Now that Julian Assange has been arrested in London after seven years in exile at the Ecuadorian embassy, many are wondering if anything will happen with the “dead man’s switch” that Assange and WikiLeaks have talked about in the past.
The arrest happened shortly after Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno withdrew Assange’s asylum.
Assange is accused of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer, related to Chelsea Manning’s release of classified data in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Assange now faces extradition to the United States, but his lawyer has vowed to fight extradition, AP reported.
When Assange appeared in Westminster Magistrate’s Court, District Judge Michael Snow found him guilty of breaking his bail conditions, saying that Assange was a “narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests.”
Assange’s next court appearance will be May 2 via a prison video-link, where he will face an extradition hearing. Another extradition hearing is scheduled for June 12.
Julian Paul Assange, born in Queensland, Australia, in 1971, is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and images that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org.
Since it went online, the site has published an huge catalogue of secret material. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization.
It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange is the operation’s prime organizer, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does.
At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time.
Key members are known only by initials even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services.
The secretiveness stems from the belief that a intelligence operation run by ordinary people, with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious enemies.
What’s still unclear at this time is, now that he has been arrested, what might happen with the dead man’s switch that Assange has talked about in the past?
Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself.
So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging.
A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country. The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.
Assange typically tells would-be litigants to stick it.
In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed.
Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”
Assange has a cyber-security analyst’s concern about computer vulnerability, and habitually takes precautions to frustrate eavesdroppers.
When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the right technical savvy could explore.
Assange established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
So we are not dealing with some amateur here.
By 2015 WikiLeaks had published more than 10 million documents. The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity, but it was only after it began publishing the aforementioned documents supplied by Chelsea Manning that Wikileaks became a household name.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is a transgender United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly three-quarters of a million classified military and diplomatic documents. Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years imprisonment.
She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama.
Manning has been jailed since March 8, 2019 for her continued refusal to testify before a grand jury against Julian Assange.
Coincidence? I think not.
Manning’s reasoning for not testifying was that she was morally against this tactic meant to force her to testify.
“I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech,” Manning said to the grand jury as she was detained.
Manning’s lawyer stated that since Assange was arrested due to publishing the material Manning provided, the evidence provided would be a duplication of evidence she could provide and that the grand jury should no longer require a testimony from Manning. They argue that Manning’s continued detention is intended to coerce her testimony.
As I previously stated, Manning served seven years in jail from 2010 to 2017, and if Assange is convicted, she’ll face no new charges.
However, Manning can legally be detained for another 17 months until the federal grand jury investigating Assange is dismissed.
The Manning material included a video (April 2010) which showed US soldiers shooting dead 18 people from a helicopter in Iraq, the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).
Opinions of Assange at this time were divided. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described his activities as “illegal,” but the police said that he had broken no Australian law.
US Vice President Joe Biden and others called him a “terrorist.” Some called for his assassination or execution.
However, worldwide, Assange has gained tremendous support.
In 2010 he received the Sam Adams Award, which Assange accepted in October.
The Sam Adams Award is given annually to an intelligence professional who has taken a stand for integrity and ethics. The Award is given by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a group of retired CIA officers.
He later won the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice, previously awarded to only three people—Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhist spiritual leader Daisaku Ikeda.
So now to the issue at hand.
Why, since the arrest of Assange, have we heard nothing further from the media?
Nothing on national evening news.
Nothing on the cable news networks.
Nothing from printed media.
Nothing from social media.
Why?
What are they afraid of? The guy is locked up.
Well, here is what I think. Julian Assange is a totally equal opportunity activist.
He could care less who he upsets with his operation.
Don’t believe me?
WikiLeaks has released numerous insurance files as a type of “deadman’s switch.”
Downloaders get an encryption key, but they need a second one before they can actually unlock the file. The insurance files operate as a type of backup. If anything happens to WikiLeaks, the second key is released, giving everyone access to the file, according to comments WikiLeaks and Assange have made in the past.
A file that is genuinely a dead man’s switch is typically labeled “insurance” in a WikiLeaks tweet. These need the second decryption key to open. That decryption key is the dead man’s switch that people are waiting on.
So what might they be afraid of? Here is a sample of what I found on a recent post claiming to list the categories and all the surrounding documents released in the dead man files.
This is just a sampling. There are literally thousands of documents.
Here we go:
US Military Equipment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine.
Hillary Clinton E-mails (Collen Powell & Huma Abadene)
Budapest Gay Rights Riot
Aryan Nation Hotmail
Wikileaks Spy files (need second code)
Gitmo
Collateral Murder
Saudi Government Tech
US Catholic Hospitals
Google
US Minutemen Tech Manuals
US Laser Range Finder
Army Playbook, Rules of Engagement, Iraq
US Nuclear Sites
British Waterways Targets
Mass Murder in Mexico
American Casinos
Airline Pilot Scab list
Al Quaeda
Mormons
Scientology
Dow Chemical
Barnes and Noble
Homeland Security Threat Overview
Fat Cats of Africa
Sarah Palin
Angela Merkel
The Peru Oil Industry
..and then of course files on various locations around the world, including Egypt, Iran, Spain, Holland, China, Kenya, Israel, India, Korea, Iceland, Kosovo, Bolivia, and Peru.
So there you have it folks. What triggered my topic this week wasn’t all the noise, but rather, the silence.
Is the national, and for that matter, worldwide media, sitting on its hands for fear of triggering the dead man switch planted by Julian Assange?
In arresting him and extraditing him to the US, have we grabbed a tiger by the tail or should we have left him be?