Slashdot Mirror
Was Julian Assange Involved With Wiretapping Iceland's Parliament?
An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports that the chat logs between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange that were used as evidence in Manning's trial have made it onto the web, at least briefly. One of those logs contained something very interesting on page 4, which was picked up on by the News of Iceland, which reports, '"Jesus Christ. I think that we have recordings of all phone calls to and from the Icelandic parliament during the past four months". This text can be found in documents that the US military published on its website and is said to be part of the conversations between Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. According to the documents, Assange claims to have phone call recordings from Althingi, the Icelandic parliament, but this is the first time that the existence of such data is mentioned publicly. ... According to Icelandic laws, it is required to inform the person you are speaking with if the phone call is being recorded. Given that the parliament is not violating laws it is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed recording devices or wiretaps in the parliament.' — What makes it even more interesting is that Wired also reports in this recent story: Someone's Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet."
Eh, why do you think Assange et al need to install anything? They just got the logs from the evil-doers... I wonder who that might be?
Betteridge's law of headlines.
Assange mentions wiretap records and they assume _he_ did the wiretapping?
Is it not possible, nay likely, that he _was given_ the wiretaps in the Manning data dump?
How exactly would Manning tap all lines into the parliament?
Why would he even try, given that he had friends in that parliament - couldn't they tell him what the scuttlebutt was?
(fp?)
Unfortunately I think most of us are bastards to him.
The treachery of Julian Assange
Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review
What Does Julian Assange Want?
Exclusive: Former WikiLeaks Employee James Ball Describes Working With Julian Assange
Wikileaks are for-hire mercenaries - Cryptome
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"Given that the parliament is not violating laws it is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed recording devices or wiretaps in the parliament".
This last sentence makes no sense. You are leaving out a huge possibility. Someone else could have done this, and leaked it to WikiLeaks.
Why would Assange wiretap the Icelandic parliament and how could he? I doubt he has that powerful connections up there.
The obviously more likely explanation is that some spy agency (like NSA or counterparts) did it, and it has been leaked to Wikileaks. Notice how he looks surprised upon finding it out, so that Manning feels like pointing out that he wasn't the one who leaked it "*had nothing to do with that one*". So neither knew how the records were obtained in the first place.
Now one wonders: who would be able and willing of doing such a thing and who would have an interest in pinning it to Assange?
to read TFS it's as if Snowden never happened. Perhaps, just maybe, someone else is tapping the world's phone lines? ya think?
and the recipient of leaks happened to, you know, end up with some of that in his inbox?
this ain't rocket science folks.
It's not sticking well enough!
Sounds like someone within iceland did the tapping. And sent that stuff out to wikileaks.
But that's not julian assanges fault. so.... SPIN THAT STORY!
"The evil julian tapped icelands parliament!" This fits our needs.
Well he must have installed listening equipment! There is no other possible explanation! WikiLeaks could not possibly have been leaked the info. That's absurd.
it is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed recording devices....
Hold on. They conclude that from Assange suddenly stating "Jesus Christ. I think that we have recordings of all phone calls to and from the Icelandic parliament during the past four months" ???????? How can anyone honestly conclude that? Assange seems to express surprise when he realizes what he has, surprise that he would not have if he had been wiretapping and recording. Assange was routinely getting leaked information. My conclusion would be that someone leaked this information to him, not that he had been wiretapping Iceland. And who do we know that has been spying on their friends and enemies alike, along with their own citizens? I'll give you a clue, it is someone with a 3 letter name that a whistle blower might want to expose.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Is it just me or does this seem like a troll article submission?
As usual the answer to the posed question in the headline is 'no'.
So much for "not going after Assange" !
Can you say frame job boys and girls?
Stuff like this with the "US military's" name being mentioned makes it blatantly clear this is PR propaganda. Or, cause I like to look at this from other angles, the idiot media/press took the actual story out of context, because people like Assange have the balls to do what the media refuses to do.
Hold on, better yet the US Military, or the US powers at be, will claim they found his "inside man" who planted the devices, ahhh the plot thickens. And there are people that buy into this stuff again because the media/press refuse to report anything.
In all fairness I absolutely dislike Assange, the guy is taking credit for things he had nothing to do with, or stole investigative stories other worked there ass off to get, and have yet to be credited for doing all the work.
Go back to that part where parliament is not violating laws.
Classic law of journalism strikes again: Any time a head-line starts with a question, the answer is 'no'.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
If Rodman can go why not? Hope I can get to watch an execution or two! Maybe I can pull a Snowden and become one of them. I would a king among them.
It is absolutely ridicules that we don't have communications systems that are properly secured with encryption and code that has been thoroughly reviewed. I suspect event the poorest governments in Africa could afford to develop such a system.
It's just probaly an NSA-leak from their backups.
An anonymous reader writes.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
So "involved with" means "NSA gets a tap on it, Manning gets a copy, gives it to Assange, and therefore he's involved with wiretapping Iceland's parliament". I guess samezenpus is also involved with wiretapping a foreign government to, then, eh?
'course if everything sent to WL is printed, it's accused of being unprofessional and putting lives at danger. If they don't print everything they get, they're accused of picking on the USA. Now it appears that not printing everything means that anything else that turns up is because WL were the criminals doing it.
I wonder what the doubling up on the "WL prints everything, therefore evil" accusation will be...
Goose, meet gander.
Pot, meet kettle.
Glass house, meet stone.
Turnabout, meet fair play.
Goes around, meet comes around.
Sowed wind, meet whirlwind.
Dances-with-devils, meet the piper.
Ever since the Snowden's leak started some months ago to appear I've been awaiting for NSA's counter-strike.
I believe this is it.
I have the feeling that this "news" is a set-up. It's designed to accomplish 3 missions at the same time:
This may be the start of NSA's worldwide diversion campaign, to shift the focus away from NSA to Assange.
By "leaking out" Assange's "wiretapping news" online, for just a couple of hours, followed by a sudden removal of all evidences, NSA is betting that the dog and pony show would piqued the interests of many.
The fact that the Wired magazine has that piece of "news" covered so prominently means that NSA's tactic is working very, very well.
Not only Assange has become a really "evil dude", people will no longer believe all subsequent disclosures from whistle blowers, no matter who they are.
And that plays into NSA's hand --- for people won't believe any more news from the Snowden files, no matter how damaging they are.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Assange had gun cam footage from US helicopters in Iraq. Clearly he's been sneaking into military bases and installing cameras in the helicopters. They never showed that in the movie!
they're neighbors. still celebrating the new blog format seems more like the old one again. hang on to our hemispheres, free the innocent stem cells......
Is it possible that the USA could start seeding whistle-blower's leaks with information that would put them at further risk of legal prosecution? /Stolzy
Why would anyone who was actually involved in the wiretapping sound surprised when he found the wiretapping data he allegedly made? It makes no sense.
What does make sense is if either the leaked cables also contained this data, or someone else leaked the data to wikileaks but they hadn't got round to looking at it yet.
Sheesh, this is a reach even for the usual character assassins. Assange is no 'hacker' he just publishes shit people pass him.
Slashdot is becoming the first landing of the USA propaganda. No credibility left anymore.
Given that the parliament is not violating laws
That's not "given" at all.
it is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed recording devices or wiretaps in the parliament
a) It's not remotely clear even if we do accept the premise above
b) If it was true he probably wouldn't be quite so surprised at finding all those recordings.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Assange posted footage of an Apache helicopter crew murdering innocent civilians. How could he possibly have that footage if he wasn't involved in the murders? It is clear that Assange or his associates would have to have installed the video recording device in the helicopter.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Here goes, sorry about the references in Icelandic.
In 2010 an unmarked laptop was discovered in an empty office at Alingi connected to the local network, the parliament offices are adjunct to the main building. The computer was running but after being shut down by employees of Alingi it self destruct and forensics did not come up with anything. ( http://www.dv.is/frettir/2011/1/20/grunur-um-njosnir-althingi-dularfull-tolva-fannst-i-audu-herbergi/). Around the same time that the computer was discovered Julian Assange was working in Iceland cutting the videos that would become Collateral Murder along with member of parlament Birgitta Jonsdottir and a group of other people on of which has been known in Iceland as Siggi hakkari (Siggi the hacker) a 17 year old boy with, well truth be said, very limited morals (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/wikileaks-mole/all/) Siggi was at the time giving information to the FBI as well as running for Wikileaks and running his own scams, stealing money (http://www.visir.is/-og-bdquo;siggi-hakkari-og-ldquo;-grunadur-um-milljonasvik/article/2013130609737) and is now applealing a case where he was sentenced for sexual crimes against a seventeen year old boy (http://www.dv.is/frettir/2013/11/19/siggi-braut-sautjan-ara-pilt-WRMWNX/) He's a dubious caracter this Siggi. Peronally I dont think that Wikileaks had any access to real data from Althingi and that was part of Siggi's scams to get into the Wikileaks crowd and, believe it or not, the offices of Alingi are not breaking the law about recording phonecalls.
Then there is the case of the jumping packages, which is totally unrelated and has been well documented in Icelandic (http://ruv.is/sarpurinn/spegillinn/26112013-0) basically the Icelandic telecom (síminn) had faulty equipment in Canada that advertised wrong BGP routes between the 31st of july until the 22th of august and as they did not have prefix filters in place in some other endpoints these routes got advertised to the internet. There are long personal discussion threads about this on facebook in direct communications between the technicians working at the Icelandic telecom and some of the other telco's in Iceland. These guys know their stuff and have no reason to take part's in cover-ups for hackers as the community of networking experts in Iceland is very small and these guys know each other personally.
Maybe the NSA needs help understanding phone calls made in a language spoken by less than half a million people alive!
C'mon, tell us. Do they pay well?
Citation: This post
Its a test to see if the sheeple count has gone down and how far.
It is possible this was the work of Siggi "the hacker".
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/28/wikileaks-mole
He was fired from Wikileaks after he transferred money from Wikileaks to his personal account. He then contacted FBI and was thought he was to be used as some kind of bait for Wikileaks. He has then been connected to number of other shady deals here in Iceland. I believe he is currently in Prison for a sexual assault.
A whois of newsoficeland.com shows it was registered in late 2009, however, there is content from 2008 on the site... is this odd?
First, this is obviously a disinformation / smear campaign.
More importantly this scenario is one of the truly terrifying scenarios involving a super-power entity with unlimited control over the web. Such an entity could, at will, create guilt on the part of anyone merely through creating false access and activity logs and creating then smuggling in electronic "evidence' that they later "discover".
This level of control and aggression against citizens
who are clearly not terrorists is part of the slippery slope to world-wide fascism that the NSA refuses to acknowledge they've created or, if they have, the nation would ever slide down. Yet in all likelihood, here we are; evidence creation and planting against anyone who resists the will of a government.
I personally would not have done what Manning did, oh OK maybe if I was 21 I might have , but in all events Assange is not the person who did it.
When he received the information he tried - repeatedly and with great risk to himself- to vet the documents WITH the governments involved. Their attitude was- "fuck you, we don't have to deal with you. Publish them and face prosecution" .
This kind of attack is something every single Large Enitity Displeaser could be subject to and, yes, that includes you dear reader.
Remember why Assange is holed up in the embassy in the first place- it's ostensibly NOT because of Wikileaks . A woman with whom he had had sex with the night before has accused him of sticking it in a second time in the morning without permission. The charge is rape.
You can imagine that such a case might be seen by some as weak.
You can also imagine that the people who want to throw him into a black hole forever whilst reporting to the public about the tragic airplane accident he was killed in whilst being flown over Poland would prefer to have something stronger to charge him with.
Not to mention framing him with respect to one the nations which might actually give him asylum has to have a devastating psychological effect on him in the short term, even if Iceland eventually sees through the ruse.
That is, if the deciders in Iceland haven't themselves all been compromised through similar means and this story is the cover they requested from the Large Entity as reason to public announce that they will not be granting asylum, but in fact quite the opposite.
Don't kid yourself, this is espionage 101, the simplest stuff on the shelves any first year can handle. This the real doings which have as their product the headlines you consume .
As we've learned from recent events, in this world to ensure greatest accuracy, it's best to let your imagination rip as best you are able,. That way, you have some chance of approximating what 's really going on.
This salvo is very well planned and executed
Well planned and executed diversion campaign??????
As a purported diversionary tactic, this fails miserably:
(1) Nobody outside of Iceland cares if Iceland's parliament's phones were tapped.
(2) Nobody outside of Iceland pays attention what people inside of Iceland care about.
If this is a "diversionary campaign," it's the worst diversion ever. They would have diverted more attention if they planted a story claiming that wikileaks tapped Miley Cyrus's tweets.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
They used OTR. This means either party can invent chatlogs post-facto.
This means Assange either said or didn't say this.
Same goes for whatever Manning has said during the chats.
Is that people disagree with you.
How does that work?
I take you agree with Kim Jung Un, then, lest you prove him right, eh?
"I'm at work and cannot watch the video again at the moment - but I do distinctly remember seeing weapons"
You're in for a surprise when you watch it, then. You'll see that they really look no more like weapons than a walking stick would. You'll also see the distance to target and note that an RPG at that range would be no danger to a scout huey, never mind an attack heli hardened indefinitely against 20-30mm cannon rounds.
You will see ZERO weapons on the civilian who came along to aid the wounded, and even if he were part of the terrorist organisation, the rules of war make CRIMINAL an attack on medics even during war time, no matter if they are armed or not.
But your memory is made up of what people told you what happened who
a) think like you, therefore you like
b) think that the USA can only be good guys, just like you
c) made it up
I stopped logging into Slashdot with my user name round abouts when Taco left. It wasn't done as any form of protest, I just found that the quality of news releases started to suck pretty heavily. Since then I've seen some of the worst bullshit articles ever submitted to this site. Well, this one takes the piss so completely I don't even know where to begin. Fuck you Slashdot editors for turning something reasonably entertaining into a complete shill site for the worst kind of people. I shan't be back.
Oops, looks like little Bobby Tables visited their site....
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
IIRC the manning story as told by the press claimed that Manning also had access to files from the state department. And the state dep is a place where intercepted foreign gov communication might be useful...
Question: How or why then does he say he has the logs? At the very least he apparently received them, which would mean he is involved, so Yes.
WTF? By that logic, we were all involved in 9/11. After all, we've all seen (therefore received) the videos of the planes flying into the WTC, so the most of THE ENTIRE WORLD WAS INVOLVED IN IT!!!!!!111!11eleventy!111!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Slashdot was already going downhill and dice pushed it over the edge. Half (or more) the "articles" are just click bait.
Used to be you could come to slashdot for an intelligent discussion. Yeah, clicks drive revenue, but when all the readers disappear there won't be anyone to click.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Why would anyone who was actually involved in the wiretapping sound surprised when he found the wiretapping data he allegedly made? It makes no sense.
What does make sense is if either the leaked cables also contained this data, or someone else leaked the data to wikileaks but they hadn't got round to looking at it yet.
Well, to be fair, if I (someone not in the security industry, working alone, and with limited resources) tried to wiretap the entire Icelandic Parliament and it actually worked, I'd be pretty fucking surprised, too. And my next stop would be to buy a lottery ticket. Just one.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Thinly veiled attempt to undermine Assange's favorable perception in Iceland is thinly veiled.
To WoofyGoofy,
Of the many comments in this thread I sincerely appreciate what you have written.
The world needs more people like you who can see through the falsehoods.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The prosecution in Manning's trial CLAIMED the chat logs in question were between Manning and Assange. They failed to prove this. Most likely they are chats between Manning and SOMEONE at WikiLeaks but there is no evidence this is Assange and to anyone familiar with the case/s, there are indications within the text that it isn't.
And Wired did not 'break' the story which was circulating at least a week before their piece.