Monday, November 14, 2016

An article that seems to explain the existence of Wikileaks

In this election past, Wikileaks has played a significant part in shaping the journalistic narrative. Wikileaks has provided information that no other reporter was willing to produce. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do consider what Wikileaks has done as journalism. I believe that if they chose to do so at all, most elite reporters included information shared by Wikileaks in their reporting in order to give the appearance of impartiality.

What we learned from Wikileaks is how the Democratic party has operated during the Clinton campaign. We were treated to emails describing how the Clinton campaign colluded with the mainstream media to shape the narrative in Clinton's favor. We learned how Clinton surrogates got more press than Sanders' surrogates. We learned of their attempts to smear Bernie Sanders. We saw how debate questions were sent to the Clinton campaign in advance of the debates. We also learned that there was not a great deal of confidence in Clinton or how she managed her campaign on the part of many people who supported her. This is just a small part of what we got from Wikileaks.

Had any of our so-called elite reporters received this information in private, without compromise, they would have kept it secret from the rest of us. Many of the conspiratorial acts of the Democratic National Committee most likely would not have been exposed without Wikileaks. The question that comes to mind for me is this: how long has this been going on? I doubt the DNC really wants us to know.

There are now even more people in very high places who would like to see Julian Assange dead for exposing their conspiracies. Yes, I did mean to say "conspiracies". What the elite in the Democratic party have done is they have conspired to deceive the American people. From what I can see from the results of the election, they have unwittingly deceived themselves, too.

They deceived many Americans by casting Hillary Clinton as a better candidate than she actually was. They forced Clinton into the position of nominee against the will of millions of Americans, and thus, disenfranchised the very people they needed to win the election.

What motivates a man to expose such conspiracies? I believe that the answer can be found in a document called, Conspiracy as Governance, by Julian Assange. It is a short and interesting essay seemingly written as a mental experiment to ask a very interesting question (though it comes near the end):
Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile
phones, fax and email correspondence — let alone the computer systems which
manage their subscribes, donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail
campaigns?
They would immediately fall into an organizational stupor and lose to the other.
For the purpose of his thought experiment in the essay, Assange imagines the workings of a conspiracy as a system of computation and information processing. He shows us how a political party, confident in their privacy, can act in a conspiracy to impose its will upon others without their consent, and without their knowledge. Finally, he shows us how it all falls apart when the communication channels are cut. When the channels of communication are cut, information can no longer be processed by the conspiracy. Then the conspiracy can no longer think and it fails.

Who lost the election? Hillary Clinton. What party is she with? The Democratic party. Which party was exposed by Wikileaks? The Democratic party. This isn't to say that Wikileaks brought the party down a notch by costing them the election. They would have lost anyway. Even if none of this information were exposed, the party deceived themselves into believing that Hillary could win. How did they do this?

The DNC deceived themselves by colluding with the press to weave a false narrative. They insulated themselves from reality by rigging polls to over-sample Clinton supporters and excluding millennials from the polls. They disenfranchised millions of people who supported Bernie Sanders and expected those same people to fall in line later. Most of them did not. They either voted for someone else or they stayed home.

While Assange does a great job of showing what happens when the means of communications are hampered, exposed or cut off, his point has not been fully proven, not yet, anyway. During the years leading up to the campaign and during the campaign, the conspirators had access to all of their electronics for communications, and so continued with their plans. But the essay does demonstrate the motivation for creating Wikileaks. That motivation is to hinder, expose and destroy effective collaboration among conspirators who intend to commit harmful acts against the people they claim to represent.

I can imagine that Assange has made very big fans of encryption out of the members and former members of the DNC and probably anyone else in power who wishes not to have their plans exposed. They will want again the privacy that affords them to be so arrogant in defiance of the will of the people. They will use more care in their means and manner of communication.

Knowing what we know now, can we can look again at our leaders with the vigilance required to regain and restore our democracy? I hope so.

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