Um, I Think It's Time for a Thread on WikiLeaks

diehard clinton supporters think there is nothing wrong with literally anything she does, clinton skeptics feel otherwise, thank god for this objective flow of information from wikileaks

(not necessarily grouping mh in with the former btw, just commenting on how predictable the reaction to most of this has been.)

and putin, he deserves props too

I was about to group myself in there, don't worry

compared to the level of outrage she engenders i think she does nothing wrong. obv she does plenty wrong but like getting paid to give a speech to a bank, or pretty much everything i've seen in the wikileaks emails, all seems v nitpicky to me.

Let's have a look at Kerry's or Powell's or Rice's emails. I'm reasonably certain this is all common nothingness.

there are people who put the stock in all at one time while making risotto?

― *-* (jim in vancouver), Monday, October 17, 2016 2:56 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol right? this is like the first rule of making risotto

― k3vin k., Monday, October 17, 2016 2:03 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol you guys are so wrong

― jason waterfalls (gbx), Monday, October 17, 2016 12:57 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no no no. it's very easy. fry sofrito, add rice and fry for a bit, add wine, gradually add stock, stir a bunch. there's no other option.

the only reason to do it gradually is to get the right amount of liquid in there, there is no other benefit afaik

#risottogate

get one pressure cooker

Wikileaks can't be called "objective flow of information ". Aside from the fact that the leaks themselves are a partisan act in support of the white nationalist candidate, WL has promoted individual emails in a grossly misleading out of context way ("taco bowls", implying Hillary used an ear piece in the debate to cheat, intentionally fanned the flames of the "murdered DNC staffer killed by Hillary" conspiracy). Their approach with these particular leaks has been a pretty bottom of the barrel exercise.

I think founder's syndrome did WikiLeaks wrong - that seems almost unnecessary to state - but they also got overtaken by simpler means of dumping exposed junk, like pastebin, and didn't do the things that would have separated them from other dump sites, like avoiding exposing irrelevant personal information. Assange's own priorities have superseded the stated goals of the institution. If you actually had something important to leak, would you go to them, when so many other outlets have their own SecureDrop systems and a less tarnished reputation?

re hillary's speeches i posted this in july

the point of bringing up the speaking fees is not to imply that she is literally taking bribes from goldman sachs but to imply that her beliefs are so amenable to the executives of goldman sachs that they will happily pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to listen to them

obv the argument against that is she's a politician she works constituencies she doesn't have to believe the stuff she says to goldman sachs or act exclusively on it and anyway i thought you said she was lyin hillary

i don't think she's lyin hillary particularly tho and i think she prob believes in and is proud, in a modest private way, of the content of her speeches, which are prob m/l the pragmatic technocratic Democratic globally-investing equivalent of mitt's 47% "gaffe" and public knowledge of which prob would not partic help her, or the project of dgaf-gonna-go-ahead-and-call-it-neoliberalism, in her+its present fight v fascism

nevertheless i am sure that a lot of people think she is literally taking bribes

become clear to me that the last allowance there is an understatement; that is obv how trump is using the speeches even tho i don't think bernie used them that way until the slightly nasty end. and other posters have been otm that ideology aside the hillary you see in them is closer to how one imagines the private thinking person to be and thus almost automatically more likable than the public, terrorized one onscreen. nor do they really contain the kind of outright dismissal i expected.

they still mildly depress me in the same way obama's turning in holy awe to the same old priests in 2008 depresses me -- but then that was real policy and this is someone working a room. i do think the "complicated lives" line -- as a symbol of the kind of flattery i meant by "her beliefs are so amenable" -- would be more of an albatross for her if trump weren't trump, if only because everyone at every publication for or against would be nonstop thinkpiecing about it.

Ok, here's something that I think actually matters:

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/18/hillary-superpac-coordination/

as noted above, the emails are still being sifted through, so it's premature to say "nothing to see here" and I think doing so evinces wishful thinking.

Have you read though the emails? It's a whole bunch of nothing, and at at least one point actually misleading. The first memo is uploaded by the journalist himself, without any other sourcing.

It's not a coincidence that these documents are 'still being sifted through', it's part of the strategy of wikileaks to maximize the impact on Hillary's campaign and staffers, rather than working with a news institution to get the biggest news stories out of it. And that strategy exactly encourages speculation 'perhaps there's something more to it.' That would probably also have left out most of the completely pointless documents in the dump, which would undermine the more important part of Assanges program: Harassing and stressing out people working for an opponent he hates. It's really so insane that Assange still is lumped into with the anti-surveillance tactics of Snowden, because he is exactly doing the opposite. He is using foreign spy services to surveil political opponents, to try and undermine their organizations. And the Intercept is ok with it. It's opposite world. It reminded me of the stress some climate activist people I knew described over alleged police infiltration up to the climate meeting in Copenhagen some years back. It's the harassment left in action.

I'm no big fan of Assange either but the Russian intrigue angle on this is much thinner so far than anything you are dismissing in the emails. And I'm not really sure what your point is on strategy, as it seems to me the dump is actually blunting the impact by burying anything potentially interesting.

as for the story itself, I think the charitable way to read it would be to say that it just shows what a farce the Citizens United decision actually was, because she's certainly not the only one whose campaign is coordinating with PACs.

what exactly is 'thin' about the russian intrigue

in 20 years that's going to be the only detail about this story that anyone remembers

what is the evidence other than the "scope and sensitivity of the efforts"?

don't believe the obama admin would be willing to make the claims purely for political reasons and putin barely even denies it

i'm not opposed to the leaks having new + potentially inflammatory information in them but when i saw this update i remembered something i had read that google v quickly turned up from April: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html

Due to FEC loopholes, the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson found this year that Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign, despite rules that typically disallow political campaigns from working directly with PACs.

“SuperPACs aren’t supposed to coordinate with candidates. The whole reasoning behind (Supreme Court decision) Citizens United rests on (PACs) being independent, but Correct the Record claims it can coordinate,” Watson told The Daily Beast. “It’s not totally clear what their reasoning is, but it seems to be that material posted on the Internet for free—like, blogs—doesn’t count as an ‘independent expenditure.’”

so essentially hacked leaks prove something that has already been asserted + reported since back in april i guess?

Russian language in the hacking logs of a romanian hacker, the same method the Russians has used before. The evidence is a lot thicker than any evidence of PAC-coordination in those emails.

No Mordy. Someone from Priorities gave Podesta the wrong address for a meeting, so clearly Hillary took Saudi money to destroy Bernie Sanders.

btw the same Sunlight Foundation also called the Clinton Foundation a "slush fund"

also disagree w/ - I'm no big fan of Assange either but the Russian intrigue angle on this is much thinner so far than anything you are dismissing in the emails - it could be US intelligence is wrong to claim that Russia is behind the hacks but it's not thinner than the nothing that the leaks have uncovered to have the accusation on record from the head of national intelligence and the dpt of Homeland Security. again before ShariVari anyone comes in and says that we don't know anything for sure and there's no absolute evidence - i agree - but that doesn't make it nothing that the administration is asserting that fact so forcefully.

i think you're missing the significance, hurting. it's not that the Sunlight Foundation is right or wrong. it's that the admission of collaboration was on the books since april. maybe it should've gotten more attention then but it's not new information that CTR and Hillary campaign are working together.

My understanding is that Correct the Record claimed it had exemptions that allowed it to coordinate, it did not "admit" to improper coordination. The new emails also include other PACs.

And doesn't prove any coordination...

why would a Super PAC be sending Podesta an address for a meeting then?

all the sure fire coordination emails are involved CTR. the two that are not are the dinner w/ donors from American Bridge (which could or could not mean coordination since afaik they are not forbidden to solicit donations from PAC donors - just cannot coordinate on strategy) and the meeting discussion from Cecil from Priorities USA which has no information re coordination (Cecil doesn't say that the meeting is on behalf of Priorities USA) but I guess is the closest thing. If you look at the Intercept article almost all the examples are from CTR - that's how they pad out the article so they can make the claim of "consistent, repeated efforts by the Clinton campaign to collaborate with super PACs."

and you are correct - there was no admission of wrongdoing. but that's the point - if i say that i got a dispensation to use the hall pass and two months later intrepid student journalist reveals my private emails where i'm given permission to use the hall pass - it is disingenuous to present that information as a new inflammatory leak. if there was information you had that revealed that i used the hall pass and claimed i had permission but knew that i didn't really - that would be something else. but this is like "i have proof that you did something that months ago you claimed you had the right to do and that you were actively doing"

the Super PAC didn't send him the address. Guy Cecil - the political director of Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign (and a member of the Priorities USA SuperPAC) - did, and there's no indication that it's related to Priorities USA. but i admit that as far as damning new information this definitely comes the closest.

look at this quality time capsule lol from back when politico was reporting Cecil joining Priorities USA:

The news of Cecil’s role comes as Republicans and Democrats alike eye Jeb Bush, whose presidential bid is expected to rely on an allied super PAC to an unprecedented extent. While Clinton’s campaign is not expected to have problems raising large amounts of money, Bush’s supporters have recently spoken of record fundraising for the Republican.

where i'm given permission to use the hall pass -- this is inexact. i meant something more like "where i discuss my hall pass usage"

Plus it could be a restaurant recommendation, or perhaps something completely unpolitical, a mistress. For some weird reason there's no other information about the meeting in the released emails, it's almost as if they are being selectively leaked to maximize speculation.

it could mean they were careful to keep incriminating details out of the emails but it's hardly a slam dunk leak either way

Yeah, 'it could'. But it doesn't. It's still all just speculation, just as it was before the leak.

rereading the intercept article this might be a violation of citizens united:

In February 2016, Dennis Cheng, the lead fundraiser for the Clinton campaign, emailed other staffers to recommend that Podesta call certain donors to Priorities USA Action, the largest pro-Clinton Super PAC, to thank them for their six- and seven-figure donations. Cheng flagged three donor names, telling a colleague they were “very important Priorities USA calls that ideally John can make.”

i don't actually know exactly what is and what isn't allowed re coordination. is using the prestige of a campaign member to thank donors for donations enough coordination - or since it's using the campaign as an asset to the PAC and not vice-versa it's not a problem. i'd have to spend more time than i'm willing to studying CU.

Also, that stuff can't be read out of the linked email. Unless it's in the attachments, but fuck if I'm downloading something from the hackers at wikileaks.

The link in the Intercept page goes 403, which is some hilarious incompetence from a news organization trying to put together an important story.

Lol, even Micah Lee from the Intercept knows who did the hack: How did these prominent political figures get their emails hacked in the first place? It appears that Russian hackers used “spear-phishing” attacks against many high-profile political targets, and some of them bit.

Of course, Greenwald himself still disputes there's any link, even while his reporters reports what's up. Such a shithead.

so did these guys just leak that Steve Jobs died of AIDS or what

wait n/m that's fake

Of course, Greenwald himself still disputes there's any link, even while his reporters reports what's up. Such a shithead.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, October 18, 2016 2:03 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you know what's totally cool tho? saber rattling for a country you don't even live in.

Well, yeah, at least me, you and Greenwald agrees on that.

ultimately in spite of everything I said upthread I think I am leaning towards "there's not that much to see here" and agreeing that from an ethical perspective it's far preferable to take Snowden's approach rather than dumping

ugh there's this stupid thing going on now where there was an email mentioning that Jane Sanders asked the Vt governor not to endorse Clinton and now it's being cut off/taken out of context to look like she begged Bernie not to endorse Clinton. These lost causers are starting to really irritate me.

just from my experience nobody really even gives a shit about this wikileaks stuff other than these lames