The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. - 4th Amendment to the US Constitution
The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that 'each man's home is his castle', secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law. - Cornell Law School
The Fourth Amendment applies to the search and seizure of electronic devices. - Cornell Law School
Oh the irony. Donald Trump is now complaining about abuses of the 4th in the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago Shangri-La, but look what he and his minion Pompeo did to Assange and his visitors in London - where US law, for US citizens, still applies and protects - even in foreign embassies.
He declared it to be true
Mike Pompeo declared it to be true.
Mike Pompeo wasn't offering an assessment or an opinion. He declared it. His statements weren't for his own benefit. His intention was to instill behaviour - to command it. Behaviour of the unwashed. The only permitted way to regard WikiLeaks.
Almost like when Corn Pop's buddy leans into the microphones and whispers menacingly "the vaccines are safe!"
Most people can't be brainwashed like that anymore. Not for now. They've seen through too many lies. But were things like that back in 2017?
Things back in 1971
Julian Paul Assange had a good childhood, but he was always on the move. His mother kept trying to stay one step, one town, ahead of a crazy musician who was part of an infamous cult. Julian's schools were the public libraries and he had to learn himself to sort the wheat from the chaff on the bookshelves. He didn't do too shabby.
Julian's mother Christine gave him a hobby computer early on. He didn't do too shabby there either. This was still pre-WWW times of course. Things like DECnet were all the rage. Julian found he had a knack for seeing logical gaps in human thinking when designing computer security systems and computer networks. Imagine that.
Julian was never a hacker. He wasn't your two-bit garden variety of the pimply-faced youth who gets a kick out of destroying stuff. Julian preferred creating things. And he found he had a passion for the truth.
Rubberhose
Julian created something called Rubberhose, along with its own mythology.
Rubberhose is - and no over-exaggerations here - a devilishly ingenious way to format computer diskettes to safeguard underground railroads, escape routes for whistleblowers and other truth-tellers. No one on a Rubberhose underground escape route can ever know more than they absolutely need.
The Rubberhose idea went on to inspire many other security products.
Suburbia
Julian created Suburbia, Australia's first-ever ISP, Internet Service Provider, Internet hosting company, a service still online to this day and still offering free Internet access for non-commercial use, this in a country infamous for bleeding customers dry.
https://suburbia.com.au (https://suburbia.net.au, https://suburbia.org.au)
Leaks
Julian's perhaps most brilliant and certainly most notable invention was LEAKS, created in 2004 and rechristened in 2006 as WIKILEAKS. The original idea had been to make a wiki but that was soon abandoned.
Part if not most of the brilliance of disruptive technologies, or technologies that fundamentally change our world, is the insight of the inventor to be able to gather disparate existing technologies and join them together to produce something unique.
Julian gathered together increased bandwidth, increased storage capacity, and the fruits of the work of the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Monterey and abracadabra he had WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks is disruptive, to say the least. No matter what happens to Julian Assange, WikiLeaks is a concept - a technology - that will never go away. Others might not be able to use it as well - most have utterly failed so far - but the technology is out there now and can't be taken away, even if various state actors keep desperately trying.
The work at the NRL was crucial for the WikiLeaks concept. The CIA needed a way to poke at the computers of foreign powers without being detected. The NRL came up with "Tor", short for "The Onion Router", today more commonly known as "The Dark Web".
To elucidate:
The transmitter of a television signal cannot, solely through the transmission itself, determine if anyone is receiving that signal or who in such case is receiving. But the opposite applies to Internet communications and the World Wide Web (WWW). When you surf to a web page, it's you personally who are asking for that page, and the remote computer hosting that page has to know who you are so it can send it back to you.
So your cover's blown. But Tor to the rescue.
Using a special protocol - the "onion" protocol - Tor is able to connect to other computers also using the protocol. And, after a sufficient number of intermediary hops, your initial request arrives, finally asking for the web page you want. Each communication between hops is encrypted its own way. The remote server can't know where the page request actually came from. In a way reminiscent of - but not otherwise connected to - Rubberhose, no node, as a hop is called in this context, can see beyond the adjacent nodes in front or in back.
Anonymity is all but guaranteed.
But at this point the fun's only beginning. For computers connected to the Tor network can establish what's known as hidden services, that's to say something that looks like an ordinary web page but doesn't act like one. Using the file extension "onion" and often with lugubriously long gobbledegook-type file names, these services, which exist only on the Dark Web, enjoy anonymity. They can't be traced either. It's likely that a great deal of WikiLeaks collaborative work, involving people around the globe, is conducted in this fashion, with Tor hidden services.
And then the all-important WikiLeaks submission system. For without source protection you have nothing. If you notice, the portal to the WikiLeaks submission system is found on each and every page of the WikiLeaks website, for a very good reason: so that "men-in-the-middle" can't figure out who is accessing the WikiLeaks submission hidden service - with millions of site visitor IPs to rake through, it's like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. Add to that Julian's trick of routing traffic through jurisdictions where anonymity is protected by law and you have a near-invincible system.
There you'll find the complete Tor link you actually need - quite a lot to commit to memory!
http://ibfckmpsmylhbfovflajicjgldsqpc75k5w454irzwlh7qifgglncbad.onion
So that's where you make an anonymous submission. The full electronic equivalent of the classic "brown envelope". Traditionally not marked with a sender address. Delivered to a news reporter you trust.
[Some people are under the impression that the WikiLeaks system failed Private Manning. Not so: Manning blurted his secret to a real bad egg, Adrian Lamo, who was already under control of the FBI.]
Scientific Computing & Modern Journalism
How many news sites are all too rife with the phrase "according to sources"? How tired are you of seeing that all the time?
The world - we the people - are sick and tired of other people presuming to know better than we do, to know what's good for us, to know what we should be told and what we should not be told. Show us the documents, is what people are thinking today. We the people will decide what's relevant and true - not some overpaid artefact in a cushy swivel chair.
The "second source" concept, the cornerstone of the "old journalism", is an eminently flawed concept anyway, as sources can still conspire. You really only need sources if the actual documents are not accessible or are being withheld. If you have the documents at hand, you don't need further sources.
Vetting documents is a black art. It takes a special skillset. See this excellent TED Talk with TED founder Chris Anderson and Julian Assange for one novel approach.
Flawless Track Record
No matter how they do it, WikiLeaks maintains, to this day, a 100% track record. Despite having released hundreds of millions of documents. They've never had to retract anything they've ever published. Not once. Not ever. That's something the MSM will never hope to come close to.
[To vet the Collateral Murder video, WikiLeaks associates Kristinn Hrafnsson and Inge Ingesson traveled to Baghdad to visit with the relatives of the victims. Nothing's taken for granted.]
Hardly an hour goes by without an MSM retraction. But WikiLeaks, despite their formidable output over the years, have never needed to retract.
That's the black art of document-vetting.
The Pledge
WikiLeaks doesn't have reporters. WikiLeaks doesn't send people out in search of a story. WikiLeaks doesn't have "action news" or a shapely "weather girl". WikiLeaks won't tell you it's going to be 72 and sunny in Pasadena for the weekend.
WikiLeaks collects. People submit documents to them. Ordinarily it's a "first in" approach. WikiLeaks pledges to publish your documents - and more - if they meet certain basic criteria.
[Note: The releases of 2010 were not "first in". Then-associate Daniel Berg from Germany had been keen on publishing a "first in" document that showed that German companies were using small plastic pellets in their ketchup. But Julian said "I have two wars I want to stop".]
WikiLeaks doesn't want something that's already published elsewhere. The documents should be in the public interest and not lead to anyone's harm. (WikiLeaks will perform "harm minimisation" to protect sources and innocents.) And the documents must of course be vetted.
WikiLeaks will in turn pledge, if your documents are published, a "maximum impact". And it's here that Julian Assange himself really excels. If anyone remembers how he had the Fools of Fleet Street jumping over each other in 2010, trying to be first to the finish line with another sensation: Julian's good at that. Rusbridger tries to play coy? Julian threatens with Rupert Murdoch. And so forth.
There is no ideology to WikiLeaks, political or otherwise, beyond the straightforward ambition to let people see what's really going on in their world, what has been hidden from them. WikiLeaks technologies enable and protect whistleblowers so they don't get caught, all to fight corruption. It's hard to get nobler than that.
So it's no wonder that Julian Assange has won every award imaginable, except for the Nobel Peace Prize (although he's been frequently nominated over the years).
Yet there are some - unsurprisingly it's often amongst the intellectually ungifted - who don't understand the WikiLeaks concept. People like Sean Hannity, for example.
Sean was sent by Fox to interview Julian in the Ecuadorean embassy. He was forced to begin by profusely apologising for his past behaviour. For in Sean Hannity's simplistic universe, if you publish something that's negative about somebody, you have to be for that somebody's opponent. Or something like that. In Sean Hannity's world:
WikiLeaks publishes something that makes George Bush look bad --> WikiLeaks is an enemy of the US
WikiLeaks publishes something that makes Hillary look bad --> WikiLeaks is my friend
The WikiLeaks concept: it's so simple. Yet Sean Hannity can't seem to get it.
Neither can Mike Pompeo.
Vault 7
He declared it to be true.
He didn't offer it as an opinion. He declared it.
Michael Richard Pompeo, born 30 December 1963, is nominated by Donald Trump to be head of the CIA on 23 January 2017, one week after Trump's inauguration. WikiLeaks begins the "Vault 7" releases two weeks later, on 7 March.
Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
Assange gutted the CIA. And this happened on Mike Pompeo's watch. And it was an unmitigated embarrassment, to say the least. Pompeo was new to the job, but it was his responsibility. "The CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal." That really stings. Pompeo had this to say a month later.
It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is - a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service.
This all ties in, magnificently enough, with the "Russia Russia Russia!" hoax that's since been debunked.
So it's ironic, to say the least, that, whilst one debunks the Russia hoax with one hand, one continues to feed on it with the other.
Here's Bill Hemmer with Catherine Herridge.
You can see quite clearly that Mike's declaring a war, not saying something he necessarily believes. If he did, you'd see the sincerity and even wrath in him. But there's nothing here to indicate anything of the sort. WikiLeaks must be taken out of the way, not because WikiLeaks is a hostile actor, but because WikiLeaks represents a threat - and not a threat to the CIA itself, only to the bad actors within it. They're the ones disparaging the CIA - not WikiLeaks.
Finally, it's not WikiLeaks digging up the dirt on bad actors - it's their own colleagues at the agency. The whistleblowers. Declaring WikiLeaks a hostile service is tantamount to declaring the brown envelope a hostile service.
That speech by Mike Pompeo signaled the new War on WikiLeaks 2.0. That's when things really intensified. When Mike Pence made overtures with Ecuador's new leader, dangling treats like getting Big Oil to finally compensate the country for damages done. And, of course, ultimately getting Assange kicked out of his asylum embassy - something unheard of, something that hardly happens every day.
Assange now languishes in a British prison, not accused of any crime, not even suspected of one. The "insinuations" against him in Sweden have finally been dropped, so he's free as a bird, or he should be.
During that long time when he was confined to those cramped quarters at 3, Hans Crescent, literally around the corner from Harrods, Assange had quite a lot of visitors. Lady Gaga. Noam Chomsky. Pamela Anderson, again and again, so often that the word on the street was that the two of them must be an item.
Julian's guests at the EC embassy: the list is long. And egregious. And every time someone would come to visit, they'd have to deposit their computer hardware and cellphones with reception. Quite the hassle, one might think, but it was a bit of a hassle and no more. After all, there never was a problem getting one's toys back on departure, was there? No one suspected...
Not known to anyone at the time, the government of Ecuador had contracted with the Spanish firm UC Global for additional security at their London embassy. And the head of UC Global, a gent with the ironic name "Morales", had been to Las Vegas and been in contact there with the CIA.
Pompeo’s CIA wanted Morales to spy on Julian Assange and his visitors.
Pompeo and the 4th
Most of this has been known for some time now. What's not been considered up to now is what happened to those computers and phones left in the embassy reception. It turns out that UC Global took the time and effort to image them all. So, regarding citizens of the US, this imaging was in violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.
And that's the subject of a new lawsuit brought before Mike Pompeo himself. For, again, this is something that happened on his watch. Mike Pompeo has evidently entertained the idea of having Julian Assange assassinated, but that's only words, so far. As far as the violations perpetrated against US citizens in the EC embassy in London, those are real. They're actions. They're criminal offences under US law.
It's rare that a press conference or press release gets as much media attention as this one did. Yes, Assange still generates headlines, but even so. The presser for this lawsuit was hosted by Consortium News and coproduced by our own media wizard Trevor FitzGibbon. An invite was sent out to a Zoom meeting, and the reporters who attended then went back to their desks and submitted their articles.
Saying the event got huge attention would be something of an understatement. How long the media buzz will continue is another thing, but for 48 hours it was there - in spades.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/14/watch-assange-attorneys-suing-mike-pompeo/
"I love WikiLeaks!"
"I love WikiLeaks!" So said Donald Trump hundreds of times on the 2016 campaign trail. Sure you do, Donald.
WikiLeaks is considered to be a major contributing factor to Trump's 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. By Trump himself. Once again, WikiLeaks exposed corruption, this time within the HRC-owned Democratic Party, which led Bernie Sanders supporters to flock to Trump in droves.
Which is why it's strange that the Donald should turn so. Which in turn is why even his supporters are starting to wonder - already back in 2017.
Comments from the Hemmer clip:
I'm a die-shard Trump supporter, even campaigned door to door for him, but he needs to shut Pompeo down or remove him - Julian Assange is a HERO!!!
You guys need to recognize something important... the people support Assange. We'll likely defend him too. It's not smart to go after WikiLeaks.
Wikileaks isn't the issue at all. CIA incompetence is the issue. Assange reached out to help you fix it, but oh no, can't do that, can we?
This better be a ploy to get Assange out of prison and to be FREED... or I will be asking for Pompeo's label to be that of a traitor against the interests of the United States of America.
Donald Trump, this is why your supporters are starting to get upset.
Whether this sentiment still holds, or whether the playing field has changed yet again, remains to be seen. But one thing seems certain.
Mike Pompeo - not the CIA and not Mike Pompeo as head of the CIA but Mike Pompeo the person, Mike Pompeo the private citizen - is heading to court.