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FBI Paid Informant Inside WikiLeaks
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur 'Siggi' Thordarson walked through the stately doors of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik, his jacket pocket concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian passport. The passport photo showed a man with a unruly shock of platinum blonde hair and the name Julian Paul Assange. Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks."
$5,000? Seems like quite a bit of work and risk for just $5,000.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
But maybe, just maybe, it isn't quite like it seems. Maybe Thordarson was snooping on the US government.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c8/Syndrome.jpg
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
Why shouldn't someone part of WikiLeaks, a secret leaking site, leak WikiLeaks' secrets? Surely you can't be surprised by this.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I mean, it ain't minimum wage but effectively committing treason on your people for the benefit of the corporations isn't really worth that little money.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Needs updating.
who did not see this coming?
... see title. Kid was dumb.
Please tell me you're fucking joking.
FBI: what did you learn from infiltrating wikileaks?
Sigurdur: Its headed by Julian Assange
FBI: okay...and....
Sigurdur: and he is on a mission to expose a ton of sensitive information about governments...especially american governments.
FBI:OKAY. AND...
Sigurdur: he intends to release any leaks he receives to the public.
FBI: How much have we paid this asshole already?
Good people go to bed earlier.
The FBI had an internal data corruption, and paid this guy $5,000 to help them restore from "off-site back-up"
1. Spell Reykjavik with Unicode U+00ED (LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH ACUTE)
2. Send to Slashdot as UTF-8: C3 AD
3. ?
4. Slashdot receives ISO-8859-1: C3 AD
5. Slashdot prints U+00C3 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE) and discards AD
Where are the brave calling home these days?
Why shouldn't someone part of WikiLeaks, a secret leaking site, leak WikiLeaks' secrets? Surely you can't be surprised by this.
You can't tell the difference between leaking information in the public interest, such as the killing of civilians, compared with leaking personal information, such as passport photos?
Why is leaking information on wikileaks internal operations not in the public interest? Say when wikileaks edits and misrepresents events that occur on a battlefield to enflame public opinion with a false narrative? If lies are bad then exposing wilileaks lies is as good an act as exposing pentagon lies.
Gee, the FBI thinks it's valuable to have an informant inside an organization that actively solicits classified intelligence and data of all kinds and seeks to distribute it? I'd be shocked (and disappointed) if the FBI (or other agency) didn't have an informant, or try to obtain one.
This is kind of what we pay an intelligence apparatus to do.
I put this in the same category as the shocking revelations that we try and hack Chinese computer systems.
Of course I'm being flippant, but somehow it wouldn't amaze me.
Wikileaks was only too happy to reveal internal documents of private organizations the world over, of no prohibitive value to the public, just damaging the companies involved. So they should be HAPPY about the same being done to them, and for the same reasons they did it. After all, if they weren't doing anything illegal, then there's no harm in the FBI having copies of their internal documents, right? Right?
I admit, going through the FBI is a rather roundabout way to get that info to the public, but it should work out in the long-term.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
An organization that specializes in betrayal of trust by insiders is complaining of the same. Not sure if serious.....
Getting real, I would imagine every intelligence service worth their weight has multiple moles planted in wikileaks. You would be incompetent as hell to run an intelligence service and not plant moles in wikileaks.
Hell, for that matter I'm sure more than a few corporations have their own agents planted. With the sheer commercial value of the material they get I would imagine organized crime has quite the presence as well. Wikileaks insiders could do well with insider trading. The better question is who doesn't have agents in wikileaks?
The internet, where 14 year-old girls are FBI agents and FBI agents are 14 year-old boys.
If the FBI was flying him internationally, aren't they going a bit out of there reach? I thought the FBI was (should anyway) only concerned with things happening on US soil. Am I wrong?
Valhalla?
Atlanta.
I thought that was only tin-foil hat news. I believe I read in the local rag, about Clintons last term, about paying news sources, then the stuff about 9-11 came out several years into bush2's term, then one of the interesting things off the bush term was wikileaks under navy payrole. So that would be old news?
And once it's gone, it's gone forever.
They pay their hookers more than that.
And if Assange had done so he would not be self imprisoned in a little room, unable to leave his compound. He's probably sitting in that little room watching his old videos over and over like Osama.
Beat me to it. Well played.
That BraveS not Brave, you know a S make all the difference.
Where are the brave calling home these days?
If you get a good answer to this, let me know.
I've been looking for a good place to relocate ever since the U.S. turned into something much worse than the "Commies" we were taught to fear when I was a young, impressionable child.
Agree. Even a reputable company shouldn't want him, and I wouldn't do business
with any company that would want him.
Absolutely. I used to do security for adult sites and even I had informants in the "haxor" community, and a few message board nicks on cracker forums. Funny, after being on some of those boards for fifteen years I was pretty well trusted. If the true professionals at the FBI, CIA, and NSA didn't have informants they'd. Z be completely incompetent .
Get this guy a US citizenship immediately, even if he clearly has awful negotiating skills.
He is closer then you are.
Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Vqx7xXpQA
The instant response is always an automatic (Score:-1, Wooosh)...
Perhaps I was only talking about one Brave. Say, Andrelton Simmons. I don't know who the hell he is, but perhaps this could satisfy your rather unnecessarily pedantic complaint.
BTW, did you mean to put an apostrophe-S after your initial 'That'?
Only then would $5,000 be anywhere near a lot of money.
This guy has already proved himself to be the kind of employee any corporate executive values. He has instacreated a fabulous career for himself within the upper echelons of the private sector. He has "CEO material" written all over every square millimeter of his body.
(Captcha: "mugging")
And we're supposed to be afraid of the NSA.
The NSA knows where you live, where you currently are, and can make something up so that black helicopters land on your front yard and some grunts unload a few clips in you because you are deemed a terrorist.
Compared to some dorks hanging around the soda and potato chip machine talking big - who, even if they could figure out exactly where this guy is, would have a difficult time getting there with their guns or whatever and would be sweating bullets every time an unknown number shows up on their phone.
So yeah, the NSA scares me and dorks talking big don't.
My 88 year old Dad, who is so conservative he considers Sean Hannity a liberal, thinks that Snowden is a hero. I was kind of surprised but really a lot of people don't like being spied on and that's from both ends of the political spectrum.
Older people tend to remember the struggles needed to gain freedom.
That not so bad. It's the "a S" that has my inner grammar Nazi itching.
Oh that works great. Wikileaks loves leaks of confidential information.
The guys at Wired ought to know quite a lot about FBI informants.
I want to point something out. I noticed it earlier tonight over at another tech-related site, and then at several other sites.
Whenever there is a story about Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, you can practically set your watch by a host of comments, usually from Anonymous Cowards, talking about Assange and Snowden's "big egos" and their arrogance and their many other personal failings. In many cases, these comments will come one after the other, uninterrupted, with the same message worded slightly differently, but always mentioning their "ego" and what jerks they are and in many cases wishing bodily harm, prison rape or death on one or both of the men.
None of the comments ever mentions the most important part of the story, that we have powerful countries, purportedly "free" countries, that have secret courts ordering secret surveillance by secret agencies (both government and private industry) because they supposedly are suspected of breaking secret laws, and who, if caught, will be held at secret prisons. Nor do they mention that the citizens of this country, though not accused or suspected of any crimes, are having each of their phone conversations registered by a secret program, looking for secret data, held in secret databases, under warrants that if they exist at all, are secret. The kind of fascistic public/private police state operations that would have made the East German secret police green with envy.
No mention in these many comments referencing these "egotistical jerks" about the totalitarian surveillance state they have uncovered. No mention of the crimes and beyond-sleazy behavior they have exposed for us to see, at the expense of their own ruined lives.
It's almost as if someone really, really wants this discussion to be about a couple of jerks instead of the massive transformation of our societies into police states, something that will effect and has effected each of our lives and behavior. The kind of transformation that once complete, is very very hard to roll back. It's almost as if someone doesn't want a discussion about how we all suddenly became suspects of our own governments and how that changes everything.
Fuck Julian Assange and fuck Edward Snowden, but their transgressions and personal defects are nothing compared to the ugly, hungry monster revealed by them.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Of course, you're right. "an S" would be more appropriate. But I ignored other issues like not ending the sentence at 'not Brave'. Or adding an S to 'make'.
That's a lot of mistakes to make in criticizing a post which simply said "Atlanta."
Sounds like he acted just fine to me. For all you dummies who are mad at him, now you see why people are mad at asange. He just whistle blew on the whistle blowers and made a few bucks.
My 88 year old Dad, who is so conservative he considers Sean Hannity a liberal, thinks that Snowden is a hero. I was kind of surprised but really a lot of people don't like being spied on and that's from both ends of the political spectrum.
Most of the geeks on Slashdot don't understand what the intelligence gathering world actually is (both commercial and government sorts), why would the elderly? You can't stop lawful intelligence gathering activities... if what you do is in public, that's that. If Bob communicates privately with Alice, she can share that with the whole world. "Information wants to be free" You can't stop people from gathering public information, and if you feel insecure about it, tough titties.
This isn't a partisan issue, it's just a major disconnect with reality most people have. You know Google reads your email, you know they own it, you know it's not legally protected from third parties, you know Google, nor anyone else has any way of positively confirming your identity or nationality because hey, the Internet is anonymous.
$5000 might be reasonable for a bit of work copying some data to some disks, but it is not nearly enough to cover being known as an evil traitor everyone in the world. His reputation is now destroyed and is essentially unemployable in any company or organization that cares about its own image.
The real question is how did he get outed? I thought the FBI didn't out their informants. You're right, it's dumb to be an informant for precisely the reason you mention. No one wants to be labeled the snitch, it's equal to being blacklisted.
Fuck Yeah!!!!
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So what. How about something that matters.
The poll asks two questions:
On another subject, from what you've heard and read, do you think the release of classified documents about the State Department and U.S. diplomacy by WikiLeaks serves the public interest or harms the public interest?
Do you think the United States should try to arrest the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange (Ah-SANGH), and charge him with a crime for releasing these documents, or do you think this is not a criminal matter?
Not blatantly misleading, but there is the distinct odor of bias in these questions, especially when asked one after the other.
The first question didn't directly ask what people thought, it asked them to conclude based on what the media presents. This is very different from an opinion poll. (From what *I've* heard and read, he is a criminal, but when I add experience, logic, and ethics I conclude that he is a hero.)
Then they present the second question in a leading manner by highlighting criminality several ways. "Arrest-Charge-Crime-or-Not-Crime - what do you think?" (A recent poll asked people if "Ben Ghazi" should be deported for his crimes, and many people said "yes, definitely!". It's easy to lead people into the position you want by framing it in the right way.)
Biasing the 1st question the other way might be something like:
Do you believe releasing the documents will make our country stronger?
An unbiased way to do the 2nd question might be something like:
Do you believe Julian Assange is a hero or a criminal?
I agree with the 1st reply-poster above: WaPo is a rag, and these polls hold little merit.
Great comeback!
+1 internets to you, sir!
Here's some trends I've noticed. Every time some politically-charged issue springs up, certain predictable actions seem to bog down debate:
1) Pointing out typos in the article summary or parent poster
Especially when the respondent makes their own typos while picking apart the OP. The flurry of people jumping on board to correct this can be enormous, and push valuable discussion down below the screen, where it has little chance of being seen.
2) Revising someone's analogy
Someone makes an analogy, so someone *else* has to make a better one. If the revised analogy is flawed, again the flurry of people jumping on board to correct this can be enormous and push valuable discussion down the page.
(Maybe when someone makes a bad analogy we should just say "no, it's not like that" and let it go?)
2) Saying it's our fault
I really hate this one. Invariably, someone will come along and say "it's our own fault because we voted for these people". This completely exonerates the politicians involved and makes everyone feel a little bit guilty - and at the same time it defuses calls for action, suggestions for improvement, and the like. "The best way is to use the power of the vote", setting aside that a) much of the time it's an unelected bureaucrat, b) the vote has been hijacked by special interests, and c) even if it were true, we should also be discussion other possible options.
Keep in mind that us old fossils (and I put my self in that category, I'm pushing 60 hard) remember when the US government tried to NOT do illegal and immoral things to its citizens.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Read the Wired UK version.
Seems this "8-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur âoeSiggiâ Thordarson" is just a tramp since he swindled $50,000 for Wikileaks and then begged the US FBI who coughed up $5,000 for his, [cough] efforts.
I'd day the FBI and Thornarson are both guilty.
There's this thing called rule of law. It doesn't matter how easy something is, if the government isn't supposed to do it, they shouldn't be doing it. Expecting the government to follow rule of law may be unrealistic and naive, but that doesn't mean people don't have every reason to be pissed off when they find out about the government's transgressions.
that's all
negocio legal
muito videos interatividade
http://negociolegal.com
When an organization that is founded on "extreme" beliefs in free information -- one has to expect them to trend towards releasing MORE information than the majority of the public would be comfortable with. The call is subjective just as the decisions to publish leaks are also subjective. You may not agree and it does not matter what you feel because the RIGHT to think differently is theirs. In the USA, when we actually follow the 1st Amendment, the press is unrestricted and the price of that comes with occasional harm. Yes, it must be OK for the press to indirectly kill people in the process of doing their job. As soon as the press is limited, not only is it the beginning of the end, but it no longer fits the definition of "free press."
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
After the whole Bradley Manning affair with him chatting on the Internet to someone from Wired, now we have this story breaking in Wired. It would therefore seem reasonable to assume that Wired is indeed deeply in bed with either the CIA or FBI or both of them.
Older people tend to remember the struggles needed to gain freedom.
Paradoxically a whole lot of them also tend to have rosy memories of the way constitutional rights like freedom of speech got trampled along the way.
Thereby proving "having won an award" means merely you have won an award.
this is the same poulsen that sat on the lamo/manning chat log for a year, hiding the fact that lamo claimed to be a journalist and a priest before he informed on manning.
the same poulsen that claimed the chat logs had to be vetted before release.
this whole article and everyone involved can not be trusted.
The difference, and why this guy has little to fear, but should, is that unlike the USA, Wikileaks have no authority to murder people because of embarrassing leaks.
But I call bullshit on your claim.
It's as easy to make that up as to claim that George W Bush has said that he does not care about any American as long as he gets to eat the still-beating hearts of babies and offer them up to his Lord Satan.
The parent shows you the effects of a careful propaganda campaign to divide the voters.
The propaganda machine counts pensioners together with welfare recipients to "prove" that government is keeping everyone dependent. That's Romney's "47%": anyone who pays into the system and expects to get anything back out is a "taker".
Two mainstream Presidential candidates tried to make food stamps a racial issue and claimed that all the children, disabled people, and Wal-Mart workers who receive them are lazy deadbeats.
If you can keep half the victims resenting the other half, you are well prepared to implement Jay Gould's solution: 'I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half".
>I could be in a better financial position if I quit my job, declared bakruptcy, and took the handouts.
See the victory of the propaganda? They've got somebody believing this even though he has an Internet connection and could find out the truth within minutes.
And when did such a make believe world actually exist? It clearly isn't any time from the 1900s until now.
I always thought the FBI's mandate limited them to national investigations; international was CIA.
You know:
Dick Gordon: We do. [Shows a card] National Security Agency.
Bishop: Ah. You're the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Dick Gordon: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance.
Bishop: Oh, I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators.
Dick Gordon: No, that's the CIA. We protect our government's communications, we try to break the other fella's codes. We're the good guys, Marty.
Still no Unicode, HTTPS, or IPv6 support for a technology news site? For shame, Slashdot.
this this THIS!!!
Actually, I wouldn't be quite that pessimistic. You might (just) manage to get up to double digits before getting back-stabbers into the inner core. You might need to count in octal in order to make double digits though.
How many people were involved in WikiLeaks? A dozen or so? One back-stabber was almost inevitable, and multiple back-stabbers (given the nature of the opposition) a near certainty. And unless Assange and co are much much stupider than they seem to be, they knew it too.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Perhaps I was only talking about one Brave. Say, Andrelton Simmons. I don't know who the hell he is, but perhaps this could satisfy your rather unnecessarily pedantic complaint.
Not really, because that would instead be the answer to the question, "Where does a Brave call home these days?" As you can see, that isn't the same question at all.
Many Wikileaks supporters seem to feel that it and its members should have near inviolable privacy, and nobody else should. It is sacred ground, that can be as secretive as it likes, while shedding light on anything else.
Now I suppose I could respect that if it were a more generalized "public/private" thing. In that they believed that government entities, being under the public's control, should have no secrets, but that private individuals and entities should be allowed secrets. However they don't do that, they've published things like sorority secrets which are for a private entity and have no public interest (meaning actual use to the public, people are interested in them with the same voyeuristic attitude as prying into celebrity lives).
It just seems to be how many Wikileaks members and supporters feel. It and its members are one of the few things that should be allowed as much privacy, including total privacy/anonymity, as they want. Everyone else? Fair game, publish whatever they can get their hands on that they decide is a juicy secret, regardless of utility or public good.
For that matter you can even see that with the governmental data they've leaked. There's various stuff that you can argue if it is in the public interest to release it but there is plenty you really can't. For example the private opinions of the diplomatic corps about the Russian leaders. There is NO REASON to release it to the public. It harms diplomatic relations, harms the individuals involved, and doesn't reveal anything, not even US policy, just the opinions of those involved. It isn't evidence of malfeasance or illegal action, it isn't useful to release. But they did, because they could.
I like the idea of infiltrating WikiLeaks being "risky":
Siggy-the-Spy to the FKGBI Quartermaster: "I need body armour, a Glock and an Uzi. Oh, yeah, and a spy-knife to carry in my boot."
FKGBI QM: "To infiltrate a pacifist organization?"
Siggy_the_Spy: "No, to get back out aftere I return to the U.S. Embassy to collect my pay-check, in case the FKGBI isn't happy with my performance."
in his briefs?
I am missing something. Obviously something would be leaked from Wikileaks. Isn't their system (technology and processes) designed with this type of attack in mind.
Some details on the processes are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
On one blog, a poster suggested that Thordarson be given a medal....
I would concur....a large medal made of depleted Uranium....I believe the dirty, stinking little rat fink bastard should be given a medal alright and I would like to be the one that pins it on him...with a railroad spike.