“Those who don’t know the value of loyalty, can never appreciate the cost of betrayal.” – Unknown Author
Recap. For those unfamiliar with my previous writings regarding ‘Wikileaks’ you can catch the heck up right here, here, and here, in that order. I really am trying to stop going on about Wikileaks and Assange, but the bloviating self-righteous shitbird just keeps on pulling stunts to endanger our personnel and, as of right now civilians too.
So what’s happened now?
Well, two weeks a go a ‘project’ popped up calling itself the ‘Transparency Toolkit’ (Website). The project (so far) created an unimpressive script to crawl Linkedin profiles looking for keywords such as ‘intelligence’, ‘military’, UAV’ drone’ etc on US citizens profiles. Once it found one or more of these pre-defined keywords it would pull everything about that Linkedin user (including resume, photo, name, location etc) into a database. They then released this database on Github in JSON format so that it could be mined and manipulated by anyone. So what, I hear you say, they just collected already public information on a particular demographic (if you are a member of Linkedin that is) and dumped it in raw data format. Here’s the three gimps behind it:
Fig 1.1 – The Three Gimpigos
Anything strike you about these dudes? Well aside from not being connected to anything even remotely real-world sensitive, like BRADLEY Manning and Edward Snowden, they do fit the same personal ‘profile’ of the two. Slightly effeminate, narcissistic, impressionable, ‘information wants to be free’, cheeto stained hipsters. And I’m not the only one to notice this fact. Assange and his Wikileaks dirtbags loved it so much they created a Wikileaks subdomain (icwatch.wikileaks.org)
On this new Wikileaks domain (ICWatch stands for ‘Intelligence Community Watch’), a user is able to search all 139,361 citizen resumes that these three scraped from Linkedin. Bear in mind, to get the information they scraped requires you to be a Linkedin member with a verified account.
Why does this matter?
I’ll tell you why. For those of us that know anything at all, Wikileaks is a major resource for those that would do the US and it’s citizens harm, not least the latest big threat ISIS, in fact here’s former CIA Chief Morrell stating Ex-CIA Snowden Actions ‘Played Role in Rise of ISIS‘ only last week, and I myself have been giving examples for years, here’s one.
Context is key
Now by it’s very nature, and historical acts, Wikileaks is renowned for publishing ‘classified’ documents, but this time it has deviated wildly from whatever the fuck it’s original messed up ‘mission’ was. They have published a giant list of already publicly available information, but published it in the context of a ‘leak’, purporting to be a ‘who’s who in intelligence circles’. (Which as you will see in a moment, it really isn’t). I think they are running out of ‘sources’ and plants in places they shouldn’t be.
Then comes headlines like this from Germany: “Wikileaks veröffentlicht 7000 Namen | Drohnen-Profis geraten ins Visier von ISIS und Al-Qaida” which translated means “: @wikileaks fully identifies 7000 UAV personnel and makes them terror targets” – because that’s not gonna attract the bad guys at all right?
Context really is key here. The victims signed up to Linkedin to network with peers in their field, but now because Wikileaks has decided they are supposedly attached to the ‘intelligence community’ they find themselves on a location searchable database on Wikileaks website, known to be the go-to place for bad guys to look for dirt.
And… here’s the kicker America
Many many thousands of these so called ‘US Government / Intelligence Community / Military’ resumes are in fact belonging to private citizens, employed by companies, who have no affiliation with the above in any capacity whatsoever. For example, there’s people with an interest in radio-controlled planes and commercially available ‘drones’ you can buy off-the-shelf listed in there. Or there’s this girl, from Detroit, a Human Resources professional with nothing to do with anything, yet she’s also listed in this giant ‘hit-list‘ available for free to any homegrown self-radicalized jihadi in her local area (Think Dearborn, that’s pretty fucking local to her).
There’s also a company out of San Fransisco called ‘Prism’. They make cameras. Their employees are also listed on your so-called ‘Intelligence Community Watch’ website.
Wrong PRiSM brainiacs.
And I won’t mention the 6th grade teacher who happened to previously work for Palantir, a big data visualization firm whose clients happen to include the US Military, who is also listed. I’m certain the DoD also use Microsoft Office, gonna lump Microsoft employees in aswell?
Even if every single person listed is current active intelligence/military personnel, as they claim and insinuate, clearly incorrectly in thousands of cases, what is the point exactly. There’s nothing good, or noble going on there. Why does Assange constantly target the US when there’s PLENTY of ACTUAL violators of human rights and ‘press freedoms’ in places like Russia, Iran, Venezuala, and hundreds of others, not least Ecuador, the very nation whose Embassy in London he has been hiding from a rape charge for 3 years.
Not long ago Assange posted this to the internet:
But only if you are not Assange’s shit list)
So what happened Jools? Your little note there says ‘Transparency for the state! Privacy for the rest of us!’ – But you just dumped a database of thousands of people who have done nothing yet they find themselves on your new website. For what? What happened to all the ‘noble’ ideas and plans you had, bitch?
Is this ‘privacy’ notion Wikileaks claims to be all about only available for the specific groups of PRIVATE CIVILIANS that Julian Assange decides deserve it and should be afforded it? You see, here’s what I think. I think Wikileaks have been reduced to painting a big target on the backs of regular private citizens because they are all out of pancake mix and desperate to stay relevant. Oh and BTW Wikileaks, your new site has a little XSS vulnerability in it here’s a screenshot for your convienience. You should get that looked at.
‘Happy’ Memorial Day Weekend.
Peace.
J.