Featured Post

The white-Left Part 1: The two meanings of white

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Why Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" are a fraud, even in name

It could be fairly stated that it was Wikileaks that established what might be called the "Files" format of releasing reams of information leaked or hacked from a government or corporation. Wikileaks first gained international attention when it release the Afghan War Diary and Iraq War logs in 2010. The first was an archive of over 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan; they were initially released through The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel. The second was a dump of over 400,000 documents related to the Iraq war, and initially released through The Guardian. Then came the massive State Department diplomatic cables release that came to be known as Cablegate. It consisted of over a quarter-billion words in over a quarter-million cables.

This was followed by Guantanamo Bay files and The Spy Files in 2011, and then the Global Intelligence Files (GIFiles), 5 million emails from the private intelligence company Strafor, and the Syria Files, 2 million emails from Syrian political and government officials. These were followed by many other Wikileaks dumps, including Spy Files 3, Sony Archives, The Saudi Cables, DNC email leak, Podesta Emails, Yemen Files, Vault 7, Spy Files Russia.

And Wikileaks wasn't the only group making once secret file dumps public.  In 2013, the hacktivist group Anonymous posted the credentials of 4,000 executives at financial services in a Wall St. data dump. In 2015, there was the 400GB Hacking Team corporate data dump, Anonymous also made a big KKK dump that year. There was the 2016 dump of 11.5 million leaked documents of 214,488 offshore entities that became known as the Panama Papers. Anonymous made massive dumps of Proud Boys and QAnon in 2021. Another hacking group dumped 10 terabytes of Military Files from Central America just a few months ago. In 2020, the BlueLeaks data dump expose 269GB of files from hundred of Police departments. More recently, there have been a dizzying number of hacktivist file dumps related to the war in Ukraine. This includes an Anonymous dump of 28GB of data from the Russian central bank.

What all these various "Files" have in common is that they are massive data dumps that have been posted to the Internet, largely without filtering. You can comb through them yourself and find the good, bad, and ugly.

I was on the staff of WL Central, which publicize much of Wikileaks' work, and also one of the pre-publication journalists selected to have early access to both the Syria Files, and the GI Files, so I know a little about how the Wikileaks "File" system worked.

Wikileaks knew that simply posting a dump of maybe a million files to the Internet would just put people to sleep. So, what they would do was give access to a selected group of journalists, maybe dozens, and not just the big names they worked with. The idea was that we were given a limited time window to comb through the files looking for the juicer bits. When you found something you wanted to use, you would flag it. Then WikiLeaks would publish that particular document simultaneously with your article, so that you could link to it. After the window closed, Wikileaks would make the whole multi-gigabyte file dump public, and hopefully the articles already generated from that material would spark further interest and investigation.

I made public about 20 documents from the GI Files and Syria Files when I published Barack Obama's Courtship of Bashar al-Assad in September 2012. Later, the complete file dumps were made publicly available. This method is what you might call the Wikileaks "File" System.

The problem with the so-called Twitter Files is that there are no files. Elon Musk is pimping the name. He's imitating the Wikileaks system in that he's giving a couple of selected journalists access to some pre-selected emails and tweets, which they then fashion into more Tweets with screen shots. But he's not releasing any files to the public. We have to take their word that they're showing us what's most important—to who?

And that's where the fraud begins. It ends with complaints about the Biden campaign's request to have Hunter Biden dick pixs blocked being honored—without telling us they're dick pixs. These images were created from the stolen data on his laptop. The particular nature of the Elon Muck "File" format is not only are no actual files being released, what we are being allowed to see are "screenshots" meaning unsearchable images of text, rather that the text. This means anyone wanting to look into matters further would need to convert the image to text before the search could even begin. 

For example Taibbi sent out this tweet as part of the "Twitter Files":

In the interest of transparency, I have OCRed those links into search text:

https://twitter.com/jared87983561/status/1320159679700373504
https://twitter.com/let3481/status/1320154175481626624
https://twitter.com/JSJX_2/status/1320152593742614529
https://twitter.com/ozwenya/status/1320151083692388352
https://twitter.com/GuySquiggs/status/1320149308625145856

Below is what I could find of these blocked and deleted tweets. They all appear to be Hunter Biden revenge porn some wanted posted because Joe Biden was winning. This trash has no legitimate place in our body politics, but apparently Elon Musk thinks it does. This should not surprise anybody that knows the billionaire is a Putin fanboy, who has been creditable accused of using racist policies against the workers in his Tesla plants.

Clay Claiborne

13 December 2022



UPDATE: BREAKING NEWS: It now appears that Twitter has de-platformed Ukrainian Twitter users by removing the Ukraine country code from the list of phone numbers acceptable to two-factor authentication according to Paul Massaro:

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)