘friendly fire’ and civilian casualties, then the leak of another 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq war. WikiLeaks had caught the imagination of those opposed to the US and other governments. Many wanted to help. PayPal was the main means by which WikiLeaks was able to receive funds for its activities and, in 2010, its donors gave around one million dollars.

…

Is that really the end result the Bitcoin community most desires? Does it make sense to actively give multiple world governments incentive to shut down Bitcoin?’ asked Garzik. ‘WikiLeaks is the enemy of major world powers right now, with many influential elites feeling that Assange committed an act of war against the United States, or, at a minimum, irrevocably disrupted world affairs. This is not some mailing list discussion or theoretical exercise; there are very real, very powerful organizations actively targeting WikiLeaks’ network infrastructure, organizational infrastructure, and most importantly, financial infrastructure. It is extraordinarily unwise to make Bitcoin such a highly visible target, at such an early stage in this project.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The Snowden leaks make the shared infrastructure of state and private data collection incontrovertible. Never again can data deregulationists claim that corporate data collection is entirely distinct and far less threatening than government surveillance. They are irreversibly intertwined. Enduring Opacity Despite the leaks of Snowden (and Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange), the national surveillance apparatus is still opaque on many levels.193 It enjoys both real and legal secrecy, hidden as it is in secure networks and protected by the heavy hand of the law. There’s plenty of complexity, too, should secrecy fail. Intelligence agencies commission private defense contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen, and Palantir to devise specialized software to monitor their data sources—which include social networks.194 Their algorithms are complex enough by themselves, but the contractors are also bound to protect company trade secrets.

…

A fully transparent society would be a nightmare of privacy invasion, voyeurism, and intellectual property theft. Sometimes the route to orderly and productive investigation is to entrust the job to a small group of experts. For example, courts often need to have a deep knowledge about events leading up to a legal dispute. Even leading leakers seem to agree: both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden fi ltered their revelations though trusted news sources. I call this general trend “qualified transparency”—limiting revelations in order to respect all the interests involved in a given piece of information. As time goes on, the negative impact of disclosure fades. Statutes of limitation run; power moves to other hands; technology that was once state-of-the-art becomes irrelevant.

…

THE HIDDEN LOGICS OF SEARCH 77 Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases. . . . Sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day; this is what happened with #wikileaks this week.109 The #wikileaks and #occupy controversies died down quickly after Twitter offered these explanations. But when a site called Thunderclap attempted to hold a trending topic in reserve until it could unleash its followers all at once, timing all their tweets for maximum impact, Twitter suspended Thunderclap’s access to its API.110 Media studies scholar Tarleton Gillespie analyzed the company’s position in a widely shared blog post titled “Can an Algorithm Be Wrong?”

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Furthermore, Iran must be punished for its “successful defiance,” which was Washington’s charge against Cuba half a century ago, and still the driving force for the U.S. assault against Cuba that continues despite international condemnation. Other events featured on the front pages might also benefit from a different perspective. Suppose that Julian Assange had leaked Russian documents revealing important information that Moscow wanted to conceal from the public, and that circumstances were otherwise identical. Sweden would not hesitate to pursue its sole announced concern, accepting the offer to interrogate Assange in London. It would declare that if Assange returned to Sweden (as he has agreed to do), he would not be extradited to Russia, where chances of a fair trial would be slight.

…

Joining the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India, the Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous 1984 Bhopal gas leak, one of history’s worst industrial disasters, which killed thousands and injured more than half a million. Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken over by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February, Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative agency Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the victims and prosecution of those responsible. Another major crime with very serious persisting effects is the Marine assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. Women and children were permitted to escape if they could.

…

The United States will “chase him to the ends of the earth,” Senator Lindsey Graham warned. But U.S. government spokespersons assured the world that Snowden will be granted the full protection of American law—referring to those same laws that have kept U.S. Army soldier Bradley Manning (who released a vast archive of U.S. military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks) in prison for three years, much of it in solitary confinement under humiliating conditions. Long gone is the archaic notion of a speedy trial before a jury of peers. On July 30 a military judge found Manning guilty of charges that could lead to a maximum sentence of 136 years. Like Snowden, Manning committed the crime of revealing to Americans—and others—what their government is doing.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The government brought twelve felony counts against Ellsberg (ultimately dismissed), and President Nixon ordered illegal wiretaps and a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an effort to find information to discredit Ellsberg.31 A more recent case is that of Wikileaks, which published thousands of government documents in 2010, most of which concerned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including videos showing U.S. troops killing civilians. The uniform reaction from American politicians on both the left and the right was one of outrage at both Wikileaks and its sources. Vice President Biden called Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a terrorist and promised that the Justice Department would be looking for ways to prosecute him. Former Arkansas governor and sometime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called Wikileaks’ source a traitor and called for his execution.

…

Pp. 63–80 in Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences, ed. J. Margolis, M. Krausz, and R. M. Burian. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Mackie, John L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin. Maley, William. 2009. The Afghanistan Wars, second edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mandel, Nina. 2010. ‘Biden: Wikileaks’ Julian Assange Closer to a “High-Tech Terrorist” Than Pentagon Papers’, New York Daily News, December 19, http: //articles.nydailynews.com/2010–12–19/news/27084869_1_vice-president-joe-biden-world-leaders-accuser. Accessed March 10, 2011. Mao Tse-tung. 1972. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

…

‘Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness: Estimated Totals for the Entire Twentieth Century’, http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm. Accessed February 13, 2012. Wikileaks. 2010. Collateral Murder (video), www.collateralmurder.com/. Accessed March 10, 2011. Williams, Juan. 1987. Eyes on the Prize. New York: Viking Penguin. Wilson, Edward O. 2000. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 25th anniversary ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, James Q. 1990. ‘Against the Legalization of Drugs’, Commentary 89: 21–8. Wing, Nick. 2010. ‘Mike Huckabee: WikiLeaks Source Should Be Executed’, Huffington Post, November 30, www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/30/mike-huckabee-wikileaks-execution_n_789964.html. Accessed March 10, 2011.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The bigger picture is a cascading diffusion of power that has put individuals in an unprecedented position not only to bypass political institutions developed over decades but also to influence, persuade, or constrain “real” politicians more directly and more effectively than any classical political theorist could have imagined. HEDGE FUNDS AND HACKTIVISTS Left in a room together, John Paulson and Julian Assange might soon be at each other’s throats. Paulson runs Paulson & Co, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the Web-based organization that specializes in divulging the secret information of governments and corporations. And yet they have one very significant thing in common: both symbolize a new breed of actors who are transforming national politics by limiting the power of governments.

…

And the dawn of the twenty-first century, with the Soviet Union consigned to the history books, found just one player paramount: the sole superpower, the hegemon, the United States. For the first time in history, many argued, the struggle for power among nations had produced one single, clear, and maybe even final winner. Consider the evidence from WikiLeaks, which released a trove of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables that, as the organization’s leader Julian Assange luridly put it, “show the extent of U.S. spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in ‘client states’; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for U.S. corporations; and the measures U.S. diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.”3 The reaction of experienced analysts such as Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, is that this is not a surprise: “This is precisely what hegemony has always been.

…

In geopolitics, small players—whether “minor” countries or nonstate entities—have acquired new opportunities to veto, interfere in, redirect, and generally stymie the concerted efforts of “big powers” and multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To name just a few instances: Poland’s vetoing of the EU’s low-carbon policy, the attempts by Turkey and Brazil to derail the big powers’ negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, Wikileaks’ disclosure of US diplomatic secrets, the Gates Foundation’s contesting of the World Health Organization leadership in the fight against malaria, and spoilers of various stripes and sizes in global negotiations on trade, climate change, and numerous other issues. These newly and increasingly relevant “small players” are vastly different from one another, as are the fields they compete in.

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

However, he was laid off because of lack of funds in 2002, after which he apparently lost faith in the project (in his farewell message he skeptically wrote that “Wikipedia still might succeed brilliantly”; Berstein, 2011). Since then he has been very critical of it. In 2007 he launched his own online encyclopedia website, Citizendium. Clearly, both being let go from Wikipedia and having his cofounder status questioned left Sanger resentful. Nonetheless, as late as December 2010, when criticizing WikiLeaks and addressing Julian Assange, he mentioned his former affiliation rather than his later projects: “Speaking as Wikipedia’s co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people” (Crovitz, 2010). Identifying himself as Wikipedia’s cofounder might have created the impression that he was speaking for the Wikipedia community or the Wikimedia Foundation, but his view was far from unanimously shared by Wikipedians.

…

The British Journal of Sociology, 8(3), 197–207. Courpasson, D. (2000). Managerial strategies of domination: Power in soft bureaucracies. Organization Studies, 21(1), 141–161. Crombie, A. (1985). The nature and types of search conferences. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 4(1), 3–33. Crovitz, L. G. (2010, December 6). Julian Assange, information anarchist. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://topics.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487039890045 75653113548361870.html Crowston, K., & Howison, J. (2006). Hierarchy and centralization in free and open source software team communications. Knowledge, Technology and Policy, 18(4), 65–85.

…

([[User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_122]]) At the time of this writing, discussion of the changes is still under way, yet it is quite clear that Wales recognized that his resignation from operational influence has further legitimized his strategic authority. 1 7 4    L e a d e r s h i p T r a n s f o r m e d Modes of Leadership in Open Collaboration While the founder’s exit has been shown to be a natural stage in organizational development, in this case the limitation of Wales’s involvement was both consciously planned and a contingent process of management models and philosophies open-community leadership, both to some extent present in the free/ libre and open-source-software (F/LOSS) environment. E. G. Coleman (2011) points out that digital-generation communities may be governed by principles as diverse as those of WikiLeaks (with one charismatic leader making all decisions and monopolizing the limelight) to those of Anonymous (an antileader and anticelebrity group). Even though rarely falling on the extremes of that continuum, large open-collaboration projects tend to rely on two kinds of models: a democratic community-decision-making process (elections, representation) and “benevolent dictatorship” (Raymond, 1998, 1999/2004).

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas suggests that Facebook’s “creepy data-grabbing ways,” such as the 2013 harvesting of the personal contact information of 6 million of its users, or that secret 2012 study to control the emotions of 689,000 of its users,9 make it the “Borg of the digital world.”10 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who knows a thing or two about spying himself, even accuses Facebook of being the “greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.”11 So is Facebook really the greatest spying machine in world history—greater than either the Stasi, the CIA, or Google? Citing Google’s Street View car privacy violations, the German privacy regulator Johannes Caspar might doubt Assange’s assertion, as probably would privacy watchdogs in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy who collectively told Google in the summer of 2013 that the company would face legal sanctions unless it changed its 2012 policy of unifying personal data collected from all its different services.12 Others would also award this dubious honor to Google.

…

Chapter Seven 1 Noam Cohen, “Borges and the Foreseeable Future,” New York Times, January 6, 2008. 2 Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Pantheon 2009), p. 121. 3 Ibid. 4 Anna Funder, Stasiland (London: Granta, 2003), p. 57. 5 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2013), p. 150. 6 Andrew Keen, “Opinion: Beware Creepy Facebook,” CNN, February 3, 2012. 7 Ibid. 8 Karin Matussek, “Google Fined 145,000 Euros Over Wi-Fi Data Collection in Germany,” Bloomberg News, April 22, 2013. 9 Robert Booth, “Facebook Reveals News Feed Experiment to Control Emotions,” Guardian, June 29, 2014. 10 Natasha Lomas, “Facebook’s Creepy Data-Grabbing Ways Make It the Borg of the Digital World,” TechCrunch, June 24, 2013. 11 Patrick Kingsley, “Julian Assange Tells Students That the Web Is the Greatest Spying Machine Ever,” Guardian, March 15, 2011. 12 Charles Arthur, “European Watchdogs Order Google to Rewrite Privacy Policy or Face Legal Action,” Guardian, July 5, 2013. 13 Claire Cain Miller, “Google Accused of Wiretapping in Gmail Scans,” New York Times, October 1, 2013. 14 Las Vaas, “Google Sued for Data-Mining Student Email,” Naked Security, March 18, 2014. 15 Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur, p. 186. 16 “The NSA’s Secret Spy Hub in Berlin,” Spiegel Online, October 27, 2013. 17 Ian Traynor and Paul Lewis, “Merkel Compared NSA to Stasi in Heated Encounter with Obama,” Guardian, December 17, 2013. 18 Duncan Campbell, Cahal Milmo, Kim Gengupta, Nigel Morris, and Tony Patterson, “Revealed: Britain’s ‘Secret Listening Post in the Heart of Berlin,’” Independent, November 5, 2013. 19 David Sellinger, “Big Data: Getting Ready for the 2013 Big Bang,” Forbes, January 15, 2013.

…

Certainly online eyes remain much less valuable than offline ones, with average advertising rates of the printed edition of a major newspaper being around ten times its online cost.36 The same is true of the value of offline versus online readers, with the Newspaper Association of America estimating that the average print reader is worth around $539 versus the $26 value of the online reader.37 And free certainly isn’t working as an economic model for online newspapers. Take, for example, the world’s third most frequently visited news website, the London Guardian. In spite of breaking the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks stories, the Guardian has reported operating losses of more than £100 million since 2010, with a stunning £50 million lost just between 2012 and 2013.38 No wonder the Guardian is experimenting with a robot-generated print edition called #Open001, which replaces editors with algorithms to select relevant stories for publication.39 But robots can’t write the kind of high-quality journalism that distinguishes the Guardian from most of its rivals.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Clive Stafford Smith, collateralized debt obligation, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, deskilling, financial deregulation, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Julian Assange, mandatory minimum, nuremberg principles, Ponzi scheme, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, too big to fail, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Obama’s administration, once again, showed no interest in holding the perpetrators of these outrages responsible. Instead, the administration did something else entirely: it launched an all-out war on WikiLeaks itself. Numerous reports quickly surfaced that the Obama DOJ was actively attempting to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, under the Espionage Act of 1917—which, if successful, would be the first time in U.S. history that a nongovernment employee was convicted of espionage for publishing classified material. Meanwhile, a very sophisticated cyberattack temporarily drove WikiLeaks offline. Overt pressure from American government officials resulted in Australia threatening to revoke Assange’s passport.

…

Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, publicly warned companies not to associate with WikiLeaks in any way, after which the assets of WikiLeaks were frozen and the organization’s accounts with MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Bank of America were terminated, impeding the group’s ability to raise funds. What’s more, when a handful of teenage hackers targeted a few of these companies with some trivial “denial of service” attacks, Attorney General Holder announced that the DOJ was criminally investigating those attacks—but not the far more sophisticated and damaging cyber-attacks that had caused WikiLeaks to lose its Internet home. To recap “Obama justice,” then: if you create a worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected.

…

He said, “I don’t want to get involved in hypotheticals.” What he didn’t disclose was that the Obama administration, working with Republicans, was actively pressuring the Spaniards to drop the investigation. Those efforts apparently paid off, and, as this WikiLeaks-released cable shows, Gonzales, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Addington, and Yoo owed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thank-you notes. The release of the WikiLeaks cable prompted the Philadelphia Daily News’s Will Bunch to write a scathing column titled “The Day That Barack Obama Lied to Me.” Recalling his interview with the candidate who had committed to look into Bush crimes, Bunch wrote: “The breakdown of justice in this country is far from exceptional.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

., The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, Anchor, 2009. Bartlett, J., People Vs Tech, Ebury Press, 2018. Beckett, C., and Ball, J., Wikileaks: News in the Networked Era, Polity, 2012. Blum, A., Tubes, Viking, 2019. Greenwald, G., No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State, Penguin UK, 2015. Harding, L., The Snowden Files, Guardian Faber Publishing, 2016. Leigh, D., Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, Guardian Books, 2010. Miller, C., The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab, Windmill Books, 2019. Susskind, J., Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, Oxford University Press, 2018.

…

Particular thanks are also due to Nick Hancock and his current fiancée for actually giving up their home permanently during the reporting of the book. Several chapters of this book draw from previous reporting projects I’ve been lucky to have been part of. On WikiLeaks, David Leigh and Luke Harding were a pleasure to work with and their book is a valuable reminder of the time. LSE’s Charlie Beckett was a joy to co-write an academic book with on the era. As to those within WikiLeaks itself, the good ones know who they are, even if the world doesn’t – and Chelsea Manning deserves to be a free woman. I discovered the surprisingly strange world of ICANN thanks to a story idea from Merope Mills, and worked with Laurence Mathieu-Léger reporting the feature and the video, which was a joy.

…

The reach and scale of the internet would enable a ‘long tail’ of small and independent producers to flourish. Online companies were launched talking in earnest terms of changing the world, with ‘don’t be evil’ mantras alongside – and generous share options making even their office decorators rich. For a long time, you could convince yourself it was all the real deal. At the start of the last decade, WikiLeaks used its unique online platform to challenge the world’s biggest superpower with an unprecedented series of leaks. Shortly afterwards, the world’s biggest social media companies were credited with boosting Arab Spring protests against corrupt and dictatorial governments. Such was the mood towards the internet that the exultant opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics culminated in a seventeen-minute dance sequence celebrating Tim Berners-Lee for creating the World Wide Web and giving it to the world for free.

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, presumed consent, rolodex, selection bias, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, WikiLeaks

What keeps surprising me is how relaxed some people seem about men using women’s bodies. Like there’s something ‘natural’ or understandable about it. I’ll give you an example. In 2010, a warrant was issued by Swedish police for the arrest of Julian Assange. The case gained a lot of publicity because of Assange’s pre-existing notoriety as the co-founder of the WikiLeaks website. He was accused of rape by one woman and of molestation by another. In both cases the alleged assault took place AFTER consensual sex. In the first account, a woman who willingly had sex with Assange one night, at her apartment, awoke the next morning to find that he was having penetrative intercourse with her against her will.

…

But if I tell you I was mugged by someone with no weapon but I still gave him all my money and was scared for my life … then maybe you fail to sympathise. I was stupid or weak, I did something wrong. You might walk away muttering, ‘Wasn’t really a mugging at all, I dunno why she’s so upset about it.’ Which was how George Galloway reacted to the claims against Julian Assange. In a podcast the politician went on record to say: ‘Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, one hundred per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape. At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it.

…

In 2005 the Swedish penal code was extended and clarified so that ‘this also applies if a person engages with another person in sexual intercourse or in a sexual act by improperly exploiting that person, due to unconsciousness, sleep, serious fear, intoxication or other drug influence, illness, physical injury or mental disturbance, or otherwise in view of the circumstances, is in a particularly vulnerable situation’. George Galloway may not recognise the allegations against Julian Assange as rape but the Swedish legal system most certainly does. ‘Sleep’, it says. In between ‘unconsciousness’ and ‘serious fear’, recognised as a state in which someone cannot properly give their consent. Oh but that’s in liberal old Sweden,† maybe the confusion has arisen because our British legal system has a different definition and putting your erect penis in sleeping folk is okay here … let me check … okay, so looking at statutory law, since 1956 rape is ‘unlawful sexual intercourse with a woman who at the time of the intercourse does not consent to it’, when either the rapist ‘knows that she does not consent to the intercourse or he is reckless as to whether she consents to it’.

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Hunton & Williams asked the trio, which operated under the name Team Themis, if they could do the same job for supporters of WikiLeaks, and also if they could locate where the organization was storing classified information it got from its anonymous sources. “Apparently, if they can show that WikiLeaks is hosting data in certain countries, it will make prosecution easier,” a member of the trio wrote in an e-mail to his colleagues. Justice Department officials were looking for information they could use to indict WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, who had posted classified military intelligence reports and State Department cables. Now the feds wanted to outsource part of their investigation, by putting Bank of America in touch with Team Themis, which drew its name from the mythological Greek Titan who represented “divine law,” as opposed to the law of men.

…

The CEO of HBGary, Aaron Barr, said the team should collect information about WikiLeaks’ “global following and volunteer staff,” along with the group’s donors, in order to intimidate them. “Need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them,” Barr wrote in an e-mail. He suggested submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks in hopes that the site would publish them and then be discredited. Barr also urged targeting “people like Glenn Greenwald,” the blogger and vocal WikiLeaks supporter, and he said he wanted to launch “cyberattacks” on a server WikiLeaks was using in Sweden, in order to “get data” about WikiLeaks’ anonymous sources and expose them.

…

The Los Angeles Police Department is another Palantir customer, as is the New York Police Department, which runs an intelligence and counterterrorism unit that many experts believe is more sophisticated than the FBI’s or the CIA’s. Though Team Themis failed, the US government has turned to other private cyber sleuths to go after WikiLeaks and help with other investigations. Tiversa, a Pittsburgh-based company, grabbed headlines in 2011 when it accused WikiLeaks of using peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, like those used to swap music downloads, to obtain classified US military documents. WikiLeaks, which claims only to publish documents that it receives from whistleblowers, called the allegations “completely false.” Tiversa gave its findings to government investigators, who had been trying to build a case against Assange.

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

I was told this could be of real interest to me, and on hearing his name I thought the same. Julian Assange – the Australian provocateur, a Scarlet Pimpernel for our digital age – wanted to talk. Julian was at London’s choice venue for hard-bitten hacks and war correspondents, the Frontline Club in Paddington. Heading there, I found him holed up in one of their rooms, being interviewed by CNN. Nervous and a little self-conscious, he was unused to the media spotlight and here he was being asked about a set of documents his whistleblowing organisation, Wikileaks, had just released: a cache of military reports that exposed the truth about America’s war in Afghanistan.

…

Power 5. THE KILLERS The world of mass shooters and assassins – Finland recalled – a bloody day in a teaching college – the American mass shooter examined – Norway – travelling into the wilds – the scene of the worst mass shooting in history – an Oslo drink with a killer’s expert – a meeting with Julian Assange in London – the ugly offerings of the dark web There are many types of people who kill other people with guns. There are those who do so for the explicit control of power. They are, by and large, criminals, gang members, terrorists, policemen or military personnel. When they pull a trigger and a life is ended, people in one of these groups do so out of obedience to a specific ideology or dogma.

…

He told me about TOR, a system that allows its users to search the internet without their computer’s address being revealed. One that lets you look at websites untraced, because TOR wraps your servers’ information around other servers’ information, hiding you behind peeled layers of anonymity, like an onion. Clearly, the head of Wikileaks needed the anonymity that TOR offers, just like investigative journalists do. But some others do not. Others use TOR not out of need, but desire. For many things lurk deep in the hearts of men, and if you give them a tool to hide their identities they will use it. Within minutes I had access to sites that sold things like $20 syringes full of HIV positive blood, a vendetta’s stabbing tool.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

FURTHER RESOURCES LAUNCH EVENT “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy,” The New School (November 2015), video archive: http://platformcoop.net/2015/video READINGS Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy,” Medium (December 5, 2014), https://tinyurl.com/oj8rna2 Nathan Schneider, “Owning Is the New Sharing,” Shareable (December 21, 2014), http://shareable.net/blog/owning-is-the-new-sharing Janelle Orsi, Frank Pasquale, Nathan Schneider, Pia Mancini, Trebor Scholz, “5 Ways to Take Back Tech,” The Nation (May 27, 2015), http://thenation.com/article/5-ways-take-back-tech Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office, 2016, with additional translations in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Chinese), http://platformcoop.net/about/primer Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016) WEBSITES Platform Cooperativism portal, http://platformcoop.net Platform Cooperativism Consortium, http://platformcoop.newschool.edu The Internet of Ownership, http://internetofownership.net Shareable, http://shareable.net Sustainable Economies Law Center, http://theselc.org OR Books PUBLISHING THE POLITICS OF THE INTERNET What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy TOM SLEE Black Ops Advertising: Native Ads, Content Marketing, and the Covert World of the Digital Sell MARA EINSTEIN Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide Web SCOTT MALCOLMSON Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture ELISSA SHEVINSKY, EDITOR When Google Met WikiLeaks JULIAN ASSANGE The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) MICAH L. SIFRY Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet JULIAN ASSANGE WITH JACOB APPELBAUM, ANDY MüLLER-MAGUHN, AND JéRéMIE ZIMMERMANN Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet DAVID MOON, PATRICK RUFFINI, AND DAVID SEGAL, EDITORS For more information, visit our website at www.orbooks.com

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Finally comes the threat posed by info-anarchists and technically sophisticated criminals. In 2010, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange barely missed becoming Time magazine’s Person of the Year after the release of thousands of politically sensitive documents badly embarrassed Washington and other governments around the world.5 In 2011, efforts by several governments to shut him and WikiLeaks down made him the world’s first cybermartyr. In response, an army of info-anarchists operating under the name Anonymous launched cyberattacks on those governments and denial-of-service attacks on financial services companies PayPal and MasterCard after they severed ties with WikiLeaks. Other companies have become targets of online criminals.

…

climate change and, 94 as debtor nation, 65, 158, 187 decline of, 63–66 defense program of, 12, 71, 76, 186, 191 entitlement programs in, 12–13, 65, 190 federal debt of, 3, 12, 34, 38, 51, 60, 62, 81, 172, 186, 189 fiscal stimulus in, 11 in G2 with China, 155–84 growing divergence with Chinese economic policies, 62–63, 77 intellectual property laws and, 84 Internet protocol in, 89 leadership role of, 3, 5, 14–15, 24, 25, 40–41, 111, 129, 154, 195 loss of manufacturing jobs in, 64 military commitments of, 187 nuclear program of, 59 oil exported by, 47–48 outsourcing by, 126–27 Pakistan’s relationship with, 115 pollution caused by, 158 poor infrastructure of, 186, 189 possibility of Chinese war with, 170–74 reduced role of, 194, 195 smart grids in, 73 taxes in, 190 trade by, 116–17, 120, 143, 153, 154, 158, 163 unemployment in, 77 in withdrawal from Iraq, 32 in world currency and debt crises, 38 United States and the World Economy, The (Bergsten), 157–58 urbanization, 52, 99, 104–5, 118 Uzbekistan, 135 Varyag, 23 vegetable oil, 100 Venezuela, 25, 48, 138, 168, 177, 182 state capitalism in, 78 Vietnam, 23, 70, 114, 121, 129, 140–41, 194 multinationals in, 80 rice exported by, 102 water security in, 105 Vietnam War, 49 Voice of America, 92 WAPI, 86 war on terror, 11 wars, 123 prevention of, 68 Warsaw Pact, 53 Washington, George, 7 Washington Consensus, 42, 46, 174 water, 68 security of, 3, 5, 97, 104–7, 129–30, 140, 147 Wells, H. G., 86–87 Wen Jiabao, 8, 12, 21, 143 Western Europe, 46–47 oil imported by, 47 West Germany, 45, 46, 47, 53, 82, 165 Wi-Fi, 86 WikiLeaks, 75 World Bank, 4, 28, 29–30, 99, 104, 118, 134, 135 American and European influence in, 42, 43–44 creation of, 39, 43 in world currency and debt crises, 38 World Brain (Wells), 86–87 World Trade Organization, 60 Doha Round, 103 World War I, 3, 11, 40, 141, 167, 170 World War II, 11, 38–40, 56–57, 151, 170, 187 Xinhua, 8, 62, 70 Yanukovych, Viktor, 138 Yeltsin, Boris, 54 Yemen, 14, 67, 114 chaos in, 112, 175, 183 yen, 83 Yom Kippur War, 48–49 yuan: China accused of manipulation of, 79–80, 154, 161–62 as international currency, 83 Yugoslavia, 32 Zambia, 119, 120 Zimbabwe, 7–8, 130, 131–32 Zoellick, Robert, 157 ALSO BY IAN BREMMER The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

I call these stories “four-sourced clovers,” because the number of unnamed sources claiming to bolster such questionable scoops has, humorously, grown over time. The “senior Russian intelligence officials” story James Comey was forced to shoot down in 2017 had four unnamed sources. So did one suggesting Trump was about to fire the Fed chair. Luke Harding had two for his recent Guardian bombshell about Paul Manafort supposedly having met with Julian Assange (that story is still unconfirmed). Some of these stories begin with a single high-ranking intelligence official speaking to a reporter (or team of reporters) at an esteemed paper like the Times or the Washington Post. The reporters might ask for additional confirmation. The official may give them some names.

…

How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use New Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate? How do the Guardian’s editors not already have Harding’s head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the most dubious un-retracted story in modern history—the tale that the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I’d be dragging Harding’s “well placed source” into the office and beating him with a hose until he handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence. The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in compromised public situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources.

…

Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too. In another CNN scoop gone awry, “Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction. The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New York Times on February 18, 2018.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Many Americans will think of the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and Washington Post in the early 1970s: leaked copies of internal US government reports showing just how unsuccessfully and mendaciously the United States was prosecuting the Vietnam War. More recently, we think of the publication by the Guardian and other leading newspapers and magazines—including Der Spiegel, Le Monde and The Hindu—of carefully redacted versions of secret US State Department communications leaked by Private Bradley (subsequently Chelsea) Manning via Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, and then a selection of the NSA and GCHQ documents passed to them by Snowden. When he first met the journalists involved, in a hotel in Hong Kong, Snowden specifically explained that he wanted experienced news media to decide what it would be in the public interest to publish.56 One can always argue about this or that specific editorial decision, but in general, these newspapers exercised an important controlling function in the public interest; one which government, parliament and the courts had failed to perform.

…

But maybe the combined secret power of the state and companies, P2, is sometimes such that you need these extraordinary measures to combat it? It was not just hacktivists who covered their faces with the stylised Guy Fawkes mask of Anonymous, inspired by the film ‘V for Vendetta’, when they joined real-life protests at what they saw as the abuse of anonymous state and corporate power revealed by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.144 After all, police or secret services would photograph you as you marched, and enter your digital image ineradicably into a searchable database. Perhaps it takes anonymous to restrain the power of anonymous? 8 SECRECY ‘We must be empowered to challenge all limits to freedom of information justified on such grounds as national security’.

…

The US supports such technologies to promote the spread of good things (democracy, human rights, free speech) and opposes them to prevent the spread of bad ones (terrorism, cybercrime, child pornography, infringements of intellectual property). But who decides what is good or bad? The United States. A State Department spokesperson, asked to explain the apparent inconsistency between her criticism of the Indian government for blocking sites the Indian government considered dangerous and Washington’s own stance on Wikileaks, said: ‘WikiLeaks didn’t have to do with freedom of the internet. It had to do with . . . the compromise of US Government classified information’.87 While governments must naturally assert perfect consistency, there is a tension here, as America’s left hand points in a different direction to and sometimes wrestles with its right.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

Among other things, they noted overlaps in the hacking infrastructure used to target the Democratic organizations and other operations attributed to Russia, including a notable one against the German Parliament.29 As an amusing extra sign that something was amiss, when a journalist interviewing Guccifer online asked him to switch over to his native Romanian, it quickly became apparent that he did not speak the language.30 Enter WikiLeaks. Even prior to the Democrats’ announcement and Guccifier’s creation, the group’s founder, Julian Assange, had sought to be relevant to the 2016 election. On June 12, he promised that WikiLeaks would release damaging Democratic emails. Why he said this remains a mystery, since the first known direct contact between the GRU and WikiLeaks occurred on June 14, though it is possible there had been a previous undetected transfer of information through intermediaries.31 The GRU and WikiLeaks continued to talk. On June 22, WikiLeaks messaged Guccifer, requesting access to any new material.

…

Even Podesta’s advice on how best to cook risotto garnered many media mentions, as if the country had no bigger things to worry about.49 The Access Hollywood tape, and certainly the United States government’s condemnation of the Russian activity, were yesterday’s news. It is hard to say whether WikiLeaks timed the Podesta leaks to bury the other stories that were less favorable to Trump. The available evidence suggests both that WikiLeaks had long planned for an October operation independent of other events and that senior officials in the Trump campaign knew about it. In the days prior to the October 7 email dump, Trump’s friend Stone told an unnamed senior Trump campaign official and other Trump supporters that WikiLeaks would imminently dump many more embarrassing files, and would commence with weekly releases.

…

On June 22, WikiLeaks messaged Guccifer, requesting access to any new material. WikiLeaks promised to distribute it with a higher profile and impact than Guccifer could. On July 6, the group reached out to Guccifer again, highlighting the upcoming Democratic convention and asking for any information related to the Clinton campaign. Time was of the essence, the message said, because the damaging material had to leak before Hillary Clinton could win over Bernie Sanders supporters in her run toward the general election.32 On July 14, the GRU provided WikiLeaks with a large encrypted batch of hacked files in an email with the subject “big archive” and the message “a new attempt.”33 After all the discussion, Assange delivered for the GRU.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

He said that they had not received any directive from Ankara and that after lunch in the canteen I would be able to talk to Mr Evyapan. Eventually I was led through to the small, oblong room. Çagatay Evyapan is cautious but self-confident. Just as Bilal Sen had told me, his instincts would detect immediately if I was trying to ferret out some snippet of information in a devious way. He reminded me of Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks – super-smart, but with an iron conviction in his own intellectual superiority, which at times might be taken for extreme narcissism. When I suggested to him that Lord Cyric was Tony – the tubby, bespectacled businessman named by Mert Ortaç – he emitted a snort of the deepest contempt.

…

Successive US governments have granted greater powers to law enforcement than most European governments would contemplate, allowing officers easier access to data from private companies, in the name of fighting crime and terrorism. The implications of this are both profound and, for the moment, impenetrable. Concerns about crime, surveillance, privacy, the accumulation of data by both private and state institutions, freedom of speech (step forward WikiLeaks), ease of access to websites (the so-called net neutrality debate), social networking as a political tool, and national-security interests constantly bump up against one another in cyberspace. One might argue, for example, that Google’s multi-platform, multitasking omnipresence violates the principles of America’s anti-trust legislation and that the agglomeration of all that personal data is both an opportunity for criminals and a threat to civil liberties.

…

That evening the websites of Estonia’s President and several government ministries started receiving inordinate amounts of spam email, while the Prime Minister’s photo on his party’s website was defaced. Russian-language chat rooms began to exhort hackers to launch attacks on Estonian sites and were distributing the software to do so. According to sources quoted in a US Embassy telegram to Washington (c/o WikiLeaks), the initial attacks were technically unsophisticated and ‘seemed more like a cyber riot than a cyber war’. Over the weekend, however, the attacks escalated from spam showers to DDoS attacks. Hackers had created dozens of those pesky botnets, suborning infected zombie computers around the world and forcing them to request Estonian websites.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

These problems became particularly pronounced after Bitcoin’s next big jump into the spotlight. In November, WikiLeaks, the organization founded by a regular participant in the old Cypherpunk movement, Julian Assange, released a vast trove of confidential American diplomatic documents that revealed previously secret operations around the world. The large credit card companies and PayPal came under immediate political pressure to cut off donations to WikiLeaks, which they did in early December, in what became known as the WikiLeaks blockade. This move pointed to the potentially troubling nexus between the financial industry and the government.

…

The financial industry seemed to provide politicians with an extralegal way to crack down on dissent. The WikiLeaks blockade went to the core of some of the concerns that had motivated the original Cypherpunks. Bitcoin, in turn, seemed to have the potential to counteract the problem. Each person on the network controlled his or her coins with his or her private key. There was no central organization that could freeze a person’s Bitcoin address or stop coins from being sent from a particular address. A few days after the WikiLeaks blockade began, PCWorld wrote a widely circulated story that noted the obvious utility of Bitcoin in the situation: “Nobody can stop the Bitcoin system or censor it, short of turning off the entire Internet.

…

Here was a broader philosophical issue that could attract a wider audience, and the forums were full of new members who had been drawn in by the attention. One new user, a young man in England named Amir Taaki, proposed making Bitcoin donations to WikiLeaks. Amir argued this could raise Bitcoin’s profile at the same time that it could help WikiLeaks raise money. This kicked off a vigorous debate on the forum. A number of programmers worried that the Bitcoin network was not ready for all the traffic—and government scrutiny—that might come if it started to be used for controversial donations. “It is extraordinarily unwise to make Bitcoin such a highly visible target, at such an early stage in this project.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Moreover, there was no independent journalism to respond when the U.S. government launched a successful PR and media blitz to discredit WikiLeaks. Attention largely shifted from the content of these documents to overblown and unsubstantiated claims that WikiLeaks was costing innocent lives, and to a personal focus on WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. Glenn Greenwald was only slightly exaggerating when he stated that “there was almost a full and complete consensus that WikiLeaks was satanic.” The onslaught discredited and isolated WikiLeaks, despite the dramatic content that could be found in the documents WikiLeaks had published. The point was to get U.S. editors and reporters to think twice before opening the WikiLeaks door.

…

The consequences of this became striking in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding WikiLeaks after it released government documents in 2010. The “U.S. government response to WikiLeaks,” MacKinnon writes, “highlights a troubling murkiness, opacity, and lack of public accountability in the power relationships between government and Internet-related companies.” Amazon booted WikiLeaks off its servers, and the site immediately collapsed, as there was nowhere else to go.229 Apple pulled a WikiLeaks app from its store.230 Monopolist PayPal—as well as MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America—also severed ties to WikiLeaks. There is no evidence that the executive branch made any explicit demand of the firms to do what they did; it appears they acted proactively, possibly egged on by all the saber rattling and macho talk coming from Capitol Hill.231 The firms responded to vague claims of illegality on the part of WikiLeaks, but no charges had been filed, nor had anyone been convicted.

…

Nothing demonstrates the situation better than the release by WikiLeaks of an immense number of secret U.S. government documents between 2009 and 2011. To some this was investigative journalism at its best, and WikiLeaks had established how superior the Internet was as an information source. It clearly threatened those in power, so this was exactly the sort of Fourth Estate a free people needed. Thanks to the Internet, some claimed, we were now truly free and had the power to hold leaders accountable.112 In fact, the WikiLeaks episode demonstrates precisely the opposite. WikiLeaks was not a journalistic organization. It released secret documents to the public, but the “documents languished online and only came to the public’s attention when they were written up by professional journalists,” as Heather Brooke put it.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

. […] I read about how I’m apparently too ugly for any man to want to rape, or I read graphic descriptions detailing precisely how certain implements should be shoved into one or more of my various orifices. Feminist blogger Dawn Foster wrote: The worst instance of online abuse I’ve encountered happened when I blogged about the Julian Assange extradition case. […] Initially it was shocking: in the space of a week, I received a rabid email that included my home address, phone number and workplace address, included as a kind of threat. Then, after tweeting that I’d been waiting for a night bus for ages, someone replied that they hoped I’d get raped at the bus stop.

…

Chapter One The leaderless digital counter-revolution It is worth thinking back now to the early 2010s, when cyberutopianism had its biggest resurgence since the 90s, before the dot-com bubble burst. This time it emerged in response to a series of political events around the world from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement to new politicized hacker movements. Anonymous, Wikileaks and public-square mass protests in Spain and across the Middle East were getting huge coverage in the news, causing a flurry of opinion and analysis pieces about their profound significance. All of these events were being attributed to the rise of social media and characterized as a new leaderless form of digital revolution.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

For its part, The Guardian never addressed what some journalists believed was a major miscue by its star reporter on the Trump/Russia beat, Luke Harding. In 2018, he and two colleagues published a scoop that looked for a moment like a game changer. They reported that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, had held a secret meeting in 2016 with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the group that would publicize the Democratic Party emails obtained by Russian hackers. The story was all the more sensational because it involved a Houdini-like feat. At the time of the supposed meeting, Assange was living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had taken refuge to avoid arrest.

…

Several corporate investigators were unable to identify the firm that produced them. In a subsequent report: “Operation Hellenic” report dated November 2, 2007. a 2009 State Department cable: The cable, which is dated January 13, 2009, was among the trove of documents disclosed by WikiLeaks. The U.S. ambassador in Kazakhstan was then Richard Hoagland. with the help of Baker and Hostetler LLC: This State Department document was released by Wikileaks. Over the years, Baker and Hostetler has used differing styles for its corporate name. It currently uses BakerHostetler and I have used it throughout. CHAPTER 2: “LAPDANCE ISLAND” When a freelance private spy named Rob Moore: I first wrote about Rob Moore’s work for K2 Intelligence in The New York Times on April 27, 2018, “A Spy’s Tale: The TV Prankster Who Says He Became a Double Agent.”

…

SOME OF THE JOURNALISTS who met with Christopher Steele at the Tabard Inn thought he was right. Since the start of the 2016 campaign, Trump had kowtowed toward Vladimir Putin with a subservience that suggested that the Russian leader had a hold over him. There also seemed to be plenty of signs pointing to collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. By the fall of 2016, for instance, WikiLeaks was unleashing a nonstop barrage of hacked Clinton campaign emails and Russian operatives were deploying social media bots aimed at swaying American voters toward Trump. However, believing that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Kremlin was one thing: proving it was very different. And for the reporters who met with Steele at the Tabard Inn, deciding what to do next was a big problem.

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

In August 2007, eighteen FBI agents, some with their guns drawn, burst into his home with only his wife and children present, to raid his files during an investigation into his alleged role in helping the New York Times develop its seminal warrantless surveillance story in 2004. The government dropped his case nearly four years later, in April 2011, after Tamm’s career had been ruined and he faced financial peril. The Justice Department is also mulling an indictment on espionage charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing tens of thousands of pages of classified U.S. diplomatic cables and war-related field reports, some of them allegedly provided by a young army private first class, who is also under arrest. Regardless of Assange’s publicly stated bias against U.S. policies and the allegations against his personal behavior, this unprecedented trove of material has allowed reporters around the world to write some of the most insightful and revealing stories of our time.

…

That is one lesson from the WikiLeaks disclosures. The leaked State Department cables were allegedly first available to a disgruntled army private with a history of instability because the government wasn’t giving even a basic level of protection to those documents, and because his colleagues allowed him to bring a rewritable CD-ROM with Lady Gaga’s music into work, not realizing it could act as the black bag into which a quarter of a million sensitive diplomatic cables could be dumped and carted away. In the government-wide security and counterintelligence investigation that has followed the WikiLeaks disclosures, government experts have learned that most federal agencies have little understanding of how to protect their sensitive information, according to people involved in the review.

…

As he did so, Arkin started to count government organizations and private companies working at the “secret” level of classification. Something is classified secret5 if its unauthorized disclosure would cause “serious damage” to national security. For instance, many of the State Department cables published by WikiLeaks are classified secret because they provide candid assessments of foreign leaders and agreements. Routine field reports from military units are also classified secret on the theory that they might provide useful tidbits to an enemy. He was quickly overwhelmed by the volume. There were simply too many organizations and companies to track.

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Indeed, he was Trumpian, but even more so, often leading Trump to brand him as a nuisance and a nutter. It certainly would be an odd kind of justice, Bannon thought, if the case against the president came down to Stone, Julian Assange, and Jerome Corsi—crazies, conspiracists, bullshit artists, and fringe players all. Corsi, a right-wing gadfly who had recently become a figure in the investigation, connecting Stone to WikiLeaks and Assange, had once spearheaded the rumors that Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012 from a heart attack, had been assassinated—and that Bannon, in cahoots with the CIA, was involved.

…

Beyond finding that here, in the Trump camp, were some of the sloppiest, most unsophisticated, stupidest people on earth—who, to say the least, had little or no sensitivity “to, shall we say, accepting foreign assistance,” as Bannon put it—what did the investigators have? Or, to put it another way, who did they have? Roger Stone, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Julian Assange? Bannon was unimpressed: “No way you impeach the president over those dragoons.” They were hopeless flotsam and jetsam. Obstruction? “Give me a break.” With a Republican Congress in place, what Mueller needed was something that would undermine Trump with the something less than 35 percent of the electorate that had become fanatically his.

…

Vanity Fair Veterans Affairs Department Vietnam, Kim summit in Vietnam War View, The (TV show) Virginia, midterms of 2018 and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Waco standoff Wag the Dog (film) Wahlberg, Mark Wall Wall Street Journal Walter Reed National Military Medical Center War on Terror Warren, Elizabeth Washington, Michigan, rally Washington Post Watergate scandal Waters, Maxine Weinstein, Harvey Weisselberg, Allen Weissmann, Andrew Wexton, Jennifer Whitaker, Matthew White House Correspondents’ Dinner White House staff “Anonymous” op-ed and communications team DOJ and midterms and Mueller and Whitestone, Erik Whitewater investigations WikiLeaks Wiles, Susie Wilson, Woodrow Winfrey, Oprah witness tampering WME company Wolf, Michelle Woman’s Day Woodward, Bob working class World Bank World War I commemoration World War II Wray, Christopher Wu Xiaohui Xi Jinping Young, Cy Zelinsky, Aaron ALSO BY MICHAEL WOLFF Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet Where We Stand White Kids About the Author Michael Wolff is the author of Fire and Fury, the number one bestseller that for the first time told the inside story of the Trump White House.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Having travelled to access cash, where are people more likely to spend it – near the ATM that dispensed it or back home in the village that so needs it?1 In central London there is no such ATM shortage, but that didn’t help Julian Assange back in 2010 when he gave himself up to the British police over charges he faced in Sweden. Assange was also wanted in the USA over ‘Cablegate’: his organisation, Wikileaks, had published several hundred thousand leaked messages between the US State Department and its embassies. It was as a result of this that PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others had started to refuse to process donations to Wikileaks.2 Unable to access funds, neither the organisation nor Assange could pay their bills, not least for the servers that hosted the leaked information.

…

It was as a result of this that PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others had started to refuse to process donations to Wikileaks.2 Unable to access funds, neither the organisation nor Assange could pay their bills, not least for the servers that hosted the leaked information. Whatever you think of Assange or Wikileaks, he had at that point only been accused of a crime; it was unrelated to money and no judicial process had actually taken place – and yet private companies chose to rescind his access to payments. Alongside Assange and Wikileaks, the likes of InfoWars (the American far right ‘news’ website) and Pornhub have been subject to similar ‘payment blocking’. Whatever you think of this crew, consider that such moves effectively put censorship in the hands of private enterprise. For most of us, access to payments is unlikely to be high on the list of things we worry about – or have even thought to think about.

…

Russell) 4 printing money 34 private keys see public-private key encryption Promontory 257 public-private key encryption 16, 189–91, 195, 200, 214, 215 Puerto Rico 36–7 Punjab National Bank (PNB) 115 Q QR codes 75, 76, 84 QuadrigaCX 200 Qualcomm 226, 271 R railway design 68, 71 Ransomware 195 Rato, Rodrigo 262 Reagan, Ronald 65 real-time gross settlement (RTGS) 126–30, 240 Red Cross 150 red envelope tradition, Chinese 76 Red Packet digital gift 77 Reed, John 220 refugees and immigrants 265, 266 regulation authorities, financial 135, 156, 179, 184, 198, 208, 212, 217, 223–4, 225–6, 229, 230–6, 237–42, 265, 267, 268, 271–2, 273 Ren Zhengfei 251 Reserve Bank of India 86 retail payment flows 120, 122 retail payment instruments 18 retailer lawsuit against card networks, US 56–7 revaluation of currency 30 Revolut 89, 158, 159 Rickards, Jim 31 Ripple/XRP 197–8, 199 risk, payment 15–16, 19, 108, 112–16, 121, 122, 214 robbery, bank 107–8, 112–16 Rogen, Seth 112 Romania 172 Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) 150 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 131 Russell, Bertrand 4 Russia 25, 89, 243, 253–4 Russian Central Bank 256–7 S Safaricom 74 Safeway 56 Sampo Bank 256, 257 sanctions 144, 213, 243, 244–5, 246, 249, 250–1, 252, 253, 254, 258, 266, 270 Sandinista National Liberation Front 65 Sands, Peter 28 Saxo 159 Scandinavia 67 Schneider, Ralph 40 Schuijff, Arnout 165 screen-scrapers 181–2 scrip 170, 219–20 Sears 56 Second World War 7–8, 12, 249 secondary sanctions, US 250, 253 Securities and Exchange Commission, US 198 securities market 132, 140, 247 semi-open payment systems 222 settlement risk 15–16 shopping channels 50 Shor, Ilan 261 shorting 188 Siemiatkowski, Sebastian 174 Signature cards 49–50, 57, 58, 69 Simmons, Matty 40 Simple 159 Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) 60, 240 Single Euro Payments Regulation 98 Singles Day, China 76 size and methods, payment 120–1, 217, 272 small economies 5–6 smart contracts 194–6, 198–9 smuggling 27 Snowden, Edward 234 social media 110, 119, 179, 206 social media fraud 110 Sofort 180–1, 183 ‘soft’ credit checks 175 Sony Pictures 112 Soros, George 226 sort codes, bank 65–6 South Korea 112 sovereign gold coins 203 Soviet bloc countries, former 24–5, 257 Space Shuttle 71 Spain 81, 261–2 spear-phishing 110 Special Drawing Right (SDR), IMF’s 202 Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) 250, 251, 252 spies, government 233–4 Spotify 202, 225 Spring Festival Gala, CCT’s 77 Square 155, 162–3, 164–5, 216, 269 Sri Lanka 113 stablecoins 196, 201 Standard Chartered 258–9, 260, 270 standing orders 82 Starling 158 Stephenson, George 68, 71 STET (Systèmes Technologiques d’Échange et de Traitement) 119 Stiftung Warentest 89 stimulus package payments, US 66 store of value, Libra as 206 store of value, money 202 Stripe 15, 162, 163–5, 216 sub-prime mortgages 132 Sun 119 Sunak, Rishi 35 Swartz, Lana 177 Sweden 32–3, 35–6, 58, 172 Swift network 102, 111, 113 114, 115, 140, 141–2, 147, 220, 222, 233–4 Swiss bank accounts 66 Switzerland 23, 67, 201, 260 Syria 266 T tabu 8 TARGET 86, 240–1 Target (US retailer) 109 TARGET2 241 TARGET2 Securities 241 targeted markets 179 tax evasion 27, 29, 258, 260 telegraphs 141 telex 141 Tencent 76, 77 Tenpay 73, 75, 76, 78–9, 85, 100, 161, 178, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 235, 270–1 terrorism 232–3, 250, 266 Tether (THT) 196–7, 199 Tez payment app 185 theft risk, payment gateways as 15–16, 108, 112–16, 121 three-corner model 174 Three Mobile 119 TIBER-EU 233 tokens – temporary digital identifiers 109, 189–90, 191, 195, 196, 205, 214 TOR (The Onion Router) 199 TransferWise 89, 146, 216, 241 Transport for London 11 travel shops 90 tribal societies, early 9 truck systems 219–20 Truman, Harry S. 249 Trump, Donald 115, 229, 243–5 tulip bulbs 6 Tumpel-Gugerell, Gertrude 241 Twitter 155 U Uber 82–3, 165, 169, 202 Ubiquity Networks 110–11 UBS 260 UFC-Que Choisir 89 unbanked people 6–7, 38, 212 underground/criminal economy 25, 27–8, 29–30, 199–200 see also financial crime; illegal activities; money-laundering ‘unicorn’ start-ups 146 Unified Payment Interface (UPI) 82–5, 182, 271 Union Pay 55, 59 unit of account, money as 202–4 United Kingdom cheques 117 credit card debt 101 decline of cash 32, 36 digital IDs 270 Faster Payments Service (FPS) 82, 83, 84, 86 GCHQ – National Cyber Security Centre 233 GCHQ – spies 234 HM Treasury 86 INSTEX transactions 245 JCPOA 243 United Kingdom (continued) neo-banks 158 Payment Systems Regulator 237 prepaid cards 37–8 Truck Act (1831) 220 United States of America $100 dollar bills 23, 24, 108 bank fines and financial crime 258–60, 270 checking accounts 91 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 65, 149, 264 Congress 57 credit card debt 45, 100 Currency Education Program (CEP) 25 Department of Homeland Security 232–3 Department of State 267 dollars as global reserve currency 246–7, 252 dollars circulating abroad 24–5, 30 domestic securities market 247 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) 220 Federal Reserve 12, 36, 37, 113–14, 131, 232, 259 free banking era (1837–63) 208 international power of the dollar 246–54 JCPOA 243–4, 252, 254 National Security Agency (NSA) 114, 233, 234, 255 National Security Council (NSC) 64–5, 244, 264 Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) 249–50, 252, 253, 255, 259 open banking 182 paying to pay 97, 101 regulation agencies 231–2 removal of access to WeChat app 270–1 sanctions 213, 243, 244–5, 246, 249, 250–1, 252, 253, 254, 258–9, 270 Securities and Exchange Commission 198 State Department 3–4 Treasury 9, 248, 249–50, 255, 260, 265 use of cheques/checks 63, 117 utility coins 193 V V-pay 58 van der Does, Pieter 165 van Hall, Walraven 7–8 Venezuela 213 Venmo 177 venture capital money 157 Verifone 48 Verizon 130–1 Vestager, Margrethe 224, 225–6 VHS vs Betamax 71, 221 Visa 3–4, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57–9, 90, 102, 161, 162, 174, 201–2, 204, 223, 269 Visa Europe 58–9 Visa Inc. 58–9 W Wal-Mart 56, 57 Watergate scandal 255 WeChat Pay app 270–1, 229 Weidmann, Jens 28 Western Union 144, 216 WhatsApp 184, 202 Which? 66, 89 wholesale payment flows 121 Wikileaks 3–4 Williams, Joe 45–6 wire transfers 141 Wirecard 37–8, 166–7 Woodward, Bob 255 World Bank 17, 32, 150, 211 World Economic Forum, Davos 187–8, 226 WorldPay 165 X, Y, Z Xoom 111 Yuebao 77, 206 ZON credit card authorisation 48 First published 2021 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 2 John Street London WC1N 2ES www.eandtbooks.com Epub ISBN: 978-1-78396-607-3 Copyright © Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Terán 2021 The Authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this Work.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Thanks to my Australian publisher, Melbourne University Press, for continuing to back my vision. Louise Adler, Elisa Berg, Sally Heath, Paul Smitz, and Penelope White have all contributed hugely to the vision in your hands. I continue to be inspired by a range of journalists and groups whose work informs my own: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Pratap Chatterjee, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, the late and great Michael Hastings, Naomi Klein, Dahr Jamail, Chelsea Manning, George Monbiot, Greg Palast, John Pilger, Jeremy Scahill, Edward Snowden, and Matt Taibbi. Alison Martin is a truly unique woman who constantly challenges, provokes, and loves me.

…

New York Times, May 28, 2014. 46Saskia Sassen, “European Economy’s Invisible Transformation: Expulsions and Predatory Capitalism,” London School of Economics and Political Science, July 3, 2014, at blogs.lse.ac.uk. 47Harriet Alexander, “Greece’s Great Fire Sale,” Telegraph, April 20, 2013. 48“Privatization of Athens Water Utility Ruled Unconstitutional,” Press Project, May 28, 2014, at thepressproject.net. 49Niki Kitsantonis, “Greece Wars with Courts over Ways to Slash Budget,” New York Times, June 12, 2014. 50Daniel Trilling, “Shock Therapy and the Gold Mine,” New Statesman, June 18, 2013. 51“Europe’s Failed Course,” New York Times, February 17, 2012. 52Joanna Kakissis, “36 hours in Athens,” New York Times, October 19, 2014. 53Yiannis Baboulias, “Our Big Fat Greek Privatisation Scandals,” Al Jazeera English, June 10, 2014. 54Helen Smith, “Greece Begins 50 Billion Euro Privatisation Drive,” Guardian, August 1, 2010. 55Slavoj Žižek, “Save Us from the Saviours,” London Review of Books, May 28, 2012. 56Alexander, “Greece’s Fire Sale.” 57Ibid. 58Katie Allen, “Austerity in Greece Caused More than 500 Male Suicides, Say Researchers,” Guardian, April 21, 2014. 59Mark Lowen, “Greek’s Million Unpaid Workers,” BBC News, December 5, 2013. 60“Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor,” Vice News, May 22, 2013, at vice.com. 61Liz Alderman, “Societal Ills Spike in Crisis-Stricken Greece,” New York Times, May 22, 2013. 3Haiti 1Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, eds, Tectonic Shifts (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2012). 2Ibid., p. 2. 3Ansel Herz and Kim Ives, “Wikileaks Haiti: The Post-Quake ‘Gold Rush’ for Reconstruction Contracts,” Nation, June 15, 2011. 4Deepa Panchang, Beverly Bell, and Tory Field, “Disaster Capitalism: Profiting from Crisis in Post-Earthquake Haiti,” Truthout, February 16, 2011, at truth-out.org. 5Herz and Ives, “Wikileaks Haiti.” 6The AshBritt company was accused of questionable practices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the CEPR revealing that a “2006 congressional report examining federal contract waste and abuse noted AshBritt used multiple layers of subcontractors, each of whom got paid while passing on the actual work.”

…

Market speculators pressurize fragile nations such as Greece, whose citizens are forced to survive with fewer public services.9 British citizens living on the margins face eviction or spiraling rent increases because global fund managers, such as Westbrook—based in the United States—purchase homes as assets to be milked for profit.10 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) traverses the world with the backing of Western elites, strong-arming nations into privatizing their resources and opening up their markets to multinationals. Resistance to this bitter medicine is only one reason that large swathes of Latin America have become more independent since the 2000s. The mass privatization that results—a central plank of US foreign policy—guarantees corruption in autocracies. Wikileaks’ State Department cables offer countless examples of this, including in Egypt under former president Hosni Mubarak.11 The World Bank is equally complicit and equally unaccountable. In 2015 it admitted that it had no idea how many people had been forced off their lands around the world due to its resettlement policies.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

The number and reach of these highly profitable transnational organized cyber-crime rings have grown, and the security intelligence firm CrowdStrike was actively tracking more than fifty such major organizations globally. Besides transnational organized crime syndicates, hacktivists—politically motivated cyber attackers—represent one of the most influential and powerful groups in cyberspace. Anonymous, LulzSec, AntiSec, WikiLeaks, and the Syrian Electronic Army fall into this group and launch their attacks in retaliation for perceived injustices. Personalities such as Julian Assange, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, and Edward Snowden have become household names for challenging some of the world’s most powerful institutions and for releasing data that others would most certainly have preferred remain hidden.

…

One such notable example is Anonymous, a self-described leaderless organization whose members have become recognizable in public for wearing Guy Fawkes masks. The group’s motto, “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us,” manifests its organizational ethos: “The corrupt fear us. The honest support us. The heroic join us.” When MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal all agreed to stop funneling donations to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization, Anonymous responded by launching a series of effective cyber attacks against the financial firms. Anonymous is strongly against what it perceives to be rigid antipiracy laws, and it took credit for an earlier attack against the Sony PlayStation Network in response to Sony’s support of U.S. antipiracy legislation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act.

…

Eventually, your personal details will fall into the hands of criminal cartels, competitors, and even foreign governments. While big data may be the new oil, our personal data are more like weapons-grade plutonium—dangerous, long lasting, and once they are leaked, there’s no getting them back. Even the federal government is realizing it too can fall victim to this problem. Just look at the 2010 WikiLeaks debacle and the hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables Private Chelsea (Bradley) Manning was able to steal while working as an army intelligence analyst in Iraq. Of course just a few years later, the world would meet Edward Snowden, who used his skills and access as an NSA system administrator to steal millions of highly classified files from America and its allies and share them with journalists for publication online.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“Well, your avatar surely did,” I said. “Why did you stop posting?” “Don’t you remember the time?” he asked with some asperity. “I won’t ever forget it. It was December 2010. Julian Assange, my virtual colleague on the Cypherpunks list, blazed on the covers of all the news magazines. He was charged with treason. People talked of bitcoin as an important facilitator for WikiLeaks. It would have been nice to get all this attention in any other context. But WikiLeaks had kicked the hornets’ nest, and now the swarm was headed toward us. “We had to get away from the swarm. Bitcoin’s success depends on being distributed and peer-to-peer,” concluded Satoshi.

…

Aren’t you a threat to the entire monetary world, to central banks and G8 summits and International Monetary Fund mandates, to five-point-one trillion dollars a day of oceanic currency trading, to preening financial strategists in Washington and New York, London and Davos, Tokyo and San Francisco, of tax collectors and financial regulators around the world?” “We do not want to lead with ‘anonymous currency’ or ‘currency outside the reach of any government.’ ” Satoshi said. “I am definitely not making such a taunt or assertion. Some people say, ‘Bring it on, WikiLeaks.’ I say, ‘No, don’t bring it on, WikiLeaks!’ The bitcoin project needs to grow gradually, so the software can be strengthened along the way.” “But in the initial ‘Genesis Block’ of bitcoin, you did put a headline from the Times of London declaring that the ‘Chancellor was bailing out the banks again,’ ” I said. “That was kind of a poke at the hive.”

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

Elmer had developed the same suspicions as Nigel: that all the corporate legerdemain his bank supplied to its clients allowed them to evade tax and launder money. He had raised his concerns with his managers, then with the Swiss authorities, then at a press conference in London during which he handed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange two discs containing the account details of 2,000 ‘prominent people’. The Economist story about Elmer that Nigel read described the Swiss authorities’ response. They used the banking secrecy law to visit a ‘legal hell’ on him. He was locked up without charge for 187 days, and he and his family were so hounded by the bank’s agents that his daughter was left traumatised.

…

., p.211 in contact with an official from the criminal division of the Interior Ministry: A leaked entry dated 1986 from the Interior Ministry files describes Mogilevich’s current criminal enterprise and past convictions and says he has been ‘in contact’ with an official deal with German intelligence: Friedman, Red Mafiya, p.210 danced with Bob Levinson: Levinson’s reports of the US law enforcement meetings with Mogilevich; Barry Meier, Missing Man, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, p.59 intelligence file disappeared: Friedman, Red Mafiya, p.211 in a bar nearby: Glenny, McMafia, pp.87–9; Friedman, Red Mafiya, pp.215–16; transcript of Tom Mangold’s interview with Mogilevich for ‘The Billion Dollar Don’, Panorama, 1999 annual profits: Roman Olearchyk, Haig Simonian and Stefan Wagstyl, ‘Energy fears highlight trade’s murky side’, Financial Times, January 9, 2009 his cable: ‘USG concerns over Austrian banking operations’, cable sent by US embassy in Austria on February 17, 2006, later published by WikiLeaks, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06VIENNA515_a.html bearer shares: Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Ukraine gas deal draws attention to secretive importer’, New York Times, February 1, 2006, nytimes.com/2006/02/01/business/worldbusiness/ukraine-gas-deal-draws-attention-to-secretive.html Seva’s blessing: ‘Ukraine: Firtash makes his case to the USG’, December 10, 2008, later published by WikiLeaks, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08KYIV2414_a.html. The cable contains the ambassador’s record of his conversation with Firtash: ‘He acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon [sic] Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into business in the first place.

…

However, the ruling also records that the document was accompanied by a cover letter from the Ministry of Industry and Energy of the Russian Federation to TNK-BP billions of dollars: Alexander Kots, ‘FSB catches energy spies’, Komsomolskaya Pravda, March 20, 2008, kp.ru/daily/24067/307041 (in Russian) told American diplomats: ‘Update on GOR investigation of TNK-BP’, US state department cable published by WikiLeaks, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW816_a.html ‘the FSB suspects’: Vera Surzhenko and Alexey Nikolsky, ‘Lubyanka does not sleep’, March 20, 2008, Vedomosti (in Russian), vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2008/03/21/lubyanka-ne-dremlet business cards of CIA officers: Asked about this by the author, McCormick neither confirmed nor denied that the cards were his seventeen hours: McCormick later told Lough in an email that the interrogation had lasted seventeen hours.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

It was the kind of thing of which any mainstream political campaign, operating out of dingy rooms in New York or Chicago or Atlanta, would be proud. Except it was coming from St Petersburg – at least 123 million Facebook posts – and, with the help of WikiLeaks, it was directed, secretly, at achieving one outcome, the disruptive one that would most please the man who could then deal with Trump: Vladimir Putin. That campaign cry – ‘I love WikiLeaks!’ from Trump – rolled down the years. There is no doubt about where Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stood on this question. In a 2015 Twitter comment he confirmed that they believed it would be better for their purpose – widespread disruption, the aim he shared with Putin – if the Republican candidate were to win.

…

The investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal email server when she was secretary of state from 2008 to 2011 was enough. It was perfect conspiracy material, because the less that was known about what the emails contained, the more sinister Trump could make them sound. At every stop he urged WikiLeaks, which said it had a huge cache of hacked Democratic emails, to publish them. ‘I love WikiLeaks!’ he would say. And if the Russians were holding emails too? ‘Bring it on! Publish!’ The campaign was to be as much an attack on his opponent as a set of promises, with assistance welcome from anyone who would join the fun, for whatever reason. At rally after rally, he responded to the crowd’s chant with remarks like this one, in Pennsylvania – ‘Lock her up is right!

…

We were on a very solid footing until the Russian co-operation with WikiLeaks and the weaponising of those emails that were stolen, and not only that, as Mueller points out in his second indictment, the Russians hacked into the cloud where very valuable information that the Democratic Party – and my campaign – had stored, and they stole it. We always were wondering how did they know who to target on Facebook. Who were these people that they were clearly going after? And however he knew it, Trump knew it. He mentioned WikiLeaks 161 times between the day that they dropped the emails and the day of the election.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

The article quoted a US source speculating that “malicious software” could be used to commandeer or crash controls at an enrichment plant.11 But there was another reason to suspect that Natanz was Stuxnet’s target. On July 16, 2009, three weeks after the 2009 version of Stuxnet was released, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange posted a cryptic note to his website about a possible accident at Natanz. An anonymous source claiming to be associated with Iran’s nuclear program had told Assange that a “serious” nuclear accident had recently occurred at the plant.12 WikiLeaks usually published only documents on its site, not tips from anonymous sources, but Assange broke protocol, he said, because he had reason to believe the source was credible.

…

The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011), 141–47. 26 Karl Vick, “Iran’s President Calls Holocaust ‘Myth’ in Latest Assault on Jews,” Washington Post, Foreign Service, December 15, 2005. 27 “06Kuwait71, Kuwait’s Country Wide Radiation Monitoring System,” US State Department cable from the US embassy in Kuwait to the State Department in Washington, DC, January 2006. Published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/01/06KUWAIT71.html. 28 The assessment comes from Ariel (Eli) Levite, deputy director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, in a September 2005 US State Department cable from the Tel Aviv embassy, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2005/09/05TELAVIV5705.html. 29 “06TelAviv293, Iran: Congressman Ackerman’s January 5 Meeting at,” US State Department cable from the US embassy in Tel Aviv, January 2006. Published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/01/06TELAVIV293.html. See this page in this book for an explanation of the problems. 30 Privately, Israel and Russia both told the United States they believed Iran could actually master its enrichment difficulties within six months.

…

See “06Cairo601, Iran; Centrifuge Briefing to Egyptian MFA,” US State Department cable, February 2006, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/02/06CAIRO601.html. 31 “06TelAviv688, Iran-IAEA: Israeli Atomic Energy Commission,” US State Department cable, February 2006, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/02/06TELAVIV688.html. 32 Ibid. 33 “Iran Defiant on Nuclear Deadline,” BBC News, August 1, 2006, available at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5236010.stm. 34 “07Berlins1450, Treasury Under Secretary Levey Discusses Next,” US State Department cable from the embassy in Berlin, July 2007, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2007/07/07BERLIN1450.html.

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

Once inside, we found that the magnetic reed switch alarm systems on the doors had been disabled prior to our arrival, a technique straight out of Ninjalicious’ book Access All Areas.81 We concluded that the PIRs must also have been disabled, based on the fact that the bunker was not teeming with angry police by this point. So it seemed we had free access to an entire bunker full of potentially sensitive documents, though in the end, we all joked about how unexciting most of it actually was. Just weeks after Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks fiasco, when he appeared in a London courtroom for disclosing government secrets, we had gained entry into a secure file-storage area and had unrestrained access to all the documents it contained. I imagined Assange would have been pleased to know this was happening; his ethos for transparency so closely aligned with ours.

…

Brick, Subterranean Twin Cities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 26 John Hollingshead, Underground London (London: Kessinger, 2009 [1862]); Charles Dickens, All the Year Round (London, 1861). 27 Whipplesnaith, The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 2007 [1937]). 28 See Tom Whipple, ‘Confessions of a Night Climber’, Times, 2 November 2007. 29 Tom Wells, ‘Deck the Halls with, er, 150ft-high Santa Hats’, Sun, 4 December 2009. 30 Patrick Sawer, ‘Cambridge University’s 1958 Car on Roof Prank Secrets Revealed’, Telegraph, 28 June 2008. 31 Jon Lackman, ‘The New French Hacker-Artist Underground’, Wired, 20 January 2012. 32 Steven Jones, The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert Is Shaping the New American Counterculture (San Francisco: CCC Publishing, 2011). 33 Geoff Manaugh, The Bldg Blog Book (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2009). 34 D. Wershler-Henry, ‘Urban Life: Usufruct in the City’, Globe and Mail (2005), quoted in Steven High and David W. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 42. 35 Ashley Fantz and Atika Shubert, ‘Wikileaks “Anonymous” Hackers: “We Will Fight” ’, CNN, 10 December 2010. 36 Lucy Osborne, ‘Urban Explorers Enter London’s Landmarks’, Evening Standard, 10 November 2011. 37 David Pinder, ‘Old Paris No More: Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-Spectacle’, Antipode 32: 4 (October 2000). 38 Quentin Stevens, The Ludic City: Exploring the Potetial of Public Spaces (London: Routledge, 2007). 39 Michael Scott, ‘Hacking the Material World’, Wired 1: 3 (July/August 1993). 40 E.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

On the other hand, Microsoft probably has better systems in place to prevent infiltration by rogue programmers. WikiLeaks is another stateless organization. WikiLeaks sits somewhere between a loose organization of activists and the personal mission of a single individual named Julian Assange. It exposes information that governments and powerful corporations would rather keep secret. In this way it is very much like an organization of journalists. But because it is not a commercial enterprise, and because it is not moored within a country, it's much more difficult to corral. And this scares countries like the United States. Compare WikiLeaks to a traditional newspaper. That newspaper is in a societal dilemma with all the other newspapers in that country.

…

In mid-2004, the New York Times learned about the NSA's illegal wiretapping of American citizens without a warrant, but delayed publishing the information for over a year—until well after the presidential election. Presumably there are things the New York Times has learned about and decided not to publish, period. WikiLeaks changes that dynamic. It's not an American company. It's not even a for-profit company. It's not a company at all. And it's not really located in any legal jurisdiction. It simply isn't subject to the same pressures that the New York Times is. This means the government can't rely on the partial cooperation of WikiLeaks in the same way it can rely on that of traditional newspapers.5 In a blog post about the topic, Clay Shirky referred to the Supreme Court ruling in the Pentagon Papers case that said it's illegal to leak secrets but not illegal to publish leaks: The legal bargain from 1971 simply does not and cannot produce the outcome it used to.

…

In 2005, Captain Ian Fishback exposed the U.S.'s use of torture in Iraq because of his religious convictions. Similarly, Bradley Manning had to deal with two competing societal dilemmas in 2010 when he allegedly became a whistle-blower and sent 250,000 secret State Department cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which made them public.5 Like the Libyan pilots, he chose to defect from the government and cooperate with what he perceived as the country as a whole. His subsequent treatment by the U.S. government—which incarcerated him, stripped him of due process, and tortured him—is in part a societal pressure by the government to prevent copycat defections.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In 1996, when most newspapers were still figuring out how to put stories online, Rusbridger, who had been named top editor the previous year, started the Guardian Online as a separate division. During the dot-com bust, as other newspapers cut online staff, he kept investing in digital journalism. More recently, he delivered some of the smartest coverage of the U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, dealing with Julian Assange to get the information and asking readers what was worth searching for in the trove of documents. Although more news outlets have started charging for content, Rusbridger believes Internet “paywalls” could hurt journalism itself. “That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms,” Rusbridger said in a January 2010 speech at the London College of Communication.

…

The demand for U.S. movies isn’t likely to change soon; countries with homegrown film businesses rarely produce effects-driven popcorn fare like Wolverine. But exporting them relies on international recognition of copyright, which the Internet is eroding. Movies also shape the world’s idea of what the United States stands for, as a cable written by an American diplomat in Saudi Arabia released on WikiLeaks showed. “It’s still all about the War of Ideas here, and the American programming on [the television channels] MBC and Rotana is winning over ordinary Saudis in a way that [the U.S.-funded satellite channel] ‘Al Hurra’ and other U.S. propaganda never could,” read the May 2009 message.25 Titled “David Letterman: Agent of Influence,” it mentioned Friends and Desperate Housewives as being particularly popular.

…

This ratio was used in the March 2010 Terra Consultants study, “Building a Digital Economy: The Importance of Saving Jobs in the EU’s Creative Industries.” 22. According to Nash Information Services. 23. According to BigChampagne. 24. This ratio was also used in the Terra Consultants study. 25. Robert Booth, “WikiLeaks Cable: Jihad? Sorry, I Don’t Want to Miss Desperate Housewives,” Guardian, December 7, 2010. 26. Ricardo H. Cavazos Cepeda, Douglas C. Lippoldt, and Jonathan Senft, “Policy Complements to the Strengthening of IPRs in Developing Countries” (OECD Trade Policy Working Paper No. 104, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, September 14, 2010). 27.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life by David Mitchell

bank run, Boris Johnson, British Empire, cakes and ale, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, lateral thinking, Northern Rock, Ocado, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, profit motive, Russell Brand, sensible shoes, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

“The effects of ‘toffee-lung’, ‘cracknell shin’ and ‘vibration white chocolate finger’ on the Oompa-Loompa communities of the Midlands have to be seen to be believed,” Rantzen claimed. A spokesman for Cadbury’s said: “If they could get the chocolate to stick to the Curly Wurlys properly, maybe they’d deserve the minimum wage.” Shock WikiLeaks revelations The debate over transparency and freedom of information intensified in 2019 when WikiLeaks published details of what everyone in the world would be getting for Christmas. “Secrets are used to control people,” said Julian Assange via Skype from his Mars-bound prison rocket. “Wrapping paper is one of the most oppressive inventions in human history. As for the Christmas cracker, it is a highly dangerous form of violent concealment.

…

But not as much as Nick Clegg, I’m afraid. 1 Weight Watchers 1, 2 West Country 1 West, Kanye 1 West Midlands, desire to evacuate of 1 WH Smith, David Cameron’s incomprehension of the business model of 1 wheelie bins 1, 2 Whisperers, The (Figes) 1 White, Charlene 1 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 1 Why Don’t You …? 1 Widdecombe, Ann 1, 2 WikiLeaks 1 Wilby, Peter 1, 2 William I 1 William, Prince, Duke of Cambridge, fictional nudey antics of 1 Williams, Ch. Supt Stuart 1 Witchell, Nicholas, arousal of 1 Wolverhampton 1 Wolverhampton Wanderers FC 1 Woods, Tiger 1 words, new, favourite and not so favourite 1, 2 World Cup 2010 1 world heritage sites 1 World War One 1 and Gove 1 Somme 1, 2, 3 World War Two 1, 2 World’s Most Hated Company 1 X Factor, The 1, 2 X-Men 1 Yarwood, Mike, inferiority to Dustin Hoffman of 1 Yes Minister 1 York, Duchess of 1 Young, Toby 1 Zimbabwe 1 About the Author David Mitchell is a comedian, actor, writer and the polysyllabic member of Mitchell and Webb.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

The long delay in issuing the arrest warrant had been entirely a result of waiting for Firtash to fly to a country which might be prepared to extradite him. The US has no extradition treaty with Ukraine, so he couldn’t be arrested at home, and previous attempts to extradite suspects from the UK had convinced them there was little prospect of bringing him to Chicago from London either. ‘Look at Julian Assange. Whether you agree or disagree with what his crimes are, it’s been, what, ten years? The sheikh who was part of 9/11 planning, he took years to get to the US,’ the source said. ‘The only other option was France, and they’re even worse than the UK. We only had a few places we could go to, because he only went to a few places, so the choice we had was Austria.’

…

Gazprom told the post-revolutionary government it would be renegotiating its gas supply contract, and when Ukraine refused to agree to its terms, cut it off. In the depths of winter the whole country suddenly realised quite how dependent it was on Russian goodwill. There’s a plaintive account in the State Department archive released by Wikileaks of a meeting between the US ambassador and Yushchenko’s prime minister. It describes the sudden urgency of the choice that had previously been postponed since 1991. ‘He was on the horns of a dilemma. If he went ahead with the deal with RUE, he and the Our Ukraine Party would be accused of corruption.

…

‘There is no business connection between Mr Mogilevich and me. I have never had any direct business dealings with him, nor does he have any interests in any of my companies,’ Firtash wrote in a letter to the WSJ in 2007. According to an account of a meeting between Firtash and US officials a year later, and released by Wikileaks, ‘Firtash acknowledged that he needed, and received, permission from Mogilevich when he established various businesses, but he denied any close relationship with him.’ (After the cable was published, Firtash issued a statement denying he had ever acknowledged this, and suggested the claim was a ‘mistranslation or misunderstanding’.)

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

This notion of the almost God-given superiority of networks informs Shirky’s interpretation of WikiLeaks, the one transnational network to rule them all. Thus, in a later speech, Shirky argues that “there was no way the State Department could go to WikiLeaks and have a conversation that hinged on or even involved anything called the national interest. Julian [Assange] is not a U.S. citizen, he is an Australian citizen. He was not operating on U.S. soil, he was in Iceland. The Pentagon Papers conversation took place entirely within the national matrix, and the WikiLeaks conversation took place outside of it.” Groups win; nation-states lose.

…

PayPal may have obviated the theoretical need for banks—but its investors still need a bank to cash their checks from PayPal, so no technoescape actually takes place. Consider the role that PayPal has played in the WikiLeaks saga: yes, it was initially a great tool to raise money for Assange’s cause, but the moment WikiLeaks took on the US government, PayPal ran away from Assange (freezing WikiLeaks’s account) in much the same way that Peter Thiel wants to run from reality. Likewise, as of July 2012, PayPal had revised how it deals with file-sharing sites, requiring any sites that want to use PayPal to solicit membership fees from users to ensure that they host no illegal files.

…

The problem here is that Clay Shirky believes that global affairs now work according to the demands of “the Internet,” while, in reality, the story is much more complicated. A conversation about the national interest between the transglobal network that is (was?) WikiLeaks and the US government actually did take place. In fact, according to at least some credible reports, WikiLeaks did offer the State Department the opportunity to review the diplomatic cables and highlight what should be redacted—an opportunity that the ugly and messy hierarchy of the State Department reportedly declined (Mark Stephens, one of Assange’s numerous ex-lawyers, once claimed that two cables were actually removed at their request).

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases