Like Molly Millions ducking 3jane for fourteen years in Neuromancer, Assange v. U.S. Intelligence Enterprise is the vendetta that just wonāt die.
Except that now, with the fourteenth anniversary imminent, it seems maybe the end IS nigh. The question I have is ā¦ for whom?
Attention Conservation Notice:
Fuck that guy. And no reacharound.
Background:
I got into this curious profession by agreeing to help Chet Uber with Project VIGILANT, fifteen years and a few weeks ago. PV was too reckless even for me, even way back then, so I was idle but still associated when Chelsea Manning was caught in May of 2010. We canāt have random enlisted people declassifying heckinā everything, but on the other hand there kinda were a bunch of war crimes on display. The only ones to get in trouble were the groundlings: Manning, Lynndie England, a few other little fish, and John Kiriakou for detecting and reporting war crimes in 2006.
I counted myself an Assange supporter until ā¦ maybe 2014 or 2015? There was no denying he was serving as a Russian agent in the summer of 2016 and foisting Trump on America was simply not OK with me. I felt that way prior to a million excess deaths from COVID19 and now Iād be pleased if they could find a way to prosecute Assange for war crimes.
More Recent:
During 2022 I had an opportunity to closely examine the backtrail of Adam Waldman, an attorney whoād been involved in attempting to broker an arrangement for Assange back in 2017. The client in that case turned out to be a fantabulous dingbat using a motley collection of scammers as āsourcesā which they wanted me to āevaluateā. The first thing I did for this duty was acquire a burner phone, but in after action review I found the client had attempted to intimidate people by publicly menacing them using my name prior to the engagement even starting(!) This is even more of why I treat any social media like itās the feeding slot for a padded cell.
This is what I ended up with in Maltego. The month after the aforementioned dingbattery, Charles Johnson approached me on LinkedIn. As a high profile right winger I did not have a specific explanation why he would have done this but there were several people of similar stature circulating at the time. I chose to ignore the proffer.
Once the Johnathan Buma whistleblower story broke I finally accepted Johnsonās connect request, fourteen months after it was made. Special Agent Buma accepted a connection request from me in early January of this year.
Despite the whistleblowing, based on the conversations I had, Johnson is still a CI, and Buma is still his handler. Some of you will recall Individual None from late last year and Deflecting DerpOps was temporally adjacent. I gave both Buma and Johnson a kick in late March, after they floated the notion that Individual None was Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and that I should take it seriously, and participate in some āinvestigationā.
When the informant business goes cold for them, theyāve both got promising careers in pretending to throw tennis balls for credulous Labrador puppies.
Bracketing the Waldman work was an approach by people I made to be pro-Wikileaks partisans, but the sort whoād be among the 25% of hackers compromised by law enforcement. They were far more effective, being the proximal cause for my removing every bit of walk on talent from my environment. A āno second chances no matter whatā policy seems to have put an end to their utility.
Prognostication:
Charles Johnson had a public spinout in late February. Maybe itās real, maybe itās performative. Given whatās happened thus far I took date stamped screen shots of it all and tossed them in a folder. I expect this will come up again sooner or later.
Way back in September of 2023 in Stop Ingesting Crap I recommended you keep a timeline. This is the dividing line between tourists and practitioners. Without having kept a timeline, and having reviewed that timeline with the assistance of a couple other people I trust, I would not have caught the aforementioned Wikileaks approach.
The details of how that happened arenāt important here, but if youāre going to creep up on someone wary, you need a good read on them and a patient, multifaceted approach. That will involve access to people in their circles who are not paying attention. Compartments help, of course, but the more you do this sort of thing the more youāll find yourself replaying this scene from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
When they get Prideaux back from the Soviets thereās ONE question. How did Esterhase know about the code names Control used in this scene? They were never written down anywhere ā¦ the only explanation is that Esterhaseās Soviet handler had told him.
If you havenāt watched that movie yet youād better get to it, the pace, the atmospherics, the methods ā¦ itās wonderfully done ā¦ and itās also a useful unit of cultural information, too.
Conceal The Squeal:
Assange, safely in custody in Belmarsh prison, can do nothing directly about the 2024 election. But his supporters are a nuisance and his case IS a political football.
Biden was buttonholed about Assange during a high level visit by Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida. Australia, one of our closest allies, has sought Assangeās release for years, and Bidenās response was āWeāre considering it.ā
I hope the consideration the U.S. gets from Assange is that heās going to come clean about what happened. His words can put away Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi. Given that it was Stoneās ratfucking in 2000 and 2016 and Corsiās in 2004 that deprived us of any chance of actually remediating climate change, as well as dragging us towards Novemberās Civil War Referendum, prosecuting those two would be one of the top five moves we could make to protect our democracy.
As much as Iād like to see a big olā public freakout like the day before the media reported that Hector āSabuā Monsegur was an informant, keeping would-be insurrectionists worried about whatās lurking might be for the best from a counter-intelligence perspective. Putting such folks away is obviously the end goal, but leaving them unable to act due to fear of what Assange may have revealed isnāt a terrible consolation prize in the mean time.
Conclusion:
Once you understand how things work, how a tempest really can start with a single flap of butterfly wings, itās essentially impossible to look away. Iād give anything to be able to un-see what Iāve seen. Iād pack every bit of electronics in my hut down to Murgatroydās Mysteries & Consignment, then take the proceeds to the nearest used book store.
But instead I am gonna sit here with this list of 606 useful idiots and see if I can make out what theyāve been up to whilst a few of them have been in the pay of a hostile foreign power. This isnāt strictly necessary for the story to move forward in the news, but like I said ā¦ once you understand how things work ā¦