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Julian Assange has said in an interview that he persuaded Edward Snowden to avoid seeking asylum in Latin America due to the CIA's reach, and that he fears assassination himself:
Julian Assange has said he advised the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden against seeking asylum in Latin America because there he could have been kidnapped and possibly killed. The WikiLeaks editor-in-chief said he told Snowden to ignore concerns about the "negative PR consequences" of sheltering in Russia because it was one of the few places in the world where the CIA's influence did not reach.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Times, Assange also said he feared he would be assassinated if he was ever able to leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought asylum in 2012 to avoid extradition.
[...] WikiLeaks was intimately involved in the operation to help Snowden evade the US authorities in 2013 after he leaked his cache of intelligence documents to Glenn Greenwald, then a journalist with the Guardian. Assange sent one of his most senior staff members, Sarah Harrison, to be at Snowden's side in Hong Kong, and helped to engineer his escape to Russia – despite his discomfort with the idea of fleeing to one of the US's most powerful enemies.
"Snowden was well aware of the spin that would be put on it if he took asylum in Russia," Assange told the Times. "He preferred Latin America, but my advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences, because my assessment is that he had a significant risk he could be kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders. Kidnapped or possibly killed."
Assange also outlined his own fears of being targeted. He said that even venturing out on to the balcony of Ecuador's embassy in Knightsbridge posed security risks in the light of bomb and assassination threats by what he called "unstable people". He said he thought it was unlikely he would be shot, but that he worried that if he was freed he could be kidnapped by the CIA. "I'm a white guy," Assange said. "Unless I convert to Islam it's not that likely that I'll be droned, but we have seen things creeping towards that."
Here's an example of the CIA's alleged influence in Latin America.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:54PM
perhaps the intelligence agencies understand the streisland effect better than politicians...Untoward deaths draw too much attention (e.g. Diana Spencer died in a car crash, where the only person wearing a seatbelt survived....not a surprise really is it...?).
Essentially this is the "tradecraft" that has been written about extensively in the post-war decades, and forms the basis for just about every spy movie you have ever seen!! If you want to see some examples of the subtly (or not) of the intelligence agencies of years past, visit the spy museum in DC. It is educational in that, the technology is not that surprising, but right time, right place, is of paramount importance.
That said, grounding the planes where they *thought* snowden was on board, really tipped their hand.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:12PM
See my comment below. It really goes to show how effective that particular cryptoanarchist has been at getting under the skin of the elites that he got Snowden to Russia... and then used the fact that he was being spied on to get the U.S. to tip its hand and ground the plane of a President. It has been described as Assange creating "rumors" to get the plane grounded, but it was just disinformation on an insecure line of communication. Heckuva job, U.S. foreign surveillance.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by zugedneb on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:50PM
...perhaps the intelligence agencies understand the streisland effect...
This has 2 sides...
I think they know, that the modern civilian, well informed in terms of pictures and videos, of how war and killing actually looks like, will not put his ass at risk.
The modern civilian will patiently wait, and drown it's sorrow in consumption, until any particular storm bloes over.
As examples, the Romanian revolution or demonstrations in Russia and China: people kind of knew/know how brutal a regime can be, and that the police and military do not ask too much before pulling the trigger, but they were/are not actually fed with youtube videos about the actions of their owners...
They revolt, because "knowing" violence is not the same as "seeing" violence.
This is the reason I like to troll threads about US...
With all the guns and all the claims about fighting for your rights, lemme see you actually pull of revolution.
I think the average US citizen values himself higher then being used as container for an entire magazine of bullets discarded by a fat cop...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:21PM
I think it has more to do with standard of living and the existence of a middle class. As long as the people are relatively well-off, they aren't desperate enough to fight against the government. That's the informal "deal" in China. You give up political freedoms but get relative economic prosperity. That deal may collapse if the urban-rural divide continues. Russia is well-off enough [oecdbetterlifeindex.org] to avoid regime change. In Syria, the people are either fighting or fleeing since stability is gone. It is likely the most well-documented civil war in history due to the proliferation of smartphones and cameras.
America has enough bread and circuses to pacify the majority of the population. The poor are too dispersed and are crushed by the middle class routinely. Easy access to drugs and alcohol helps to pacify this segment. Despite allegations of the media inciting violence against cops by playing up #BLM incidents, the cops routinely dictate to mainstream and local media. The Occupy movements got infiltrated and destroyed by the FBI. Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Rand Paul (who is doing terribly, he might as well quit) face opposition from the mainstream candidates and party infrastructure. The NSA has undergone token reforms that aren't even in effect yet. The list goes on and on. Nothing will change as long as MOST Americans feel financially secure and physically safe most of the time.
Being in the middle class correlates to greater access to "pictures and videos", but the global poor are increasingly using smartphones. If they topple governments in spite of seeing images of war and killing, or actually coordinate their opposition using the technologies, then the problem is income/safety, not imagery.
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