Approximately 100 victims, 90 victims.
Domestic violence homicides in New York City increased by 29% between 2021 and 2022.
The increase was 57% in the Bronx and 225% in Brooklyn.
Paul Durienzo, New York.
It is 7 p.m. Stay tuned for Off the Hook,
coming up on WBAI New York 99.5 FM
and WBAI.org online. Stay tuned.
And the time is just about 7.01 p.m.
You are listening to WBAI 99.5 FM here in New York,
and it is time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing,
so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving,
now I can't make a cut.
We couldn't get much worse,
but if they could, they would.
Bum diddly bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum diddly bum!
And this shrinkflation has gotten out of hand.
When you have a smaller ring ding than your parents grew up with,
folks are going to be mad.
It makes sense.
I remember my father coming home from work with a bag of pretzels,
and I used to count them every time,
and there were always 151 pretzels in that bag.
When I counted yesterday, it was down to 129.
Give me a break. Come on.
The big pretzel companies need to know we're paying attention.
Look, here's the deal.
These are the issues voters care about.
Let me tell you a story about these people over in New York
who run the Hope Conference every two years.
They get hackers from all over the world to come to St. John's University
and share their knowledge about technology.
Computers, telephones, wares, and zero days.
And that is what this country is all about,
the sharing of knowledge,
developing high tech to make something that my father would have called
totally awesome do.
Listen, I'm not being facetious.
Hackers play such an essential role in keeping this nation going.
They work hard. They use their brains.
Occasionally, they step out of line.
But I'll tell you what, that is what America is.
Testing the limits, building it better,
being the first to figure something out,
and hacking teleprompter screens.
Wait a minute. What?
Thank you very much, fake AI-generated Joe Biden.
The program is Off the Hook, Rob T. Firefly here with you.
And I am joined out in Skypland by Gila.
Sorry, let me try that again. Good evening.
Good evening. Alex is with us.
I am indeed. Good evening, everybody.
Good to see you both. Good to hear from you both.
And we are joined today by a very special guest.
Our listeners of this program will know them
as one of the founders of Distributed Denial of Secrets.
Emma Best is with us.
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Let's get right into it.
Kyle and Emmanuel are out on assignment
doing various things that they do,
and we have a lot to talk about.
Emma, I'm going to get into why you're with us momentarily,
but there are a couple of stories in the news
that I would like to just touch on.
Oregon has a reason to celebrate.
The governor has just signed the nation's first
right-to-repair bill that bans parts pairing.
A story from Ars Technica.
Starting in 2025, devices can't block repair parts
with software pairing checks.
This was a particularly devious sort of thing
where you could not just replace a part in something
because the something, say, for example, an iPhone,
would check to see if that part is allowed
to be installed in the phone,
see if it's an approved thing,
see if it should be replaceable by the user,
and that's dirty pool in Oregon now.
Oregon's bill prevents companies from implementing schemes
that require parts to be verified
through encrypted software checks
before they will function,
known as parts pairing or serialization.
Oregon's bill, SB 1596, is the first in the nation
to target that practice.
Oregon State Senator Janine Solomon
and Representative Courtney Niren
sponsored and pushed the bill
in the state senate and legislature.
This is pretty exciting stuff
for lots of folks in the hacker community
who we have long been talking about right-to-repair
and why it's important on this year's program,
and I think we're rather excited about this.
What are your thoughts? Gila?
So I'm making a face,
which obviously Radioland can't see,
but my co-hosts can,
and, I mean, it's great conceptually,
but with all the carve-outs behind it,
I don't know.
This feels like Swiss cheese, a Swiss cheese bill,
and I don't know how helpful it's going.
I'm skeptical,
because I'm looking further in the article.
There are carve-outs for certain kinds
of electronics and devices,
including video game consoles, medical devices,
HVAC systems, motor vehicles,
and in other states, electric toothbrushes.
So, you know, there are things that will...
The fact that the right-to-repair bill passed at all
is super exciting,
but I'm just a little apprehensive
about the Swiss cheesiness of this particular bill.
This is true. Alex?
That was going to be my question about this, too,
but I think you've answered it, Gila,
and it sounded like, based on what Rob had read,
that this Oregon bill,
and if I understand this correctly, Rob,
it's a bill, it's not necessarily a law yet?
Or is it a law?
The governor has signed it.
He did sign it.
Okay, gotcha.
We don't need to go into how a bill becomes a law
on this program, right?
I think there's other civic-minded programs on that.
I thought, based on what you read,
that this would apply to a Tesla
and would prevent car manufacturers
from disabling certain things
or requiring some kind of verification
before certain components or features would work,
but it sounds like that's completely carved out.
That's really unfortunate.
Wow.
I'm less excited about this now
than I was at the top of this show.
Thank you, my esteemed colleagues,
for revealing the Swiss cheesiness going on.
That being said, though,
sometimes these things have to be good starts, right?
Oregon is certainly, I think,
a state that leads the country
in its liberality in lots of ways.
Oregon is very forward-looking.
According to the show Portlandia,
when it was on,
it was a place where young people went to retire,
which is, I thought,
talking about Portland itself.
But Oregon, in terms of data security,
privacy,
especially when it comes to the use of data,
I think that Oregon's senior senator in Congress
is really kind of on the ball,
and I think maybe the state of Oregon
is following Senator Ron Wyden's examples here.
So I think that this may be a good start.
It may be a model on which other states
base their right-to-repair laws,
but hopefully without the Swiss cheese of exceptions,
as Gila had rightly noted.
Well, we will certainly keep an eye on this,
and similar bills have been passed in New York here,
in California and Minnesota,
and, of course, we want to hear about it
if there are efforts to push for things like this
anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world.
If you know of such things, let us know,
oth at 2600.com.
Another story, also on Ars Technica,
is kind of fascinating to, I think, a couple of us here.
Jails have banned visits in quid pro quo agreements
with prison phone companies, according to lawsuits.
Two lawsuits filed by a civil rights group
allege that county jails in Michigan
banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue
from voice and video calls
as part of a quid pro quo kickback scheme
with prison phone companies.
We have spoken before on this program
about this idea that you can replace a prison visit
with a video call, basically,
and, of course, phone calls to prisoners
have long been a price-gouged thing,
very, very expensive
for the friends and family of those incarcerated,
and, Alex, I think you're familiar
with how this stuff tends to work,
and I'd like to know what you think about this story.
Yeah, I think it's, you know,
it sounds to me like it's a step in the right direction here.
You know, I have the unfortunate privilege,
I guess would be the way to describe it
in a kind of awkward or paradoxical way,
of talking with our friend Virgil Griffiths
quite regularly from a federal prison.
Right now, he's located in Milan, Michigan.
I don't know why they pronounce it that way.
It's some kind of bastardization of the word Milan
and, you know, in Michigan,
just like how they say Montpellier
instead of Montpellier in Vermont
and, you know, all these types of things.
Anyhow, it's spelled Milan, Michigan.
But Virgil and I talk pretty regularly.
It's interesting.
I don't know exactly how much it costs him to call me,
but it must not be cheap,
and there's only a certain amount of minutes
that he'll get every month as well.
So we usually wind up running out of minutes
towards the end of the month
based on all the phone calls and things that he's had.
But it is, it's gouging,
and the idea that you're forcing people to talk
or use these video programs
instead of going and meeting face-to-face
is really, really unfortunate.
I think both from the standpoint
of having the physicality of a visit
being so important to a person's mental well-being,
especially when they are
locked away from society and their family.
These are things that, you know,
when I would go visit Virgil,
and, in fact, Emmanuel and Kyle came with me
the last, I think it was actually the last time
I was there to visit him
before he was transferred to Michigan.
It's such a meaningful thing,
and I think people that are in that situation
are very much always looking forward
to those types of visits,
and it means that people are thinking of you
and they're making the effort to show up
and be with you physically.
And that's one aspect of it
that is irreplaceable, I think, by anything electronic.
And then the other aspect of these visits
that is also irreplaceable from any form of electronics
is that there's a privacy component to these visits
that people don't realize
because most of the time we understand
what it's like to make a visit to somebody in prison
simply by watching television or Law & Order
or something like that,
and you think that everything is happening
through a screen or a wall or a phone
and that there's people listening and monitoring
and all this, which couldn't be farther from the truth
in, let's say, a low-
or especially minimum-security facility.
When I go and visit Virgil, we're in a big open room,
and there's lots of other people.
There's families there.
There's people, you know, I find it very sad
when kids have to go into this situation
and visit parents and things.
It breaks my heart.
But you're there amongst a whole bunch of people,
and there's no way that anybody can listen in
or monitor what you're saying
because of all of the din from the room.
I mean, I guess if someone was really, really careful
and used some kind of parabolic microphone,
but in all likelihood,
nobody's listening to what you're saying.
So you have this measure of privacy
that you don't have afforded to you
when you're on some kind of electronic communication,
whether it's a telephone call or a video call,
that makes it incredibly easy to simply listen in
on that singular conversation.
So I think these are aspects of those types
of non-electronic interactions that are so important.
Yeah, and I want to mention the name of the group.
This is Civil Rights Corps,
who filed the lawsuits on March 15th
against the county governments, two county sheriffs,
and two prison phone companies.
The suits filed in county court seek class action status
on behalf of people unable to visit family members
detained in the local jails, including children
who have been unable to visit their parents.
And this is definitely something
we'll be keeping a close eye on.
But I want to get to why we are joined
by Emma Best.
Emma, would you like to talk a little bit
about what you do and why you've joined us today?
I'm a journalist and transparency activist,
and like you said, I'm one of the co-founders
of Distributed Denial of Secrets,
DDoSSecrets.com.
We publish leaks,
and so we've been following the Assange case
and the WikiLeaks case very closely
since before charges were even filed.
And we recently announced
that we have a large database
of about 100 gigabytes of data
with tens of thousands of documents,
hundreds of thousands of emails
related to WikiLeaks and anonymous.
And this gives us a lot of insight
into what the government's case is,
because I believe 99.9% of this
should already be in the U.S. government's hands.
However, because not everything
that the U.S. government has
is in the hands of every other government,
that's one of the reasons why
we're not simply putting all of this online
for everyone to read unredacted.
We want to go through it
and work with other people
to get out the most relevant parts,
but not necessarily dox every journalist
and volunteer that worked with WikiLeaks
and the various sources and whatnot.
So it's an extensive database
that I've been doing my best to go through,
and about two months ago,
we gave Wired access to it,
and there should be more reporting
coming out from Wired soon.
You know, Emma,
this sounds like it could be
a massively explosive treasure trove of information
about the operations of WikiLeaks
coming during an election year
where we know that WikiLeaks
played a pretty pivotal role
in the last election cycle
that involved Donald Trump.
I wonder if there's anything
that you can speak to
about the timing of this,
the provenance of the data,
how it crosses over with other leaks
or troves or, I guess, data sets
that relate to WikiLeaks and Assange,
and I've got tons of questions for us.
Why don't we start with that?
Sure.
The data comes from a number of places.
Some of it is from former insiders,
people who were associated with WikiLeaks.
Some of it is archived material,
not all of which is still available
in various places.
One of the more interesting things
that I've been going through
is old forum posts
on various WikiLeaks websites,
including WikiLeaks Forum,
which some listeners may recognize
for being controversial
due to the people that were involved in running it.
It initially had the support of WikiLeaks,
and then later they decided,
like, these are some bad things
that are happening with it.
We don't want our name on it anymore,
and it spiraled out from there.
But that forum has been deleted since
along with several other Telegram channels
that we have copies of,
and this all, yeah,
it gives a big insight
into both how things progressed,
the internal discussions that they had,
and some of the documents
that are from sealed court cases
give us a lot of insight
into what the U.S. government is thinking.
And that's really fascinating to me
because you say
what the U.S. government is thinking here.
If we go back to the original indictment
of Assange,
I think it was 2019,
it was for a single charge.
It was one charge that was,
I believe it was a CFAA violation,
essentially a hacking charge,
and that charge pertained to
Assange working with Chelsea Manning
to utilize something called the Rainbow Table,
which is a way of reversing hashes
or taking what was
a one-way cryptographic function
and turning, usually passwords,
for our listeners that don't know this,
passwords are very ordinarily
hashes, and if you can match
what a hash is,
like a long string of numbers,
it's a unique digital fingerprint
of one bit of data,
some kind of data thing,
type, whatever it is.
You could take a hash of something
that's 100 gigabytes or it could be 10 bytes,
and the hashes are obviously going to be
totally different.
If you change one bit
in that 100 gigabyte file,
you're going to get a totally different hash.
Using a Rainbow Table was a way
to take those password hashes
and reverse them by having this
long list of, hey, let's say
monkey equals this in a hash,
and monkey123 is this is a hash.
I believe what
Assange was charged with
doing in connection
with Chelsea Manning,
was the attempt to
utilize Rainbow Tables to crack
Department of Defense passwords,
and that was it.
That was a very singular charge.
Assange was arrested
in the United Kingdom when he was ousted
from the Ecuadorian embassy.
I actually
wrote about that charge for
CNN in an opinion piece where I
had argued that this seems
pretty straightforward, apolitical.
There's nothing here that threatens
journalists, that crosses
the line,
or would be
inherently a political offense.
I thought this is pretty narrowly
tailored and he's going to be extradited.
But then shortly
thereafter, these 17 new
charges were piled onto it, and a lot of
that journalists had said,
and I also
mentioned this in a separate
CNN opinion piece, that
a lot of these charges seemed
really over the top
and attacking
what journalists ordinarily
do, especially in the national security sphere.
Tell us what
you mean there, Emma,
because you must be talking
about these 17 new charges on top
of the original charge that
Assange is facing right now, and for which
he might be extradited.
Learning what the U.S. government is thinking here,
this is entirely new stuff.
One other quick
question for you is,
and maybe this is a preliminary or threshold
question, but
looking at Distributed Denial of Secrets,
it doesn't seem like you've announced
this new
data from the Assange
leaks anywhere yet.
Is this the first time you're talking about it
in public?
WIRED made a brief mention
of it in their coverage last
week, and like I said,
I think that they're planning on doing more with it
soon.
As for what you brought up
before that with the development
of the indictments,
one
thing that I think gets
overlooked a lot when discussing
the charges against Assange
is the second superseding
indictment didn't add
any new charges.
What it did was add a whole
lot of information and background,
and the
original indictment, if the U.S.
government had been a little bit smarter,
I think the original indictment would
have looked a lot more like that, because it
talks about how Wikileaks
supposedly collaborated with
different hacker groups, how they incentivized
things,
how they tried to recruit
people, and
that's not really there
in the original indictment, and to get
any of the background on it,
you mostly had to go to the affidavit that
the FBI agent filed alongside it.
Now that affidavit,
was that a public document
that was associated with the second indictment, or
is that something that's part of the data set now?
The FBI affidavit,
I think, was with
the original indictment, and it is
public. I see, very good.
Yeah, so that was what supported
the indictment,
or I guess
maybe some kind of application to the
court or something like that.
That's really interesting,
and learning more about what the government is thinking
here. So tell us about
this collusion with Wikileaks
and what these documents say.
So,
as far as their
cooperation with hackers,
one thing that needs to be
made clear pretty much at the beginning
is that, while it
seems like Julian had at least some
awareness of what was going on,
and there are some people that have said,
oh, he directly knew about this,
most of the communications
went through Siggy.
Sigurdur Thordarson,
he
formerly worked with Wikileaks,
later infamously became
an FBI informant.
He was
the one who talked to Sabu
initially about receiving documents,
but
he's
also been
credibly accused, and I
think convicted, of sex crimes,
and it's truly horrific
stuff.
And Siggy
is a liar.
This is what everyone knows him most for,
aside from his crimes.
He is not a reliable person.
And we've seen
reporting where he's gone back and forth
and said, I lied to Wikileaks. No,
I lied to the FBI.
So,
there's a lot of debate over what was actually
done and said there.
But the logs
are very useful for reconstructing
that, and we can see things like
Siggy was talking to Sabu
before Siggy became an informant.
But it
seems that Sabu got in touch with
Wikileaks within days
of becoming an informant.
We have Siggy
talking to hackers
and asking them to go after specific
targets.
One of the more interesting things
is that Wikileaks'
contact at Datacel,
who processed
their donations for quite
some time and later helped Sue
I think it was Visa
or one of the banks for not processing
things. One of the higher-ups
at Datacel knew about
some of the LulzSec hacks
before they happened
and even suggested other targets
that might be beneficial
to him.
One of the more interesting
things about the involvement of
hackers with Wikileaks
is they seem to cross
the border between just
being sources and having
actual involvement in research.
Sorry, I started to cough there.
That was one of the things that Siggy
was talking to Sabu about. He actually
sent a CV at one point,
a resume, and they were talking
about signing him on as a contractor.
He was working with
one of the hackers
in LulzSec, one by Kayla,
I think that was Ryan,
and
even Gnosis,
which was Lorelei Batley.
She was involved with research
specifically for the
Gitmo detainees
where Wikileaks
was in a massive rush at the last
minute to get this out because
they felt like they were being scooped.
Sarah Harrison contacted
Siggy and said,
we need you to do this. We need you to go to Wikipedia.
We need you to copy the
names, the prisoner numbers, the basic
information, put it into a table,
organize it this way.
Siggy turned around and passed that
research task on to
Lorelei Batley of Gnosis.
That's
interesting.
There's a lot of
line crossing here
perhaps between being a
journalist and
gathering the actual information itself,
which is at root
what I think the government
was really charging Assange with, isn't it?
Yeah, and the
government really did just a terrible job
of explaining that in
even the second superseding
indictment.
Per usual, they're not
talking about cases that are in
progress or where someone hasn't even been
extradited yet.
But for
the U.S. government, as far as I can tell,
and I don't want to say this is the
reason they want to go after Julian and
Wikileaks, but the reason that
they feel like they're able to is
because Wikileaks
did more.
The most
wanted list was always going to be
a problem for Wikileaks.
Saying, oh, we'll pay you this much
money if you come forward with this data
was always going to be a problem
for Wikileaks.
Things like that are not great.
And then
one thing that I think most people have
overlooked in the second superseding
indictment especially...
Excuse me.
Sorry, my lungs aren't so good.
One thing that people tend to overlook
is there's repeated references
to Wikileaks trying to
recruit CIA administrators.
The indictment never goes anywhere
with this, but at the time that the second
superseding indictment was filed,
Joshua Schulte's
trial, or his retrial,
was underway.
And he was the CIA administrator
who gave Wikileaks the Vault
7 data.
So I think when we look at things like
that too, we get a little bit more of an idea
of what Wikileaks was...
Not Wikileaks.
What the government was setting up for in regards
to Wikileaks.
They put that there in the second superseding
indictment, and
it seems very
clearly a setup for what happened
in 2015,
2017 with Schulte
contacting Wikileaks, handing
over all the CIA data.
We are speaking with
Emma Best of Distributed Denial
of Secrets. That's ddosecrets.com.
You're listening
to Off the Hook on WBAI,
which you can keep going
by throwing in
what you can at give2wbai.org.
Emma, I wonder if you could speak a bit
more about, just as a journalist,
obviously you're going through
this raw data and incredible
amounts of it, responsibly
redacting it, of course.
But that puts
you in a unique position to just form
an overall picture
of what was going on behind the scenes
of all this.
I wonder if you could talk a bit more about
the things about that
that people
should know that they don't.
One thing that I thought
was very interesting when going through
this, Wikileaks
basically put together enemy lists
with opposition
research on people that
were not
good for Wikileaks or who had been
critical. This included
politicians,
former Wikileaks members,
Julian's
accusers in Sweden,
along with the lawyer and prosecutor
It's
interesting that
in 2010-2011
they're already listing
Hillary Clinton as
she's the first name
in shitlist.pdf
Sarah Palin is also
in there along with Joe Biden
but
the fact that Wikileaks was
doing this and pulling together
what they felt was negative
information on people
and in some cases
especially with the accusations
against Julian,
looking at it, in hindsight
there's a lot that is very
questionable or outright
inaccurate.
There's
one quote that
I don't really want to go into the contents
of the opposition research
for obvious reasons, but there's
one quote where they're talking about what they
had just described.
They said, no media quote
available of course, but it's something
they are assumed to be
behind completely.
That's
the
level of attribution that
they're putting for this, but then they believe it
fully and this is
how they then craft later
messaging. You can see that a lot
in conspiracy theories about the
Swedish accusations
against Assange.
That's very interesting and
really crazy
background to think that they had
Hillary Clinton in their
sights way back
when.
It almost seems
like this was a long-standing
vendetta against her
and brings me back
to the point that I had raised earlier, which
was that the last
time we saw WikiLeaks extort
an early act, it was during the 2016
election when Trump was up for
election. Now we see Trump
is up for re-election and it's
2024, eight years
later from 2016. I can't
believe it was eight years ago.
It feels like the blink of an eye,
quite frankly.
Do you think that there'll be political
ramifications for when you
release this dataset?
I'm not
sure. The data
overall raises questions
about everyone who's involved
and there's
a lot in there that you
can point to with the data and say
about WikiLeaks, oh, this is questionable
or that is questionable.
But
when you use some of the data to
examine one of
the quotes that were in the second
superseding indictment,
they talk about at one point
Siggy, I think, was
talking to Gnosis and described
WikiLeaks as the largest hacking
organization in the world.
And that is an accurate
thing from the chat log.
But
when you look at the chat log,
that sentence ends with a quotation
mark and there's no
beginning to it.
And that sort of thing raises questions about
oh, well,
was Siggy quoting someone or
was that his description?
And that sort of thing is a very important
distinction.
There's other instances where
one of the things they talk about in the
indictment was WikiLeaks
and Assange suggesting
putting a Trojan on a
former
volunteer's laptop.
And again,
that's something that happened, but when you look at
all the logs together,
it looks like Siggy is lying
to people and manipulating them.
And this doesn't
change the fact that
everyone said all these things,
but it raises questions
that are really important to get into.
And one thing that I thought was very
interesting is
after WikiLeaks released
the Iraq data,
Denmark, their
defense department requested a copy of it.
They wanted
access to investigate
their own military
activities, I believe it was.
Denmark
is a founding member of NATO,
but it is a foreign military
and
WikiLeaks gave them access to it.
And that's
a very
gray area legally.
And on the one hand,
it's morally defensible
if everyone was acting
on the motives
that we believe.
They wanted to investigate their own military
for abuses.
That's something that we all can and should
get behind.
Directly giving
classified, unredacted data
to a foreign military?
That's the sort of thing
that's outside of typical
journalism lines.
That's
a really shocking
revelation here.
So Emma, can you talk a little bit more
for our listeners about the
types of data that
this new data set that distributed
in our secrets has in its possession
and presumably will make available
to the public at least or
to journalists or the public
in some limited form.
Can you talk a bit more
about the types of data
that this information indicates
WikiLeaks provided
exclusively
to the Danish military?
In terms of what they gave the Danish
military, all that I
can be positive of
is that they listed
contact at the
planning branch of a naval commander
as having unredacted
access to the
Iraq military
or the Iraq files.
It's unclear from the data if they were
also given access to
the Afghanistan files or
Cablegate.
The
one thing that's very interesting
about this though is
so at the end of
October, Julian Assange
gave an interview with Al Jazeera
and in that interview
he said that WikiLeaks had
been approached by Russian intelligence
and that Russian intelligence
wanted to cooperate.
And
according to Julian, they just
didn't engage with Russian intelligence.
A week later
WikiLeaks sends this
email to the
Danish military and says
thank you for your email and please accept my
apologies for the delayed response.
We have limited resources which often take up
which are often taken up
with various attacks on our system.
We would be delighted to provide the Danish
investigation with the necessary information
however we are investigating
ways of delivering the information in a secure
manner.
So the scope of the Danish
investigation isn't spelled out there
and the original email from
the Danes so far
I haven't found it.
But the other documents
show that a username
and password was generated for them
they made contact with someone else
at the Danish military who
they gave the access to
and
yeah
it's
those very surprising things.
Shocking.
I would say shocking and really
providing exclusive access
to a foreign military
to a data set that contains
classified information from
the United States government is really
an extraordinary
revelation. If this is something
that WikiLeaks did on a one-off basis
I think it's extraordinary and shocking
but it sounds like this might have
been something that perhaps
I'm extrapolating here
total speculation I should note but
maybe this is something that WikiLeaks engaged
in on a regular basis
do you think that
the manner, the tone
or the documents themselves
would indicate that whether this was a common
practice?
I wouldn't be surprised if it was
and there's a lot of other things
that are suggestive
but this is the only clear-cut instance
of that.
We mentioned
2016 a little bit earlier
and just a slightly similar
thing
shortly WikiLeaks
made an announcement that they would give a reward
for the Goldman Sachs
speeches, Hillary Clinton's
and a few hours later
Russian hackers started the phishing
campaign that penetrated Podesta's
email and got
access to those transcripts.
So
when you look at the broader context
there's a lot of things like that that
raise eyebrows
especially when you look at the 25 year history
between Assange, WikiLeaks
and Russia
but there's nothing else that
so far is clear-cut
for this
but it is
very
notable
I suppose would be the best word
that when WikiLeaks decided
to make all of Cablegate
available unredacted, the way they defended
this and the way their supporters
defended this was by saying that security
services already had access to the data
and
the surface reading has always been
well because they're intelligence
agencies, they compromise things, they get a
hold of stuff
it's what they do
but knowing that
a related data set from the same
source at about the same time
was given
to foreign security services
again, it raises
a lot of
questions
Well, one question that
it raises for me in particular is
why Denmark? Why the Danish
military here?
I don't think
Julian Assange or WikiLeaks was an
organization that did things as a matter
of Christian charity or
out of the beneficence of their own
hearts. It seems to me
like there was probably some kind of motive
or some kind of reason why
they did this for Denmark
perhaps some kind of quid
pro quo arrangement
is there any indication what WikiLeaks
got out of that arrangement?
No
and
I do want to mention that
prior to WikiLeaks responding
to Denmark's email
there had been a public
statement from Denmark
where they called on WikiLeaks to give them
the information
and so that public appeal may have
played some role in it
I did say
a few minutes ago that there
are no other instances where we know
that WikiLeaks gave a foreign
government information
and I just remembered that that's
not strictly true because
at around the same time
Israel Shamir was
delivering cables to Belarus
and Israel Shamir
is also the infamous
anti-Semite that worked with
WikiLeaks, he was a friend of Julian's
they've
denied the extent to which they coordinated
with Israel Shamir
but when you look at the documents he's one of the
cool people that they planned out
the release of articles with
and it was
Israel Shamir that helped Julian
apply for the visa in Russia
back when WikiLeaks
was potentially going to relocate there
Wow
that's incredible too
so they shared diplomatic cables
with Belarus
this is a country too not necessarily
known for its
democratic principles
or beliefs that would
comport with what we would consider
to be liberal ideas
liberal being in the sense of
liberal democracy not conservative or liberal
of course but
so where
were those, I know we
don't have too much time left in the show
but I'm so curious about this
do you know what diplomatic cables
were provided to
Belarus?
I would have to check, I don't remember
that off the top of my head
that particular saga
is mostly public
it has been discussed before and it was one reason
that James Bull decided to leave
WikiLeaks was because of what Israel
Shamir was doing
the cables that he gave to
Belarus were
then republished
seemingly by the government
they set up their own Belarusian
WikiLeaks and started publishing
cables and the
degree of impact that
that has had is
somewhat debated where some people
say oh well all the major leaders
were already rounded up
and so naming the dissidents
in these cables didn't
have a big impact on
them and it didn't allow them to be
arrested. Other people
have disputed that and I've also
seen very credibly people
say that the direct
impact that it had in terms of getting
people arrested was
not as bad as it could
have been but that it created
a chilling effect
for those dissidents and that
was part of what happened
with the election cycle in Belarus.
We would be
horrified to learn
of any media or journalistic
organization in the United States picking
favorites and sharing classified information
with a foreign military
or a foreign government
that is known to be run
especially in such an autocratic
and authoritarian manner as Belarus.
Do you think
Emma that this
undercuts that this dataset
that you will be
presumably releasing in some
limited capacity
undercuts the notion
of WikiLeaks
being a journalistic organization
itself, being part of the media because it
seems to me like they're
playing favorites and playing sides and
operating more almost like
some form of
freelance intelligence
agents as opposed to
actual journalists.
That's a really good point and
I want to start off by just
saying that
you can be both
an intelligence organization
and a journalist.
I think it was
William Casey? It was one of
the CIA directors who got his
start as a journalist
and it was doing that and interviewing
Hitler that started
him on his path to
rising through the ranks of intelligence.
There's no reason that
a spy can't be a journalist or a journalist
a spy.
If someone at CIA
or FSB
or MI5 or wherever
says, I'm a journalist
now, I'm going to write articles and publish
them, that might be true.
But that doesn't change the other thing.
They're not self-negating.
And I think that that's one
really important thing that
most of the discussion has missed
out on. It's not either or.
But WikiLeaks has always
described themselves as an intelligence
agency. That's been
on their website from the beginning
or it was on their website
in the beginning.
They sold merchandise
with that for quite a while.
They described themselves as
doing all the things that an
intelligence agency does while
talking to Manning and getting
documents.
And
you know,
they even launched what they called a counter
intelligence unit in 2013.
It's part of the spyware files.
The goal of WikiLeaks has always
been a form of counter intelligence
using the exposure
of secrets to degrade
the operations
of a government, military or corporation.
The
ideal has always been
that this is limited to corrupt activities
and that that's
where the secrecy taxes, Julian described
it, would come in.
But the reality is, it applies to
just about everything
and
yeah.
So to answer your question, WikiLeaks is both.
They're a journalist organization
and an intelligence organization
and they admit
as such.
I love that answer too
because
having spent time in intelligence myself
and there are
obviously such parallels
between journalism and intelligence
collection. In fact, some would say that
the activities themselves are very, very similar
especially when it comes down to
the protection of an
intelligence community, we would call it the
protection of sources and methods
and in the journalistic world,
the media world, you know, there is this
very high premium placed on the
protection of sources
and so the tactics and
the techniques of journalists and intelligence
agents I think are, and the
priorities of both are very
aligned in so many interesting
ways that create unique parallels
and perhaps even
paradoxes like we're seeing here.
But I want to
pass it over to you to talk
about what are the next steps with this
data leak,
how do we get in touch with you, how do our listeners
keep track of distributed
denial of secrets, all that type
of thing that I'm preempting Rob T.
Firefly from asking here.
Yes indeed, but
we just have a couple of minutes left.
Hopefully we'll be launching
the new version of our website soon
and that'll come with some updates including
the updated listing for
Assange leaks.
In the meantime, if journalists are
interested in going through the
data or accessing the database,
they can find the
contact information on
DDoSSecrets.com
Unfortunately,
you cannot tweet about us.
We have been banned from Twitter since we
published the Blue Leaks,
the law enforcement documents.
But
yeah, you can still
email people about it
even if you can't go on Reddit
or Facebook or
Twitter to talk about us.
Too much transparency.
Emma, thank you so much for
joining us today.
Again, that's DDoSecrets.com
and
check out Hook.net
for the latest on what we're up to
outside of this here radio show.
Our conference comes up in the summer.
And Gila,
you had something to say about
how things go over here at WBAI.
I sure do.
So we wanted to thank
the listeners of Off the Hook.
We have
gotten a lot of new BAI buddies
which is amazing if you want to
donate to the radio station.
Keep us on the air and keep asking you for money
less. If you want to give us a call at
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pledge what you can or visit
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and you can become
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And again, the more you give us, the less
we have to ask you for.
Everybody wins.
It's a great thing. Also, don't forget
this Friday is the first Friday
of the month. So get out and
meet your 2600 buddies
in three dimensions
at a meeting near you. Check out
2600.com
meetings to find out
where to find your local
hacker meetup.
Absolutely. And you happen
to be listening to a track called
Press the Yellow Key by Todd Mazierski.
If you're a creative,
if you make music, let us know
if you'd like us to consider something you've made
as an outro.
Send us email, oth at 2600.com
Find us on Mastodon
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and
take care of that crazy world out there.
We all put a lot of work into it.
For Off the Hook, this has been
Rob T. Firefly. Good night.
Yellow key to choose a song.
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press the
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in time.
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Press the yellow key
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Press the yellow key
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