Who does this hurt in the UK, Cameron and his dad? Two people not up for re-election
just had a great laughāthanks of that. the world is pretty messed up when it seems reasonable that some secret grudge against the Icelandic prime minister seems to justify a leak the size of the moon.
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Would the CIA even want the possibility of the Pirate Party giving Snowmen and Assange citizenship?
And donāt forget a certain British Prime Minister and his father.
āPanamaā is arguably the long con, when it comes to US-wants-access-to-the-region. The heroic freedom fighters (with a little help from the US navy) who founded this proud and totally legitimate nation state for reasons that stretched deep into the blood and soil of the place only popped into existence when our ability to get a good deal on a canal route was looking problematic. Merely doing a little clandestine shoving of the established governement would be softy stuff by comparison.
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Well, the US has sources that claim he has embezzled around $200 billion, so a leak that seems to show it is under $2 billion is going to make the average Russian think heās rather honest.
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There are no U.S. names on the list because Delaware exists. Why would you try to hide money offshore when you can easily hide it close to home?
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Having a hard-to-dismiss member of The Free World grant asylum would be much more awkward in PR terms than the current ālol, heās obviously a hypocrite you should totally ignore because he cares so much about freedom and stuff but hangs out in Russia with Putin!!!ā stuff; it would actually be really interesting to see whether or not Snowden, Assange, or their like would be able to take them up on it: Itās a matter of record that weāve been willing to do bag 'n drag jobs even when the country we are infiltrating is an ally and agrees with us on the matter we are bagging and dragging on(the case that comes to mind is when the CIA abducted someone we thought was a terrorist right from underneath the Italian security forces actively investigating his suspected terrorist activities; we didnāt even disagree on the matter of the guy being bad news; and we still went behind Italyās back on the subject).
While it has a great many deficiencies, moral and practical, Russia is almost certainly a whole lot scarier to a prospective CIA black-bag team than Iceland is. US spooks would probably get at least a soft-pedaled trial if they were caught abducting or murdering within the jurisdiction of a US ally; the domestic blowback of pure impunity would be too high to make that an option; but the odds of getting in and out before local law enforcement could get you would be better; and the odds of actually being treated like a cold war spy or invited for specially formulated tea certainly arenāt as high.
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There is also the issue of the CIA worsening the publicās perception of the mega wealthy-- how much does that benefit US interests, itās not like the US public is going to think āoh, they only do that in Iceland and Uganda and other out-of-the-way places. . . .ā
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As others have noted, itās more probably because this particular company happened not to have many US clients. The notion that Mossack Fonesca was the only company in the world doing this sort of thing is the absurd bit. I thought it was hilarious that the UK tax authorities responded to the Panama Papers not by demanding āhow about declaring all the business you do with questionable off-shore entities?ā but merely ādid you deal with this one specific company that happens to have been exposed, not that weāre going to do anything anyway?ā
On the other hand, the conspiracy theory that says that it was about warning David Cameron off attempting to reform this deeply broken system seems superficially attractive, but itās entirely possible that it may have the opposite effect. We shall see.
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Question: Why is Rob Schneider in that photo? Is he working for the CIA now?
Hereās a better photo of himā¦
Makes more sense than most conspiracy theories. It catches the president of Ukraine, The king Of Saudi Arabia, casts doubt on Cameron and puts his oligarch friends on notice if ever they think of turning on him.
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No one has suggested the Reverse Vampires yet?
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Plus, when you actually do have actual impunity; it isnāt always a bad thing to āget caughtā. Careful balance is required between things that cause you to lose face/support/face popular discontent and things that inspire a sense of dread and hopelessness in your opponents by being blatantly illicit, made public, and still totally incapable of penetrating your impunity. Itās the rule-of-law equivalent of the āOur weapons are useless!!!ā scene standard in alien-invasion and monster movies.
(Like the Litvinenko tea party incident: itās possible that that was supposed to remain under wraps; and they seriously underestimated the ability and/or willingness of the UK to chase down traces of radioisotopes all over the place; but whether it was a mistaken reveal or never intended to be permanently hidden, āYeah, evidence is enormously strong that I had a guy poisoned with a novel high intensity alpha emitter right in the capital of a NATO member state: he died in agony; absolutely nothing whatsoever happened to me; what does that mean to you?āā¦has a certain persuasive edge to it.)
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Their site and client portal were both running ancient and highly insecure versions of Wordpress and Drupal respectively. Their mailserver was on the same server as the websites. It was total amateur hour. Anybody with rudimentary lamp hacking skills could have exploited that server and dumped everything.
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Based on the evidence available, Mossack Fonseca had atrocious information security. Eight-year-old Drupal and WordPress installations with no updates. From a technical standpoint, this type of operation falls well within the skillset of a moderately skilled individual. No need for a nation state. The only wrinkle would have been data exfiltration. Patience and a fat enough pipe would have solved that, but 2.6TB over a year is not insignificant.
Rather circumstantial evidence pointing to the CIA ā¦ or FSB ā¦ or any other nation state. Why not blame the Icelandic Pirate Party? They seem to have benefitted more than any other entity to this point and surely could find the know-how for such an operation.
As far as motivation, there are plenty of precursors to this form of hacktivism.
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Funny how some people are debating about whistleblower conspiracy theories when the whole frigginā offshore banking system is a conspiracy.
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Your theory depends on the ultra wealthy having some concept of āenoughā
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ā¦but thatās what they want you to think!
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