4 ms·

Fyi at this point there is speculation that something has happened with WikiLeaks, including Assange, who has not been seen for a week now since the early morni

Fyi at this point there is speculation that something has happened with WikiLeaks, including Assange, who has not been seen for a week now since the early morning events at the Embassy (when his Internet was cut). Their subreddit has had their share of panic threads. Take this with a grain a salt, and I won't link to 4chan where this was first pointed out, but the last two days of tweets have also included typos/ missing letters that come close to spelling out "help him," overall to a small p-value.

bobsgame 10y ago
NSFW due to images in replies and language: http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94081465/julian-assange-wikileaks-cryptic-messages http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94081465/julian-assange-w... http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94082701 http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94082701 http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94075699 http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94075699
- abgawrv 10y ago
  No way, that's absurd (the "help him" message, not that Assange might be in danger). First, those tweets were not posted one after another, or even in chronological order. Second, it's a mixture of missing letters and extra letters, and for example in "recipie" they select "e", when it's obviously "i" that is the extra letter. And then why take three letters from "algorithim"? And most importantly, many of these tweets were posted before Assange even lost his internet connection. I will say that I am totally dismayed by the general response toward Wikileaks on HN. I wish Assange the best, and hope Wikileaks continues with its work in the American political sphere for a long time. I don't know so much about Wikileaks' activity relating to Turkey, for instance, and if that was handled improperly, but the Podesta and DNC leaks are proving extremely valuable to American democracy.
  - oelmekki 10y ago
    Let's go through the various possibilities, here. I see three of them: 1. this is over interpretation and there is no message 2. there is a message because wikileaks account is under control and want to get a message through 3. there is a message because wikileaks want to gain favors from conspiracy theorists (please people, feel free to add more) I would tend to see the first possibility as the most probable, because indeed, the "rules" used to compose this message are really not rigorous. I would give same probability to the two next ones. Gaining access to the people handling the account and forcing them into tweeting damaging things seems possible. I would not understand why this would be accomplished instead of just taking over the account, though. Leveraging conspiracy theorist also sounds like a possibility. Rumors are a strong weapon, easily undermining convictions with background doubt. And if confronted about it, they could totally say they never intended to do such thing and it's plain over interpretation. But of course, tin foil support is not the best support you can hope for.
  - throw324159 10y ago
    That's not true, they were posted in the last ~48 hours and Julian has been cut off since last Sunday. And only one letter is out of order. I'm not saying we should have full confidence that this is a distress message, but it deserves to raise an eyebrow and put some pressure on figuring out what has (or hasn't) become of Julian.
    - abgawrv 10y ago
      Really? I'm pretty sure I searched through and saw some dating back to at least October 15th, and others I kept scrolling back and couldn't even find them via a CTRL-F search. I'm not super versed in Twitter though so maybe I made a mistake, I'll have to double-check. EDIT: Ok yeah, I definitely made a mistake about those dates. I can't find the tweet containing "recipie" at all, was it deleted? Sorry, I had no intention to mislead anyone.

bobsgame 10y ago

NSFW due to images in replies and language: http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94081465/julian-assange-wikileaks-cryptic-messages http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94081465/julian-assange-w... http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94082701 http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94082701 http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94075699 http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94075699

abgawrv 10y ago
No way, that's absurd (the "help him" message, not that Assange might be in danger). First, those tweets were not posted one after another, or even in chronological order. Second, it's a mixture of missing letters and extra letters, and for example in "recipie" they select "e", when it's obviously "i" that is the extra letter. And then why take three letters from "algorithim"? And most importantly, many of these tweets were posted before Assange even lost his internet connection. I will say that I am totally dismayed by the general response toward Wikileaks on HN. I wish Assange the best, and hope Wikileaks continues with its work in the American political sphere for a long time. I don't know so much about Wikileaks' activity relating to Turkey, for instance, and if that was handled improperly, but the Podesta and DNC leaks are proving extremely valuable to American democracy.
- oelmekki 10y ago
  Let's go through the various possibilities, here. I see three of them: 1. this is over interpretation and there is no message 2. there is a message because wikileaks account is under control and want to get a message through 3. there is a message because wikileaks want to gain favors from conspiracy theorists (please people, feel free to add more) I would tend to see the first possibility as the most probable, because indeed, the "rules" used to compose this message are really not rigorous. I would give same probability to the two next ones. Gaining access to the people handling the account and forcing them into tweeting damaging things seems possible. I would not understand why this would be accomplished instead of just taking over the account, though. Leveraging conspiracy theorist also sounds like a possibility. Rumors are a strong weapon, easily undermining convictions with background doubt. And if confronted about it, they could totally say they never intended to do such thing and it's plain over interpretation. But of course, tin foil support is not the best support you can hope for.
- throw324159 10y ago
  That's not true, they were posted in the last ~48 hours and Julian has been cut off since last Sunday. And only one letter is out of order. I'm not saying we should have full confidence that this is a distress message, but it deserves to raise an eyebrow and put some pressure on figuring out what has (or hasn't) become of Julian.
  - abgawrv 10y ago
    Really? I'm pretty sure I searched through and saw some dating back to at least October 15th, and others I kept scrolling back and couldn't even find them via a CTRL-F search. I'm not super versed in Twitter though so maybe I made a mistake, I'll have to double-check. EDIT: Ok yeah, I definitely made a mistake about those dates. I can't find the tweet containing "recipie" at all, was it deleted? Sorry, I had no intention to mislead anyone.