You did it again, Dave!

Last week Green­wald report­ed that Snow­den had dis­trib­uted all of the thou­sands of doc­u­ments to mul­ti­ple par­ties. But the par­ties could­n’t access the files because they were encrypt­ed. Snow­den made arrange­ments so that, should any­thing hap­pen to him, the third par­ties get full access to the encrypt­ed files. Just yes­ter­day, Julian Assange told the world that all of Snow­den’s leaks will be dis­closed no mat­ter what hap­pens to him. So while it’s a safe bet that Wik­ileaks has the encrypt­ed files, you have to won­der if Snow­den’s “arrange­ment” to have the encryp­tion key released should some­thing hap­pen to him involved giv­ing Wik­ileaks the key to act as the dis­trib­u­tor. Unless it’s some sort of auto­mat­ed thing (maybe Snow­den has to update some­thing peri­od­i­cal­ly to reset the encryp­tion?). Any­ways, it’s look­ing like all of Snow­den’s doc­u­ments are com­ing out at some point. It’s now guar­an­teed:

Wik­ileaks founder says Snow­den info will keep get­ting pub­lished

By Deb­o­rah Charles

WASHINGTON | Sun Jun 30, 2013 1:39pm EDT

(Reuters) — Wik­iLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Sun­day that Edward Snow­den made sure that the infor­ma­tion he took about U.S. sur­veil­lance pro­grams will con­tin­ue to be pub­lished regard­less of what hap­pens to the for­mer U.S. spy agency con­trac­tor.

Assange crit­i­cized the Unit­ed States for revok­ing Snow­den’s pass­port and said it would not stop the clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion tak­en by the 30-year-old for­mer con­trac­tor from get­ting out.

“Look, there is no stop­ping the pub­lish­ing process at this stage,” Assange said in an inter­view with ABC’s “This Week” tele­vi­sion show. “Great care has been tak­en to make sure that Mr. Snow­den can’t be pres­sured by any state to stop the pub­li­ca­tion process.”

He did not direct­ly respond when asked if Wik­iLeaks was in pos­ses­sion of the files.

Last week, Glenn Green­wald, the Guardian jour­nal­ist who first pub­lished the clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion released by Snow­den, said Snow­den had made encrypt­ed copies of his files and dis­trib­uted them in case any­thing hap­pened to him.

Green­wald told The Dai­ly Beast that the peo­ple in pos­ses­sion of these files “can­not access them yet because they are high­ly encrypt­ed and they do not have the pass­words.” But Green­wald said “if any­thing hap­pens at all to Edward Snow­den, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”

...

@Pterrafractyl–

The tor­rent is prov­ing more than a lit­tle chal­leng­ing to cov­er.

One of the MANY things that seems to have elud­ed the “guardians of free­dom and civ­il lib­er­ty” in the press and blo­gos­phere is how in Hell Assange and com­pa­ny have been able to do what they have done.

Assange is holed up in the Ecuado­ri­an embassy in the U.K!

How is all this being done?

How did Fast Eddie get around in Hong Kong and then to Moscow?

Not only Snow­den’s activ­i­ties but Wik­iLeaks’ actions as well are VERY obvi­ous­ly intel­li­gence oper­a­tions.

It is less clear who exact­ly is zoom­ing who, here, but all of the insti­tu­tion­al assig­na­tions go the far-right and fas­cist ele­ments. Is Fast Eddie a BND asset inside CIA and stick­ing it to NSA, Oba­ma, U.S., U.K for CIA/Underground Reich?

In future posts, we will be exam­in­ing this against the back­ground of the BND/Underground Reich.

Stay tuned!

Best,

Dave

I would still like to know 2 things. 1) How, after only 4 weeks on the job, Snow­den could deter­mine what doc­u­ments he need­ed, where they were, and what the doc­u­ments real­ly cov­ered. I’m sor­ry, but I’ve had qua­si tech­ni­cal posi­tions in which I had to access doc­u­ments to find answers to my ques­tions about sys­tem devel­op­ment, fea­tures, etc and it’s a chal­lenge (for many logis­ti­cal rea­sons, much less addi­tion­al secu­ri­ty con­sid­er­a­tions) to find the most recent doc­u­ments and try to under­stand the infor­ma­tion cov­ered. It has noth­ing to do with com­put­er savvy. It has to do with orga­ni­za­tion­al “logis­tics” savvy and expe­ri­ence in a par­tic­u­lar job. If he has the most cur­rent, com­plete doc­u­men­ta­tion (which I’m not sure he has) I sus­pect some­one else fed them to him. Does any­one else agree with my log­ic here? 2)The oth­er ques­tion that nags me is why this is sud­den­ly an issue after all these years?

@Kathleen–

This is a spook oper­a­tion. That’s how.

So is Wik­iLeaks.

See my response to Pter­rafractyl.

Best,

Dave

And now it looks like Snow­den may not be leav­ing Rus­sia at all. Ecuador just backed out of the Snow­den-saga and Rus­sia just received an asy­lum request. Snow­den also released a new state­ment via Wik­iLeaks charg­ing Oba­ma with “decep­tion” and the “extrale­gal penal­ty of exile”. In this lat­est let­ter Snow­den states, “My con­tin­ued lib­er­ty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, fam­i­ly, and oth­ers who I have nev­er met and prob­a­bly nev­er will”. This rais­es the ques­tion of whether or not the Wik­iLeaks folks real­ly rep­re­sent ‘new’ friends or old ones:

Talk­ing Points Memo
Wik­iLeaks Pub­lish­es State­ment From Snow­den
Eric Lach 6:04 PM EDT, Mon­day July 1, 2013

Updat­ed at 7:01 p.m. ET

Wik­iLeaks on Mon­day evening pub­lished a new state­ment pur­port­ing to be from Edward Snow­den in Moscow:

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my free­dom and safe­ty were under threat for reveal­ing the truth. My con­tin­ued lib­er­ty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, fam­i­ly, and oth­ers who I have nev­er met and prob­a­bly nev­er will. I trust­ed them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thank­ful.

On Thurs­day, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma declared before the world that he would not per­mit any diplo­mat­ic “wheel­ing and deal­ing” over my case. Yet now it is being report­ed that after promis­ing not to do so, the Pres­i­dent ordered his Vice Pres­i­dent to pres­sure the lead­ers of nations from which I have request­ed pro­tec­tion to deny my asy­lum peti­tions.

This kind of decep­tion from a world leader is not jus­tice, and nei­ther is the extrale­gal penal­ty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of polit­i­cal aggres­sion. Their pur­pose is to fright­en, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca have been one of the strongest defend­ers of the human right to seek asy­lum. Sad­ly, this right, laid out and vot­ed for by the U.S. in Arti­cle 14 of the Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights, is now being reject­ed by the cur­rent gov­ern­ment of my coun­try. The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion has now adopt­ed the strat­e­gy of using cit­i­zen­ship as a weapon. Although I am con­vict­ed of noth­ing, it has uni­lat­er­al­ly revoked my pass­port, leav­ing me a state­less per­son. With­out any judi­cial order, the admin­is­tra­tion now seeks to stop me exer­cis­ing a basic right. A right that belongs to every­body. The right to seek asy­lum.

In the end the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion is not afraid of whistle­blow­ers like me, Bradley Man­ning or Thomas Drake. We are state­less, impris­oned, or pow­er­less. No, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry pub­lic demand­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­ern­ment it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my con­vic­tions and impressed at the efforts tak­en by so many.

@Dave Emory
Dave, I total­ly agree with you. I just find it “inter­est­ing” that the “main stream media” don’t ask these basic ques­tions. Thanks for your analy­sis. I’ve weed­ed out 90 per­cent of the blogs I used to read because of their blind sup­port for Snowald. I fig­ure they have no inter­est­ing per­spec­tive to bring to the table on oth­er mat­ters, either.

A use­ful NSA sur­veil­lance-scan­dal fun-fact: 10 out of the 11 cur­rent FISA court judges — the folks that pre­sum­ably approved all of the war­rant­less sur­veil­lance — were appoint­ed by John Roberts:

The New York Times
Roberts’s Picks Reshap­ing Secret Sur­veil­lance Court
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Pub­lished: July 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — The recent leaks about gov­ern­ment spy­ing pro­grams have focused atten­tion on the For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance Court and its role in decid­ing how intru­sive the gov­ern­ment can be in the name of nation­al secu­ri­ty. Less men­tioned has been the per­son who has been qui­et­ly reshap­ing the secret court: Chief Jus­tice John G. Roberts Jr.

In mak­ing assign­ments to the court, Chief Jus­tice Roberts, more than his pre­de­ces­sors, has cho­sen judges with con­ser­v­a­tive and exec­u­tive branch back­grounds that crit­ics say make the court more like­ly to defer to gov­ern­ment argu­ments that domes­tic spy­ing pro­grams are nec­es­sary.

Ten of the court’s 11 judges — all assigned by Chief Jus­tice Roberts — were appoint­ed to the bench by Repub­li­can pres­i­dents; six once worked for the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Since the chief jus­tice began mak­ing assign­ments in 2005, 86 per­cent of his choic­es have been Repub­li­can appointees, and 50 per­cent have been for­mer exec­u­tive branch offi­cials.

Though the two pre­vi­ous chief jus­tices, War­ren E. Burg­er and William H. Rehn­quist, were con­ser­v­a­tives like Chief Jus­tice Roberts, their assign­ments to the sur­veil­lance court were more ide­o­log­i­cal­ly diverse, accord­ing to an analy­sis by The New York Times of a list of every judge who has served on the court since it was estab­lished in 1978.

Accord­ing to the analy­sis, 66 per­cent of their selec­tions were Repub­li­can appointees, and 39 per­cent once worked for the exec­u­tive branch.

“View­ing this data, peo­ple with respon­si­bil­i­ty for nation­al secu­ri­ty ought to be very con­cerned about the impres­sion and appear­ance, if not the real­i­ty, of bias — for favor­ing the exec­u­tive branch in its appli­ca­tions for war­rants and oth­er action,” said Sen­a­tor Richard Blu­men­thal, a Con­necti­cut Demo­c­rat and one of sev­er­al law­mak­ers who have sought to change the way the court’s judges are select­ed.

Mr. Blu­men­thal, for exam­ple, has pro­posed that each of the chief judges of the 12 major appeals courts select a dis­trict judge for the sur­veil­lance court; the chief jus­tice would still pick the review pan­el that hears rare appeals of the court’s deci­sions, but six oth­er Supreme Court jus­tices would have to sign off. Anoth­er bill, intro­duced by Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Adam B. Schiff of Cal­i­for­nia, would give the pres­i­dent the pow­er to nom­i­nate judges for the court, sub­ject to Sen­ate approval.

Chief Jus­tice Roberts, through a Supreme Court spokes­woman, declined to com­ment.

The court’s com­plex­ion has changed at a time when its role has been expand­ing beyond what Con­gress envi­sioned when it estab­lished the court as part of the For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance Act. The idea then was that judges would review appli­ca­tions for wire­taps to make sure there was suf­fi­cient evi­dence that the F.B.I.’s tar­get was a for­eign ter­ror­ist or a spy.

But, increas­ing­ly in recent years, the court has pro­duced lengthy rul­ings inter­pret­ing the mean­ing of sur­veil­lance laws and con­sti­tu­tion­al rights based on pro­ce­dures devised not for com­plex legal analy­sis but for up-or-down approvals of secret wire­tap appli­ca­tions. The rul­ings are clas­si­fied and based on the­o­ries sub­mit­ted by the Jus­tice Depart­ment with­out the par­tic­i­pa­tion of any lawyers offer­ing con­trary argu­ments or appeal­ing a rul­ing if the gov­ern­ment wins.

The court “is becom­ing ever more impor­tant in Amer­i­can life as more and more sur­veil­lance comes under its review in this era of big data,” said Tim­o­thy Edgar, a civ­il lib­er­ties advis­er for intel­li­gence issues in both the Bush and Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tions. “If the court is seen as skewed or biased, polit­i­cal­ly or ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, it will lose cred­i­bil­i­ty.”

At a pub­lic meet­ing this month, Judge James Robert­son, an appointee of Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton who was assigned to the sur­veil­lance court in 2002 by Chief Jus­tice Rehn­quist and resigned from it in Decem­ber 2005, offered an insider’s cri­tique of how rapid­ly and recent­ly the court’s role has changed. He said, for exam­ple, that dur­ing his time it was not engaged in devel­op­ing a body of secret prece­dents inter­pret­ing what the law means.

“In my expe­ri­ence, there weren’t any opin­ions,” he said. “You approved a war­rant appli­ca­tion or you didn’t — peri­od.”

The court began expand­ing its role when George W. Bush was pres­i­dent and its mem­bers were still assigned by Chief Jus­tice Rehn­quist, who died in 2005. Mid­way through the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, the exec­u­tive branch sought and obtained the court’s legal bless­ing to con­tin­ue secret sur­veil­lance pro­grams that had orig­i­nal­ly cir­cum­vent­ed the FISA process.

The court’s pow­er has also recent­ly expand­ed in anoth­er way. In 2008, Con­gress passed the FISA Amend­ments Act to allow the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency to keep con­duct­ing a form of the Bush administration’s pro­gram of sur­veil­lance with­out war­rants on domes­tic soil so long as only for­eign­ers abroad were tar­get­ed. It gave the court the pow­er to cre­ate rules for the pro­gram, like how the gov­ern­ment may use Amer­i­cans’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions after they are picked up.

“That change, in my view, turned the FISA court into some­thing like an admin­is­tra­tive agency that makes rules for oth­ers to fol­low,” Judge Robert­son said. “That’s not the baili­wick of judges. Judges don’t make pol­i­cy.”

For the most part, the sur­veil­lance court judges — who serve stag­gered sev­en-year terms and take turns com­ing to Wash­ing­ton for a week to han­dle its busi­ness — do not dis­cuss their work, and their rul­ings are secret. But the doc­u­ments leaked by Edward J. Snow­den, a for­mer N.S.A. con­trac­tor, have cast an unusu­al spot­light on them.

The first of the doc­u­ments dis­closed by Mr. Snow­den was a top-secret order to a Ver­i­zon sub­sidiary requir­ing it to turn over three months of call­ing records for all its cus­tomers. It was signed by Judge Roger Vin­son, an appointee of Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan who had pre­vi­ous­ly achieved promi­nence in 2011 when he tried to strike down the entire­ty of Pres­i­dent Obama’s health care law.

Chief Jus­tice Roberts assigned Judge Vin­son to the sur­veil­lance court in 2006, one of 12 Repub­li­can appointees, com­pared with 2 Demo­c­ra­t­ic ones.

While the posi­tions tak­en by indi­vid­ual judges on the court are clas­si­fied, aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies have shown that judges appoint­ed by Repub­li­cans since Rea­gan have been more like­ly than their col­leagues to rule in favor of the gov­ern­ment in non-FISA cas­es over peo­ple claim­ing civ­il lib­er­ties vio­la­tions. Even more impor­tant, accord­ing to some crit­ics of the court, is the court’s increas­ing pro­por­tion of judges who have a back­ground in the exec­u­tive branch.

...

Hope­ful­ly Snow­den is a fan of snow because he might be see­ing a lot more snow in his puta­tive new home:

Edward Snow­den bet­ter off in Rus­sia than US, his father says

NSA whistle­blow­er’s father says he has lost faith in the US jus­tice depart­ment and his son needs a safe haven

Asso­ci­at­ed Press in McLean, Vir­ginia
guardian.co.uk, Fri­day 26 July 2013 21.16 EDT

The father of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency whistle­blow­er Edward Snow­den says his son has been so vil­i­fied by the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion and mem­bers of Con­gress that he is now bet­ter off stay­ing in Rus­sia.

Lon Snow­den had been work­ing behind the scenes with lawyers to try to find a way his son could get a fair tri­al in the US. Edward Snow­den has been charged in fed­er­al court with vio­lat­ing the Espi­onage Act by leak­ing details of NSA sur­veil­lance.

But in a tele­phone inter­view with the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, the elder Snow­den said he had lost faith in recent weeks that his son would be treat­ed fair­ly by the jus­tice depart­ment. He now thinks his 30-year-old son is bet­ter off avoid­ing the US if pos­si­ble until an admin­is­tra­tion that respects the con­sti­tu­tion comes into office.

“If it were me, know­ing what I know now, and lis­ten­ing to advice of sage peo­ple like [Pen­ta­gon Papers leak­er] Daniel Ells­berg ... I would attempt to find a safe haven,” Snow­den said.

As a mil­i­tary ana­lyst more than four decades ago, Ells­berg leaked the Pen­ta­gon Papers, a secret study of Amer­i­ca’s involve­ment in Viet­nam, to news­pa­pers.

The elder Snow­den said he thought Rus­sia was prob­a­bly the best place to seek asy­lum because it was most like­ly to with­stand US pres­sure. Edward Snow­den applied for tem­po­rary asy­lum in Rus­sia last week.

Lon Snow­den, a Coast Guard vet­er­an who has worked on nation­al secu­ri­ty issues in his career, said he has tremen­dous faith in the Amer­i­can peo­ple and in the con­sti­tu­tion. He said that in a more sub­dued envi­ron­ment his son could get a fair tri­al, and his actions would be con­sid­ered in the con­text of his desire to expose a sur­veil­lance pro­gram that he and oth­ers believe exceeds con­sti­tu­tion­al bounds.

But he said the jus­tice depart­men­t’s efforts to pres­sure oth­er coun­tries to turn over Snow­den, cou­pled with silence from Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma and the attor­ney-gen­er­al, Eric Hold­er, in the face of denun­ci­a­tions from mem­bers of Con­gress who have labelled Snow­den a trai­tor, have erod­ed his hope for a fair tri­al.

On NBC’s Today show on Fri­day, Lon Snow­den said there had been a con­cert­ed effort by some mem­bers of Con­gress to “demonise” his son.

Lon Snow­den and his lawyer, Bruce Fein, released a let­ter on Fri­day ask­ing Oba­ma to dis­miss the crim­i­nal charges against Edward Snow­den and to sup­port leg­is­la­tion “to rem­e­dy the NSA sur­veil­lance abus­es he revealed”.

The elder Snow­den and Fein said they were dis­gust­ed by Hold­er’s let­ter on Fri­day to Russ­ian offi­cials promis­ing that Snow­den would not face the death penal­ty if he were extra­dit­ed. They said it reflect­ed a mind­set that Snow­den was pre­sumed guilty and that a sen­tence of 30 years or life would be a rea­son­able pun­ish­ment.

In the phone inter­view Lon Snow­den said he had had no direct con­tact with his son, and knew no more about his day-to-day life in Moscow, where he is report­ed­ly stay­ing at an air­port tran­sit zone, than any­one else.

Lon Snow­den and Fein are start­ing a non­prof­it group called the Defense of the Con­sti­tu­tion Foun­da­tion to pro­mote the issues his son has raised.

“In essence, he has passed on the torch of democ­ra­cy,” Lon Snow­den said of his son.

...

It’s worth not­ing that Lon Snow­den’s attor­ney, Bruce Fein, is a long-time Ron Paul sup­port­er, becom­ing his chief Legal Advi­sor for Paul’s 2012 cam­paign. Some­one from Rand Paul’s office report­ed­ly rec­om­mend­ed Fein to Lon, although Fein dis­putes that he and Rand are in any way affil­i­at­ed. Dit­to with the LaRouch­ies:

Cana­da Free Press
Snow­den Lawyer Close to Sen­a­tor Rand Paul’s Office
By Cliff Kin­caid (Bio and Archives) Tues­day, July 2, 2013

In a curi­ous devel­op­ment, NSA trai­tor Edward Snowden’s father is being rep­re­sent­ed by attor­ney Bruce Fein, who appeared with Sen­a­tor Rand Paul at his anti-NSA news con­fer­ence on June 13. Fein says “some­one in Sen­a­tor [Rand] Paul’s office” rec­om­mend­ed him to Edward Snowden’s father, Lon­nie.

It appears that Fein is try­ing to nego­ti­ate Edward Snowden’s return to the U.S, although his father report­ed­ly hasn’t spo­ken to his son since April.

Asked about his involve­ment in the case, includ­ing a let­ter he wrote to Attor­ney Gen­er­al Eric Hold­er on behalf of Edward Snow­den and his father, Fein told me on Fri­day: “I do not work for or rep­re­sent Sen­a­tor Paul or any asso­ci­at­ed group in any capac­i­ty and nev­er have. I was not rep­re­sent­ing Lon­nie Snow­den at the time of the [June 13] press con­fer­ence. The rep­re­sen­ta­tion agree­ment was signed ear­li­er this week. Lon­nie called me on the phone last week seek­ing my advice and assis­tance. I was informed some­one in Sen­a­tor Paul’s office rec­om­mend­ed me and a few oth­ers who could be trust­ed and would be unwa­ver­ing in defense of the Con­sti­tu­tion, espe­cial­ly the Fourth Amend­ment.”

But his involve­ment in the Snow­den case isn’t the only con­tro­ver­sial aspect of Fein’s recent career moves. A well-respect­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyer whose books include Amer­i­can Empire: Before the Fall, Fein has appeared at two con­fer­ences this year spon­sored by the Schiller Insti­tute, a group start­ed by polit­i­cal extrem­ist and con­vict­ed felon Lyn­don LaRouche.

“I have no involve­ment” in the LaRouche orga­ni­za­tion, Fein told me. “They have asked me to speak at a few events which I did, and gave the same mes­sage I give to all of my audi­ences. The Con­sti­tu­tion is sacred. The Amer­i­can Repub­lic was found­ed on the idea that every man and woman is a king and queen but no one wears a crown. We take risks oth­ers shun because we believe life as a vas­sal or serf to Big Gov­ern­ment is not worth liv­ing.”

...

Fein’s April appear­ance at the Schiller Insti­tute con­fer­ence in Ger­many was under the ban­ner of “A Last Chance for Human­i­ty.” Video greet­ings came from U.S. Rep. Wal­ter Jones, a Repub­li­can from North Car­oli­na, who thanked “the LaRouche peo­ple” for the “mag­nif­i­cent job” they are doing on Capi­tol Hill to sup­port his leg­isla­tive ini­tia­tives.

Fein, who also con­tributes to the Huff­in­g­ton Post, a far-left web­site, says his pur­pose at the LaRouche gath­er­ings was to empha­size the impor­tance of the phi­los­o­phy of the Fourth Amend­ment and “to restore the philo­soph­i­cal val­ues of the Repub­lic which evoked the hero­ic sac­ri­fices at Val­ley Forge, Ceme­tery Ridge, Oma­ha Beach, etc.”

The pur­pose of Sen­a­tor Paul’s June 13 press con­fer­ence, which includ­ed a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the ACLU, was to threat­en a law­suit against the NSA over its ter­ror­ist sur­veil­lance pro­grams. It is doubt­ful, how­ev­er, that Sen. Paul has the stand­ing to sue.

In order to restore the lib­er­ties and pri­va­cy that have sup­pos­ed­ly been lost because of the NSA pro­grams, Paul intro­duced the “Fourth Amend­ment Restora­tion Act of 2013” in the Sen­ate on June 7. It still has no co-spon­sors.
vtts­leyd
Beyond the legal ques­tions and whether the anti-NSA cam­paign is designed to bring in names and mon­ey for a Rand Paul pres­i­den­tial bid, Aaron Gold­stein asks, in an Amer­i­can Spec­ta­tor arti­cle, “Why Is Rand Paul Being Duped by Edward Snow­den?” Sen­a­tor Paul’s “admi­ra­tion” for Snow­den was obvi­ous dur­ing an inter­view with Sean Han­ni­ty on June 17, in which he went so far as to call Snow­den “a civ­il dis­obe­di­ent,” com­par­ing him to Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.

...

We should prob­a­bly expect a lot sto­ries about Lib­er­tar­i­ans cham­pi­oning civ­il lib­er­ties con­cerns going for­ward. The GOP is going to have to tran­si­tion to a more Lib­er­tar­i­an-lean­ing par­ty if it’s going to have a future in the US. And since the Lib­er­tar­i­an eco­nom­ic agen­da will lit­er­al­ly kill off the pop­u­lace, the Lib­er­tar­i­an stance on civ­il lib­er­ties and social issues are going to be the obvi­ous sell­ing points for the main­stream­ing far-right con­cepts as the tra­di­tion­al base of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers goes into the night. Fein has dis­put­ed the notion that a sub­stan­tial drop in the US stan­dard of liv­ing as a result of gut­ting the social safe­ty-net would be prob­lem­at­ic in the past, and it’s unlike­ly that such views will be the at the fore­front of the end­less attempts to ped­dle Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism to the mass­es. That gen­er­a­tion out­reach job will go to groups like that the “Amer­i­can Free­dom Agen­da” that Fein co-found­ed with for­mer head of the NRA David Keene. And, of course, Rand Paul. And now, per­haps from Rus­sia, Edward Snow­den.

Ron Paul just had his final inter­view in a series of inter­views with Julian Assange on his new sub­scrip­tion-only web­site that start­ed last month. When asked about his polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, he described it as a blend of “Cal­i­for­nia lib­er­tar­i­an­ism” (is that a Rea­gan ref­er­ence?), Greek polit­i­cal the­o­ry, along with thoughts from the Fed­er­al­ist Paper and some nat­u­ral­ist views. He also had some inter­est­ing com­ments on the role his fam­i­ly life played in shap­ing his phi­los­o­phy (note that his father, John Ship­ton, is the sec­re­tary of his Wik­iLeaks par­ty) although he did­n’t want to define it too much:

News­max
Ron Paul: Assange ‘Fight­ing for the Cause of Lib­er­ty’

Thurs­day, 05 Sep 2013 08:33 PM

By Jen­nifer G. Hick­ey

For­mer Rep. Ron Paul on Thurs­day thanked Wik­iLeaks founder Julian Assange for “fight­ing to increase trans­paren­cy in our gov­ern­ment” and fight­ing “for the cause of lib­er­ty.”

Paul’s praise came dur­ing the third and final install­ment of an inter­view with Assange on the Ron Paul Chan­nel — http://www.ronpaulchannel.com– the sub­scrip­tion-based Inter­net chan­nel launched last month by the Texas Repub­li­can.

Paul con­clud­ed the inter­view with Assange – con­fined in the Ecuadore­an embassy in Lon­don — by direct­ing view­ers to the Wik­iLeaks site where they could donate to Assange’s cause.

The day after Assange told Paul in the sec­ond part of the inter­view that the Unit­ed States was tak­ing advan­tage of the human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis in Syr­ia to jus­ti­fy a mil­i­tary strike, Paul took a more per­son­al approach in the final install­ment, ask­ing about Assange’s per­son­al phi­los­o­phy.

The Aus­tralian described his polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy as a blend of “Cal­i­for­nia lib­er­tar­i­an­ism,” Greek polit­i­cal the­o­ry, along with thoughts from the Fed­er­al­ist Paper and some nat­u­ral­ist views.

“I freely admit to bor­row­ing from parts of my polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion from dif­fer­ent schools of thought and one of those is, rough­ly speak­ing, Cal­i­forn­ian lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and from your Fed­er­al­ist Papers,” Assange said.

His polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal diver­si­ty is reflect­ed in the polit­i­cal par­ty he found­ed this year and on whose plat­form he is cam­paign­ing in this week­end’s Aus­tralian elec­tions.

The Wik­iLeaks par­ty “is already the fourth most pop­u­lar par­ty in Aus­tralia and we have a wide vari­ety of peo­ple from what are clas­si­cal­ly known as the right and the left with­in the par­ty. There are ten­sions about that and I have to try and resolve those ten­sions and explain the com­mon­al­i­ty,” Assange said.

Born in Aus­tralia to a moth­er who was the daugh­ter of aca­d­e­mics and a father who was the son of engi­neers, Assange says polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy was not some­thing which his par­ents imposed on him.

“My moth­er was the daugh­ter of aca­d­e­mics. My grand­fa­ther left school at age 14 and worked his way up through the Chris­t­ian edu­ca­tion sys­tem and to become a very young mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cer in World War II, but my moth­er was very care­ful not to bias me,” he told Paul. He acknowl­edged that his fam­i­ly envi­ron­ment was influ­en­tial, includ­ing the divorce of his par­ents when he was 9.

Accord­ing to Assange, he devel­oped his feel­ings about the world dur­ing a “burst of matu­ri­ty in ado­les­cence” and by expos­ing him­self to a myr­i­ad of polit­i­cal philoso­phies.

Assange said he is hes­i­tant to assign a con­crete def­i­n­i­tion to his beliefs.

“I have been very care­ful not to define my polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy because those terms tend to trap you into one camp and then oppo­nents of that par­tic­u­lar camp try to use it against you,” he said.

As a con­se­quence of the recent NSA dis­clo­sures by Edward Snow­den and dur­ing the Bradley Man­ning tri­al, Assange said that a unique polit­i­cal phe­nom­e­non is devel­op­ing.

Assange sees an “extreme cen­ter” emerg­ing in the estab­lish­ment from both sides of the polit­i­cal spec­trum that is com­prised of peo­ple “more con­cerned about self-pro­mo­tion, polit­i­cal net­work­ing, and cre­at­ing polit­i­cal dynas­ties, doing favors for mates” than the issues.

“They are just work­ing the sys­tem,” Assange said. “They don’t real­ly have any ideas they believe in. The extreme cen­ter, which is push­ing for­ward aggres­sive­ly in a par­tic­u­lar direc­tion to pro­mote itself, has led to oth­ers feel­ing like that is not what they want to be involved in. There is now a mag­net­ic force between those on the right and those on the left,” Assange said.

What unites the two sides is the sense of injus­tice, he said, adding that the lib­er­tar­i­an right views injus­tice in terms of a lack of free­dom.

“Your lib­er­ty can’t be deprived from you unless some­one else has more pow­er, so there is a com­mon­al­i­ty between these two sides,” Assange said.

...

If will be inter­est­ing to see how much of Assange’s free­dom-phi­los­o­phy ends up includ­ing the kind of hyper-eco­nom­ic free­doms endorsed by folks like Rand Paul. Because hyper-eco­nom­ic free­dom and real jus­tice are often incom­pat­i­ble ideals.

Despite the Wik­ileaks Par­ty’s implo­sion, it sounds like we can still look for­ward to Julian Assange liv­ing out his Pla­ton­ic ideals in future Aus­tralian elec­tions:

The New York Times
Opin­ion

Assange as Tyrant?

By JULIA BAIRD

Pub­lished: Sep­tem­ber 14, 2013

SYDNEY

WHEN asked to explain why he was run­ning for a seat in the Aus­tralian Sen­ate while holed up in the Ecuadore­an Embassy in Lon­don, Julian Assange quot­ed Pla­to: “One of the penal­ties for refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate in pol­i­tics is that you end up being gov­erned by your infe­ri­ors.”

Pla­to was “a bit of a fas­cist,” he said, but had a point.

Imag­ine the cha­grin Mr. Assange must feel now, giv­en that not only did he fail to win a place in the Sen­ate in the recent elec­tion, but he was less suc­cess­ful than Ricky Muir from the Motor­ing Enthu­si­asts Par­ty. Mr. Muir, who won just 0.5 per­cent of the vote, is most famous for hav­ing post­ed a video on YouTube of him­self hav­ing a kan­ga­roo feces fight with friends.

...

Mr. Assange’s actions were at odds with a demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty struc­ture. He had appoint­ed him­self pres­i­dent, for exam­ple, although there was no men­tion of this role in the Wik­iLeaks con­sti­tu­tion.

When a reporter asked him why, he laughed: “I found­ed it. I mean seri­ous­ly, this is so fan­tas­tic. Look at the name, this is the Wik­iLeaks Par­ty. The promi­nent can­di­date is Julian Assange! Who found­ed it? I found­ed it. Are you seri­ous?”

An unbowed Mr. Assange has vowed to fight the next elec­tion in three years. But to woo the 99 per­cent of the Aus­tralian pop­u­la­tion who spurned him, he’ll need to stop laugh­ing at those who sug­gest that appoint­ing your­self the unques­tioned leader of a par­ty, for an unlim­it­ed term, might make you a politi­cian after all.

And not exact­ly a demo­c­ra­t­ic one.

There’s an inter­view of Glenn Green­wald in Haaretz about his encoun­ters with Snow­den. The arti­cle is behind a pay­wall at this point, but it’s worth point­ing out that Green­wald states in the inter­view that Snow­den had been “plan­ning every­thing for two or three years”. This helps give us a bet­ter sense of how much time passed between the Snow­den’s Jan­u­ary 2009 cha­t­room com­ments about want­i­ng to see a pre­vi­ous leak­er’s balls shot off and his own plans.

Now we’re learn­ing that, around the same time Snow­den was post­ing about shoot­ing the balls off leak­ers in 2009, he was also caught access­ing clas­si­fied files he should­n’t have been access­ing by his boss at the CIA. This was short­ly before he left that job for one as an NSA con­trac­tor at Dell:

The New York Times
C.I.A. Warn­ing on Snow­den in ’09 Said to Slip Through the Cracks

By ERIC SCHMITT

Pub­lished: Octo­ber 10, 2013

WASHINGTON — Just as Edward J. Snow­den was prepar­ing to leave Gene­va and a job as a C.I.A. tech­ni­cian in 2009, his super­vi­sor wrote a deroga­to­ry report in his per­son­nel file, not­ing a dis­tinct change in the young man’s behav­ior and work habits, as well as a trou­bling sus­pi­cion.

The C.I.A. sus­pect­ed that Mr. Snow­den was try­ing to break into clas­si­fied com­put­er files to which he was not autho­rized to have access, and decid­ed to send him home, accord­ing to two senior Amer­i­can offi­cials.

But the red flags went unheed­ed. Mr. Snow­den left the C.I.A. to become a con­trac­tor for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, and four years lat­er he leaked thou­sands of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments. The supervisor’s cau­tion­ary note and the C.I.A.’s sus­pi­cions appar­ent­ly were not for­ward­ed to the N.S.A. or its con­trac­tors, and sur­faced only after fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors began scru­ti­niz­ing Mr. Snowden’s record once the doc­u­ments began spilling out, intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment offi­cials said.

“It slipped through the cracks,” one vet­er­an law enforce­ment offi­cial said of the report.

Spokes­men for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. all declined to com­ment on the pre­cise nature of the warn­ing and why it was not for­ward­ed, cit­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion into Mr. Snowden’s activ­i­ties.

Half a dozen law enforce­ment, intel­li­gence and Con­gres­sion­al offi­cials with direct knowl­edge of the supervisor’s report were con­tact­ed for this arti­cle. All of the offi­cials agreed to speak on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because of the con­tin­u­ing crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion.

In hind­sight, offi­cials said, the report by the C.I.A. super­vi­sor and the agency’s sus­pi­cions might have been the first seri­ous warn­ings of the dis­clo­sures to come, and the biggest missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to review Mr. Snowden’s top-secret clear­ance or at least put his future work at the N.S.A. under much greater scruti­ny.

“The weak­ness of the sys­tem was if deroga­to­ry infor­ma­tion came in, he could still keep his secu­ri­ty clear­ance and move to anoth­er job, and the infor­ma­tion wasn’t passed on,” said a Repub­li­can law­mak­er who has been briefed on Mr. Snowden’s activ­i­ties.

...

While it is unclear what exact­ly the supervisor’s neg­a­tive report said, it coin­cides with a peri­od of Mr. Snowden’s life in 2009 when he was a pro­lif­ic online com­menter on gov­ern­ment and secu­ri­ty issues, com­plained about civ­il sur­veil­lance and, accord­ing to a friend, was suf­fer­ing “a cri­sis of con­science.”

Mr. Snow­den got an infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy job at the C.I.A. in mid-2006. Despite his lack of for­mal cre­den­tials, he gained a top-secret clear­ance and a choice job under State Depart­ment cov­er in Gene­va. Lit­tle is known about what his duties were there.

Mava­nee Ander­son, who worked with Mr. Snow­den in Gene­va and also had a high secu­ri­ty clear­ance, said in an arti­cle in The Chat­tanooga Times Free Press of Ten­nessee in June that when they worked from 2007 through ear­ly 2009, Mr. Snow­den “was already expe­ri­enc­ing a cri­sis of con­science of sorts.”

“Any­one smart enough to be involved in the type of work he does, who is privy to the type of infor­ma­tion to which he was privy, will have at least moments like these,” she said.

Lat­er, Mr. Snow­den would tell the news­pa­per The Guardian that he was shocked and sad­dened by some of the tech­niques C.I.A. oper­a­tives in Gene­va used to recruit sources. “Much of what I saw in Gene­va real­ly dis­il­lu­sioned me about how my gov­ern­ment func­tions and what its impact is in the world,” he told The Guardian. “I real­ized that I was part of some­thing that was doing far more harm than good.”

There were oth­er signs that have since drawn inves­ti­ga­tors’ atten­tion. In ear­ly 2009, some­one using Mr. Snowden’s screen name expressed out­rage at gov­ern­ment offi­cials who leaked infor­ma­tion to the news media, telling a friend in an Inter­net chat that leak­ers “should be shot.”

“They’re just like Wik­iLeaks,” Mr. Snow­den — or some­one iden­ti­fied as him from his screen name, “TheTrue­HOOHA,” and oth­er details — wrote in Jan­u­ary 2009 about an arti­cle in The New York Times on secret exchanges between Israel and the Unit­ed States about Iran’s nuclear pro­gram.

He lat­er told The Guardian he was dis­ap­point­ed that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma “advanced the very poli­cies that I thought would be reined in.”

“I got hard­ened,” he said.

It’s unclear from the report what, if any, mis­chief Snow­den could have been up to in ear­ly 2009 at the CIA. But for a guy that vot­ed for a third part in 2008, but claims to have held off from leak­ing ear­li­er because he believed in Oba­ma’s promis­es (to revise the FISA courts and Patri­ot Act), Snow­den must have been filled with an immense amount of Hope for very rapid Change in 2008 if dis­ap­point­ment with Oba­ma by ear­ly 2009 real­ly was the cat­a­lyst that start­ed to “hard­en” his world­view.

Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing set of fun-facts: One of the first reporters to assist Green­wald and Poitras on ana­lyz­ing the Snow­den doc­u­ments was Guardian reporter James Ball:

How Edward Snow­den led jour­nal­ist and film-mak­er to reveal NSA secrets
Whistle­blow­er drew Glenn Green­wald and film-mak­er Lau­ra Poitras togeth­er to expose sur­veil­lance pro­grammes

Roy Greenslade
The Guardian, Mon­day 19 August 2013 16.52 EDT

Jour­nal­ists would do well to read a 7,700-word arti­cle by Peter Maass in the New York Times mag­a­zine head­lined How Lau­ra Poitras helped Snow­den spill his secrets.

It under­lines just why the for­mer NSA com­put­er spe­cial­ist Edward Snow­den is so deserv­ing of the sta­tus of whistle­blow­er. He has revealed that what we jour­nal­ists might have sus­pect­ed about gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance to be true was indeed so.

The arti­cle tells how Snow­den first tried to win the atten­tion of Guardian jour­nal­ist Glenn Green­wald by anony­mous­ly email­ing him to say he had sen­si­tive doc­u­ments he want­ed to share.

He fol­lowed that up with a step-by-step guide on how to encrypt com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and then sent a link to an encryp­tion video. Green­wald ignored the approach­es.

In frus­tra­tion, Snow­den con­tact­ed doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Lau­ra Poitras. And it was she who even­tu­al­ly got in touch with Green­wald, draw­ing the three of them togeth­er.

...

After Poitras made a video of Snow­den, duly post­ed on 9 June, he checked out of his hotel and went into hid­ing. A week lat­er, Poitras flew to Berlin, “where she could edit her doc­u­men­tary with­out wor­ry­ing that the FBI would show up with a search war­rant.”

And two weeks after that she flew to Brazil. It was there, in a Rio de Janeiro hotel, that Maass met her along with Green­wald, where they were work­ing with MacAskill and anoth­er Guardian jour­nal­ist, James Ball.

It was sev­er­al days before they all dis­cov­ered that Snow­den had arrived at Moscow air­port.

...

James Ball, it turns out, used to actu­al­ly be a part of Wik­iLeaks. But in ear­ly 2011 he left in dis­gust. Why? Israel Shamir:

The Dai­ly Beast
05.30.13
Exclu­sive: For­mer Wik­iLeaks Employ­ee James Ball Describes Work­ing With Julian Assange
For­mer Wik­iLeaks employ­ee James Ball, a sub­ject of the Alex Gib­ney doc­u­men­tary ‘We Steal Secrets: The Sto­ry of Wik­iLeaks,’ on what hap­pened behind the scenes at Julian Assange’s con­tro­ver­sial com­pa­ny.

by James Ball

It’s now been more than three years since the world saw the hor­ri­fy­ing footage of the “Col­lat­er­al Mur­der” video: civil­ians mown down in a ghast­ly bat­tle­field error. Their would-be rescuer—a father tak­ing his chil­dren to school—similarly shot to pieces by a U.S. heli­copter gun­ship, its pilots chat­ting and laugh­ing as if play­ing a video game.

And for those who kept watch­ing, an aspect of the footage often for­got­ten: a Hell­fire mis­sile fired into a build­ing, with no regard of the passer­by just out­side. Wait­ing a mere few sec­onds longer could’ve kept him safe—but no. Amid the revul­sion at the ear­li­er hor­ror of the clip, this became a mere back­ground detail.

That footage was just the start of a string of ever-larg­er Wik­iLeaks doc­u­ment releas­es, report­ing, and rev­e­la­tions that shook the faith of many around the world in the U.S. government’s activities—from rev­e­la­tions of death squads oper­at­ing in Afghanistan, through com­plic­i­ty in tor­ture in the Iraq doc­u­ments, to evi­dence of spy­ing on U.N. diplo­mats in U.S. Embassy cables.

...

For me, the film was more like déjà vu—something I’d lived once already. From sum­mer 2010, Wik­iLeaks became my life for months. First, at the U.K.-based Bureau of Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism, I was part of the team work­ing for 10 weeks inves­ti­gat­ing the Iraq War Logs for Al Jazeera Eng­lish and Ara­bic, Chan­nel 4’s flag­ship Dis­patch­es doc­u­men­tary, and iraqwarlogs.com.

I then went a step fur­ther, work­ing direct­ly for Wik­iLeaks for sev­er­al months on the embassy cables—analyzing the cables, dis­trib­ut­ing them to staff, writ­ing press releas­es, appear­ing on TV, and more.

It was ground­break­ing, impor­tant jour­nal­ism, but it was done against the back­drop of an orga­ni­za­tion crum­bling under pres­sure, cross­ing eth­i­cal bound­aries, and plac­ing peo­ple need­less­ly in dan­ger.

For me, it was too much, and I left. Since then, in a leak of the script of Gibney’s film, Wik­iLeaks has post­ed that I sold them out for cash (nope), was a wan­na-be spy who inter­viewed for MI5 (nope), and stole their data—including, bizarrely, my own copy of a gag order they asked me to sign to stop me speak­ing out on what I didn’t like.

See­ing your­self por­trayed by Wik­iLeaks is like walk­ing through a cir­cus hall of mir­rors: there’s just enough resem­blance for you to rec­og­nize your­self, but you’re seri­ous­ly distorted—and usu­al­ly in a way that makes you look grotesque.

Many made their mind up on Julian Assange long ago—but here, for the record, is what real­ly hap­pened in those fate­ful few months.

...

The rea­son I quit was because of a friend of Julian’s whose activ­i­ties were unstom­ach­able and unfor­giv­able. That man was Israel Shamir. Shamir is an anti-Semit­ic writer, a sup­port­er of the dic­ta­tor of Belarus, and a man with ties and friends in Russ­ian secu­ri­ty ser­vices. He and Julian—unknown to us—had been in friend­ly con­tact for years. It was a friend­ship that would have seri­ous con­se­quences.

Intro­duced to Wik­iLeaks staff and sup­port­ers under a false name, Shamir was giv­en direct access to more than 90,000 of the U.S. Embassy cables, cov­er­ing Rus­sia, all of East­ern Europe, parts of the Mid­dle East, and Israel. This was, for quite some time, denied by Wik­iLeaks. But that’s nev­er a denial I’ve found con­vinc­ing: the rea­son I know he has them is that I gave them to him, at Assange’s orders, not know­ing who he was.

Why did this prove to be a grave mis­take? Not just for Shamir’s views, which are easy to Google, but for what he did next. The first hints of trou­ble came through con­tacts from var­i­ous Putin-influ­enced Russ­ian media out­lets. A pro-Putin out­let got in touch to say Shamir had been ask­ing for $10,000 for access to the cables. He was sell­ing the mate­r­i­al we were work­ing to give away free, to respon­si­ble out­lets.

Worse was to come. The NGO Index on Cen­sor­ship sent a string of ques­tions and some pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence, sug­gest­ing Shamir had giv­en the cables to Alexan­der Lukashenko of Belarus, Europe’s last dic­ta­tor. Shamir had writ­ten a pro-Belarus arti­cle, short­ly before pho­tos emerged of him leav­ing the inte­ri­or min­istry. The day after, Belarus’s dic­ta­tor gave a speech say­ing he was estab­lish­ing a Wik­iLeaks for Belarus, cit­ing some sto­ries and infor­ma­tion appear­ing in the gen­uine (and then unpub­lished) cables.

Assange refused and blocked any attempts at inves­ti­ga­tion, and released pub­lic state­ments that were sim­ply untrue.

Dis­turbing­ly, Assange seems to have a per­son­al moti­va­tion for stay­ing friend­ly with Shamir. Shamir’s son, Johannes Wahlstrom, is appar­ent­ly being called as one of Assange’s defense wit­ness­es in his Swedish tri­al. That’s not the only time self has come before prin­ci­ple.

...

All things con­sid­ered, that’s an inter­est­ing twist to the whole affair.

@Pterrafractyl–

Note that Ball also worked with Al Jazeera.

Note, also, that nei­ther Ball nor any of the oth­ers work­ing with the Wik­i­Fas­cists seems to have a prob­lem with all of Wik­iLeaks’ mate­r­i­al going through Carl Lund­strom’s PRQ serv­er, some­thing that would have giv­en his milieu access to all of the infor­ma­tion.

Best,

Dave

While not at all sur­pris­ing at this point, it’s worth not­ing that Julian Assange just gave an inter­view where he hails the virtues of Bit­coin and unreg­u­lat­ed finan­cial mar­kets in gen­er­al:

meme­burn
Julian Assange: Bit­coin could estab­lish a new glob­al con­sen­sus [Net Prophet]
By Michelle Ata­gana: Man­ag­ing Ed.
05.21.14

“Bit­coin is the most intel­lec­tu­al­ly inter­est­ing devel­op­ment in the last two years,” said Julian Assange via a WeChat Livestream at Net Prophet — the annu­al tech­nol­o­gy and trends con­fer­ence. Accord­ing to the Wik­ileaks founder, the next great inno­va­tion that is head­ed our way will be in the finance sec­tor.

He reck­ons that the tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion behind Bit­coin is estab­lish­ing a new glob­al con­sen­sus.

Usu­al­ly, we need laws to estab­lish and enforce the way finan­cial trans­ac­tions take place, but Bit­coin is chang­ing that. Cryp­to­graph­i­cal­ly enforced agree­ments, like the ones com­ing out of Bit­coin, are dif­fer­ent from the norm in as much as the code behind them enforces how trans­ac­tions are done.

Assange, who is still being grant­ed asy­lum at the Ecuado­ri­an embassy in Lon­don, sus­pects that in the next few years we’ll see a lev­el of inno­va­tion in finan­cial ser­vices that far out­strips those of the past. The way he sees it, the cur­rent tra­di­tion­al mod­el of the finance indus­try isn’t work­ing and Bit­coin is dis­rupt­ing it in a good way.

Respond­ing to a ques­tion on the rise of one dom­i­nant play­er in some aspects of the inter­net (think Google with search), the weath­er-worn whistle­blow­er reck­ons the age of sin­gle dom­i­nance is prob­lem­at­ic.

“I think that is a seri­ous ques­tion — whether most things that most peo­ple use most of the time will be eat­en up by a few dom­i­nant play­ers,” said Assange, who again turned to the exam­ple of Bit­coin to illus­trate his point.

You can quick­ly form a full finan­cial sys­tem with hedge funds and oth­er such finan­cial ser­vices where there is no reg­u­la­tion, where the reg­u­la­tion is a cryp­to­graph­ic agree­ment, he points out. The ben­e­fit of such a sys­tem is that peo­ple have to be part of this agree­ment in order to talk to each oth­er.

Anoth­er ben­e­fit is that there is no reg­u­la­tion, because it is all done through com­pu­ta­tion. Finan­cial ser­vices run­ning over the top of cryp­to­graph­ic pro­to­cols such as Bit­coin there­fore tend to evolve and inno­vate incred­i­bly quick­ly.

Assange reck­ons that when it comes dis­cussing inno­va­tion with­in the finance indus­try, we must under­stand that what we are talk­ing about is the inter­ac­tion of finance. He explains this con­cept as “the abstrac­tion of rela­tion­ships”.

“What we are talk­ing about is the inter­ac­tion of finance: the abstrac­tion of rela­tion­ships between organ­i­sa­tions and indi­vid­u­als and the quan­tifi­ca­tions of those rela­tion­ships.”

For the renowned hack­er, cryp­to­graph­ic agree­ments involve the need to agree. In turn, he says, we are talk­ing about a way of cre­at­ing new orders and new soci­etal agree­ments that include all of soci­ety, not just new orders that only apply to those who chose to come in and agree to a par­tic­u­lar aspect or cryp­to­graph­ic.

Assange argues that cur­rent struc­tures around finance from polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic points of view mean that the peo­ple in con­trol can often get pushed around by the state. This is why Bit­coin is impor­tant, he says, as it brings about diver­si­ty, which is need­ed in any organ­i­sa­tion.

...

Julian Assange: Cyber-lib­er­tar­i­an or cyber-anar­chist? How about a neolib­er­al utopi­an?

Either way, with each new leak by Assange of his per­son­al pol­i­tics the ques­tion gets raise: which zany far-right par­ties will Assange force his Wik­ileaks Par­ty to endorse in Aus­trali­a’s next elec­tion?

Julian Assange wants full con­trol of Wik­iLeaks Par­ty, says par­ty fig­ure

JARED OWENS
The Aus­tralian
March 14, 2014 12:31PM

THE Wik­iLeaks Par­ty has implod­ed amid a push by Julian Assange to para­chute his asso­ciates on to the par­ty exec­u­tive and shut down its cam­paign­ing activ­i­ties, alleged­ly over fears the Aus­tralian par­ty is dam­ag­ing his inter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion, a senior par­ty fig­ure says.

Jamal Daoud, a mem­ber of the microparty’s nation­al coun­cil, has also labelled “dic­ta­to­r­i­al” par­ty chief John Ship­ton — the Wik­iLeaks founder’s father — as “arro­gant and dis­re­spect­ful” and claimed the par­ty holds no meet­ings and has no active mem­ber­ship.

“They’re not a polit­i­cal par­ty, there’s no dis­cus­sion, no meet­ings, no active mem­ber­ship, noth­ing … It’s like a fam­i­ly con­ve­nience store,” Mr Daoud told The Aus­tralian.

Mr Daoud said Wik­iLeaks’ nation­al coun­cil had been refused access to the party’s books and that he had been told by Mr Ship­ton the group is $70,000 in debt despite hav­ing no employ­ees and no main­stream media adver­tis­ing.

The micropar­ty has large­ly with­drawn from domes­tic pol­i­cy debates since win­ning 0.6 per cent of the nation­al vote at the Sep­tem­ber fed­er­al elec­tion, and has since focused on defend­ing the regimes of Syr­ia and Rus­sia against per­ceived West­ern con­spir­a­cies.

Mr Ship­ton has refused repeat­ed inter­view requests by The Aus­tralian about the party’s inter­nal oper­a­tions and would not com­ment on Mr Daoud’s alle­ga­tions.

The par­ty has been wracked by inter­nal tur­moil since August last year, when the par­ty decid­ed to pref­er­ence extreme-right par­ties ahead of like-mind­ed par­ties such as the Greens.

Although the par­ty blamed an “admin­is­tra­tive error”, Mr Daoud said the pref­er­ences were direct­ed per­son­al­ly by Mr Assange, who has been inside the Ecuadore­an Embassy in Lon­don since June 2012 fol­low­ing British moves to extra­dite him to Swe­den to face ques­tion­ing over a sex­u­al assault inves­ti­ga­tion.

“They blamed it on an admin­is­tra­tive error and set up an inquiry that blamed nobody, found noth­ing and no rec­om­men­da­tions were fol­lowed,” Mr Daoud said.

Solic­i­tor Greg Barns, a for­mer elec­tion advis­er to the par­ty, insist­ed the pref­er­ences direct­ed to right-wing par­ties in NSW was a gen­uine admin­is­tra­tive error. In West­ern Aus­tralia, Mr Barns said can­di­date Ger­ry Geor­gatos was per­son­al­ly fond of Nation­als can­di­date David Wirrpan­da and delib­er­ate­ly placed him ahead of the Greens’ Scott Lud­lam.

Mr Barns accused Mr Daoud of ped­dling a “nasty alle­ga­tion with no sub­stance what­so­ev­er”.

Mr Daoud said Mr Ship­ton called him late last Fri­day night and direct­ed him to resign from the party’s nation­al coun­cil, so he could be replaced by one of Mr Assange’s sup­port­ers in Lon­don.

Mr Ship­ton and anoth­er coun­cil mem­ber, Gail Mal­one, were also set to resign and be replaced with asso­ciates of Mr Assange, he said.

“The can­di­dates were already decid­ed for West­ern Aus­tralia, but he said Julian doesn’t want can­di­dates in West­ern Aus­tralia and he wants to regain full con­trol of the par­ty,” Mr Daoud said.

“He want­ed to take over the par­ty but, because under the con­sti­tu­tion nobody can close down the par­ty for five years, what he want­ed was for the par­ty to be silent, to run no can­di­dates.

...

So....no par­ty endorse­ments?

The Cat­alon­ian seces­sion move­ment is con­tin­u­ing to chug along and as the inde­pen­dence vote approach­es, a vote the Span­ish gov­ern­ment declared to be ille­gal, it’s look­ing like the Rajoy gov­ern­ment is going to take exact­ly the kind of heavy-hand­ed approach to stop­ping the ille­gal ref­er­en­dum that could end up fuel­ing it. Don’t for­get that Cat­alo­nia is the wealth­i­est state in Spain and much of the sen­ti­ment dri­ving it is a per­ceived resent­ment over help­ing the its poor­er neigh­bors so this isn’t exact­ly an instance where Cat­alo­nia is be ‘oppressed’. But if there’s a sig­nif­i­cant state crack­down on the move­ment that cross­es a line it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that this move­ment will take on a real ‘we’re being oppressed!’ dimen­sion. It’s a tricky sit­u­a­tion for any gov­ern­ment but it’s not hard to imag­ine Mar­i­ano Rajoy’s right-wing gov­ern­ment fuel­ing the fire.

So, with that in mind, check out the two Twit­ter accounts that appear to account for near­ly a third of all Twit­ter traf­fic with the #Cat­alo­nia hash­tag, in ref­er­ence to the Cat­alon­ian seces­sion move­ment: Julian Assange and Edward Snow­den:

Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald

On Cata­lan inde­pen­dence, Julian Assange, Edward Snow­den emerge as sur­prise back­ers

Chris Zap­pone
Sep­tem­ber 26 2017

Two Moscow-linked fig­ures have emerged as the loud­est voic­es on Twit­ter ampli­fy­ing news and com­men­tary about Cat­alo­ni­a’s seces­sion ref­er­en­dum.

Research inde­pen­dent­ly con­firmed by Fair­fax Media shows Twit­ter accounts of Wik­iLeaks leader Julian Assange as well as for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tor con­trac­tor Edward Snow­den now account for near­ly a third of all Twit­ter traf­fic under the hash­tag #Cat­alo­nia.

Assange has pep­pered his fol­low­ers with more than 80 orig­i­nal tweets sup­port­ing the Cata­lan inde­pen­dence ref­er­en­dum, sug­gest­ing “the future of West­ern civil­i­sa­tion is being revealed” by the renewed push by region­al seces­sion­ists.

Those tweets have been gen­er­ous­ly shared.

Of the 150,279 tweets and retweets using the #Cat­alo­nia hash­tag in the 10 days until Sun­day, more than 40,368 came from the Julian Assange account, accord­ing to one mea­sure by social media analy­sis account Con­spir­a­tor Norteno. A fur­ther 8198 came from the Edward Snow­den Twit­ter account.

Oth­ers includ­ed the Wik­iLeaks account, with 2120 #Cat­alo­nia tweets and retweets, while Rus­sia-owned net­work RT gen­er­at­ed 598 tweets and retweets.

The surge in pro-seces­sion mes­sages comes as author­i­ties in Madrid con­tend with a new move for inde­pen­dence in the autonomous region of Cat­alo­nia. Span­ish author­i­ties have moved to quash a Octo­ber 1 ref­er­en­dum by dis­solv­ing the region’s elec­tion com­mis­sion, arrest­ing local offi­cials and seiz­ing cam­paign mate­ri­als.

Nei­ther Wik­iLeaks’ Julian Assange nor Edward Snow­den, have a deep his­to­ry of involve­ment with Span­ish pol­i­tics.

...

Hash­tag analy­sis ser­vice Hash­tag­i­fy, accessed on Tues­day, iden­ti­fied the Snow­den account as the biggest “influ­encer” for the hash­tag, fol­lowed by Julian Assange.

...

The Twit­ter accounts of both Snow­den and Assange have pub­lished state­ments that dis­tort or exag­ger­ate what is hap­pen­ing in Spain.

Recent polls show 49 per cent of Cata­lans oppose inde­pen­dence. That seg­ment is less like­ly to par­tic­i­pate in the ref­er­en­dum. How­ev­er, the 41 per cent who sup­port becom­ing an autonomous nation, are like­ly to par­tic­i­pate..

A “dis­cred­it­ed” vote is expect­ed to go ahead in Cat­alo­nia. Whether Assange and Snow­den tweet­ing about Cat­alo­nia in Eng­lish would make much dif­fer­ence on the ground, is not clear.

How­ev­er, cast­ing doubt about the legit­i­ma­cy of the Span­ish gov­ern­ment over Cat­alo­nia may have a longer-term effect.

“The right of self-deter­mi­na­tion — for peo­ple to freely decide their own sys­tem of gov­ern­ment — can­not sim­ply be out­lawed. It is a human right,” Snow­den’s account tweet­ed on Sep­tem­ber 21.

Fair­fax Media has sought com­ment from Assange’s and Snow­den’s Twit­ter accounts.

———-

“On Cata­lan inde­pen­dence, Julian Assange, Edward Snow­den emerge as sur­prise back­ers” by Chris Zap­pone; Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald; 09/26/2017

“Of the 150,279 tweets and retweets using the #Cat­alo­nia hash­tag in the 10 days until Sun­day, more than 40,368 came from the Julian Assange account, accord­ing to one mea­sure by social media analy­sis account Con­spir­a­tor Norteno. A fur­ther 8198 came from the Edward Snow­den Twit­ter account.”

It appears that the Cat­alon­ian seces­sion is a new pet project for Assange and Snow­den. And Snow­den specif­i­cal­ly appears to be advo­cat­ing that no seces­sion move­ment any­where ever can be reject­ed by the gov­ern­ment under the premise that self-deter­mi­na­tion is a human right:

...
“The right of self-deter­mi­na­tion — for peo­ple to freely decide their own sys­tem of gov­ern­ment — can­not sim­ply be out­lawed. It is a human right,” Snow­den’s account tweet­ed on Sep­tem­ber 21.
...

And Snow­den is pret­ty clear that he’s view­ing this as a “nat­ur­al law” issue. When a twit­ter user respond­ed to his above tweet, Snow­den replied:

Respect­ful­ly, human rights are nei­ther earned nor sub­or­di­nate to pol­i­tics: they are nat­ur­al, not gifts of law. No state may restrict them. https://t.co/ZXplfrzmVy— Edward Snow­den (@Snowden) Sep­tem­ber 21, 2017

And let’s not for­get that the right to secede is one of those con­cepts cham­pi­oned by the Lib­er­tar­i­an far-right, all the way down the right to indi­vid­u­als to secede from all gov­ern­ment. As this piece from Lib­er­tar­i­an David S. D’Am­a­to that was pub­lished on July 4th, 2016 in Newsweek demon­strates, extend­ing the right to secede down to the indi­vid­ual is a great way to cre­ate an anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety with no gov­ern­ment at all was seen by fig­ures like Mur­ray Roth­bard as a great way to achieve the anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist utopia.

So giv­en Snow­den and Assange’s anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist hyper-Lib­er­tar­i­an lean­ings, what’s their take on the US Civ­il War giv­en the ‘the right to seces­sion is nat­ur­al law under all cir­cum­stances’ phi­los­o­phy. How about Seast­eading? Should bil­lion­aires be allowed to start their own pri­vate­ly-owned nations off­shore with­out out­side inter­fer­ence? These are the kinds of ques­tions Snow­den and Assange are invit­ing and it’s be inter­est­ing to hear their answers. Inter­est­ing and prob­a­bly depress­ing.

While there’s no short­age of mas­sive ques­tions fac­ing Cat­alo­nia should it fol­low through with its bid to secede from Spain, its inevitable that a num­ber of those mas­sive ques­tions are going to involve Cat­alo­ni­a’s new finan­cial sys­tem that it’s going to have to imme­di­ate­ly set up. It’s an espe­cial­ly mas­sive ques­tion giv­en that seces­sion would auto­mat­i­cal­ly kick Cat­alo­nia out of the EU and force the new nation to reap­ply to the union. Which could take a while. Plus, Mar­i­ano Rajoy has already threat­ened to cut off fund­ing for the state if it pro­ceeds to declare inde­pen­dence.

But nev­er fear. Julian Assange, one of the biggest Cat­alo­nia seces­sion boost­ers out­side of Cat­alo­nia, has a solu­tion: Bit­coin. Yep, Cat­alo­nia can just switch over to Bit­coin. And as Assange points out, that’s one of the bonus fea­tures of Bit­coin. It makes seces­sion eas­i­er:

Coin Tele­graph

Julian Assange Sup­ports Bit­coin As Ways to Free Cat­alo­nia From Spain’s Dic­tate

By Jon Buck
SEP 16, 2017

A recent report from BBC News indi­cates that the Span­ish gov­ern­ment will seize con­trol of the finances of the autonomous region of Cat­alo­nia with­in 48 hours, if they don’t stop the ‘ille­gal’ ref­er­en­dum vote regard­ing inde­pen­dence.

Jul­lian Assange, the free­dom-tout­ing founder of Wik­ileaks, quick­ly tweet­ed his sup­port of the ref­er­en­dum, as well as a com­ment on the impor­tance of Bit­coin in this regard.

Why all free­dom lov­ing peo­ple and states need Bit­coin part 29192: https://t.co/6mivKUh3wZ— Julian Assange ?? (@JulianAssange) Sep­tem­ber 15, 2017

Sup­port from Wik­ileaks

The vote was pro­posed after years of the wealthy region pay­ing into the cen­tral gov­ern­ment far more than it received in pub­lic ser­vices. The Span­ish gov­ern­ment has threat­ened to take con­trol of all finan­cial trans­ac­tions in order to stop the spend­ing of state funds on ille­gal acts. Spain’s finance min­is­ter Cristo­bal Mon­toro is cat­e­gor­i­cal:

“These mea­sures are to guar­an­tee that not one euro will go toward financ­ing ille­gal acts.”

...

———-

“Julian Assange Sup­ports Bit­coin As Ways to Free Cat­alo­nia From Spain’s Dic­tate” by Jon Buck; Coin Tele­graph; 09/16/2017

“Jul­lian Assange, the free­dom-tout­ing founder of Wik­ileaks, quick­ly tweet­ed his sup­port of the ref­er­en­dum, as well as a com­ment on the impor­tance of Bit­coin in this regard.”

Bit­coin for Cat­alo­nia! What could go wrong?

Oh yeah, a lot. For exam­ple, there’s the fact that the ‘no gov­ern­ment con­trols it’ fea­ture of Bit­coin also means that Cat­alo­nia would­n’t con­trol its own cur­ren­cy and would just have to fol­low the whims of Bit­coin’s hyper volatil­i­ty. And Bit­coin is one of the most volatile cur­ren­cies on the plan­et and no cen­tral bank to smooth the volatil­i­ty. The hand­ful of peo­ple who own almost all the Bit­coins are the de fac­to cen­tral bank­ing car­tel for Bit­coin and they would become the new cen­tral bankers of Cat­alo­nia. So pre­sum­ably any­thing involv­ing cur­ren­cy hyper volatil­i­ty could go wrong because Bit­coin’s oli­garchy clear­ly loves volatil­i­ty.

Oh, and if the inter­net goes down tem­porar­i­ly the Cat­alon­ian econ­o­my would freeze. That could also go wrong.

But oth­er than hand­ing the fate of your nation’s cur­ren­cy over to the Bit­coin oli­garchs and requir­ing an inter­net con­nec­tion for every trans­ac­tion it sounds like a great idea.