Tag: Wikileaks

Assange may be released

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent

The Australian,  December 09, 2010 12:00AM

JULIAN Assange has received a glimmer of hope in his battle against sexual abuse allegations.

A British judge says the WikiLeaks founder may be released from jail next week unless Swedish prosecutors produce evidence in London to back up their allegations.

Senior district judge Howard Riddle said Swedish authorities would need to show some convincing evidence if they wanted to oppose bail for the 39-year-old Australian when he appears in court next Tuesday to oppose extradition to Sweden.

Mr Assange was yesterday refused bail and sent to Wandsworth prison when he appeared before Judge Riddle to answer a Swedish extradition application.

The internet activist’s lawyers say if he stays in jail, it will be much harder for them to organise his defence against the Swedish sex charges and to stave off what they believe is a US government plan to charge him with espionage-related crimes over the publication of thousands of secret American cables.

Gemma Lindfield, the lawyer representing Swedish authorities at the initial extradition hearing in the City of Westminster Magistrates Court, said she believed the strength of the evidence over the sex charges was not relevant to the process of extraditing him under a European Arrest Warrant.

Judge Riddle disagreed, saying the four charges, including rape, were “extremely serious allegations (and) if they are false, he suffers a great injustice if he is remanded in custody”.

The judge said he would “suggest” to Ms Lindfield that “if she is going to oppose bail in future”, she would need to be armed with some substantial material to back up the allegations.

Mr Assange’s lawyers, including Australian human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC, are worried that if, as seems likely, he is handed over to Swedish custody, the US government would then mount its own extradition case to try to prosecute him over the release of the cables on his website rather than his personal life.

Read all of it here…

It’s not a secret: the Internet was always going to radically change the world of information.  That’s nothing new.  What is new, is that the struggle over who controls and possesses information isn’t going to be fought solely in the courts or in the legislatures or the media.  It’s going to be fought out as well on the Internet itself and the weapons are going to be computers.

The present battle, fought between Wikileaks and its allies, on one side, and its well organized adversaries, including financial organizations and governments, on the other, may eventually bring information democracy, in the form of unprecedented and simple access to all kinds of information, even classified or secret information, to anyone with a modem.  Or at the other pole, it may eventually bring unprecedented censorship through even tighter control of information to the Internet and harsh penalties for publication of various kinds of information.

The New York Times reports from today’s digital battlefront:

LONDON – A broad campaign of cyberattacks appeared to be under way on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of rape.

Attacks were reported on Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; on the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange of sexual improprieties; and on PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland.

At least some of the attacks involved distributed denials of service, in which a site is bombarded by requests from a network of computers until it reaches capacity and, effectively, shuts down.

It was unclear whether the various attacks were independently mounted, but suspicion was immediately focused on Anonymous, a leaderless group of activist hackers that had vowed to wreak revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks and that claimed responsibility for the Mastercard attack.

Anonymous, according to the Times, has expressed its philosophy in two manifestos released this past week, and is battling for nothing less than free information on a free Internet:

The group, which gained notoriety for their cyberattacks…  released two manifestos over the weekend vowing revenge against enemies of WikiLeaks.

“We fight for the same reasons,” said one. “We want transparency and we counter censorship.”

The manifestos singled out companies like PayPal and Amazon, who had cut off service to WikiLeaks after the organization’s recent release of classified diplomatic documents from a cache of 250,000 it had obtained.

In recent days, Gregg Housh, an activist who has worked on previous Anonymous campaigns, said that a core of 100 or so devout members of the group, supplemented by one or two extremely expert hackers, were likely to do most of the damage. Mr. Housh, who disavows any illegal activity himself, said the reason Anonymous had declared its campaign was amazingly simple. Anonymous believes that “information should be free, and the Internet should be free,” he said,

Information, as the law now stands, is anything but free. But the Internet for more than a decade and a half has eroded much of the traditional deference to ownership of information. Napster and its progeny have brought a generation of people who think music and film should all be free.  Readers of Blogs are never disturbed by what amounts to wholesale infringement of copyrighted photos and videos and text. Wikileaks has carried this a step further by publishing enormous amounts of material officially designated “secret”.  The trend on the Internet is toward free and unfettered access to all information.  But those who own the information have no intention whatsoever to allow it to flow without charge and without a fight.

Today’s attacks, I think, mark the Cyber Battle of Lexington and Concord.

——-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

Via Lisa Simeone, the US State Department sent out this magically timed press release:

The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

UNESCO’s home page.

On its Facebook page, World Press Freedom Day states that,

World Press Freedom Day provides an opportunity to defend journalists and media organisations from attacks on their independence; to evaluate the state of press freedom around the world; and to pay tribute to those brave journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession.

Hillary Clinton’s spies at the UN have not yet reported how this message was received by other diplomats, but Joe Lieberman was observed  pumping his fist in the air yelling “Fuck yeah!  America roolz!” in the halls of Homeland Security,just after calling for prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act and a criminal investigation of the New York Times regarding its release of diplomatic cables redacted under governmental guidance.

What are those howls of derisive laughter?

Hackers take down website of bank that froze WikiLeaks funds

By Daniel Tencer, RawStory

Monday, December 6th, 2010

A group of Internet activists calling themselves Operation Payback have taken credit for shutting down the website of a bank that earlier Monday froze funds belonging to WikiLeaks.

Announcing its successful hack on a Twitter account, the group declared, “We will fire at anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks.”

Earlier in the day, Swiss bank PostFinance issued a statement announcing that it had frozen 31,000 euro ($41,000 US) in an account set up as a legal defense fund for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The bank said it had frozen the account because, in opening it, Assange had claimed residency in Geneva.

“Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance,” the bank said.

As of Monday evening, the PostFinance website was unavailable.

Operation Payback also promised a hack attack on PayPal, the online payment service that last week cut off WikiLeaks, denying the group a major tool for collecting donations from supporters.

With the financial noose tightening around WikiLeaks even as a legal one tightens around its founder’s neck, Operation Payback has effectively declared war on the organizations working to hobble WikiLeaks.

“In these modern times, Internet access is fast becoming a basic human right,” the group says in a video posted to YouTube. “Just like any other basic human right, we believe it is wrong to infringe upon it.”

Stephen Webster writes this morning at RawStory that Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange has been arrested Tuesday morning by London Metropolitan police on a warrant out of Sweden:

The Guardian reports on a statement from Metropolitan police that “Assange, 39, was arrested on a European Arrest Warrant by appointment at a London police station at 9.30 a.m.

He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010.”

Assange’s attorney says they plan to fight extradition to Sweden. A full extradition hearing is expected sometime in the next 21 days. If he is successfully taken to Sweden, the Guardian noted, he could also be legally vulnerable to extradition requests from other countries as well.

His attorneys were reportedly negotiating a sum for bail, but his freedom was not certain as Swedish rape laws make bail more difficult to obtain when the charge is rape.

Assange has reportedly recorded a video statement, set to be published online later Tuesday.

The list of WikiLeaks Mirrors is at the bottom of this post.

Embed the WikiLeaks logo on your blog or site linking to this list of WikiLeaks mirror sites.

To embed the WikiLeaks Logo linking to this page on your blog or website, copy the code from the box above or below, and paste it in your site where you want it to display.

Mary Ann Wright is a former United States Army colonel and retired official of the U.S. State Department, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. She is most noted for having been one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. (wikipedia)

“We were told as diplomats, ‘Don’t ever put anything in a cable you wouldn’t want on the front page of a newspaper.’ It shows that they’re a lot of arrogant people, that the system itself wasn’t checking itself,” says Wright of the latest documents released from WikiLeaks.  Meanwhile, several of the diplomatic cables released depict possibly illegal actions by the U.S. government, and Wright notes that the chances of anyone being held accountable are slim.

Ann Wright joined Laura Flanders of GritTV to discuss the latest releases from WikiLeaks, what they tell us about the U.S. Government and Defense and State departments, and what should happen, but probably won’t, to the people implicated therein.

Although WikiLeaks has had problems since the latest release with hacking, denial of service attacks, web hosts closing their sites down, and domain name registrars pulling their domain name, you can always get to their site by navigating to any of the WikiLeaks mirror sites listed at wikileaks.info:  

Hork!

“The whole chain of command who was aware of this order, and approved it, must resign if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law. The order is so serious it may well have been put to the president for approval,” Julian Assange told Spanish daily El Pais.

“Obama must answer what he knew about this illegal order and when. If he refuses to answer or there is evidence he approved of these actions, he must resign,” he added during an Internet chat interview published online.

“…if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law.”

This guy has a very dark sense of humor.  He’ll be found dead in a fishing net before the US even feigns credibility on the rule of law.

In 1953 the CIA distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:

 

“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve… The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the ‘horrified witness’, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.”

Originally posted at Polizeros.com

Bloggers like Bob Morris of Polizeros have pointed out that even some who are typically rebellious in their rhetoric are condemning Julian Assange (while there are people like Jonah Goldberg and Chuck Schumer calling for his head), so I think it’s worth pointing out how historically important Assange (and Wikileaks, of course) could be.  With the caveat that we have all yet to see the effects of what Wikileaks is doing, he has the potential to play two essential and complementary roles: radical anti-authoritarian and someone who makes it safe for others to voice similar opinions.

In the film “Spartacus,” after the Romans crush the slave revolt, they attempt to locate the rebel leader. Their task is made difficult because each of the defeated captives in the rebel army declares that he is Spartacus. (The Roman response was to crucify them all.)

Today, Julian Assange is the head of a global movement for transparency and accountability that has challenged the secrecy that lies at the core of malevolent state-sponsored actions. He has been denounced as a “terrorist,” harassed by legal investigations, and slandered by the servile “reporters” of the world’s commercial press.

We are witnessing an extraordinary act of heroism as the few hundred individuals of Wikileaks confront the might of states and corporations accustomed to using deadly force to work their will in the world. All that protects these brave people is the technological robustness of the global Internet and the force of world opinion. Assange may be killed or imprisoned, but Wikileaks will not be silenced, because there will always be another honest and courageous person to sustain the flame of freedom that Wikileaks has lit. There will always be another Assange.

Each of us has a choice to make. We can cower in fear under the “protection” of local governments and continue to serve the interests of amoral corporations whose activities have become indistinguishable from those of corrupt governments, or we can side with freedom and defend courageous individuals like Assange.

I declare proudly, with millions of others, I am Assange!