Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Hate Mail - Why Are You So Mad At Sam Seder and Michael Brooks - Why Do You Hate Assange

I have written enough about that.  Instead of going into it, here's an excerpt of a piece I wrote in August, 2016:

In the mean time, here are some instances in which Julian Assange, complaining about the time and expense of "vetting" the stuff he has used and uses to gain fame and, I'd guess, fortune for himself, including the private information they or their contributors have stolen in the past.

WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill.

In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial, or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.

‘‘They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,’’ said a Saudi man who said he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. ‘‘If the family of my wife saw this . . . Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.’’

WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy, even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site’s allies.

Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn’t immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks’ stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material ‘‘involving war, spying and corruption’’ into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a ‘‘giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.’’

The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the US Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s governing party, and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records.

The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children, or refugees.

‘‘This has nothing to do with politics or corruption,’’ said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document

‘‘This is illegal what has happened,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It is illegal!’’.


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Wikileaks is a bunch of irresponsible thugs, tools of the Putin regime (about which they don't seem to reveal much, Assange is a massive a-hole and so are his supporters.  I don't recall who the journalist was, as I recall it was someone in the Guardian, who reported about a dinner with journalists where Assange had it pointed out that he could get people killed with some of the stuff he was planning on publishing which contained names of people, as I recall it was journalists, who had worked with western entities, naming them would make them targets for assassination.  Assange said he thought they deserved to be killed, shocking the journalists.   If that's Sam Seders and Michael Brooks' idea of journalism, they're dead to me. 

I hope the scumbucket rots in prison. 

Update:  I found it

You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.


As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.

David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.

Yeah, I hope the scumbag rots in jail.  Sam and Micheal are chumps, so are the rest of his supporters who mistake him for a journalist. 

Update 2:  Also:

James Ball joined [Wikileaks] and thought that in his own small way he was making the world a better place. He realised that WikiLeaks was not what it seemed when an associate of Assange – a stocky man with a greying moustache, who called himself "Adam" – asked if he could pull out everything the State Department documents "had on the Jews". Ball discovered that "Adam" was Israel Shamir, a dangerous crank who uses six different names as he agitates among the antisemitic groups of the far right and far left. As well as signing up to the conspiracy theories of fascism, Shamir was happy to collaborate with Belarus's decayed Brezhnevian dictatorship. Leftwing tyranny, rightwing tyranny, as long as it was anti-western and anti-Israel, Shamir did not care.

Nor did Assange. He made Shamir WikiLeaks's representative in Russia and eastern Europe. Shamir praised the Belarusian dictatorship. He compared the pro-democracy protesters beaten and imprisoned by the KGB to football hooligans. On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the "organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones" who had protested against rigged elections.

The proof of Assange and Shamir's treachery was strong but not conclusive. Given Shamir's history, there were reasonable grounds for fearing the worst. But even now, you cannot show beyond reasonable doubt that the state has charged this pro-democracy politician or that liberal artist with treason or collaborating with a foreign power because WikiLeaks named names.


One can say with certainty, however, that Assange's involvement with Shamir is enough to discredit his claim that he published the documents in full because my colleagues on the Guardian inadvertently revealed a link to a site he was meant to have taken down. WikiLeaks put the cables on the web last month with evident relish, and ever since I have been wondering who would be its first incontrovertible victim. China appeared a promising place to look. The authorities and pro-regime newspapers are going through the names of hundreds of dissidents and activists from ethnic minorities. To date, there have been no arrests, although in China, as elsewhere, the chilling effect WikiLeaks has spread has caused critics of the communists to bite their tongues.

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