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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."
Assange's narcissism facilitated this - the kid got put to work after the Wikileaks schism, and there surely was not enough manpower to properly vet the new guys. Longest lasting fallout is probably talent that would otherwise have gotten involved now have to wonder whether they are talking to just Wikileaks, or Wikileaks and the FBI/NSA/CIA.
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
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?
Loss of reputation.
How is that even possible for somebody that nobody has ever even heard of in the first place? You can't lose a reputation until you have one.
Mr. Thordarson, your resume is very impressive. All we have left to do is google your name and you're hired! Hmm.. seems you sold out your last employer to the US Government... Yeah, we'll let you know..
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.
Among other things they exposed why Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted in a position of responsibility (orders to steal credit card details from diplomats). That alone is of benefit to the USA.