Wikileaks to sue Visa, Mastercard over "financial blockade" ..Wikileaks said that it plans to file its complaint with the European Commission but indicated that "further actions in other jurisdictions will follow," according to the statement..
In a statement, Wikileaks described last December's decision by the companies to block credit card transactions to WikiLeaks and DataCell as "a serious violation of the Competition Rules of the EU (Article 101(1) and 102)." It also said that the companies violated Danish merchant laws by terminating the payment services and by their refusal to reinstate them.
An anti-trust action?! isn't that for commies from the bad old days like FDR?
Second WikiLeaks payback vs. MasterCard: LulzSec or Anonymous? MasterCard Inc., operator of the second-largest electronic payments network, with card brands MasterCard MasterCard, Maestro and Cirrus, temporarily lost service on its website due to a cyber attack from hackers backing whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
MasterCard restored its site after facing "intermittent service disruption," James Issokson, a spokesman for the firm, said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg News. "It is important to note that no cardholder data has been impacted and that cardholders can continue to use their cards securely."
Messages circulated on Twitter claiming that hackers were responsible. WikiLeaks tweeted on Tuesday that "hacktivists" had taken down MasterCard "over the continuing WikiLeaks fiscal embargo." Ibom Hacktivist wrote, "thats what you get when you mess with @wikileaks @Anon_Central and the enter [sic] community of lulz loving individuals."
"Wintler2, you are a disgusting example of a human being, the worst kind in existence on God's Earth. This is not just my personal judgement.." BenD
Research question: are all god botherers authoritarians?
not sure if this has been posted anywhere. Visual timeline for keywords from the diplomatic cables. It's from the norwegian daily Aftenposten (They have the full database and no deals with wikileaks).
Click a keyword to have it's frequency shown along the timeline. The percentage that pops up is it's share out of the top 100 keywords for that time period. Click "Dokumentsøk" (Document search) in the popup to search for related cables.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
Wikileaks to sue Visa, Mastercard over "financial blockade" ..Wikileaks said that it plans to file its complaint with the European Commission but indicated that "further actions in other jurisdictions will follow," according to the statement..
In a statement, Wikileaks described last December's decision by the companies to block credit card transactions to WikiLeaks and DataCell as "a serious violation of the Competition Rules of the EU (Article 101(1) and 102)." It also said that the companies violated Danish merchant laws by terminating the payment services and by their refusal to reinstate them.
An anti-trust action?! isn't that for commies from the bad old days like FDR?
Second WikiLeaks payback vs. MasterCard: LulzSec or Anonymous? MasterCard Inc., operator of the second-largest electronic payments network, with card brands MasterCard MasterCard, Maestro and Cirrus, temporarily lost service on its website due to a cyber attack from hackers backing whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
MasterCard restored its site after facing "intermittent service disruption," James Issokson, a spokesman for the firm, said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg News. "It is important to note that no cardholder data has been impacted and that cardholders can continue to use their cards securely."
Messages circulated on Twitter claiming that hackers were responsible. WikiLeaks tweeted on Tuesday that "hacktivists" had taken down MasterCard "over the continuing WikiLeaks fiscal embargo." Ibom Hacktivist wrote, "thats what you get when you mess with @wikileaks @Anon_Central and the enter [sic] community of lulz loving individuals."
*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
don't know if this has been posted before but Zizek kicks it:
AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Žižek, the importance of WikiLeaks today in the world?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Wait a minute, to understand properly this question, this question is just, you can withdraw and just give me two hours. No, but we’ll try to condense it. First, let me say also how proud I am to be here and mention something, which maybe most of you don’t know—that, how difficult it was even to organize this event. Like, it had to be moved two times—out and more out from Central London and so on.
And so, what again, what I want to say is let me begin with the, uh, the significance of what you—Amy started with, this shots, I mean not shooting, but video shots of those Apache helicopters shooting on...You know why this is important? Because the way ideology functions today it’s not so much that—let’s not be naive, that people didn’t know about it. But I think the way those in power manipulate it. Yes, we all know dirty things are being done, but you are being informed about this obliquely in such a way that basically you are able to ignore it.
Can I make a terrible, maybe sexually offensive, but not that dirty don’t be afraid, remark? You know, like a husband, sorry for making male chauvinist, uh twist—a husband may know abstractly my wife is cheating on me and you can say, okay I’m modern, tolerant husband, but you know when you get the photo of your wife doing things it’s quite a different thing. And I would say with all respect, something similar, it’s very important because it, just say no, I’m not dreaming here.
The same thing happened about two years ago in Serbia. You know, people rationally accept that we did horrible things in Srebrenica and so on, but you know it was just abstract knowledge. Then by chance all the honor to the Serb media, to publish this, they got hold of a video effectively showing a group of Serbs pushing to an X and shooting a couple of Bosnian prisoners. And the effect was a total shock, national shock, although again, strictly saying nobody learned anything new.
So here, so that I don’t get lost, if you allow me just a little bit more, here we should see the significance of WikiLeaks. Many of my friends who are skeptical about it are telling me. So, what did we really learn? Isn’t it clear that every power in order to function you have collateral damage—you have to have a certain discretion? What you say, what you don’t say, but to conclude I mean to propose a formula, what WikiLeaks is doing and it’s extremely important. Of course, I’m not a Utopian. Neither me nor Julian believes in this kind of pseudo-radical openness—everything should be clear and so on. But what are we dealing with here?
Another example from cinema, very short, Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka. You find there a wonderful joke where, I think towards the beginning of the film, the hero enters a cafeteria and says, "can I get some coffee with cream please?" And the waiter answers him, "sorry we run out of cream we only have milk. So, can I serve you coffee without milk?" That’s the trick here. When we learn something from the media, like, if I may repeat the metaphor, they behave as if they are serving coffee with cream.
That is to say of course we all know they are not telling the entire truth, but you know, that is the trick of ideology, even if they don’t lie directly the implication is the unsaid is a lie. And you bring this out. You are not so much putting them, catching them, as they put it, with their pants down and lying on behalf of what they explicitly say, but precisely on behalf of what they are implying. And I think this is an absolutely crucial mechanism in ideology. It doesn’t only matter what you say it matters what you implied to say.
So, just to make the last point, I think that—are we aware that what an important moment we are living today? On the one hand, as you said information is crucial and so on. We all know that it’s crucial economically. I claim that one of the main reasons capitalism will get in to crisis is intellectual property. In the long term it simply cannot deal with it. But what I’m saying is just take the phenomenon that media are trying to get us enthusiastic for clouds. Like you know, computers getting smaller and smaller and all is done for you up there in a cloud.
Okay, but the problems is that clouds are not up there in clouds—they are controlled and so on. For example, you rely on, maybe you have an iPhone, but you mentioned Murdoch. [His] name was mentioned here. Do you know, it’s good to know if you rely on your news through iPhone or whatever, that Apple signed an exclusive agreement with Murdoch. Murdoch’s corporation is again the exclusive provider of entire news and so on and so on. This is the danger today. It’s no longer this clear distinction, private space-public space. The public space itself gets, as it were, privatized in a whole series of invisible ways—like the model of it being clouds; which is why and again this involves new modes of censorship, repeat this.
That’s why you say, but what really did we learn new? Maybe we learned nothing new, but you know it’s the same as in that beautiful old innocent fairy-tale, the Emperor is Naked. The Emperor is Naked. We may all know that the emperor is naked, but the moment somebody publicly says, "the emperor is naked," everything changes. This is why even if we learned nothing new – but we did learn many new things – but even if nothing learned, the forum matters.
So, don’t confuse Julian and his gang – in a good sense not the way they accuse – don’t confuse them with this usual bourgeois heroism, fight for investigative journalism, free flow and so on. You are doing something much more radical. That’s why it aroused such an explosion of resentment. You are not only violating the rules, disclosing secrets and so on. Let me call it in the old Marxist way the bourgeois press today has its own way to be transgressive. Its ideology controls not only what you can say but also how you can violate what you are allowed to say. You are not only violating the rules, you are changing the very rules how we were allowed to violate the rules. This is maybe the most important thing you can do.
Is Assange the "world-spirit embodied"? A Hegel scholar reports from the Žižek/Assange Troxy gig
Petri Autio, 9 July 2011
WikiLeaks combats the hidden but constant brutality of institutionalized violence, not just by the news content it brings to light but by disturbing the formal functioning of power itself: it has the power to circumvent the oblique ways in which information flows and thereby rewrite the very rules which regulate how rules can be violated. The critical task is to keep this disruptive strength alive.
After firing off his rapid salvo of ideologico-critical nuggets on the 1st of July at Cadogan Hall in London, Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek revealed what he considers his favourite meeting between a famous thinker and a famous agent of change. The thinker in question was, of course, the great philosopher of freedom Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the protagonist Napoleon Bonaparte, the year 1806. Hegel, then on the cusp of completing his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, long enthused about Napoleon as the "world-spirit embodied." That is to say precisely as an agent (a capable one, to be sure) only contingently thrust into the world's limelight, pursuing his own aims - mostly oblivious to the true extent of the societal changes the processes he nominally leads are engendering - but nonetheless producing emancipation in his wake.
It is only all too tempting to link this anecdote to the proceedings on the very next day, when Žižek (who is himself on the verge of completing a book on Hegel) met with the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, for a two-hour conversation moderated by the award-winning journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! The flow of the relaxed event, held at the Troxy in Eastern London in front of over 9000 online viewers on top of the nearly 2000 present in the hall, was carefully balanced: Goodman set the scene clearly and posed questions about the past and present of WikiLeaks to Assange, Assange then gave measured and factual responses, after which Žižek was let loose to try and elucidate what he saw as the broader significance of WikiLeaks and the replies given.
Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists) and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why - whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) - the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.
To illustrate: in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.
In this way, the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today's "post-ideological" world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever - alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself. In other words, we can play a game of where I know that you know (about, say, the everyday violence that underpins our free society), and you know that I know, although only so far. Once confronted with information in a naked enough way, the we (the public) can no longer ignore its false cynical distance to it. Or so Žižek contended using as an example the difference between a husband knowing abstractly about his wife’s infidelity contrasted with the visceral reaction to seeing a picture of the act itself. WikiLeaks, he argues, does just this.
That Wikileaks is disruptive is amply shown by the vast reaction against it, whether through the calls (which Goodman listed) to label Assange a terrorist and assassinate him, in the financial blockade enacted by Mastercard and Visa (which, as Assange pointed out, have been deemed unlawful), or by the seemingly extralegal way his extradition is being handled. Here, Žižek points out, the innocence of the accusers is anything but innocent; they decry the violence of WikiLeaks revelations, themselves oblivious to the military, economic, political and social framework of everyday violence that goes unmentioned in public discourse. The violence of leaks is on a formal level, and precisely this is at the root of the Slovene’s exclamation to Assange: “Yes, you are a terrorist, but by God, then what are they?”
By casting WikiLeaks as a emancipatory, even heroic, phenomenon under constant threat we get to the true import of the initial analogy: just as the French armies did not fully bring the kind of lasting social liberation many expected from them, and just as Hegelian philosophy was grossly distorted and misappropriated after his death, the danger remains that whatever disruptive power WikiLeaks has will be defused, or even hijacked to work against its original liberating potential. If this is so then what, precisely, can be done to prevent this?
Sadly, sharp answers were lacking at the Troxy and time ran out before the audience could grill the all-too-friendly participants with questions. Žižek did voice his main concern, however: the risk of WikiLeaks being directly domesticated into the functioning of the official system via a rhetoric of accepting the project’s principle whilst only allowing the ‘right’ figures to run it.
This I would nonetheless take away as the key message: WikiLeaks should not be seen as merely another chapter in investigative journalism and free flow of information, but a positive, subversive emancipatory force by virtue of the way it operates outside the system of secrets and allowed revelations. What then remains ahead is the hard task of keeping this subversive strength alive. Remember, by 1814 Hegel had re-appraised the great emancipatory power he had once encountered, as a "genius destroyed by mediocrity."
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister
been wondering for a while about the Wikileaks BoA docs that were to be released and why we haven't heard a thing. and found these:
2011-04-26 Julian Assange says Rudolf Elmer is being held hostage for Swiss banking data Submitted by Heather Marsh on Tue, 04/26/2011 - 05:17
News Switzerland Wikileaks
Image
Julian Assange told the Times of India Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, that the Swiss banking data that was handed to him on January 17 of this year has not been released because the source, Rudolf Elmer, gave the data to Assange publically and was immediately arrested pending a criminal investigation. Assange told Goswami, "We have had an indirect offer through a third party that if we return what they believe to be the data then they will work to acquit Mr. Elmer to be free. So my ability to talk about this subject is of course limited by the fact that the Swiss bank has a hostage."
Assange also stated that India seems like it is losing per capita much more tax money than Germany.
Whistleblower Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer arrested in Zurich
NDTV Correspondent, Updated: January 20, 2011 12:04 IST Comments
Zurich: Just hours after his trial on fresh charges of breaching banking secrecy, whistleblower Rudolf Elmer was arrested in Zurich. Elmer had faced a trial in Zurich on Wednesday too, but he escaped a prison sentence for making secret data public in 2007 and threatening an employee at his former employers, with a fine of 7200 Swiss Francs.
However, even before he could heave a sigh of relief, when Elmer got back to his home in a Zurich suburb, there were eight policemen waiting for him. His wife claimed their house was thoroughly searched and Elmer was taken away.
Swiss police say Elmer was arrested on the suspicion of breaking banking secrecy laws by handing over CDs earlier this week in London.
Earlier, Elmer had said that his former employers had set private detectives after him and his family. He had also admitted he sent a mail from an anonymous email id under pressure but denied having sent a bomb threat to the bank.
Elmer claimed he wanted to expose large scale tax evasion and just before his arrest, he said he was ready to face the consequences.
"I am on the right side of the street in fighting this abuse so if I have to go to jail I say let's go," said the former banker.
Now, the data that Elmer had handed over is being analysed by WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing website. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks now claims that this information will soon be released.
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Yes. You are working on the Rudolf Elmer material. What’s the state of play there?
The state of play there is Rudolf Elmer has been put in prison and he has been there for some eight, ten weeks now. But he’s not been charged with anything; there’s no evidence against him. He is in a position where he has severely embarrassed the Swiss state, which gains nearly 50 per cent of its GDP from Swiss banking — and Switzerland holds nearly one-third of all the world’s private wealth. So we of course are not in a position to be able to talk about the material in any direct way that he is alleged to have given us.
Sweden is bound by different extradition agreements. It is not meant to grant onwards extradition to a third country without agreement from the extraditing country. But at the same level of the legal hierarchy there is a bilateral treaty between the US and Sweden that allows for extradition without consent from the UK or minimum tests. This is the ’conditional release’ regime - a legal fiction that allows for automatic extradition - on a loan basis. It is highly likely that the United States will soon request Julian Assange’s extradition and this legal fiction will be used.
Julian Assange’s Extradition to the United States
There are several main reasons for Julian Assange’s challenge to Sweden’s extradition order. Relevant to this topic, they are:
1) Julian Assange has not been charged with any offense.
2) Sweden has a bilateral agreement with the United States which would allow it to surrender Julian Assange without going through the traditional tests and standards of regular ’extradition’ procedures.
3) There are standard EU mechanisms (such as Mutual Legal Assistance) for Julian Assange to answer any questions the Swedish government may have. It is disproportionate, and an abuse, to use extradition proceedings in this manner.
4) Extradition law requires a "judicial authority" (e.g a judge or other independent body) to issue an extradition warrant, in order to keep the separation between the executive and the judiciary. It is an abuse to permit prosecutors, intelligence agents or other officials who are not independent to issue proceedings.
Temporary surrender - "Conditional Release" under the US-Sweden Extradition Treaty
Most of the attention regarding Julian Assange’s possible extradition to the US has focused on the EU agreements that are meant to prevent onward extradition - namely that the UK Home Office would have to consent to his onward extradition. Little or no attention has been given in Europe to the temporary surrender (called ’conditional release’) regime that Sweden has established bilaterally with the United States. The US has put this de facto extradition in place that sidesteps extradition safeguards in place with several strong allies.
One of the strategic allies that have this agreement is Panama - a recently released US embassy cable described the "conditional release" regime:
use of Conditional Release, under which the GOP [Government of Panama] releases to the US a suspect already under arrest in Panama on other charges. Under this procedure, the suspect is "lent" to the US for prosecution on the condition that they will be returned for prosecution in Panama at the end of their sentence. This procedure is much faster than a formal extradition, and has proven so successful, that DEA sometimes designs operations to bring suspects to Panama so they can be arrested in Panama and turned over to US authorities quickly. - US Embassy Panama Cable, 2008
How likely is it that Sweden will extradite Julian Assange to the US?
Both the UK and Sweden refuse to guarantee that they will not extradite Julian Assange to the United States. Political and military extraditions are expressly prohibited under the extradition treaty between Sweden and the United States, so this refusal is unusual. Moreover, it is likely that the US will request extradition on charges that are not overtly political (see below).
Shortly after issuing the EAW and Interpol Red Notice to 188 countries, the prosecutor Marianne Ny originally stated that extradition to the United States was ’out of the question’ (05 December 2010) - but her statements were later redacted (see Prosecution).
The Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has adopted several strategies in order to lessen the pressure on him to provide assurances that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the United States:
1. Reinfeldt claims that the decision to extradite Julian Assange is up to the courts, not the executive.
- This is false. Sweden’s extradition treaty with the United States explicitly prohibits political and military extraditions. The final decision lies in the hands of the executive, who can block an extradition if it believes that political/military motivations underlie the extradition order. However, it it difficult to prove the underlying motivations of an extradition order. The US is likely to issue an order under charges that are not overtly political (see below).
- It is likely that the United States will decide to charge Julian Assange with a number of offences (whether or not in conjunction with espionage) that are seemingly not political offences. The US Department of Justice has broadened its attack to include a possible indictment under the federal computer crimes statute, which it would argue was a non-political offence. Sweden is likely to consent to such an extradition given its close relationship with the US and the argument that the offences he is being sought for are not political in nature.
- It is very difficult for an individual to prove that the underlying motivations for an extradition are political, especially where the requesting state is a close political ally, which is the case of the United States both for Sweden and for the UK. Swedish troops are under NATO-US command in Afghanistan. Sweden was one of the first countries to send fighter jets to Libya at the request of the US and, in June, the Swedish parliament voted to send marines to Libya together with more fighter jets (See Political Interference).
2. Reinfeldt claims that it is not up to Sweden, but up to the UK, whether or not Julian Assange is extradited to the United States.
- Sweden is shifting attention away from the fact that the final decision of whether to extradite Julian Assange to the United States or to block it is an executive decision.
- Under EU law, Sweden should only initiate Julian Assange’s onward extradition if and when the UK gives its agreement, but the UK has little incentive to block an extradition order if Sweden does not take the step to do so first. Moreover, legal commentators in the UK have stated that it is likely that the UK would consent to Julian Assange’s extradition from Sweden (this is likely to raise less criticism and mobilisation if Julian Assange is not physically under UK custody).
- Sweden has in the recent past violated international treaties in relation to surrendering foreign nationals into US custody to be interrogated and tortured (case of extraordinary rendition, Agiza v. Sweden at the European Court of Human Rights). Furthermore, Amnesty International and the UN Committee against Torture criticised Sweden because it rendered two refugees to the CIA who were then tortured under the Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak.
- Diplomatic assurances that the person extradited will not be subjected to torture or other inhumane and degrading treatment are not a sufficient guarantee to prevent Julian Assange from suffering such treatment while in US custody, or to realize a fair trial in the United States, given the politicization of the allegations against him.
- The UK and Swedish governments can choose to allege that Julian Assange is not wanted for political offences, and will not interfere with a judicial decision (despite the fact that this ’judicial decision’ would be taken by the secret grand jury in Virginia where there is no judge or defence counsel).
Given that Julian Assange is neither a citizen nor permanent resident in Sweden or the UK, these countries have little incentive to afford him the type of protection they would afford one of their own citizens or permanent residents. Moreover, it is safe to assume that both the UK and Swedish government have come under pressure to comply with the United States’ upcoming request for Julian Assange’s extradition (these pressures by the US government proved effective in the extra-judicial and arbitrary denial of service by Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, Western Union & Bank of America of Wikileaks donations).
Wouldn’t the UK be more likely to extradite Julian Assange?
Some critical voices claim that the UK-US extradition treaty is more permissive than the Sweden-US extradition treaty. Extradition to the US, they claim, would be more simple from the UK than from Sweden.
This argument fails on several points:
- The UK’s extradition treaty does not have the temporary surrender (’conditional release’) clause. The UK’s judicial review process, while far from perfect, has a number of practical review mechanisms. The nearest equivalent case, of Gary McKinnon - a UK citizen who has been charged for hacking US military systems, has been opposed in the courts for 8 years.
- Public opinion and the media (to a greater extent) is more sympathetic to Julian Assange in the UK than in Sweden. Public pressure could draw out the process of extradition to the United States in the UK. In Sweden the media climate is hostile (see Media climate in Sweden) due to the sex allegations. Public outcry would be significantly weaker and therefore less likely to stand in the way of a strategically convenient extradition.
- In the UK, Julian Assange is better able to defend himself, muster support and understand the legal procedures against him. In Sweden on the other hand, the language barrier prevents him from effectively challenging the actions against.
- The UK is politically better positioned to withstand pressure from the United States than Sweden. Sweden is a small country of nine million people close to Russia. It has grown increasingly dependent on the United States. In recent years Sweden has complied with directives from the United States in a manner that has not been scrutinised by Parliament, as has been revealed by the disclosed diplomatic cables (see Political Interference).
United States: Secret Grand Jury
The United States is looking to charge Julian Assange under the Espionage Act among other charges:
A secret grand jury located in Alexandria, Virginia, only six kilometres from central Washington D.C., has been meeting since December 2010. The grand jury decides whether to bring charges against Julian Assange and other people associated with Wikileaks.
- The grand jury is held in secret, with no judge and no defence counsel. Four prosecutors are imposing subpoenas on individuals that are affiliated with Wikileaks and on social networking sites including Twitter to disclose information about Wikileaks’ work.
- The grand jury consists of 16-23 people. Given the high incidence of government employees and public and military contractors living in this geographical area, it is likely that a majority of the components of the grand jury are ideologically opposed to Wikileaks’ work.
- It is very likely that the grand jury will decide to prosecute, even on very weak grounds that would not withstand the minimum threshold under normal criminal prosecutions.
United States: What would happen if Julian Assange was extradited?
The suspected whistleblower Bradley Manning has been subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment. Julian Assange is likely to face similar treatment or worse: he will not be afforded the same constitutional rights as Bradley Manning because he is a foreign national. Over the past ten years the United States has developed a doctrine that denies basic rights to foreign political prisoners.
The 2012 US presidential elections are an opportunity to seize upon for the campaign trail: Julian Assange’s prosecution will probably be used by presidential candidates to show they are strong on "national security". Senators and presidential candidates have already called on the Obama administration to take an aggressive approach.
Republican candidates have urged the US treasury and Department of State to label Wikileaks as a terrorist organisation, and to ’illegally assassinate’ or kidnap him, and treat him and his associates as ’enemy combatants’.
In other words, internal political pressure is calling for the United States to illegally apply torture in order to extract information, subject him to inhumane and degrading treatment as they have with Bradley Manning, or sentence Julian Assange to the death penalty. Public pronouncements by US senators and television personalities amount to hate speech and persecution (see Timing of EAW and INTERPOL Red Notice ).
Navy medic detained for refusing training over WikiLeaks claims
Michael Lyons sentenced to seven months' detention after developing moral objections to Afghanistan conflict
James Ball
# guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 July 2011 16.30 BST
A Royal Navy medic has been sentenced to seven months' detention for refusing rifle training prior to deployment in Afghanistan after developing moral objections, following revelations made by WikiLeaks.
Michael Lyons, 25, was found guilty of wilful disobedience of a lawful order at a military hearing on Tuesday. He had served since 2005 as a medical assistant submariner. He was demoted and dismissed from the navy.
Lyons's case had been the first heard since 1996 by the Advisory Committee on Conscientious Objectors, which considers appeals from serving forces personnel to resign or retire on moral grounds. His was one of only 37 cases considered by the committee in its 41-year life. The committee rejected Lyons's appeal for conscientious objector status in December, leading to Tuesday's hearing.
The court martial, at Portsmouth naval base, heard that on 20 September 2010, Lyons refused pre-deployment assault rifle training, repeatedly requesting to be assigned to a non-combat role.
Speaking in court, Lyons confirmed he had no physical or mental impairment preventing him following orders, but had chosen to disobey orders based on his personal convictions.
"My initial objections started with Afghanistan and I wanted to investigate the reasons why we were at war. At the time WikiLeaks came along and mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan. The reports said there had been some civilian casualties that nobody knew about and they were being covered up," he said.
"After a lot of deliberation I decided I was a conscientious objector."
Lyons claimed he was told he would be barred from treating Afghan civilians, and this formed part of his objection.
He said: "We were put into scenarios and in one of these a family had been walking for two days to our base. The child had a birth defect that was causing it pain and the instructor asked us whether they would get treatment. I said we would offer them whatever we could, but I was shouted down by an officer who said it was a waste of resources."
Warrant Officer Robert Bainbridge, who issued the training order, told the court he discussed Lyons's objections for hours.
"We spent six hours in my office talking about the issue. I told him that as a medic he is in a combative and non-combative role and had an inherent right to self-defence. He briefed me that he felt that the war in Afghanistan was unjust, but I told him I was not sending him to war, I was training him how to use a rifle."
Lyons was unable to speak publicly about his case, but his wife, Lillian, wrote in the Guardian that she felt his appeal for conscientious objector status was damaged because of his lack of religious belief.
"[Michael] was ordered to see a chaplain, even though Michael is an atheist, and the chaplain's statement implied Michael had a slight political reservation, not a moral objection," she said. "If Michael had been dishonest and said he was a committed Christian, and because of his faith he could not be part of war on moral grounds, perhaps this would have been over in an instant."
Speaking after the trial on behalf of Lillian Lyons, Emma Sangster, co-ordinator of pressure group Forces Watch, said: "This seems a deliberately harsh sentence, which serves not only to punish Michael but to dissuade others from following his actions.
"Considering that servicemen have a right to conscientious objection and this inevitably comes to be a point where an order is not going to be obeyed, I think this indicates that the armed forces don't take conscientious objection seriously and are seeking to undermine it."
"I hope that people will realise from this they do have a right to object on grounds of conscience and that there is a process, albeit a very obscure one, which they can follow."
Sangster also added on her own behalf: "Michael has been extremely courageous to act on his conscience and remain consistent and dignified throughout this whole process.
"We urge MPs to uphold the human rights of forces personnel by clarifying and strengthening the right to conscientious objection, and the procedures for it in the armed forces bill currently going through parliament."
The Ministry of Defence declined to comment on the case.
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister
Former WikiLeaks deputy Daniel Domscheit-Berg has been expelled from Germany's top hacker group, the Chaos Computer Club. In an interview, the group's spokesman Andy Müller-Maguhn told SPIEGEL how he lost faith in Domscheit-Berg and his new whistleblowing project OpenLeaks.
Over the weekend, former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg was kicked out of Germany's legendary hacker organization the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) for allegedly exploiting their reputation for his own ends. Last week, during the CCC's annual summer camp in the eastern state of Brandenburg, he challenged hackers there to try and break into his new platform OpenLeaks to ensure its credibility.
Since falling out with controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2010, Domscheit-Berg has created OpenLeaks, a site which "aims at making whistleblowing safer and more widespread." In his new book "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World's Most Dangerous Website," Domscheit-Berg outlines his disagreements with Assange over transparency and politics. He aims to make his new site a neutral place of exchange between whistleblowers and media partners such as weekly Der Freitag and left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung, but the project has been delayed.
Ahead of the site's upcoming launch, Domscheit-Berg asked CCC hackers to test its security during the organization's four-day event last week. But CCC leadership rejected the notion and expelled him from the group.
The news late on Saturday evening came as a surprise, Domscheit-Berg told news agency DPA on Sunday, citing positive feedback to his project during the camp in Finowfurt. "I think it's too bad that this isn't being recognized," he said.
The real reason for the expulsion is his refusal to take part in mediation over WikiLeaks documents in his possession, he said. "But I can't do anything that could potentially create difficulties for a source," he added.
The CCC's spokesman, Andy Müller-Maguhn, who also works as a security consultant for a number of companies including SPIEGEL, has been acting as an intermediary between Domscheit-Berg and his estranged former colleague Assange. At stake are a number of confidential documents that Domscheit-Berg apparently took when he left WikiLeaks in 2010. The negotiations have not reflected well on Domscheit-Berg's character, Müller-Maguhn told SPIEGEL in an inverview.
SPIEGEL: Last week former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg announced the test start of his new project OpenLeaks. Have his conflicts with WikiLeaks been resolved?
Müller-Maguhn: Unfortunately not. The members of the CCC's board are not at all happy that Domscheit-Berg has aroused the impression that OpenLeaks will be tested by our people and thus earn what amounts to a CCC seal of approval. The CCC is not the TÜV (ed's note: a German safety certification organization). We won't allow ourselves to be co-opted like this. It was shameless.
SPIEGEL: Why so harsh? Domscheit-Berg is a member of your club. (Ed's note: This interview was conducted shortly before the CCC expelled Domscheit-Berg.)
Müller-Maguhn: The fact that he came to us from WikiLeaks played a large role in our receptiveness to him. That was his reputation. We were also sympathetic to his plan to build another platform. But now I doubt Domscheit-Berg's integrity. He is certainly quite flexible with facts.
SPIEGEL: How do you substantiate such serious accusations?
Müller-Maguhn: For 11 months, I have tried to intercede between Julian Assange and Daniel, because I know them both and I believe the idea of a whistleblowing platform is right. When Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks amid conflict there, he also took the archive and unpublished submissions with him. He said that he had no plans to use the material for himself or OpenLeaks. But now I have my doubts about that. I have put lots of patience and discussion into this. Still, flimsy excuses have led to unbelievabe delays in the handover of the archive. I can no longer believe in his willingness to hand over the unpublished material either.
SPIEGEL: Perhaps he can't surrender the material because he doesn't have it. Last week he told the weekly magazine Der Freitag: "I took no documents from WikiLeaks with me."
Müller-Maguhn: That is exactly the reason for me to suspend my mediation efforts. He told me last Thursday evening that he had to look at each document before handing them over. It doesn't match up. I have never personally seen the documents. But Assange told me that there are about 3,000 submissions, some of them with several hundred documents.
SPIEGEL: Domscheit-Berg argues that the confidential material isn't safe with WikiLeaks.
Müller-Maguhn: That's nonsense. I've visited Assange a number of times in England over the last 11 months. There I also saw more than 10 hard-working WikiLeaks employees from around the world. And Assange's mobility is limited by the electronic ankle monitor in any case.
SPIEGEL: Will Assange file a lawsuit against Domscheit-Berg?
Müller-Maguhn: For that to happen the material would have to be described in more detail. I don't believe he would do that, out of responsibility to the sources.
SPIEGEL: What does the mudslinging mean for future exposés?
Müller-Maguhn: Unfortunately I don't currently see a platform that can really simultaneously reconcile the responsibility to protect sources with transparency regarding its own structures. For me right now, OpenLeaks is nothing more than a cloud with promises of security.
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister
The posts about DDB/Openleaks at Rixstep seem to reflect how the hacker community views the guy ie Aaron Barr degrees of epic failure.
Here's a review of his tattle-tale book that made me ROFL:
The Life and Times of the Leberkäse Kid
Inside Daniel Domscheit-Berg - the dark tragedy, the comedy gold.
Someone came round with a copy of DDB's book in English. No one here would have bought a copy of it. The content is of no practical value and the money would go to a suspect source and to a publisher owned by the insidious Bonnier Group known for vicious attacks on The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks.
But this was a 'free' copy and reading it generated no further revenues for anyone. And now that we've all read it, it's time to reflect on the bizarre journey we've all been through. 1. Sad!
Keeping to an impartial plane as much as possible, we can only say the book is a sad experience. It's not so much hatred or disgust with Daniel Domscheit-Berg that one feels as it's outright pity.
We also took the time to lift out key passages of the book and send them to someone in our German network who'd already read the book in its original language. Had the translator at Crown Publishing applied a layer of unrequested Leberkäse grease to the narrative? No. The translation was close to 'word for word'. So the actual tone of the original is intact in the translation.
The book is so creepy and funny in that regard that we're now working on a special article citing 'the worst of the worst' - sound bites that will absolutely stagger you. It's really a puzzler how Dreamworks could ever consider using the book as source material - even if all they want to make is a low budget soap opera or a slapstick cartoon.
And it's the tone of the narrative - a bit like the testimony of Sofia Wilén - that sticks with you the longest. After all the cautious admissions of unethical behaviour and outright theft, this is what will stay in your mind.
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister
I can't say i'm surprised that mr Domscheit-Berg is all mouth no trousers, what i want to know is, is it too soon to make jokes about his name?
Whatev', its not to soon to support Wikileaks, who by every test seem to be the white hats. They are still not accepting new submissions, which is not a great sign .. no doubt the State+corporate+? war against the free cryptographers is on going.
"Wintler2, you are a disgusting example of a human being, the worst kind in existence on God's Earth. This is not just my personal judgement.." BenD
Research question: are all god botherers authoritarians?
I suspect that Wikileaks is doing some negotiating with others besides DDB.
The BoA leaker Rudolf Elmer, was quietly released in July:
Alleged Wikileaks-linked banker Rudolf Elmer released by Swiss authorities Posted by Sarah Bosdiccia ⋅ August 14, 2011 ⋅ Leave a Comment
Rudolf Elmer, the former Swiss banker who allegedly turned whistleblower and handed over documents to Wikileaks, has been released by Swiss authorities.
No reason has been given for the sudden release, and it’s not clear whether the investigation into Elmer’s actions has been dropped.
Elmer accused one of Switzerland’s leading banks of a number of indiscretions. He was subsequently accused of handing over documents that were then posted on the Wikileaks site. In January 2011, Elmer appeared at a high profile press conference with Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange, at which Elmer handed over two data discs.
It has now been revealed that Elmer was released on July 25th, although it’s not clear where he has since gone or why the release was ordered.
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister
wintler2 wrote:I can't say i'm surprised that mr Domscheit-Berg is all mouth no trousers, what i want to know is, is it too soon to make jokes about his name?
No its not. I would suggest doing it now to beat the rush.
Account of Domscheit-Berg's theft of leaked documents and other questionable behavior:
martes 16 de agosto de 2011 Open Letter Dear friends and supporters of Wikileaks,
I am a human rights and information rights lawyer working in Central America. I met both Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Julian Assange during the summer of 2008 at the Global Voices conference in Budapest.
Since then Mr. Domscheit-Berg and I kept in touch via e-mail and instant messaging service. When I met them I was very interested and excited by Wikileaks’ potential, particularly for human rights practitioners in Latin America, where institutions are very weak and offer little protection to human rights defenders. In May 2009 I stayed at Mr. Domscheit-Berg’s home in Wiesbaden, Germany for a week while I was visiting a research center located a few hours from his home. On arriving at Mr. Domscheit-Berg’s home, Mr. Assange had just left. Mr. Domscheit-Berg explained to me that he had only asked Mr. Assange to leave because there was not enough space for all three of us to stay in his home. During my stay, he told me that he had had a great time with Mr. Assange. He even went so far as to say it was the best time of his life. It was clear to me that he had very much enjoyed Mr. Assange’s company. He was full of admiration for Mr. Assange, saying what a pleasure it was to talk to him and that he could listen him for hours. For example, he described the time they spent in Italy, at the journalism conference in Peruggia, giving interviews and spending time with Italian colleagues as “a wonderful time”.
Before leaving I gave WikiLeaks some documents detailing proof of torture and government abuse of a Latin America country. The documents were only in hard copy. I entrusted those valuable documents - the only copy available - to Wikileaks because of the expertise of the people running it, their procedures and the mechanisms they used to maximize impact when published. I did not intend to give such material to Mr. Domscheit-Berg personally, as was made clear to him by me at the time. My intention was to give it to the platform I trusted and contributed to; to WikiLeaks. The material has not been published and I am disturbed to read public statements by Mr. Domscheit-Berg in which he states that he has not returned such documents to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Domscheit-Berg and I stayed in touch, he invited me to his wedding in mid 2010 but I was unable to attend. After his wedding, I noticed that his enthusiasm, his interest and priorities regarding WikiLeaks changed significantly. His interest and dedication to WikiLeaks work had decreased. After the arrest of Bradley Manning became public, I asked Mr. Domschiet-Berg how I could help the young soldier, but he did not appear to be interested. He was on holiday. I sent him contact details of human rights workers I thought would be able to support Manning, which he said he forwarded on to someone else. He never followed it up. I was under the impression that he didn't care or that someone else must have the situation well in hand. It was only after he was suspended from WikiLeaks that he became outspoken about Manning.
The last time I saw him was on 7 October 2010 in Berlin - less than a month after he had been suspended from WikiLeaks. This was during the time of WikiLeaks’ stand off with the Pentagon and the State Department. By that time his behavior had changed a lot and he was clearly very hostile towards Mr. Assange. He had changed in other ways too. In the past he was seldom in the limelight; suddenly he was surrounding himself with journalists, arranging meetings and giving disparaging interviews as “former spokesperson” and “second in command” of Wikileaks to both local and international media. He criticized Mr. Assange constantly. We arranged to meet at a landmark and then we walked to his home. It was not a private meeting; he was in the company of an American journalist Heather Brooke who said she was leaving for the US in a few days and a person who identified himself as researcher writing about “the internet”.
I found it quite odd that someone usually very careful with strangers was inviting such people to his home. Mr. Domscheit Berg, his wife and Heather Brooke were toasting with Champagne. All the people there were offered a glass but the reason for the toast was unclear and the conversation between them was cryptic. I left quietly. Heather Brooke subsequently published an article about her upcoming book in the UK tabloid, The Daily Mail (on August 7, 2011), entitled "The WikiFreak: In a new book one author reveals how she got to know Julian Assange and found him a predatory, narcissistic fantasist" in which she states "one of his disaffected colleagues gave me a full set of the US diplomatic cables that Assange was planning to use in his next publication."
I was surprised and disappointed to read that Mr. Domschiet-Berg, both in his public interviews and in his paperback book (published in February 2011), makes a number of extraordinary statements about his work with WikiLeaks and about Mr. Assange.
I have been surprised by the number of statements he has made that I know from first hand experience to be false. One of the most extraordinary statements Mr. Domscheit-Berg has made is that Mr. Assange abused his cat (in Germany) so severely it was driven to psychosis. This is a serious allegation because animal cruelty is a crime in Germany and it is very damaging for someone to be presented as an animal abuser, especially when that is not the case.
The allegation was made by Mr. Domscheit-Berg in his book and subsequently reprinted by the New York Times and AFP newswire. I understand from press reporters that Mr. Domscheit-Berg has sold the book to Steven Spielberg's Hollywood production house, DreamWorks.
I can confidently say that, while visiting Mr. Domscheit-Berg in Wiesbaden, I was able to meet and observe his cat. This was immediately after Mr. Assange had been staying with him. I myself have a cat and from my observations it was a perfectly normal and healthy cat that, like all cats, enjoyed attention. Mr. Domscheit-Berg was too busy to pay him much attention, as he was often on the telephone or on the computer, so I spent quite a bit of time playing with the cat. Mr. Domscheit-Berg watched and replied, laughing fondly, that the way I was playing with the cat was “exactly the same way” as Mr. Assange had played with the cat the week before. There was absolutely no mention from Mr. Domscheit-Berg that the cat had been abused or mistreated in any way by Mr. Assange. Therefore, it is very unlikely that a healthy animal, behaving normally and playing with strangers, had any disorder provoked by Mr. Assange’s behavior, as suggested by Mr. Domscheit-Berg.
I was alarmed by all the private details Domscheit-Berg was disclosing to journalists, irrelevant details that only yellow press or groups hostile to WikiLeaks or Mr. Assange would care about. Useful details for someone willing to divert the attention from all the important information disclosed by WikiLeaks' sources.
I am still surprised at the importance Domscheit-Berg gives to every tiny detail of Mr. Assange’s conduct while at the same time ignoring or choosing not to explore what WikiLeaks sources reveal. The revelation of torture in a country receiving international aid to equip their security forces, would seem to me be a better use of time, to those claiming to care about transparency, than the eating habits and clothing styles of an ordinary citizen leading a tiny NGO with a micro budget.
Now with the announcement of OpenLeaks two questions arise: the first will be if those behind the new platform have access to copies and they intend to publish documents people like me sent to WikiLeaks? If that is the case, such conduct would be wrong and largely disrespectful of the will of the sources - those who sent the documents wanted WikiLeaks to publish them. They did not intend for Mr. Domschiet-Berg to keep them for himself, for almost a year. The other is will Openleaks request their permission to publish it? And if so, how? Is it legitimate to free ride on the trust of people like me have in WikiLeaks?
These are valid questions, still waiting for a response. Journalists also owe a response to their public, waiting for relevant content to be published, like the largely ignored content of the prisoners in Guantanamo or the relevant facts unveiling abuse in Syria, the threats faced by union leaders in countries like mine, relevant facts that a platform like Wikileaks and the courage of sources made possible to surface.
The purpose of this letter goes beyond clarifying Mr. Assange’s behavior. It is a reflection and an invitation to move the conversation to what is relevant, what is urgent and how to behave accordingly.
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister
