That’s the Cables, Iraq War Logs & Guantanamo publications, back in 2010, around which most of the left side of US politics passionately defended Wikileaks, and Republicans wanted the head of its editor-in-chief on a platter. Are the latter just as hungry now to devour journalists? Here’s their chance, but will they make a move? Unsurprisingly, that looks like a negative. Today @AssangeLegal reported that the Department of Justice filed its opposition to the motion by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (@rcfp) to unseal the Assange Indictment.

Why the charge is about the Manning era is because it was filed in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, and bears the signature of the officer associated with the Grand Jury investigation into that case, G. Zachary Terwilliger. We’ve known about it since February 2011, when the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age reported that in one internal email sent in January 2011 a senior Stratfor exec writes: “We have a sealed indictment on Assange”. In response, the Australian QC, Julian Burnside sent the following request for information and assistance to the Australian Attorney General.

As for the Mueller indictments relating to the 2016 elections & ‘Russiagate’, as Charlie Savage in the New York Times advises, they were issued from the District of Columbia. Nothing related would be filed in a different jurisdiction, least of all collusion with those parties already indicted.

The strategy of Hillary Clinton and the DNC has been to portray Wikileaks as a partisan organisation, stirring up a lot of anger in Trump haters around the world. The democrats are no doubt happy to have their supporters think the charges relate to the Mueller investigation or the DNC lawsuit. And equally so, when Trump supporters suggest he owes Assange one for helping him win the election, since that supports their case against both. It is most unlikely charges will be brought in relation to the publication of DNC or Clinton emails. The most significant obstacle is the First Amendment. Behind that, the fact that this material was never classified as state secrets.

President Trump has no reason to celebrate or be grateful to Julian Assange in respect of Manning’s revelations through Wikileaks. In fact he called for Julian’s assassination when in 2010, their publications exposed war crimes during the Bush administration. Interestingly for both sides of politics, is that Colin Powell was not the only one to lie to the American people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So did Robert Mueller.

As they come to realise that this is a First Amendment issue, the Fourth Estate in the US is getting nervous. The records from the Eastern District Court of Virginia show that the line of investigation in relation to Assange, was into conspiracy to commit espionage. To convict Assange, the conspiracy had to be with someone charged with espionage, as Manning was. However, as Joe Lauria points out to Chris Hedges in a recent assessment of the situation, there is legislation in the Espionage Act of 1917 to charge any unauthorised person of state secrets, such as an investigative journalist.

That clause has never been used to date to convict a journalist. Indeed conflating the notion of conspiracy with a journalist’s process of gathering information would cripple the Fourth Estate’s freedom to publish truthful information in the public interest. It would deny the rights of the First Amendment. Daniel Ellsberg and James Goodale  (the First Amendment lawyer for the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case)  have both warned, if Assange goes down on this charge, the First Amendment goes with him.

Will either the Trump or Clinton camps protect the First Amendment? I think not. On December 31st 2011, the long-term Propaganda Act was repealed by President Obama in the amendments made to the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), making propaganda permitted again under law. This was an expedient and sweeping move to control the narrative,; initiated by the Democrats, but cozy for all. As long as the government of the day owned the MSN, it would work. That is, if Wikileaks could be effectively silenced.

The climate today is such that the President of the United States (POTUS) is even attacking MSN journalists and calling them the enemy of the people. He advises that they ignore the brutal murder of one of their own, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The most reliable left-wing media that is critical of the DNC narrative and hosts CIA veteran officials like William Binney – whose forensic team proved there was no hacking of DNC servers – that media is being disappeared down Google search lists by Silicon Valley, who are largely in the pocket of the DNC. That is why the hacking scenario is still being taken as a given by the MSN and consequently, most of the public.

But let’s not forget the tactics of Trump’s campaign team, Cambridge Analytica, to identify and target the most vulnerable citizens (in multiple countries) with mendacious propaganda in order to get their vote. Let’s remember how fair comment between friends about John McCain was being deleted before our very eyes on social media. The battle for control of the narrative is deeply pervasive. Their ‘givens’ can become our givens, when repeated often enough. Sound familiar?

Trump could intervene, and be considered by many a hero for protecting the Constitution, but that seems as unlikely as the pig flying. What both sides of politics have been conducting over the last 8 years is a bipartisan war on whistle-blowers (in the case of Assange, across multiple countries) and intensifying surveillance on public servants (insider threats). This amounts to taking back control of the historical record.

The worst response ‘we the people’ can have, is to help either camp chip away at the freedom and safety of the Fourth Estate, or journalism’s fundamental ethic of impartiality. If a precedent is set with one journalist for the handling of state secrets – and in the case of Assange, a foreign national who has never worked or published in the US – every journalist in the world who handles (never mind publishes) US state secrets becomes vulnerable to the same prosecution.

The US should be very careful about making such a move against a foreign journalist. Not that the Australian government has any concerns in the case of Assange, where bipartisan smear and lies have been consistent across six administrations. The point is that if other ‘civilised’ countries follow suit and start hunting down journalists, whatever their nationality or jurisdiction of publication, trouble may soon arise for US foreign correspondents who regularly violate foreign secrecy laws, with the greatest threat to their freedom and safety coming from abroad. Such was the case for Khashoggi. If President Trump wants to avoid going down that dangerous road, he must protect the First Amendment; not any journalist in particular. All of them.

Cambridge Analytica: how big data-assisted behavioural micro-targeting facilitated the Trump & Brexit victories

Speaking at a Sydney event last month, Cathy Vogan, founder of thing2thing.com and author of ‘The Wikileaks Tapes’, offered a comprehensive view of how the use of behavioural micro-targeting, big data and psychometrics by Cambridge Analytica got Donald Trump elected and led to a vote for Brexit.

Vogan opened by addressing some of the claims made by Hillary Clinton in a 2017 interview on Australia’s ABC TV, giving Julian Assange the right of response to Clinton’s question: “Why doesn’t Wikileaks ever publish anything about Russia?”. Assange’s answer was: “Wikileaks has published over 800,000 documents about Russia, most of them critical”. The ABC journalist had left the question hanging in the air.

Clinton suggested that Wikileaks had been involved in the spread of “awful stories… the worst of which was ‘Pizzagate’”. Vogan cross-cut to John Pilger and Assange discussing the content of the Podesta emails: weapons deals that ended in arming ISIS, pay-for-play with dictators via the Clinton Foundation and the death of tens of thousands of Lybians, which she suggested would help her presidential campaign.

Vogan’s take on the 2016 US elections would not involve Russians or Wikileaks, but perception management by what Slavoj Žižek refers to as a “cognitive-industrial-complex.

There were claims by Micah Lee in ‘The Intercept’ of a ‘Nazi-Soviet Pact’ moment between Assange and the Trump campaign. When Trump Jr made his Twitter communications public, it appeared someone with access to the Wikileaks Twitter handle had communicated with him. Lee, assuming for us that it was the editor-in-chief, wrote:

“An organisation with a sterling reputation for providing the public with accurate information about secret government and corporate activities was used to launder conspiracy theories that helped elect a racist, sexual predator president of the United States.”

Vogan’s exposé on Cambridge Analytica concluded on a similar note. An audience member at their show in Germany pointed out to the CEO, Alexander Nix, that there is no glory in assisting a “misogynist buffoon into power… who is fucking up our lives” [audience cheers].

There was no mention of Pizzagate in the Trump Jr DMs, but the Intercept amplified the accusation Clinton made on ABC Australia, that Wikileaks’ co-orchestrated the spread of “preposterous conspiracy theories”. Lee’s article proved more effective than the Russian narrative in deflecting attention away from the content of Podesta’s emails, since it damaged trust in the organisation, rendered supporters vulnerable to propaganda and turned some into enemies.

He said no, he forgets and I'm saying nothing...

“the hacked emails were used to reverse-engineer preposterous conspiracy theories, like the imaginary pedophilia scandal called Pizzagate”

Hacked means extracted via the internet. Former NSA technical director, William Binney, and his team from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have interpreted the forensic evidence available. They reported that the rate of transfer of the data could only have been on to a USB stick. That suggested the files were copied in-house, not hacked. Ignoring conflicting evidence, Lee adhered to the DNC’s hacking narrative and Clinton’s claim that there was nothing incriminating in the Podesta emails. He also aroused suspicion of ulterior motive behind their release, the editor-in-chief’s alleged partisan allegiance.

The idea of the truth-teller in league with a serial liar was too much for some to assimilate with their values and those of the Wikileaks-inspired transparency movement. In the eyes of many Wikileaks supporters, political chicanery and opportunism was perceived in the (alleged) machiavellian tactics employed by Assange in his support for Trump’s ascendency to the White House. It was sadly reminiscent for them of the cynical act of betrayal in Stalin’s signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact (“The Devil’s Alliance”) in 1939, which had a demoralising effect and also broke up the “movement” of anti-fascist Popular Fronts.

Barrett Brown, one of Wikileaks most heroic and prominent allies, who went to jail for 4 years for co-ordinating the supply of material to Wikileaks, compared their communications with the Trump campaign advisor, to those that preceded the taking over of Poland. He was done with the movement; but there were still people saying: “Why Everyone Should Do What WikiLeaks Did”, offering a broader perspective on the organisation’s activities and a different angle on the Trump Jr DMs.

The Intercept had made a point about Wikileaks ‘sleeping with dogs’, and damaging their support base, but none of this pointed to Russia, or towards the real problem of ‘What Happened’ to two democracies. Oxford & Washington university studies do; Tim Berners Lee does; and so do pending legal proceedings against Cambridge Analytica.

In the longer term, it may not be about who’s supporting whom; or financial corruption; or excess spending – as the current thrusts of Transatlantic political and legal enquiry would suggest. Money issues are simply the most viable way in at the moment. But the freshly-launched British Electoral Commission enquiry, into excessive Leave EU campaign spending and collaboration between multiple campaigns, can at best, only point to everyone spending their money in the same shop. They are not tackling the more serious problem of what that shop is selling.

The case of Professor David Caroll vs Cambridge Analytica takes us much closer to the heart of the problem that ‘we the people’ now have. It concerns an individual’s privacy, and promises to be a landmark case, if sufficiently funded.

Professor David Carroll vs Cambridge Analytica (via SCL parent company)

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Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web, is worried that the democratic platform he gifted humanity with is failing. He lashes out at Facebook & Twitter for facilitating the spread of misinformation and condemns the trafficking of “weaponised AI propaganda”. The term comes from Berit Anderson’s “The Rise of Weaponised AI Propaganda’, which Vogan cites in her exposé of Cambridge Analytica:

“By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion. Many of these technologies have been used individually to some effect before, but together they make up a nearly impenetrable voter manipulation machine that is quickly becoming the new deciding factor in elections around the world.”

The use of armies of bots has been proven, by Oxford University researchers into computational propaganda, to have had a profound effect in setting the agenda for political debate during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. In fact it “throttled out” the voice of humans and gave such a false sense of source diversity and consensus, they largely followed its lead. Of particular interest in that study, is that the technology is open to anyone. There was a chain reaction to the bots among ordinary citizens.

“… democratisation of online propaganda is also an especially salient issue. While government departments, academics, and journalists continue to search for evidence that campaigns used these means to manipulate public opinion, they tend to ignore the fact that anyone can launch a bot or spread fake news online. It was these citizen-built bots that probably accounted for the largest spread of propaganda, false information, and political attacks during the 2016 election.”

Indeed the ‘hive-mind’ has become The Wild West, and The Law has not yet ridden into town. The Oxford study revealed more inter-connectedness between the Trump campaign and its citizen-generated bot networks, than with those associated with the Clinton campaign. Maybe that was because so many DNC supporters preferred to “Feel the Bern”, and the party was divided – or maybe they were more scrupulous. The study shows, in any case, that citizen recruitment in the spread of false information and propaganda is the principle catalyst for political chaos in the UK and the US.

A foreign power, and Wikileaks, may or may not have influenced the outcomes of the US elections, but domestic armies of bots and bot-meisters did much more so. To focus so much on foreign influence, we risk to assume that anything local is fair game, even when technology is used by Everyman to disinform and persuade. Theoretically, we can all play, but it is no longer an even playing field when humans are being driven or drowned out by armies of propaganda bots. Tim Berners Lee also believes that highly-funded dark political messaging threatens democracy and net neutrality:

“We have these dark ads that target and manipulate me and then vanish because I can’t bookmark them. This is not democracy – this is putting who gets selected into the hands of the most manipulative companies out there,”

Cambridge Analytica boasts the use of ‘dark strategy’ for the Trump campaign – that practice of dividing the political offer on the basis of information obtained about the target’s personality type. On their advice, the Leave EU campaigns did the same, sending a billion psychologically tailored messages to the British public. Both were were focusing on those who were undecided about their vote, and thus ‘persuadable’.

The Russian troll influence has been exposed in the US, via targeted social media advertising – for a very nominal sum of money. Their targeting techniques are being exposed as shocking, but as if they apply uniquely within the Russian context. The elephant in the room is that the Trump and Brexit campaigns spent millions using the same techniques! Figure it out. Is it not our own back yards that been occupied, and that are sorely in need weeding?

Dark Strategy on Facebook - the dividing of the political offer

Considering that the company who persuaded impressionable people to vote Trump and Leave EU, themselves claim to have a 25 year record of performing similar psychological operations on populations for governments around the world, I suggest that ‘What Happened’ in the US and UK is more akin to a military coup, primarily funded by the playful and principled western oligarch – Robert Mercer, and that his ‘MI6 for Hire’ people at SCL need to be stopped, before they break any more democracies.

What we should be examining is the abuse of power, in locating and propagandising impressionable people, and those who could be identified as ignorant of politics. This would have made targets of the BeLeave campaign, who were very young, especially vulnerable to manipulation.

One is suddenly reminded of Assange’s words in 2013, during his Australian Wikileaks Party campaign speech:

“When all of the communications – heart-felt – the inner core of our life – communications between boyfriends and girlfriends – between husbands and wives, sons and daughters – between business partners – even between bureaucracies and states – when all of those communications are swept up, hoovered up, into a vast collection apparatus – indexed and stored for all time – available only to a select few – then we are in a situation where we have a tank on the street of the inner core of our lives – a soldier under the bed, listening…”

It’s not sure Assange anticipated what the “select few” would say back to the masses, after the indexing of that vast collection was complete. He knows now.