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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.
to get a new credit card couriered to a backwater in Brazil because he thought he was helping the world by publishing my personal details and my credit card details on WikiLeaks.
All because I subscribed to a geopolitical newsletter which I used for research to write investment reports, but WikiLeaks thought I was part of an international private spying network. If I was I certainly wouldn't be on /. I would be drinking martinis on a tropical island whilst contemplating my next mission.
The good news is that eventually he will have some sort of medical emergency and will have to be taken to a hospital. Hopefully, I will get my money back then by laying a bet that he will be put in a dark hole somewhere.
Meh. I'd offer him my embassy... Oh, wait!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
This kind of jackasses always make excuses and cry that people are just bad with them without reason.
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)
Assange's daily activities, moods, and interactions with staff and visitors
These are all things that the Ecuadorian government should leak to the public. Afterward, they should kick that freeloading, attention whore to the kerb.
At first I was willing to give Assange the benefit of the doubt, but as time went on and he demonstrated what an utterly disrespectful, ungrateful and pretentious twat he is, I've changed my opinion.
Cameras are cheap.
People to watch them, however, aren't. Nor are security-cleared installers to install stuff in international embassies.
That $5m also did a lot more than just put a camera in.
It's ok to like what he built while also thinking he's a lousy person.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I had it in Canada of all fucking places.
I think it's really just a symptom of the universal truth that the role of customs officer across the globe is the sort of role that has a high likelihood of attracting the odd dickhead who failed at everything they wanted to do in life (like becoming a police officer) and so had to settle for what little power tripping they could do at a checkpoint on a national border instead.
I've always found US customs officers decent, and UK customs officers nice on my return (albeit a little fucking dense), I've found Canadian customs officers to be universally complete arseholes in Ottawa and Montreal, but usually pretty nice in Toronto and Vancouver. Across the rest of the globe it's always been a mixed bag - nice and laid back in the Caribbean, corrupt and dodgy in Egypt for example.
Personally I wouldn't judge a country by it's customs officers because the high likelihood of down and out power trippers is bound to be at odds with the norm.
Sorry, but why give him any more credit than we do for any of the other Russian Trolls in their propaganda machine?
Hahahaha - Canadians don't even know how to be assholes properly, though I've seen them try a few times. I live in Minnesota and am a dual citizen and have family in Canada so I cross the border a lot. I sometimes get a few curt questions from the Canadian customs, one sent me to immigration (lol) because I had forgotten my Canadian passport and didn't let me explain I was a citizen. But in perhaps 50 crossings I was treated rudely maybe 3-5 times and it was at best a 3/10. When I filed for my social insurance number the lady behind the desk at service Canada rudely said "and why do you think you need one?" Going off my American accent she probably thought I was a medical refugee. After saying "umm, because I'm a citizen..." she absolutely couldn't stop apologizing and directed me straight to an open agent lmao, here in America they would have called the cops over and doubled down and never, absolutely never apologized.
At the border coming back the customs agents are assholes about 40% of the time, one asked why I was in Canada and part of my answer involved being a citizen at which point he interrupted me "Son, we don't recognize dual citizenship (lol a lie), just what kind of American are you? Son, If we went to war with Canada what side would you fight for??!?" Then he went off the goddamn handle and started to make racially charged comments about my family member names and asked me insane questions for another 5 minutes. Then I got sent to be searched. I felt lucky to have made it across alive and until I see it, Canada just dosent have the culture to put assholes like that in authority and approve of thier treatment of citizens.
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.
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I know this will shock you, AEtna is doing even better than gold which we all know is the holy grail of investing. /s
The insurance companies are ripping people off genius.
not sure if trolling or stupid, but it doesn't take that long in either of those listed locations
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 ...
Check out my novel.
What's wrong with being disrespectful?
You should have said "What's wrong with being disrespectful, you warthog faced buffoon?"
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
... allegedly breached the embassy's network security, reading confidential diplomatic material and setting up his own secret communications network. ...
Rough translation: Assange found that little placard with the WiFi password written on it for all to freely use, discovered an open share on one of the embassy's network-connected computers (but probably didn't find anything particularly interesting on it) and then he casually turned on his VPN to tunnel through the embassy firewall and log into Wikileaks.
It feels to me like certain high profile personalities in the media (like Assange, but certainly not limited to him) are all-too-often treated like they possess some sort of super-intelligence, and can do shockingly amazing things with computers. The reality is likely to be underwhelming most of the time, when you break down the colorful but vague terminology into layman's terms.
Problem is, communism will always fall into totalitarianism.
Why you say?
From each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs.
That says it all. We'll take from those that we think can do stuff, and give it to those that we think need it. Someone has to make the decision. But, what if they decide that YOU can do stuff, but YOU don't need stuff? What if you start to think that their decision is completely arbitrary, and think that YOU need stuff, too? What if you begin to think that YOU are doing to much, and not getting enough? What if you decide that YOU just aren't going to do so damn much anymore?
Well, you can't just make that decision, because then everybody will make that decision. And then, nobody is working, and everybody still has needs. So, the government has to come down hard and demand that such-n-such work be done. We call that ..... totalitarianism.
Now, think of how capitalism can be used to funnel greed into good behavior.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba