A lot of people defending Wikileaks from The Atlantic today. I’m not here to argue on that rags behalf, nor am I here to defend $Hillary, as anyone who has ever read my essays well knows. I’m here to tell you that Wikileaks can’t be trusted and to show you why.

First off, keep in mind that the Podesta leaks happened while the Sanders campaign still had a fighting chance to pull off the upset. Wikileaks could have released the leaks in time to sway the primaries, but Assange chose not to. He did, however, choose to release the emails when it would aid Trump. Why? Who else wants at all costs for the progressive movement to fail, but would love to see a full blown fascist who is willing to gut everything the left stands for and hand out huge tax cuts to the rich and increase military spending?

Why, the military intelligence apparatus, that’s who.

The same military intelligence apparatus that bankrolled TOR.

Peek under Tor’s hood, and you quickly realize that just everybody involved in developing Tor technology has been and/or still is funded by the Pentagon or related arm of the US empire. That includes Roger Dingledine, who brought the technology to life under a series of military and federal government contracts. Dingledine even spent a summer working at the NSA.

In 2012, Tor nearly doubled its budget, taking in $2.2 million from Pentagon and intel-connected grants: $876,099 came from the DoD, $353,000 from the State Department, $387,800 from IBB.

One of the most important figures in Wikileaks, Jacob Appelbaum, was on the spooks payroll.

Yet in 2010, right in the midst of him being funded by intel grants, Appelbaum emerged as an important Wikileaks volunteer. He used his celebrity status in the hacker world to promote the organization, helped secure Wikileaks’ servers with Tor technology and even bailed Assange out of public speaking gigs when the heat from US authorities got too hot.

Did Assange know that Appelbaum was a key employee at an organization funded almost exclusively by the US National Security State — the same all-powerful imperial machine that Wikileaks and Appelbaum were supposedly fighting against?

And it’s not just the money. Appelbaum also spends quite a bit of time touring the world and giving US government-sponsored “training sessions” to corporate lackeys, pro-western “activists” and even government officials of repressive states that are allied with the United States.

For someone who sells himself as a techno-anarchist fighting against the all-powerful US Imperial Surveillance State, it’s a bit weird to see Appelbaum fight for the interests of political movements and activists in conflict zones around the world — activists that just so happen to be in states like Iran and Syria, where the U.S. has been trying to conduct regime operations since before Appelbaum was born.

As soon as Appelbaum’s relationship with the MIC was confirmed by independent hackers, Wikileaks had no choice but to sever its ties with him.

Julian Assange announced Wednesday that WikiLeaks was severing all formal and informal ties with former spokesperson Jacob Appelbaum. This comes after hackers provided Wikileaks documents exfiltrated from the US Office of Personnel Management which clearly showed Appelbaum received over 50 million dollars in the past seven years from his employer, the United States Department of Defense.

Previously, Appelbaum postured as a rebel “cypherpunk” in exile from the United States government even as the military paid for his jet-set playboy lifestyle. Appelbaum coded much of the Navy’s sophisticated cloaking device, Tor, and also was one of the most active publicists working to depict Tor as a non-profit tool for activists in need of online anonymity, finishing the crucial task of populating Tor’s encrypted network for Naval deployment.

Assange added, before returning to the embassy, “I think it goes with out saying that anyone who so much as uses Tor is complicit in the mission of the US Navy and can consider their online privacy permanently ruined.”

Yet Wikileaks is founded on the anonymity of Tor.

Planning a Leak? Chat With WikiLeaks Via a New Tor Hidden Service

This is not the first time Wikileaks has made use of the powerful anonymizing network, however. Chelsea Manning first chatted with Wikileaks using Jabber and IRC before using Tor to leak her cache of documents from the US military and diplomats, now famous as the largest leak of classified information in the history of the America. In fact, here you can still read WikiLeaks’ ancient documentation relating to Tor. This page appears to pre-date the Tor Browser Bundle, as it instructs users on how to manually configure Firefox to use the Tor network. It also lists a broken hidden service link that was once used as its anonymous dead drop for uploading documents: http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/.

Only a fool would use Tor. As this author rightly points out, Tor won’t protect you from Trump.

The reason is simple, and can’t be repeated often enough: most of today’s “grassroots” privacy technology pushed by privacy activists like Lee and Snowden were created and continue to be controlled by the very same U.S. military-intelligence apparatus these apps are supposed to shield us from. I’m talking about the Pentagon (including the NSA), the State Department and several CIA spinoff outfits that had been covertly set up during the Cold War. In short, these tools are a part of the very same state apparatus that will in just a few months be under the control of President Donald Trump.

Today, Tor is private in name only. It’s a federal weapons contractor with its own federal contractor number and gets the bulk of its budget via contracts from various wings of the U.S. National Security State: the State Department, the Pentagon and the U.S. Navy and several CIA spinoffs, including the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Radio Free Asia.

Does Tor work? Don’t get your hopes up. Tor is a bit of a boondoggle. As Tor developer Mike Perry admitted a few years back, Tor is not at all effective against powerful, organized “adversaries” (aka governments like the United States) that are capable monitoring huge swaths of the Internet.

Front and center: a small group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University had figured out a cheap and easy way to crack Tor’s super-secure network with just $3,000 worth of computer equipment. The method was then used by the FBI to mount an international raid that punched holes in Tor’s defenses and shutdown several hundred anonymous drug and kiddie porn markets.

…The moral of this story: Tor and Signal are creations of America’s spooky war apparatus. They are designed for regime change in the age of the Internet. If they ever posed a threat to the United States — and to the corporate monopoly power that calls the shots here — their funding would be pulled and they would cease to exist. In short: if you’re worried about corporate-state surveillance, technology funded by this very same state is not the answer.

All the MIC needs to intercept Tor messages is a lot of Tor nodes.

Back in 2007, a Swedish hacker/researcher named Dan Egerstad showed that just by running a Tor node, he could siphon and read all the unencrypted traffic that went through his chunk of the Tor network. He was able to access logins and passwords to accounts of NGOs, companies, and the embassies of India and Iran. Egerstad thought at first that embassy staff were just being careless with their info, but quickly realized that he had actually stumbled on a hack/surveillance operation in which Tor was being used to covertly access these accounts.

Although Egerstad was a big fan of Tor and still believes that Tor can provide anonymity if used correctly, the experience made him highly suspicious.

He told Sydney Morning Herald that he thinks many of the major Tor nodes are being run by intelligence agencies or other parties interested in listening in on Tor communication.

In other words, the military industrial complex, for which Trump now works, had the Clinton emails before even Assange did.

Wikileaked.

Which brings us back to the question: Why didn’t Assange release the emails in time to sway the primary if his only goal was to bring down Hillary? He could have, but he didn’t. And even if Hillary would have still won, it would have given the public that much more time to discover the truth of the Podesta emails and been an even bigger boon to Trump.

But then, we all know Bernie would have won and the MIC isn’t interested in that outcome. Neither is Wikileaks.

Connect the dots.