Wikileaks is under Russian influence, which is relevant in their releases.

[Vekseid]

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

This famous video expresses the same sentiment.

Whether or not Richelieu said the quote above, this concept applies to the releases by Wikileaks regarding the United States over the past several years.

First, I want to go over the timeline of what happened back in 2010.

Wikileaks was about to make a major information drop about Russia, announced in October.

Several weeks later, their site got hijacked by the Russian mob, which I posted about shortly after.

No official communication from Wikileaks or Assange ever explained what happened, much less resolved it. Their Twitter feed continued to advertise the wikileaks.org website, and they proceeded as if nothing ever happened.

Russia Today did give Assange his own TV show a year and a half later, though.

They still have servers operating out of Moscow:

host wikileaks.org
wikileaks.org has address 95.211.113.131
wikileaks.org has address 141.105.65.113
wikileaks.org has address 195.35.109.44
wikileaks.org has address 95.211.113.154
wikileaks.org has address 195.35.109.53
wikileaks.org has address 141.105.69.239
wikileaks.org mail is handled by 1 mx.wikileaks.org.

This is all fully public information. You don't need to trust any given media source to verify the accuracy of the above. All you need is to either look at the reports from the era - Spamhaus's report hasn't gone down. You can run a host lookup yourself.

This is of course relevant to Russia's involvement in the US election, but I'm only going to refer to that slightly here.



So why does this matter?

Editorializing.

Let's begin with their famous Vault 7 releases, and look at their first example. These are mostly tools that work after device has been compromised - either remotely or with physical access - and got seriously overblown in the media. There were also a number of old, largely patched exploits discussed in the leak.

Physical access is full access. So is getting root or SYSTEM on a machine. There are a lot of things you can do with full control of a device and I don't think I need to explain what.

Notably, the CIA admitted to using public resources to build some of their remote monitoring and backdoor tools. This surprised no one in the technical community. They go over their reasons in what did Equation do wrong?

The desire to avoid having their tools linked together as the Equation toolset had led to the following bit by Wikileaks:

The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

At least 'stolen' is in quotes. Compare the 'stolen' library to say, APT29's toolkit (Cozy Bear). Like the Equation toolkit, the Russians made a lot of the same mistakes the Equation developers (presumably NSA) did. At best, UMBRAGE might make a given CIA operation seem more amateur than it is.

To be clear, if someone detected an attack from Cozy Bear using these publicly known signatures, the UMBRAGE leak is evidence that the CIA does not have the sophistication to spoof such an attack.

As some of their discussions allude to, they have other reasons to avoid rolling their own crypto.

The media didn't really run with Wikileaks' editorializing on this one. Mostly spying through Samsung TVs. Which still required physical access to the TV.

Americans can at least rest easy knowing one CIA operative was quite thorough in assembling a collection of Japanese emoticons, however. Also ed master race.



But why does it really matter?

Wikileak's editorializing doesn't stop there, of course. Assange has one hell of a hate boner for Hillary Clinton.

By law, Hillary Clinton could not stop the Uranium One deal. Her responsibility was one of nine people to evaluate the purchase for national security issues and turn their findings over to the President.

There was a lot of paltering surrounding Uranium One - like omitting the fact that neither company was licensed to export. Most of them aren't relevant, however. The fact is Clinton did not control the transaction.

Anyone telling you otherwise is lying to you.

There are other emails that show Hillary's character. Of course, Wikileaks never mentioned these.

Caring about abused boys, wanting to make sure medical supplies got where they are needed, looking out for an ex child bride...

Nothing from the Podesta leaks actually stuck, and conspiracies developed instead. Leading to this man firing an assault rifle at an object he thought children were behind.

To reiterate, it is entirely possible that innocent children could have died over this, simply due to the warped depictions by conspiracy theorists.



I personally found Wikileaks response to the Panama Papers quite telling. "Where are there Americans on this list!?"

Americans don't need Panama. We have Nevada. For ~$1,500 a year you too can have an untraceable shell corporation.

The Panama papers revealed a lot of non-US corruption. Including some Russian corruption, so obviously it's an attack on Russia and we should ignore what it reveals. Fortunately, most countries haven't, and will be better places as a result, less hampered by corruption.

The level of political bias in Wikileaks' releases isn't just relevant to them being political stooges. We know for a fact they they have withheld some releases - most notably the Russian infodump I mentioned at the top of this post.

Wikileaks is very selective in its choice of what material to highlight, and can be very creative with its descriptions, as I showed.

So far, I've not heard of any evidence that material released to Wikileaks has been edited. The reactions they get prove that they don't need to, however, and frequently the assumption promoted by the media is whatever Wikileaks has released is far more serious than it is in reality.

Or worse, actively endangering people for no good reason.



At the end of the day, Wikileaks is far from an unbiased reporter. They are one of many participants in a disinformation campaign that seeks to set the 'West' against itself, and this needs to be kept in mind whenever anyone refers to anything they released from 2011 onward.

Thank you for reading, everyone.

[Callie Del Noire]

Not to mention Assange’s past comments, posts and such about the US in the past. I can’t find some of the more telling ones now but I’ll see if can find it tonight.  I recall as a naval service member his causal attitudes towards sources in the gulf and Afghanistan was quite chilling

[Callie Del Noire]

Couldn’t find the discussion he had on the Us back in the day, sadly my notes were on the drive that went belly up, but I did find this fun note.. apparently the Ecuadorean President is tiring of his inherited problem.


https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assange-free-wikileaks-ecuador-embassy-evict-london-uk-a8460531.html

[Lustful Bride]

Saw this article thought it might go well here.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/new-leak-shows-julian-assange-sought-russian-visa-in-2010/ar-BBNrvLx?ocid=spartandhp