Manning was being squeezed to get at Assange, who most people on HN agree is himself only being squeezed for geopolitical reasons. Nobody is happy to see the justice system abused for geopolitical goals, so any step away from "jail all of the dissenters and all of their supporters" is good to see.
I am baffled that no matter how many times Assange (and a fair number of NY State Fed LEOs) say "It wasn't the Russians", that the "system" nor the "media" nor the "people" seem to be able to take him at face value: It wasn't the Russians. (Even CrowdStrike seems to be backing away from those claims in this last week)
1. Please don't use the term "The Russians". That could mean any Russian national, or Russian corporation, or the Russian government. Conflating all of those is a mechanism for smearing all of "The Russians" for actions not by all of "The Russians".
2. Even if Russia had provided Wikileaks with the Democratic Party emails (which it probably didn't), that wouldn't matter, i.e. Wikileaks was still quite justified in publishing them.
1) Please don't read too much into that. I meant it as an umbrella term. When I say "it wasn't", I'm sort of un-smearing all of them, as an umbrella. I have no problem with Russians (I actually like them - fun people - except in winter). I have problems with American disinformation.
> Even CrowdStrike seems to be backing away from those claims in this last week
This is untrue:
As we’ve repeatedly stated, we stand by the findings and analysis of our investigation, and, as detailed in our company statement, we’ve provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI as requested. Additionally, our findings have been supported by the U.S. intelligence community and other cybersecurity companies.
Has he actually said that? The actual quotes I've seen have not been definitive:
"The same day, Assange told NBC News that "it's what's in the emails that's important, not who hacked them." When asked by NBC News if WikiLeaks might have been used to distribute documents stolen as part of a Russian intelligence operation, Assange replied: "There is no proof of that whatsoever. We have not disclosed our source."[1]
and
"On Sean Hannity’s radio show, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that hacked Democratic documents sent to reporters at Gawker and The Hill may have come from Russia. But, he said, he is confident the emails he received did not come from the same source.".. "“Our source is not the Russian government,” said Assange, later claiming WikiLeaks did not receive its material from any state actor, Russia or otherwise."[2]
(Note "state actor" - which would align with the idea that the hacking group is just under direction of Russian intel, not that it is part of it)
I came across more recent statements from Crowdstrike, but failed to save them, and must dig them up again. Will attempt to do so (I've noticed that Google has gotten more efficient at letting me fail to find previously discovered materials, but I hope to be able to be back with my references)
All the evidence points to it being the Russians, Putin himself said it might have been "patriotically minded" Russians, all US intel agencies say it was the Russians, all non-US agencies say it was the Russians.
And you claim to be baffled as to why people say it was the Russians?
Maybe it wasn't, but it's not exactly baffling why people say it is. There are no real counter theories at all - the only counter claims sort of say "Deep State" but nothing else.
What are you talking about? It was Russians (at least two independent Russian groups even) and CrowdStrike has only reiterated that. CrowdStrike is also not the only source of that intelligence.
It doesn’t matter what Assange said, the only thing he could possibly know is who gave it to him. He doesn’t know where his source got it, even if his source was not Russian.
I’m also pretty sure that no LEOs said any such thing.
> CrowdStrike is also not the only source of that intelligence.
Who else examined the servers? The US Government stated in court that it relied exclusively on their analysis and never examined the servers at issue. One might think this was normally something they should be doing, but it's getting more common (e.g. with Bezos' phone, where the private company failed to decrypt the supposed malware, despite there being open source tools for WhatsApp decryption).
Given that they failed to identify the Ukranian P.A.S. malware or a bunch of Tor exit nodes, it's legitimate to question how definitively they were able to pin this on a specific APT.
> It doesn’t matter what Assange said, the only thing he could possibly know is who gave it to him.
A fair point, but one you should make to the US Government and the media who promulgated the myth that he would somehow get a pardon for saying exactly what he's repeatedly said in public for years now when the real story was that someone hoped to convince Trump of that and never actually got to talk to him.
Also, we do have some evidence against. The exfiltration happened at almost exactly the speed of a USB drive. That doesn't seem likely to be coincidental, or likely to randomly happen for internet exfiltration of data.
Uhhhh, yeah. I was curious about why this is a "good thing". I think I got a response that tries to respond to that more specifically up-thread. Thank you.
Well, there are many different... idealogical alignments in America.
Some believe Manning is a hero who followed her conscience and leaked classified information in order to inform the public of secret crimes the government/military committed.
Others think what Manning did was incredibly reckless and treasonous, tantamount to selling secrets to the enemy (just without the "selling" part)
So to answer your question, people in the first camp see news like this as a good thing.
I don't think this should be reduced to her original actions. She was sentenced as a consequence of them, she served 7 years until the rest of the sentence was communted by Obama.
So the real question is: was it appropriate to throw her back into prison, under very harsh conditions, just to force a statement from her. I think there is very good reasons to doubt that, independant of the stance about her original actions. From that perspective, I think her release is good news.
She is in jail for refusing to testify in front of a secret jury. The grand jury is essentially a politically motivated persecution of Julian Assange. She has already spent 7 years in jail for her part in the Wiki leaks mess and then they threw her in jail again. She released tapes to Assange documenting US killing of civilians. She is clearly a psychologically damaged person and now they are just trying to break her.
I don't know. I don't think I started that way. I think I started out normal like?
But when your mother awakened certain hidden feelings in me with her sex toys when I was 9, I did feel feelings against her other object of sexual obsession, you; I developed an urge to put my hands around your neck.
She was a whistleblower, hence everyone with a hint of credibility saying she was.
Also, it's customary on HN to point out when you have a conflict of interest. You work for a military contractor & used to work for the government, and probably should disclose that when talking about a subject so closely tied to your work.
It's a form of personal attack to bring in someone's personal history as ammunition in an argument. You can't do that on HN, regardless of how strongly you feel about some other commenter or their work. No amount of personal upbraiding is worth the damage it does to the container. Please don't do it again.
The case of using someone's employer or field to shame them is particularly bad for this site, because it disincentivizes people from showing up where they have the most expertise. It's true that we're all strongly biased by our work, so some distortion is inevitable, but having HN be a place where people feel free to show up on topics that they're knowledgeable in is more important than policing each other for bias.
We're also trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture on HN in general.
> You work for a military contractor & used to work for the government, and probably should disclose that when talking about a subject so closely tied to your work.
How do you know that? I don't see anything in their profile. Was it a post that they made?
Whistleblower is commonly understood to uncover illegal, criminal or otherwise punishable activity within the organization, that is being hidden. Thus the metaphor of "blowing the whistle" - as in, attracting attention to something untoward going on. However, just releasing secret documents which do not contain the proof of any specific criminal, or otherwise untoward, behavior is not "whistleblowing". For example, Manning released 251,287 US Diplomatic cables and 482,832 Army reports - unless you consider the whole US Diplomatic corps and US Army to be a criminal enterprises, this goes way beyond whistleblowing, as described above.
I mean do you understand what it is that she "leaked"? Her intentions were obviously good, she was blowing the whistle on the government committing war crimes, at her own expense, no benefit. She may have not gone through proper channels, but you can't even really expect to be protected by those systems anyway. A "leak" is generally done for some kind of personal benefit or simply to cause harm and has no noble intention. the information leaked did not put anyone in danger but did expose crimes committed by the military. She should never have been jailed in the first place, free her.
A 'whistleblower' has protections gained by following the correct procedure to identify improper/criminal behavior first. If those actions result in punishment you can bring a suit against the offending party.
A more precise term would be leaker, as somebody who commits a data breach or spillage (military term). Manning did release evidence that appears to constitute a potentially criminal act, however the quantity and material subject of information leaked greatly exceeded any single, or collection of, criminal acts at 750,000 unrelated items.
A whistleblower is a subset of leaking with the limited intention of exposing something specifically nefarious.