Winner has spent the last months fighting for compassionate release into home confinement. She and her lawyers warned this would happen, and now, like all prisoners at Carswell, Winner’s safety is clearly in danger.

Later in the show, Gosztola covers two police stories that bear a striking similarity to the national security whistleblower stories he has tracked closely.

In Des Moines, Iowa, the Associated Press reported two Black Lives Matter protesters were extraordinarily charged with “unauthorized dissemination of intelligence data,” a felony that carries up to five years in prison. They allegedly took a police bulletin from an officer during a demonstration and then read the contents during a news broadcast.

Then, Sgt. Javier Esqueda, a police officer in Joliet, Illinois, was put on leave and demoted after he released a disturbing video showing how Eric Lurry, a black man, died while in the Joliet Police Department’s custody.

Esqueda’s whistleblowing is under criminal investigation. Authorities believe he gained “unauthorized access to a video that was being investigated by an outside agency.”

This week’s stories:

The post Dissenter Weekly: Leak Prosecutions Against BLM Protesters, Police Whistleblower In Illinois appeared first on Shadowproof.

She believes denying her release was wrong and “could have saved her” from the suffering she currently must endure.

Winner pled guilty in 2018 to one count of violating the Espionage Act when she disclosed an NSA report to The Intercept. She believed the report contained evidence that Russian hackers targeted United States voter registration systems during the 2016 election.

She has served more than half of her 63-month sentence, and her attorneys urged a federal court to release her to home confinement to serve the remainder of her sentence.

But Judge Randal Hall sided with the Justice Department on April 24 and contended the “medical prison,” where Winner is incarcerated, is “presumably better equipped than most to deal with any onset of COVID-19 in its inmates.”

Hall refused to grant Winner a hearing to present specific evidence on the risks posed to her health by the pandemic.

According to Tarrant County Public Health Director Vinny Taneja, Carswell is currently the site of a facility outbreak. “Last week 51 inmates and two staff members tested positive.”

“In the last few days the BOP has released new information confirming increases in active, positive COVID-19 cases at FMC Carswell, first from zero to 28 cases, and then from 28 to 45, literally overnight,” Whitley notes in a response to the government that was filed on July 6 [PDF].

Whitley adds, “The information just released confirms the exigent circumstances Reality faces at FMC Carswell right now and why this court should swiftly grant her relief.”

The government, led by U.S. Attorney Bobby Christine, argues [PDF] the medical records that Winner provided to the district court did not contain information that “detailed how COVID-19 would impact these conditions or how those conditions placed Winner at greater risk or COVID-19. And none were particularly recent, having been prepared before her original sentencing.”

Winner shared a psychological evaluation from July 1, 2018, and therapy session records from between March 5, 2014, and January 12, 2015.

Prosecutors note the psychological evaluation “reflected diagnostic impressions of ‘bulimia nervosa,’ ‘obsessive compulsive personality disorder,’ and ‘dysthymic disorder.'” Her therapy session records related to Winner’s bulimia.

Yet, in a previous submission to the appeals court, Winner’s legal team suggested they could not introduce more recent medical records because they were in the “possession, custody, and control of the government.”

If the district court had agreed to hold an evidentiary hearing, the court “could have heard from stakeholders at BOP and FMC Carswell about the BOP response generally and specifically at FMC Carswell.” The court also would have been able to review “critical evidence” related to Winner’s present medical condition. 

As Winner’s defense recalls, the government initially claimed that neither the BOP nor Warden Michael Carr received her request for compassionate release (something Winner predicted).

“In reply in the district court, Reality included a declaration under penalty of perjury from her Texas-based counsel, confirming the substance and form of the request and all relevant details,” Whitley outlines.

“Later, only after this appeal was filed, the government amended its position to state that her request was received but the government chose to treat it under a different statute, despite the fact that Reality cited the specific compassionate release statute in both requests she submitted and in every filing submitted to the district court.” 

The government played this game even as representatives were in discussions with the warden and BOP officials, as her motion proceeded in court.

That leads Winner’s legal team to believe the “government’s absurd position” bolsters her arguments made to the district court.

Prosecutors are upset that Winner supposedly circumvented an administrative procedure during a pandemic in order to expedite her request for release. Their conduct proves “exhaustion is futile.”

“The administrative process was incapable of granting adequate relief and agency review would subject Reality to undue prejudice and harm in the midst of a global pandemic,” Winner’s legal team concluded.

“What people need to understand is even if she is saved from the virus, she is still being tortured in this double lockdown situation that they have them in,” Winner-Davis stated.

“They have been deprived of all programs—recreation, fresh air and sunlight, and nutritional food. How long can the government keep them in this environment and under these situations and call it protecting them?”

With the outbreak, we now know “they were unable to protect them,” she added.

“In April,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “Carswell inmates talked to the Star-Telegram about their fears of the virus spreading in the prison.” (Winner’s mother Billie Winner-Davis spoke with the newspaper.)

Several inmates requested in a letter to Carr that all elderly and sick nonviolent offenders be released to home confinement. They said a “single coronavirus could have the effect of lighting a match on a book of matches.”

The post US Government Plays Games With Reality Winner’s Life As Coronavirus Outbreak Is Confirmed At Carswell appeared first on Shadowproof.

David penned an excellent article in 2017 with Dan Berger and Mariame Kaba entitled, “What Abolitionists Do.” He reflects on this article in this moment of greater awareness of abolition and shares his thoughts and experiences from spending time in abolitionist spaces.

David Stein is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA. His book manuscript, Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press. It describes the political economy of unemployment and efforts to win a federal governmental job guarantee, and how this struggle impacted the ascent of mass incarceration. His research focuses on the interconnection between social movements, public policy, and political economy in post-1865 U.S. history.

He has been a member of Critical Resistance since 2006, though his comments in this interview are not on behalf of the organization.

Episode Resources

“What Abolitionists Do” by Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein

David Stein’s website: https://davidpstein.wordpress.com/

Follow David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidpStein

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The post Beyond Prisons: Historian David Stein Reflects On Ascent Of Abolition appeared first on Shadowproof.

The New Orleans punk band released their sophomore album “The Passion Of,” which the group describes as “a precise and deranged vision of punk, an apocalyptic celebration, a step forward into a perverse and uncertain landscape.”

As the band’s lyricist and lead vocalist, Alli Logout articulates the mood many are feeling with the current political turmoil. The lyrics are effectively complemented by dark soundscapes.

An album highlight, “All Tomorrow Carry,” confronts several systemic issues and criticizes the prevalence of apathy. 

It addresses gentrification and how it contributes to systemic poverty and homelessness. “Arise from the rubble. Another tawdry condo. And a high rise suite. Yeah, they were pushed out. Soon evacuated. House was near dilapidated.”

These lyrics resonate since these issues as poverty is compounded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another notable line, “We were willingly blind,” relates to the way people ignore current realities.

Many seem to deny that systemic racism exists. They close their eyes to the issues of police brutality by trying to dismiss the problem as just a few bad apples.

Special Interest sound out the wake-up call. Open your eyes and act, before it is too late.

The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘All Tomorrow Carry’ By Special Interest appeared first on Shadowproof.

The man was taken to the hospital and tested positive for COVID-19. Officials placed his housing unit on lockdown, but only after he potentially exposed kitchen staff and incarcerated people in his housing unit to the virus.

His seven roommates were later tested and quarantined, and on June 29 and 30, mobile testing sites were deployed.

Messages from incarcerated people shared with Shadowproof allege that at least six housing units (8-1, 8-2, 7-2, 4-1, 3-3, and 2-2) were recently locked down in response to potential COVID-19 exposure.

It remains unclear when results from testing will be made public. Through July 1, the DOC reports that it tested 1,277 incarcerated people and 70 corrections staff at MCI Norfolk, resulting in three and six positive tests, respectively.

Incarcerated people also allege that over a dozen people have been placed in solitary confinement for COVID-19-related reasons, and that corrections officers have threatened people with solitary confinement if they refuse COVID-19 testing.

Bonnie Tenneriello, a staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, told Shadowproof that an incarcerated person who tests positive for COVID-19 may be placed under lockdown or moved into restrictive housing.

“Some people refuse testing if they know a positive test might send them to a solitary confinement unit,” Tenneriello said. “But it’s a Catch-22 because refusing testing can also get you sent to solitary. While medical isolation is an appropriate response to COVID, solitary confinement is not.”

Tenneriello also confirmed concerns about heat and a lack of airflow in restrictive housing raised by incarcerated people in messages shared with Shadowproof.

“To use the third floor of this building for people who are positive or may be positive for COVID seems very dangerous given the temperatures,” she added.

Multiple sources told Shadowproof that corrections officers have not consistently worn masks and have refused voluntary COVID-19 testing in at least some instances.

“The Department of Correction has taken several steps to protect the health and safety of those in our care, including universal COVID-19 testing at all 16 facilities,” department spokesperson Jason Dobson claimed in a statement to Shadowproof.

“MCI-Norfolk currently has one active case and continues to adhere to public health guidelines and utilize PPE, hand sanitizer, and other preventative measures to reduce the risk of introduction and transmission of COVID-19.”

The Executive Office of Public Safety and Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

*

The average age of people incarcerated at MCI Norfolk is 47 years old, which makes the prison population the oldest among Massachusetts correctional facilities (and therefore the highest-risk for COVID-19). Even so, when the state first tested incarcerated people across ten facilities for the virus in May, MCI Norfolk was the last facility to receive testing.

July’s COVID-19 outbreak is not the first time that MCI Norfolk has endangered incarcerated people. Among the 35 correctional facilities in Massachusetts, MCI Norfolk had the third-highest number of repeat environmental health violations (475 at most recent inspection), including overcrowding, mold, and other hygiene concerns.

According to Deeper than Water, a coalition that exposes human rights abuses in prisons by focusing on water justice, this month’s COVID-19 outbreak is just one entry in a longer history of intolerable conditions at MCI Norfolk.

“The reality is that the Massachusetts Department of Correction has a legacy of neglect at MCI Norfolk that stretches back for decades,” said Deeper than Water organizer Jess Kant. “This is the same prison where the water notoriously ran the color of instant coffee.”

Indeed, Roger Herbert died from liver cancer in 2018 after being exposed to contaminated drinking water at MCI Norfolk, and reports of unclean drinking water have persisted.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH)  has an obligation to perform biannual environmental health inspections of every prison and jail. It is also the agency coordinating the state’s COVID-19 response.

On May 1, DPH conducted a site visit at MCI Framingham, a women’s prison, prompted by a tip from an employee alleging that 68 incarcerated people were sick, that the facility was underreporting COVID-19 cases to DPH, and that corrections staff were not following isolation protocols.

DPH has not stated any intention to conduct a site visit at MCI Norfolk, nor have they specified what conditions might justify a site visit in the future.

Advocates say decarceration is the best way to prevent incarcerated people from falling sick or dying from COVID-19. In April, the ACLU of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Public Health Association sent a letter to Governor Charlie Baker urging him to use his executive powers to release prisoners.

“As COVID-19 continues to spread, prisons and jails across the country continue to serve as a breeding ground for the disease,” ACLU MA legal director Matt Segal told Shadowproof. “Massachusetts can still act to save lives now and throughout this public health emergency.”

Even after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court urged Governor Baker to release prisoners, Baker said he didn’t “buy as a matter of law, fact, or policy” the notion that prisons can become hotspots for COVID-19 infection. Meanwhile, the five largest COVID-19 clusters in America are located in correctional facilities.

Ultimately, implementing social distancing in overcrowded prisons remains effectively impossible. In that context, failure to decarcerate risks exposing incarcerated people, corrections staff, and nearby communities to the coronavirus as American states break single-day hospitalization records.

“We believe that the state cannot possibly provide the means for prisoners to protect themselves inside,” Kant concluded. “The only option is decarceration. To do anything less is to risk a death sentence for people inside.”

*Editor’s note: This article was updated on July 2 to include a statement from MADOC

The post COVID-19 Outbreak Feared At Massachusetts Prison After Incarcerated Man Collapses In Kitchen appeared first on Shadowproof.

The label released their first album on Juneteenth—BL Shirelle’s “Assata Troi”—and now they have released a single, “Domestic Terrorist,” by a musician who is unnamed in order to protect them while they remain incarcerated.

“The way I grew up, when they roll up, you froze up—or you hit the fence,” the unnamed musician raps. “Never minding your guilt or your innocence. We live daily with the threat of domestic terrorists.”

“Or you hit the fence” is given an intensity with background vocals that attempts to communicate the feeling a Black person may experience as they are shoved up against a wall and frisked by police for simply being Black.

Nearly 20 percent of police are United States military veterans. In Dallas, a study found the city’s police were more likely to fire their weapon if they were once enlisted soldiers.

Anonymous connects the wars in the Middle East to the war in Black or minority neighborhoods by describing an officer in a police unit who “did some tours in Iraq. He came back. He did decided to give back, badge on his chest, vest on his back.”

Musing over why he joined, the musician suggests he may have been looking for more action. Or maybe he was “motivated by the unnatural stats that justify heavy patrols in neighborhoods that are Black or minority.”

“Maybe he was nervous, post traumatic from his service. It only took a second for him to see insurgents,” Anonymous adds.

The track ends with a chant for Amadou Diallo, a 23 year-old Guinean immigrant who was shot 41 times and killed by the New York Police Department in 1999. (His death has inspired a number of artists in and outside of hip-hop.)

According to Die Jim Crow Records, the track is a counter to President Donald Trump, who described the activists who were protesting police brutality as “domestic terrorists.” It turns the political discourse to put attention on the real culprits for fear and dread in Black communities.

“As a measure to protect the artist, who is currently incarcerated, DJC and the artist have decided it is best for this song to be credited to Anonymous for now.”

DJC credits Trvp Lvne and dr. Israel, who respectively provided the beat and mixed the track at revolutionsound in Brooklyn. Both have worked on several DJC music.

Trvp Lyne worked on BL’s debut album released in June, and in fact, BL is thanked for her work supporting music created by incarcerated musicians.

Listen to “Domestic Terrorist” from Die Jim Crow Records:

The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Domestic Terrorist’ From Die Jim Crow Records appeared first on Shadowproof.

Several school boards voted or are in the process of voting on resolutions that would defund school police forces

On June 23, the Los Angeles School Board voted against a proposal to slash the budget of the Los Angeles School Police Department by 90 percent over the next two years and rejected two other resolutions related to school policing. But teachers, unions, and activists have not abandoned their effort to remove police from schools in L.A.

In fact, two days later, the United Teachers of Los Angeles officially passed a resolution to eliminate school police in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“We should not be turning over discipline of our children or our children’s mental health to police officers. We should have the resources that make wellness a priority on all campuses, not policing,” said Georgia Flowers, an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles.

Flowers explained at her elementary school they have several students with special needs, but the school psychologist is only retained 1.5 days per week and other support staff aren’t provided.

“We end up routinely calling police to deal with children who are having reactions to trauma in their lives because we don’t have anything else,” Flowers added. “Police get called in to do non-police work because the funding is not where it should be. The funding is not being provided to address the things that would help our children to heal.”

Unlike L.A., the Oakland School Board in California voted to eliminate police from schools throughout their district on June 24.

It was a victory for a movement led by the Black Organizing Project that began in 2011 after an Oakland school police officer shot and killed 20-year-old Raheim Brown, who was sitting in a car near a high school during a school dance.

“The police in our schools don’t add educational value, it’s a punitive measure to criminalize youth.” said Amanda Seaton, a special education teacher at an Oakland Elementary school. “One of my first years teaching, the police were called on a first grade Black student, a young Black boy at a school I was working at that was majority Black. Basically the police were called on him to ‘teach him a lesson’ because he had too many tantrums in the mind of school leadership. I don’t think those are the kind of lessons we should be teaching any students and they’re often reserved for Black students.”

School boards in the cities of Minneapolis, Denver, Madison, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon also voted to remove police from school districts.

Law enforcement presence in schools began in the 1940s in response to youth-led racial justice movements emerging ahead of the civil rights era. In Oakland, a school police force was created in 1957 partly in response to Black migration to the city after World War II as schools began integrating.

“Policing creates a lot of stress for a lot of students. As a teacher my concern is those stress levels contribute to difficulties in learning,” said Ben Evans, a middle school science teacher in Seattle. “People outside of education don’t understand the impact of the structure and functioning of our schools that set kids up for the school to prison pipeline. It’s simple things like the strict behavior guidelines, trying to run a school like how a prison functions. The presence of the police in that system has a very strong impact in terms of that school to prison pipeline.”

Student led-organizations, teachers, and community groups are pressuring their local elected officials to do the same and remove police from schools in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Diego, St. Louis, Tacoma, and several school districts in Maryland.

“There is a culture clash that happens when police are in schools,” said Maria Fernandez, senior campaign strategist with the Advancement Project, a non-profit based in Washington D.C. that has led a campaign for police-free schools over the past two decades. “Education and schools need to be a place of learning, developing, and nurturing of young people, and police are there to enforce criminal code, so there’s a fundamental contradiction to those things.”

The mayor-appointed school board of Chicago, Illinois, recently voted 4-3 in favor of delegating the decision to remove police from schools to local school councils. Currently, the city spends $33 million to fund police in Chicago schools.

A recent report conducted by #CopsOutCPS found over the past decade Black students have been targeted by school police in Chicago at four times the rate of white students, despite making up 35.9 percent of the student body.

The Chicago Teachers Union, along with student and community groups, are maintaining pressure on local officials, especially  because the school board is expected to vote on whether to renew the $33 million contract with the Chicago Police Department some time over the next two months. (The current contract expires at the end of August.)

“We’re not saying take them out and do nothing else. We’re saying stop spending on something that is harmful to students and spend it on what we know supports genuine community safety and harm reduction in our school buildings,” said Jenine Wehbeh, a teacher at Murphy Elementary School in Chicago. “We need to disinvest and defund police while funneling resources into self determination, well funded public schools, smaller class sizes, school nurses, restorative justice, counselors, and social workers.”

The post Prioritizing Children’s Wellness Over Cops: The Movement To End Policing In Schools appeared first on Shadowproof.

He was the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the southeast Asia correspondent for the Washington Post.

Watch the interview by clicking the above video or go here for audio version.

As Bevins contends, United States-backed violence that occurred in Brazil and Indonesia in 1964 and 1965 “greatly reshaped the world.” He examines the dark history and legacy of anticommunism in two of the most populous countries.

Bevins offers a brief overview of the politics in Indonesia and the Third World and how there really wasn’t any opposition or fear of communism until it was fueled by the U.S. and factions within the Indonesian military.

Sukarno was removed from power in a CIA coup and replaced by Suharto. Bevins highlights who each of these figures were and describes the massacres that occurred.

Later in the interview, Bevins offers his view on the parallels between the 1960s and now. He comments on the economic warfare that was used against Indonesia, U.S. training of military officers from Indonesia, and the way in which the U.S. media justified the bloodshed that occurred.

The post When US Backed A Mass Murder Program In Indonesia: Interview With Vincent Bevins On ‘The Jakarta Method’ appeared first on Shadowproof.

WikiLeaks Openly Displayed ‘Attempts To Assist Snowden In Evading Arrest’

“To encourage leakers and hackers to provide stolen materials to WikiLeaks in the future, Assange and others at WikiLeaks openly displayed their attempts to assist Snowden in evading arrest,” the indictment declares.

It notes Harrison (“WLA-4”) traveled with Snowden to Moscow from Hong Kong, leaving out the part where the State Department revoked his passport and trapped him in Russia.

During an interview for “Democracy Now!” in September 2016, Sarah Harrison said WikiLeaks understood Snowden was in a “very complex legal and political situation” and needed “some people to assist with technical and operational security expertise.”

“I went over there, as the person on the ground in Hong Kong, to help him, not only for him, himself, because he had clearly done something so brave and deserved the protection, I felt, but also for the larger objective to try and show that despite [President Barack] Obama’s war on whistleblowers, that actually there was another option.”

Harrison added, “At the time, the Obama administration was intent upon putting alleged source Chelsea Manning into prison for decades — as she is now in prison for 35 years — and we really wanted to try and show the world that there are people that will stand up, there are people that will help. And The Guardian, for example, did not give any additional help to Edward Snowden as a source, as a person there, and we wanted to show there are publishers that will help in these scenarios.”

Prosecutors note WikiLeaks booked Snowden on “flights to India through Beijing” and Iceland as examples of how Assange engaged in an alleged conspiracy.

At the annual Chaos Computer Club conference in Germany on December 31, 2013, Assange, Appelbaum, and Harrison participated in a panel discussion called, “Sysadmins of the World, Unite! A Call to Resistance.” (Assange appeared via video.)

The indictment criminalizes Assange’s speech in support of Snowden and any future whistleblowers and twists his words into a prime example of WikiLeak “encouraging” the “theft of information” from the U.S. government.

Prosecutors even omit particular words to make the message Assange shared seem more nefarious than an endorsement of radical transparency.

From the indictment:

…Assange told the audience that “the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations” showed that “it was possible now for even a single system administrator to…not merely wreck[] or disabl[e] [organizations]…but rather shift[] information from an information apartheid system…into the knowledge commons…

But here is the full quote:

…And we can see that in the cases of the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations, that it’s possible now for even a single system administrator to have a very significant change to the—or rather, apply a very significant constraint, a constructive constraint, to the behavior of these organizations, not merely wrecking or disabling them, not merely going out on strikes to change policy, but rather shifting information from an information apartheid system, which we’re developing, from those with extraordinary power and extraordinary information, into the knowledge commons, where it can be used to—not only as a disciplining force, but it can be used to construct and understand the new world that we’re entering into.

Assange’s video message to Chaos Computer Club conference attendees in 2013. (Screen shot from “Democracy Now!” broadcast.)

Assange encouraged young people to “join the CIA. Go in there. Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out—with the understanding, with the paranoia, that all those organizations will be infiltrated by this generation, by an ideology that is spread across the Internet. And every young person is educated on the Internet.”

“There will be no person that has not been exposed to this ideology of transparency and understanding of wanting to keep the Internet, which we were born into, free. This is the last free generation,” Assange added.

The government presents this message as evidence that WikiLeaks solicits government employees to steal classified information. However, what Assange did was appeal to young people to help the public address a crisis of corruption in government by forcing transparency at a time when the government abuses the classified information system to conceal waste, fraud, abuse, and other illegal actions.

Appelbaum is singled out for saying Harrison “took actions” to protect Snowden, and “if we can succeed in saving Edward Snowden’s life and to keep him free, then the next Edward Snowden will have that to look forward to. And if we look also to what has happened to Chelsea Manning, we see additionally that Snowden has clearly learned.”

This is a fairly innocuous observation numerous people in the news media, including this author, have shared. It means if whistleblowers do not believe they will be punished with decades of prison or forced to flee their home country then we will have more whistleblowers because they will not believe it so dangerous to come forward.

At no point does the Justice Department attempt to connect the alleged “recruitment” of “hackers” or “leakers” to an actual individual, who heard these words and acted upon them.

Of course, the Justice Department refuses to accept the public benefit that came from Snowden’s disclosures. He still faces an indictment for allegedly violating the Espionage Act, which is why he remains in Russia, where he obtained asylum in 2013.

On May 6, 2014, the indictment alleges Harrison “sought to recruit those who had or could obtain authorized access to classified information and hackers to search for and send the classified or otherwise stolen information to WikiLeaks by explaining, ‘from the beginning our mission has been to public classified, or in any other way, censored information that is of political, historical importance.'”

It is one of the clearest indications that the “conspiracy” charge is a not-so-subtle effort to criminalize the journalism of an adversarial media organization that the United States has spent the last decade working to destroy. At no point in this statement does Harrison ask any specific persons to steal information.

If what Harrison did—and by association, Assange supported—is a crime, then there are countless news media organizations which pride themselves on publishing documents they obtain from sensitive sources that must worry they are opening themselves up to prosecution if they boast about their work in a public setting.

Conspiracy Charge Depends On Statements From Paid FBI Informants

The section of the indictment on Assange’s alleged role in “conspiring” with “hackers” mentions a “Teenager,” who Assange met in Iceland. This individual is Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson.

As Wired Magazine reported, “When a staff revolt in September 2010 left the organization short-handed, Assange put Thordarson in charge of the WikiLeaks chat room, making Thordarson the first point of contact for new volunteers, journalists, potential sources, and outside groups clamoring to get in with WikiLeaks at the peak of its notoriety.”

Thordarson was fired from WikiLeaks in November 2011 after the media organizations discovered he embezzled about $50,000.

After the FBI asked to talk with him in person following his termination, Thordarson “begged the FBI for money.” Agents initially ignored his requests, but eventually they paid him $5,000 for “the work he missed while meeting with agents” in Alexandria, Virginia, where the grand jury investigation was empaneled.

In 2013, WikiLeaks stated, “Because of requests from people close to him and his young age [Thordarson] was offered the opportunity to repay the stolen funds, which amounted to about $50,000. When it became clear he would not honor the agreement the matter was reported to the Icelandic Police.”

Thordarson apparently embezzled funds from several other organizations in Iceland that were not related to WikiLeaks. The Icelandic authorities process charges of embezzlement.

“It has materialized that the individual has engaged in gross misrepresentations of different types to obtain benefit from a range of parties,” WikiLeaks added. “We will not identify him by name in light of information that he has recently received institutional medical treatment.”

“In light of the relentless ongoing persecution of U.S. authorities against WikiLeaks, it is not surprising that the FBI would try to abuse this troubled young man and involve him in some manner in the attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks staff. It is an indication of the great length these entities are willing to go that they will disrespect the sovereignty of other nations in their endeavor. There is strong indication that the FBI used a combination of coercion and payments to pressure the young man to cooperate,” WikiLeaks contended.

Hammond was the target of an FBI operation. As Dell Cameron previously reported for the Daily Dot, chat logs, surveillance photos, and government documents showed it was Monsegur who introduced Hammond to a hacker named Hyrriya, who “supplied download links to the full credit card database as well as the initial vulnerability access point to Stratfor’s systems.”

According to Hammond, he had not heard of Stratfor until Monsegur brought the firm to his attention. Monsegur transferred the details for at least two stolen credit cards.

In December 2011, Monsegur gave “AntiSec” or the group of hackers targeting Stratfor access to the private intelligence firm’s systems. He pushed Hammond and others to “unknowingly transfer ‘multiple gigabytes of confidential data’ to one of the FBI’s servers. That included roughly 60,000 credit card number and records for Stratfor customers that Hammond was ultimately charged with stealing,” according to Daily Dot.

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman wrote in her book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, that AntiSec went to the WikiLeaks internet relay chat server. Monsegur was largely unaware. A deal was made to provide files from Stratfor to WikiLeaks.

When talking to WikiLeaks,” Hammond recounted to me, “they first asked to authenticate the leak by pasting them some samples, which I did, [but] they didn’t ask who I was or even really how I got access to it, but I told them voluntarily that I was working with AntiSec and had hacked Stratfor.” Soon after, he arranged the handoff. When Sabu found out, he insisted on dealing with Assange, personally. After all, he told Hammond, he was already in contact with Assange’s trusted assistant “Q.”

Thordarson was “Q.” 

According to Hammond, Monsegur attempted to entrap WikiLeaks by suggesting the organization pay him “cash for the leaks.” But WikiLeaks already had the documents they planned to publish.

The U.S. government had a deadline in June 2019 for submitting an extradition request. It seems improper to add these substantial details to the request, especially since a one-week hearing was already held.

While the conspiracy charge includes sensational claims of collaboration with hackers, it is no less of a political charge than the seventeen Espionage Act offenses Assange faces for publishing information.

The additional sections in the indictment represent an attempt to give the illegitimate prosecution a greater veneer of criminality. Unfortunately, it does not take much to scrape it off and expose the contempt for press freedom that still lies behind this vindictive prosecution.

The post US Government Expands Assange Indictment To Criminalize Assistance Provided To Edward Snowden appeared first on Shadowproof.

“People are doing the things that they need to do for change, however, I’m a little startled at how quickly we were able to flip the switch from the pandemic to this.”

“I just hope we can keep multiple things on our minds at the time. I hope that we can multitask, and I hope that throughout all this, as we’re fighting, we don’t forget about the deliberate indifference to health care inside of prisons and being exposed to COVID-19 inside of prisons.”

“If we have to be the torch to keep that going, we’ll be the torch. So, hopefully it doesn’t die out,” Shirelle concluded. “That’s also very serious, very important, very scary, and I just want to keep that in the forefront of everyone’s minds.”

Listen and support BL Shirelle’s “Assata Troi” at Bandcamp. 

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