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Wikileaks Suspends Publishing Of Cables Due To "Financial Blockade"
lee1 writes "Wikileaks has had to cease publishing classified files due to what the organization calls a 'blockade by US-based finance companies' that, according to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has 'destroyed 95% of our revenue.' Assange also opined that 'A handful of US finance companies cannot be allowed to decide how the whole world votes with its pocket.' According to Assange the group was taking 'pre-litigation action' against the financial blockade in Iceland, Denmark, the UK, Brussels, the United States, and Australia. They have also filed an anti-trust complaint with the European Commission."
Since all the major credit card companies are based in the United States, they are free to push their national interests through financial attacks. Let's not forget the numerous and notorious failures of Paypal. There is a slow but steady drive to decentralize everything that has become concentrated enough to control these aspects of our lives.
Publish them already. I simply cannot believe that in all of the Wikileaks organization, not a single copy or backup had been made. There's got to be something, especially with a bundle of files so damaging that they managed to turn one of your own against you. I just can't handle the idea of that level of competence in a modern internet organization tasked with anonymizing its sources. It's too scary.
WikiLeaks would need $3.5 mln over the next 12 months to maintain its current levels of operations, he said.
Either they've signed up for the world's most expensive hosting plan, or Assange and his friends are running up quite a nightclub tab.
With the U.S. government now controlling all the major credit card companies and banks, I guess they really are the world emperors and overlords. And I, for one, would like to welcome our new Yank overlords.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
For now. Speech is only free as in beer, where the beer is made from hops grown on Pandora.
Given that the financial blockade was well in place before that release, the chronology of your account seems more than a trifle suspect...
It's weird that the financial companies can control the media in such a way.
I thought that credit card companies had some legal obligation to transfer money from A to B, unless the money was actually criminal money? But last time I checked, Assange was accused (not convicted) of rape. And the Wikileaks organization as a whole wasn't accused of anything in a legal court. Or am I missing something?
FYI
I have got an impression that Wikileaks haven't reach yet the status of al-Qa'ida, Taliban or al-Shabaab, but they pretty close to that in the ranks of Iran and Syria.
If I were Julian I would keep my movements to heavily populated areas avoiding shires of England.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I don't support wikileaks but what's stopping them from publishing what they have? SO much for information being free. It's free as long as they get their pockets lined. F wiki leaks!
Public opinion swung hard against Wikileaks after the accidental release of the un-redacted cables. That leak put many people in harm's way, including a lot of people trying to help overthrow oppressive regimes or criminal enterprises. If we are able to ask "who watchers the watchers?" we have to ask "who watches the watchers of the watchers?" and the answer is that, in Wikileaks' case, big problems of credibility exist.
And, still, his point is valid. It's not public opinion that's starving Wikileaks at the moment, it's small number of big finance companies that have cut them off. What he is asserting is that financial blockade is akin to setting up barriers at polling places - what remains to be seen is if the world will agree with him.
I suspect the majority popular vote would support Assange's assertion (financial blockade should not be used to suppress free speech), but the final decision will be against him.
The original goal of Wikileaks was to publish documents where secrecy were misused to hide criminal acts. By releasing everything indiscriminately they took upon themselves a load they can not bear.
You threaten to publish the secret, evil, nefarious ways of financial institutions, claim to have a hard drive full of incriminating information, and now these same financial institutions now won't deal with you?
Why... I never. How demonic indeed!
I've often wondered that too.....
Who does "watcher" those watchers. Who'd a thunk it?
No ? ...thus not financed !
The market has no want for truth
Before people will be able to render an opinion, they need to also face an uncomfortable truth: That the people who control the world's money also have a non-impartial agenda which they will assert when it suits them to do so.
This isn't a "political" issue as much as it is a personal one. Note that the flow of money to Wikileaks was not inhibited until they decided to leak things about banks. That's when they started to choke Wikileaks' money flow.
After the people are made to recognize this fact, that's when they can make an opinion about whether this is good or bad.
The rulers of the world are exposing themselves through their actions. And the activities of late are showing who controls the government... hint: it's not the people.
How I wish I had mod points...
Take bitcoins to transfer cash. Doesn't seem overly complicated. I can turn $50 into BTC without much time or effort, send it to them, and they can turn it into euros or whatever they need with little effort.
Don't they have a postal mail address where they can accept innumerable forms of psuedo-currency like gift cards, postal stamps, etc?
Handling $3.5 million might be a bit labor intensive, maybe they need a slightly smaller budget?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I think you will find, your own public opinion has swung, and that opinion is yours alone. In all honesty the only "opinion" i have changed is that of the guardian's editors *cough* david leigh *cough* for breaking confidentiality agreements, and of course the Shit-Berg (whatshisname?). The two main culprits of the wikileaks-leak are not even part of the organization anymore, and have been reverting to childish interviews trying to smear julian and his colleagues, almost as if they are having tantrums over it.
In regards to the USG. If you have nothing to hide, then why try to hide information about it? Any harm done is the result of american politics. Wikileaks should have released the cables un-redacted in the first place.
As for the article, they have every right to go ahead and take legal action, by the looks of it they should win the case.
Considering it was a rogue newspaper bungling the encryption key and forcing their hand so that the bad guys weren't the only ones that had access, I very much doubt the egg on Wikileaks's face was truly their own.
Someone fucked up, wikileaks got blamed for making the best of a bad situation, and some secret operative somewhere in the guardian is probably giving the agency he works for a jolly laugh of "eeeeeeeeggcellent"
Intelligence networks have been trying like clockwork to get Wikileaks shut down ever since their parent governments started getting embarrassed by the leaks.
Infiltrating a news organization and spilling an already compromised key for the sole purpose of embarrassing and discrediting wikileaks would be very useful and if that's what really happened I would not be the least bit surprised.
Oh, and if I suddenly stop posting on slashdot...feel free to get even more suspicious.
The governments pressured the bank cards not to transfer funds. In the modern age you cant run an internet enterprise on physical cash.
When a powerful multinational corporation does something that's not legal, it will be made legal afterwards.
Example #1: Citibank bought Travelers, knowingly violating the Glass-Steagal act. Result, Glass-Steagal was repealed (Joe Biden voting against, oddly enough) with the current, totally predictable results.
Example #2: Telcos performed warrantless wiretaps for the Bush administration without proper authorization. They (hilariously) claimed to be doing so out of patriotism, but when the FBI missed a billing cycle the telcos suddenly stopped having this vaunted "patriotism" that somehow justified trampling US laws. Result, congress granted telcos immunity from prosecution (both McCain and Obama rushing back to DC from the campaign trail to cast votes in favor).
They do what they want, and then they buy enough government to make it legal. The only time there is any issue is when two zaibatsus have conflicting goals - the people don't matter any more, which is what OWS is about.
I think this may be the first relevant BitCoin post I've seen here.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Or not, because everything you said is partisan, and your own opinion, and many of us don't see it this way.
Still, you keep asserting your world view is everyone's world view if it makes you feel better about yourself.
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war/singleton/
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Yes, you can turn $50 into BTC today, and on Wednesday they can easily cash it in for $25 :)
Pay 'em in Bitcoins.
#DeleteChrome
Next time don't associate with liars and murderers and their cloak-and-dagger bullshit and you won't be so afraid of the truth and the whole truth.
One could argue that Wikileaks does the same thing...In order to obtain the truth from untruthful people, you will ultimately have to tell a few lies yourself. Assange is no better than the people and entities he is outing.
Given that the financial blockade was well in place before that release, the chronology of your account seems more than a trifle suspect...
Perhaps, but the end result is still that, with public opinion swinging against them, it's less likely some white knight will come to their rescue.
Maybe their whole idea of "piss off the companies who can do the only significant money transfers to keep us in business by leaking sensitive information about them" could have been thought out a wee bit better...
Isn't that pretty much free?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
This author must dispute two statements of fact in the above post:
FYI: the un-redacted cable release came from a confluence of several events:
The corporate media and the fickle public will NEVER digest a huge leak -- it has to be slowly leaked out over time so if we hear anything we hear the SAME bit of leak information at the same time everywhere and not too much that it gets skipped over.
If you dump it all out on a friday, you'll only hear about some diplomat screwing some presidents wife for the next few weeks and maybe a couple things the station doesn't mind reporting. Then the whole thing dies down and they don't talk about the rest of it anymore. Something like that happens all the time; especially on friday media dumps. (most people don't read the paper; tv, radio are not watched friday night or much on the weekend either.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Seems the Media campaign against got to you, puppet!
Out of curiosity, what is your signature referring to?
And I'm curious how I never once before heard that the cables have evidence of murdering civilians? All the previous reports I've seen state that the big evidence was the "collateral murder" video. I've watched that repeatedly, and don't see any evidence of "murder".
A reporter is seen walking with an armed group in a DMZ. Carrying weapons in there is illegal, and asking to be shot. You see the reporter with a camera. Later someone points an RPG at the helicopter. Some claim this is the camera that is seen earlier, except the reporter wasn't the one standing there, and the RPG is much larger than the camera seen earlier.
The troops in the helicopter call and ask permission to engage before engaging. A van comes onto the scene and tries to take people away. If you drive into a situation where people are being shot and aid them, you are placing yourself in the line of fire. And while the whole incident was covered by several reporters (who love reporting on deaths of reporters), none mentioned kids being in the van, which Wikileaks claims. In fact, there is zero evidence anywhere that children were in the van. And if there were, there deaths would at the very least partially be responsible for the driver who put them in harm.
When you're in warfare in which the enemy doesn't wear a uniform, and can attack from anywhere, it is hard to determine who is the enemy. But you had armed people who pointed an RPG at the helicopter, and then a group aiding them. That supposedly was definitive proof of murder. I'm just not seeing it.
If the leak had other definitive proof of murder, I'd be curious to see it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
A handful of companies can make sure that you get the media attention, or not. a handful of other companies can decide whether you get the funds to be able to get the media attention, or not. So it goes.
This is why all the representative democracies on the planet are failing. Because the only ones that can be seen and elected, are those that the powerful few private interests allow people to see.
Wikileaks has been a prime example that exhibited how crooked our media/finance system, and how they are able to limit everyone's alleged liberties at their private whim - You are only as free as the size of your wallet, and then again only if you are compatible with those who would allow/bar you from using your wallet.
Read radical news here
Probably only those who are in usa ? i dont see public opinion swinging against them anywhere in europe, or middle east, china or japan ...
Read radical news here
for, these watchers are not the kind of watchers that can destroy cities like in the movie.
these are not watchers, these are observers, and talkers. and what they are talking, is what they are finding that we are specifically and nefariously prevented from finding out - what is done against us behind our backs by powerful corporations and governments.
in this filth-ridden, corrupt times, it is a dire necessity to have such a function in society. and that does not need to be 'watched', but encouraged.
Read radical news here
Note that the flow of money to Wikileaks was not inhibited until they decided to leak things about banks.
Agreed. Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union == the U.S. government.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Next time don't associate with liars and murderers and their cloak-and-dagger bullshit and you won't be so afraid of the truth and the whole truth.
One could argue that Wikileaks does the same thing...In order to obtain the truth from untruthful people, you will ultimately have to tell a few lies yourself. Assange is no better than the people and entities he is outing.
Can you name a confirmed lie Assange has told? I do not mean that for a challenge -- I am ignorant about this and want to know if there is proof of such a thing.
.. assuming you know for sure Assange does use deception as a weapon just like those he exposes ... by turning their own machinations against them, you do not think Assange is better than those he is outing? That maybe what he does is some kind of necessary evil like government or taxes? Is he not beating them at their own game and in the process exposing what is wrong with the game and its rules? Do you view it otherwise?
And ethically
The way he keeps pissing off powerful corrupt people makes me think he is part of the solution, on the side of the common man so to speak.
Amnesty International blasted Assange for repeated leaks where he didn't redact civilian volunteer names, leading to civilian volunteers coming under death threats.
THAT NEVER HAPPENED
WikiLeaks won Amnesty International 2009 Media Award. That's what the organization thinks of the other organization. What did happen, and you're misremembering it the way t was designed to be misremembered, is that one individual that worked for AI made a comment blasting Assange. That individual did not represent the organization. And the death threats were the same hypothetical threats that were U.S. official FUD all along, nothing real.
You can't take the sky from me...
That's why anyone using Bitcoin seriously at the moment should use an exchange to instant sell their Coins for a more stable currency, and buy Bitcoins only exactly when they want to transfer them.
Holding Bitcoins is for speculators.
Wikileaks has taken on the two most powerful kinds of organisations in the world, the pillars of the international political system and the global marketplace. It directly damaged the interests of the government of the world most powerful sovereign state (still the USA) and made noises about hurting corporate financial institutions. That's a tall order for any organisation.
Wikileaks put itself in a particularly hard spot because it hasn't played well with others. It took an 'our way or the highway' approach to disclosure. It also released information that no one was asking for, so it didn't make allies with its disclosures. Moreover, it didn't support or enable calls for specific kinds of disclosure from existing organisation. Now it's isolated and atrophying because no one can operate at that level without allies for long.
the "Conservative" SCOTUS will strike it down.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Except it did.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703428604575419580947722558.html?KEYWORDS=julian+assange+rights+groups
Amnesty International went after Assange in 2010, a year after that award when they learned how he put civilians in danger. And yet in every interview on the matter, Assange insists he did nothing wrong. In this article, he blasts others for being lazy, when he was the lazy one who didn't bother redacting names. And if you bother taking two seconds to Google such matters, you'll find several quotes where he says he won't redact civilian names unless people give him $200,000.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
that Assange is only in it for his own interests.
Has Wikileaks ever lied, or provided demonstrably false information?
Yes, they posted a video that was clearly manipulated to the point of not even being close to 'the truth'. I know, I saw both the full version and the edited version, there is no mistake.
The video showed they have an agenda and they'll manipulate facts into lies in order to further their agenda. From that point on, everything else they do and have done is tainted. If you're too stupid to start thinking for yourself, nothing we can do about that, but we're still going to point out that your a moron.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
can someone explain what this financial blockade is? I can't figure it out. I read both articles and its so vague that it doesn't make any sense. All I hear is a 'financial blockade' is hurting our donations. I am lost. What are these companies supposedly doing to prevent people from giving him money. I am lost. Are they block fund transfers? They can pay with a cashiers check.
Factual error: the US Soldier who carried one of the wounded children away (visible in long version of the video!) later identified himself and went public with this fact.
Now, a theoretical situation: You are a father, with two children in you van, in your home city, which happens to occupied by a foreign army. You come upon a scene of death and mayhem in the middle of your home city, and see a wounded man (you don't know he's a reporter) crawling from the scene. Do you A.) Drive away and not render aid, because it's too dangerous ? or B.) Decide to risk yourself and your children to render first aid to the wounded? In the event you choose B, do you think it is acceptable for the occupying army to then kill you? That's what happened ...
I am not saying Assange in particular, but Wikileaks as an organization. Did they disclose the people that are leaking the information to them, such as Manning? How is that any different than a government refusing to release the sources of their information? a lie by omission is still a lie.
I would argue that Assange is not doing this so much for the good of the people, but for the good of his ego.
Agreed, that never happened. Poster was repeating a Fox News falsehood.
Mr Assange has become a complete spin doctor. His actual problem is that he planned to bank roll Wikileaks with the profits from his book sales, and truthfully the book isn't selling. Also, Mr Assange and the other leaders of Wikileaks believe that their would be a ground swell of donation after leaking bank records. Which also has not happened.
Mr Assange your actual problem is that your business model failed. Donations and books sales are not what you projected, and now you're attacking the banks for freezing your assets (approximately 100,000 Euros in total), and PayPal for canceling your PayPal account for "violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity." This is due to PayPal not wanting to be indited on United States RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1961) changes.This has nothing to due with the banks, but the illegal activity that Wikileaks promotes.
The Man cut the money hose to stop us leaking, so we'll show him... why, by golly, we'll not leak anything until we get more money in our pockets.
Yes, well done, very convincing.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Given that there is a $5000/day limit on the Bitcoin exchange, I don't think that's going to be a viable way to launder the money. The whole point of that limit is to prevent people from moving money too fast and showing people the inevitable crash (and why it's crashing veeerrry sloooowly) so the early "investors" get a steady paycheck until the money runs out. If Assange were to try to use it, he would end up losing a fairly hefty percentage of every dollar/euro/pound he put in it due to the constant downward pressure on the coin and the overhead from the various middlemen all trying to prop up their own bank accounts.
I read the internet for the articles.
Can you provide a link to the soldier carrying kids away? Because all the news stories when the incident occurred said there were no kids.
And as a parent, I wouldn't endanger the lives of my kids to aid a stranger.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
According to Assange the group was taking 'pre-litigation action'....
We call that voting with your money. Perfectly moral and legal.
The lens pointed at helicopter around the corner looks like Canon 500mm F4. Google it out if you can't tell the differrence between RPG and Canons gray/white professional lenses. (Hint: RPGs are thin, long and have very distinctive conical shaped charge at the end)
I haven't heard of one single death coming as a direct result of Wikileaks revelations. However, they have brought to light a whole heap of corruption and cover ups. They have done WAY more good than harm (if any harm at all). Personally, I think the people who like power and war just enjoy using that as an excuse to bash Wikileaks. Those in power and money also control the media and try to portray Wikileaks in the worst light possible. Things like Wikileaks just might be the only thing that will save democracy from collapsing on itself.
I have no problem with Assange publishing Wikileaks. But the US government has a right to interfere with Assange's financial transactions through US banks until the case against him is resolved. He is welcome to use non-US institutions if he likes.
Cause and effect proclamations about cloak and dagger are mostly just a Rorschach over eigenvalues of paranoia.
You're effectively asserting that if he hadn't pissed off the banks, the money would not have been choked off, which is by no means clear. I think major banks, as institutions founded on secrecy and power, would be remarkably obtuse to take no alarm long before the BoA cross-hairs made them front line participants.
I will concede that anger does tend to cut through institutional inertia. When the threat is less overt, your adversaries might wish to not be seen wielding their power directly.
Banks are extremely reluctant to suggest that criminality or public disfavour of the recipient is grounds for non-payment: it's their least favorite publicity to admit they have a list of reasons for taking your money then not giving it back. Trust in reciprocity is their entire business model for accumulating their bankroll. Banks pretty much go to the wall, a very thick and heavy wall, before conceding in public that conveyance of funds is an act of discretion.
And you're imagining what you want to see.
Since all the major credit card companies are based in the United States, they are free to push their national interests through financial attacks.
However this seems an inconvenience, not a death sentence for a political organization. People could send paper checks. Some other group could aggregate online donations and deliver a paper check. Independent groups raise money for a cause and then donate to organizations supporting that cause all the time.
I think Occam's razor would suggest that Wikileaks was financially mismanaged (as in things like the above not embezzlement) or that the Wikileaks organization has been discredited and the donations don't exist at the required level. Blaming a lack of credit card processing seems a little bit like the wall street CEOs blaming the weather. Maybe is was really how the organization was managed?
But their objective has never been to make as much money as possible, so it is wrong to say that they have made mistakes because something did not turn out as financially good for them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Here's a hint:
If the people aren't really in charge, then it's not really a democracy.
"Public opinion" is bought and sold by the media. Guess who controls the media.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The solution to all of this is very simple, but sadly the general population, and many of the journalists who are paid to corral their thoughts, is even more simple. If half of all the people who follow the Wikileaks account adopted Bitcoin ...
Technology is not always the answer. A far simpler solution is to mail a paper check, either as an individual or a group that raised money (possibly aggregating online donations) for a cause.
In the first pass, you can see the reporter with the camera in question. And he isn't at the front of the group. They pass around a building and you lose sight of the group for a moment. But before then, you can see it is someone else who reaches the corner of the building first. He is the one who points the object at the helicopter. And what he points is considerably larger than the camera that you see seconds before.
There was only one reporter on the scene. Everyone else in the group was carrying weapons. When the group is shot, the reporter is in the back (not in the front where this object in question was being pointed at the helicopter). No one else was carrying a camera.
When Assange himself was questioned on the matter, he said the object could have in fact been an RPG. Even he didn't dispute that point. His argument was more that the American troops didn't have the right to fire on the van. And while I would agree that is questionable, I don't know you can easily chalk that up to outright murder. The troops didn't open fire without permission. They didn't randomly fire on just anyone. There were armed troops that pointed a weapon at them. If you're seen as aiding the enemy, then you're placing yourselves in danger. It isn't unreasonable for troops to react that way. This is a questionable decision that I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge. But I certainly wouldn't call it murder.
I haven't served in combat. I don't claim to know what it is like. I was in the Marine Corps though. During boot camp they ran us through a fake drill where we were issued orders and told we were shipping off for war. An entire company of Marines (6 platoons of 60-70) sat in a room. Every single one was saying that they didn't want to go to combat. I didn't hear a single voice saying, "man, I just want to kill people!"
Is it possible that individuals sign up during wartime because they do want to shoot people? Certainly. But I don't assume all soldiers are evil, nor that they want to kill people. But I have been told several times over again that all US soldiers are blood-thirsty killers. And I give these guys a little leeway because I don't think most people are asking themselves what they'd really do in a combat situation. Most people here have never had to lay their life on the line for others and don't know what it is to make such decisions.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
So you can't get credit card deposits. What is stopping you from doing it the old way, you know, with cheques, money orders and wire transfers?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's called cause and effect.
Note that these are paraphrases:
Assange 2010: "I've got secret documents from two US-based financial organizations that I may give to the press."
Assange 2011: "We don't have enough money to release any more documented due to a blockade by US-based financial organizations."
Duh, what did you think would happen?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Julian has all these documents ready to go to blow the lid off the financial crisis, the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the sexual proclivities of one nominal political figure or another, and yet because he's not getting enough money donated to his 'cause' he can't publish them? Sounds more like to me that he's strictly in it for the shakedown, if not of the people who are the objects of the leaks, then the sheeples who think they'll learn something by reading them. I guess he needs to try and maintain his undeserved high profile lifestyle somehow...
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
Wikileaks wikileaks, is this all people hear can they consider any other method? If I was cynical I'd say that Wikileaks was setup or subverted to discourage people leaking, to change people's perception online. It sounds like whinging but it's good to see attention given to the financial system and to have it so clear.
There's Freenet, eepsites, tor hosted sites and Bitcoin. No need for Wikileaks, post direct and then leak.
Perhaps this can help OccupyWallstreet people to stop whinging and start doing, starting by takening a long hard look inside ones own wallet.
A blog I run for the wealth
VISA, Matercard, et al, are acting as our "moral police" and are preventing money from being fed to organisations that they believe do not benefit the greater good of society.
They *will* do the same for paedophiles, etc, without informing them if they become aware that cards, accounts, etc, are being used to support such activities without any request from the police.
The significant problem with all of this "moral policing" is that we have no means for recourse if we are wrongly accused or *they* make a choice that is in *their* best interests and not ours.
$5000/day makes almost 2 million per year, am I vastly underestimating the amount of money WikiLeaks needs? Also, how many bones did you break last time you crashed veeeerrry slooooowly?
People manage to distribute petabytes of illegal material daily on bittorrent. Assange can't find a way to distribute megabytes?
The real story is that Assange can't make a dime off seeding a few torrents, and so he's not interested.
Advice: on VPS providers
Note that the flow of money to Wikileaks was not inhibited until they decided to leak things about banks. That's when they started to choke Wikileaks' money flow.
Sorry, can you show me what Wikileaks decided to leak about the banks? I'm pretty sure Wikileaks has not released anything like you think. You are probably getting caught up in the five-month-long claims from Julian Assange that there was going to be a bombshell Wikileaks release about Bank of America, and then......... nothing. If I'm wrong, then mod me down... but otherwise, don't let that guy sit at Score:4, Insightful for a silly conspiracy post.
... And until you unblock delivery of our finances, we'll hold our breath until we turn BLUE!!!
SO THERE!!!!!
According to TFA, 3.5 Million a year. So you are short by about half, especially when you consider just how much money you would lose through continuous use of BTC.
I read the internet for the articles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik&t=17m10s
If the link doesn't take you to the right time, go to 17:10 in the video. They discuss a wounded child several times over the next 5 minutes or so. I'm not sure if there's actual video of the soldier carrying the child (didn't watch the whole thing, just skimmed looking for this), but I think that's enough to prove there was at least one child injured (the video annotations indicate 2 children, so I'm not sure what happened to that supposed second child)
There's nothing, AFAIK, to prevent a Real World scenario of BTC being used in monetary transactions.
All it would takes is to be given BTC the same treatment as Forex ("foreign exchange") trading.
Due to the apparent number of people (mostly, the tech avant-gard) interested in it, and being the coins of today fiduciary objects (based on trust), I don't see why some quant/financial geek couldn't establish some calculations in order to establish some force conversion rates.
However, I'm not an economist or trader, so I might be wrong.
The video showed they have an agenda
Woopty-do-dah
Prey-tell who doesn't have an agenda? Yourself?
Somehow I think that you believe that the world would have been better off without wikileaks, because they have an agenda.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I like what wikileaks did in the cables situation. It actually improved my attitude about the US was doing in demonstrating that US diplomats were in fact acting the way they had claimed to be. I like their other leaks...
But wikileaks has constantly been an anti-establishment, essentially criminal enterprise which is anarchist. Why would they expect governments to intervene against US banks on their behalf?
The point here is that Wikileaks and friends aren't disinterested seekers of truth.
People to care? people are ignorant. You can't care if you do not know. The whole issue is INFORMING people in a system which fails time after time to properly inform the public. WTF? How can you think that gaming the system to INFORM is turning it into something other than what it is??
Often it requires DEPTH to understand it and get properly upset about it. If the corruption leaks for Tunisia were simple short headlines about US corrupting their government, it may not be enough to motivate people already fed up-- it wasn't new; they knew the system was broken already; what was needed was enough to push past a threshold so something would be done about it--- it contributed to the outrage and possibly wouldn't have met the threshold to get a sustainable democracy movement. It had an international focus put upon it. I don't know jack about Tunisia but when the leak came out I heard mention of it; it had coverage -- when I'd probably not have heard about it otherwise. Hell, in many places the news is limited or restricted so getting outside coverage is the best way to reach some people.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
As a fellow american, I wholeheartedly disagree with you.
The united states was founded on the core principles of liberty, justice, freedom, and the soverignty of its people.
The current us government pays halfassed lipservice to half of that, and blatantly flaunts the other half.
Assange can be a dickhead, that it his perogative. I don't mind that he is a dickhead. However, the sanitizing light he shines on the canerous boils of our ntion ARE in our nation's best interest. Jingoism, and blind adoration are what turned an innocent germany into a stage of obscene abuses of power. This can, has, and always will happen where money, power, corruption hide beneath a gleaming vaneer of propaganda and nationalistic fervor. (Be it ancient rome, with senators gobbling up resources and lands, making the whole population destitute, or us senators doing the same using BoA as a proxy to illegally forclose on people in good credit standing as a common practice.)
While I might see assange, the man, as a foolish platinum haired egotist, there is no law against being an asshole. Wikileaks, the organization, has done wonders to upset the consolodation of power that has been trending away from common citizens like you or I. Personally, I feel that if our soldiers are commiting attrocities, the people they have victimized under the guise of war deserve the justice they demand. Our armed forces are not magical just because they are american in origin. Calling out our government for covering up attrocities, either foriegn or domestic, militarily or financially, DOES tarnish the veneer of golden splenor that was painted on by the propganda machine, but in doing so it permits us to see the horrible rot going on beneath.
If the appearance of that rot angers you, the action to take is to destroy the rot, not to shoot the messenger and ostridge-plant your face in the dirt and shout about libel so as to shoot the messenger. It is only libel when it is untrue, and so far, as far as I know, the leaked cables and documents have panned out legitimate every time.
You are right, something does reek of treachery, but it isn't assange or wikileaks. It is our cocksucjing beholdenness to the choad of multinational interests, banks, and domestic corruptions that they thrive in.
America has sucked on that diseased organ, and now our nation has ghonorrhea of the mouth. No amount of breathmint is going to make it stop stinking and being inflamed. To do that, we have to stopb giving BJs to multinationals, and use heavy use of antibiotics in the form of radical transparancy. The quaint notions of our country as a fragile virgin are long past. The expose' of our nation as a crackwhore sucking dick to curry favor is not a surprise to anyone but our own deluded populace.
Again, if this angers you, the correct action is to solve the problem, and not to accuse the messenger of libel, especially when said messenger has the equivalent of the clinic's pathology report on hand to prove the charge.
America is no longer a great country, and has not been for quite awhile, and the reason it has ceased to be so is because we have allowed our leaders to sell it into prostitution.
Get over yourself, and get off your self riteous ass, and do something about the actual problem, and stop pretending that if we all just ignore the problem, that the blisters in our mouths will go away on their own.
If public opinion were in favor of Wikileaks, there would be a massive outcry against this financial starvation.
However, since Wikileaks accidentally leaked information that put innocent people in harm's way, public opinion has swung against them and as a result, we're not seeing much opposition to this financial starvation.
Had Assange and Co. behaved perfectly ethically, you would have seen much more defense of them throughout the time Wikileaks has been in the news.
You know. . . .
If not for whistle blowers, you would never have known the Telcos were handing a feed of all that data directly to the NSA.
If not for whistle blowers, the Pentagon Papers do not exist.
Or Watergate. . . . or Israel's Nuclear Program. The Olympic Bid Scandal, Bernard Madoff, Worldcom, Enron, the lack of
action done prior to 9/11, TSA's plan to secretly remove Fed Air Marshalls from flights due to hotel expenses, man. . . .
The list goes on and ON.
Go here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whistleblowers )
Go read that page then sit there and tell me we don't need folks who have the SPINE to stand up against what they consider
to be illegal or immoral actions that would otherwise remain hidden from the general public.
DO NOT HIDE YOUR ILLEGAL ACTIONS BEHIND A BUREAUCRATIC CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM.
In my opinion, doing so is far more treasonous than disclosing valid secrets as the officials in charge are supposed to
be trustworthy enough to refrain from engaging in the practice to begin with.
If you're willing to use violence to deal with Assange, then you damn well better be ready to do the same for the officials
who use the system to hide their illegal activities. The problem is, we would have to replace the entire government
afterwards. Too few would remain behind to run it.
Please explain the ethical and practical difference between giving the encryption key to a REPORTER, and publishing the clear text. Because I don't see it.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Assange who has operated as a fence for stolen property (as opposed to journalists who make intelligent discussions but do not release information that can and will get others murdered ), is gripping that American companies is destroying him. Yet, he points to a number of western nations. Well, there is an alternative. He should consider moving to China, Iran, north Korea, Venezuela, or even Somalia. There, he will be able to continue wikileaks. And I am sure that the host gov will not mind if he receives stolen property about that gov. and simply dumps on the net.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
WAAAAAAH! Someone broke our confidentiality agreement on information we were only able to obtain through someone else breaking a confidentiality agreement! Poor us!
Why would they still want to use Paypal or credit cards at all? If they simply encourage donations in bitcoins, this will solve many problems. Also, as long as they use bitcoins for their own purchases they wouldn't even be affected by any fluctuations in exchange rate towards some other currency. In the meantime I use bitcoins for most of my online business - its becoming pretty popular and since there are no transaction fees, I find it surprisingly easy to get local businesses to start accepting it.
I am not saying Assange in particular, but Wikileaks as an organization. Did they disclose the people that are leaking the information to them, such as Manning? How is that any different than a government refusing to release the sources of their information? a lie by omission is still a lie.
You are missing the whole point. Wikileaks has to keep the leaker's identity secret so that they will be free to reveal what they know. This used to be the job of the press in this country but unfortunately they are in bed with the government and the corporations.
The purpose of all this is so that we, the voters, can know what is going on. How can we vote intelligently when all we are fed is propaganda?
As stupid as it sounds, don't do it during the US holiday months (November, December) or during March Madness. First week of January might be good, as people will be pissed off about the weather and their Christmas bills.
If you know of a way for a democracy to continue operating without corruption, while supposedly keeping the people in charge, I would like to hear it.
The purpose of all this is so that we, the voters, can know what is going on. How can we vote intelligently when all we are fed is propaganda?
And how do we know what Wikileaks releases is not propaganda to further their own agenda? I am by no means saying that the governments and/or financial institutions are not guilty, but Wikileaks is no less blameless than the ones it is "reporting on." Their methods of obtaining information is no better than those they claim to be informaing against.
The media has never been truthful. Remember Yellow journalism? That had more to do with heads of the media trying to sell more papers than it ever did with being in bed with the government. The media has had a long history of self-serving motives.
No, they have all been relevant. This is just the first time you realized WHY.
This sort of thing is EXACTLY what the bitcoin creator was thinking about when it was being developed. Its *my* money. No one else should get to decide who I can send it to.
By a sniper rifle. This man and his cohorts are enemies of the United States and should be treated accordingly.
This is one of the saddest comments I've ever seen on Slashdot while I've been here. What kind of world does the parent live in where anyone who disagrees with people in power should be murdered?
One of the entire points of the United States and democracies/republics/non-dictatorships in general is in the rule of law, and not just arbitrary death for "enemies of the state."
And it exactly because of that type of attitude that US has such a great image out there. Congratulations.
So Brussels is a country now or am I missing something?
they need to learn about 2 things:
1. use bitcoins to accept donations. after receiving, immediately sell them on some exchange and you got the money. some 3rd person can get the money who is not under surveillance.
2. use TOR to provide the information. can't be tracked so no one will know where exactly the servers are so gov't can't make the provider to close access. even if they found one location, just resume from another one - no need to change addresses, no matter where you are, all the users can see you via old address..
If the goal of Wikileaks is merely to leak information to the public because they feel that the public deserves to see it, a financial blockade shouldn't really matter that much. Wikileaks could pursue a decentralized model where their own operational costs are relatively small and they rely on a network of donated mirrors to disseminate information.
Unfortunately, it appears that the goal of Wikileaks was to make a huge splash, get a lot of publicity and then cash in on it. This stance is consistent with their complaints about having lost access to tens of millions of dollars. And it's positions like this that most strain their credibility in my eyes. An organization like Wikileaks needs to be operating with the primary goal of representing the public, not trying to get rich. They've positioned themselves as an idealistic organization and they need to act like one.
It's inconvenient either way...
Twinstiq, game news
Wikileaks has been a prime example that exhibited how crooked people can be while flying a flag of good intentions. Do you REALLY think they couldn't publish all this shit in a torrent and solve all of their hosting problems? If you do, you're a moron ... oh wait, too late, already flagged you for that one.
it doesnt. there is no way to reach these people, who actually constitute the majority of voters who decide things, than through the media monopoly that has their tv screens.
and to do that, you need to romp up so much controversy that they WILL have to broadcast news about you. else, you'd remain as a ghost, like how some presidential candidates in current u.s. elections are apparently being made into.
Read radical news here
Human nature being what it is I don't think such a thing is possible.
I would boldy state that humans are NOT capable of governing themselves.
No, not really. I know what BitCoin is, there's been no big epiphany here. It has been massively overposted on Slashdot as a solution for all of the world's ills. But yes, it's good as an anonymous payment method.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I heard the true culprit was LemmiWinks.
Assange showed how out of touch he is when he blamed the problem today on right-wing Washington.
Yes, you heard that right: right-wing Washington. I almost drove off of the road laughing at that.
And, of course, he remains totally oblivious to the actual damage Wikileaks does. People die from his leaks and he doesn't even give it a second thought. With his form of thinking, I can believe that he actually did rape those Swedish women as they maintain.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yeah, let's send them virtual fake money, that will solve the problem.
By a sniper rifle. This man and his cohorts are enemies of the United States and should be treated accordingly.
This is one of the saddest comments I've ever seen on Slashdot while I've been here.
I agree with the man with the sniper rifle. How many people have to die because of Assange's leaks before the immediate parent of this post will decide that he is a danger to too many people? The financial boycott has finally taken down Wikileaks -- for now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
5th Amendment provides in part, "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
Obama ordered the execution of an American citizen based solely on allegations by the Executive branch that he was a bad guy. That is not due process. That is summary execution by the President. That should terrify anyone who values American principals. It will be comforting to those who wish we had an authoritarian dictatorship.
What's worse, is that like the Bush Administration's reliance on secret laws, i.e., secret legal memos justifying its own brand of 5th amendment violation, the deprivation of liberty, Obama is following the same practice. So we have secret laws now that allow the president to kill anyone he thinks is a bad guy, without having to justify himself. That's jaw dropping.
And of course, to show the duplicity of the "two" party system, Obama's secret memo author lambasted the Bush administration for its secret laws:
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/09/the_awlaki_memo_and_marty_lederman/singleton/
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You are kinda leaving out a KEY fact there buddy, and that fact is this: Assange said if you want names redacted it will cost $200,000 to hire the staff to do the job otherwise the men who committed those warcrimes would be dead of old age before anything got released.
If YOU were handed more than a half a million REPORTS, not pages, reports, sometimes hundreds of pages long, and it was only you and a couple of volunteers do YOU think you could actually get the work done before dying of old age?
So if you are gonna make a statement at least make it a true one. Assange said he didn't have the staffing required to redact such a huge number, he even asked for help, and he simply didn't get it, so he released. in his shoes looking at Obama wanting to escalate again? i'd have done the same thing. in a perfect world he would have been able to redact the docs in a week because he would never be short staffed but the world ain't perfect friend and as many of us know sometimes you just gotta do the best you can with what you got.
There are many things you can legitimately nail Assange on, big ego, not really a people person (most geeky types aren't I've found), likes the spotlight, but I'd argue not redacting ain't one of them. Would you have rather had Obama get his "all troops have a get out of Iraq free card' when it comes to warcrimes? Just the fact that he had the balls to want that made me sick, it was an insult to all the guys like my grandfather that fought in WWII and did their damnedest to follow the rules.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Thanks. That is a good read.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Perhaps they have been put on the OFAC list, thereby making it illegal for those financial institutions to do any transactions for them. It would also make them trap any incoming funds.
It was an open secret that Wikileaks had a large amount of data on Bank of America and were close to publishing it. However, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and others left Wikileaks last year and took the Bank of America data with them. According to Reuters News Service, DDB later admitted this and claimed to have destroyed the BoA data and 3,000 other submissions to Wikileaks.
There's a great deal more about this subject in various places, and there's a tremendously useful service that can help you find it - it's called Google. I daresay Bing and Yahoo would do nicely also. In the time you took to write your comment you could have easily found the extensive basis for the remarks that you claim are totally false and a silly conspiracy.
the Bitcoin exchange
What in the world are you talking about? The ecosystem is a lot bigger than one exchange. Multiple exchanges, and anyone can accept private transactions. I'm not entirely certain what Julian plans to do with 3.5 million but presumably at least some small amount can be directly paid for via BTC. Certainly webhosting, stuff like that.
Also most activity is quite psuedo-anonymous. Thought experiment: Julian decides to exchange 3.5 million per day, with a 5000 limit, thats a perl script running 700 times creating a new BTC address, sending $5000 to each new address from the main addrs, and then each of the 700 new addrs sending $5000 to separate new exchange accounts to cash them in or exchange or whatever. We're talking about something a small desktop and an IT tech school kid can handle, we don't need a computing cluster or PHD for this.
If Assange were to try to use it, he would end up losing a fairly hefty percentage of every dollar/euro/pound he put in it
Its a bitCOIN not a bitBANK. I can turn $ into BTC practically instantly. I can send his address the BTC, and he can turn "his" BTC into someone elses BTC in exchange for "whatever". It takes maybe about an hour of work from I say go to he has "something". I have never sent Julian money but I have given friends gifts and its pretty straightforward.
People who are used to paypal via checking account payment going to ibanpal.eu or whatever are always horrifically confused with how fast BTC works. It doesn't take three weeks to clear and have three 5% commissions along the way. It takes about, eh, an hour, and the exchange rate simply doesn't change that fast. Frankly Julian can sleep all night (or whatever it is he does all night) and he will still lose far less on average than the current crop of international money changers charge...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well, considering who is answering the question, I'm going to guess that the answer you're looking for is "George Soros and the liberals."
Do customers or suppliers control the relationship?
Both have control of each other, of course. Relatively benign control in the case of customers and suppliers, most of the time.
Entirely malevolent in the case of gov and entities with money.
They lost the support of a lot of people when they started naming names of innocent people and putting them in danger (eg: people who spoke out against Hezbollah in confidence). These people were risking a lot by speaking to US officials and had their lives put in danger for no good reason.
The whole point of the transaction was that The Guardian was to get full access to the non-redacted cables, but was not going to publish them. The Guardian insisted on this. Publishing the password to encrypted sensitive information is tantamount to publishing the sensitive information. If there is blame for publishing the clear text of the cables it mostly falls on The Guardian, but the story was spun differently. The Guardian reporters in question can achieve plausible deniability only by claiming ignorance and stupidity.
Here is an interview with the soldier in question, Ethan McCord. I continue to be amazed at the bad journalism and outright lies surrounding this incident. There has been an active disinformation campaign surrounding this entire issue, of which Fox News is only the most blatant participant.
I also watched both videos. The manipulation of the video scaled down the time and posted captions, it did not substantively alter the story told. The longer, non-edited video is MUCH harder to follow, and requires a larger time investment to understand. This is a journalistic judgement call. Also, they published BOTH versions of the video, so that anyone who did not trust the edited version, and wished to see the original evidence, could do so. I call 'troll' on you! Are you a sock puppet?
Umm... other than Obama, who is somewhat centrist, who controls the rest of Washington-- including the Supreme Court? Right-wingers. Heck most of them would tell you that (with pride), well except the Obama part. To most of the world calling Obama a centrist is kinda pushing it even, perhaps right leaning centrist would be a better definition? As for real liberal/lefties I'd say Dennis Kucinich is one of the few that springs to mind. The US has always been a pretty right-wing conservative country. I say this as a left-wing American because I think its pretty much the agreed upon reality from the perspective of the vast majority civilized society. Not that its a bad thing per se-- its our right to govern as we want. But lets not pretend that we live in a leftist society, or under some liberal government.
Julian Assange is a delusional egomaniac any way.
>>According to TFA, 3.5 Million a year. So you are short by about half, especially when you consider just how much money you would lose through continuous use of BTC.
To be fair, 3 of the $3.5 million goes to Assange's travel budget, hookers, and blow, so the Bitcoin exchange ought to be sufficient for their actual hosting needs.
Even the most robust, most de-centralized organization will fall against a good drop on their mineral line.
kekekekekek
While wikileaks certainly does have a few histrionic personalities, they have an additional expense: In the service of being "responsible" in shedding light on dark places, they do their own editorial work on material that comes to hand, so that "List of undercover informants working in $DUSTY_HELLHOLE" doesn't get the same release as "Redacted to avoid embarrassing $AGENCY".
If you just want to move leaked docs into public distribution like shit through a goose, that's a comparatively simple and cheap problem(with the only real difficulty being on the collection end). Shove it on bittorrent, possibly spiced with some porn so people will download and seed, and call it a day.
If you want to run an operation that seeks to maximize transparency, on the other hand, you have to assure would-be-whistleblowers and leakers that legitimate(or at least proximately legitimate: you might have issues with the CIA fucking around in hellhole X with complete lack of public oversight; but you probably don't want undercover agents X,Y, and Z getting their heads hacked off) secrecy will be preserved, while illegitimate secrecy-in-the-service-of-impunity will be lifted. That part gets slow and comparatively expensive...
Intelligence networks have been trying like clockwork to get Wikileaks shut down ever since their parent governments started getting embarrassed by the leaks.
If this were the case, the best way to shut down WL would not have been through a protracted series of half-blunders through the media and courts over three years across a dozen jurisdictions. A commercial off the shelf solution to cleanly eliminate all crucial members of the WL organization can be hand for well under 10,000 euro per head. Heck, hundreds of supposedly embarrassed rich and powerful, or simply angry, individuals who would have had a beef with WL could have ordered similar services online in the time elapsed.
I think you overestimate the importance of WL and its activities.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
If humans are not capable of governing themselves, they sure as hell aren't capable of governing others.
Just release the information and you don't need hosting - other people will host it for you.
What WikiLeaks is doing is self aggrandizement - dripping it out slowly so as to build fame and money for themselves. Just what they are complaining about
If $3.5 million would be transferred using bitcoin, these would likely turn out to be more in the end. Because pumping $3.5 millions onto bitcoin/fiat exchange markets would most likely start a rally at some point. Coins bought before the rally would therefore be worth more.
Now for a more interesting question to ask: What services/goods can wikileaks buy directly with bitcoins?
Skimming orver this list: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade, I can think of the following:
* VPS and other network services (also anonymous) ...
* Coffee, Tee, Tobacco
* something from silkroad (?)
* Consulting
* Web Design
* Legal Services
*
And I give these guys a little leeway because I don't think most people are asking themselves what they'd really do in a combat situation. Most people here have never had to lay their life on the line for others and don't know what it is to make such decisions.
Alternately: most people have no idea what they would do if thrust into a life-or-death situation by their corporate masters. They'd probably just shoot the nearest strangers. Funny, how this seems to happen repeatedly.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
No, don't give me the fucking wall street journal's opinion on the matter.
If you say that Amnesty International has a beef with Wikileaks, give me a link to an Amnesty website, not to a pro-war propaganda outfit.
I don't want your spin, I want facts.
You can't take the sky from me...
The human creatures are fundamentally based on hiding, lying and manipulating. Not just some, not the majority, but every.single.person on this entire planet.
Wikileaks is a travesty. A PR stunt. A joke. A play.