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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.
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?
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.
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?
Atlanta.
Think about Microsoft much? What a strange contribution to the discussion.
Beat me to it. Well played.
That BraveS not Brave, you know a S make all the difference.
Such is the fate of those that expose world-wide corruption of powermongers, murderers and liars.
Requiem for the American Dream
Because the title of the article is FBI Paid Informant Inside WikiLeaks. It just popped in my head what can I say.
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.
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 .
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'?
The IRS knows where you live too, where you work....and can make your life a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than the NSA too. Anyone who has tangled with the IRS would much rather black helicopters come in and just put them out of their misery. Consider that for perspective.
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.
Oh that works great. Wikileaks loves leaks of confidential information.
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.
FBI spying? Get a book about J. Edgar Hoover. The current bunch are pussies by comparison.
Pennies.
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."
$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*
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!
Really? You see FBI and Wikileaks, and Microsoft pops into your head?
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.
that's all
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
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.
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"
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 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