Cryptome.org – It is often reported that John Young (founder of Cryptome.org) accused Wikileaks during its formation of being associated with the CIA and/or George Soros. Not correct, he said its lofty goals and secret procedures mimic those authoritarian meddlers, which remains correct. Here are his statements and Wikileaks acknowledgement followed by predicted competitor backlash:

Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2007 06:58:04 -0800

To:
From: John Young

[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.
Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‚WL‘.
This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer
and plenty of backbone.]

Announcing a $5 million fund-raising goal by July will kill this effort. It
makes WL appear to be a Wall Street scam. This amount could not be
needed so soon except for suspect purposes.

Soros will kick you out of the office with such over-reaching. Foundations
are flooded with big talkers making big requests flaunting famous names
and promising spectacular results.

I’d say the same about the alleged 1.1 million documents ready for
leaking. Way too many to be believable without evidence. I don’t believe
the number. So far, one document, of highly suspect provenance.

Instead, explain what funding needs there are and present a schedule
for their need, avoid generalities and lump sums. Explain how the funds
will be managed and protected against fraud and theft.

Instead, operate on a shoe-string for a few months, best, for a couple
of years, establish WL bonafides by publishing a credible batch of
documents for testing public feedback and criticism. Show how to
handle the heat of doubt and condemnation. Use that to support
fund-raising.

At moment there is no reason to believe WL can deliver on its
promises. Big talk no action, the skeptics say.

BTW, the biggest crooks brag overmuch of how ethical their operations
are. Avoid ethical promises, period, they’ve been used too often to fleece
victims. Demonstrate sustained ethical behavior, don’t preach/peddle it.

__________

Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2007 07:21:34 -0800
To:
From: John Young

[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.
Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‚WL‘.
This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer
and plenty of backbone.]

Addendum:

The CIA would be the most likely $5M funder. Soros is suspected
of being a conduit for black money to dissident groups racketeering
for such payola.

Now it may be that that is the intention of WL because its behavior
so far fits the pattern.

If fleecing the CIA is the purpose, I urge setting a much higher
funding goal, in the $100M range and up. The US intel agencies
are awash in funds they cannot spend fast enough to keep the
Congressional spigot wide open. Academics, dissidents, companies,
spy contractors, other nation’s spy agencies, whole countries, are
falling over themselves to tap into this bountiful flood. But competition
is fierce, and accusations of deception are raging even as the
fleecers work in concert.

Chinese dissidents — a brand name among many — are already
reaping huge benefits from covert funding from the US and from
the PRC, along with others in the former Soviets, in Africa and
South America, inside the US, UK and Europe, in the Middle East
and the Koreas, who know how to double-cross ditzy-rich Dads
and Moms.

In solidarity to fuck em all.

__________

From:
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2007 11:26:00 -0500
To:

[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.
Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‚WL‘.
This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer
and plenty of backbone.]

Advice noted. We’ll polish up our sheers for cutting fleeces golden.
__________

[This message was not distributed by the closed wikileaks list.]

To: Wikileaks
From: John Young
Subject: Re: [WL] Funding / who is on this list.
Date: Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2007 11:47:00 -0500

Cryptome is publishing the contents of this list, and how I was induced to serve as US person for registration.

Wikileaks is a fraud:

[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.
Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‚WL‘.
This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer
and plenty of backbone.]

Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy.

Read all @ Cryptome.org

This article was first published @ Members of the Faculty of the College of Ontopoetic Machines

Following „Twelve theses on WikiLeaks“ by Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens.

1. Wikileaks exposes the slippery moralism of global capital.

The corporate abdication of non-discrimination prefigures more scrutiny of online activity. Visa, Amazon, Mastercard, Tableau, PayPal, PostFinance, and EveryDNS: each severed their relationship with one or more aspects of the WikiLeaks organization due to technicalities. None were served with legal documents requiring that they stop supporting „illegal“ activity; rather, some caved due to vague public and private requests by functionaries within US government offices.

Yet, these business have no moral qualms as to provide similar services to the Ku Klux clan, homophobic sites and just about anything else. As to the decision to cut Wikileaks off they justified their actions via the legalese of their Terms of Service (ToS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), contracts that we all accept as the necessary evil of using free services online. AUPs, once the interest of legal scholars or small actors who fell afoul of them, now become the prime means for ending of services to the undesirable. (Recall, for example, Facebooks‘ threat of legal action against the seppukoo project.

This is a refrain that continues to haunt the online space; however it was never seen with such vehemence as with WikiLeaks.) Yet in a truism, this does not only eliminate the possibility of online activity, for the actions of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal prevent the flow of electronic currency to WikiLeaks, requiring the organization to ask for either bank transfers (that are prohibitively expensive for people in the US) or paper money orders sent to a physical address. These actions by financial institutions foreground the linkage between online activities and their real reliance on forms of money that are still tied to large corporations.

As well, the use of contractual language to engage in corporate censorship enables what is prohibited by US Constitutional guarantees, among other legal safeguards elsewhere in the world. Given the tiered nature of the internet—in that a hosting provider purchases bandwidth from a separate company, that probably purchases DNS service from a separate company—means that any activity can be forced offline by any intermediary if found to be in violation of the ToS. While you may have legal recourse via a civil suit, such an undertaking is oftentimes impossible due to the legal costs involved and the vastly unequal power differential.

2. Wikileaks draws on the tense affair between the antiauthoritarian ethos of hacker culture and the authoritarian logic of capital, also known as neoliberalism.

WikiLeaks found a characteristically computational way around their hosting problems, drawing on an unorganized group of volunteers to provide mirrors of the site (http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html). This strategy of providing mirrors for content hearkens back to 1990s internet culture, where the practice of setting up FTP mirrors was commonplace (hacker culture itself is situated in the 1940s, see Steven Levy).

Mirroring mitigates the impact of corporate censorship somewhat, but is likely to be impractical on a large scale in the long-term, especially for all of the worthwhile projects that can be removed by intermediaries. Nevertheless, this example of mirroring is an interesting case of hackers relaxing their security mindset for what they perceive as a greater good. Setting up a WikiLeaks mirror requires the administrator to allow a member of WikiLeaks remote access to their server in order to upload new files as needed; this is made possible using public-key encryption techniques, the focus of much hacker attention in the 1990s.

Usually system administrators would never open their servers for unknown people to upload files. But there seems to be a belief here that the sysadmins of WikiLeaks, whomever they are, will not abuse their power and will only upload what they say they will upload. There is something here that deserves greater scrutiny, especially in light of what Mathieu O’Neil calls „hacker charismatic authority“. Most studies consider this as a form of authority over people; in this case, however, the authority is exercised amongst sysadmins, enabling them to open their machines to the unknown WikiLeaks administrators.

3. Wikileaks shows that any system is vulnerable to infiltration.

WikiLeaks is highly collaborative, and not only as a result of the recent mirroring activity. Indeed, the project is only possible due to their collaboration with the individuals and groups providing the content to be leaked. Throughout the recent consternation over „Cablegate“, the hundreds, if not thousands, of other people who have put their lives on the line to pass documents to WikiLeaks have unfortunately been forgotten, Bradley Manning excluded. To ignore these people is to make a grave analytical error. Be thankful that we do not know their names, for if we did, they would be in immediate danger.

4. Wikileaks demonstrates that the human ‚factor‘ is the weak spot of networks.

The „Cablegate“ release also shows the importance of having collaborators within governmental and military institutions. If we assume that Manning is the source of the diplomatic and military cables—and this has not been proven yet—then we can see how individuals within these organizations are disgusted with the conduct of the war. This is of a piece with other projects such as Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Veteran’s Book Project that aim to present the personal side of the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a way of organizing public outrage.

Do not discount the power of solidarity with disgruntled soldiers. We only have to recall the Abril Revolution in 1974 in Portugal, where the military supported the peaceful transition from the Salazar dictatorship, to understand how important it is to have military forces on one’s side. Recall as well that the main technical tool used to anonymize submissions to WikiLeaks, Tor (The Onion Router), came out of a US Naval Research Laboratory project to protect clandestine activities overseas. In fact, members of the military are some of the most vocal opponents of current attempts in the US to require person-level attribution of data packets online.

5. WikiLeaks is a classic example of using media as a tool for de-dehumanizing.

The actions of Anonymous on the websites of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, PostFinance, and others are in a lineage with the FloodNet by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. While many mainstream media sources see these as „attacks“, others, such as the editors of The Guardian, realize them to be „non-violent action or civil disobedience“. We do not want to discount how easy it is for the media and authorities to misconstrue these actions as illegal denial of service attacks, as a 16-year old Dutch teenager is finding out right now, or as the EDT and b.a.n.g. lab found out earlier this year. Nevertheless, we are seeing a certain maturation of this technique as acceptable to others outside of the net.art community.

Furthermore, the deliberation process of Anonymous prefigures future forms of activist collaboration online, subject to the caveats mentioned above. Discussions happened across a diversity of networked media, both old and new (IRC, Twitter, Blogspot, PiratePad, etc.). Orderly discussion under the control of a leader was not the norm, as individuals simultaneously put forth their own suggestions to have them edited into or out of existence. As Gabriella Coleman wrote in her analysis of their planning, they appeared to be „seasoned political activists“, not simply „script-kiddies“ as they are described by both the mainstream media and other hacker organizations such as 2600. Maybe there is something those of us interested in new forms of organization can learn from these predominantly 16-24-year olds.

6. Wikileaks suggests an understanding of a notion of networks as media assemblages.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the recent Wikileaks phenomenon has to do with what it portends for future networked tendencies. Given what we stated in anti-thesis 1, we ought to pay more attention to the movement of information outside of Internet-based networks. There is a tendency to conflate network sharing of data with the Internet proper, but this is not a necessary condition. Indeed, there are multitudinous methods of arranging networks of humans and things that do not rely on corporate or government controlled conduits for the passage of bits.

Consider, for example, the host of artistic projects in this space just from the past couple of years: netless, Feral Trade, deadswap, Dead Drops, Fluid Nexus, Autonet, etc. These projects rely on assemblages of humans and infrastructure in motion. And, they rely in part on a prior agreement among participants with respect to protocols to follow. This is already at work in the Wikileaks project with respect to their main members. Only they know who they are; we are in the dark, and rightly so. This is an application of Hakim Bey’s concept of Immediatism, updated to take into account a certain mongrel of immediate contact and networked activities.

Additionally, the projects just mentioned foreground a certain notion of slowness that works to counteract the notions of „information overload“. If data transport relies on the motion of humans from one location to another, this will require a particular patience, producing a form of slowness. Nevertheless, this should not be understood as a pastoral call as voiced by certain proponents of, for example, the Slow Food Movement. Rather it is a way to reinvigorate thought and practice regarding human-scale machinic assemblages. What remains is the difficult and challenging work of producing long-term, permanent ad-hoc networks.

Lukas Vogelsang – Man kann die Anstrengungen von Wikileaks, oder vor allem von Julian Assange gut oder schlecht finden. Immherhin bewegt dieser Mann mit seinem Team ziemlich viel. Und wenn Hillary Clinton meint, dass Wikileaks nicht nur Amerika, sondern der gesamten internationalen Gemeinschaft schade, so stimmt das natürlich nur halb.

Assange ist ein moderner Terrorist geworden, der statt mit Gewalt, mit der Wahrheit kämpft. Und deswegen wird er wohl eines Tages getötet.

Diese vermeindliche Gemeinschaft ist ja auch nur eine Art Geheimbund der Mächtigen, welche versuchen, die Welt so zu führen, wie SIE es für richtig befinden. Da spielt die Wahrheit nur halb eine Rolle – die Funktion ist wichtiger. Und dieses Verhalten ist ja grundsätzlich in der Politik gang und gäbe – was eben die spürbare Trennung von den Staatsmächten von der Bevölkerung immer wieder beweist. Natürlich lieben es Beamte nicht, wenn man ihnen auf die Finger haut – und genau dies ist mit der Veröffentlichung der zig tausend Dokumenten geschehen. Bisher verlief doch alles gut? Wenn man wollte, könnte man politisch auf diesem Planeten viel verändern. Aber man will nicht und verkündet deswegen lieber Lügen, als dass man sich ernsthaft einer Sache stellt. Dass es dabei um Macht und Geld geht, aber natürlich auch um Kompromisse, damit Macht und Geld weiterhin fliessen können, ist logisch. Etwas anderes treibt den Menschen anschenend nicht an (Sex mal ausgenommen).

Barack Obama wäre eigentlich der Mann, der das Signal zu einer bessern Welt gesendet hat. Er müsste eigentlich die Veröffentlichungen gutheissen – sind sie doch der von ihm vertretenen Wahrheit näher. Doch leider kann auch er nicht machen was er will. Seine Wahlschlappe vor kurzem hat gezeigt, dass er mit dem Wahrheitskurs schlecht wegkommt. Und dies – groteskerweise – von der Bevölkerung bewilligt. Nicht erstaunlich: Der Mensch will die Wahrheit nicht – sondern sucht die Lüge. Nur in der Lüge fühlen wir uns anscheinend wohl genug, um überleben zu wollen. Wir trinken, rauchen, nehmen Drogen, fahren Autos – auch zu schnell, betrügen, bereichern uns und fördern in jeder Hinsicht alles, was unser Ego, aber nicht die Gemeinschaft stärkt. Wir töten sogar im Glauben, Gutes zu tun. Mit Worten wie Sinn, Moral, Verantwortung, Teilen, Gemeinschaft… verjagen wir jede und jeden. Erstaunt es da, dass ein Julian Assange als Einzelkämpfer gejagt wird? Nein. Assange ist ein moderner Terrorist geworden, der statt mit Gewalt, mit der Wahrheit kämpft. Und deswegen wird er wohl eines Tages getötet. Eine Geschichte eines modernen Märtyrers.

Eine grosse Chance hätte jetzt die Schweiz, sich in dieser Sache neutral zu zeigen und Assange politisches Asyl zu geben. Da wir ja eh schon mit ramponiertem Ruf in der Weltengemeinschaft stehen, können wir damit nur punkten. Allerdings sind wir etwas angeschwärzt, denn die Fichenaffären haben im eigenen Land bereits gezeigt, wie “neutral” wir sind und wie viele “Geheimbünde” es hier gibt. Trotzdem, ein Assange in der Schweiz würde mich mit Stolz erfüllen. Wenn nicht wir selber, so wenigstens würden wir mit einem Teil beitragen, dass Demokratie und Gerechtigkeit, Wahrheit und Respekt in der “internationalen Gemeinschaft” wieder ins Vocabulair aufgenommen wird. Und mit der Wahrheit wären wir alle sicher verletzlicher, aber menschlicher und damit dem Leben näher.

Dieser Artikel erschien beim berner ensuite Kulturmagazin

Sibel Edmonds – I have been waiting. I have been searching and reading. I have been waiting impatiently while searching and reading the initial pile of recently released Wikileaks’ documents, specifically those pertaining to Turkey. I have received many e-mails asking me impatiently to comment and provide my analyses on this latest international exposé. I am being impatiently patient in doing so, and here is a brief explanation as to why:

There’s so much I don’t know. I don’t know how real this entire deal actually is. If truly ‘real,’ I don’t know how far and deep the involved documents actually go. Many of my trusted friends tell me it is indeed real. A few trusted friends and advisors are ringing cautionary bells. I am truly pro transparency, and considering the abusive nature and use of secrecy and classification, I am mostly pro leak when the information in question involves criminal deeds and intentions.

Sibel Edmonds: So far, some of the first cache of the recently released documents is strongly pointing towards Iran, and that too is bothering the heck out of me.

During the previous release (Afghan Files), in my gut I was a bit bothered by the direction of some of these released documents – pointing towards Iran – which was generously milked by the US mainstream media. But then again, that was only based on some gut feeling, and I didn’t want to pour out analyses and opinion solely based on ‘some gut feeling.’ So far, some of the first cache of the recently released documents is strongly pointing towards Iran, and that too is bothering the heck out of me. But again, in my gut, and that alone is not sufficient to make me sit and analyze and interpret. So this is why I’ve been impatiently patient, waiting for more. Meanwhile, while I am restraining myself and being uncharacteristically patient, I am going to go on record and tell you what I expect to see if this whole deal proves to be completely genuine, and if the obtained files go as far as they say they go.

I prepared a long list of items (documented diplomatic correspondence) I know to be included in diplomatic communications which took place between the mid 90s and early 2000s. I know I have a fairly large credit due with Santa since I’ve never made a wish list for him; ever. He owes me. He knows it and I know it. While that justifies my very long list (now you know I am old!!) I am going to exercise a little bit of fairness and present my list in manageable quantities and intervals. I hope my Wikileaks Santa has ‘word/phrase search’ technology at his disposal, because that would make his task of sorting and finding my requested items a far easier task. Okay, here it goes Wikileaks Santa, my first list for you, may your immensely large goodies bag contain these items highly beneficial for not only me but many others here and abroad:
Read the Boiling Frogs treasures @ Boiling Frogs Post