Isn't the simple answer that the embassy of Ecuador in London cut off his access to the Internet? The embassy announced they had restricted his access to the Internet beginning October 17th.
This sequence of events can give some light on the issue (quoted from 4chan):
Oct 20th/21st: Wikileaks tweets 5 tweets with misspelled words. The incorrect letters spell "HELP HIM". The Wikileaks twitter has never made a spelling error, let alone 5 in two days. [1]
Oct 21st: Massive DDoS attack on US internet. Wikileaks tweets to imply the attack originates from its supporters, asking them to stop, no evidence supports claim.
Oct 21st: London Airport evacuated due to "chemical attack", potentially used as cover to fly Assange out of country.
Oct 22nd: Gavin MacFadyen (mentor to Assange and key player in Wikileaks) dies of lung cancer.
Oct 23rd: Wikileaks Tweets poll asking how best to prove Assange is alive (he still hasn't appeared on video or at the window since).
Oct 24th: Wikileaks Tweets video of Assange and Michael Moore recorded in June.
Oct 26th: 4chan users successfully successfully decode their first message in Wikileak's blockchain. Threads are instantly flooded by shills saying that it's not worth looking into. The blockchain is blocked with fees and 43000 unconfirmed transactions appear in the mempool.
Nov 6th: Huge DDoS takes down Wikileaks for first time in years.
Nov 7th: Various entities notice hundreds of Podesta and DNC emails are missing from recent leaks, accessed with direct entry.
Nov 8th: Trump wins.
Nov 12th: Assange meets with Swedish prosecutor regarding rape allegations, lawyers barred from attending, meeting conducted via an Equadorian ambassador (not face to face)
Nov 14th: Wikileaks releases insurance files, SHA-256 hashes do not match those tweeted in October.
> Oct 21st: London Airport evacuated due to "chemical attack", potentially used as cover to fly Assange out of country.
Cover for who to fly Assange out of the country?
When an airport is evacuated that's going to stop air traffic out of the airport, and it is likely to cause enhanced scrutiny of the people who are at the airport. If the people trying to get him out are not working with the UK government, that would not be the opposite of what they want.
If it was the UK government trying to get him out, they could probably arrange for a special flight to leave the airport while it is ostensibly down. Of course, that would draw attention to that flight because you'd have assorted airport workers see that a flight had received special permission to leave a closed airport, and so it must be something very important.
Why would they do that, when if it is the UK government they could simply take Assange in a windowless van to a UK military base and fly him out on a military flight? That could easily be done in a way that would have virtually no risk whatsoever of calling attention to the operation.
Actually, the same goes for anyone else trying to get him out. The hard part in moving Assange is at the Ecuador embassy end of things, not at the transport out of the UK end. If the Ecuador embassy is cooperating with the move, then the windowless van works no matter who the party is.
Furthermore, in addition to the practical aspects you list, it was actually London City Airport that was evacuated; that's the small, single-runway one in the Docklands.
Because of its steep approach there are only certain specified aircraft types permitted to operate there and anything untoward would be quickly spotted.
It's also 11 miles east of the Ecuadorian embassy, requiring a journey right through the heart of the city. Whereas RAF Northolt is a much quicker and easier trip to the north-west...
I think we see here how 'false news' starts. Unhelpful facts are omitted or made ambiguous, and then mixed with a spoonful of conjecture.
Also jets leaving an airport aren't invisible and anyone living near there could have noticed a plane leaving an airport that was supposed to be closed due to a chemical attack.
It would actually be pretty counterproductive to draw so much attention to the airport and then send a supposedly secret flight out of it.
That article says that his internet was cut off because they were afraid he was interfering with US Elections, which were two weeks ago. Why wouldn't they have turned them back on by now?
Also, the internet isn't the only way to communicate and prove you are alive, so one would think there would be credible information by now.
Not that I really believe anything's happened - could well be he's trying to drum up some drama - just pointing out that on its face the "temporary" cutting off of his internet seems to have extended beyond the deadline.
He could still stand at a window or have someone else share a photo of him.
There's just too many strange things going on. The one thing that did it for me is when they published those pre-commit hashes.. and then released the files and the files didn't match the hashes... then they tried to claim that the hashes were for the decrypted files..
Which to me raises just too many red flags that something is off.
> then they tried to claim that the hashes were for the decrypted files
What do you mean "tried"? Even if WL didn't say it explicitly, that would be the top sensible explanation after one find the actual hash of one of the encrypted files does not match the published one.
Most often encrypted archives contain more than one file, so the only way this could be true is if there is an archive inside an archive. Which is totally possible.. but then the whole point of a hash is to let someone know that a file is as it was intended. So, if you're not giving a hash for the file you're sending.. you're basically setting people up for opening potentially malicious files on the hopes that the file they want is actually inside.
Well, someone like Assange would surely have a Dead Man's Switch, but may be of interest that it hasn't triggered yet. (Honestly, if I were ever in the same situation, I'd probably let it run for quite a long time, just in case I'm incapacitated for a long time by an accident, say.)
The speculation is that the reason the switch didn't get triggered is related to the ddos attack on the dyn dns provider which happened shortly after that.
Nobody knows. All anyone knows is that A happened and B happened. Everything else is speculation, including how the switch might operate or whether or not the outage is related.
I'd recommend reading the chronology on the website, it's all the facts anyone knows for sure.. but regardless, at the end of the day, some proof that the man is alive would be nice.
That's unjustified equivocation, IMO. You're arguing that the probabilities are somehow "equal" (or at least of comparable magnitude), but I don't think that's even remotely the case.
Don't get me wrong! It's very worrying that we haven't heard anything from him. I think a simpler explanation is simply that he's been killed and that "they" are waiting for enough time to pass for either: 1) everyone to 'forget' his importance, or 2) to control the 'narrative' enough that "we" will hate him regardless.
EDIT: If he has been permanently incapacitated, I'd hope that he has staged a series of increasingly disruptive DMSes over, say, a few decades. I'm guessing there was enough data in some of the leaks for that.
The first minute of this interview should clear this up quite quickly. Julian Assange has certainly been seen alive recently, and certainly much more recently than 46 days ago!
I'm sorry, but can someone explain to me why this would not be accepted as proof of life? He is asked questions in the first minutes of the interview and gives answers about events that happened this month. Isn't that conclusive? Somehow I must be missing something.
In the first minute of the video, he is asked about "this final week of the election campaign". Also, he refers to the following Podesta email that was released on October 10th, which is quite clearly more recent than 46 days.
This is nothing more than a silly conspiracy theory.
Looking at the video more, I agree with you that this is more recent.
However, I don't see any reason to believe that wikileaks itself is not compromised.
Wikileaks is saying assange is in control, wants to give proof, does not give proof, releases hashes, releases files that don't match the hashes, and despite all the calls for proof of life, they do nothing.. which if assange is still alive is possibly his way of trying to get people to not trust wikileaks anymore because it's been compromised and he can't say anything about it. (1) because they're not letting him and (2) because ecuador might kick him out for revealing the truth
Until the man himself gives some proof that he is alive and in control of the organization, I see no reason to trust wikileaks.
If you start going looking for evidence that you are right about this, you will keep finding it, due to confirmation bias, and you will never let the conspiracy theory go. The only thing which I think is reasonable to suspect at present is that Assange's internet was cut off, and wasn't reinstated after the election. Once you go beyond that you are into conspiracy theory territory. To shut up the whole of Wikileaks in all the countries it operates in, would be a conspiracy of such massive proportions that the chances of it being pulled off are negligible.
If you think about it, Assange normally appears in interviews via some internet based conference software. If he hasn't got internet, he can't do that. So the only interviews you will see for a while are ones like Pilger's, where the interviewer actually goes into the embassy.
I'm not looking for evidence that "I'm right".. I have nothing to be right about, I'm not even claiming anything.
All I know is that it doesn't look like Assange has control of wikileaks anymore, and until he offers proof himself that he does, I find it unreasonable to just blindly trust re-assurances from nameless twitter posts.
What possible proof could Assange offer to convince everyone that he is "in control of Wikileaks"? And why should/would he do that for you personally. There's probably a thousand people demanding Assange offer proof of this or that.
I'm not suggesting he do anything for me personally (?) And yes, there are thousands of people demanding proof that he is alive, that's the whole point of this post.
The fact that he and wikileaks aren't providing this despite saying they want to is the topic of discussion.
And as far as what possible proof.. GPG signed statement would be preferable. This can easily be accomplished without internet. Even a video statement would be somewhat acceptable. Wikileaks held a poll asking for how people wanted proof, and video was the top response. None was supplied.
The questions are asked by an Ecuadorian prosecutor and was supplied by Swedish prosecutors earlier. The Swedish prosecutor and a Swedish police is present at the hearing and is allowed to ask Assange to clarify his answers but not to ask any new ones. A DNA sample will be taken if Assange agrees to it. Ecuador has not permitted Assange's lawyer to be present against Asssange's wishes.
Who knew Ecuador wasn't an ideal country for human rights? Is it possibly even worse than Great Britain and Sweden?
Counter-conspiracy: after the Reddit AMA in which most redditors were pissed off and accused WikiLeakas to act in Putin's interests, Assange engineered this drama as a way to regain his previous cult status among the digerati.
I agree that that could be a proof of life, but in Assange's particular situation, that would be putting a good amount of faith in his operational security with respect to his GPG keys. I try to keep good op-sec, but I'm not sure that my GPG keys would be secure if someone had physical possession of both me and my devices and the motivation to try and get at my keys.
Yes, but more importantly now, the poll was almost a month ago, and they never bothered to do anything about it. This despite the masses of people calling for proof of life on every twitter post they make.
This would all be super easy to end, for so many smart people in here you guys are acting pretty dumb. Guess making up conspiracy theories is better than actually finding a solution to get PoL.
According to the previous photos from Assange and the data that I could find publicly, he's most likely in this part of the embassy.
"Assange’s living space, a former embassy office, is located on a ground-floor corner overlooking a small dead-end street.His window sits above one of the hundreds of thousands of security cameras."
That is also the part of the building where he talked to the press, and his cat is sitting most of the time.
Now that we have established where he is most likely to find we look at how far the office he is staying in is from the building on the other side of the street ( what would be our observation point, I'll come to that later again.)
According to Google, that is surprisingly accurate for measurements the distance is:
Total distance: 19.67 m (64.52 ft)
So let's say about 65 ft or 20m.
Now how does that help us to find out if Assange is still alive?
There is a technique mostly used by the military called "TTWS" (Through-the-Wall Sensors). The portable devices in the price range up to $80k have a range up to 65ft.
While this does not deliver a clear image of Assange if you had this running from a window in the observation point across the street, there is a pretty high chance you will see if someone stays / lives in that room.
The better devices also can give you a "signature" and work up to 230ft (70m), so setting this up for a few days you will be able to track pretty precisely who stays in that part of the embassy and if he left and came back to that room.
So if you really care if he lives or not, if you start a crowdfunding or find someone with such a device / willing to spend about $150k for a new device, a ticket to London, and a few grand to bribe someone in the building across the embassy to let you stay for a few days you could make a pretty good guess if Assange is still in the embassy / alive.
P.S.: Just letting you know that this is a gray area and you'd most likely get arrested if the Ecuadorian embassy finds out you do surveillance on them.
Also, I think Assange is well and alive, it plays into his cards greatly to have people believe he got kidnapped / killed / exfiltrated.
At least I had a good laugh reading all these bullshit theories. Thanks for the entertainment.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/19/wikileaks-ecua...