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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."
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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war/singleton/
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As far as I'm concerned bitcoin has been swamped by hackers and techies that swooped in after the feds swooped out.
I trust my bank only because the FDIC and FED are watching it like a hawk. I know human nature.
But I would not trust a bitcoin bank, because as far as being regulated goes it's about as trustworthy as a corporation in EVE Online.
When bitcoins can be protected just as effectively as real cash, give me a call.
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:
"I trust my bank only because the FDIC and FED are watching it like a hawk."
That's going to do nothing with over 70 trillion in toxic assets being moved by banks into FDIC-backed stuff.
Your account is about to become non-existent once those banks default on all those toxic assets. You won't even have a place to stand in line to get a few paltry dollars - the banks get first dibs on payback.
Which means you need to pull your money out now.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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
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.