With their continued publishing of what we are supposed to believe are John Podesta's e-mails, I want the Obama administration to start putting pressure on the Ecuadoran government to expel Julian Assange from their embassy. I want to see him made available for the possible prosecutions in Sweden, then I want him extradited to the United States to face charges here.
Assange is doing far worse than what the NSA has been accused of in publishing stolen e-mails by John Podesta, a private citizen of the United States, in order to influence American elections. He is doing, before the eyes of the world, what the most paranoid fantasies encouraged by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and Oliver Stone have worried COULD happen if the NSA did to us what it is now, just about certain, Russian intelligence has, in fact, done.
Back when the Edward Snowden story was hot I pointed out, over and over again, that anyone who believes their biggest worry about online communications being hacked came from the NSA or the FBI were deluded. The same communications that they could have monitored under legal restriction HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AVAILABLE TO BE STOLEN BY ANY FOREIGN GOVERNMENT WITH THE MEANS TO HACK THEM. The United States government is probably one of the least likely to violate your privacy because the United States isn't a fascist dictatorship as so many other countries with high-tech capabilities are. And now we see one of those countries has an intelligence apparatus which is doing that, working with the hero of the paranoids club, Julian Assange, to publish that information to throw an election to someone as bad as Donald Trump. Assange is part of an operation that is reminiscent of the worst of what the CIA did in third-world and even some European countries, things that the American Congress investigated in the wake of Watergate. Which, in the American system led to legal restrictions that are not in place in other countries.
The paranoia whipped up in the wake of Edward Snowden's theft of massive amounts of stuff the NSA had collected - despite some real concerns - largely based on some pretty transparent foolishness. When you send stuff over the internet, even when you just allow your computer access to the internet, you are vulnerable to hacking and organized crime and criminal governments around the world have some of the most sophisticated hackers working for them. Even if the American government didn't do a single thing by way of monitoring internet use other governments entirely outside of democratic control will violate the privacy we have been duped into believing we had.
John Podesta and, even more so, the people who sent him the stuff that the Putin government, entities such as Assange's organized crime outfit and the Trump campaign are using to try to get their guy elected, they were stupid to send the kind of stuff they did over the internet. Unless there is some unhackable means of encryption used - if there is any such thing - they would have been far better off using the U. S. Postal Service to send anything they didn't want read by unwanted eyes. The U.S. Mail can't be accessed even by the federal authorities without a judge issuing a warrant. And it's pretty well untouchable by foreign governments and organized criminals. The United States government has SOME restrictions as to what it can do and get away with, those others who can hack anything you make available online, don't have any.
If it comes to a contest of trusting the United States government or trusting Assange and his ilk, well, I never voted to make Assange commissar of information.
My standard of practice is to still not put anything in e-mail I wouldn't want to see on a billboard.
ReplyDeleteI may be more blunt with my closest friends, but even them I'm more cautious than I was when I typed letters and put them in envelopes. It's a reflex more than anything. Sharing letters is still considered improper, if not downright taboo.
Sharing e-mails, or for that matter hacking e-mails, is somehow considered not only appropriate, but a public duty. I don't understand it, but this is the brave new world we have created.