I don’t think that’s the issue here. I’ve been a fairly consistent “sunshine” person when it comes to government operation where my attitude is that a need for classification of secrecy must be demonstrated before something can be classified, and then the government shouldn’t abuse that discretion.
That being said, campaign operations are not government operations. They are not subject to the same set of sunshine criteria, because I don’t want HRC so much as using a Bic from the State Department to sign an autograph. hillaryclinton.com is genuinely none of our business because we don’t pay for it, and especially because it doesn’t seem to contain any government classified information. That would be a serious concern. Instead we’re just getting a lot inside baseball and pragmatic political campaign calculations.
You’re being fooled by information asymmetry. The Russians have no interest in hacking and revealing Trump’s indiscretions. You think a dedicated state actor can’t hack their outdated servers? They absolutely can.
My apologies, I didn’t take you literally before. Yes, I can see how it might be difficult to figure out what they’re doing if they decide to cut off all communication with the public.
I guess what inspired my post was that I noticed that most places started referring to wikileaks info about HRC as “stolen”. As far as I can tell, both candidates are pretty deeply tied to Russian investors or worse.
You can tell a lot of things that others can’t. I’d ask for a citation here but I know I know, it’s something your read this one time, somewhere, and you’ll be back with a citation… … …
Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort seems to be pretty closely tied to Russian investors
With the Clintons, I guess you can start with her campaign manager
Skolkova
What used to be our Uranium reserves
Speaking fees in lieu of old fashioned bribes
It goes on. The hardest thing is finding objective sources. I am sure that at least some of the allegations on both sides are BS. but if even 10% are true, that is too much. I really hate the idea of any high office holder having such entanglements.
It’s been roughly 7 years since Wikileaks embarrassed Bush with the “Collateral Murder” releases. Assange & Co. have repeatedly outed Democrats since that time. This makes proper members of our refined, aethetically distinguished intelligentsia quite angry. Hence the many furious, waspish comments here over the past few days about Assange; the careless libel that will continue even if he is cleared by the Swedes. People who deeply don’t give a shit about relict Cold War rivalries are in a rare snit over Wikileaks and Russian meddling just now. Because, you see, they are ‘meddling’ on behalf of the Wrong People.
Assange is doing what he’s done for the past 10+ years. He is embarrassing the powerful with remarkably accurate data dumps. The Right sort of People get just furious when this happens to them and theirs. I mean… they are so much better than that. How could he!
Seeing this hypocrisy clearly and discussing it publicly is not a defense of Assange. It is just an expression of contempt for the people who tolerated Assange when he shat on Bush, and who hate him now because he inconveniences Obama, Clinton and their colleagues.
Times being what they are, I wonder how long before someone packages up a whole bunch of Onion-type bollocks and sends it to Wikileaks to breathlessly release…
[quote=“Max_Blancke, post:21, topic:87873”]
It is interesting how wikileaks are the good guys, exposing corruption and evil, as long as the subject is Chelsea Manning, or the TPP, The Panama Papers, John Brennan, NSA, Sony, and the US Military.[/quote]
I was a big fan of Bill Cosby until I learned that he was a serial rapist.
It isn’t necessarily hypocritical to support some leaks and not others. The difference between the Sony leaks, which exposed information from many innocent people, and the latest leaks, which are clearly politically motivated, are certainly in a different class from leaks which expose government attempts to conduct policy in the dark (TPP) or war crimes or details of an industry that exists to suck money out of public coffers (Panama Papers).
It’s a little different than that. When Assange came on the scene he claimed to be a brave truth teller shining light on the world’s governments to keep them all honest. Many people though that was excellent. Then a few years ago Wikileaks released a mail trove related to the Syrian civil war that had been edited by its Russian source (presumably an intelligence agency using the data they released to Wikileaks to further an agenda in Syria). Knowing that Wikileaks was manipulated then, and now seeing Wikileaks’ entire agenda this election season be targeted towards manipulating US elections with data we now know Russian intelligence supplied them, doesn’t that shift one’s perspective quite a lot? Given the fact that they’re being manipulated by Russian intelligence agencies (and perhaps others) they aren’t a brave truth teller shining light on the world’s governments to keep them all honest. Not at all. They’re truth tellers telling truths that are useful towards the goals of some Russian (and perhaps other) government agencies. They’re not speaking truth to power, they’re another voice power can be projected through.
Your contempt is stunning. You will find fewer elite intelligentsia if you return to RedState, you know. As for changing attitudes about Assange, why is that hard to understand? He exposed serious war crimes and some people, myself included, think that was important and necessary. Then he started doxxing people and uncritically publicizing material received from Russian intelligence, and some people, myself included, thought that was despicable.
A few years ago they looked like crusaders for justice. Now they look like they will do whatever it takes to harm the US. Does that make sense?
Can you elaborate on that? I did a quick search and did not find any mention of manipulated syria files released by wikileaks. I found a wikipedia page for the “Syria Files” but there is no mention of them being edited. Are you referring to a different release?
FWIW, I think my main objection to wikileaks right now is their deliberate pushing up against the election deadline. It takes a while to digest any serious disclosures, but the closer we get to election day (and early voting has already started in many states) the more likely people are to vote based on sensationalism rather than rationality. Sensationalism is good for wikileaks promoting themselves, but not good for a healthy democracy.
This is interesting and might point to a new type of espionage in the works - the planting of documents and allowing them to be leaked to groups like wikileaks. Though once the Soviet Union collapsed, we quickly figured out that much of our intelligence about what was happening in the Kremlin over the years was actually wrong. So, misdirection isn’t new, I think just this particular kind of middle man to serve up the misdirection is (and the mode of releasing info).
I’d think this is why having someone who is familiar with various intelligence agencies, how they operate, and where they might try and influence a source of leaks like wikileaks is important. We also can’t rule out that the CIA or NSA isn’t doing some of the same stuff - doctoring information and letting it out there for groups like wikileaks.[quote=“nemomen, post:36, topic:87873”]
They’re not speaking truth to power, they’re another voice power can be projected through.
[/quote]
especially…