Assange has written in detail in the past regarding his methodology.
That predates the current incarnation of Russian cyberwarfare against the US.

He wrote, _in 2006_:

"Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, cut many high weight links. The act of assassination — the targeting of visible individuals, is the result of mental inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which our species evolved.

Literacy and the communications revolution have empowered conspirators with new means to conspire, increasing the speed of accuracy of the their interactions and thereby the maximum size a conspiracy may achieve before it breaks down.

Conspirators who have this technology are able to out conspire conspirators without it. For the same costs they are able to achieve a higher total conspiratorial power. That is why they adopt it.
For example, remembering Lord Halifax’s words, let us consider two closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings, the US Democratic and Republican parties.
Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence — let alone the computer systems which manage their subscribes, donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail campaigns?

They would immediately fall into an organizational stupor and lose to the other."

There is nothing really new as far as Russia is concerned from Assange POV.
Everything had been laid out, publically, a decade before it happened. Also,
let's not forget that Assange rose out of the hacker underground of the 90s. This
sort of thinking (feedback loops, information flows and emergence) was
commonplace back then. A lot of the "hacker wars" of the 90s and early 2000
were various groups trying to get a feel of what was possible, by manipulating feedback
loops.

If there's something novel here, it's watching a nation state (Russia)
apply the same principles on a grand scale. In Hypernormalisation,
it's shown that Surkov experimented on Russian population and then
let it be known publically that he was doing so. Watching a nation state
embrace that sort of operational mindset and throw its full weight behind
it, is surely extremely interesting to those in this arena :-]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/23/2017 01:21PM by zoskia.