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Ecuador Spent $5 Million Protecting and Spying On Julian Assange, Says Report (theverge.com)
Citing reports from The Guardian and Focus Ecuador, The Verge reports that Ecuador's intelligence program spent at least $5 million "on an elaborate security and surveillance network around WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange." The intelligence program was known as "Operator Hotel," which began as "Operation Guest" when Assange took refuge in Ecuador's UK embassy in 2012. From the report: Operation Hotel has allegedly covered expenses like installing CCTV cameras and hiring a security team to "secretly film and monitor all activity in the embassy," including Assange's daily activities, moods, and interactions with staff and visitors. The Guardian estimates Ecuadorian intelligence agency Senain has spent at least $5 million on Assange-related operations, based on documents they reviewed. The report details attempts to improve Assange's public image and potentially smuggle him out of the embassy if he was threatened. But it also writes that relations between Assange and Ecuador have badly deteriorated over the past several years. In 2014, Assange allegedly breached the embassy's network security, reading confidential diplomatic material and setting up his own secret communications network.
Agreed... as someone who's lived all their life in the UK, and travelled quite a bit, I can safely say that the UK is no worse than any other civilised place I've been to.
Plus, I don't get regarded like an idiot that can't cross the road unsupervised.
Plus, literally, I do not feel in fear of government one iota (except from a "what stupid thing are they doing now" viewpoint, but that's universal).
Strange that people complaining they live freer lives than other countries that they've never been to also think they have to sustain a household armoury in order to do so.
(P.S. The last time I was questioned in any official capacity, or had any interaction with official law enforcement bodies, was while entering the United States for a brief holiday... honestly, I've never been asked so many obtuse, unrelated, obscure questions and I hear they're going to start asking for social media details? Oh... unless you count the policeman who came to my daughter's school fair and let the kids press the siren button)
Er, actually they selectively publish what people send them, usually to suit whatever PR strategy they are using at the moment.
Yes, the information was compromised already, but now I am stuck with my personal information (not to mention the 10,000s of others) on WikiLeaks for anyone to get hold of it.
You missed something somewhere. What about The Guardian's wish to credit Focus Ecuador makes the story possibly "disinformation"? Or alternatively what about The Guardian being British and the Verge being American makes it that? (If this is some kind of weird ass smear about The Guardian, well, you do know The Guardian is one of the only independent media outlets in the world, right? It's owned by a self-contained trust that exists solely to publish The Guardian and related newspapers, and the trust itself is run by journalists. It has its biases but it's not in any way establishment or government controlled - hell, they've had MI-5 enter their offices and smash their computers in the past, and were one of the first newspapers to raise the profile of Wikileaks, and assisted them for a time.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
tinkerton sneered:
You despise him because you're an induhvidual eh. Apparently the idea is that if Assange is anything less than perfect we can easily betray him and your standards are so very high that everything Assange has contributed melts away when you consider the charges.
Actually, I despise the sonofabitch, too - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with his sex life.
Instead, it has everything to do with the contents of more than 11,000 Twitter DM's between Assange and a select group of "long term and reliable supporters" of Wikileaks that were leaked to The Intercept by a member of that group, and published on Valentine's day, 2018. (How's that for irony?)
Those DM's make it Waterford clear - in Assange's own words - that, far from being the neutral information broker he has always portrayed it as, Wikileaks always was, instead, an instrument designed to impose his own, personal agenda on the USA in particular, and the world, in general. It was - and is - engaged in a deliberate propaganda campaign to sway public opinion in favor of the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign, and in favor of Russia (as what Assange claims to be a necessary counterbalance to American influence on the international stage, a positive influence on the world, and, bizarrely, a weak - and helpless - victim of American covert tampering).
It's transparently obvious from even a cursory scan of the trove that Julian Assange is, at best, arrogantly delusional about how geopolitics works in the real world, is determinedly ignorant of how American domestic politics actually influences its international policies and actions, and is either grossly misinformed about, or is deliberately misleading his key financiers (because that's what, from context, his audience of "long term and reliable supporters" consists of) regarding the effectiveness of Vladimir Putin's covert operations to destabilize democracies not just in the USA, but globally, as well. Regardless of which is the case, in these DM's to his inner circle of "reliable" supporters - one of whom, I remind you, is unquestionably responsible for having leaked them to The Intercept - his determination to influence the USA's 2016 election against Hilary Clinton, and for Donald Trump is repeatedly, explicitly made clear (as is his belief, all historical evidence notwithstanding, that Democrats, rather than Republicans, are the primary authors of American global adventurism).
But, hey, don't take my word - or the Intercept's - for that. Instead, read their most germane Twitter DM's for yourself, and come to your own conclusions ...
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