What Julian Assange's War on Hillary Clinton Says About WikiLeaks

By Robert Mackey, The Intercept

07 August 16

n recent months, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.

This has puzzled some of the group's supporters, and led to speculation that the site's Australian founder, Julian Assange, had timed the release of emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee to drive a wedge between supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The publication of emails that revealed an anti-Sanders agenda inside the Democratic party was certainly welcomed by the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

But it should come as no surprise to anyone who looks back at the founding principles of WikiLeaks that Assange - who has clearly stated his distaste for the idea of the former secretary of state becoming president - would make aggressive use of leaked documents to try to undermine her.

As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, "Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events." To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, "Leaks were an instrument of information warfare."

In other words, Assange's project has been from the start more like opposition research than dispassionate reporting. His goal is to find dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations he sees as corrupt or dangerous, and bring them down by exposing it. As he memorably told Der Spiegel in 2010, "I enjoy crushing bastards."

His recent focus on "crushing" Clinton but not Trump has led some to ask Assange if he is worried about helping to elect someone who might be even more hostile to him - let alone to the causes of justice and peace that have motivated Wikileaks' previous disclosures. Asked recently by Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now" if he does prefer Trump over Clinton, Assange replied, "You're asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?"

Speaking to Bill Maher on Friday night from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been effectively confined for more than four years, Assange joked about hacking Trump's tax returns, but added, "from the perspective of WikiLeaks trying to protect its sources, you have really two very bad presidential candidates."

In an address to the American Green Party convention on Saturday, Assange reiterated that both major party candidates for the presidency were "horrific," but argued that "it certainly doesn't make as much difference as people say," which of them gets elected. What is important, he said, is to build political pressure "to discipline and hold to account and check the abuses of power during the next four years."

To better understand Assange's recent intervention in the U.S. election, it helps to look more closely at a sort of manifesto he wrote as he was creating WikiLeaks. The same month that WikiLeaks.org went live, in December of 2006, Assange posted an essay on his blog, "Conspiracy as Governance," in which he explained his theory that authoritarian regimes - and western political parties - maintain power by conspiring to keep the public in the dark, through "collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population." In order for the people to regain control of the political system, Assange argued, it is necessary to find ways of "throttling the conspiracy," like disrupting the ability of the conspirators to communicate secretly.

With that in mind, Assange wrote, "let us consider two closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings, the US Democratic and Republican parties." He continued, "Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence - let alone the computer systems which manage their subscribers, donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail campaigns? They would immediately fall into an organisational stupor and lose to the other."

A decade later, by releasing thousands of unredacted emails and voice-mail messages hacked from the Democratic Party - in a database that makes it easy to search for the social security numbers of donors, as well as their passport and credit card details - Assange was finally able to put his theory into practice, by attempting to throttle one of the "conspiratorial power groupings" that selects candidates to run the U.S. government.

Assange's attack on the DNC certainly revealed hypocrisy within the party, and led to the resignations of four senior officials, but his decision to not redact personal information from those documents - or from a second cache of emails hacked from a Turkish political party - also led to criticism from some longtime supporters, including Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

My colleague Glenn Greenwald also told Slate last week that he was troubled by the fact that WikiLeaks had abandoned its previous policy of redaction. "There were tons of redactions when they were releasing Pentagon documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars," he noted. "And they even wrote a letter to the State Department before they released the cables requesting the State Department's help in figuring out which information ought to be withheld."

Although Assange has spoken of the dumping of "pristine," unedited documents as a philosophical principle - and his biographer Andrew O'Hagan reported that the collapse of his working relationship with the editors of the New York Times and the Guardian was partly fueled by disagreements about redaction - it seems possible that the intense pressure on the organization has also made it nearly impossible to carry out careful editing of every document it obtains. Assange continues to be confined to Ecuador's embassy in London - which has been described as illegal, "arbitrary detention" by a United Nations panel - and Sarah Harrison, his investigations editor, has chosen to live in exile in Berlin since helping Snowden get from Hong Kong to Russia, heeding legal advice that she could face prosecution if she tried to return to Britain.

Whatever the reason, it is difficult to see a public-interest argument for making public some of what was contained in the DNC files. One of the voice-mail recordings, for instance, was a conversation between a staffer and his young child during a visit to a zoo, which appears to have been left by accident, following a pocket-dial. The staffer's phone number was made available, much to the delight of some Trump supporters.

As the Turkish scholar Zeynep Tufekci explained in the Huffington Post, a trove of Turkish-language emails WikiLeaks released last month, inaccurately presented as private messages from members of Turkey's ruling party, the AKP, also included little of public interest but did reveal the private information of ordinary citizens.

To make matters worse, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed also shared a link to another cache of hacked Turkish documents that included home addresses or phone numbers for every female voter in 79 of Turkey's 81 provinces.

Unfortunately, for believers in the WikiLeaks project, Assange has responded to criticism of his redaction-free document dumps by attacking even longtime supporters who have spoken out. The @wikiLeaks Twitter account the site's founder uses to annotate documents and rebut critics replied angrily to Snowden's message about the desirability of some sort of selective editing, accusing the NSA whistleblower whom Assange helped get asylum in Russia of angling for a pardon from Clinton.

WikiLeaks also suggested, wrongly, that Tufekci is an "apologist" for Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan - a leader she has, in fact, frequently criticized for his opposition to internet freedom.

Of course, Assange is hardly alone in being quick to denounce his critics on Twitter, but the way in which he uses the @wikileaks account these days matters to the overall functioning of the organization because it is the only obvious way for outsiders to provide feedback on the annotation or analysis of the documents. Despite the site's name, WikiLeaks never developed into a Wikipedia-like website that welcomes, or facilitates crowd-sourced annotation and vetting of the documents it obtains. If you spot an error on Wikipedia, you can fix it, but WikiLeaks does not allow for that kind of collaborative fact-checking.

That the site was originally intended to function more like a crowd-sourced, wiki platform was suggested by the Wikipedia-like annotation that accompanied the very first document uploaded by WikiLeaks in 2006. (Although it was described as a "leak," that document - an order from an Islamist rebel leader in Somalia that the site's editors could not verify as authentic - was not provided by a whistleblower, but stolen from Chinese hackers by a WikiLeaks activist who intercepted traffic flowing through a Tor network server he owned.)

Since the crowd-sourced aspect of WikiLeaks proved difficult to implement, and the site no longer relies mainly on collaborations with news organizations to vet and make sense of the vast troves of documents it obtains, Assange has, over time, taken on the role of the organization's main analyst. Before the advent of Twitter, analysis and annotation written by Assange and his volunteers filled a section of the WikiLeaks website. Lately, though, most of the interpretation of the documents has been done only in short bursts on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed, where the site's founder draws attention to items he thinks are important, and tries to provide some context and analysis.

The micro-blogging format has obvious limits, however, when it comes to making complex annotations. The generally hostile tone of the WikiLeaks Twitter feed in response to even well-intentioned efforts to fact-check the group's work has also severely hampered the project's ability to use crowd-sourcing to properly annotate and vet the documents it posts. (I know this from first-hand experience, having been denounced by @wikileaks last month for pointing to a factual error in one of the group's tweets about a DNC email.)

This criticism might seem like a narrow, technical objection - and it is certainly the case that journalists independently continue to help verify and interpret the most significant documents Assange publishes - but WikiLeaks' lack of scrutiny of the documents it obtains, and its founder's hostility to constructive criticism from outsiders, could be a significant problem if it is ever duped into publishing a forgery.

What if, as the cybersecurity consultant Matt Tait asked last month in relation to the DNC emails, a source - like, say, a hacker working for a Russian intelligence agency - provided WikiLeaks with a cache of documents that was tampered with in order to smear a political candidate?

In a post on the blog Lawfare, Tait explained that he had spent some time looking through the DNC files for any signs of a fake email planted among the genuine ones:

The metadata analysis I did on the leaked documents that day was almost by accident. I was actually looking for evidence of something much more frightening and which still keeps me up at night: What if the documents were mostly real, but had been surgically doctored? How effective would a carefully planted paragraph in an otherwise valid document be at derailing a campaign? How easily could Russia remove or sidestep an inconvenient DNC official with a single doctored paragraph showing "proof" of dishonest, unethical or illegal practices? And how little credibility would the sheepish official have in asserting that "all of the rest of the emails are true, but just not the one paragraph or email that makes me look bad?"

WikiLeaks is justly proud of its record to date of not being duped by forgers.

"The materials that we release are pristine," Assange told Bill Maher on Friday. "We're really good at this, we have a ten-year perfect record of having never got it wrong in relation to the integrity of what we've released."

Still, given that WikiLeaks is now unwilling or unable to closely scrutinize all of the documents it obtains, it is not hard to imagine a scenario where something like this could occur - and that possibility itself serves to diminish the group's credibility as a source of unvarnished truth.

Even so, for an organization so wounded by official persecution, it remains capable of inflicting remarkable damage. Although the DNC leaks have so far failed to derail Clinton's campaign, Assange has hinted in recent interviews that he has more material on the candidate that he plans to release soon. While it is unclear why Assange would hold on to any secrets that might torpedo Clinton, if he has something like that, the fear of a WikiLeaks-powered October surprise must still haunt the dreams of her advisors.

The Inexplicable 'Courtesy' That Could Elect Donald Trump

By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress

07 August 16

n its surface, Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. has very little to do with voting rights. It's a case about the right of transgender students to use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, wrapped up in an equally important question of whether conservatives will succeed in weakening the executive branch's power to shape policy during an age of congressional dysfunction.

But Justice Stephen Breyer, a Clinton appointee who normally votes with the Court's liberal bloc, cast a strange and unexpected vote in the G.G. case. Though the immediate impact of that vote is likely to be temporary, Breyer's decision to cast this one vote raises serious questions about how the Court will behave in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

Court watchers had largely assumed that a raft of lower court victories by voting rights advocates were safe from the Supreme Court now that conservatives no longer enjoy a majority on that Court. Breyer's vote casts doubt upon that assumption. And, if Breyer behaves in voting rights cases in the same way that he did in the G.G. case, he could throw close elections to the Republicans this November.

Courteous Discrimination

To explain, the "G.G." in the G.G. case is Gavin Grimm, a trans high school senior who challenged his school's discriminatory bathroom policy. Grimm won in a federal appeals court, and the school district sought a stay of that decision from the Supreme Court. Although Breyer opposed granting the stay, he nonetheless voted with his four conservative colleagues to grant it, explaining that he did so "as a courtesy" that "will preserve the status quo (as of the time the Court of Appeals made its decision) until the Court considers the forthcoming petition" asking the justices to hear this case on the merits.

Such "courtesy" votes are fairly common in death penalty cases due to a quirk of the Supreme Court's rules. It takes four justices to agree to hear a case, but five to grant a stay. To prevent a situation where the Court announces that it will hear a capital case, only to have that case become moot after the inmate at issue in that case is executed, a fifth justice often grants a courtesy vote to stay that execution while the case is pending.

Courtesy votes in death penalty cases, in other words, acknowledge the fact that death is irreversible. If an individual is executed, and the Court later decides that this execution is illegal, not even the Supreme Court of the United States has the power to bring this individual back to life.

Nothing about Gavin Grimm's case is analogous to the irreversible machinery of death. When Grimm returns to school this fall, he will either be afforded his full measure of civil rights, or he won't be. If the school district allows him to use the men's room, and then a Supreme Court decision holds that the district is free to lock Grimm out of that bathroom, then there is nothing preventing the school district from doing so in the future.

Indeed, the irony of Breyer's courtesy vote is that it may bring about the very circumstance that these votes are supposed to prevent. Again, courtesy votes are cast in death penalty cases to prevent an irreversible event from frustrating the Court's jurisdiction over a case. The stay that Breyer voted to grant will remain in effect until "the issuance of the judgment of this Court," if the Supreme Court agrees to hear this case. But the Court may not issue its judgment until late June, weeks after Grimm will have graduated from high school.

In extending "courtesy" to his conservative colleagues, in other words, Breyer may have taken away Grimm's one shot to have his rights vindicated.

Courteous Disenfranchisement

Which brings us back to the issue of voting rights. In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, which rejected a challenge to a common form of voter suppression law, laws restricting the right to vote have proliferated. Often, these laws are justified as necessary to combat in-person voter fraud, a phenomenon only slightly more common than unicorns and elves, but their real effect is to disenfranchise voters who tend to prefer Democrats over Republicans.

According to one study, for example, strict voter ID laws cause Democratic turnout to drop "by an estimated 8.8 percentage points in general election," as compared to only 3.6 percentage points for Republicans. More conservative estimates indicate that these laws add more than a full percentage point to Republican candidates' margin over their Democratic opponents.

In the final weeks of July, several lower courts handed down decisions halting many of these voter suppression laws, including an appeals court's decision striking down major provisions of North Carolina's omnibus voter suppression law on the grounds that it was enacted for the very purpose of reducing African-American turnout. This and similar decisions by federal appeals courts were widely viewed as safe from Supreme Court review. Conservatives no longer have the votes to reverse them.

But Breyer's vote in G.G. raises serious doubts about whether these pro-voting rights decisions are safe or not. Sure, Breyer is likely to vote to strike these laws down on the merits - just as he is likely to eventually side with Gavin Grimm if the Court decides to give G.G. a full hearing. But an eventual vote on the merits won't be enough to stop these voter suppression laws from impacting the 2016 election if Breyer shows the same "courtesy" in voting rights cases that he did in G.G..

Indeed, the potential for irreversible harm is even greater in the voting rights cases than it is in G.G. Though resolution of the G.G. case could be delayed until late June, it is possible - even if the Court agrees to give the case a full hearing - that the Court could dispose of this case as soon as this winter, especially if the Court splits 4-4 and there is no need for the justices to write opinions. Breyer's courtesy vote may only delay Grimm's ability to enjoy his full civil rights, without preventing Grimm from ever attending a high school free from discriminatory policies.

In the voting rights cases, by contrast, conservatives only need to delay resolution of the cases until Election Day this November for Republicans to benefit from the challenged voter suppression laws, assuming that Breyer gives them another courtesy vote in those cases. And once the election has happened, the voters who were disenfranchised by those laws will never have the opportunity to vote in the November 2016 election again.

Additionally, as time passes the GOP's hand only gets stronger in these cases. The Roberts Court has historically been reluctant to halt voter suppression laws as an election draws near. So even if Breyer only grants his conservative colleagues the "courtesy" of a very short stay, they may use that time to run out the clock and then argue that it is too close to the election to lift the stay.

In fairness to Breyer, the justice did explain in G.G. that part of his reason for granting the courtesy vote is that doing so "will preserve the status quo (as of the time the Court of Appeals made its decision)." So Breyer's own reasoning only extends, at most, to voter suppression laws that are already in effect. If the law has not yet taken effect, perhaps because it was halted by a court order shortly after its passage, then Breyer's explanation for his vote in G.G. does not extend to that law.

Nevertheless, should Breyer decide to cast similar courtesy votes in any voting rights case, he is likely to permanently strip voters of their ability to participate in the upcoming election. And, if an election is close, he could potentially change its outcome as well.