Assang gets Ecuadorian ID. Working on passport and the immunity to leave

[Pavlov]

You're showing no correlation in even asking that question.

Assange did just that.

Would you approve of his doing the same with your information?

Yes or no.

[Spurtacular]

Assange did just that.

Would you approve of his doing the same with your information?

Yes or no.

Present the case in which you speak of with clarity.

[Pavlov]

Present the case in which you speak of with clarity.

Cases.

Multiple cases.

Myriad cases.

CAIRO (AP) — WikiLeaks’ giant data dumps have rattled the National Security Agency, the U.S. Democratic Party, and the Saudi foreign ministry. But its spectacular mass-disclosures have also included the personal information of hundreds of people — including sick children, rape victims and mental health patients, The Associated Press has found.

In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or iden y records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that sexuality can lead to social ostracism, a prison sentence or even death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.

“They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,” said a Saudi man who told AP he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. “If the family of my wife saw this ... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.”

WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, drawing criticism from longtime allies.

Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for an interview over the past month have been unsuccessful and the ex-hacker did not reply to written questions. In a series of tweets following the publication of the AP’s story, WikiLeaks dismissed the privacy concerns as “recycled news” and said they were “not even worth a headline.”

Assange has been holed up for the past four years in Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he sought refuge when Swedish prosecutors sought to question him over sexual assault allegations. He gave no indication Tuesday that the offending material would be taken down.

WikiLeaks’ purported mission is to bring censored or restricted material “involving war, spying and corruption” into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a “giant library of the world’s most persecuted do ents.”

The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the U.S. Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s governing party and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records.

The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed by AP. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children or refugees.

“This has nothing to do with politics or corruption,” said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired prac ioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the do ent.

“This is illegal what has happened,” he said in a telephone interview. “It is illegal!”

The AP, which is withholding identifying details of most of those affected, reached 23 people — most in Saudi Arabia — whose personal information was exposed. Some were unaware their data had been published; WikiLeaks is censored in the country. Others shrugged at the news. Several were horrified.

One, a partially disabled Saudi woman who’d secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, said she was devastated. She’d kept her plight from members of her own family.

“This is a disaster,” she said in a phone call. “What if my brothers, neighbors, people I know or even don’t know have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?”

Medical records are widely counted among a person’s most private information. But the AP found that WikiLeaks also routinely publishes iden y records, phone numbers and other information easily exploited by criminals.

The DNC files published last month carried more than two dozen Social Security and credit card numbers, according to an AP analysis assisted by New Hampshire-based compliance firm DataGravity. Two of the people named in the files told AP they were targeted by iden y thieves following the leak, including a retired U.S. diplomat who said he had to change his number after being bombarded by threatening messages.

The number of people affected easily reaches into the hundreds. Paul Dietrich, a transparency activist, said a partial scan of the Saudi cables alone turned up more than 500 passport, iden y, academic or employment files.

The AP independently found three dozen records pertaining to family issues in the cables — including messages about marriages, divorces, missing children, elopements and custody battles. Many are very personal, like the marital certificates that reveal whether the bride was a virgin. Others deal with Saudis who are deeply in debt, including one man who says his wife stole his money. One divorce do ent details a male partner’s infertility. Others identify the partners of women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and Hepa is C.

Lisa Lynch, who teaches media and communications at Drew University and has followed WikiLeaks for years, said Assange may not have had the staff or the resources to properly vet what he published. Or maybe he felt that the urgency of his mission trumped privacy concerns.

“For him the ends justify the means,” she said.

___

Initially conceived as a Wikipedia-style platform for leakers, WikiLeaks’ initial plan was for a “worldwide community of informed users” to curate the material it released wholesale, according to the site’s now defunct question-and-answer page. Prominent transparency advocate Steven Aftergood privately warned Assange a few days before the site’s debut that the publish-everything approach was problematic.

“Publication of information is not always an act of freedom,” Aftergood said in an email sent in late 2006. “It can also be an act of aggression or oppression.”

Those concerns were heightened after WikiLeaks published a series of do ents leaked by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, now known as Chelsea, in 2010. The publication provided explosive evidence of human rights abuses in Iraq and Pakistani cooperation with the Taliban in Afghanistan — among many other revelations — but it also led to allegations that civilians in war zones had been endangered.

Assange insisted WikiLeaks had a system to keep ordinary people’s information safe.

“We have a harm minimization policy,” the Australian told an audience in Oxford, England in July of 2010. “There are legitimate secrets. Your records with your doctor, that’s a legitimate secret.”

Assange initially leaned on cooperating journalists, who flagged sensitive material to WikiLeaks which then held them back for closer scrutiny. But Assange was impatient with the process, describing it as time-consuming and expensive.

“We can’t sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line-by-line, to redact,” he told London’s Frontline Club the month after his talk in Oxford. “We have to take the best road that we can.”

Assange’s at ude has hardened since. A brief experiment with automatic redactions was aborted. The journalist-led redactions were abandoned too after Assange’s relationship with the London press corps turned toxic. By 2013 WikiLeaks had written off the redaction efforts as a wrong move.

Withholding any data at all “legitimizes the false propaganda of ‘information is dangerous,’” the group argued on Twitter.

But some private information genuinely is dangerous, courting serious consequences for the people involved.

Three Saudi cables published by WikiLeaks identified domestic workers who’d been tortured or sexually abused by their employers, giving the women’s full names and passport numbers. One cable named a male teenager who was raped by a man while abroad; a second identified another male teenager who was so violently raped his legs were broken; a third outlined the details of a Saudi man detained for “sexual deviation” — a derogatory term for sexuality.

Scott Long, an LGBT rights activist who has worked in the Middle East, said the names of rape victims were off-limits. And he worried that releasing the names of people persecuted for their sexuality only risked magnifying the harm caused by oppressive officials.

“You’re legitimizing their surveillance, not combating it,” Long said.

https://apnews.com/b70da83fd111496db...ls-its-secrets

Now, if your name address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.

[Spurtacular]

Cases.

Multiple cases.

Myriad cases.https://apnews.com/b70da83fd111496db...ls-its-secrets

Now, if your name address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.

So, your point would be that you're all about the privacy of citizens? Gonna have to put a check mark in the dossier on you for hates Obama. This is good stuff. Anything else you want to add to the list?

[Pavlov]

*ding*

Now, if your name, address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.

[Spurtacular]

Buzz words are muh turnoff switch

[Pavlov]

yes or no questions make me myself

Now, if your name address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.

[Spurtacular]

Now, if your name address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.

The New York Times are alegit media outlet?

Yes or no.

You approve of the Obama presidency?

Yes or no.

[Pavlov]

*ding*

*ding*

Damn you really are ting yourself trying to change the subject of the thread to avoid a simple yes or no question that has been asked of you five times already.

Now, if your name address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.

[DMX7]

I'm sorry to break it to you but right now it looks like he's not going to be able to leave the embassy in the UK without getting arrested even if he has citizenship in Ecuador. UK denied him diplomatic immunity necessary for him to get from the embassy to an airport. Rumor now is Ecuador may force him out of the embassy which will probably land him in a UK jail which is why he's stuck in the embassy in the first place.

[Pavlov]

I'm sorry to break it to you but right now it looks like he's not going to be able to leave the embassy in the UK without getting arrested even if he has citizenship in Ecuador. UK denied him diplomatic immunity necessary for him to get from the embassy to an airport. Rumor now is Ecuador may force him out of the embassy which will probably land him in a UK jail which is why he's stuck in the embassy in the first place.

They need the closet space.

[Spurtacular]

More buzz words shutting me down. .

[Pavlov]

I don't know what to do to avoid this question without looking like a total pussy. Maybe I'll try changing the entire subject of the thread again. That always works!

Now, if your name address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.

[DMX7]

They need the closet space.

We should be putting diplomatic pressure on Ecuador to remove him. Here's an interesting fun fact... Ecuador's official currency is the U.S. Dollar.

[Pavlov]

We should be putting diplomatic pressure on Ecuador to remove him. Here's an interesting fun fact... Ecuador's official currency is the U.S. Dollar.

No, he's Spurtacular's hero because Depeche Mode.

[DMX7]

No, he's Spurtacular's hero because Depeche Mode.

I don't know what that means, but he's Spurtacular's hero for probably another reason.

[hater]

I'm sorry to break it to you but right now it looks like he's not going to be able to leave the embassy in the UK without getting arrested even if he has citizenship in Ecuador. UK denied him diplomatic immunity necessary for him to get from the embassy to an airport. Rumor now is Ecuador may force him out of the embassy which will probably land him in a UK jail which is why he's stuck in the embassy in the first place.

Anything is possible but the plan is for Ecuador to give him a diplomatic position thus triggering a diplomatic immunity. UK cannot arrest a foreign diplomat especially with no charges.

Hes already halfway there

[Pavlov]

I don't know what that means, but he's Spurtacular's hero for probably another reason.

Why do you like Assange so much?

But you're right. Assange is also his hero because he releases private information and medical records of innocent people, and he would love for Assange to release his private information too.

[Pavlov]

Anything is possible but the plan is for Ecuador to give him a diplomatic position thus triggering a diplomatic immunity. UK cannot arrest a foreign diplomat especially with no charges.

Hes already halfway there

They can't just unilaterally make him a diplomat.

[DMX7]

Anything is possible but the plan is for Ecuador to give him a diplomatic position thus triggering a diplomatic immunity. UK cannot arrest a foreign diplomat especially with no charges.

Hes already halfway there

UK just denied him diplomatic status requested by Ecuador, and he can be arrested for violating his bail conditions in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...-uk-government

[Spurtacular]

But you're right. Assange is also his hero because he releases private information and medical records of innocent people, and he would love for Assange to release his private information too.

Obamacare made my medical records far less "private." But again, we've established you disapprove of the Obama presidency. And phone numbers and addresses aren't exactly "private" information.

[hater]

UK just denied him diplomatic status requested by Ecuador, and he can be arrested for violating his bail conditions in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...-uk-government

Thats just after ecuador asked UK. Doesnt mean Assange cant become a diplomat through other means. Thats why ecuador is looking for a mediato

[djohn2oo8]

[dabom]

[Pavlov]

Obama

*ding*

Now, if your name address and full medical record were taken without your knowledge or consent and published on a website for everyone to see like Assange did with these people, would you approve of that?

Yes or no.