Guest Post by Perry Gaskins

They sent me this secret invisibility formula. Take this stuff
and we can walk right out of here. You go first…

Hacker, Interrupted

Julian Assange has lost his cat.

As part of an apparent downward spiral marking his years holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, things for the Australian über hacker, alleged Pfc. Bradley Manning co-conspirator, and Wikileaks founder have continued to go from bad to more bad. Among other things, current Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, who considers Assange an inherited problem amounting to “more than a nuisance” has recently been annoyed by the fact Assange has been using embassy internet access to tweet support for Catalan independence which amounts to flipping the finger at Spain. Something Moreno would like to avoid.

Evidently things got testy when the embassy cut off Assange’s internet access in March, and also let him know they were not amused he didn’t clean up after his cat. Assange’s own version of the cat controversy, according to an Italian newspaper account:

Even the cat that once kept him company and “diffused tension” is gone, according to La Repubblica. “Assange preferred to spare the cat an isolation which has become unbearable and allow it a healthier life.”

For those marking the calendar, it’s been eight years this week that Assange’s cyber bad boy career started to tank. It was on December 7, 2010 that Assange surrendered himself to British custody as the result of sexual assault charges by two women in Sweden. One of women victims apparently having said she objected to a close encounter of the Wikileaks kind if it didn’t involve use of a prophylactic.

A few days later, with help from supporters, Assange was able to make more than $350,000 in bail. And for awhile, things weren’t so bad. There were the speaking gigs, the awards from a fawning news media and social justice groups, even talk of a movie deal. But the legal appeals to fight extradition to Sweden eventually all failed, and by June 2012 Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he now lives in a converted office with bars on the windows. As a result of the bail jumping to avoid showing up in court, the British government initially assigned police sentries to keep Assange from slipping out, but the cops were withdrawn a couple of years later.

Also withdrawn as of last year were those pesky rape charges which made Assange dash into the embassy one step ahead of the posse in the first place. Part of the reason was due to legal statutes of limitations running out, another apparent part was that the Swedes simply got tired of Assange’s act. It’s probably reasonable to now wonder, if those charges have been dropped, what keeps Assange in his room? The answer, more likely than not, involves both legal nuance and politics.

When Pfc. Bradley Manning was convicted of espionage, it was the result of stealing classified material from a secure facility at Forward Operating Base Hammer near Baghdad in Iraq. Among the first items Manning passed along to Wikileaks was video footage of an attack by helicopter gunships which came to be titled “Collateral Murder.”

If Manning had come across the gunship video during his normal duties, he might have been able to later escape a harsh sentence by claiming to be a whistleblower. But later, by the time he was passing hundreds of thousands of cables he hadn’t read, he had crossed over into espionage.

During the course of passing around all the secret stuff, evidence from chat logs between Manning and Assange indicate a strange relationship. Manning, a neurotic outcast at FOB Hammer, wanted a pal which led to apparent increased efforts to please Assange. There’s never been any evidence Assange warned Manning about what he was doing. Assange also seems to have taken it right to the edge of being an active participant in Manning’s thievery without crossing a thin line. Such as being coy about providing Manning with cracker code to break into even more systems.

One of the things also making the prosecution of Assange tricky is the precedent of a 2001 Supreme Court decision, Bartnicki v. Vopper, which decided that 1st Amendment protections for the news media apply even if the published material is from a source that obtained it illegally.

And such a court ruling raises yet another question: Should Wikileaks actually qualify as news media? According to Ben Laurie, a software engineer who sits on the Wikileaks board, the organization can best be described as an “open-source, democratic intelligence agency.” It can be argued in the Manning case that its main function was to act as a conduit for stolen classified documents, and not as a publisher in any conventional sense.

Assange’s situation might have improved in more recent days except for a shift in political winds. Back in the days of still living large, for example, he hosted a television show on Russia Today, and had the support of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, among others.

Such support has evidently led to current allegations that Russian intelligence services were ultimately responsible for the Democratic Party nightmare of Wikileaks revelations close to the 2016 election. Those about Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, the DNC’s efforts to sandbag Bernie Sander’s campaign, and so forth.

Which means a lot of the news media is now having a difficult time buying into the notion that hackers are also just journalists fighting for truth, justice, and freedom from condoms.

A more recent development, so far unconfirmed, is that Assange met three times with Paul Manafort, a one-time President Trump associate, who is now a target of the Robert Mueller investigation. But then, it’s probably fair to ask, who isn’t a target of the Mueller investigation?

CIA Director Mike Pompeo last year also called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” and there are now rumors of a sealed indictment with a laundry list of charges against Assange including espionage, conspiracy, theft or conversion of U. S. government property, and violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

So Assange sits in his room likely waiting for a knock at the door, passing his days still weaving a web of intrigue, one keystroke at a time, based on a hacker ethic known only to himself.

No friends. No movie deal. No cat.

Category: Guest Post, Politics