Re: [New post] Wikileaks Russian Ties: Julian Assange’s Forgotten Trips To Moscow

Fri Jan 3 20:36:37 UTC 2020

When you say you don't ascribe to this article, does that mean you doubt
the faces presented re. Assange's history w Russia?  Like, this might be
fake facts?

On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 2:18 PM Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don’t endorse this. I just saw it
> and thought it might spark some conversation.
> kd
>
> Www.keithdavismusic.com
>
> > On Jan 3, 2020, at 9:59 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 
> >
> > Www.keithdavismusic.com
> >
> > Begin forwarded message:
> >
> >> From: Patribotics <donotreply at wordpress.com>
> >> Date: January 3, 2020 at 12:51:15 AM EST
> >> To: kbob42 at gmail.com
> >> Subject: [New post] Wikileaks Russian Ties: Julian Assange’s Forgotten
> Trips To Moscow
> >>
> >> 
> >> New post on Patribotics
> >>
> >>
> >> Wikileaks Russian Ties: Julian Assange’s Forgotten Trips To Moscow
> >> by Louise Mensch
> >> Julian Assange, who rang in the New Year in Her Majesty's Prison,
> Belmarsh, appears to have spent a significant amount of time in Russia in
> the 1990s. Additionally, he lived in Paris with a Russian-speaking
> 'girlfriend' and was part of group of hackers intimately connected with
> Russia and the then KGB as a teenager. Assange has also admitted to being
> deeply steeped in Russian culture, reading Russian and pro-Russian Ukranian
> authors, and even being devoted to Russian vintage children's cartoons.
> >>
> >> Biographies and profiles of Assange have, inexplicably, glossed over
> the Wikileaks' founder's youth and activities prior to starting Wikileaks.
> As attention focused on Assange's ties to Russia in 2016, and even before
> then, as Assange fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy while dodging a trial for
> rape in Sweden, countless biographies and profiles of Assange have been
> published.
> >>
> >> Bizarrely, most of them completely omitted Assange's clearly extensive
> ties to Russian intelligence, that go back as far as his early years as a
> proto-hacker, part of an international group of 'phone phreakers'. The
> general impression has been left of Wikileaks as an idealistic organization
> that somehow 'went wrong' as Assange's anti-Americanism drove him into the
> arms of the Kremlin, as an 'unwitting idiot'. The facts, however, make it
> clear that this approach gives the Australian both too much, and too
> little, credit. Too much, in that it assumes Assange meant no harm, and was
> merely tricked by the GRU into his assault on American democracy; too
> little, in that it underestimates the length and witting depth of Assange's
> treacherous association with Russian intelligence, dating back to the days
> of Yeltsin and the KGB.
> >>
> >> Biographies and profiles such as those on Wikipedia, The New Yorker,
> the Guardian, (by no less an authority than David Leigh and Luke Harding),
> the Independent, and several others this author found simply omit, and
> apparently do not even know about, Assange's travels to Russia before
> founding Wikileaks and his connections to Russian intelligence. The LA
> Times profile of Assange, for example, published last spring, says only:
> >>
> >> Born in 1971, Assange’s coming of age coincided, somewhat fatefully,
> with the dawn of the internet era. He showed an early talent for
> puzzle-solving and mathematics that swiftly morphed into a knack for
> computer programming and coding – and for hacking, which led to a brush in
> his 20s with Australian law enforcement.
> >>
> >> A 2013 CNN 'Fast Facts' on Assange simply starts in 2006, with the
> foundation of Wikileaks. The New York Times' timeline on Assange and the
> United States likewise starts in 2010, with the Chelsea Manning (then known
> as Bradley Manning) link to Wikileaks.
> >>
> >> In 1996, Julian Assange was tried for hacking in Australia. In 2006, he
> founded Wikileaks.  In the ten years in between, according to almost all
> public biographies, Assange 'lived quietly' in Melbourne, attending, then
> dropping out of, university. Nothing to see here. In their book on Assange,
> "Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy", David Leigh and Luke
> Harding, both highly respected Guardian journalists, describe some (not
> all) of Assange's programming activities after the trial and before
> Wikileaks, but they also mistakenly report:
> >>
> >> As early as 1999 he came up with the idea of a leakers' website, he
> said, and registered the domain name 'Wikileaks[.]org'. But otherwise, he
> didn't do much about it. Assange was living in Melbourne and quietly
> raising his son.
> >>
> >> That wasn't true. In 1998 and 1999, Julian Assange was traveling in
> Eastern Europe, Russia and China. And since 1999 is when "he came up with
> the idea of a leakers' website" this seems galactically significant.
> >>
> >> Julian Assange Pre-Wikileaks: Money and Moscow
> >> According to Assange himself, in a now-deleted 2011 interview
> originally hosted on Wikileaks,  and preserved on archives of both
> Wikileaks mirrors and other sites, he was a frequent visitor to Moscow, and
> was intimately familiar with its system and even its TV shows:
> >>
> >> When I was in Russia in the 1990s, I used to watch NTV in Moscow. NTV
> was the freest TV I have ever seen. I don’t know if you’re familiar with
> Spitting Image. It was a British public satire that was very politically
> aggressive, but NTV and other Russian channels had far more guts. And that
> was because at that time, Russia had something like 10 independent points
> of power. It had the army. It had the remnants of the KGB and the external
> KGB, which ended up becoming the SVR. It had Yeltsin, and his daughter, and
> that mob. It had some broader mish-mash of bureaucracy that was left over
> from the Soviet Union. And it had seven oligarchs. That meant, in terms of
> media control, the state plus the oligarchs with own their own independent
> media. As a result, you could actually put out almost anything you wanted
> under the patronage or protection of one of these groups. And when Putin
> came in, he tamed the oligarchs. Some were arrested, some had their assets
> seized, and some were exiled. The result was that they fell in under
> Putin’s centralized patronage pyramid. The ownership of the TV stations
> also reined popular democracy under Putin’s pyramid. And now, in order to
> get anything of scale done in Russia, you have to have a sponsor in the
> pyramid somewhere.
> >>
> >> Assange carried this deep knowledge with him into Wandsworth prison,
> where Russian authors and popular culture inspired him:
> >>
> >> As for inspirational texts, well, there isn’t one in particular. But
> when I was in prison, I read Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and
> I’ve been a long-term appreciator of Solzhenitsyn and other Russian
> literature....Pasternak and Dostoyevsky, and yes, Tolstoy when I was
> younger, and Bulgakov, though he’s a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian. Cancer
> Ward is a wonderful book. Solzhenitsyn was in a cancer ward after being
> released from prison and exiled in Siberia, and he draws parallels between
> experiences in a Soviet labor camp and a hospital ward, but also uses these
> as a way to get at power relationships within a Sovietized state. But
> having cancer in a cancer ward is even worse than being locked in the
> basement of Wandsworth Prison in solitary confinement. So I found it oddly
> cheering.
> >>
> >> Asked what 'the most beautiful story you ever heard' was, Assange says:
> >>
> >> I’m very fond of Russian children’s cartoons from the 1970s and 80s.
> These cartoons embody the highest representation of childhood and beauty
> and innocence and curiosity—all together. This is terribly underappreciated
> in Western society in this particular period. For something that I find
> beautiful, this is what comes to mind instantly.
> >>
> >> Russophilia is not, of course, a crime. But the facts on Assange's
> history indicate actual recruitment. Several biographers did go as far as
> to note his co-byline on the early history of a hacking group he was
> involved in, "Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession". This
> includes a limited amount on himself, "Mendax", as his nom-de-phreak had
> it. But Assange is an author of the book, and thus intimately involved with
> all the hackers in it. Take this early mention of Germany's "Chaos Computer
> Club":
> >>
> >> Pengo... a well-known hacker with links to the German hacking group
> called the Chaos Computer Club.... Pengo had been involved with people who
> sold US military secrets - taken from computers - to the KGB.
> >>
> >> Oh. Well, OK then.
> >>
> >> His real interest was in hacking, not spying. The Russian connection
> simply enabled him to get access to bigger and better computers. Beyond
> that, he felt no loyalty to the Russians.
> >>
> >> More on the 'Chaos Computer Club' and its KGB assets shortly. But
> Assange also writes a long chapter on 'Anthrax', who was involved in human
> trafficking and liked, in his off-time, to listen to Radio Moscow.
> >>
> >> In 1996 Assange was tried in Australia for a string of hacking
> offenses, including of United States military sites, the same targets his
> KGB-connected friends in the Chaos Computer Club had hit. He was convicted,
> and, essentially, let off with a warning. He was 25.
> >>
> >> Most Assange biographies gloss over the next few years. But that is a
> horrible dereliction of duty. As soon as the trial was over, Assange,
> formerly an indigent teenage hacker, met his biological father again and
> "came into money". This money was large enough to allow him to travel all
> over the world:
> >>
> >> Well, I’ve been traveling all over the world on my own since I was
> twenty-five, as soon as I had enough money to do it.
> >>
> >> Not only, even before skating on charges of attacking the US military,
> did Assange get enough cash to travel the world, an unnamed "Italian real
> estate investor" [sic] gave him and his anti-US-military co-conspirator
> "Trax" enough money to buy a mainframe computer at an Italian university.
> >>
> >> Note how this models what Assange wrote of 'Pengo' - the Russians gave
> Pengo access to 'bigger and better computers'
> >>
> >> In 1992 Mendax and Trax teamed up with a wealthy Italian real-estate
> investor, purchased La Trobe University's mainframe computer (ironically, a
> machine they had been accused of hacking) and started a computer security
> company. The company eventually dissolved when the investor disappeared
> following actions by his creditors.
> >>
> >> Uh-huh.
> >>
> >> It is genuinely amazing that the Guardian would wrongly report in 2011,
> of the time when Assange himself said he had enough money to travel the
> world, that:
> >>
> >> Convicted but leniently treated, Assange was now an unemployed father
> in Melbourne surviving on a single parent pension.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Assange's Choice of Travel - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Beijing
> >> In 1998 Assange was in the long period of traveling that he admitted
> started in 1996. According to the biography he refused to allow to be
> published, which has not come out in e-book, he announced some few of the
> destinations in a round-robin email for his "international" group of
> hackers: Frankfurt, Berlin, Poland, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irtkutsk, and
> Beijing.
> >>
> >> If anyone feels like getting together for beer, vodka, Siberian bear
> steak.... just let me know
> >>
> >> It is apparent, then, that several of his round-robin emailees lived in
> Russia. It would be pretty hard to meet him for Siberian bear steak in
> Irkutsk if they did not.
> >>
> >> The Chaos Computer Club, the KGB, and... the 2016 Election?
> >> Starting in Frankfurt and Berlin was also significant. The Chaos
> Computer Club was the one Assange wrote about back in 1997 - admitting one
> of his friends there had sold US military secrets to the KGB.
> >>
> >> But what is this? A 2018 Washington Post profile of Andy Muller-Maguhn,
> going to visit Assange, says that in 2016, Muller-Maguhn:
> >>
> >> ...typically brings Assange books, clothes or movies. Once in 2016, he
> delivered a thumb drive that he says contained personal messages for the
> WikiLeaks founder, who for security reasons has stopped using email.
> >>
> >> These visits have caught the attention of U.S. and European spy chiefs,
> who have struggled to understand how Assange's organization operates and
> how exactly WikiLeaks came to possess a trove of hacked Democratic Party
> emails that the group released at key moments in the 2016 presidential
> campaign.
> >>
> >> No, ma'am, Ms. Nakashimae - US and European spy chiefs have no problems
> whatsoever understanding how Wikileaks operates - it's a lazy as hell
> mainstream media that overlooked how Wikileaks operates.
> >>
> >> The piece continues:
> >>
> >> The roots of Müller-Maguhn's relationship with Assange trace back to
> his teenage years in the 1980s when his walk to school in Hamburg took him
> past the offices of the Chaos Computer Club.
> >>
> >> Oh.
> >>
> >> In a Herculean effort to whitewash Muller-Maguhn, the profile then goes
> on to admit that the German works for the Chinese state and has attended
> conferences in Moscow.
> >>
> >> One of his clients is in China, a state known for its suppression of
> the Internet and its surveillance of dissidents....In recent years,
> Müller-Maguhn's consulting and advocacy work has carried him all over the
> world, including Moscow, where in 2016 and 2017 he attended a security
> conference organized by the Russian Defense Ministry.
> >>
> >> Riigggghhhhhht. (Dr. Evil voice)
> >>
> >> In the superseding espionage indictment of Assange, the Chaos Computer
> Club is mentioned by name.
> >>
> >> In 2007, Assange admitted he had a "girlfriend" in Paris helping him
> build the Wikileaks website by translating Russian for him:
> >>
> >> I had a girlfriend who would come round. She just brought food and I
> stayed at the computer. She spoke Russian, and would sometimes lend a hand
> with that
> >>
> >> Why would Mr. Assange need Russian translated to build the Wikileaks
> website? Before he'd received a single, solitary leak?
> >>
> >> Because Russians were helping him build it and directing the build.
> >>
> >> Timeline of Assange's Russian Connections
> >> Here is a partial timeline of Julian Assange's Russian connections, as
> demonstrated in this piece from open source research. Taken as a whole, it
> should be amply clear that Assange has been working, knowingly, with
> Russian intelligence since the days of the KGB; that he has been funded by
> outlets working for Russia; that the 'Chaos Computer Club' is an offshoot
> of the GRU, best considered as contractors to Russian and Chinese
> intelligence; and that Wikileaks was a Russian-intelligence approved effort
> to use naive Western hackers and activists to help Russian military
> intelligence access United States Military facilities.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> This blog has long exclusively reported that the Mueller Grand Jury
> case is 'United States vs Wikileaks, et al,' and that the Government's case
> is that Wikileaks has always been a witting partner of the GRU. Once this
> is proven, the Trump campaign's partnership with Wikileaks becomes a
> legally chargeable partnership with the GRU, and DOJ can and will charge
> them with collusion.
> >>
> >> Julian Assange's completely forgotten and overlooked trips to Moscow
> and other Russian cities, and the influx of money he received after hacking
> the US military, entirely support our reporting and analysis. In their book
> on Wikileaks, David Leigh and Luke Harding describe the meeting the paper's
> journalists had with a triumphant Assange just before the Guardian
> dutifully published the leaks the GRU and Assange had jointly taken from
> Chelsea Manning.
> >>
> >> The partners again headed for dinner in the Rotunda restaurant beneath
> the Guardian offices... Here, as the journalists sank pints of Pilsner...
> Assange confided he was thinkin
> >>
> >> g about going to Russia. Russia was an odd choice - especially in the
> light of soon-to-be-published cables describing it as a 'virtual mafia
> state'.....
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> But, of course, Russia was not at all an 'odd choice', and had the
> Guardian done any research whatsoever into the man they were assisting and
> his motives, they would have realized that.
> >>
> >> Later, Guardian journalists would hide behind their opposition to the
> Russian anti-semite and open Russian intelligence asset Israel Shamir, who
> scorned to hide his affiliation with, and payment by, Assange and
> Wikileaks. 'Oh look, as soon as we realized Assange was deep in with
> Russian racists, we pulled back.' But by then, the damage to Western
> security had been done, by Russia, with their willing assistance.
> >>
> >> The Guardian, the New York Times, and all the other Western
> institutions who unwittingly helped Russian intelligence attack their own
> nations by giving Assange such a platform, now had a built-in disincentive
> to ever really examine the origins of Wikileaks and the motivations of its
> deeply repellent founder. Because if they "committed journalism", as
> Assange apologists like to say, they would have to report that they,
> themselves, had been so-called 'useful idiots'. And a headline like that is
> unlikely to make the front page.
> >>
> >> Timeline of Assange's Early Russian Connections
> >> Here is a partial timeline of Julian Assange's Russian connections, as
> demonstrated in this piece from open source research. Taken as a whole, it
> should be amply clear that Assange has been working, knowingly, with
> Russian intelligence since the days of the KGB; that he has been funded by
> outlets working for Russia; that the 'Chaos Computer Club' is an offshoot
> of the GRU, best considered as contractors to Russian and Chinese
> intelligence; and that Wikileaks was a Russian-intelligence approved effort
> to use naive Western hackers and activists to help Russian military
> intelligence access United States Military facilities.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 1971 - Julian Assange born.
> >>
> >> Late 80s - Julian Assange becomes part of an international group of
> hackers including the Chaos Computer Club in Germany
> >>
> >> 1986 - 1988 - 'Pengo', of the CCC, has been hacking the US military and
> selling its secrets to the KGB for 'access to better computers'. Assange
> gleefully records this in his book. Pengo hands himself in to German
> authorities after his fellow hacker of the US, Habgard, who also sold
> secrets to the KGB is burned alive before a court case, presumably because
> the KGB thought he would talk.
> >>
> >> 1989 - Julian Assange hacks NASA with the WANK worm, dropping the name
> of Midnight Oil into his code.
> >>
> >> 1989-1991 Assange befriends another hacker, Anthrax, an antisemite who
> likes to listen to Radio Moscow
> >>
> >> 1991 - Assange hacks the US military Milnet and gets caught, but the
> trial date takes several years
> >>
> >> 1992 - Assange and a fellow hacker suddenly come into enough money to
> buy a huge mainframe computer at an Italian University
> >>
> >> 1992-1996 Assange starts reading extensively in Russian literature
> >>
> >> 1996 - Assange is convicted but let off by an Australian judge, despite
> having done extensive damage to the US military
> >>
> >> 1996 - Assange comes into a large amount of money and begins
> extensively to travel the world alone. He sets up bulletin boards for
> international hackers, including hackers in Germany with the Chaos Computer
> Club, the KGB's partners, and Russia
> >>
> >> 1997 - Assange writes and publishes his self-laudatory book about
> hackers, from which many of the above facts are sourced
> >>
> >> 1990s in general - Assange spends enough time in Moscow to become
> intimately familiar with their TV shows and cartoons
> >>
> >> 1998 - Assange sends a 'round robin email' to his string of hacker
> friends asking to meet them in Berlin 'or Siberia' . He announces he will
> be visiting Germany, then Moscow, St. Petersburg and Irkutsk in Siberia,
> followed by Beijing, China
> >>
> >> 1999 - Assange registers Wikileaks
> >>
> >> 1999- 2007 - These years are obscured by Assange, apart from a short
> stint dropping out of college in 2003, but, of course, despite having
> convictions and no gainful employment, he is able to travel all around the
> world on, it may fairly be assumed, Russian money. Assange has never
> explained the source of the wealth he came into at 25, once he was 'let
> off' for hacking the US military
> >>
> >> 2006 - Wikileaks 'soft launches' in Iceland
> >>
> >> 2007 - Assange's Russian-speaking girlfriend in Paris is helping him
> code the Wikileaks website, and he uses her for Russian translations
> >>
> >> 2009 - the Chaos Computer Club and Assange solicit US military
> materials in Malaysia, as described in Assange's superseding indictment for
> espionage
> >>
> >> 2009 - Chelsea/Bradley Manning responds to the solicitation and Assange
> helps her crack US military passwords with the help of "Wikileaks
> Affiliates" who, I submit, are clearly agents of the GRU; the superseding
> indictment states:
> >>
> >> ASSANGE, WikiLeaks Affiliates,and Manning Shared the Common Objective
> to Subvert Lawful Restrictions on Classified Information and to Publicly
> Disseminate it.
> >>
> >> Readers will note the indictment does not speak of other members of
> Wikileaks, but "Wikileaks Affiliates".
> >>
> >> 2012 - Russia Today gives Assange his own television show, paying him
> handsomely, and sets up his flight to the Ecuadorean embassy by arranging
> for Correa to be his guest
> >>
> >> 2016 - the Chaos Computer Club's Andy Muller Maughn delivers Assange a
> thumb drive, while openly boasting he works for Russian intelligence and
> the Chinese government
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Louise Mensch | January 3, 2020 at 12:50 am | Tags: Assange, chaos
> computer club, GRU, Impeachment, Louise Mensch, Mueller Report,
> Patribotics, Russian Hacking, Wikileaks | Categories: Mueller, Trump
> Russia, Wikileaks | URL: https://wp.me/p8iY1U-2Zp
> >> Comment         See all comments
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> >>
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