WikiLeaks To Its Supporters: 'Stop Taking Down the US Internet, You Proved Your Point' (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: The Internet took a turn for the worst this morning, when large parts of the DNS network were brought down by a massive distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeting DNS provider Dyn. If you couldn't access Amazon, Twitter, and a host of other large sites and online services earlier today, this was why. Now, if a couple of additional tweets are to be believed, it appears supporters of WikiLeaks are responsible for this large scale DDoS attack on Dynamic Network Services Inc's Dyn DNS service. WikiLeaks is alleging that a group of its supporters launched today's DDoS attack in retaliation for the Obama administration using its influence to push the Ecuadorian government to limit Assange's internet access. Another earlier tweet reassures supporters that Mr. Assange is still alive, which -- along with a photo of heavily armed police posted this morning -- implies that he may have been (or may still be) in danger, and directly asks said supporters to stop the attack. WikiLeaks published this tweet a little after 5PM: "Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point." It was followed by: "The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate."

Comments

"Internet took a turn for the worst this morning"

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it really? I'm in the US and I didn't notice anything.

Meh.

Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[TigerPlish]

.... or by the 2nd?

Looks like the shoe's on the other foot, at least for their 15 minutes of Internet infamy, whomever did this.

Ruling Party

[Black Parrot]

LoL. Someone doesn't have the most basic understanding of how the USA works.

Re:Ruling Party

[Black Parrot]

Not to mention the split in governors and state legislators.

Re:Ruling Party

[Darinbob]

Agreed. We currently don't have a ruling party. We have a president of one party and a legislature with a majority from a different party.

Re:Ruling Party

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he's referring to the overlaying party that actually runs shit.

Re:Ruling Party

[ugen]

It's written by Russians, I wouldn't expect any different.

Re:Ruling Party

[cfalcon]

The party of the president is the ruling party when it comes to something that is handled by the executive branch, such as a great deal of military actions (these days, everything except open war). Make no mistake, the president could not oppose a fully or nearly united congress- but that would normally take a president who is wildly out of touch or tyrannical. Even veto overrides on generally popular legislation are pretty rare (though we just had one).

Re:Ruling Party

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why trump as president is the most logical choice. If he fucks up, Congress will unite to remove him. Half the Republicans dislike him so bipartisan legislation will happen due to the necessity to override a veto.

But more importantly, congress will likely have to take a lot of powers it has given the executive branch over the years back into their control. You have a lot more control over your senators and representatives than one person who regularly sees approval ratings of 30% or lower.

Re:Ruling Party

[Anonymous Coward]

And that someone is the previous repliers. We do have a ruling party - the rich.

Re:Ruling Party

[Anonymous Coward]

"George Washington in his farewell address to the american people warned against the fallacy and pitfalls of the two party system."
Quick, name the two viable Political Parties back then.
Time up, pencils down:
Hamilton's Federalist Party, and Jefferson's Democratic Republican Party, both long extinct, their policies largely forgotten. If this Country seems wedded to the current two Parties, note that it has had a Polygamist past.
While Washington claimed that he belonged to no Political Party, he clearly favored Federalist positions, and he had a personal dislike for Jefferson. Now a little bit of History:

George Washington was called the Father Of His Country for decades, as someone who was above Family squabbles. He was the one and only Founding Father. The plural, Founding Fathers, was applied in the 19th Century to the Franciscans who founded the Missions in California and Mexico. Leading up to the 1916 Elections, Harding and Coolidge started using the plural in political speeches for the Republican Party, while being quite careful to not actually name any of them. This came into general usage with the same fuzzy concept- There is no authoritative or definitive list of the "Founding Fathers" because the term and concept itself are relatively recent.

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[Anonymous Coward]

.... or by the 2nd?

To clarify, it is protected by the 1st, and enforced by the 2nd.

Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[fufufang]

Wikileaks hadn't been pushing Trump leaks as hard as Clinton leaks. Now its supports are trying to take down US infrastructure. I used to think that Wikileaks is a neutral organisation promoting government transparency, but not any more. I kind of feel that they are up to no good.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikileaks publishes information they are given, FYI. They're not a hacking group.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

If America was in orbit, we wouldn't have to deal with the bullshit China and Russia spread around the globe.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

Start here, and you'll see plenty of source links.

http://www.politifact.com/trut...

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Narcocide]

I really don't know but I really don't think so. I think they're gleefully publishing ANYTHING they get their hands on, and it just so happens right now that Hillary's enemies are the only ones feeding them juicy leaks right now because so little of Trump's wrongdoing is even a secret.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Rei]

Um, have you seen their Twitter feed lately? It's a nonstop feed of anti-Clinton propaganda, half of it retweets, a lot of the claims so bad that even Wikileaks supporters on the Wikileaks Reddit sub have been calling them out on it. It's morphed into Breitbart.

They're even repeating Trump's "rigged election" lines:

There is no US election. There is power consolidation. Rigged primary, rigged media and rigged 'pied piper' candidate drive consolidation.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Narcocide]

I dunno, that one "big release" that turned out to be "Just kidding, buy our new book, LOL!" didn't really help Trump's campaign at all.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Shane_Optima]

The NSA and NRO are toxic organizations. What the hell is there to leak about Trump that hasn't been leaked, and what would it matter even if Wikileaks had something extra to throw on that pile? Hillary's skeletons involve about policy and important governmental stuff. Trump's skeletons are about him being an airheaded flip-flopping womanizer.

If your first reaction, upon seeing evidence that a candidate for the most powerful position in the world has not only been lying but is self-aware of her lies and has been openly talking with industry leaders about the necessity of these lies ("public" vs. "private" positions) and your first impulse is to vilify the messenger... then you, good sir, are up to no good.

I welcome any and all revelations about Trump that anyone is sitting on, but I sure as well want to hear about Hillary's policy on veracity regardless.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Narcocide]

Lol, nope we'd just have to deal with all the garbage we left in orbit ourselves...

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[kangsterizer]

Maybe I don't understand English but what I read is that they do NOT support the DDOS. They realized people were doing it because of them and is asking them to stop.

I think you're blinded by your hatred toward a political candidate. Wikileaks is not a perfect organization but also does not have access to all the secrets of everyone. It just happen to have more about Hillary, probably because more people have something against her or her party and thus Wikileaks get more data (because, let me spell that for you: more people hack Hillary's party stuff. Plain simple.)
Basic demand & availability laws.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Anonymous Coward]

What would Wikileaks have to publish on Trump that the media hasn't already published? The Hillary stuff is the only stuff worth publishing.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Shane_Optima]

Pardon him for what? He's a non-citizen of the USA who never signed any non-disclosure agreement with the NSA, who reported information given to him by a source. (He didn't do it in an objective way, but throughout history most newspapers have never claimed to be entirely objective.) The fact that you can casually admit that we're after the man in clear disregard for our first amendment (but we're not after any of the perjurers he exposed) and then say that somehow means he's "lost every shred of credibility" is staggering.

Credibility for what, pray tell? I don't give a shit about the man's opinions, that's not even relevant, so are you actually asserting he's putting out false information now?

I don't care if the information about Hillary's lies are part of some Russian plot or not. If the truth is "destabilizing" well then fuck stability. Hillary admitting to having "public" and "private" positions is a piece of information that I, as a citizen, want to have. I especially want that information to be out there if she wins, as seems likely enough. And if you think we shouldn't have that information, just because Wikileaks didn't tit for tat release something on Trump as well... well, to hell with you.

Anyone who thinks shooting the messenger is more important than examining the message is highly suspect in my book.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can be pretty damned sure that any organization that contains the word "fact" in its name is absolutely a propaganda outlet.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[rtb61]

The propaganda runs thick in this thread. Wikileaks is a website for publishing secrets that should not have been kept, nothing more and nothing less. People either choose to send it information or not and obviously the corrupt hate it. This mind bogglingly dumb attack is pointless, Wikileaks can be replaced again and again and well, realistically tens of thousands of times over. Wake up to your bullshit, they can be a publishing branch of the entire worlds intelligence services or as in reality the publishing branch of government agents from all over the world pissed off with their own governments.

Seriously this shit is so stupid, governments are clearly far more upset that foreign intelligence services are publicly releasing this information rather that in a collusive manner keeping it secret. It seems that corrupt politicians are quite amenable to blackmail for services, as long as a suitably large deposit in a tax haven occurs, for them just business as normal (the business as normal part is when corporate executives paying enormous multi-million dollar bribes throw sex and drug fuelled parties which corrupt politicians are required to attend to demonstrate their active corruption and evidence is retained to ensure compliance, they accept it).

That what all this Democratic party propaganda is about, it is not that the Russian Intelligence Services have this information, it's that they are releasing proof of government corruption to the US public. They do not give one crap, that Russia has this information, they are pissed off the same old, same old does not occur ie we have this evidence of corruption and we will publish it unless you do us some favours in return, the corrupt politicians reply, not a problem but you will have to pay me as well, I will not do it for free, so you can either lose me as an agent of your government or make pay me millions of dollars.

In the most disgusting fashion imaginable, this is exactly what the entirety of US main stream media is cheering on and what the majority of the unrepresentative US government is cheering on and what US Investigatory agencies are really, really pissed off about.

As far as I am concerned keep it coming the more the merrier and for those scum policing agencies who are not using this information to pursue and prosecute the corruption exposed, you soil yourselves and dishonour your service, you become less than nothing. In the most pathetic fashion imaginable you support the corruption of others earning millions upon millions whilst you collect peanuts in return to appear incompetent (you are not even being paid for your corruption, just your regular wage, even when as part of conspiracy that you can bring down, you in the typical corrupt fashion are entitled to a equal share of those millions, so pathetically lame).

Wikileaks should of course not issue instruction to anyone, that is a technical faux pas. The only thing allowed is an editorial with regard to how those working at Wikileaks feel about the digital conflagration. The only public response should be to send more secrets to Wikileaks to be exposed to the public, so the public can start acting upon them and investigate and prosecute the corrupt or at the very least embarrass the crap out of investigatory agencies failing to do their job, failing their oaths and failing their countries, shame, shame, shame.

In that light Wikileaks should send a copy of the information to the applicable agencies and record and display their response, each and every time, information is sent to them regarding corruption, so the public can watch as those agencies corruptly fail to act upon the evidence of corruption provided.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Darinbob]

When were they ever neutral once Assange took over as sole leader?

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Anonymous Coward]

They also intentionally released SSNs and passwords of accounts. That doesn't help transparency at all and is just plain harassment. Of course, they are basically just a Russian tool at this point. No one with any decency considers them a reliable source or a moral source any more.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[PPH]

The leakiest thing about Trump is his mouth, for better or for worse. He doesn't hold back anything, so there isn't anything interesting for WikiLeaks to publish.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TheReaperD]

The only thing that could be "leaked" that would be of interest would be his tax returns. I wonder if they would prove him to be as broke as I think he is.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[nanoflower]

As far as I know they've had no such releases on Trump. Then you add in the staggered release at the end of the campaign when it seems like they had this data months ago so it definitely looks to me like they are trying to hurt Clinton's campaign at the end of the race when the release can do the most damage. If they were just interested in exposing the information why not release it months ago when they got the data?

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Carewolf]

The problem with Trump leaks is that they usually come from Trump himself when he opens his mouth.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

There's been absolutely nothing in the actual stolen data that's been released, which has shown any evidence of actually rising to corruption or anything criminal or destabilizing. What's destabilizing is the manner in which Wikileaks has been promoting and releasing the information, calculated to cause maximum disruption in the American press in the leadup to the election. If Wikileaks were operating simply as a neutral information broker, they'd have dumped it all at once.

A fundamental problem here is that these hacks actually fail the basic qualification for Wikileaks, that's right in the name of the organization. "leaks".

These aren't leaks, these are hacks. A leak is when someone on the inside of something puts information out there for public consumption, which actually has a completely different set of possible motivations. Hacks on the other hand, are frequently committed by people who have a real stake in hurting the target of the hacking, and the motivations involved mean that any reasonable person needs to be more careful about giving the results any actual weight because of the likelihood of modification.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

What the hell is there to leak about Trump that hasn't been leaked, and what would it matter even if Wikileaks had something extra to throw on that pile?

How about his tax records for the past 30 years, like Hillary made available in the same way every candidate has done in modern history?

Hillary's skeletons involve about policy and important governmental stuff. Trump's skeletons are about him being an airheaded flip-flopping womanizer.

Her "skeletons" are all in the open, and not a single thing from the hacked documents has shown anything that surprises anyone. There hasn't been anything of note from her, and very little of note that will matter for more than a few weeks from any of her aides and associates.

Also, Trump's skeletons are buried in his tax returns, which nobody has seen. Oh, and the hundreds of lawsuits against him for shady business practices ranging from failing to pay small businesses, all the way to fraud on multiple occasions. And his racist treatment of housing in the 70's. And his use of cheap illegal labor and foreign steel that was dumped on the market. He is also currently facing child sex charges, though even I'm a bit skeptical about that one. I'd hope to think that even he couldn't sink that low.

If your first reaction, upon seeing evidence that a candidate for the most powerful position in the world has not only been lying but is self-aware of her lies and has been openly talking with industry leaders about the necessity of these lies ("public" vs. "private" positions) and your first impulse is to vilify the messenger... then you, good sir, are up to no good.

If you don't believe any kind of negotiation requires public and private positions and presentations, you've obviously never been in any kind of negotiation worth a damn. When you're trying to make bargains with people who have a completely different viewpoint from yourself, you often need to juggle how you present things and how you work that presentation toward an end goal. And as has been pointed out many times, Clinton's quote wasn't about her doing that, it was about the way Abraham Lincoln pitched the 14th amendment by appealing to people in different ways.

I welcome any and all revelations about Trump that anyone is sitting on, but I sure as well want to hear about Hillary's policy on veracity regardless.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Babel-17]

So nobody has any leaks of the years Trump spent in government service? Nothing about the drone strikes he asked for? I'd love to hear the excuse for that! :sarcasm:

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[cfalcon]

> It's morphed into Breitbart.

It's morphed into Jill Stein, not breitbart. Republicans don't like their nominee being called a "pied piper candidate", for instance, which Wikileaks absolutely called him (the quote is from a Democrat email, of course). The Green party is absolutely calling out the Democratic party too, remember.

Also note that Assange spoke at Jill Stein's nomination. He didn't endorse anyone (neither did Wikileaks), but when asked whether he prefers Clinton or Trump his quote was "you are asking if I prefer cholera or gonorrhea".

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Shane_Optima]

. If Wikileaks were operating simply as a neutral information broker, they'd have dumped it all at once.

Where does Wikileaks or Assange claim to operate as a neutral information broker? I think you'll find that newspapers across the world often have an editorial page, and even their headline stories, as you may have noticed, can seem to fortuitously appear at opportune times.

These aren't leaks, these are hacks. A leak is when someone on the inside of something puts information out there for public consumption, which actually has a completely different set of possible motivations.

1. There's really no way to differentiate between the two, as a large proportion of hacks originate from someone with inside knowledge. If this was 20 years ago, it would have been a simple "leak", not a "hack". It's not like we're talking about nuclear launch codes here.

2. Cry me a fuckin' river. When it comes to peoples' privacy rights that I'm concerned about, a future POTUS is at the absolute bottom of that list. This disturbs me slightly less than leaks disturb the characters on Yes, Minister. May we never live in a world without political leaks (and/or "hacks") of this nature.

Once again, I find it most disturbing that you choose to focus on the unspeakable crime of someone showing evidence that Hillary is a completely self-aware, unrepentant liar. I don't mean "caught in contradicting statements"; I mean, she was actually talking about the art and necessity of lying as a politician. And you really think the most damning and horrible thing in this situation is that this astoundingly frank little speech of hers wasn't hushed up for all eternity?

the motivations involved mean that any reasonable person needs to be more careful about giving the results any actual weight because of the likelihood of modification.

Is that your roundabout way of saying you think it's fabricated? Even though the Clinton campaign refused to deny or comment on its authenticity? Because if someone called me a liar and put words in my mouth that were definitely unfavorable, I don't think I would hesitate to mention that it was a lie. Pleading the fifth is fine for an actual criminal court, but you cannot possibly expect any thinking person to take seriously the possibility that this was a fabrication if she and her people completely refused to comment on it, especially seeing as how Wikileaks is not particularly well known for publishing fabrications.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[cfalcon]

Politifact is run by the Tampa Bay Times, which has endorsed Hillary Clinton. Right wing sites throw around its somewhat loose ties to Clinton Foundation donors, which you may or may not find compelling (I don't). There's also a whole (right wing) site devoted to calling out stuff politifact does, http://www.politifactbias.com/ . Those claims at least can be accepted or rejected on a case-by-case basis.

When a site claims to be neutral or know facts, even if it is launched and initially operated with the BEST of intentions, there's a big chance it will become biased via some method or other, soon enough.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

Wikileaks should of course not issue instruction to anyone, that is a technical faux pas. The only thing allowed is an editorial with regard to how those working at Wikileaks feel about the digital conflagration. The only public response should be to send more secrets to Wikileaks to be exposed to the public, so the public can start acting upon them and investigate and prosecute the corrupt or at the very least embarrass the crap out of investigatory agencies failing to do their job, failing their oaths and failing their countries, shame, shame, shame.

In that light Wikileaks should send a copy of the information to the applicable agencies and record and display their response, each and every time, information is sent to them regarding corruption, so the public can watch as those agencies corruptly fail to act upon the evidence of corruption provided.

So, here's the problem with that.

How do we trust that the information from Wikileaks is valid information?

Back when most of what Wikileaks published was actually *leaks*, given to them by people who saw injustice from the inside and wanted to expose it such as Snowden and Manning's leaks, it was a lot easier to take them at face value. But now, you have outside entities stealing documents and handing them to Wikileaks as genuine. Those entities have motives for it, and those motives may not be as pure as you might like. So information can be doctored, information can be falsified, and how do you know when that happens?

There are markers for it, but those markers aren't always perfect and will almost certainly be overcome with time.

Additionally, you have Wikileaks making statements attacking the target of said hack, and publishing documents that have been shown to be modified. (a user toward the top of the thread mentioned one possible way to detect modified files, but was rated 0 as an anon or possibly brigaded down)

In principle, I agree with your idea of an approach for Wikileaks to take. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any kind of realistic way that anyone can trust the organization anymore. I half expect them to release something that says Hillary did 9/11. but have the metadata show it was created on a copy of Word registered to . They've just utterly and completely blown any pretense of unbiased work, and that was the shield that made the entire thing worth considering.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

There are a lot of evil things about Trump, but most of them don't need to be leaked because they're already public knowledge. He just lies about them with absolute conviction and for some reason, people believe him.

Hillary keeps being accused of corruption, but even in the wildest fantasies of the Republican opposition, they've never had a damn thing that she could actually be *charged* with, because she's just doing the same things politicians have done since the dawn of time. They're just mad because she does them far, far better than they do. Is she a manipulative person with her own agenda that will steamroll her opposition? Absolutely. But to many of us, she's *our* kind of steamroller. I don't know what your media is telling you about Hillary, or what sites on the internet you're reading, but many of us don't believe she's going to be a blank check for the financial industry by any means. Is she "cozy" with them? Maybe, but at least she knows what she's dealing with, and is in a position to challenge them from a position of authority and begrudging respect from most of them.

It's a terrible thing that your country has to deal with such problems due to sanctions, but unfortunately for you, Russia has really put themselves in a position to earn them. Seizing the Crimea through the "invasion of green men" as it's been called is a blatant assault on Ukraine, and they should absolutely be shunned for it.

Regarding the media in your country and how they report on Trump... well, that's pretty much what our media is saying, too. But at every turn, Trump has chances to say things to disprove those accusations and completely fails to even get close to it. He will quite literally say things like "I respect women, I respect women more than any other man alive." and then follow that up the next day by saying that a woman wasn't pretty enough to sexually harass or assault. He's a cartoon come to life, a terrible, terrible cartoon.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

Pretty much every media outlet that doesn't have implicit bias in its very DNA has endorsed Hillary, including ones that haven't endorsed a Democrat at all in over 100 years, ones that have only endorsed candidates two or three times in a century, and as of October 6th the number of endorsements for Donald Trump among major American newspapers sat at a big fat zero.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/don...

The only "conspiracy" that would be on par than that, if it were actually indicative of one, would be climate science. However, you can usually find maybe 2-3 people in every group of 100 climate scientists that will disagree.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but they're playing politics by choosing what, and when, to release information.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

Where does Wikileaks or Assange claim to operate as a neutral information broker? I think you'll find that newspapers across the world often have an editorial page, and even their headline stories, as you may have noticed, can seem to fortuitously appear at opportune times.

When Wikileaks made it big, they had a simple claim of "no filter" access to leaked documentation and at the time, there were no signs that Wikileaks sourced information from anyone other than insiders.

1. There's really no way to differentiate between the two, as a large proportion of hacks originate from someone with inside knowledge. If this was 20 years ago, it would have been a simple "leak", not a "hack". It's not like we're talking about nuclear launch codes here.

2. Cry me a fuckin' river. When it comes to peoples' privacy rights that I'm concerned about, a future POTUS is at the absolute bottom of that list. This disturbs me slightly less than leaks disturb the characters on Yes, Minister. May we never live in a world without political leaks (and/or "hacks") of this nature.

So you're saying that the motivation of a person distributing private documents has absolutely no bearing on whether or not those documents should be given scrutiny for truth?

Once again, I find it most disturbing that you choose to focus on the unspeakable crime of someone showing evidence that Hillary is a completely self-aware, unrepentant liar. I don't mean "caught in contradicting statements"; I mean, she was actually talking about the art and necessity of lying as a politician. And you really think the most damning and horrible thing in this situation is that this astoundingly frank little speech of hers wasn't hushed up for all eternity?

I'm sorry, but I haven't seen any actual evidence of what you're claiming. Do you know about politics at all? I mean that seriously, do you know how it works? Have you ever taken a PoliSci class? I haven't, but based on many years of studying politics and the history of the American political system for fun (yes, some people do that) I've found it pretty clear that such things happen *all the damn time*. Politics is a dirty, ugly business and in order to get even the greatest and most altruistic things done, you need to make deals with the devil.

Is that your roundabout way of saying you think it's fabricated? Even though the Clinton campaign refused to deny or comment on its authenticity? Because if someone called me a liar and put words in my mouth that were definitely unfavorable, I don't think I would hesitate to mention that it was a lie. Pleading the fifth is fine for an actual criminal court, but you cannot possibly expect any thinking person to take seriously the possibility that this was a fabrication if she and her people completely refused to comment on it, especially seeing as how Wikileaks is not particularly well known for publishing fabrications.

Honestly, at this point, I have no idea. I won't accuse Wikileaks of publishing *known* fabrications, at least. Given Assange's personality and the grudge he has against Clinton, I wouldn't entirely put it past him. But even saying that, I wouldn't make that accusation.

However, with the information we have about the *source* of this data? And the known history of Russian information warfare should lead anyone to being concerned about what they're taking at face value. See some of the links on this page for a bit of background on Russia's recent history in this area.

https://epthinktank.eu/2015/12...

The way Clinton's campaign has responded to the information leaked so far, wouldn't lead me to think it was falsified in any large way. But, the risk is there and if people get into the habit of taking everything Wikileaks publishes at pure face value, what happens when somethi

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

Unless there's a conspiracy to alter the evidence on the part of the people whose information was leaked. Google can't get involved without protracted legal action and a forced reveal, otherwise they'd lose any shot at trying to be a trustworthy service for *anyone*.

If you send me an email, someone hacks into my computer and distributes it, and then we both go "Oh, shit, that shouldn't have gotten out there!" and modified our copies of the original mail - you get a complete stalemate, because it's an easy argument that the hacker is the one that changed the file.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe journalists just aren't as universally fucktarded as Trump voters? Oh, and that's all journalists, not just political ones, many of whom are prohibited from political donations for just such a reason. See for example, Keith Olbermann.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

If we wanted him dead, he'd just get a dose of Polonium. It's not exactly hard for a government to kill someone whose location is always known and contained. Even if he's in an embassy.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[thegarbz]

Trump leaks

It hasn't had to. Trump leaks come from Trump's own mouth for the audience of the entire world to mock. What's the point of a leaking organisation digging up dirt on someone who spends his entire day rolling in mud and doesn't shower before going on stage?

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[c]

... as of October 6th the number of endorsements for Donald Trump among major American newspapers sat at a big fat zero.

That's a bit of a no-brainer, really.

One thing Trump has said (and stuck with) is that he wants to open up libel laws. No news organization anywhere on the political spectrum wants their job to get harder or more expensive.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[gtall]

Wikileaks might have started that way, now it is just Putin's bitch.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

Bogus claim, no evidence that any such thing actually shaped policy or was involved in direct quid pro quo activities.

Counter: Running a foundation that illegally issues it's money to pay for court rulings against its named founder.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[TellarHK]

It proves that those documents are legit, but nothing about any others. The longer documents are in the possession of wikileaks and unreleased, the longer they have to potentially manipulate data.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[cyber-vandal]

They released an awful lot on Bush if I remember rightly. Does he not count as the other side?

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[HornWumpus]

Wikileaks started with the 'collateral murder' video. Which was clearly propaganda and had been edited to advance a false narrative.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[HornWumpus]

When was Wikileaks a source for unbiased data dumps?

Remember 'Collateral Murder'? Clear propaganda, edited to tell a lie.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[ScentCone]

The leaked emails have many elements that reinforce our understanding that Clinton lied, repeatedly, under oath. You know, criminally.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Xest]

You say that, but in the UK when libel laws last changed, there were actually papers sat on both sides of the argument. Typically the division was the red tops that libel and ruin people's lives on one side being pissed they wont get away with it anymore, and those who publish factual, well sourced information and that have some actual journalistic integrity and hence no threat of losing a libel suit anyway.

So yeah, even with stuff like that it makes no sense that absolutely every media outlet would oppose someone over it. Some are happy to see the sleezy lie-rags pulled into line and forced to compete on the same level by having to do real actual journalism rather than pedalling outright lies to make sales.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Shane_Optima]

Do you know about politics at all? I mean that seriously, do you know how it works?

I'm almost certainly a bigger cynic and misanthrope than you, so, yes. It's still not a commonplace thing to be so completely cynical and chameleon and hollow as to casually tell a large (though private) audience of your backers that your public position is not the same as your private position.

Do you want politics to always be based on boldfaced lies? Because I would prefer we slowly drift towards something, verisimilitude-style, a little more genuine.

So you're saying that the motivation of a person distributing private documents has absolutely no bearing on whether or not those documents should be given scrutiny for truth?

By all means, scrutinize. I'm saying that based on their past performance and Clinton's refusal to comment on it, an assumption of truth seems reasonable. The bare minimum you need in order to make a claim of fabrication plausible is for the target, having had several days to hire someone to look it over, actually deny it. Let's be fair here--if the most outrageous thing possible came out about Trump--from ANY source--and days and days later he was still saying "no comment", you wouldn't be entertaining any theories that it was a complete fabrication, would you?

Really, the best way to survive American politics is to avoid black and white viewpoints.

Preaching to the choir.

Never let yourself fall into the trap of feeling like everything has to be good versus evil

I'm in no way for Trump, if that's what you're getting at. I encourage everyone to vote Johnson or Stein.

However, we all have our priorities and our pet issues here, and one of mine happens to be truth. Trump's disregard for truth is one of the many reasons why I couldn't support him, and I'm not going to support anyone who has said the kinds of things Hillary has said.

I really can't stand the We've Always Been at War with Eurasia style of governance. Perhaps you can.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Xest]

"I don't care if the information about Hillary's lies are part of some Russian plot or not. If the truth is "destabilizing" well then fuck stability. Hillary admitting to having "public" and "private" positions is a piece of information that I, as a citizen, want to have."

Sure, but here's the question you need to ask yourself, given that, are you willing to completely and utterly disregard it when choosing a political candidate to back, given that you have absolutely no idea whether Trump shares the exact same trait due to a lack of similar leaks on his side of the spectrum?

Therein lies the problem, if you're only receiving one side of facts, and are deciding based on only a half-truth, then you're no better off than if someone had just outright lied to you. You're still exactly as likely to make an incorrect choice when you have half the information, as when you have all the information - Wikileaks is influencing the election with half-truths.

The English legal system originally changed it's court vow from "I promise to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth" to "I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" precisely because after a few shoddy court cases where the guilty went free it was realised that half-truths can be as misleading as outright lies.

So sure, transparency is great, but unless you're willing to completely disregard everything from transparency leaks that only tell half the story when forming an actual opinion and making a decision then there's a good chance you're actually making yourself more stupid by making decisions based upon those half-truths because you're letting them influence you into making decisions that do not benefit either your personal self-interest, or any hint of altruism you may have. For something like an election there is simply absolutely no benefit in making a decision based on transparency of one candidate over another with no transparency, and that works both ways - you may now believe you know, you have evidence that Hillary is corrupt, but what you don't know is whether Donald is even more corrupt, and that is a problem - you still have the exact same 50-50 chance of guessing which one is more corrupt that you had before you had any of that leaked information.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Shane_Optima]

Nobody gives a shit about his tax returns, at least not in terms of his POTUS run. He doesn't want to reveal them because he doesn't want people to know how much he's worth and he's also probably a bit worried that all those eyes will spot something shady there.

Neither of things matter to the people voting for him. Trump has reasons for keeping them secret that have everything to do with his ego and his bottom line, but very little to do with his candidacy. But by all means, if someone at the IRS wanted to leak his tax returns... I won't shed any tears.

If you don't believe any kind of negotiation requires public and private positions and presentations, you've obviously never been in any kind of negotiation worth a damn.

Well Trump, for all of his many many many MANY flaws, last time I checked has nonetheless managed to handle this pretty well regarding the transsexual bathroom dispute. (Unless he's flip-flopped on this; I can't be bothered to keep up with every stream of consciousness ramble that comes out of the man's head.) He's for allowing them to go in whatever bathroom they want. When point-blank asked, he answered that if a transsexual woman wanted to visit the women's bathroom at Trump towers that he would have no problem with that. But he defers the issue to the states, which is a fancy way of saying that he would veto legislation trying to protect those rights on a national level and the red states will be allowed able to restrict them.

There are other ways of indicating that someone supports something (or doesn't support something), but that this position will not be an issue for the party or for people worried about it. It requires some courage, beginning a sentence along the lines of "I personally think X, but...", but voters have been known to respect this sort of honesty before. Clintonian politics is not the only form of politics this country has seen or appreciated I happen to think that, in 2016, the boldfaced lie approach favored by Bill and Hillary Clinton would be a step backwards for this country.

And this is a determination I have made that must stand regardless of my disdain for Trump.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Maxo-Texas]

TellarHK said:
And I'm this case the information they were given was hacked and given to them by Russian intelligence. And, they've made absolutely every possible effort to hurt Hillary's campaign by hyping releases, staggering them, and releasing them at time when they're calculated to do the most potential harm. They are in no way acting like a neutral party.

The only way Wikileaks can have credibility is if they release things on a fully non-partisan basis and that has clearly not happened here.

You are correct sir.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/...

The headline jumped out at me and I thought it a good idea to post it here. The original story was posted by Tim Peacock at Peacock Panache. They source the following article on Motherboard by Thomas Rid: All Signs Point to Russia Being Behind the DNC Hack.

I think by now, itâ(TM)s a foregone conclusion that the bad actors that Wikileaks is releasing information from are state-sponsored and are from Russia. Putin has made no secret of his political love for Trumpâ and Republicans have used the occasion to make great hay over the DNC and itâ(TM)s terse relationship with Bernie. . . .not out of true concern for Sanders, of course, but because they have had to embrace a very undesirable candidate as their standard-bearer.

The big takeaway from the Motherboard article is the following:

        The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named âoeÐÐÐÐÐÑ ÐÐмÑfнÐоÐÐÑ,â a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round.

        Then there is the language issue. âoeI hate being attributed to Russia,â the Guccifer 2.0 account told Motherboard, probably accurately. The person at the keyboard then claimed in a chat with Motherboardâ(TM)s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Guccifer 2.0 was from Romania, like the original Guccifer, a well-known hacker. But when asked to explain his hack in Romanian, he was unable to respond colloquially and without errors. Guccifer 2.0â(TM)s English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply, albeit only on political subjects, not in technical mattersâ"an indication of a team of operators at work behind the scenes.

Rid went on to add:

        The metadata show that the Russian operators apparently edited some documents, and in some cases created new documents after the intruders were already expunged from the DNC network on June 11. A file called donors.xls, for instance, was created more than a day after the story came out, on June 15, most likely by copy-pasting an existing list into a clean document. Although so far the actual content of the leaked documents appears not to have been tampered with, manipulation would fit an established pattern of operational behaviour in other contexts, such as troll farms or planting fake media stories. Subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation of content may be in the interest of the adversary in the future. Documents that were leaked by or through an intelligence operation should be handled with great care, and journalists should not simply treat them as reliable sources.

(article continues.. follow the link above).

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Shane_Optima]

baldfaced, not boldfaced, damnit.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Third Position]

Um, have you seen their Twitter feed lately? It's a nonstop feed of anti-Clinton propaganda, half of it retweets, a lot of the claims so bad that even Wikileaks supporters on the Wikileaks Reddit sub have been calling them out on it. It's morphed into Breitbart.

They're even repeating Trump's "rigged election" lines:

There is no US election. There is power consolidation. Rigged primary, rigged media and rigged 'pied piper' candidate drive consolidation.

I'd say they have some pretty good reasons for repeating it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[Shane_Optima]

Which is why I've repeatedly said that people should vote for Stein or Johnson, not Trump.

This pathetic, myopic devotion to throwing all of one's weight behind the lesser evil for the next 4 years must stop.

Re: Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[eaglesrule]

Exactly. Can you imagine how difficult it would make it for news organizations to have a legal obligation to present the facts and portray stories accurately? They wouldn't be able to cover themselves with the 'its just entertainment' excuse, when they pull off stunts like editing 911 audio tape in order to make someone appear racist.

Re:Wikileaks is a toxic organisation.

[eaglesrule]

There are a lot of evil things about Trump, but most of them don't need to be leaked because they're already public knowledge. He just lies about them with absolute conviction and for some reason, people believe him.

It is like the difference in the lies and deception told by Marketing, compared to the lies and deception of the Mafia.

Hillary keeps being accused of corruption, but even in the wildest fantasies of the Republican opposition, they've never had a damn thing that she could actually be *charged* with, because she's just doing the same things politicians have done since the dawn of time. They're just mad because she does them far, far better than they do.

You're right about this. The Dems have a long and proud tradition of covering for their own, especially the Clintons, in a tradition that is live and well as recently demonstrated by the vote not to find Brian Pagliano in contempt of congress. It was a great way to say Fuck You to the R's and the non-gullible American public, and to remind us that Clintons are untouchable. Without this kind of support, the mistakes Clintons made in the past would have cost them dearly, and not just a bit of reputation. There is also the matter of the incredible luck that people like Vince Foster and Ron Brown wound up dead before they could provide damning testimony in court, but that is just a niggling little detail.

Is she a manipulative person with her own agenda that will steamroll her opposition? Absolutely. But to many of us, she's *our* kind of steamroller.

Steamroller, indeed: fake online commentors (Correct the Record), fake protestors (Democracy Partners), fake news aggregators (Facebook and Google), fake journalism (CNN, Washington Post), fake primaries, fake investigations, fake outrage. Such a marvelous machine for flattening anything that gets in the way, like truth or intellectual honesty, because the ends will always justify the means as long as your team wins. Too many partisans and too few patriots is why we ended up with the choice we have this cycle, in a reverse-meritocracy where only the most skillful liar and underhanded manipulator has any chance at being given the reigns of power. The cycle will then just repeat itself and the status quo will go on, because there will never be a shortage of useful idiots.

If the point was ...

[quax]

... that they are a bunch of jerks. Point taken.

Re:If the point was ...

[Narcocide]

A long time ago I saw an interview with Assange on The Colbert Report, before Wikileaks became such a household name. As I recall, he was very up front in the interview that free speech and power to the people is great and all, but that his primary motivation was that he's a jerk. I'm paraphrasing, but seriously. Watch the interview. He never proclaims to be a champion of any ideal other than making the rich and powerful angry at him personally, then thumbing his nose at them while they struggle in futility to try to get some sort of revenge.

Re:If the point was ...

[quax]

I guess, with the exception of the revenge part, that worked out swimmingly for him.

Too bad that this turned into a one man show. At one point I really thought of Wikieaks as a force for good.

Re:If the point was ...

[Bruce Perens]

There's no proof that it has anything to do with Wikileaks, but in a world of IoT devices with no thought toward security, anyone who cares to do so can mount DDOS with the power of a national entity.

What's the point of doing what Assange and Wikileaks have been doing without any moral position? He isn't helping his own case.

Re:If the point was ...

[TellarHK]

The idea behind Wikileaks was a great one, and managed correctly, it could have been extraordinarily useful. But they pissed it all away.

Re:If the point was ...

[TellarHK]

You hit the nail on the head there, but most of us trying to point out the moral issues with the way Wikileaks is conducting themselves now are getting modded trolls.

I don't imagine that Wikileaks has anything to do with causing the DDOS, but wouldn't be surprised at all if someone claiming to be behind it contacted Wikileaks to take credit as a sign of support.

Re:If the point was ...

[quax]

What's the point of doing what Assange and Wikileaks have been doing without any moral position? He isn't helping his own case.

It's most flummoxing. Even before he holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy his behavior started to look somewhat erratic. Some prescient bloggers (such as Sean-Paul Kelly) warned Wikileaks about tying its reputation this closely to just one person. Alas, the warnings were ignored, and now the damage is done.

Re:If the point was ...

[quax]

If you drop the article you hit closer to home. Love or hate America - doesn't change the fact that the world needs to have sane, rational leadership at the helm of the world's largest power.

Re:If the point was ...

[quax]

Came across this article that offers some insight.

Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[Mal-2]

It doesn't really matter who was firing the shot, so much as all those loaded, pwn3d weapons remaining in the wild that can be pressed into service again and again. This is not the first such event, it's at least the third. It won't be the last either, and the only way I can see to stop it is to permanently dismantle the IoT until it can be rebuilt from the ground up with security in mind. If security is too hard for the poor vendors and end users, then don't rebuild it. The health of the network as a whole is far more important than any single purpose for which it is used -- besides which, the devices can't be trusted to do their jobs anyhow once they've been pwn3d.

Make the vendors take them back in a recall -- could be a service recall in which they are made field-upgradable, or if they're hard-coded then they get the Galaxy Note 7 treatment as the hazards they are. Those who won't take them back should be cited under FCC Part 15 rules and have their certifications revoked and fines levied. It is easily provable that the devices are "causing harmful interference". It's time to get them off the network. Like yesterday.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[spire3661]

"the only way I can see to stop it is to permanently dismantle the IoT"

How do you do that without breaking the internet? How do you do that without onerous registration or whitelisted hardware? How do you get your way without destroying the network?

There is nothing special about 'the IoT', they are computers on the internet, like any others. Why dont we start with educating people on how to administer and secure their networks before you start taking out your ass again.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[spire3661]

" but it is actually worth discussing."

No, its not. What you are suggesting is a Pyrrhic Victory. You would salt the ground to 'win'? You wouldnt be left with the internet, it would be something else, something ugly.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[Shane_Optima]

That 'cure' is going to be worse than the disease. Maybe most people around here are too young to remember, but the internet has had these growing pains before. What was it, MyDoom? Sasser? I forget. This was early 2000s, and there was a month or so when things were a lot worse than they were today. Huge chunks of the internet were unusable, I mean it was BAD. I had an XP box literally get pwned about 20 minutes after a fresh install had finished, before it could finish downloading security updates. (To be completely clear here, I wasn't doing anything on it other than updating)

The problem with computer security is rebuilding from the ground up is never as simple as all that. Building a trusted boot environment, for instance, in the real world inevitably means giving the DRM keys to the kingdom to Microsoft or something. Making things truly secure inevitably entails permanently taking power away from the users. No more rooted phones, and quite possibly no more rooted laptops, either.

You can come up with some amazing back of the napkin idea that will solve all our security woes without infringing on white hat hackerdom and it can be 100% feasible... but that isn't the solution that the industry leaders or the politicians are going to go with. Ever.

Better solution: use this as an excuse to make the pipes fatter and boxen stronger (aren't we getting close to the point where we can have patent-free boxen that are fast enough to run web servers? Or do we need another 10-15 years?) that so DDOSes become more and more resource-intensive to pull off, work on identifying the zombies better and quicker and pass around the blacklists so that ISPs start throttling or banning or sending messages to the users letting them know that their devices are owned. If security patches aren't forthcoming for certain devices, well, eventually consumers simply stop buying that brand because "______ sucks. It's so slow!"

A total ground-up rebuild of things, if such a thing is even possible, would be an unmitigated disaster because it will be used as an excuse to push through all kinds of horrible ideas. Instead, use this problem to push through good things: fatter pipes, better Android patching, more aggressive use of sandboxing (we've had a mature LXC for years now, damn it) and various "defense in depth" strategies that make remote exploits much trickier to pull off, etc.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[yuriklastalov]

How do you figure? He's talking about all the "Internet of Things" garbage Sillicon Valley is so in love these days. You know, those little spy devices they get you to pay for and then leverage for data collection?

Anyway, these smart lights, hubs, thermostats, toasters, etc., are wildly insecure, to the point of some even having an open telnet port with root access! So we have all these fancy networked gewgaws which get pwned by hackers and used to DDoS anyone they feel like.

To be perfectly clear: These devices didn't exist as little as four years ago, so banning them from the internet would not in any way reduce its functionality. Other than that a bunch of rich nerds will have to remember to turn their fucking thermostats to the right setting before they go to work, nothing of value will be lost.

The Internet of Things is a solution looking for a problem and a way for sleazy tech companies to fleece the consumer. That it has ended up being co-opted by (other) scumbags to do their (differently) evil bidding is just one more nail in the coffin.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[nanoflower]

The problem is that as I understand it many of the devices being abused were made by companies that no longer exist. Others are Chinese companies over which we have no control and until/unless China is attacked I don't see the Chinese government having much interest in forcing them to fix the issue. Hell, even if they did fix the issue how do you get all of the devices updated when they don't have a remote update feature?

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[TellarHK]

That 'cure' is going to be worse than the disease. Maybe most people around here are too young to remember, but the internet has had these growing pains before. What was it, MyDoom? Sasser? I forget. This was early 2000s, and there was a month or so when things were a lot worse than they were today.

In the early 2000s, it was possible to live life without worrying about whether the internet was down. Today, so many services of various degrees of sensitivity have moved to a place where they require the internet be up and running in order to function. In 2004 when those both hit, you also didn't have anywhere near the number of computers online 24/7 as you do today, given that many people were still on dialup services. 2004 was the year that broadband finally got close to surpassing dialup service for most users online, and everything was still quite new. The total population of internet users was also 1/3rd of today's total.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[Mal-2]

The "must accept" clause simply means that the device needs to deal with such interference without aggravating the problem. Not by emitting more noise of its own to try to shout over it. It doesn't mean it has to remain in perpetual BOHICA mode.

A device isn't allowed to shoot back under Part 15 rules. That doesn't mean it has to be the goatse guy.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[Zontar The Mindless]

It seems the open source community fell into the same trap MS did back in the win 95 days of not thinking ahead with security when these things come online.

Huh? The FOSS community is not responsible for the misuse of its software by third parties.

Re:Doesn't really matter who fired the shot

[spire3661]

Those things all work because the internet is open. An 'IoT' device is still a computer that has a right to be on the net like any other. Look, you cant grow anything good without getting some weeds, its the NATURE OF FERTILE GROUND. You have to be very careful how you deal with the weeds or you risk making the ground worthless.

Totally different!

[Okian Warrior]

.... or by the 2nd?

Looks like the shoe's on the other foot, at least for their 15 minutes of Internet infamy, whomever did this.

We don't threaten to jail our political opponents - that would be a dictatorship!

(But we totally use our influence to silence their detractors! That's completely different!)

Re:Totally different!

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't threaten to jail our political opponents - that would be a dictatorship!

(But we totally use our influence to silence their detractors! That's completely different!)

The US government has as a core responsibility defending its citizens against all threats. If a nation state were kicking down doors and hauling off files, we would do something.

How is this different? Theft is theft. I'd put him in the _exact_ same place as someone who rips a blue-ray then sells copies on E-bay, except it is actually worse. No one delivered an encrypted hard disk to assange and the rest. No, the thieves clearly were involved in a complex conspiracy, and it wasn't to watch the latest new movie. It was a conspiracy to not just get simple profit, but to change the leadership of perhaps the most powerful nation on the Earth to one of their choosing. (It may also have been just to weaken US democracy, but that reason is no better.) That is a hell of a lot more dangerous and no I do not distinguish assange from the people that stole the data. He is part of the conspiracy. Aiding and abetting a crime is itself a crime. There was no journalistic reason to release that data. There was no smoking gun, or anything all that important. They just threw it out in the hopes someone could make something of it. Hell, if someone had a copy of Trumps tax returns and just released the entire set, they are very likely to be prosecuted, particularly if they did it after the election. That too would be a crime.

Re:Totally different!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr Assange is a not a citizen of the United States, he is Australian, currently hiding out in an Ecuadorian embassy and thus discussing US constitutional rights is probably irrelevant. Critical words spoken by Mr. Assange against the policies or practices of the United States government or personal dislike of US politicians is fine. Pointing out corruption and exposing the injustices with which our species is riddled is depressing, but certainly fair. Interfering in a US election by participating in the efforts of the Russian government to publish stolen political documents in an effort to alter the outcome of a US election, alter the stability and integrity of the US election system is NOT criticism, but rather an attack upon the United States. It appears that Mr. Assange does have a particular dislike for the US and its businesses and spends much of his time publishing things that would tend to harm the United States and its interests. With that in mind, it would be fair for the US to consider Mr. Assange an enemy as his actions, rather than merely his words, demonstrate, and therefore pressuring the Ecuadorians to cut off his internet connection is certainly fair, and quite mild as other enemies of the US have been blown up by drones. Stopping the average US citizen from buying something from Amazon, cutting off X-box live, or even Reddit does not anger the citizen at the government, but rather at the hackers. And threatening US citizens tends to get countries bombed - just look at the US history. Many passionate believers in a cause think that the proper way to get attention is to do something violent or to vandalize something. This gets the protester blamed for the problem rather than building support.

Protesting corruption is honorable and right, but I think that history demonstrates the proper way to change societies is not through violence, but through organized political activity - take a page from the Prohibition Movement, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the Suffrage Movement in the US. Each one of these was successful and for the most part non-violent. Ghandi is a good source for this type of non-violent change.

While the bane of corruption is transparency, and in this Mr. Assange and I are in agreement, I do not agree with the use of Wikileaks to alter the political processes of any country including the US because this makes Wikileaks a political site rather than an anti corruption site. By picking a political side, Wikileaks is no longer any more honest than the politicians using it for their own gains.

Re:Totally different!

[murdocj]

When you are in a dictatorship (say, Russia), trust me, you'll know it.

Re:Totally different!

[murdocj]

Jeez I wish I had the points to mod the parent up. Exactly right.

Re:Totally different!

[Agripa]

He is part of the conspiracy. Aiding and abetting a crime is itself a crime. There was no journalistic reason to release that data.

CNN and the ACLU agree with you. The people only have collective rights so only officially recognized news organizations have a 1st amendment right to view and interpret these documents.

Re:Totally different!

[Shane_Optima]

Yes, clearly this couldn't possibly be the result of some nonmaterial encoding or transcription errors along the way.

Do any of the ones that people actually care have bad sigs? The two examples you provided appear to be pretty mundane / noncontroversial.

Re:Totally different!

[Shane_Optima]

There was no journalistic reason to release that data. There was no smoking gun, or anything all that important.

Except there very clearly was a journalistic reason to release that data given SHE'S A GODDAMN POTUS CANDIDATE SAYING INTERESTING AND CONTROVERSIAL STUFF. Just because *you* don't think any of it is controversial doesn't make it so.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that the journalists cannot legally be stopped from publishing documents obtained or leaked illegally.

Re:Totally different!

[Shane_Optima]

You should be shamed of yourself for implicitly advocating the reversal of a very important Supreme Court decision. It doesn't matter how many laws were broken in obtaining that information. As a POTUS candidate, there is a very strong public interest and thus it is wholly protected by the first amendment.

And yeah, I'd argue the same for anyone who leaked Trump's tax returns. The leaker may do wrong; the journalist does not.

Equal amounts?

[Okian Warrior]

Wikileaks hadn't been pushing Trump leaks as hard as Clinton leaks. Now its supports are trying to take down US infrastructure. I used to think that Wikileaks is a neutral organisation promoting government transparency, but not any more. I kind of feel that they are up to no good.

What do you propose? Should Wikileaks hold off on Clinton until they have an equal amount on Trump?

Is that your definition of neutral? That they must expose corruption in equal amounts for both sides?

Re:Equal amounts?

[fufufang]

Wikileaks hadn't been pushing Trump leaks as hard as Clinton leaks. Now its supports are trying to take down US infrastructure. I used to think that Wikileaks is a neutral organisation promoting government transparency, but not any more. I kind of feel that they are up to no good.

What do you propose? Should Wikileaks hold off on Clinton until they have an equal amount on Trump?

Is that your definition of neutral? That they must expose corruption in equal amounts for both sides?

How about not sensationalising everything they publish? How about not making political statements against Clinton? They can leak stuff without appearing to be political, you know.

Re:Equal amounts?

[Gussington]

Wikileaks hadn't been pushing Trump leaks as hard as Clinton leaks. Now its supports are trying to take down US infrastructure. I used to think that Wikileaks is a neutral organisation promoting government transparency, but not any more. I kind of feel that they are up to no good.

What do you propose? Should Wikileaks hold off on Clinton until they have an equal amount on Trump?

Is that your definition of neutral? That they must expose corruption in equal amounts for both sides?

They should just publish without opinion or manipulation. Assange has made it clear it wants to be more than just an independent source of information.
Transparency doesn't work when the gatekeeper has an ego.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

Why is attacking the Hillary campaign a bad thing? We now know they corrupted the democratic process in the primary to deliver her the nomination. And we know from the latest Wikileaks release that Clinton has been openly talking to Wall street about the fact that she's been routinely lying in public, saying what is necessary to get elected.

Why are you attacking someone for attacking this loathsome woman? She and her campaign deserve to be attacked. I think it would've been fantastic if she could've been forced to step down and give someone else a chance (not Bernie, or at least not necessarily, just anyone decent the Democrats can shuffle into place quickly.) to take on Trump. Barring that, I think pushing Johnson or Stein into double digits would be fantastic. I even think that would be a more important goal, long term, than sacrificing literally every shred of dignity and concern for the truth and the future of our democracy just to stop some shock-jock version of George W. Bush (i.e. someone who is almost certain, at the end of the day, just a lazy puppet.)

Assange never claimed to be objective, but as a purported newsman he doesn't need to. News organizations all over the world have taken an opinion in this race. Assange isn't pro-Trump; he's just anti-Clinton. As am I.

Re:Equal amounts?

[Razed By TV]

What do you propose? Should Wikileaks hold off on Clinton until they have an equal amount on Trump?

I don't know, maybe post anything at all about Trump?
Offer a bounty on his tax returns?

At this point, it seems like Assange is just trying to solidify a relationship with the Republican party in order to get the US off his back.
I'm interested in a Wikileaks that posts about all abuses and corruption in my government.
Not just the ones that help Assange meet his agenda.

Re: Equal amounts?

[TellarHK]

They didn't corrupt the process. I was a Bernie supporter from the start, and caucused for him at the neighborhood level and served half a day as an alternate at the county level until learning that there wasn't any reason to be there that day. There were procedural messes, particularly in my state of Nevada at the final statewide convention. That was a mess, and a disaster on all sorts of levels, but it wouldn't have changed the final outcome.

Did the people in the leadership of the party have a preference? Yes. Did most of the party know that going in? Absolutely, and so did Bernie. Hillary had spent eight years trying to build up her credentials and preparing for this run, and she absolutely stacked the deck in her own favor by courting superdelegates. Does that sting, as a Bernie supporter that sees his preferred candidate on the losing end? Yeah, it does. As much as I'll defend Clinton these days, I'll admit it still stings. But you know what?

If you want to see what happens to a party without superdelegates, look at the GOP nominee right now. Had the Democrats voted for someone less scrupulous than Bernie without superdelegates, the DNC would be in just as bad a spot if not worse.

The Democratic party would have been better off with Bernie in many ways, but Bernie wasn't perfect. His debate performances were lackluster at best, and I was really waiting for the red meat of in depth plans and policies every time he got up on stage, and it never showed.

When it became clear that Trump was going to be the GOP nominee, I was actually somewhat relieved he was going up against Hillary. She knows what it's like to deal with idiots having put up with the Republicans during their long slow slide into insanity, and knows exactly how to play them and give them all the rope they need to hang themselves. And honestly, I think Bernie would have been too good for that. I think he'd have been too nice to Trump, and not given Trump the reason to prove what his natural temperament was.

I don't think Bernie wanted to win. I think he wanted leverage to shape the future of the party, and I believe he got that 100%.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Comen]

First of all the DNC is setup with Super Delegates to basically allow selected people inside the democratic party to have much more power than regular voters during the nomination for this very reason, they do not want the party high jacked by a disguised 3rd party candidate, to think they do not coordinate between super delegates would be naive, but it still does not make it impossible for a candidate not selected by the super delegates to win, they would just have to win by a very big margin. We saw the republican party come out loud and clear about trying to get rid of Trump before he won the nomination, they did the same thing the DNC was doing but out loud.
But the real issue here is, that if you hacked every politicians email account in the USA I think you would have a really good chance to find the same or way worse than anything that Wikileaks has released, regardless of what party you are for, you got to admit something is not right when one side has all the internal conversations released and the other does not. You are always going to find things like this if you try hard enough, I am sure both parties say negative things about the other side and even its own followers behind closed doors. If they had found some kind of smoking gun and wanted to release it, I am fine with that, but what they released and the way they released it, to me seemed like they were just trying to sway peoples minds more than do justice.

Re: Equal amounts?

[quantaman]

Why is attacking the Hillary campaign a bad thing?

Because it's a one-sided effort driven by a rival power. Say Russia has pushed the polls by 1% to the Republicans by releasing DNC communications, they could have redirected their efforts the other way and done just as much, if not more.

An entity who sees you as the enemy is trying to manipulate into a certain course of action, don't you think it wise to resist that manipulation?

We now know they corrupted the democratic process in the primary to deliver her the nomination. And we know from the latest Wikileaks release that Clinton has been openly talking to Wall street about the fact that she's been routinely lying in public, saying what is necessary to get elected.

What a shocking revelation! Next you'll tell us that wrestling is fixed!!

Why are you attacking someone for attacking this loathsome woman?

Because even if you were right that she was loathsome (she isn't, but your other wrong ideas take precedence), that doesn't mean the ends justify the means.

What happens when someone decides your favourite candidate is loathsome? Do you still think the Russian government is justified in hacking their internal communications and dumping them to the Internet to look for dirt? Do you want a political system where no one can have an honest discussion over email because a state-sponsored hacker might dump it and cause a scandal?

I even think that would be a more important goal, long term, than sacrificing literally every shred of dignity and concern for the truth and the future of our democracy just to stop some shock-jock version of George W. Bush (i.e. someone who is almost certain, at the end of the day, just a lazy puppet.)

This is basically what I take from your position:

Sacrifice our principals to stop Trump? Never!

Sacrifice our principals to stop Hillary? Hell yeah!

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

But the real issue here is, that if you hacked every politicians email account in the USA I think you would have a really good chance to find the same or way worse than anything that Wikileaks has released, regardless of what party you are for, you got to admit something is not right when one side has all the internal conversations released and the other does not.

Trump isn't a politician; Clinton is. People aren't complaining that the media isn't publishing stories about (Hillary) Clinton being a some kind of girl-crazed uber-macho creep, and so you really shouldn't complain that people aren't leaking stories about Trump talking about lying in his (nonexistent, until now) career as a politician. I'd welcome any all leaks about any and all politicians from any and all news outlets. If Wikileaks/Assange is the only one doing it, and/or if Hillary is the only one with an actual leak in the wild... so be it.

And as it happens, I don't think all politicians have "way worse" than what Wikileaks released. I think the vast majority of politicians have enough sense (and shame) to at least pretend that they believe what they say in public, or at least they have enough sense to not flatly state that their public opinions are completely distinct from their private beliefs. I even think that a significant minority of them actually do believe what they say in public.

None of this should be construed as pro-Trump. If you can't hang Trump on his own words by now, that's not my problem. The Democrats are playing with fire with this this "we're the not-Trump party; therefore, you're not allowed to say anything bad about our candidate!" attitude. We're are voting for someone, not against someone. After Brexit turned out the way it did, I can't believe people on this side of the pond still think that Project Fear will see them through until the end. Americans are at least twice as suicidally stubborn as Brits are, and Trump isn't a tenth as dangerous as Brexit is.

Re: Equal amounts?

[StevenMaurer]

Although I agree with everything you say here, let me point out that Hillary Clinton would have won without superdelegates at all. She got 3 million more votes than Senator Sanders did, so this is pretty natural.

These days, the style doesn't appear to be "well, we got outvoted - sure hope I'm wrong about how bad this is going to turn out", and instead has become a bunch of "It's RIGGED, CHEATING, see we have EMAILS that say people are ANNOYED with us, and Benghazi, and stuff!!1!!1!". Pretty childish, if you ask me.

Re: Equal amounts?

[sydbarrett74]

they do not want the party high jacked by a disguised 3rd party candidate

All the more reason for structural reform or abolition of the Electoral College to give alternative parties an actual chance of winning an election. The two-party system is clearly a failure and mostly produces bland, lowest-common-denominator candidates. Until we have more choice, our elections will continue to be a choice between a douche and a turd.

Re: Equal amounts?

[TellarHK]

Bernie handled things well, it was sadly some of his supporters that didn't. I made several predictions during the campaign regarding how Bernie's run would go. And was right pretty much every time.

Re: Equal amounts?

[TellarHK]

I dunno. On one hand you've got a former first lady, successful senator and secretary of state, and on the other side you have a former reality TV show host that won't prove he's not broke or in debt to foreign powers. I think one of those choices is pretty damn good and it's not the guy that lost money in the casino business.

Re: Equal amounts?

[thegarbz]

And we know from the latest Wikileaks release that Clinton has been openly talking to Wall street about the fact that she's been routinely lying in public, saying what is necessary to get elected

Actually we knew that before Wikileaks. It's right there in her job title "politician".

Re: Equal amounts?

[Razed By TV]

Assange never claimed to be objective, but as a purported newsman he doesn't need to. News organizations all over the world have taken an opinion in this race. Assange isn't pro-Trump; he's just anti-Clinton. As am I.

WikiLeaks was founded under the premise of exposing secret/leaked/classified information, as a non-profit. They have unpaid volunteers and pro bono lawyers. They operate on donated money. I think that people donating their time and money have a reasonable expectation for WikiLeaks to be at least somewhat impartial in their activities. I do have a problem with a political agenda emerging after WikiLeaks portrayed themselves for so long as politically agnostic. I think a lot of people who once rooted for Wikileaks do.

Do I think attacking the Hillary campaign is wrong? Not particularly. Especially if the information is being dropped right in their lap. I do expect them to release whatever damning information they receive. What I don't expect is for them to pick favorites. They can't even be bothered to make a token effort to find something on Trump.

Take the EFF. If they started showing partiality towards certain internet providers, certain media groups, certain tech companies, I would have an issue with that. If they gave Google a free pass on a major pirvacy goof, I would be concerned. They have a stated purpose, and I expect them to live up to it.

Re:Equal amounts?

[RandomSurfer314]

Why shouldn't Wikileaks make politics? There is no valid reason not to. Take a look at NYT or CNN and tell me they don't have political opinions. Every journalist and every press organization is biased in one way or another, and of course Julian Assange and other Wikipeaks members have opinions. The only problem you have with people that are in such positions and have political opinions is really just that they don't happen to have your political opinion.

Re: Equal amounts?

[aardvarkjoe]

Do I think attacking the Hillary campaign is wrong? Not particularly. Especially if the information is being dropped right in their lap. I do expect them to release whatever damning information they receive. What I don't expect is for them to pick favorites. They can't even be bothered to make a token effort to find something on Trump.

It's not Wikileaks' responsibility to find the stuff; it's their responsibility (as far as they've taken it on) to publish what they're given. Do you have evidence that they have a bunch of dirt on Trump that they're refusing to publish? If it would just take a "token effort" to find it, then don't you think that the Democrats would have it by now?

Re:Equal amounts?

[14erCleaner]

An org like Wikileaks should act like a common carrier. If somebody gives them a mass of documents that shouldn't be secret, they should release it, not try to manipulate the leak schedule and content to conform to their political views.

Re:Equal amounts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind at all that you have different political opinions. I don't mind at all if your side wins the election. I would love to debate you on the issues and the data. What I don't want is some non-US citizen monkeying around with the US political system because of their own personal problems. Wikileaks is taking sides not against corruption, but against a person. Nothing in the leaked materials is actionable - i.e. its not illegal and its not dishonest. SO then the purpose is not to expose corruption or to improve human civilization, but to obtain a specific political outcome in the US for the benefit of a foreign government.

Re:Equal amounts?

[ScentCone]

How about not sensationalising everything they publish?

They publish non-sensational stuff all the time. But written evidence reinforcing our long understanding of Hillary Clinton's parade of corruption is rather sensational here in the weeks right before millions of people who know she's a corrupt liar none the less make her the chief law enforcement officer of the country. You don't think things related to that deserve some attention?

The "stuff they're leaking" is ABOUT politics. It's the DNC (a political entity) and her campaign (a political entity) making back room deals with the media, among others, to spin for her in her quest for power. How can leaks that are entirely about a politician's conduct and the behavior of her supporting minions in their pursuit of the White House be anything BUT political in nature?

Re: Equal amounts?

[ScentCone]

Barring that, I think pushing Johnson or Stein into double digits would be fantastic.

Why? Getting them in to double digits is guaranteeing that Clinton will be in power and will shape the Supreme Court for next 20-30 years. Her loathsomeness extends to her ideology, not just her corrupt ways of working people and making herself wealthy at the public trough. She's anti-liberty. Trump can be a tool, socially, but we know which direction is SCOTUS nominees will lean: towards contstructionism, not tyrannical liberal activism a la Clinton. Having a hissy fit and voting for the Libertarian or Green candidates is guaranteeing the Hillary Clinton will be our chief law enforcement officer for at least the next four years, and will seat justices that are as hostile as she is to the liberties protected by the constitution.

Re: Equal amounts?

[ScentCone]

successful senator and secretary of state

Please list the successes (not counting her own family's enormous cash enrichment) while she was holding those two positions. There's no need to list the huge failures and corruption, since we all already know about those.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

If you want to see what happens to a party without superdelegates, look at the GOP nominee right now. Had the Democrats voted for someone less scrupulous than Bernie without superdelegates, the DNC would be in just as bad a spot if not worse.

Trump is the best thing to happen to the GOP in a long time. It'll take quite a few years to take root, but may well be the beginning of the end of their unholy wedding of evangelical Christianity and highly corrupt pro-corporate fiscal conservatism. (Even the evangelicals themselves don't really want to see gay marriage and transsexual bathrooms as the big hot button issues any more.) In another 8+ years I could easily see myself voting Republican, particularly if the Democrats continue down their current path.

The superdelegates make the Democrats less beholden to the changing political climate, and over the long term this is probably going to hurt them. The biggest mistake you (and they) can make is to assume a reversion to the mean is inevitable. Take a gander at "The Southern Strategy" sometime if you want to see how radically the political landscape can change over just a few election cycles.

But if all you care about are the next 4 years then sure, the Democrats are in a much better position.

Re: Equal amounts?

[cfalcon]

> And honestly, I think Bernie would have been too good for that. I think he'd have been too nice to Trump, and not given Trump the reason to prove what his natural temperament was.

Right, but without thirty years of accusation and baggage, without a ton of awful shit on his record, Bernie wouldn't have had to try to turn Trump into some demon in order to prevail. We wouldn't have a bunch of stuff on the record of Bernie cheating Hillary out of the nomination, for instance. This election would have a totally different character, possibly without massive damage to the national psyche. It's not really fair to compare them, but I'm still of the opinion that Bernie would have a better chance of defeating Trump than Clinton does, and, win or lose, the USA would be in a much better spot after a Trump/Sanders election than a Trump/Clinton one.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

They are malevolent and criminal.

A fair description of many unindicted higher-ups at the NRO, NSA and plenty of other three letter organizations who have violated their charter by directing their apparatus at American citizens and then perjured themselves to Congress when asked about whether they were doing it.

But that's beside the point. I don't need to love Assange or Wikileaks to respond to information they have released. They are not known for releasing fabrications, and Clinton has refused to comment on this release. Therefore, the only reasonable position to take is that material they have released is probably genuine.

I care about analyzing and responding to that material. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to change the subject to a nonstop vilification of Assange or Wikileaks instead. Leaks have always happened. They just sound a lot scarier now because they can call them "hacks", but I'll lay dollars to donuts that it was an insider to enabled it. Go have a Yes, Minister marathon if you think leaks are some scary new invention of the 21st century.

If it wasn't Wikileaks, it would've been someone else. I'll be willing to discuss the "problem" of Wikileaks, Assange and their methods immediately after James Clapper is fired and indicted for perjury.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

I don't know where you get your information, but Assange has never been neutral. He has been anti-lies, anti-corruption and anti-secrecy (its this last one that terrifies our national security apparatus, which is why they are after him) in general for years before Wikileaks. Clinton has made herself a target through her actions and what she stands for: Clintonian politics, i.e. politics based on baldfaced lying and scheming.

I'm sure if Trump had a long history as a politician, there would be more stuff on him that Wikileaks would be in a position to release. Right now, what could they possibly have? Maybe his tax returns, if someone over at the IRS were willing to leak them, but I highly doubt people are going to care about that at this point in the race (the staunch Democrats will, I'm sure, but the Trump supporters and fence-sitters more or less view Trump's supposed ruthlessness and savvy as a plus, not a minus.)

Re: Equal amounts?

[ABEND]

Do you have evidence that they have a bunch of dirt on Trump that they're refusing to publish?

Hillary's operatives are currently working to fake documents to dump to Wikileaks for just that purpose.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

Most politicians have enough shame to not bluntly state this to their backers. Even Trump apparently had enough courage, in between his airheaded ramblings, to take a personal stance against discrimination against transsexuals whilst deferring to his party's platform by saying that he's in favor of letting the states decide. (Although I don't know whether he's walked that back since then.)

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

This is basically what I take from your position:

Sacrifice our principals to stop Trump? Never!

Sacrifice our principals to stop Hillary? Hell yeah!

Well that's a glorious way of summing up your own bias that you could possibly parse it that way. Advocating that people vote for a third party is clearly not favoring one of those over the other. Advocating people vote for Johnson or Stein is obviously a way to not sacrifice my principles to either.

Neither candidate so dangerous as to be worth sacrificing one's principles over. At the end of the day they are both pathetic and craven. Neither one will cause armageddon; they're too vain to.

What a shocking revelation! Next you'll tell us that wrestling is fixed!!

Actually, it is a bit shocking. Most politicians are not so pathetic and chameleon as to openly state this to their backers. There are ways to openly and honestly separate one's personal opinions from one's politics whilst not lying to the people about the positions one will be fighting for. Even Trump managed to do this, at least once and at least briefly regarding the transsexual bathroom thing. He's for letting transwomen use the bathrooms in Trump Tower, but he defers to the party when it comes to national policy--he'll veto legislation that tries to protect transsexuals on the national stage because he's "in favor of letting the states decide." (Maybe he's walked this back since then; I don't know.)

That's pretty slimy, but at least that's reasonably honest. Clintonian politics is not the only form of politics there is in the world.

Do you still think the Russian government is justified in hacking their internal communications and dumping them to the Internet to look for dirt?

I don't respond well to this sort of fear-mongering or this protectionist attitude toward unrepentant liars. Leaks have always happened. They are an essential tool for keeping our democracy at least semi-functional. But suddenly they're not leaks any more--they're "hacks" ! Oh noes!

It's pathetic. Go have a Yes, Minister marathon if you think that leaks are some dangerous new element in our political process, some kind of highly destabilizing new form of warfare.

I appreciate lies being exposed. If it's true that the Russian government is the only one doing it at this moment in time then kudos to them! I encourage anyone and everyone to leak/hack Trump's dirty little secrets as well, though I must say that (as I am with Bill Clinton) I'm much more interested in his lies on policy than his lies about his personal affairs.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

Let me put it another way: we haven't heard anything yet, to my knowledge, of Wikileaks refusing to leak something on Trump. If this happened, it would have been very easy for the leaker to simply contact someone else and say "oh by the way, I tried to get this out there via Wikileaks but they refused to do it."

Unless and until this happens, this accusation of bias (in the sense that you're using the term) is nonsense. Wikileaks and Assanage are biased against secrecy and lying in government; this has been open knowledge for years now. But they can only use the material that people provide them, and Clinton just happens to have more dirt of the sort that Wikileaks deals with (of the sort that is typically presented to them) as a result of her long political career.

Your argument thus boils down to timing alone. I don't have a problem with Wikileaks timing the release of information to damage individuals. They have never claimed to be neutral. They are anti- certain forms of policies and governance, and by embodying some of those very things that they stand against Hillary Clinton has made herself a completely legitimate target.

Re: Equal amounts?

[quantaman]

This is basically what I take from your position:

Sacrifice our principals to stop Trump? Never!

Sacrifice our principals to stop Hillary? Hell yeah!

Well that's a glorious way of summing up your own bias that you could possibly parse it that way. Advocating that people vote for a third party is clearly not favoring one of those over the other. Advocating people vote for Johnson or Stein is obviously a way to not sacrifice my principles to either.

It's ironic that you complain of how I parsed your statement, because you completely misparsed mine.

I didn't say you were abandoning your principles by supporting a 3rd party.

I said you were abandoning your principles by endorsing the actions of a major power using spycraft to try and sway the election.

Neither candidate so dangerous as to be worth sacrificing one's principles over. At the end of the day they are both pathetic and craven. Neither one will cause armageddon; they're too vain to.

GWB went into Iraq based on his gut feeling that it was the right thing to do.

As a result of that action hundreds of thousands have died, the EU is experiencing a migrant crisis that threatens breakup, and the global recession was a lot worse than it likely should have been.

And GWB was orders of magnitude better suited to be president than Trump. Don't underestimate just how much damage Trump could cause.

What a shocking revelation! Next you'll tell us that wrestling is fixed!!

Actually, it is a bit shocking. Most politicians are not so pathetic and chameleon as to openly state this to their backers.

How would you know? We've only seen Clinton's dirty laundry.

Romney for certain was at least as guilty as Clinton with his 47% comments.

There are ways to openly and honestly separate one's personal opinions from one's politics whilst not lying to the people about the positions one will be fighting for.

If you're looking to confuse the public and cause needless controversies. Do you really think Obama only came around to the idea of gay marriage in 2012?

Clinton's personal opinions are kept personal because they're irrelevant. It's the positions she campaigns on that will show how she'll govern.

Even Trump managed to do this, at least once and at least briefly regarding the transsexual bathroom thing. He's for letting transwomen use the bathrooms in Trump Tower, but he defers to the party when it comes to national policy--he'll veto legislation that tries to protect transsexuals on the national stage because he's "in favor of letting the states decide." (Maybe he's walked this back since then; I don't know.)

That's not nuance, that's incoherence. On everything except immigration Trump's policies are under-defined and incoherent. Unless it has to do with immigration, Muslims, or the military, Trump is just trying to repeat what he thinks the GOP wants to hear.

I don't respond well to this sort of fear-mongering or this protectionist attitude toward unrepentant liars. Leaks have always happened. They are an essential tool for keeping our democracy at least semi-functional. But suddenly they're not leaks any more--they're "hacks" ! Oh noes!

And there's a strong ethos that the media, who is the one typically digging for and exposing leaks, will pursue both sides more or less equally. Because the power to expose leaks is the power to sway elections.

I appreciate lies being exposed. If it's true that the Russian government is the only one doing it at this moment in time then kudos to them! I encourage anyone and everyone to leak/hack Trump's dirty little secrets as well, though I must say that (as I am with Bill Clinton) I'm much more interested in his lies on policy than his lies about his pers

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

I didn't say you were abandoning your principles by supporting a 3rd party. I said you were abandoning your principles by endorsing the actions of a major power using spycraft to try and sway the election.

That was far from clear. Regardless, even if I were steadfastly against Russian involvement (and I'm not for it per se; I'm just not against these sorts of things coming out), that doesn't mean I should or could ignore the contents of the leak. Nothing is being sacrificed here.

Except few entities other than the Russian government have the resources to leak/hack on this scale.

Except for a disgruntled DNC employee who favored Bernie or disliked Hillary.

There's nothing new here. This is just a leak. If someone tells me there's poison in my glass and there is indeed poison in my glass, then the poison and how it got there becomes my primary interest. The motivations of the informant are something I'll get around to analyzing maybe if there's time. I'm not at all convinced of Russian involvement, and even if this were proven it wouldn't change my analysis of the situation except that we should probably step up counter-espionage a bit, because I don't particularly want a strong Russian intelligence presence to remain in this country. That doesn't mean that they didn't happen to do a good thing in this case, if indeed they are behind the leak.

Incidentally, one of the more effective ways to crack down on Russian intelligence capabilities in this country, if it really is something that bothers you, is to implement comprehensive immigration reform--something the left has been pretty steadfast in refusing to consider (other than the path to citizenship stuff, which is something that I do wholeheartedly agree with.)

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

More:

We've only seen Clinton's dirty laundry. ... And there's a strong ethos that the media, who is the one typically digging for and exposing leaks, will pursue both sides more or less equally.

Yes, clearly the media is biased against Hillary, and for Trump. Where the fuck have you been?

If you want to argue Wikileaks specifically, go show me the person who says they brought Wikileaks anti-Trump material that they refused to publish. They can only use what they're given, and Trump doesn't have many political secrets, just personal ones (that are already being aired pretty effectively by the rest of the media at this point in time.)

Clinton's personal opinions are kept personal because they're irrelevant. It's the positions she campaigns on that will show how she'll govern.

That's donkey shit. That has clearly no bearing on the documents in question here, documents that Hillary refuses to comment on, which contain this quote:

Clinton: “But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position.”* CLINTON: You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically...

She is very clearly talking about working against things behind the scenes that she supports in public, or vice versa. This is worth knowing when considering her position on things such as the TPP. (Which is something I haven't quite made up my mind on myself, but you should be able to clearly see how many people might be interested in how Hillary's public vs. private positions on it may differ.)

Not all politics follow the Clintonian school of thought. Not every president we've ever had has engaged in these sort of two-faced antics. I think that the nature of information in the twenty-first century is such that, as a country and as a species, we should be looking for other ways to govern that do not involve baldfaced lies. It will be a gradual process and there will be plenty of deception involved in the foreseeable future, but it is conceivable that we could leave it behind.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Agripa]

If you want to see what happens to a party without superdelegates, look at the GOP nominee right now. Had the Democrats voted for someone less scrupulous than Bernie without superdelegates, the DNC would be in just as bad a spot if not worse.

If only there was some system of voting which prevents splitting the vote. If nerds just need to nerd harder, then political parties should, um, party harder to solve this unsolvable problem.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Agripa]

Having watched Clinton's successes, I am not reassured.

Re: Equal amounts?

[david_thornley]

Clinton's been accused of a whole lot of things for decades now, whether she was guilty of them or not (usually not). There's no new dirt for Republicans to throw. Sanders was getting the kid glove treatment from the GOP during the nomination. Had he been the candidate, they would have immediately started going after the Socialist who wants to raise your taxes and spend them on lazy bums and other causes you're against. It would not have been pretty.

Despite what the polls said, I think Sanders would have been a lot more vulnerable. Much as I admire the man and agree with his policies, he had a pretty good chance of being the next McGovern if nominated.

Re: Equal amounts?

[david_thornley]

Let's see. Assange has been known to leak genuine materials, and so he's reliable? That's pretty darn thin. Clinton doesn't make a statement so the material is genuine? Suppose Clinton had made a statement; what then? If she'd said the information was bad, would you have more doubt, or would you just conclude that Clinton was lying? It's perfectly reasonable to doubt the authenticity.

You also seem awfully sure it was an inside job, while everything I've seen says there was an external attack.

Assange's story about why he's hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy makes no sense, so he's flagrantly lying and is anti-US. Further, there's evidence that the Russians broke in, and I trust them about as far as I can throw Kamchatka.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

Let's see. Assange has been known to leak genuine materials, and so he's reliable? That's pretty darn thin.

That is not a semantically valid rephrasing of what I just said. I said that he is not known for releasing fabrications. Stating the inverse, as you just did, is obviously a much weaker endorsement.

Someone not having any known fabrications released, after many years of genuine materials released, more or less means that a decent default assumption is that it's genuine. When we combine this performance record with the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign has made no reasonable effort to disavow the emails after many, many days they've had to examine them (only eventually saying some extremely suspicious, hand-wavy things about a few of the emails, not specified, being 'somewhat inaccurate' or something. I forget the exact quote but it was one of the weakest, weasely-ist attempts at a disavowal-but-not-really-a-disavowal I've ever seen.), an assumption of authenticity is the only reasonable and intellectually honest assumption. If the other side doesn't call it a fake when they have every reason to call it a fake, then don't try to tell me it's not genuine.

Someone else in this thread was claiming that there were some crypto signatures or something that proved their authenticity, but I didn't get around to looking into this.

Clinton doesn't make a statement so the material is genuine?

Ah ok, so you did address that bit as well (I wasn't reading ahead.) Uh, yes? I'm sorry, what is *your* standard of "burden of proof" here when we're talking about casual conversations of what is likely to be true, not a court of law? A known-reliable (so far) source released information and Clinton decided not to dispute it. Yes, that more or less means that all reasonable people should assume that it is genuine.

You also seem awfully sure it was an inside job

I don't really give a shit (if it was the Russians and the Russians alone, then sure, I thank them for doing their part to make American democracy better by revealing evidence of corruption), but yes in general I assume most hacks are an inside job. The boogieman of hackers in foreign countries is pretty misleading. For non-soft targets, those hackers frequently need help.

while everything I've seen says there was an external attack.

I don't have any words of enlightenment for the especially credulous tonight. I'm fresh out. Sorry.

Well, I can say this: go back and read old newspapers. If that's too boring for you, go watch "Yes, Minister". Notice how leaks happen ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.

And now notice how people talk about leaks much less often nowadays, but they talk about hacking a hell of a lot. I do not believe that is a coincidence. Perhaps you do.

Assange's story about why he's hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy makes no sense

Uh, ok, well the prosecutor's story for why he didn't detain Assange while he was in Sweden makes no sense.

One of the women (whom he supposedly raped)'s story was completely ridiculous: she was bragging on her phone and/or computer about being his girlfriend immediately after the supposed rape and he stayed at her house for like two weeks after the supposed rape. The other one's story had fewer holes, but there were also long unexplained delays and there was no hard evidence (I don't recall which was the one who eventually withdrew her complaint.)

He asked the USA to provide assurances that we wouldn't kidnapped him; our government refused. Britain's government acted extremely aggressively and briefly threatened to STORM THE ECUADORIAN EMBASSY... for an alleged rape with zero evidence other than the word of one accuser? They were willing to violate diplomatic immunity for that?

But most importantly, as Secretary of State Hillary is on record asking whether or n

Re: Equal amounts?

[david_thornley]

Okay. I'm not known for releasing fabricated evidence, so you should assume I'm telling the truth? That's what you seem to be saying. Assange has released stuff that appears to be genuine in the past, but it's impossible to actually check most of it. I still think that's weak evidence for trusting him.

My attitude on burden of proof is that it's on the people who claim to have obtained documents illegally, without being able to verify them. I also like judging things scientifically, based on the results if true. Clinton says nothing, so the emails must be legit. Clinton casts doubt on the veracity of all the emails, so the emails must be legit and Clinton is untruthful. Doubtless if Clinton said it was all a hoax you'd use that as evidence that she's lying (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here). My conclusion is that, no matter what Clinton said, you'd think the emails were all legit. This means that you can't take anything she says or doesn't say as evidence for the emails. If not, please tell me what Clinton could have said that would convince you.

"From everything I've seen" is probably not the way I should have put it, since the evidence I've seen is a bit thin, but it does appear that the DNC servers were hacked by someone with Russian connections. We do know that most such leaks are internal, and that's what I'd assume in the absence of evidence otherwise. Obama is certain enough that it was a Russian state-sponsored attack to create a diplomatic incident about it, FWIW.

I seem to have two advantages over you in interpreting Assange's story: I know a little about how rape victims often behave, and I don't know the Swedish legal system so I don't make assumptions. I see nothing suspicious about the victims' behavior or the Swedish legal system. Rape's a tough crime to prove. However, Sweden, Interpol, and the UK thought that the evidence of the rape was enough to extradite.

I hadn't heard of Assange asking the US for promises. He did ask the Swedish government for assurances that they could not legally provide, since that would involve the executive branch committing the judiciary branch to something. He did annoy a lot of people in the US, and I'd suspect that lots of them were talking about kidnapping or killing him in their private conversations. Obviously, we can't kill Assange with a drone, so Clinton wasn't serious.

As for the mountain of evidence, people have been pointing me at a lot of mountains I can't see, and failing to deliver when I ask for a pointer to a pebble. It's actually kind of fun, calling people out on things they can't support.

So, what you're pointing at is emails and documents that were likely obtained by the Russian government, or at least someone in Russia, which means there's no reason to trust them. They're posted by a guy who has been making up stories about the US to the point where he doesn't like it (superpowers get people saying wild things about them). In any case, they were provided by one or more criminals or as an act of war, and transmitted through someone I don't trust. That isn't very good evidence of authenticity.

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

My attitude on burden of proof is that it's on the people who claim to have obtained documents illegally, without being able to verify them.

Except it's not illegal for a journalist to publish a document that may have been obtained or disseminated illegally. We've known this for quite some time.

Obviously, we can't kill Assange with a drone, so Clinton wasn't serious.

"Obviously", Secretaries of State don't make jokes like that about people they are wholly uninterested in. Obviously, Ecuador didn't cut off his internet unless America pressured them to. It's pitiful to continue pretending that we've taken no interest in the man whatsoever.

As for the rest of your post... well, I'll leave you with two final observations:

1. You seem bent on emphasizing their being obtained illegally at the exact same time that you emphasize their supposed untrustworthiness. Uh, well, if there was an actual, real hack then we've every reason to believe that the emails are (at least mostly) genuine. These two qualms of yours are directly at odds with one another.

2. You apparently didn't look into the cryptographic proof of the emails' authenticity that I twice mentioned. Signatures are provided. Apparently some of the sigs (not all) do have mismatches, but the examples I saw were for trivial, non-controversial emails (I suspect some transcription or encoding issues may have cropped up along the way). If you really do doubt the emails' authenticity, you're free to examine the cryptographic signatures of the more interesting emails. I don't really care to put in the time to check because I think the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the material of interest is materially accurate and not fabricated. If Hillary wants me to put in the effort, she needs to at least bother to utter the words "not true."

But if you don't check because you prefer to quietly nurse your suspicions (in combination with nursing your completely contradictory grudge over the illicit nature of the leak/hack), you are of course free to. Just be aware that we do have a name for what you are engaged in: willful self-delusion.

Re: Equal amounts?

[david_thornley]

I believe I already said there was no evidence that Assange had committed a US crime. That applies to the Manning leaks as well as the Clinton-related leaks. However, the people who got those are criminals (Manning has been convicted and sentenced).

Obviously, Clinton was annoyed at Assange. Unofficially. That doesn't translate into official actions.

There is no evidence that Ecuador shutting off his web access involved any pressure from anyone. I don't know the relationship between Ecuador and Assange. It may well be that the government of Ecuador doesn't approve of official Ecuadorian facilities being used in certain ways. It may be that he's ticked them off, like he's ticked off so many others, and they're doing some petty revenge. Assange can apparently be a real pain to be around.

I'm emphasizing the criminality, because I don't consider criminals to be prima facie honest and truthful. If it was, as seems likely, a Russian operation, I especially distrust them.

I'm not a security guy, and haven't yet checked the cryptographic proof. However, AFAIK there is no such thing as proof that something came from somewhere or something, only proof that something was created or modified by someone with a certain private key, and it's going to be hard to show that no private keys were picked up in the hack. It is possible to run things so that the private key is never on the server, but I really, really doubt the emailers went through that hassle. FWIW, I don't think Assange has the ability to fake this, so any faking would have been done by the original criminals.

Are you trying to tell me that all you need is Cinton saying "The emails are in the large genuine, but some have been tampered with" and you'll drop the whole email issue? Would you believe her?

Re: Equal amounts?

[Shane_Optima]

I wouldn't drop it, but I'd instantly become a lot more suspicious (to the point that I'd be vocal in mentioning the potential issue if any particular quotes of hers were being passed around.) This is particularly true if she could provide any specifics about what has supposedly been modified or fabricated.

Mentioning that their private keys were compromised (if indeed that is the case) would be good, too. Well... 'good' in one particularly limited sense of the word.

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[ShanghaiBill]

Did it really? I'm in the US and I didn't notice anything.

Me neither. I am on the West Coast, and I heard it mainly affected the East Coast, but my East Coast friends say they didn't notice anything either.

Did anyone actually notice this "outage"?

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[Narcocide]

I didn't notice, but isn't Dyn that dynamic-dns provider? So you would only really notice it if you were using a domain pointed to a rotating ip address, right?

Competing theories

[Okian Warrior]

There were Trump leaks? News to me. It seems like Assange has just been going after Hillary because he knows she won't pardon him.

There are really multiple competing theories on this.

Maybe Assange has been going after them because he leaks what he has, and doesn't have dirt on the other side.

Maybe Assange has been going after them because they are more corrupt than the other side, so he has much more dirt on them.

Maybe Assange is going after them because Hillary conspired to have him killed, and took "legan and extra legal" steps to silence him.

Your position doesn't look too strong.

Who are the "morons" again?

Re:Competing theories

[Rei]

1) TruePundit is not a real news website.
2) It's much simpler than that. Julian Assange is a right-winger - a self-described fan of Ron Paul, anti-abortion, and with a long history of supporting authoritarian leaders worldwide.

Re:Competing theories

[Rei]

Here's some past examples of True Pundit "journalism" for you.

  * Clinton secretly wearing mini stealth earbud to receive answers from her team during the debate

  * Clinton was using secret hand signals to tell Lester Holt what to say

  * Claims Clinton had a medical issue during the debate and Trump mouthed the word "Seizure"

  * Offers a $1m reward (as if a website like True Pundit has $1m) for Clinton's medical records, suggesting that she has "dementia, post-concussion syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, brain tumor, brain injury, complex partial seizures, and/or many more alleged ailments" and is followed by a doctor disguised as a Secret Service agent carrying an autoinjector of diazepam.

Re:Competing theories

[Xenographic]

Really? He was happy to call out Bush back in the day -

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Bus...

He was happy to call out the Iraq war. That doesn't really fit your claimed fact pattern very well when we look back to past leaks and not just to the current panic as the DNC's corruption is exposed.

Re: Competing theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Well known, or repeatedly claimed? There's a difference, you know.

There's no evidence whatsoever that she's cheated at the debates, as every claimed bit of evidence to that effect has been debunked by pretty much everyone that's worked in that area.

You know how she does so well at debates? Fucking practice. She spends days, full days, before each debate with coaches and people playing the role of opposition and moderators. She goes over the questions, which are for the most part obvious to anyone that knows the categories, and those are made public when the candidates agree on terms.

It would be HARDER to respond the way she does, quickly and without undue pauses, if someone were speaking into her ear. And if she knew the questions beforehand she'd probably have more concise responses. When she's on stage, she responds to everything that comes up, even Trump's nonsense quickly and without hesitation.

Re: "Internet took a turn for the worst this morni

[TellarHK]

A lot of major sites were also down, I couldn't get to The Verge for most of the morning and afternoon today. West coast here as well.

Collateral murder

[Okian Warrior]

Let's take a trip down memory lane.

Wikileaks published the diplomatic leaks in three large chunks, which included the "collateral murder" video.

At the time, Julian was surprised at how little impact the releases caused. He thought at the time that a huge drop would cause a huge response, but that turned out not to be the case(*). The news cycle quickly moved on to other issues.

He realized then that to get maximum effect you have to play the media a little.

So now he announces ahead of time that he has the data, then releases the data. He releases the data in smaller chunks, to spread the effect out, to keep the news cycle interested..

People see the "I have an interesting drop coming up" announcements as feeding his ego, but what he's *really* doing is getting everyone's attention.

And of course, a single monolithic drop is easy to counter with a juicy counter article. We saw that with the Trump "locker room" clip, which completely eclipsed the first of the recent Podesta E-mail drops. If Julian had released the entire tranch at that time, it would have been lost in the noise.

If Wikileaks had simply released everything at once after getting it, and not let Assange make his statements obviously made to be clear attacks on Clinton's campaign, you might have a point. But they didn't.

You're completely wrong on this point. Portioning out the drops gives the data maximum exposure, and helps to ensure that people notice and comment.

Julian is doing a good job, let's not lose sight of the sheer volume of corruption he's brought to light.

(*) From my memory of an interview he gave.

Re:Collateral murder

[Anonymous Coward]

He also released a bunch of SSNs and passwords to iCloud and gmail accounts and such. That's grade-A asshole behavior. It helps nothing and amounts to harassment.

Don't forget how they released obviously altered and faked documents.

Wikileaks is a tool of Russia at this point and everything they do is at the behest of a hostile foreign power.

Assange himself is a rapist, misogynist, alt-right asshole. The fact the US hasn't put a bullet through his brain is pretty much proof that they don;t really care about him. Maybe they ought to start.

Re:Collateral murder

[TheReaperD]

The point is to get any attention from the US media about US events that actually matter, you have to be a complete and total asshole about it or else they ignore you. Assange is just such an asshole (I don't dispute this fact.)

Assange was never accused of rape by the two women. They went to the police to track him down to take a STD test because a condom came off. Once it was realized who they were checking on, the police pressured them into filing a criminal charge of a type of secondary sexual battery charge (a type that doesn't exist in any other country; so no equivalent to match it to) of which the women have since withdrawn when they realized they were used by the police for political purposes. Note: Sweden did this due to US pressure which is a violation of Sweden's constitution. Misogynist? Maybe; and falls under asshole anyway so, it's not worth the debate even if you're wrong. He's not alt-right, not the racist version currently running rampant through Europe but, he's a serious libertarian though. His support of Ron Paul points to this as well. He doesn't trust governments in any form at the moment as even the "good" ones seem to be corrupt as hell at the moment. With the data he's published and the actions taken against him, do you blame him?

Re:Collateral murder

[david_thornley]

Two Swedish women made allegations about him. One of them was counted as rape. If you have actual evidence that they weren't being truthful, I'd like to see it. I haven't so far, and suspect it's made up to confuse the issue. The Brits don't extradite people except for allegedly doing something that is against the appropriate British law, and Assange's case was very well reviewed. He had every chance to argue that he was a political refugee.

The idea of the US pressuring Sweden to extradite him for no particular reason is ludicrous. If we'd wanted him when he was vountarily in Sweden, we'd have acted then. Or we'd have waited until Assange voluntarily appeared in the UK; they've normally been very cooperative when we wanted someone. In short, if we'd wanted him, we would have taken action earlier, before he got tangled in this extradition matter.

Re:Smokescreen

[Xenographic]

Maybe someone got upset over this? - https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiL...

Whoever did it, it's a really bad way to make a point.

Re: "Internet took a turn for the worst this morni

[Anonymous Coward]

Dyn *does* provide dynamic DNS, but they also do quite a bit of "real" DNS hosting (with a lot of redundancy), as well as several related services like SMTP relaying and the like.

Was that on purpose?

[Okian Warrior]

1) TruePundit is not a real news website.
2) It's much simpler than that. Julian Assange is a right-winger - a self-described fan of Ron Paul, anti-abortion, and with a long history of supporting authoritarian leaders worldwide.

Scott Adams says that attacking the source first is a tell for being "guilty".

I notice that you didn't sat that the information was false.

Was that on purpose?

Bring back porn

[belthize]

Back when the internet was a porn distribution system everything was fine.

Now it's just a factoid distribution system so one group of conspiracy theory loons can yell at the other conspiracy theory loons that they're all a bunch of damn lunatics.

There was supposedly a point?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm in the U.S., and other than a little random slowness - i didn't really notice much earlier today. Slashdot was a little slow, maybe. But the claim that some supposed Assange supporter "took down the U.S. Internet" seems silly at best. If it honestly was someone's best attempt to take down the U.S. Internet, they did a piss-poor job of it.

As an aside... this sounds very similar to those cases where some random crazy guy hurts a few people, then later ISIS posts something saying "That was us! Cower in fear!"

Re:Smokescreen

[Humbubba]

Looking past its purpose or the abhorrent nature of the act, this suggests WikiLeaks (or somebody) has an internet dimmer switch. Wow.

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[itsenrique]

I couldn't get to groupme until I used a different browser, with different DNS settings. Located southern US east coast.

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[lister king of smeg]

Did it really? I'm in the US and I didn't notice anything.

Me neither. I am on the West Coast, and I heard it mainly affected the East Coast, but my East Coast friends say they didn't notice anything either.

Did anyone actually notice this "outage"?

Nah but I use my own domain name servers. I just always install bind9 on all of my Linux computers and configure them to use it for lookups.

Re:GRU

[lister king of smeg]

And by supporters they mean GRU

So thats why he went silent he was eaten by a gru

Too Many Eggs in One Basket!

[BrendaEM]

Nice single point of failure : P

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[guruevi]

Yes, except all those big name sites were using exactly that (crappy) provider.

Re:Smokescreen

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, someone just flooded a DNS provider that a lot of big people were using as their only DNS provider.

That said, the floods were HUGE thanks to some crappy, vulnerable devices they were able to exploit.

Who says the amounts are equal?

[KalvinB]

Clinton has been in public office for 30 years and is a big steaming pile of evil and now we have the emails to prove it.

Despite the Liberal narrative, there isn't much being "exposed" about Trump because there's nothing there to expose that isn't already public.

It's just anti-intellectualism to assume every person running for office is equally corrupt.

Liberals just can't accept the facts: Clinton is evil. Trump says mean things.

Re:Who says the amounts are equal?

[TellarHK]

Except Trump's withheld tax returns, unknown business relationships, the use of his non-profit for personal gain, his importing of cheap Chinese steel which was dumped illegally on the market, his hiring and abuse of illegal immigrants used to build his projects (complain about being underpaid again and I'll have you deported!), his record of sexual harassment and assault, his history of racial bias in housing access, his multiple lies on stages contradicted by his own words as little as a few hours later and his longstanding history of forcing small businesses to settle for pennies on the dollar by refusing payment and threatening extended legal battles before he declares bankruptcy anyhow. Oh, and he claims to be worth ten billion dollars because he "feels" like that's his net worth, when independent estimates of his personal wealth range from 150 million to 3.5 billion, tops.

You've got a lot of things that make you want to think Hillary is evil that don't really surprise most observers that follow politics (and she's never even been properly charged with any of her supposed "evils"), and an absolute dirtbag lying to your face and saying he's perfect about everything and always succeeds.

Re:Who says the amounts are equal?

[schnell]

It's just anti-intellectualism to assume every person running for office is equally corrupt.

Agreed.But "corruption" - in the dictionary sense of giving outside parties undue influence for personal gain - isn't the only criterion for a person's vote. I think, to your statement, that Clinton is certainly more "corrupt" due to providing favored access and potentially some degree of quid pro quo to donors to her family foundation. But it's possible - although unpalatable - that someone is more corrupt but still better prepared to do their job.

It sucks that we have such poor choices to pick from, but I think many voters will think of it in terms of this analogy. Which would you rather want to be the CEO of your company - a qualified, stable executive who will keep things going OK but has a penchant for lining their own pockets through business deals favorable to their pay? Or an unqualified, loutish, narcissistic executive who says he wants to turn the company upside down to fix things? It's possible that the latter's ideas might be good, or they might be terrible. Many people will probably pick the distasteful #1 over the tremendous upside/downside risk of #2.

Liberals just can't accept the facts: Clinton is evil. Trump says mean things.

I'm not a liberal across the board (socially liberal but conservative in fiscal and national security issues) but I take issue with the oversimplification in this statement.

Clinton is venal, secretive, entitled and a cold fish. Trump says mean things. But he doesn't just say mean things, he believes them. Or at least he does today. Tomorrow it might change. But it seems like he's prepared to take positions based on what he read on the Internet yesterday. If your CIO read an article yesterday about how Azure was great today and tomorrow recommended that everything should be outsourced to the cloud, would you trust his judgment?

Hurting people's feelings isn't the problem. I hate the idea of Safe Spaces and people reading only the websites or watching the TV networks that agree with their preconceived notions. Fuck that.

But ultimately it's very possible that a smart person will be better at being President than a dumb person (or at least one who lacks critical thinking skills). I don't like Clinton at all but I think she's at least intelligent and capable of dealing with things rationally (if with a side dish of self interest). If you think there's an easy solution to a problem that other smart people have worked on for decades and found no clear answer (e.g. immigration) then you're dumb. If you think that you can solve problems with a magic bullet (e.g. the answer to everything is "I would negotiate a better deal" with no explanation of why) then you're dumb. If you say you can solve thorny multi-dimensional problems easily (e.g. "I would defeat ISIS in 60 days but I can't tell you why") then you're dumb.

TL/DR. America faces a presidential choice between two deeply unlikeable human beings. Your choice will probably hinge on your preconceptions but there are some substantive differences between the two evils you are expected to choose the lesser of. The lesser of two evils is still evil, but is also still lesser.

Re:Who says the amounts are equal?

[ABEND]

You seem to imply that you have a right to see Trump's tax returns. If you want this right you should get a job at the IRS.

We do have a right to know why Hillary blamed the Benghazi 9/11 on a video. It's been four years since the attack and we still do not (officially) know the origin of that claim. Hillary's denunciation of the video is available on YouTube. You should watch with the thought in mind that we now know that the video did not trigger the attack.

Re:Who says the amounts are equal?

[david_thornley]

We have no right to see Trump's tax returns. However, it's traditional for Presidential candidates to release them, and it's reasonable to suspect that there's things in there Trump doesn't want us seeing.

And, in your opinion, Clinton is a bad person since she said something immediately after some serious incidents that we now know was false? Ever heard of people making mistakes when they have insufficient information?

corrupted

[vel-ex-tech]

Sparky: Lookin' good, except uh... there's something wrong with the matrix.

AK: No, there's not. You're lookin' at what we're lookin' at. What the hell is going on in there.

Link: Whatever it is, it can't be good.

Re:Very interesting...

[Narcocide]

Well, you're obviously smarter (or at least better informed) than most the other people in the crowd. Who is actually responsible though, that's the part I'm still trying to figure out. Unless its an underground cabal of multinational internet trolls (the South Park/Danish episode theory) then I've got no clue a this point. They don't seem to be on the side of any specific nation-state. They do seem to have gotten pretty good at making North Korea or Russia into scapegoats though.

Re:Smokescreen

[quax]

Reads like the sloppiest conspiracy ever.

Re:Very interesting...

[tehlinux]

Well, the Saudis control Twitter. They can probably tweet anything they want from any account they want.

unfounded accusation

[FalseModesty]

There is zero evidence that the USA is behind this.

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[cfalcon]

> bring your AK-47 to a tank fight. See how it turns out

It'll turn out better than if you show up with your fucking dick in your hand and hope your conquerors show mercy.

Re: GRU

[cyber-vandal]

And his minions?

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[Alioth]

I couldn't get to Github, but that's the only outage I noticed due to a DNS error. It was right at the end of the day so I was about to go home anyway so didn't investigate any further.

Factual accuracy, truth, and propaganda

[martrootamm]

Malicious makers of propaganda do not care, if information used is accurate or not, so long it servers their agenda.

Bad propaganda is, when a foreign government that actively works against the way of life of your country, has made a decision for you that they want you to think like them.

The question is, why would you allow a foreign entity or government to make a decision about how you should think about anything by way of that government and its supporters influencing the news cycle of your country, which they regard as their enemy.

Re:Smokescreen

[meerling]

Naw, trump was never smart enough to rake in the big bucks by starting his own religion. Also, hubbard wrote his own books, unlike trump.

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[meerling]

I'm on the west coast, and I definitely noticed several things weren't working right. I did some testing and determined it wasn't in my system, so it seemed likely it was another stupid douche running a dns attack somewhere.

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[JonnyCalcutta]

Yeh, I couldn't get onto Spotify on my PS4 last night. I'm in the UK. I didn't notice it on anything I care about though.

Re:Assange

[quax]

What's worse, I fear that they really don't care.

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[HornWumpus]

Tanks without infantry support are, more or less, already dead.

The last 10 years history proves you wrong.

Yes, he should...

[Berkyjay]

"The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate."

When foreign entities hack the email of a U.S. political party and then tries to influence U.S. elections with that information, you better believe the PotUS should step in and stop it.

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[murdocj]

Actually, no, interfering with communications is not protected by the First Amendment, and the government of the United States is sworn to protect the Constitution. People carrying guns haven't shown any vested interest in protecting freedom.

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[murdocj]

Probably has enough nukes.

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[mschwanke97402]

I couldn't watch Netflix yesterday AM through the end of lunch (Pacific). So, yeah, I noticed.

Well, Scott Adams is a class A moron.

[Brannon]

So there.

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[Agripa]

So the only targets will be tanks and not something softer. That is good to know. Thanks.

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[Agripa]

Fantasy insurrections are all very nice, but if we ever reach that point, then the Great American Experiment will have been well and truly finished.

I *knew* the Battle of Athens was a fantasy! And now I have a citation to prove it!

Re:Is this DDoS protected by 1st Amendment?

[HornWumpus]

'Molotov cocktail' is the root password for all tanks. Modern ones have fire suppression, so they require two or three Molotovs each.

In a guerilla war, Tank support/recovery vehicles are a much better target than tanks.

Wikileaks Supporters == Russians...

[herbierobinson]

Not being sarcastic here...

Re:"Internet took a turn for the worst this mornin

[Samizdata]

I am still seeing issues accessing certain sites today.

Any good analysis?

[jon3k]

Has anyone seen a good analysis of the actual impact? Here in the southeast US we didn't even notice it. Everything was working fine.