I'm surprised Julian Assange doesn’t have a kill switch in place, where sensitive info which has been held up to this point will be released upon his death or conviction. At least none that we know of.
I wonder if this could backfire. With the "normal" or old guard politicians, this could have been a credible threat. Nobody wanted a scandal. With the new breed, scandals are just life.
A kill switch is different than a dead man's switch; the former is a switch to stop the entirety of a process, and the latter is one that is activated when the human operator is incapacitated.
Because reports have him receiving information either directly or indirectly from the Russian government. And they have access to all sorts of sensitive information.
John Podesta and Hillary Clinton's emails allegedly found its way to Wikileaks through this path.
Correct. Former Ambassador Craig Murray has stated that a disgruntled DNC employee, unhappy with the treatment of Sanders, personally gave him the emails in Washington and he couriered the emails to his friend Assange who then published them.
And as has been pointed out the Podesta emails were taken through a phishing email which was sent to thousands of people (so it wasn't spear phishing) and which he foolishly fell for.
Murray was citing the findings of a forensics team comprised of veteran members of the intelligence community.
There's two aspects to the time stamps. One is that based on the time stamps, the emails were all copied on Nov 7 2016 at rates of up to 49.1 megabytes per second.* This is fairly high for internet transfers. The other aspect is that the last modified timestamps of all emails and attachments were quantized to a 2 second granularity. This means this was not a hacked internet server to server transfer but was a copy to an intermediary drive that was formatted with the old FAT format.
The forensics show it wasn't a hack. No one competent in security or forensics would honestly come to that conclusion based on what is known. When coupled with Murray's testimony that he personally couriered the emails from a park near American University in DC back to Assange himself, it's curious Murray has not been subpoenaed to name the leaker, also it's curious the FBI had no interest in inspecting the DNC servers or drives.
* The wikipedia article deceptively misrepresents this as 49.1 megabits per second. Both its own sources explicitly say megabytes, and this is confirmable by examining the original data, which anyone competent can easily do themselves if they have doubts.
It's disappointing that even the Hackernews crowd, which is generally more skeptical and intelligent than the general population, has fallen victim to Russiagate hysterics. I get that Donald Trump is vile to many, but that's a sad excuse to let critical thinking go out the window.
The problem is, the chaos and shockwave caused by such an event would a) only induce further chaos as a response, and b) likely be interpreted as an attack. Considering the fairness and justice of current proceedings, the response would not only likely be ugly, it would set a precedent difficult to answer. Many possibilities there.
While I don't know, I would be very surprised if Wikileaks itself wasn't sitting on more than enough information to create such a dent. It seems things are effectively at a cross between stalemate and a Mexican standoff. Poor health is better than death, I guess?
It's very sad. If I was told all the details about the sequence of events, but not told which countries were behind the subsequent response, treatment and current conditions, I would not correctly guess on the first try, and probably not the second, or the third...
And indeed he does. Some time ago Wikileaks/Assange distributed an encrypted insurance file. The torrent is about 90GB: https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/2016-06-03_insurance.aes2...
There was actually multiple versions fo this file, each larger than the previous one. This is the most recent version afaik.
It's likely this particular dead man's switch is actually trusted people though.