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DNC serves WikiLeaks with lawsuit via Twitter
The Democratic National Committee on Friday officially served its lawsuit to WikiLeaks via Twitter, employing a rare method to serve its suit to the elusive group that has thus far been unresponsive.
As CBS News first reported last month, the DNC filed a motion with a federal court in Manhattan requesting permission to serve its complaint to WikiLeaks on Twitter, a platform the DNC argued the website uses regularly. The DNC filed a lawsuit in April against the Trump campaign, Russian government and WikiLeaks, alleging a massive conspiracy to tilt the 2016 election in Donald Trump's favor.
All of the DNC's attempts to serve the lawsuit via email failed, the DNC said in last month's motion to the judge, which was ultimately approved.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in Ecuador's London embassy for six years, is considering an offer to appear before a U.S. Senate committee to discuss alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, his lawyer said on Thursday.
WikiLeaks published a letter from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday which asked Assange to make himself available to testify in person at a closed hearing as part of its investigation into whether Moscow meddled to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. "The U.S. Senate Select Committee request confirms their interest in hearing from Mr Assange," lawyer Jennifer Robinson said in a statement.
Julian Assange 'seriously considering' request to meet US Senate committee
Lawyers for Julian Assange say they are "seriously considering" a request from a US Senate committee to interview the WikiLeaks founder as part of its investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
The Senate select committee on intelligence has written to Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been living for more than six years.
[...] The chairman of the committee, Richard Burr, wrote: "As you are aware, the Senate select committee on intelligence is conducting a bipartisan inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. As part of that inquiry, the committee requests that you make yourself available for a closed interview with bipartisan committee staff at a mutually agreeable time and location."
The ultimate irony would involve Julian Assange avoiding Metropolitan Police arrest by somehow fleeing to the United States.
See also: Mueller subpoenas Randy Credico, who Roger Stone says was his WikiLeaks back channel
Previously: DNC's Lawsuit Against WikiLeaks is an Attack on Freedom of the Press
Related: Prominent Whistleblowers and Journalists Defend Julian Assange at Online Vigil
Ecuador Reportedly Almost Ready to Hand Julian Assange Over to UK Authorities
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 12 2018, @11:56AM (1 child)
I like the message. If you have Sunday services, I might like to attend. At least sign me up for your newsletter, alright?
But, I have problems with your message. Where to start? How to phrase it? Hmmm . . .
Let me start with I2P. Been there, pretty often. Has it changed recently? It's probably been more than a year since I checked it out, that's time for a lot of change. On a typical day, I was able to connect to maybe a couple dozen sites, that were almost universally neglected. That is, some message had been put up, in the form of a web page, and it stuck there, forever, without any kind of updates. Worse, finding sites with meaning is something of a chore, because you have to sift among some of the worst shit on the internet - child porn shit.
It's been accepted that if we want our anonymity, then we have to protect the anonymity of the worst of the worst. But I do get tired of clicking on something that sounds like it might be interesting, only to find that it's more CP.
Next . . .
Sorry, I strongly disagree with that. The masses don't give a damn. You don't know how sorry I am that you are wrong, but you are wrong there. The masses simply don't CARE. You could take a hundred random people off of the street, and PAY THEM to attend a seminar exposing how crooked the system is - and 97 of them will shrug their shoulders, and go right back to whatever they were doing. They simply don't give a damn. 24/7 surveillance? Many of those damned fools are actually PAYING the surveillers to surveil them! "Oh, but Alexa only listens when . . . " People are that freaking STUPID! Those who aren't that stupid, just don't care!
When the white man arrived in the New World, they dangled shiny baubles in front of the native's eyes, and used those baubles to "purchase" huge tracts of land, among other things. That is the way things work today, in real life. The tech companies, as well as government, dangle some shinies in front of the masses, and the masses feel like they have something wonderful. "Oh, I can play Angry Birds on my phone to kill the time, and all I had to do was surrender my privacy!" Fokkin' idiots.
I'll give you this much: There almost certainly is some tipping point, at which the public (or at least a significant portion of the public) decides that "enough is enough". Some catalytic event may very well prove cathartic, and motivate Joe Sixpack to take charge of his computer, communications, social life, news sources, and whatever else. At this point in time, I can't imagine what that event might be.
One of the things you need to consider is, government and it's agencies never stop learning. Jane Q. Public stops learning the day she leaves high school. You know as well as I do, that most kids toss that silly mortar board aside on their way out the high school doors, they forget 80% of what they were taught, books, pencils, and all the tools of the academic are tossed into the trash, they get drunk on their asses, and work hard to stay drunk for the rest of their lives.
But, government never stops learning. They are listening, looking, prying, and nosing around - and they seldom forget a lesson. What's more, government uses it's collective knowledge to isolate and cull individuals who come to their attention. It is never "government vs the people", it's "government vs Wayne Witless" - and Witless almost always loses.
I could go on and on.
Maybe I'll fire up I2P and see if things have changed or not.
Oh - before I post: I invite your attention to gab.ai It is a fine example of something "new". Over the years, I've stuck my nose into, and even registered, all manner of "new" things. Google+, Facebook, Twitter - I was there early for all of them, only to be disappointed. I almost missed getting here, on Soylent, because so many "new" and "different" things have failed outright, or turned to crap very soon. Gab is one of the newest "something new" - but I haven't seen anything really worthy of my attention. Everything is rapidly pulled down to the lowest common denominator, and that is how people like it. You might beat government, if you're really really good, and really really lucky. But, you're not going to beat the masses. If you succeed in building out that new technology that you hint at - the public will move in, and shit all over the place. They are like fucking pigeons!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @02:14PM
Sorry, I'm not in the preaching business. No sunday services from me. I'm in the humanism business, so maybe I should start printing some spiffy newsletters.
I2P has its peculiarities. I only recently got into it and found that some important non-obvious information was not documented in any of the official places. Apparently they have ironed out a lot of bugs and network DOS vectors since last year though.
Things they should tell you on the front page:
The more serious participants run their's on a VPS or if they have good residential lines, a Raspi at home and these never go down except for major version upgrades. They achieve respectable bandwidths (the only hard number I remember right now was a Raspi running at 500/500KB/s on the Java client, the VPS crowd may have been getting significantly more, check reddit), fast enough for streaming video and serious downloading.
My test setup is on my shitty residential line, running the unofficial i2pd daemon (C++ codebase). After initial head scratching and disappointment I clawed together the above info for a proper setup, then just let it do its thing for a week while seeding a couple torrents. When I checked back then, network performance was acceptable.
The network itself is still pretty small in terms of number of nodes, but the number of sites seems to grow steadily. Yes, it still has its fair share of defunct or derelict sites listed in directories, but I'm finding enough worth exploring.
My general impression of I2P is a blast of nostalgia. Currently, the whole experience feels eerily like the early web 1.0 ride. There are no search engines, only manually updated link lists to guide you, speeds can be abysmal and the incantations required for a proper connection are byzantine. But it's free as in beer and free as in libre, the population is mostly idealists sharing a dream of a truly free society.
Well yeah and the drug and arms dealers and kiddie porn traffickers in the dark corners. I don't mind the dealers, they provide a product for voluntary consumers and the online version of the market seems to be a lot safer than street dealers in ensuring consumers get exactly what they want in a decent, predictable quality. Net benefit to society in my book. The kiddie porn traffickers are bad of course, but I think we should differentiate between consumers and producers. Consumers are inflicted with a mental illness that is so stigmatized that safely getting treatment without exposing themselves to a lynchmob can be difficult. Giving them a place to release their urges without harming anyone is also a net benefit in my book. The producers need to get more law enforcement attention, sting operations with proposed IRL meets should be pretty effective. Bonus: no backdoors in encryption necessary.
And there's a lot of a blank canvas, open space in need of a community to populate it and fill it with content. There's lots of work to be done until it will look like home. But the tech is ready now IMO and arguably better than TOR. Exciting!
I can relate to your criticism, but here we have the chance to try and start over. It's a gamble on humanity being able to save itself with nothing to lose but everything to win. The only losing move is not to play.
Thanks for mentioning gab.ai. I wasn't aware of it but this ED article [encyclopediadramatica.rs] provided some insights while being hillarious.