WikiLeaks Tweets Hash Codes, Worry For Assange, Damaging Info On Kerry Expected

[UPDATE] WikiLeaks is reporting that “Julian Assange’s internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans.”

BREAKING…. WikiLeaks Confirms Ecuador Cut Off Assange Internet

On Sunday, WikiLeaks tweeted hash codes in what many hope is an effort to authenticate emails ahead of time that could prove to be very damaging to Secretary of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Hash codes are a digital “fingerprint” of a file that can demonstrate provenance of the file itself and authenticate its source.

The United State government has been embarrassed by the emails obtained and released by WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which is dedicated to exposing corrupt governments, has promised to continue to release the emails obtained through various sources despite threats by the U.S. government.

In 2012, Assange sought and received refuge at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for more than four years. Many believe that false charges of rape have been lodged against him in order to return him to Sweden. Once in Sweden, he would then be extradicted to the U.S. to face espionage charges .

While his opponents, primarily those who have been embarrassed by the emails, see Assange as a traitor, his supporters believe he is a hero.

The last release of emails involved Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. According to WikiLeaks, “Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of the Clintons and was President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the Podesta Group with his brother Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank.” Click here to read the emails

The hash codes WikiLeaks posted are “message digests”, summaries of files created using one-way mathematical operations: While it is easy to determine what number was multiplied by seven to get twenty-one, and therefore to back into the original secret number of three, some mathematical operations on the binary numbers that computers use do not have a predictable antecedent and cannot be traced back. By using those operations many times over on a file, one can create a hash of that file that can prove its integrity.

For example, this is the hash code of a real document composed in Microsoft Word using the well-known SHA-256 algorithm:
44F9E6E4157EBBD2137006EA04249D830D180895524BA2DAB7DE03808040B68F
This is the hash of the same document converted to Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) format:
78930CCD82C21B0F4F9AA4BC9E46E8350B5C135DDFFB327B7203B520E3E62C83
And lastly, this is the hash of the same document, except for the replacement of one period with an exclamation point:
8A6373E06655DBB02878969225FFD87CC871FE866354B8F32FF796C9F863C6E5

All three hashes are fingerprints of files that convey the exact same meaning, but all three hashes are wildly different. There is no publicly-known method to reconstruct a document from its hash alone, as the hash changes completely and unpredictably for even semantically irrelevant differences in the source.

In other words, even tiny changes in the source files cause two hashes to bear absolutely no resemblance to each other. Also, the limitations of conventional computing effectively make it impossible to reconstruct a document from a hash. Therefore, if a file goes public and its hash matches one posted by a known source, the hash effectively proves that the known source had contact with and vouches for the authenticity of that file.

If it is not possible to reconstruct a document from its hash, though, that also means that the hashes are completely meaningless to anybody who does not have the files. There are two reasons Assange may have released the hashes:
1) To prove to those who know what the files contain and fear their release that he does indeed have them, or
2) To prepare to vouch for the authenticity of the files even if he succumbs to some grave threat, be that extradition and imprisonment or, perhaps, death.

If Assange released the hashes to prove he has specific secrets as in the former scenario, he could now bargain with those secrets. However, his history proves he will release the truth, so the latter scenario is plausible. He would simply need to have set up a “dead-man’s switch”.

A dead-man’s switch enables some action to occur in automated fashion if its operator either fails to check in over a given period of time with a safe code, or if its operator checks in with a duress code. By storing secrets to leak on a few computers around the world, and by rigging those computers to send the files containing those secrets to every conceivable major news-gathering organization outside the United States should Assange either be extradited to the United States or killed, Assange gives himself a crucial bargaining chip to save his own life.

By using his authenticated WikiLeaks Twtiter account to publish hash codes ahead of time, Assange has told the world that he has certain documents and that only he can stop those documents—and the secrets within them—from seeing the light of day. Whether he released those hashes as a threat or as a safety measure remains to be seen, but his action is extremely unsettling. The complete silence of the legacy mainstream media about this release so far, however, may indicate how much control politicians have over this country’s editors.