espionage
Julian Assange released from prison after agreeing to plea deal with US government
Julian Assange, Embassy Of Ecuador on May 19, 2017, in London, England
From LifeSiteNews
Following a 5-year solitary incarceration, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was released from a London prison after taking a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the publication of classified information online.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released from prison after agreeing to a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department.
On Monday, the high-profile journalist was released from prison after agreeing to a deal in which he plead guilty for his involvement in publishing classified information received from a whistleblower working inside the U.S. government.
As CNN reported, Assange will receive a 62-month prison sentence according to the terms of the agreements. The sentence equals the time he spent in the high-security prison Belmarsh near London. The time served will be credited toward his sentence, allowing Assange to leave prison immediately and return to his native Australia.
“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks announced in its statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a…
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 24, 2024
“This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalized. We will provide more information as soon as possible.”
“After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars,” the statement continued, adding that “WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.”
Assange is expected to officially plead guilty in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, a U.S. territory located in the Pacific Ocean relatively close to Assange’s native Australia.
Assange faced life in prison in the U.S. for 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse related to the publication of millions of classified documents by WikiLeaks.
Assange’s legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified documents regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a video that showed a U.S. military helicopter killing several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad, Iraq. The information was provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. From 2012 to 2019, Assange lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London under asylum status. After he was arrested by Metropolitan police in 2019 under an extradition warrant from the U.S. government, Assange was imprisoned at Belmarsh, a high-security prison close to London, where he has been held in solitary confinement up until Monday.
According to sources cited by CNN, officials at the Justice Department and the FBI opposed any deal that did not include a guilty plea to a felony by Assange.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald warned of the danger of Assange pleading guilty to a felony for publishing classified information, which, in the eyes of many, was not a crime but a service to society, namely providing information showing that governments are deceiving their citizens.
“I never believed that the Biden administration actually wanted to bring Julian Assange onto American soil to stand trial,” Greenwald said. “Imagine the spectacle that it would have created as Biden heads into an election.”
It would put on Joe Biden’s record that he would be the first American president in history to preside over the imprisonment, not of a source who leaked information, but of someone who published classified information, which every newspaper in the United States does on a regular basis…
The goal of… keeping him in prison was to crush Julian Assange physically and mentally, and they succeeded in doing that…
They wanted to break Assange and simultaneously send a message to any future Assanges that ‘We will ruin your life if you publish our secrets.’
Drawing parallels to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden not being allowed to return to the U.S., Greenwald said, “It is a deterrent message to keep the ability to hide their own crimes through secrecy, immune from the one vulnerability that they have which is that brave people inside the government leak that information to the public or through the media and reveal what it is they are doing.”
Daily Caller
Chinese Agents Can Now Access Every American’s Phone Calls And Texts, GOP Senator Warns
Republican South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds warned Friday that China’s state-sponsored hackers, known as Salt Typhoon, have gained the capability to spy on millions of Americans through their mobile phones. (Screenshot/YouTube/HalifaxtheForum)
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Republican South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds warned Friday that China’s state-sponsored hackers, known as Salt Typhoon, have gained the capability to spy on millions of Americans through their mobile phones.
During an event at Halifax The Forum, Rounds revealed that hackers have infiltrated all major U.S. telecommunications firms. Rounds said these hackers have penetrated every major telecom provider in the country. He also said the Chinese Communist government is capable of reading texts and listening to conversations.
“Any one of us and every one of us today is subject to the review by the Chinese Communist government of any cell phone conversation you have with anyone in America. Because they have access to every single one of our major telecommunications companies. They have broken in. They can read your texts, and they can hear your conversations,” Rounds said. “It’s just a matter of who they want to listen to and who they don’t.”
Salt Typhoon, identified as a Chinese hacking group, has infiltrated the networks of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and their presence lingers, according to Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The Washington Post reported. Warner called the breach “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history—by far.”
The breach, ongoing for over a year, affects telecom giants such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Hackers even accessed law enforcement wiretap request logs, revealing investigative targets, though the wiretap system itself remains uncompromised, WaPo said. The breach reportedly targeted communications involving former President Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and White House officials.
Despite intervention from the FBI, the hackers remain embedded in the U.S. telecom infrastructure, according to WaPo. Warner explained that expelling them will require a massive overhaul, including the physical replacement of thousands of routers and switches across affected networks.
“This is an ongoing effort by China to infiltrate telecom systems around the world, to exfiltrate huge amounts of data,” Warner said.
The group exploited outdated infrastructure and inter-network trust, enabling real-time eavesdropping and data exfiltration, the outlet reported. While fewer than 150 individuals were directly targeted, the scope of compromised data extends to millions of associated contacts.
The Biden administration urges stricter cybersecurity measures to counter persistent Chinese aggression.
“We must lock our digital doors,” Deputy National Security Adviser Anne Neuberger said.
National security officials, including Trump appointees, vow heightened focus on combating cyber threats.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Tucker Carlson: Longtime source says porn sites controlled by intelligence agencies for blackmail
From LifeSiteNews
Journalist Glenn Greenwald replied with a story about how U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson changed his tune on a dime about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the government to spy on American communications without a warrant. The journalist made the caveat that he is not assuming blackmail was responsible for Johnson’s behavior.
Tucker Carlson shared during an interview released Wednesday that a “longtime intel official” told him that intelligence agencies control the “big pornography sites” for blackmail purposes.
Carlson added that he thinks dating websites are controlled as well, presumably referring at least to casual “hook-up” sites like Tinder, where conversations are often explicitly sexual.
“Once you realize that, once you realize that the most embarrassing details of your personal life are known by people who want to control you, then you’re controlled,” Carlson said.
He went on to suggest that this type of blackmail may explain some of the strange, inconsistent behavior of well-known figures, “particularly” members of Congress.
“We all imagine that it’s just donors” influencing their behavior, Carlson said. “I think it’s more than donors. I’ve seen politicians turn down donors before.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald replied with a story about how U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson changed his tune on a dime about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the government to spy on American communications without a warrant. The journalist made the caveat that he is not assuming blackmail was responsible for Johnson’s behavior.
Greenwald told how he had seen Johnson grill FBI Director Christopher Wray about his agency’s spying and “could just tell that he felt passionately about (this),” prompting Greenwald to invite Johnson on his show, before anyone had any idea he might become Speaker of the House.
“One of the things we spent the most time on was (the need for) FISA reform,” Greenwald told Carlson, noting that the expiration of the current iteration of the FISA law was soon approaching. He added that Johnson was “determined” to help reform FISA and that it was in fact “his big issue,” the very reason he was on Greenwald’s show to begin with.
Johnson said regarding FISA, “We cannot allow this to be renewed; it’s a great threat to American democracy; at the very least, we need massive, fundamental reform” according to Greenwald.
Johnson became House Speaker about two months to three months later, and Greenwald was excited about the FISA reform he thought Johnson would surely help bring about.
“Not only did Mike Johnson say, ‘I’m going to allow the FISA renewal to come to the floor with no reforms.’ He himself said, ‘It is urgent that we renew FISA without reforms. This is a crucial tool for our intelligence agencies,’” Greenwald reounted.
He noted that Johnson was already getting access to classified information while in Congress, wondering at Johnson’s explanation for his behavior at the time, which was that he was made aware of highly classified information that illuminated the importance of renewing FISA and the spying capabilities it grants, as is.
Greenwald doesn’t believe one meeting is enough to change the mind of someone who is as invested in a position as Johnson was on FISA reform.
“I can see someone really dumb being affected by that … he’s a very smart guy. I don’t believe he changed his mind. So the question is, why did he?” Greenwald asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. But I know that the person that was on my show two months ago no longer exists.”
Theoretically, there are many ways an intelligence agency could coerce a politician or other person of influence into certain behaviors, including personal threats, threats to family, and committing outright acts of aggression against a person.
A former CIA agent has testified during an interview with Candace Owens that his former employer used the latter tactic against him and his family, indirectly through chemicals that made them sick, when he blew the whistle on certain unethical actions the CIA had committed.
“This is why you never hear about CIA whistleblowers. They have a perfected system of career destruction if you talk about anything you see that is criminal or illegal,” former CIA officer Kevin Shipp said.
As a form of coercion, sexual blackmail in particular is nothing new, although porn sites make the possibility much easier. In her book “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb discusses not only how the intelligence community uses sexual blackmail through people like Jeffrey Epstein but how it was used by organized crime before U.S. intelligence even existed.
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