ASSANGE Case Study David Elan Morales Devry University ETHC445 Introduction During the 2016 election, information in the form of emails mainly was released by Wikileaks. They expose some of the perceived foul play in the DNC with regard to election fairness and transparency. These leaks were claimed to cause interference during the process and sway the people toward Donald Trump. The influence was said to stem from Russian using memes based on private documents that could have been fake or otherwise lacking integrity. The effect of reading the information and being exposed to memes that relied upon those emails for their subject matter has been said to have changed the public’s mind about the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. In this case the entity sharing the information is a journalist and not a person charged with the hacking or illegally acquiring the information, just disseminating it. Only some of the advertisements in question were actually Trump, Clinton or election related. The release of some private information was was unnecessary, however we know that many people have died due to negligence and questionable motivations stemming from the actual content of the email leaks themselves. Wikileaks In Brief Wikileaks is responsible for the publishing of many government and industry secrets, emails and other documents. It was started by Sunshine Press and went public with the transparency site called Wikileaks in 2007. Their web site states that they accept secret, historical or ethical material that is being censored. They do not accept rumor or publicly available information. Julian Assange is considered at least an adviser prior to it going public and now serves as its spokesperson. Assange is the only member that is known publicly but there is some speculation as to who is a member. Assange wrote about his personal philosophy that contradicts Case Study a secrecy based governance. They have released information on many things including US expenditures in Afghanistan, shed light on the killing of journalists and United States diplomatic cables. Wikileaks is not associated with Wikipedia despite the sharing of the “wiki” portion of the word. It is a jounalistic attempt to shed light on the inner workings of corporations and governments and has shared many documents of countries around the world also. Turkey at one time, banned access to Wikileaks due to the release of documents related to Turkey’s government. Many countries, but mostly the United States, have tried to shut it down. Facts During the 2016 election cycle Wikileaks released emails related to the DNC and the questionable nature of its operation at the time. Many important issues have come to light leading to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz for apparently misleading the public about its obligations and tilting the playing field in favor of Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. At the same time these documents were released detailing corrupt officials and their methods, innocent people’s information was also released including passport and credit card numbers. Bracy J. (2016, July 26) Although the sources of these leaks has not been revealed, it has been attributed to various sources including Russia and a democratic staff member named Seth Rich. The FBI was not allowed to look at the actual server and a forensic copy was provided by a third party IT company named CrowdStrike, as the DNC declined to release the server. Perez E, Diaz D. (2017) Some say that the server was really a cloud based system but Clinton was found to be maintaining it in her home. The only analysis of the attack comes from CrowdStrike which was hired by the DNC. This is the first time a private company was allowed to be the sole party to Case Study investigate a crime committed against the claimant. The claim that Russia hacked the election is also incorrect and a result of media hyperbole. Most of these emails were written and sent using Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures to insure authenticity and integrity. The element of non-repudiation is key in business and government in that it creates a web of trust that can be relied upon. They cannot deny the emails were sent, as they are, by the listed sender. As an example, Donna Brazile claimed an email was doctored by Russia that states she sometimes gets the questions in advance and gave the question to Hillary Clinton. It had been validated since a change in anything, even a comma or a space, invalidates the signature. Cybersecurity experts verified the hashes of many emails and found them to be authentic. Some emails do not contain this signature but the majority do. These unsigned emails have the potential to be false or misleading however, unlike most other media sources, Wikileaks has never had to retract anything The Clinton campaign has never refuted the veracity of the emails, instead, referring people to other sites that claim Russian hackers obtained them and then gave them to Assange. Carroll L. (2016) Another leak that was published by Wikileaks was the leaks surrounding Recep Erdogan and his government. The leaks are mainly embarrassing but some tie his son to ISIS’s oil industry. This country has been increasingly oppressive. They have surpassed China in the number of jailed journalists. This leak, and a few others, are problematic. They exposed the personal information of thousands if not millions of people. Wikileaks, in this case, dumped information without curation as Edward Snowden had done. Hackers left a tell-tale signature in Cyrillic which is the alphabet of the Russian language. The signature is held as evidence of Russian liability, however, they went to great lengths to cover their tracks, only to simply sign it with Russian a fingerprint. Many security experts called it a plant. The NSA expresses “moderate confidence” that the emails were hacked by Russian agents. Edward Snowden’s leaks gives us an idea what they mean; low, moderate, high or full confidence. Other than “full confidence” means no hard evidence. The timestamps of all the files end in even seconds, that is, when the files are transferred to a device that uses the File Allocation Table system (FAT), timestamps are rounded to the nearest even second. The meta data also includes the FAT data which futher indicates that the emails were transferred to a storage device like a thumb drive. The FAT features are not present in the emails related to John Podesta who was the Clinton campaign manager at the time. According to a former NSA official, William Binney, the data rate that the emails were transferred indicated direct access and not inter-continental transfer by network. He and others argue that DNC emails were leaked and not hacked. The data rate maxed at around 49 megabytes per second. Campbell D, Risen J. (2017) It is hard to get that that from one local server and your home. However you can easily attain those speeds using a thumb drive or other USB media. The CIA concluded that the attacks were meant to sure up Trump’s campaign due to the fact that “only democratic data was leaked.” The ODNI which oversees the entire 17 organizations that comprise the intelligence community said that was not proof of intent. Hosenball M, Landay J. (2016) The opportunity may not have arisen to hack Republican servers given the known insecurities of Clinton’s home server and Podesta’s poor choice of a password. Assange has said that he does have information on Trump but that “it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Hensch M. (2016) Russia and many other nations have been attacking our networks further back than 2014 which is when the former administration first started focusing on it. Facebook says that $100,000 was spent on Facebook and about $7,000 with Google for advertisements during the election. They targeted both conservatives and democrats alike, no doubt sowing discord but many of the advertisements were humorous and had more to do with cats than elections. Some attacked Trump with the famous catch line “not my president.” Others seemingly promoted Bernie Sanders. This seems to be just evidence that Russians are grifters when it comes to clicks and advertising revenue. Analysis To date no person has been recognized to be killed as a result of Wikileaks releases. That is not to say there are none, just that no documented killings exist. I would implore Wikileaks and other whistle-blowers to curate their releases better and insure that that does not happen in the future. Wikileaks could mean its own demise. Both parties in the US and others seek to prosecute Assange and he is now being held. The philosophies of Errol E. Harris and Immanuel Kant provide me with some guidance in this matter. The idea that government can choose among us who is really a journalist, deny our freedom of the press, which clearly goes against the constitution, is the very idea that former president J. F. Kennedy was talking about. Freedom of speech, and in this case of the press, are ideas that have become universal principles in our society. Government deciding to hide its mistakes and transgressions and attempt to deceive the population. The actions of these whistle-blowers have consequences. The release of these documents allowed some light to be shed on the inner workings of government. In the Turkish release, it could have caused deaths. It also gave us an insight as to how the United States thinks privately of other countries. Many of the leaks shed an unfavorable light on the inner workings of our military and corporate cultures and our actions during war. These actions unequivocally resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocents. It has shed light on bribery and corporate lobbies writing their own laws. Many crimes are hidden still but this insures that, in the absence of a sense of a god or divine oversight, that agency is always threatened by exposure. So much of governmental operations go unnoticed and crimes go unpunished in the current systems. The government is there to serve the interests of the people and not the interests of the government. At least as much is written in our Constitution. When the government authorizes the sale of your personal information, without permission, to corporations, it is profitable. When the people release information about government it is a crime. This was not the intent of the founding fathers nor does it provide the framework for a proper functioning government by the governed. An organization who’s goal is to govern will try to increase that power. Conclusion If you see a crime being committed by a friend do you say anything? Of course because wrong is wrong no matter who is the perpetrator. We forgive the little things of course but some things are meant to see the light of public opinion. We know that the DNC cheated and misrepresented itself among other things, so we can assume that other parts of government may run the same way, including the RNC. It is for this reason that a crime committed should not be covered up but rather exposed and the corruption dealt with. Corruption, if left unchecked, will flourish and this will harm us in the long run. If in the end the only people allowed “press freedom” are the entities that can pay exorbitant fees and are vetted by the corrupt, we will be in a truly sorry state. If I forgive a friend his misdeeds and he does to you the same, I have harmed you also. Our obligations to our families, friends, fellow humans and even ourselves require that we consider the actions of each individual, the effect it may have, and the best outcome for all. If the media feeds us propaganda from the outset, some of it paid research from shady sources, that are then published as fact, humanity lives in a fake world and is left to wonder why actions taken do not seem to work. Our moral ideals strive to make a foundation where we can take haven in the knowledge that men are corrupt power exacerbates the corruption but we recognize the tendency and take steps to contain its pervasiveness. These are framed in many constitutions and by-laws of the world and ours is a hybrid of idealism, pragmatism, and experience. We would consider another country, who was found to have run this course, a pseudo democracy or banana republic. We are held financially responsible due to the fact that the government increases the national debt every year, increasing the amount the government needs to extract from the populace. We are held accountable in the eyes of every other nation to a point also. When a country like the United States commits to policy it is often assumed by outsiders that we voted for these actions. We should know what we are paying for. In former president John F. Kennedy’s speech, delivered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 27, 1961, he said “The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.” J. Kennedy (1961) Here he describes our historical opposition and the resulting dangers of governing via secrecy. He makes it clear that the real results of secret governance is a tendency toward corruption. No one is held accountable for what is unknown. At this point I say that Wikileaks is in fact journalism. Greater was the scandals than any damage caused to the people by their leaks. At the same time greater responsibility should have been shown on their part as private information was given out and that is unacceptable. Though much of that information could be gleaned from other sources, it is irresponsible. We are held financially responsible for the decisions that are made every day whether fraudulent exploits abroad or secret programs here. References Bracy J. (2016, July 26) The International Association of Privacy Professionals https://iapp.org/news/a/ethics-and-the-privacy-harms-of-wikileaks/ Ethics and the Privacy Harms of WikiLeaks J. Kennedy (1961, April 27) The President and the Press: Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Retrieved from https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-newspaper-publishers-association-19610427 Carroll L. (2016, October 23) https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/oct/23/are-clinton-wikileaks-emails-doctored-or-are-they-/ Perez E, Diaz D. (2017, january 5) CNN Politics. FBI: DNC Rebuffed Request to Examine Computer Servers. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/05/politics/fbi-russia-hacking-dnc-crowdstrike/index.html Campbell D, Risen J. (2017, November 7)CIA Director Met Advocate of Disputed DNC Hack Theory — at Trump’s Request. Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2017/11/07/dnc-hack-trump-cia-director-william-binney-nsa/ Hosenball M, Landay J. (2016, December 12) Exclusive: Top U.S. spy agency has not embraced CIA assessment on Russia hacking – sources. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-intelligence/exclusive-top-u-s-spy-agency-has-not-embraced-cia-assessment-on-russia-hacking-sources-idUSKBN14204E Hensch M. (2016, August 26) Assange: WikiLeaks’s Trump info no worse than him https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/293453-assange-wikileaks-trump-info-no-worse-than-him FROM THE EDITOR: WIKILEAK JULIAN ASSANGE BUST IS A REELECTION GIFT TO NETANYAHU BECAUSE OF ASSANGE'S SUMMARY OF Charles Lindbergh Jr. 9/11/41 Des Moines SOS 911 Rev 3:9 speech: "... The greatest danger is their ownership and influence in motion pictures, press, radio, and governments." MARK THESE 911 SOS Revelation 3:9 DATES. THERE WILL BE MORE. 9/11/73 Declassified documents reveal the US PNAC government's role in the Pinochet coup & murder of thousands 9/11/91 George Bush Sr. New World Order Live Speech 9/11/00 PNAC CALLS FOR "A New Pearl Harbor" 9/11/01 Declassified documents reveal the US PNAC government's role in neo con coup & murder of thousands http://www.cdmag.us YOUTUBE ASSANGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ub03C4dOJo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx0xB5ZmHXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYdDp4mHDRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hyZktgMp4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFXZD_DSWqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhkETbKCwQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLCGb3RFRZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw8yf6Luwo4&t=464s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msTCOqaeg5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmLNmRovA1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFDdHMEpqeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9OrNJOfL0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wroVuMHhgK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBaodwvGXco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=774jK6F5vE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4kWVE2M2h8&t=232s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J6mMfGDdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10yIU7nFVLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWyFpSqxR94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r96RWyhDPS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMeyq7yC3AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq6OY-puJXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dwmsvm48QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtULMFJlo2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqJbzD1SM3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q3JYKyC6hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HMBjnPHOvw http://www.wmal.com/2019/04/12/listen-dr-jerome-corsi-responded-to-the-arrest-of-julian-assange https://www.therussophile.org/robert-steele-julian-assange-arrested-celebrating-100-top-wikileaks-on-hillary-clinton-violations-of-the-law-sufficient-to-put-her-in-jail-for-all-eternity.html https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/04/15/the-fake-charge-against-julian-assange-proves-that-the-us-government-has-no-integrity/ https://duckduckgo.com/?q=paul+craig+roberts+assange&t=hi&ia=videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot8foidxT5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FseknQXDIkg