Julian Assange offers to prove Russia hack

[Hindustani78]

AGENCIES
Published Dec 20, 2016, 1:57 am IST
Updated Dec 20, 2016, 2:21 am IST
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/world/america/201216/julian-assange-offers-to-prove-russia-hack.html

Washington: Wikileaks has offered to help US President Barack Obama authenticate CIA’s assessment that Russia was behind the leak of hacked Democratic emails during the presidential election. The CIA had claimed that Russia had interfered in the US elections, in part to help Donald Trump win the White House.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had previously claimed in an interview that Moscow was not the source of the leaked emails.

The whistleblowing website this week tweeted: “Obama should submit any Putin documents to WikiLeaks to be authenticated to our standards if he wants them to be seen as credible.”

Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s top aides on Monday said the president-elect isn’t ready to accept the finding by intelligence officials that Moscow hacked Democratic emails in a bid to elevate Mr Trump. Even if it’s true, they said, Mr Trump still won the White House fair and square.

The pushback comes as members of the Electoral College vote to formally appoint Mr Trump as the 45th president.

While Democrats likely are powerless to stop it, they suggested Mr Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton would forever be tainted by Russian meddling. “This whole thing is a spin job,” said Mr Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus. “And I think what the Democrats ought to do is look in the mirror and face the reality that they lost the election.”

Mr Trump tweeted: “If my many supporters acted and threatened people like those who lost the election are doing, they would be scorned & called terrible names!”

 

[Hindustani78]

http://www.thehindu.com/news/intern...spionage-details-from-cia/article17423686.ece

Experts who’ve started to sift through the material said it appeared legitimate and that the release was almost certain to shake the CIA.

WikiLeaks on Tuesday published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to provide an eye-opening look at the intimate details of America’s cyber-espionage toolkit.

The dump of more than 8,000 documents could not immediately be authenticated by The Associated Press and the CIA declined comment, but WikiLeaks has a long track record of releasing top secret government documents. Experts who’ve started to sift through the material said it appeared legitimate and that the release was almost certain to shake the CIA.

“There’s no question that there’s a fire drill going on right now,” said Jake Williams, a security expert with Augusta, Georgia-based Rendition Infosec. “It wouldn’t surprise me that there are people changing careers and ending careers as we speak.”

Bob Ayers, a retired U.S. intelligence official currently working as a security analyst, agreed, saying that the release was “real bad” for the agency.

If the authenticity of the dump were officially confirmed, it would represent yet another catastrophic breach for the U.S. intelligence community at the hands of WikiLeaks and its allies, which have repeatedly humbled Washington with the mass release of classified material, including hundreds of thousands of documents from the State Department and the Pentagon.

WikiLeaks, which had been dropping cryptic hints about the release for a month, said in a lengthy statement that the CIA had “recently” lost control of a massive arsenal of CIA hacking tools as well as associated documentation. The radical transparency organization said that “the archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner” and that one of them “provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

Jonathan Liu, a spokesman for the CIA, said, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

Williams, who has experience dealing with government hackers, said that the voluminous files’ extensive references to operation security meant they were almost certainly government-backed.


“I can’t fathom anyone fabricated that amount of operational security concern,” he said. “It rings true to me.”

“The only people who are having that conversation are people who are engaging in nation-state-level hacking,” he said.

The documents cover a range of topics, including what appeared to be a discussion about how to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

WikiLeaks said the leaked data also included details on the agency’s efforts to subvert American software products and smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows.

A “substantial library” of digital espionage techniques borrowed from Russia and other countries is in the data as well, WikiLeaks said.

Ayers noted that WikiLeaks has prom0ised to release more CIA documents, saying Tuesday’s publication was just “the first full part of the series.”

“The damage right now is relatively high-level,” he said. “(But) the potential for really detailed damage will come in the following releases.”

 

[Hindustani78]

Russians tried to help Julian Assange escape from London embassy hideout: Report
A Guardian report claims Russian officials were involved in a “basic” plan to extract Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuador embassy in London on Christmas Eve last year and fly him to Russia.
Updated: Sep 22, 2018 19:47 IST

https://www.hindustantimes.com/worl...eout-report/story-rrNrRTmhMBjTLCDyaeBfvL.html

Russian officials had devised a covert plan to help Wikileaks founder Julian Assange escape to Russia from his Ecuadorian embassy hideout in London, a UK media report claimed on Friday.

The 47-year-old Assange remains in hiding in a back room of the central London building six years after losing a legal battle against extradition to Sweden for questioning on allegations of rape and sexual assault.The Australian national had sought asylum from Ecuador over fears of further extradition to the US for sedition and espionage for leaking secretive documents on Wikileaks.

‘The Guardian’ has now claimed that Russian officials were involved in a “basic” plan to extract the Wikileaks founder from the embassy on Christmas Eve last year and fly him to Russia. The plot, said to have been abandoned at the last moment, was thought to have involved a diplomatic vehicle.

The newspaper said that details of the Assange escape plan are “sketchy”. Two sources familiar with the inner workings of the Ecuadorian embassy said that Fidel Narváez, a close confidant of Assange who until recently served as Ecuador’s London consul, had served as a point of contact with Moscow.

Assange and the embassy have denied the report, which comes days after the Associated Press announced it had obtained documents showing that Assange had applied for a Russian visa in November 2010, just before he was arrested by Scotland Yard.

Assange is a key figure in the ongoing US criminal investigation into Russia’s attempts to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Robert Mueller, the special counsel conducting the investigation, filed criminal charges in July against a dozen Russian GRU military intelligence officers who allegedly hacked Democratic party servers during the presidential campaign.According to Mueller, WikiLeaks published “over 50,000 documents” stolen by Russian spies.

However, Assange has denied receiving the stolen emails from Russia.

The Russian embassy in London tweeted on Friday to say the ‘Guardian’ report was “another example of disinformation and fake news from the British media”.