WIKILEAKS UPDATES 01 FEB. 2017 - LE PEN + BARRETT BROWN: 3 YEARS FOR WHAT?

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	Southern Exposure: Cannon Beach, meet WikiLeaks Daily Astorian But as any self-respecting muckraking local journalist would do, I poked around on WikiLeaks and typed in the search term “Cannon Beach.”. Flag as irrelevant
	WikiLeaks Has Over 1100 Documents on France's Marine Le Pen Al-Manar TV Wikileaks said that the archives of the whistleblowing website contained over 1,100 documents related to French presidential candidate from National ... Flag as irrelevant
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	Roger Stone, Trump confidant: I did not know John Podesta's email would be hacked Washington Times No, not whatsoever,” he said. “Did they pass that information on to WikiLeaks, the Russians? Assange denies that — there's no evidence of it,” he said. Flag as irrelevant
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	Did Media Bias Help Trump Become President? No rating results yet The Greyhound According to the Washington Times these WikiLeaks included Hillary calling for open borders, Clinton saying sometimes she has a public and private ...       Southern Exposure: Cannon Beach, . meet WikiLeaks A risky business   By R.J. MarxThe Daily Astorian Published on January 31, 2017 12:01AM Last changed on January 31, 2017 10:16AM   This column could get me arrested. Something only a little more extreme happened to journalist Barrett Brown, released in November after serving three years in federal prison for sharing a link to hacked emails from the intelligence group known as Stratfor. He was released from prison in late November 2016. In a video on Brown’s website, Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation says Brown “took information that may have been stolen or leaked and used it to do investigative journalism in the public interest.” While originally facing up to 100 years in prison for sharing other Stratfor hacked links in a chat room with other journalists, 11 of 12 charges were dropped and Brown ended up pleading guilty to transmitting threats, aiding hackers and obstructing authorities from carrying out a search warrant resulting in his three-year incarceration. Many of the charges were a result of the leak of credit-card numbers — six months after the hack was revealed, giving, Brown’s defense argued, credit companies plenty of time to protect the accounts. “This was a failure on our part,” Stratfor CEO George Friedman told investigators eight days after the hack and months before the leaks were shared by Brown. Unwisely, Brown, who said he was withdrawing from heroin at the time, threatened an FBI agent prior to his arrest in 2012. Along with jail time, Brown was ordered to pay more than $829,000 in fines. On a journalist’s salary, he’ll still be paying that back when Donald Trump Jr. is in the White House. Data dumps I can assure you I am not withdrawing from heroin, printing any leaked credit-card numbers or issuing any challenges. But as any self-respecting muckraking local journalist would do, I poked around on WikiLeaks and typed in the search term “Cannon Beach.” Who knew what juicy items I might stumble on? Two particular items caught my attention. One document was obtained by WikiLeaks from the U.S. Congressional Research Service. According to the WikiLeaks site, the research service is a congressional “think tank” with a staff of around 700. Reports are commissioned by members of Congress on topics relevant to current political events. Despite taxpayer costs of more than $100 million a year, its electronic archives are, as a matter of policy, not made available to the public. The link to Cannon Beach? Pretty tenuous, a mere footnote, referring to a 2005 opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the subject of property takings — usually involving disputes between property owners and municipalities. A 1994 Supreme Court decision held that Cannon Beach’s denial of an oceanfront property owners’ permit application to construct a seawall in the dry sand area of their property “does not constitute an uncompensated taking under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” It affirmed the state’s goals of limiting development on “conditionally stable dry sand and the implementing city ordinances and department regulations do not constitute taking of the owners’ property.” This is not the stuff of Cold War espionage — it can also be found at supremecourt.gov. The second WikiLeaks reference to Cannon Beach comes in a hacked email from Stratfor, a global intelligence agency based in Austin, Texas. In February 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Global Intelligence Files, more than five million hacked emails from the Texas headquartered Stratfor. The emails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. These were the leaks that got Brown, then a contributor to The Guardian and Vanity Fair, in trouble. According to WikiLeaks, the leaked Stratfor emails reveal “the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.” The WikiLeaks site says “the emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.” Among the material was several thousand emails exchanged by staff members between 2004 and 2011, including a short wire service report about the crash of a U.S. F-15 fighter jet into the ocean 35 miles off Cannon Beach. The single-seat aircraft, based at the Portland Air Base, was from the 142nd Fighter Wing of the Oregon National Guard, and went down while on a training mission. The incident was nationally reported by United Press International (cited in the leaked document) and results of the investigation — that the pilot became disoriented during flight — published by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Washington Post and others. Protections needed Releasing hacked emails from WikiLeaks became a characteristic of the 2016 presidential campaign, contributing to the demise of Hillary Clinton and her top aides, notably campaign vice chairwoman Huma Abedin (wife of the notorious nude Tweeter Anthony Weiner) and John Podesta, former chairman of the Clinton campaign. To me, the email revelations were about as exciting as somebody else’s Chinese food order. But they upset a lot of people on both sides and arguably led to a Trump win, along with a nudge-nudge wink-wink from the nation’s FBI chief James Comey. What do the Cannon Beach WikiLeaks reveal? That a federal agency and international think tank really may not know much more than the rest of us: analysis of a 1994 Supreme Court decision and the rehashing of old news. Intelligence agencies, it appears, get the news from … the newspaper. With huge data dumps available to anyone with an internet connection, secrecy is only as good as your encrypted software. Even Stratfor’s intelligence information is available to the public with a subscription — $39 a month or $349 a year. A year of the Cannon Beach Gazette is a lot less and apparently has much of the same information. According to FreeBarrettBrown.com, Brown is now working at D Magazine in Dallas, living in a halfway house while out on parole. Brown’s defenders seek to turn him into a cause célèbre, but he is far from the only journalist at risk for doing their job. An arrest warrant was issued for Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman when she covered the Dakota Pipeline protest story — charges later thrown out by a North Dakota judge. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 259 jailed reporters worldwide; 81 of those are in Turkey, a U.S. ally. On Jan. 10, we observed the anniversary of “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine’s classic plea for independence and a model of journalistic dissent. Shockingly, the United States is listed as No. 47 out of 180 countries in the world in terms of press freedoms, described by the international journalists’ group Reporters Without Borders as especially weak in terms of federal protections for whistleblowers and lacking a federal shield law to protect sources. Maybe I’m watching a little too much “Homeland,” but I’m wondering if a little more public information just might make us a lot safer. R.J. Marx is The Daily Astorian’s South County reporter and editor of the Seaside Signal and Cannon Beach Gazette. source: http://www.dailyastorian.com/columns/20170131/southern-exposure-cannon-beach-meet-wikileaks see more: Anonymous’ Barrett Brown Is Free—and .  Ready to Pick New Fights . Andy Greenberg Security  Date of Publication: 12.21.16. 12.21.16     When Barrett Brown was arrested in his home by FBI agents in 2012—a moment captured by chance in a public videochat streamed to his fans and haters alike—the hacker group Anonymous was an online force to be reckoned with. Just nine months earlier the group had hacked the private intelligence firm Stratfor and dumped five million of its emails, the crime to which Brown would later be tied and sentenced to five years in prison. Today, just a few weeks after Brown walked out of Texas’s Three Rivers Federal Correctional Institute, Anonymous has shrunk to a thin imitation of the hacker army it once was. But with or without the hacktivist group that he championed, Brown can’t imagine a better time to resume his work as a journalist and radical information agitator. “When things deteriorate, when the system destroys itself as it’s doing right now and does so in such an obvious and disgusting way, my ideas seem less crazy,” he says. Brown, after his four years in detention, now lives in a halfway house 20 minutes from downtown Dallas and shares a room with eight ex-convicts. (To find a quiet place for a phone interview with WIRED, he spent most of the conversation in the shower.) But since leaving prison, he’s wasted no time in resuming his work and regaining his notoriety. He’s already signed a low-six-figure book deal with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for a combination memoir and manifesto. He’s featured in a short documentary released today by director Alex Winter and production company Field of Vision, who filmed his release from prison. (Watch the film for the first time below.) And foremost in Brown’s post-prison plans, he’s already plotting to launch a new and improved movement of online activists, one designed to pick up and expand his hacktivist muckraking from where he left off. . Over the next six months, Brown tells WIRED, he intends to build a piece of software called Pursuant, designed to serve as a platform for coordinating activists, journalists, and troublemakers of all stripes. Pursuant, as Brown describes it, would be an open-source, end-to-end-encrypted collaboration platform anyone could host on their own server. Users will be able to create a “pursuance,” an installation of the software focused on a group’s particular cause or target for investigation. The software would offer those groups the same real-time collaboration features as Slack or Hipchat, but also include a kind of org-chart function to define different users’ roles, the ability to host and search large collections of documents, and a Wiki feature that would allow collaborators to share and edit their findings from those documents. A Protestant Approach to Protest The software, in other words, would make it far easier to do the sort of work that Brown focused on before his arrest: crowdsourced digging through and making sense of massive collections of leaked or hacked files offered up by groups like WikiLeaks and Anonymous. And unlike the structureless anarchy of Anonymous, Brown says Pursuant’s design will let users create efficient hierarchies, while still allowing anyone to start contributing without the hurdles of joining an organized NGO or media outfit. “People can just show up and begin working,” says Brown. “It’s a protestant versus a catholic system of activism. We want a direct line to civic participation.” All of that, it’s worth noting, may for now be more of a solitary-confinement fantasy than a real roadmap. Brown has yet to recruit a team of coders or volunteers to launch Pursuant. Aside from his own book advance, he isn’t ready to name any sources of funding, either. But Brown has never had trouble finding followers for his subversive schemes. A group he founded in 2010 called Project PM devoted to crowdsourced document analysis had around 75 members at its peak, by his count. It earned the trust of the hacktivist community and media attention for its investigation combing through documents stolen by the cybersecurity contractor HBGary Federal: The breach exposed HBGary’s plan, conceived along with data intelligence firm Palantir and two other companies, to retaliate against WikiLeaks with cyberattacks and threaten its supporters. In the years since, Brown’s celebrity in the activist world has only grown, thanks in large part to federal prosecutors so zealously determined to put him in prison that they instead created a living martyr to the cause of free information. His name made a cameo in the television show House of Cards. And a column he wrote for the Intercept from prison using a pencil and paper—the Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison—won a National Magazine Award. “In a perverse sense, the government did him a favor,” says Tor Ekeland, a defense attorney who frequently represents politically motivated hackers. “He’s emerging from prison bigger and stronger than when he went in.” One Felonious Link Brown’s crime, it’s worth noting, was never actual theft of information from Stratfor—he was always closer to a public relations spokesperson for Anonymous than one of its hackers. Nonetheless, the Justice Department in 2012 accused him of sharing a link to an already-stolen trove of information from Stratfor to other members of a Project PM chatroom. That trove also included, unbeknownst to Brown, credit card data for thousands of the company’s customers. (Brown was more focused, for instance, on the Stratfor emails that showed the group had spied on victims of the deadly 1984 Bhopal toxic gas disaster on behalf of Dow Chemical.) For sharing that link, the FBI raided Brown’s home and seized his computers. When prosecutors went so far as to threaten his mother with obstruction of justice for hiding his laptops in her kitchen cabinet, Brown posted a somewhat unhinged YouTube video threatening to launch his own personal investigation into FBI agent Robert Smith, to “ruin his life and look into his fucking kids.” (Brown blames the threats on a manic episode brought on by withdrawal from his anti-depressant Paxil as well as heroin, an addiction he’s been fighting for years.) Barrett Brown’s prison ID.Alex Winter/Field of Vision   Brown was almost immediately arrested and charged with threatening a federal agent. In the trial that followed, prosecutors attempted to gag Brown from speaking about his case with the press and to seize defense funds raised by his supporters. On top of his prison time, his sentence includes $890,000 in restitution payments to Stratfor, which he’s still paying, including 15% of his book sales advance. “The prosecution was completely overblown,” says Ekeland. “It was draconian, disproportionate to any real harm, and indicative of the vindictive nature of the US government in these kind of cases, where there’s political speech they don’t like.” Now Brown is out again, and he’s ready to start picking new fights. He intends to not only build Pursuant as a platform, but to use it to continue his own investigations of intelligence contractor firms. In the age of Trump, he sees a greater role than ever for his form of grassroots, no-holds-barred adversarial journalism. He’s kept tabs in particular on Palantir, the fast-expanding intelligence contractor whose founder Peter Thiel has become a member of President-elect Trump’s transition team, and who Brown calls an “extraordinarily dangerous person.” A Four-Year Education Brown has no intention of going back to prison. His Pursuant work will be devoted to analyzing and publicizing leaked and hacked documents, not stealing them. But he concedes that those illegal data dumps are still a key part of his journalistic model. “I’m very much in favor of further leaks and hacks against select targets, those institutions we believe are engaging in crimes with the complicity of our government,” he says. (As for the heroin habit that helped fuel his FBI threats, he says he’s kicked it.) But prison wasn’t all bad for Brown, he says. Aside from honing his writing skills and winning the biggest journalist plaudits of his career, he also passed the time creating an elaborate Dungeons-and-Dragons-like tabletop roleplaying game based on the Nixon administration. And he read close to 500 books out of the thousands sent to him by supporters, getting the education in history he’d largely missed as a University of Texas dropout. Of all those books, he found particular inspiration in the autobiography of Emma Goldman, the anarcho-communist agitator who served two prison terms in the 1890s and 1910s, and was eventually deported to Soviet Russia by J. Edgar Hoover’s Justice Department. Her life, he says, serves as a reminder that a mere single prison stint doesn’t give anyone an excuse to quit fighting. “It’s very easy to fade into nihilism, to say, fuck these people, they’ve made their own bed,” says Brown. “But everyone’s compelled to consider that she did this, that she felt the need to do so. You can decide whether to emulate that. Or you can just accept that people like her have sacrificed so much for us, and then proceed to have fun with your telephone.” source: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/anonymous-barrett-brown-free-ready-pick-new-fights/ Good luck Barrett!! It took me 30 years to kick it...no fun...ed.