The Daily Beast Moscow's Bid to Blow Up WikiLeaks

[totodeinhere]

Source: The Daily Beast

As U.S. officials struggle to control damage from the secret cables, Russia is planning to block a similar dump about the Kremlin. And they will be ruthless, Philip Shenon reports.

American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, outraged by their inability to stop WikiLeaks and its release this week of hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, are convinced that the whistleblowing website is about to come up against an adversary that will stop at nothing to shut it down: the Russian government.

National-security officials say that the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country’s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.

“We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it’s been frustrating,” a U.S. law-enforcement official tells The Daily Beast. “The Russians play by different rules.” He said that if WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, follow through on threats to post highly embarrassing information about the Russian government and what is assumed to be massive corruption among its leaders, “the Russians will be ruthless in stopping WikiLeaks.”

Read more: http://preview.tinyurl.com/25aztd6

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The Russians don't play. This should be very interesting.

[Joanne98]

1. Bummer!

[HereSince1628]

2. In other words, when a particularly large western empire succeeds

in dropping a dime on Wikileaks, blame the Russians and not US.

[totodeinhere]

3. I am going to withhold judgment on this. Let's see what happens.

If Wikileaks really does do a document dump on the Russians, then this story will have more relevance.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

4. If anybody was dirty laundry to air I'm sure Russia has some

I wonder if WL would be too scared to make such a dump. I would imagine the raw data would make it pretty easy to ID sources and methods to obtain the documents.

Do you think WL will do it or do they only pick safe targets like Obama?

[totodeinhere]

8. Good question. I hope they have the balls to do it. n/t

[Nuclear Unicorn]

12. I dunno

As much as I think the Russians, more than anybody, need to have a light shone into their dark closets they really would kill people without a hint of remorse.

I don't want to see anyone murdered.

Yet, if WL doesn't then the talking point becomes they are not pro-justice just anti-American.

Ironically, the very sort of dirty operations the Russians are running is the very same sort of operations that need to be exposed but that is the very same type of operation that would murder the people at WL.

It's scary and I'm just a passive observer.

[Renew Deal]

5. Yup

[glinda]

6. Yup X 2.

[TroglodyteScholar]

10. Exactly...

Assange and any number of other people involved in Wikileaks could be dead already....

[Renew Deal]

11. I was thinking along those lines.

You might be getting Bin Laden style "tapes" for years to come.

(I'm not suggesting Bin Laden is dead.)

[Freetradesucks]

7. "They Russians don't play. This should be interesting".

What I find interesting is that Obama could not stop this. It appears he did not have the guts to do what it takes....perhaps the Russians will.

[Hestia]

9. I don't doubt that Russia will try to cyberattack WL. The world's largest identity

thieves have been operating in Eastern Europe/Western Russia for years, with Russia's approval. This might be interesting - to see a cyber war. Will it be like Spy vs Spy (white hat vs black hat vs gray hat)? After reading about the cyber group in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", will people like that get involved, just because they can? Will hackers then take over the world, just because they can?

Interesting times...