 |
| I hope this isn't reality, but it feels like it lately. |
It's becoming more and more apparent that Russia, Wikileaks and maybe Trump or his minions are trying to turn the United States into a wholly owned subsidiary of Putin, Inc.
Unless we get a James Bond-like figure to save the day, I worry that this effort might succeed.
Friday, the nation got more details on the intelligence gathering that shows Russia was trying - and succeeded, apparently - at tilting our elections toward Donald Trump last November. Vladimir Putin was personally involved in some of this, apparently.
We have Trump get his top secret intelligence briefing on the issue, and still insisting that there wasn't much to the intelligence gathering that Russia did this...
Maybe most ominously, we got more evidence that WikiLeaks, far from being a way to prompt government and corporate transparancy world wide, is more like Putin's goon squad.
The news from WikiLeaks kept getting weirder and more ominous Friday.
First, WikiLeaks objected to Thursday leaks detailing parts of the intelligence report on Russia to NBC News.
WikiLeaks tweeted: "The Obama admin/CIA is illegally funneling TOP SECRET/COMINT information to NBC for political reasons before PEOTUS even gets to read it."
(POETUS refers to President-elect Trump.)
But get this: WikiLeaks was critcizing.......leaks. A little hypocritical maybe? Or was WikiLeaks just ,mad because the NBC leak had the potential to make Trump look bad.
Besides, it appears what got leaked to NBC News Thursday was the declassified version of the intelligence report that was widely released to the public Friday.
Much more ominously, WikiLeaks seemed to issue a warning of a witch hunt against journalists and others who discuss, investigate or report on Russian meddling.
Which is interesting, since Trump himself called reports of Russian influence on the U.S. election as political witch hunt, prompted by sour grapes among those who lost the election.
The worrisome potential WikiLeaks, went like this, as Ars Technica reports:
"A Friday Twitter post from WikiLeaks' official task force declared intent to build a publicly seachable database revolving around a particular group of people: Verified Twitter accounts.
'We are thinking of making an online database with all verified Twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships,' the Friday tweet reads. A follow-up post sought suggestions fro the public and said the group is 'looking for discrete (father/shareholding/party membership variables that can be put into our AI software."
In short it appears that WikiLeaks might want to intimidate journalists into silence by "doxing" them. That means making their personal information such as home, family etc. public so goons who support Trump can harass, threaten or even assault journalists or others who criticize Trump.
A very Russian thing to do, don't you think? Suppress dissent, intimidate critics, stamp out free speech.
And WikiLeaks says they're for the truth? Ha!
I'm not sure what's in store once Trump takes office. Trump's constant dismissiveness of Russian hacking indicates either he wants to partner with Puting to squelched democracy, or more likely, Russia thinks Trump is a chump and has the goods on him.
Either way, this won't end well.
Let's hope people - and the media - fight efforts to stop the spread of information about who is influencing what in America, and holding on to the basics of democracy.
It's interesting that an outfit like WikiLeaks which says they want information freely available now so obviously shilling for such an anti-freedom outfit like Russia.
Once press freedom and freedom of speech is suppressed, which seems to be the effort underway, we all sink under the thumb of oppressive dictators.
I hope the resistance is stronger
Trump keeps calling the news about Russian hacking "a political witch hunt."
Trump appears to have gotten a number of important details wrong about the NBC story. No one “gave” NBC the top-secret report, as Trump claimed. As the NBC story notes, the official quoted by the network never even saw a copy of the intelligence report; he or she just repeated to NBC what someone had said about its findings.
On Friday morning, Trump told The New York Times that the ongoing public interest in possible Russian interference in the presidential election was “a political witch hunt.” He also complained the election-hacking story was getting more attention than other instances where government computers were compromised. These previous hacks, however, did not include releasing the stolen information to the public.
No comments:
Post a Comment