How the Trump Admin Used a Secret Livestream to Spy on Julian Assange
Working directly with Ecuadors corrupt government, the U.S. government
abandoned all sense of legality and moral decency by spying on Assange
twenty-four hours a day via an illegal livestream surveillance operation set
up by a private security firm and approved by Ecuadors president.
by Jimmysllama
September 30th, 2019
By Jimmysllama
Earlier this year MintPress News published an article about how Australian
journalist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea
Manning had brought the U.S. government to its knees, by revealing the
U.S. torture program, war crimes, and Cablegate. At the time it appeared
that the Trump administration was more than ever willing to exact full
revenge upon those who exposed the truth, and now we know just how far
theyve been willing to go to make that happen.
Working directly with Ecuadors corrupt government, the U.S. government
abandoned all sense of legality and moral decency by spying on Assange
twenty-four hours a day via an illegal livestream surveillance operation set
up by a private security firm and approved by Ecuadors president, Lenin
Moreno. The revelation was made by Spanish news outlet El Pais, and its as
stunning as the corporate medias complicity.
Ecuador granted Assange asylum under former President Rafael Correa but
after the 2017 election and despite Morenos running as a left-wing PAIS
Alliance candidate the countrys political landscape shifted dramatically
to the right. When Moreno wasnt busy renegotiating Chinese loans, he was
making backroom deals with the U.S., and Julian Assange was the bargaining
chip. Morenos cooperation with the Trump administration was bought and paid
for by massive IMF loans and in April 2019 Moreno illegally revoked
Assanges political asylum and allowed British authorities to enter the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange had sought protection for over
seven years, and seize him.
After Assanges arrest, Moreno refused to return Assanges belongings from
the embassy, instead turning over his documents, equipment, cellphones,
personal effects, and more to the United States. The Canarys John McEvoy
recently published an interview with the former foreign minister of Ecuador,
Guillaume Long, who described Moreno as a Shakespearean traitor who he
says betrayed Correa, he betrayed his party, he betrayed his electorate
he
betrayed Ecuadorians, and he betrayed democracy, and he certainly betrayed
Assange.
Surveillance at the embassy
According to El Pais, Judge Jose de la Mota of Spains High Court, the
Audiencia Nacional, is currently investigating UC Global S.L., a security
company headquartered in Spain, and the activities of its founder, David
Morales, for what has been exposed as a mind-blowing, complex, and invasive
surveillance operation set up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by UC
Global in order to monitor Assanges every move. Theyre also being
investigated for misappropriation, bribery, and money laundering.
According to sources and court documents examined by El Pais, meetings that
Assange took with his attorneys, family, friends, and colleagues were all
monitored. Fire extinguishers, decorative elements in the embassy, and
even the womens bathroom were all bugged. The scandal seems to have reached
peak insanity when the Ecuadorian government took it upon itself to steal a
used diaper from a baby who was seen occasionally at the embassy and have it
tested for DNA, which begs the question of what exactly the government
planned on doing if the test showed Assange to be the father. Blackmail?
Threaten the wellbeing of the child? What exactly?
Assange Surveillance Feature photo
Ecuadors Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino holds a photo an electric socket
at the London embassy where a hidden mic was found. Dolores Ochoa | AP
In Edward Snowdens words:
Not a joke: the CIA allegedly ran an operation to livestream surveillance of
women in the toilet, hoping to overhear them planning the legal defense for
an asylum seeker. This is skulls-on-hats level villainy; simply indefensible
for people claiming to be the good guys.
UC Global, the company that initially set up the security apparatus at the
embassy, was hired and paid directly by the Senain, Ecuadors now-defunct
intelligence service established by former President Correa in 2009, because
he feared that the U.S. had co-opted Ecuadors existing intelligence
services. However, Fidel Narvaez, the former ambassador to the U.K. assigned
to the embassy in London, admitted that after the Senain was created the
agency became an animal without god or law, and that neither he nor
the-Foreign Minister Long had any control over its activities and security
operations within the embassy. But the Senain wasnt the only thing out of
control.
UC Globals Morales admitted that he was working for the United States at
the same time the Senain was paying him and that he sent documents, videos
and audios of meetings Assange held at the embassy directly to the CIA. He
was quoted as saying, We are playing in another league. This is the First
Division. El Pais reported that Morales first met the Americans at a 2015
security fair held in Las Vegas which may have been the 2015 ICS West
International Security Conference held at the Sands Expo and Convention
Center owned by Sheldon Adelson, a Zionist billionaire who, interestingly
enough, is on Morales roster of clients.
Sheldon Adelson
Adelson is a self-made American businessman who made most of his money in
the casino business and was last estimated to be worth around $34 billion.
In 2006, he co-founded the newspaper Israeli and then later established
Israel Hayom, a free daily newspaper created to support all things
Netanyahu. He also purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal,
where three of its own investigative journalists uncovered the secret sale
of the newspaper to Adelson. NPR later reported that a flood of reporters
and editors left the paper after it was bought by the Adelson family, citing
curtailed editorial freedom, murky business dealings and unethical
managers.
Adelson is also a pro-Israel Zionist fanatic who donated $5 million to the
Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in 2014, rejects the idea of a
two-state solution and continued aid to the Palestinians, and believes in
establishing Jewish sovereignty throughout the biblical land of Israel
which means more illegal land grabs, annexation, settlements, and violence
for Palestinians.
Adelson was close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but leaked
transcripts from a corruption investigation into Netanyahu revealed he told
police that he had cut ties with Netanyahu and vowed he would never meet
with him again. Of course this could just be a means to distance himself
from the corruption allegations being lodged against Netanyahu.
Adelson is also considered one of the most generous and influential Jewish
philanthropists in the world and, according to a WikiLeaks cable, once
donated $54 million to Israel in a three-month period. Hes a member of the
Republican Party and, in case anyone was wondering who the biggest
influencer of the Trump campaign was in 2016, that would be Adelson, along
with his wife, Miriam. They donated $5 million to Trumps inauguration fund,
making it Trumps largest inaugural contribution as well as the largest
individual donation ever made to a presidential inaugural committee.
When it came to Trumps campaign, the Adelsons were his second largest donor
after Robert Mercer and, according to the New York Times, Adelson and his
wife were the biggest spenders on federal elections in all of American
politics. The Times went on to report:
Mr. Adelson in particular enjoys a direct line to the president. In private
in-person meetings and phone conversations, which occur between the two men
about once a month, he has used his access to push the president to move the
United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and, more recently, cut aid to
the Palestinians, according to people familiar with their discussions, who
spoke anonymously to discuss private matters. Mr. Trump has done both,
triggering a backlash from some American allies.
Like John Bolton, who was recently fired, Adelson pushed Trump to pull out
of the Iran nuclear deal, proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Tehran, and
once said that he wanted his son to grow up to be a sniper for Israels IDF.
Hes also been accused of allowing the CIA to use his casinos as a front for
spying; and, according to reports, Adelson encouraged Trump to focus on the
embarrassing disclosures about the Clinton campaign and Hillary Clintons
dealings with major banks found in [a] recent WikiLeaks documents dump,
reinforcing speculation that Trumps I love WikiLeaks rant on the campaign
trail was merely a tactic to get elected.
Trump administration complicit in illegal spying
Its clear that Adelson, a client of Morales UC Global, has a close
relationship with Trump, leaving little to the imagination about what Trump
knew in terms of the surveillance operation at the Ecuadorian Embassy. And,
regardless of how Trump-thumpers or Q zombies want to twist what he said or
did on the 2016 campaign trail, Trump has always been anti-leaks,
anti-WikiLeaks, and anti-Assange. In 2010, he called for the execution of
WikiLeaks staff and in 2017, his long-time close friend Ivonne Baki, an
Ecuadorian ambassador now stationed in Qatar, brokered meetings between Paul
Manafort and President Moreno, who expressed his desire to expel Assange
from the embassy in return for U.S. concessions.
After Assanges arrest earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice
revealed a superseding indictment against Assange that included 17 charges
under the Espionage Act. This will be the first time in American history
that an administration has charged a journalist under that draconian law for
committing acts of journalism. Although Trump has the Constitutional power
to pardon Assange of all charges and end his extradition case in the U.K.,
it appears hes washed his hands of any responsibility to consider such an
option by claiming he now knows nothing about WikiLeaks, despite the
dozens of times he invoked the name on his campaign trail.
But the truly vile and nefarious element of this case, which has exposed the
Trump administrations true colors, is the fact that in December 2017 UC
Global installed new video cameras in the embassy along with an external
streaming access point in the same area so that all of the recordings could
be accessed instantly by the United States. Instantly accessed by the
United States. Trumps secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was head of the CIA
at the time.
The administrations direct involvement in an illegal, livestream
surveillance operation of a publisher, journalist, and political prisoner
who at the time had never been charged with a single crime is beyond
shocking and reveals just how corrupt that administration is and how
critical the situation has become for press and media workers around the
world.
Meanwhile, Trump has spent his presidency tweeting about a witch hunt the
Democrats have been carrying out against him since before the 2016 election
and initiating conspiracy theories like Spygate. Just this year Trump
tweeted (his emphasis):
[R]eally bad people SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!
They got caught spying on my campaign
SPYING did occur on the Trump 2016 campaign
It is now finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very
sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps
even Spying or Treason.
My campaign was seriously spied upon by intel agencies and the Democrats.
THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN (We will never forget)!
Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!
And while the Trump administration was secretly watching a political
prisoner via a livestream in one of the grossest voyeuristic intelligence
games America has seen, it egregiously breached his privacy and violated
attorney-client privilege and not just with the livestream but with audio,
documents and files handed over to them by UC Global and President Morenos
government.
Theres a reason Ecuador shut down Assanges communication on March 27,
2018, after he tweeted out the forgotten message about the Senain, and a
reason he was arrested 24 hours after WikiLeaks held a press conference
about the spying operation at the embassy: the U.S. government in no way
wanted Ecuadors spy operation which was likely initially shared with
former CIA Director John Brennan and then taken over by his successor and
current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who once called WikiLeaks a
non-state hostile intelligence service exposed.
A suspicious timeline of events
When Assange was granted asylum in 2012, the Ecuadorian government hired UC
Global, a private military company founded by David Morales, a former member
of the Spanish Defense Marine Infantry who was once described as the
perfect mercenary. As previously reported, most of UC Globals employees
come from the NATO military sector and the company operates around the
world, including in Spain, France, U.K., Qatar, and the United States.
Three years after UC Global was hired, WikiLeaks published the emails of
Italian malware vendor Hacking Team, which rocked the Ecuadorian government.
The technology company specializes in spyware, such as monitoring online
activities, decryption of files and emails, and remote activation of
microphones and cameras on targeted computers. The emails not only revealed
that the Senain had purchased a three-year spyware package from Hacking
Team, but that the intelligence agency had been spying on citizens,
activists and detractors.
Opposition forces decried former President Correas government while
Ecuadorian political activist Fernando Villavicencio, an opposition
mouthpiece for the U.S., published an article entitled, Assange Spied on by
the Intelligence of Ecuador, detailing the Senains spying operation at the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which was dubbed Operation Hotel.
Villavicencios article was likely a joint intelligence effort to deflect
from U.S. involvement in the operations, deride Correas government,
dismantle his support base, and turn public opinion against Assange by
describing him as a bad houseguest and releasing alleged derogatory
intelligence reports from the Senain.
Rafael Correa, Christine Assange
Correa, right, holds the hands of Julian Assanges mother, Christine, during
a meeting in Quito, Ecuador. Martin Jaramillo | AP
Fast forward to March 13, 2018, when welivesecurity.com published an article
reporting that the Hacking Teams Remote Control System had been detected in
the systems of 14 countries. Less than a week later, President Moreno
rescinded Ecuadors contract with UC Global, hired PromSecurity Cía. Ltd. to
surveil the embassy in London, and announced that he was shutting down the
Senain and that a new intelligence agency would be established.
Exactly two weeks later, on March 27, 2018, when Assange was still in
control of his Twitter account, he tweeted what has since been described as
the forgotten message:
Senain bought spy packages from Hacking Team for 3 years.
He included a link to an article published earlier that day that reported,
While developers suspect that the Hacking Team (HT) spy program is still
working, the National Secretariat of Intelligence of Ecuador (Senain) has
not confirmed whether or not it terminated its relationship with this
Italian company. Approximately four hours after Assanges tweet, President
Moreno cut all of Assanges communications, including visitors to the
embassy and phone and internet access. A few days later WikiLeaks tweeted,
Although Ecuador claims it isolated Assange over his Tweeting about the
detention of [Basque rebel leader Carles] #Puigdemont in Germany, the
political context is his breaking the Watergate of Ecuador, #HackingTeam,
which led to the implosion of the national spy service this month.
Two weeks later, The Guardian went on a one-week propaganda spree about
Operation Hotel (read Tom Coburgs Julian Assanges lawyers were placed
under surveillance. But thats not the whole story via thecanary.co), the
same operation that Fernando Villavicencio reported on back in 2015 after
WikiLeaks published the Hacking Team emails.
This time, however, Villavicencio and The Guardians Luke Harding reported
that the Senain had spent an extraordinary amount of money protecting
Assange rather than surveilling him and that Correas government had been
rife with corruption, working hand-in-glove with Assange to build some
sort of elaborate war room to meddle in the 2016 U.S. elections which
apparently no surveillance camera picked up:
Moreno has gone to extreme lengths to convince the public that hes rooting
out government corruption. With the shutdown of the Senain, the revocation
of UC Globals contract at the embassy
the Guardian articles, and the
creation of a new intelligence agency, he would have everyone believing that
he saved the country from the evil trappings of Rafael Correas former
government if he could.
But now we know that the U.S. government, including the Trump
administration, was directly involved in the operation at the embassy and it
seems obvious that at every turn where they may have been exposed, Ecuador
took steps to protect itself as well as the United States. And sure, maybe
Trump didnt know but his secretary of state was likely heading up the
operation stateside while he was the director of the CIA and his second
biggest campaign donor is a client of the guy who was running the actual
operation within the embassy so any deniability would be, at best,
implausible.
The UN investigates Ecuadors human rights violations
On March 29, 2019, the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Professor Joe
Cannataci, received a complaint filed by Assanges legal team from the
Special Procedures Branch of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, which stated that Assanges right to privacy
during his stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London had been violated.
Cannataci immediately requested that a meeting be set with Assange that day
and he contacted the Ecuadorian Embassy three times with no response. Two
days later, he emailed the Ecuadorian ambassador in London, Jaime Marchán,
again to no avail.
Then, in a conspicuous attempt to distract the public and distance
themselves from the PR shit-storm they knew was coming with the inevitable
disclosure of Morenos spying operation, on Tuesday, April 2, Ecuadors
minister of foreign relations, Jose Valencia, filed a complaint with the
OHCHR Office in Geneva claiming that President Morenos privacy was also
violated. He cited the INA Papers a leaked batch of documents that
included Morenos personal emails, text messages, and family photos, and
exposed his involvement in corruption and money laundering via an offshore
company giving the impression that Assange was behind the leaks.
The meeting between Assange and the UN Rapporteur never took place in the
Ecuadorian Embassy (although they subsequently met at Belmarsh prison) and
only five days after Assanges legal team lodged the privacy complaint with
the UNCHR, they caught wind of President Morenos plan to revoke his asylum
and hand him over to British officials.
Extortion
The entire spying operation at the embassy, sans U.S. involvement, was first
disclosed by WikiLeaks during an April 10, 2019 press conference, at which
WikiLeaks informed the public about the large-scale operation, as well as
about a group of individuals who attempted to extort the publishing outlet
with material obtained from the operation. According to WikiLeaks Editor in
Chief Kristinn Hraffnson:
We learned about some individuals in Spain who were peddling around that
they had a massive trove of documents relating to Julian Assange from inside
the embassy and that it entailed audio, video, photographs, and documents.
Hraffnson eventually met with the extortionists, who showed him hundreds of
thousands of documents, videos, and confidential medical records and legal
documents, all pertaining to Assange. They had pretty much everything on
the life of Julian Assange inside the embassy, he stated. The extortion
ring demanded 3 million euros from WikiLeaks for the material, threatening
to go to the press if WikiLeaks didnt pay.
Assange Surveillance
A still from surveillance footage shows Assange meeting with a confidant at
the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Screenshot | El Pais
According to Anonymous Scandinavia (@AnonScan) at the time:
We have reason to believe that the attempt of extorsion [sic] in the amount
of three million euros, has connections to government officials cooperating
with for example C 9 [Senain] and Prom Security.
In complaints later filed by Assange, a group of Spaniards, Ecuadorian
Ambassador Jaime Marchán, and four employees of Promsecurity were all named
as taking part in the extortion ring and/or alleged crimes that would have
been committed inside the embassy, especially data leaks, listening and also
the dissemination of both audio and video data and thousands of documents.
President Moreno retaliated against WikiLeaks public disclosure of the
colossal surveillance operation running at the embassy by illegally revoking
Assanges asylum and allowing U.K. officials to enter the diplomatic embassy
in London to arrest him. With El Pais latest article, the U.S. may take
further steps to distance itself and distract the public by planting
articles via corporate media outlets such as The Guardian, more restrictions
placed on Assange at Belmarsh, and a general black-PR campaign carried out
by British and U.S. intelligence agencies especially now that the Trump
administration has been directly implicated.
This is not the time for dialogue
In light of recent developments, this is no longer the time for debate or
dialogue. Its time that the people in power who have been complicit in
Assanges ongoing torture and what can only be described as a breach of
human rights and privacy violations of epic proportions be held to
account. This includes President Moreno, Ambassador Marchán, President
Trump, and Secretary of State Pompeo among many, many others. This also
includes the corporate media, who have been spewing U.S. and Ecuador
intelligence garbage about Assange for years.
This isnt just about a journalist who is still sitting in a high-security
prison despite his custodial sentence ending last week although that alone
should be enough of an outrage for anyone sitting on the side of justice and
a free press. The U.S.-Ecuadorian spying operation in the Ecuadorian Embassy
in London is about the precedents that will be set for spying on journalists
and media workers if citizens do not rise up and demand accountability.
Its become an almost macabre comedy of sorts how many journalists and
publishers who work with the U.S. and British intelligence agencies and/or
side with the Trump administration think theyre immune because the U.S.
intelligence community never spies on its allies (insert senior officials of
the European Union, Great Britain, Germany, Brazil, France, Spain, Mexico,
and on and on). Or perhaps, like so many Americans, they justify it because
they arent doing anything wrong, until they realize theyve been booted
out through Trumps revolving door over some minuscule infraction like
questioning the government.
Its dangerously naive or ignorant to believe that the president of the
United States who thinks that presidential term limits dont apply to him;
has a former CIA director as his secretary of state; pushed 38-and-counting
high-ranking people out of his administration; casually talks about nuking
other countries; encourages hatred and violence not only against ethnic
groups but against some of our own U.S. congresswomen; calls the press an
enemy of the state; wants the staff of WikiLeaks executed; threatened the
life of the unnamed CIA Trump whistleblower; refuses to pardon Edward
Snowden; is holding Chelsea Manning hostage in a federal prison; imprisoned
whistleblower Reality Winner for five years and is currently prosecuting
Daniel Hale and Joshua Schulte for revealing illegal drone assassinations
and CIA hacking weapons respectively; is the first president in U.S. history
to prosecute a journalist for journalism; and deliberately and with cold
calculation spied on Julian Assange twenty-four hours a day for years via an
illegal live-stream is worthy of any media workers trust.
Feature photo | A still from surveillance footage shows Julian Assange
resting inside of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Screenshot | El Pais
Jimmysllama is an independent researcher and writer who provides balanced,
critical analysis with a focus on the Boston bombings, Magnitsky Act, and
WikiLeaks. She is currently trying to stay warm in the Midwest. You can
read more of her work at jimmysllama.com and find her on Twitter at
@jimmysllama.
