How much would you charge to be a body-double for Assange even if there was bullet-proof glass? Or a food taster? How much do you suppose that the bribes to Ecuadorian security personnel are up to by this time?
Doesn't matter for this operation; if Assange has gotten on the announcement it's a fair bet that the info will be released no matter what. And in the worst case scenario, a hell of a lot of other info besides.
Wouldn't it be something if Assange is noted in the history books as the main player who steered humanity away from a one-world corporate dictatorship? As awful as his sacrifices have been, many others have payed a much more dear price for vastly fewer rewards. Never was there a better illustration of the pen being mightier than the sword.
For my part, I retain open the hypothesis that Assange, Snowden, Binney, and the rest are part of a sophisticated psychological operation. That said, their continued performance continues to erode the strength of the hypothesis. Such a hypothesis is unlikely to be completely dead until long after the principle actors involved are. Such are the workings of a complex world.
Catch-up for those following the story. As I mentioned, Wikileaks and Bitcoin are intermingled in my life so I'm extra-interested in the topic:
I stayed up to watch the thing (the presentation in Germany.) I nodded off and awoke about the time that the Infowars crew had given up hope and gone into fully pissed off and silly mode since nothing happened.
The parts I did catch seemed odd in a way I cannot really describe. The quality both technically and content wise was poor. Obviously a balcony appearance is not conducive to a Q&A format so there were some last-minute changes here. Also, I presume that data stream transfers continue to be complex due to potential interference which can degrade things.
Currently I consider the strongest hypothesis to be that 'they' got to Assange in some way or another. The most likely way would be to make a credible threat of force against parties he could not bring himself to neglect and which outweighed the needs of his sources. (e.g., Self, Family, Manning, Ecuador, etc.) In this case Wikileaks is effectively history. Hopefully Assange would have taken some steps to 'divide and multiply' along the lines I mentioned in a different post if the guy really does care about transparency and I believe he does.
Another hypothesis which I dearly hope for is that Assange has a trick up his sleeve and computes the most effective strategy would be to play dead to a degree but still get the job done. I'm not hopeful about that since tonight's performance did significant damage to the organization.
Another is that he doesn't have that much more.
Other hypotheses which I don't completely rule out is that there is some degree of 'virtual reality' about the whole thing. For now I'll use this bin as a catch-all for instances in which things are not as they seem or as commonly thought true. I just cannot shake to 'odd' feeling about things but nor can I put my finger on it (though I slept through about half of it and didn't even watch the last part after Infowars gave up in disgust.)
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With Wikileaks and it's gift of transparency out, Trump is back to having about 33% fewer of the advantages than he had before. Basically he has his status as a better candidate and the peeps stacked against Hillary's many advantages (funding, dem and repub parties, mainstream media, multi-national corporations, hedge fund managers, foreign leaders, etc, etc.) If Trump somehow pulls it off it will be one of the most miraculous feats I've seen in my lifetime.
When things are 'gentlemanly' it might be workable for hubs such as Wikileaks or Greenwald's thing to 'curate' leaks. When people are getting 86'd, not so much. I'm hopeful that the next generation of transparency will be bulk dead-drop type dumps with crowd-analysis. If that results in some collateral damage that could be avoided by more responsible releases (where both Assange and Greenwald did reasonably well), so be it.
Those election-aware leakers who are adverse to the risk of Assange failing to perform may (or may not) still have time to arrange alternate methods of engineering transparency, and it might be a good idea for the more highly motivated of them to think about it. There seems currently to be a healthy enough alternative media network to get things distributed around. How much longer that will last is unknown.
