In Election Hacking, Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision Becomes Reality

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/business/media/assange-wikileaks-dnc-hacks.html

by dankohn1 • 10 years ago

70 62 10 years ago

exabrial2• 10 years ago

This is simply fake news. No "election hacking" happened; the integrity of the vote was never compromised.

What we have here is a bunch of media organizations throwing a tantrum because they were no longer the primary influencers of the election.

g_sch• 10 years ago

The article actually discusses the DNC email hack, and nowhere in the article does it allege that any election systems were compromised.

The lexical ambiguity in the headline is not optimal, true, especially when allegations of the latter sort are being tossed around. But "fake news" (another term that has IMO become pretty loaded) is a rather uncharitable term for this article, which is largely a historical look at Wikileaks' vision in the context of the DNC leaks.

exabrial2• 10 years ago

I disagree, there is no lexical ambiguity about the title. Those two words have a very exact meaning, and it simply is not true, per your own statement.

If the title was simply the second half, and the facts were not begrudgingly acknowledged in the article, I'd feel differently about an otherwise interesting opinion piece.

digler9993• 10 years ago

and nowhere in the article does it allege that any election systems were compromised.

Apparently you didn't check the headline

zwerdlds• 10 years ago

Is "Election Cracking" perhaps the way you interpreted the title here?

panarky• 10 years ago

People are confused by Assange apparently attacking one US political party and then switching to attack the other party.

What's missing is an understanding of his underlying motivations. This piece hints at it, but it doesn't quite get there.

Assange sees the existing power structure as a connected graph that requires secrecy to function.

His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by exposing secrets.

  Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every
  conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though
  all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy,
  others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others
  still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between
  important sections or groupings of the conspiracy.

  If all conspirators are assassinated or all the links between
  them are destroyed, then a conspiracy no longer exists. This
  usually requires more resources than we can deploy, so we ask our
  first question: What is the minimum number of links that must be
  cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number?
  (divide and conquer).

  When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see
  a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose
  blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied;
  unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its
  environment.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/con...

devoply2• 10 years ago

What does Assange want to replace the conspiracy with? A true democracy. There is no such thing. Have you seen the Game of Thrones. That's how the world is without a super power. All that this will end up doing is cause the US to lose its place as a super power. Which will enable other powers play more freely. Which will in the end cause different types of chaos in the world rather than that which the US causes. These things don't go away. Problems are not solved, they just move, wiggle, and multiply.

euyyn2• 10 years ago

But I watched Game of Thrones, and chaos was a ladder...

tomp• 10 years ago

Maybe a better democracy would do? Even if the US maintains its status as a world order keeper (which I'm not entirely opposed to, despite all criticism they've played the role remarkably well), we can/should all wish for more transparency from the government. Prevent another WMD fiasco, maybe?

aminorex2• 10 years ago

Centralizing power insures that all are dominated by the most brutal. When power is decentralized, abuses are quarantined.

pickytorro• 10 years ago

His objective is to reduce their power of nuisance. Trump can't do anything on the international level because of ... Trump. On the other hand Clinton would be terrible in his logic because she is backed by everyone. The problems don't disappear but they can't grow much in those type of conditions. I'm just explaining the idea and not approving it.

brbrodude2• 10 years ago

That goes against everything sensible and is FUD(tbh, I don't watch Game of Thrones, I don't care much for fiction and prefer reality, history, etc). I'd like to see you make this offer with a straight face to all that have been affected by the imperialist policies. We don't even need to go too far, to the other side of the Atlantic, we can start with Mexico, central America, Honduras and Latin America.

mhurron2• 10 years ago

You do know Game of Thrones is fiction written by someone who has no experience in international politics, right?

throwaway161220• 10 years ago

On iq.org he lists j u l i e n @ post.harvard.edu as one of his email addresses but people from Harvard, if Quora answers are to be believed, cannot confirm he ever was at Harvard in any capacity. Maybe a joke or smoke and mirrors?

at-fates-hands• 10 years ago

> His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by exposing secrets.

Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

The funny thing is people misconstrue the emails as an attempt to influence our election instead of actually looking at the fact that it exposed the idea that the DNC was already in the bag for Hilary long before the primaries even started.

If you want a conspiracy, you should look at how incredibly slanted the DNC was in favor of electing Clinton. All the emails did was confirm what a lot of people had long suspected was already going on.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

The people talking about the emails influencing the election are talking about the Podesta emails that were dribbled out long after the D primary had concluded.

graedus• 10 years ago

If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

Don't you think this vastly overestimates the technical competence and infosec understanding/awareness of the organization in question? It seems obvious that they presumed that their unencrypted emails were not going to become public information.

Bartweiss5• 10 years ago

> Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

This seems to have a baseline assumption of competence that I don't think is warranted. There's shockingly little relationship between privacy intentions and privacy actions. Presumably "let's attack Sanders for being Jewish" isn't something the DNC wanted to see on the front page of a newspaper, no matter how clumsy they were about protecting it.

More broadly, what you describe in the other two paragraphs is exactly what Assange has been pulling for. Elsewhere, he's talked about raising the difficulty of secret dealings until powerful organizations have the choice of being ethical or inefficient. If transparent dealings are enough easier than opaque ones, opaque and anti-public-interest dealings should become rarer.

There are a bunch of criticisms here, some of which are quite reasonable. Assange nominally respects personal privacy while opposing institutional privacy, but revealing institutional behavior after the fact almost always compromises some personal information. And anti-public-interest is not 1-to-1 with opaque; plenty of groups do incredibly harmful things based on deniability or sheer boringness instead of secrecy.

Even so, I think things like "showing the DNC was in Clinton's pocket" are exactly in Assange's wheelhouse. If the DNC was neutral (as their bylaws required), there would have been no problem. If it had been an open pro-Clinton PAC it would have been non-notable. As is, he's hopefully raised the difficulty of screwing the public as a nominally-neutral organization.

1_2__3• 10 years ago

His actions do not suggest such noble goals. I don't really care what he claims.

rihegher3• 10 years ago

A bit out of topic but quite interesting the last minute transcript of the last wikileaks PR on periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/WikiLeaks/1YpKkqmkDkmJj?t=4250

"Tomorrow I will give an ‘ask me anything’ on reddit where I’ll talk about why it is that many people came to believe that I was dead or missing or kidnapped, quite interesting story, not just an organic phenomenon but people placing deliberately false file report to say that I was dead and then for wikileaks could not be trusted and no one should give us leaks or information."

cloakandswagger3• 10 years ago

This is Wikileaks own fault for three reasons:

1) Julian disappeared completely after the internet to the Ecuadorean embassy was cut in October 2016

2) Wikileaks inexplicably changed their policy for insurance file hashes, publishing the hash of the decrypted files instead of the encrypted ones. This meant the hash of the insurance files didn't match the .AES files, giving the impression that they had been altered

3) Wikileaks stopped issuing verifiable proof of life for Assange. A simple PGP signed message would have sufficed.

With all that was going on, it was actually very believable that Assange had been abducted/killed during the internet blackout, and that Wikileaks was now being run as a black-ops site for a three letter agency.

rihegher3• 10 years ago

So you think he's not alive and that the press conference of today was a fake?

Shouldn't we wait for the explaination he may come up with tomorrow on reddit? I just don't know on which channel this AMA will happen.

Bartweiss5• 10 years ago

I'm excited for the AMA to see if any of this is touched on. There was a whole string of unforced errors enabling these theories, and what's stranger is that none of them were abrupt choices under pressure. There was plenty of room to offer some kind of proof of life after these theories started circulating, and I'd love to know what drove the decision to not, say, have Assange walk up to the embassy window.

tzs• 10 years ago

Wikileaks stopped issuing verifiable proof of life for Assange. A simple PGP signed message would have sufficed.

Wouldn't that just prove that someone knows the private key of the signer? That's not sufficient to prove that the signer is alive.

LyndsySimon• 10 years ago

As a result, I believe that Assange intended for people to believe that he may have been captured or killed.

samirillian• 10 years ago

Antonio Gramsci, in "The Modern Prince," observes that Machiavelli himself was not at all "machiavellian". The information conveyed in "The Prince" was already well-known by those in power. The purpose of "The Prince" was, rather, to give the knowledge of how political power is wielded to the masses.

Interesting parallels with Assange's project.

In Election Hacking, Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision Becomes Reality

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