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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.
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.
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"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.