Tag Archives: Wikileaks

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange: Facebook is greatest spy vehicle ever created (video)

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The founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange in an exclusive interview to RT (formerly known as Russia Today) called Facebook the greatest espionage tool in history. According to Assange, Facebook automatically collects confidential data of the registered site users, and later this information is transferred to the U.S. intelligence.

The founder of the WikiLeaks said in a television interview that Facebook is the greatest spy vehicle ever created by human beings. He added that we were dealing with a very detailed database about people, their habits, their social ties, addresses, places of residence, relatives, and all these data is located in the United States and available to U.S. intelligence.

Answering the question about the role of social networks in shaping the recent revolutions in the Middle East, the infamous online journalist said that Facebook in particular was the most disgusting of all espionage tools ever invented. He said that the users should be aware that adding a contact on Facebook they are working for American intelligence, updating its database. Other intelligence can either hack Facebook, or get this information from the Americans in exchange for some services.

He stated that Facebook, Google and Yahoo, all large American companies, have built-in interfaces for the use by the American intelligence. Does this mean that Facebook is in the hands of the American intelligence? No, it is different. It means that the U.S. intelligence agencies have legal and political means to pressure them.

Assange is currently expecting the review of his complaint regarding the London court decision on his extradition to Sweden, whose authorities accuse the 39-year old Australian of sexual crimes. Assange’s lawyers tend to believe that Sweden is seeking the expulsion in order to give the truth-seeker to the USA. Meanwhile, the most famous debunker of our days, who, in fact, did not debunk anything, is restating elementary truths.

Recently, Facebook has puzzled some of its users by privacy and security settings, and company founder Mark Zuckerberg strongly opposed the anonymity on the Internet. His statement provoked resistance from the founder of website 4chan Christopher “moot” Poole, who considers that preserving the incognito allows people to reveal themselves in all their stark, unfiltered, brutally primitive beauty. The authority, or if you will, popularity of Assange as a hacker will not change much in the situation with social networks. The catchers of people’s souls have made the right bet relying on common stupidity.

Over the last five years almost a billion people worldwide were in the full sense caught in the net, and their number increases exponentially. The leadership of major media outlets requires their employees to register on such social networking sites as Facebook or its Russian analogue VKontakte.

“The problem of the leakage of data from social networks, Internet services and mobile devices is becoming ever more urgent. There are regular reports that phones and Android platforms iOS preserve photographs, data on the movement of the device and personal data and send them to the network, “Globalist” reports. On May 1st “Yandex” has acknowledged that it provided the FSB with the data of people using the services of Yandex. We should not forget that social networks can become a meeting place for terrorists and dangerous sociopaths, which has been a topic for a discussion since the beginning of the social networks.

The only argument of those who lost faith in conspiracy theories is the following argument: it is a hard task to handle this amount of information. However, besides the politics social networks have a negative social and public component.

“Psychologists believe that the most popular social networks are based on the principle of the Maslow pyramid. According to this theory, the highest level of needs of the individual is simply self-expression. A network user can not only provide information about themselves, but also display their successes, create audio and video libraries, own albums. Yet, few people think about the information that we so thoughtlessly put on our pages. This information becomes a desirable target for the intelligence services and, as the experience of the American social networks indicates, a great way for creditors to determine our true income. There was recorded a range of cases when mentally unbalanced individuals traced and blackmailed users,” “Globalist” reports.

We are no longer able to live without social networking and we will not stop eating fish caught in Japan. Some will continue yelling that it is all lies (like the poisonous “Fukushima” fish), others will continue unsuccessful attempts to resist progress. It would be interesting to find out how the Russian president and other senior officials who opened accounts on Facebook and Twitter are protected from such scrutiny of foreign secret services. It is quite clear why such a question was not posed to Julian Assange. After all, he has repeatedly admitted that his main revelations are yet to come, explaining that the information that has already been revealed is “just the tip of the iceberg.”

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HIGHLIGHTS – Latest WikiLeaks developments

LONDON (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he and his colleagues are taking steps to protect themselves after death threats following the publication of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables on their website.

WikiLeaks moved its website address to the Swiss http://wikileaks.ch on Friday after two U.S. Internet providers ditched it and Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting its database of leaked information.

Swedish authorities said missing information in the European arrest warrant for alleged sex crimes against Assange had been handed to British authorities.

Here are some of the latest revelations in U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks and related stories:

MIDEAST

– Top U.S. officials have grown frustrated over the resistance of allies in the Middle East to help shut the financial pipeline of terrorists.

CHINA

– The hacking of Google Inc that led the Internet company to briefly pull out of China was orchestrated by two members of China’s top ruling body.

IRAN

– The WikiLeaks publication of secret cables was not the embarrassing blow to U.S. diplomacy many people assume, but a deliberate ploy by Washington to improve its image, a senior Iranian official said.

– Iran told Gulf Arab states it was not a threat and wanted cooperation, in an apparent attempt to lower tensions after WikiLeaks revelations that Gulf Arab leaders are deeply anxious about its nuclear program.

AUSTRALIA

– Australian police are investigating whether WikiLeaks’ Australian founder, Julian Assange, has broken any of the country’s laws and is liable to prosecution there, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said.

LIBYA

– Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi caused a month-long nuclear scare in 2009 when he delayed the return to Russia of radioactive material in an apparent fit of diplomatic pique, leaked U.S. embassy cables showed.

GERMANY

– A top official in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives said he was shocked how sloppily the United States policed sensitive data and that it had failed to live up to its responsibilities as a global power.

AFGHANISTAN

– Leaked U.S. government cables critical of Afghanistan and Pakistan have helped bring the two nations together, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said, dismissing their content as lies.

– Afghanistan’s finance minister offered to resign over a leaked U.S. cable which reported him as describing President Hamid Karzai as a “weak man” and said ties with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were damaged.

– British troops were “not up” to the task of securing Afghanistan’s Helmand province and the governor pleaded for U.S. reinforcements, American diplomats said.

EGYPT

– President Hosni Mubarak warned U.S. officials Egypt might develop nuclear weapons if Iran obtained them. A U.S. ambassador described Egypt, recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid since making peace with Israel in 1979, as a “stubborn and recalcitrant ally” in a February 2009 cable.

Egypt lobbied last year to delay southern Sudan’s secession vote for 4-6 years because it feared the division could imperil its share of Nile waters.

ITALY

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dismissed reports of U.S. worries over his ties with Moscow and repeated he had never profited personally from his contacts.

LEBANON

U.S. spy planes flew reconnaissance flights over Lebanon from a British air base in Cyprus in a counter-terrorist operation requested by Lebanese officials.

MEXICO

– A Mexican official said the government was in danger of losing control of parts of the country to powerful drug cartels.

RUSSIA

– President Dmitry Medvedev said the leaks showed the “cynicism” of U.S. diplomacy but suggested they would not seriously upset improving ties with Washington.

TURKMENISTAN

– Turkmenistan’s leader is described as “not very bright” and “a practiced liar” in a cable from the U.S. embassy in the gas-rich Central Asian state. It said President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov did not like the United States, Iran or Turkey, but was fond of China.

UNITED NATIONS

– The CIA prepared a list of the kinds of information on U.N. officials and diplomats that it wanted U.S. envoys in New York and around the world to gather.

VENEZUELA

– Cuban intelligence services directly advised Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in what a U.S. diplomat called the “Axis of Mischief,” according to a State Department cable. Other cables revealed U.S. anxiety at Chavez’s “cosiness” with Iran, and concerns of Venezuelan Jews over what they saw as government prejudice against them.

YEMEN

– Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh secretly offered U.S. forces open access to his country to launch attacks against al Qaeda targets.

C.I.A. Secrets Could Surface in Swiss Nuclear Case

A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world’s most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms.

The prospect of a prosecution, and a public trial, threatens to expose some of the C.I.A.’s deepest secrets if defense lawyers try to protect their clients by revealing how they operated on the agency’s behalf. It could also tarnish what the Bush administration once hailed as a resounding victory in breaking up the nuclear arms network by laying bare how much of it remained intact.

“It’s like a puzzle,” Andreas Müller, the Swiss magistrate, said at a news conference in Bern on Thursday. “If you put the puzzle together you get the whole picture.”

The three men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well, not only providing information about the Khan network’s manufacturing and sales efforts, which stretched from Iran to Libya to North Korea, but also helping the agency introduce flaws into the equipment sent to some of those countries.

The Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to protect the men from prosecution, even persuading Swiss authorities to destroy equipment and information found on their computers and in their homes and businesses — actions that may now imperil efforts to prosecute them.

While it has been clear since 2008 that the Tinners acted as American spies, the announcement by the Swiss magistrate on Thursday, recommending their prosecution for nuclear smuggling, is a turning point in the investigation. A trial would bring to the fore a case that Pakistan has insisted is closed. Prosecuting the case could also expose in court a tale of C.I.A. break-ins in Switzerland, and of a still unexplained decision by the agency not to seize electronic copies of a number of nuclear bomb designs found on the computers of the Tinner family.

One of those blueprints came from an early Chinese atomic bomb; two more advanced designs were from Pakistan’s program, investigators from several countries have said.

Ultimately, copies of those blueprints were found around the globe on the computers of members of the Khan network, leading investigators to suspect that they made their way to Iran, North Korea and perhaps other countries. In 2003, atomic investigators found one of the atomic blueprints in Libya and brought it back to the United States for safekeeping.

Mr. Müller, the Swiss magistrate, investigated the Tinner case for nearly two years. He said Thursday that his 174-page report recommended that the three men face charges for “supporting the development of atomic weapons” in violation of Swiss law.

They are accused of supplying Dr. Khan’s operation with technology used to make centrifuges, the machines that purify uranium into fuel for bombs and reactors. Dr. Khan then sold the centrifuges to Libya, Iran and North Korea and perhaps other countries.

Mr. Müller’s recommendation comes as a new book describes previously unknown details of the C.I.A.’s secret relationship with the Tinners, which appears to have started around 2000.

The book, “Fallout,” by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, scheduled to be published next month, tells how the C.I.A. sent the men coded instructions, spied on their family, tried to buy their silence and ultimately had the Bush administration press Switzerland to destroy evidence in an effort to keep the Tinners from being indicted and testifying in open court.

Ms. Collins is a freelance writer and investigator, and her husband, Mr. Frantz, is a former investigations editor for The New York Times and a former managing editor of The Los Angeles Times. He currently works on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The C.I.A. has never commented on its relationship with the Tinners. But the story has leaked out, in bits and pieces, after news reports of Dr. Khan’s illicit atomic sales forced Pakistan’s government to expose the atomic ring and place Dr. Khan under house arrest. But Pakistan never allowed him to be interrogated by the C.I.A. or international nuclear inspectors, perhaps out of fear that he would implicate other Pakistani senior officials.

As a result, there has never been a full accounting of his activities, few of his associates have been tried or jailed, and there are strong indications that some of his suppliers are still operating.

But if the Pakistanis were worried about revelations surrounding Dr. Khan and whom he might have worked with in the Pakistani military and political hierarchy, the C.I.A. was worried about the Tinners.

The new book says the Bush administration grew so alarmed at possible disclosures of C.I.A. links to the family that in 2006 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lobbied Swiss officials to drop their investigation.

The book says the C.I.A. broke into a Tinner home in 2003 and found that the family possessed detailed blueprints for several types of nuclear bombs.

Paula Weiss, a spokeswoman for the C.I.A., declined to comment, and lawyers for the Tinners did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Tinners have said that they were not aware that the equipment they supplied was intended for nuclear weapons projects.

Based on Swiss investigators’ findings, the book suggests that the bomb designs may have spread to a half dozen outposts of Dr. Khan’s empire around the globe — including Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa — and sharply criticizes the C.I.A. for leaving those plans in the hands of people suspected of being nuclear traffickers.

In late 2007, the Swiss government, under strong American pressure, decided to drop legal proceedings on espionage charges against the Tinners and other charges against a number of C.I.A. operatives who had operated on Swiss soil in violation of the country’s laws.

In early 2008, the more limited investigation on trafficking charges inched forward with great difficulty because the Swiss government — again at the behest of United States officials — had destroyed an enormous trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of the atomic family. That action led to an uproar in the Swiss Parliament.

But in 2008 Swiss investigators discovered that 39 Tinner files scheduled for destruction had been overlooked, giving the authorities fresh insights into the ring’s operation — and new life for the legal case.

In his news conference on Thursday, Mr. Müller harshly criticized the Swiss government for having “massively interfered in the wheels of justice by destroying almost all the evidence.” He added that the government had also ordered the federal criminal police not to cooperate with his investigation.

If the Tinners are formally charged and their case goes to trial in Switzerland, they face up to 10 years in prison if they are found guilty of breaking laws on the export of atomic goods. All three men spent time in Swiss jails pending the outcome of the espionage and trafficking inquiries. The time they have already spent in jail would count toward any possible sentence.

In early 2009, Marco Tinner was freed after more than three years of investigative detention, and his brother Urs was released in late 2008 after more than four years in jail. Their father, Friedrich, was released in 2006.

Mr. Müller recommended that, in addition to charges of atomic smuggling, Marco Tinner should be accused of money laundering.

The Swiss attorney general is now studying the magistrate’s report and will decide next year whether to file charges against the Swiss family of atomic spies and entrepreneurs.