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Sunday, October 23, 2016 8:32:15 PM
For those who are seriously interested in Julian Assange, There's This:
Here’s What I Learned About Julian Assange While Working Alongside Him
The WikiLeaks founder is out to settle a score with Hillary Clinton and to reassert himself as a player on the world stage, says BuzzFeed News special correspondent James Ball, who worked for Assange at Wikileaks.
James Ball
BuzzFeed Special Correspondent
posted on Oct. 23, 2016, at 1:11 p.m.
Carl Court / Getty Images
On 29 November 2010, then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton stepped out in front of reporters to condemn the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks and five major news organisations the previous day.
WikiLeaks’ release, she said, “puts people’s lives in danger”, “threatens our national security”, and “undermines our efforts to work with other countries”.
“Releasing them poses real risks to real people,” she noted, adding, “We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.”
Julian Assange watched that message on a television in the corner of a living room in Ellingham Hall, a stately home in rural Norfolk, around 120 miles away from London.
I was sitting around 8ft away from him as he did so, the room’s antique furniture and rugs strewn with laptops, cables, and the mess of a tiny organisation orchestrating the world’s biggest news story.
Minutes later, the roar of a military jet sounded sharply overhead. I looked around the room and could see everyone thinking the same thing, but no one wanting to say it. Surely not. Surely? Of course, the jet passed harmlessly overhead – Ellingham Hall is not far from a Royal Air Force base – but such was the pressure, the adrenaline, and the paranoia in the room around Assange at that time that nothing felt impossible.
Spending those few months at such close proximity to Assange and his confidants, and experiencing first-hand the pressures exerted on those there, have given me a particular insight into how WikiLeaks has become what it is today.
To an outsider, the WikiLeaks of 2016 looks totally unrelated to the WikiLeaks of 2010. Then it was a darling of many of the liberal left, working with some of the world’s most respected newspapers and exposing the truth behind drone killing, civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, and surveillance of top UN officials. [ https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/219058 ]
Now it is the darling of the alt-right, revealing hacked emails seemingly to influence a presidential contest, claiming the US election is “rigged”, and descending into conspiracy. Just this week on Twitter, it described the deaths by natural causes of two of its supporters as a “bloody year for WikiLeaks”, [
The questions asked about the organisation and its leader are often the wrong ones: How has WikiLeaks changed so much? Is Julian Assange the catspaw of Vladimir Putin? Is WikiLeaks endorsing a president candidate who has been described as racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and more?
These questions miss a broader truth: Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed – the world they operate in has. WikiLeaks is in many ways the same bold, reckless, paranoid creation that once it was, but how that manifests, and who cheers it on, has changed.
Julian Assange in the grounds of Ellingham Hall in December 2010. Carl Court / AFP / Getty Images
The cable release
Clinton’s condemnation of WikiLeaks and its partners’ release of classified cables was a simple requirement of her job. Even had she privately been an ardent admirer of the site – which seems unlikely – doing anything other than strongly condemning the leak was nonetheless never an option.
That’s not how it felt to anyone inside WikiLeaks at that moment, though. It was an anxiety-inducing time. WikiLeaks was the subject of every cable TV discussion, every newspaper front page, and press packs swarmed the gates of every address even tenuously connected to the site. Commentators called for arrest, deportation, rendition, or even assassination of Assange [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/fox-news-bob-beckel-calls_n_793467.html ] and his associates.
At the same time, WikiLeaks was having its payment accounts frozen by Visa and Mastercard, [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/#62510a044bc2 ] Amazon Web Services pulled hosting support, [ https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/wikileaks-got-kicked-off-amazon-on-purpose-says-assange/ ] and Assange was jailed for a week in the UK (before being bailed) on unrelated charges relating to alleged sexual offences in Sweden.
Inside WikiLeaks, a tiny organisation with only a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, such pressure felt immense. Most of the handful of people within came from a left-wing activist background, many were young and inexperienced, and few had much trust of the US government – especially after months of reading cables of US mistakes and overreactions in the Afghan and Iraq war logs, often with tragic consequences.
How might the US react, or overreact, this time? WikiLeaks was afraid of legal or extralegal consequences against Assange or other staff. WikiLeakers were angry at US corporations creating a financial blockade against the organisation with no court ruling or judgments – just a press statement from a US senator. [ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/bankers-wikileaks-free-speech ]
And the figurehead of this whole response was none other than Hillary Clinton. For Assange, to an extent, this is personal.
Oh there is much much more to see! ..for those interested, Go Take a Look! .. ;)
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/heres-what-i-learned-about-julian-assange?utm_term=.sv8L46VQz#.syEvboLBY
Here’s What I Learned About Julian Assange While Working Alongside Him
The WikiLeaks founder is out to settle a score with Hillary Clinton and to reassert himself as a player on the world stage, says BuzzFeed News special correspondent James Ball, who worked for Assange at Wikileaks.
James Ball
BuzzFeed Special Correspondent
posted on Oct. 23, 2016, at 1:11 p.m.
Carl Court / Getty Images
On 29 November 2010, then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton stepped out in front of reporters to condemn the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks and five major news organisations the previous day.
WikiLeaks’ release, she said, “puts people’s lives in danger”, “threatens our national security”, and “undermines our efforts to work with other countries”.
“Releasing them poses real risks to real people,” she noted, adding, “We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.”
Julian Assange watched that message on a television in the corner of a living room in Ellingham Hall, a stately home in rural Norfolk, around 120 miles away from London.
I was sitting around 8ft away from him as he did so, the room’s antique furniture and rugs strewn with laptops, cables, and the mess of a tiny organisation orchestrating the world’s biggest news story.
Minutes later, the roar of a military jet sounded sharply overhead. I looked around the room and could see everyone thinking the same thing, but no one wanting to say it. Surely not. Surely? Of course, the jet passed harmlessly overhead – Ellingham Hall is not far from a Royal Air Force base – but such was the pressure, the adrenaline, and the paranoia in the room around Assange at that time that nothing felt impossible.
Spending those few months at such close proximity to Assange and his confidants, and experiencing first-hand the pressures exerted on those there, have given me a particular insight into how WikiLeaks has become what it is today.
To an outsider, the WikiLeaks of 2016 looks totally unrelated to the WikiLeaks of 2010. Then it was a darling of many of the liberal left, working with some of the world’s most respected newspapers and exposing the truth behind drone killing, civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, and surveillance of top UN officials. [ https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/219058 ]
Now it is the darling of the alt-right, revealing hacked emails seemingly to influence a presidential contest, claiming the US election is “rigged”, and descending into conspiracy. Just this week on Twitter, it described the deaths by natural causes of two of its supporters as a “bloody year for WikiLeaks”, [
] and warned of media outlets “controlled by” [A bloody year for WikiLeaks pic.twitter.com/7Dy6RgJlhv
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 23, 2016
] members of the Rothschild family – a common anti-Semitic trope.The new sober cover of the Economist, which is controlled by Lynn de Rothschild, Clinton's "loyal adoring pal" https://t.co/oTCspy3ddR pic.twitter.com/KuRRfEELLJ
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 22, 2016
The questions asked about the organisation and its leader are often the wrong ones: How has WikiLeaks changed so much? Is Julian Assange the catspaw of Vladimir Putin? Is WikiLeaks endorsing a president candidate who has been described as racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and more?
These questions miss a broader truth: Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed – the world they operate in has. WikiLeaks is in many ways the same bold, reckless, paranoid creation that once it was, but how that manifests, and who cheers it on, has changed.
Julian Assange in the grounds of Ellingham Hall in December 2010. Carl Court / AFP / Getty Images
The cable release
Clinton’s condemnation of WikiLeaks and its partners’ release of classified cables was a simple requirement of her job. Even had she privately been an ardent admirer of the site – which seems unlikely – doing anything other than strongly condemning the leak was nonetheless never an option.
That’s not how it felt to anyone inside WikiLeaks at that moment, though. It was an anxiety-inducing time. WikiLeaks was the subject of every cable TV discussion, every newspaper front page, and press packs swarmed the gates of every address even tenuously connected to the site. Commentators called for arrest, deportation, rendition, or even assassination of Assange [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/fox-news-bob-beckel-calls_n_793467.html ] and his associates.
At the same time, WikiLeaks was having its payment accounts frozen by Visa and Mastercard, [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/#62510a044bc2 ] Amazon Web Services pulled hosting support, [ https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/wikileaks-got-kicked-off-amazon-on-purpose-says-assange/ ] and Assange was jailed for a week in the UK (before being bailed) on unrelated charges relating to alleged sexual offences in Sweden.
Inside WikiLeaks, a tiny organisation with only a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, such pressure felt immense. Most of the handful of people within came from a left-wing activist background, many were young and inexperienced, and few had much trust of the US government – especially after months of reading cables of US mistakes and overreactions in the Afghan and Iraq war logs, often with tragic consequences.
How might the US react, or overreact, this time? WikiLeaks was afraid of legal or extralegal consequences against Assange or other staff. WikiLeakers were angry at US corporations creating a financial blockade against the organisation with no court ruling or judgments – just a press statement from a US senator. [ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/bankers-wikileaks-free-speech ]
And the figurehead of this whole response was none other than Hillary Clinton. For Assange, to an extent, this is personal.
Oh there is much much more to see! ..for those interested, Go Take a Look! .. ;)
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/heres-what-i-learned-about-julian-assange?utm_term=.sv8L46VQz#.syEvboLBY
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