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by elfismiles » Thu Aug 29, 2013 2:27 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 04, 2013 5:19 am
WikiLeaks Files Complaint in Sweden Against ‘Unlawful Interference in Its Journalistic Activities’
By: Kevin Gosztola Tuesday September 3, 2013 12:12 pm
WikiLeaks has alleged in a criminal complaint filed in Sweden that its operations as a media organization were unlawfully interfered with when it was subject to “physical surveillance by US military intelligence” at a conference in 2009. Furthermore, a suitcase containing three laptops with “WikiLeaks material, associated data and privileged communications” protected by attorney-client confidentiality laws was seized in 2010.
An affidavit by WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, reports that on September 27, 2010, Assange “arrived at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport shortly after noon.It was on this flight that my suitcase, laptops, privileged attorney-client communications and other important information belonging to WikiLeaks disappeared.”
By that time, the “Collateral Murder” video had been released, Pfc. Bradley Manning, who now goes by the name of Chelsea Manning, had been arrested, the “Afghanistan War Logs” had been released. The State Department was aware WikiLeaks might be publishing US diplomatic cables soon and the United States government was escalating its investigation and targeting of WikiLeaks.
“When I arrived at Berlin Tegel airport,” Assange recounts, “I went directly to the designated luggage carousel. My luggage did not appear. I then immediately went to the airport luggage claim office. The claim office said there was no unclaimed luggage there and that no one else from my flight, a direct flight within the Schengen area, was missing their luggage. The office also told me that it was extremely unusual that luggage had disappeared from a direct SAS flight within the Schengen open border area between Stockholm Arlanda and Berlin Tegel.”
Assange had tried to use “counter-intelligence practices” to “reduce the chance of post-flight surveillance” by buying and exchanging his tickets immediately before the flight. However, after attempting to purchase the ticket he wanted, he was unable to get a seat on his “preferred flight and had to wait until a later flight.” He waited much longer than he normally would have given “security concerns.”
Multiple inquiries into what had happened were made. The missing luggage, based on a 12-hour policy in place, should have been prioritized. That did not happen. Assange adds, “My suitcase had simply disappeared from the system. The lack of response or resolution on the part of the authorities and handling companies compounded these unusual characteristics.”
“No explanation has been given to me, directly or indirectly, as to the whereabouts or the reason for the disappearance of the WikiLeaks equipment and data, despite my efforts and the efforts of those acting on my behalf to recover it,” he shares. “None of the entities involved, including the Swedish police, the airline SAS, the airports Arlanda and Tegel and related handling companies GlobeGround and Acciona, have offered an explanation, and in one case refused to communicate at all.”
Assange was scheduled to meet with journalists Stefania Maurizi of L’Espresso and Holger Stark and Marcel Rosenbach from Der Spiegel. The meeting with Maurizi was “arranged over open email, which meant that this correspondence” could have been intercepted.
“The intelligence services could have had ample time to prepare an operation through monitoring these communications, for example by trying to seize material which was going to be handed over,” Assange suggests. He notes the first contact was made by Stefania Maurizi on July 26, 2010 and he replied on August 7, “four days before flying to Stockholm.” The meeting date was confirmed for September 27 or 28 “over a month” in advance.
The alleged seizure of materials bears a similarity to the seizure of materials in the case of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda. Assange acknowledges this in the affidavit. British authorities intercepted electronic devices from Miranda, which they believed to contain documents on NSA and GCHQ operations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. They used a terrorism law to detain Miranda for just under nine hours, the maximum amount of time the government is allowed to detain a person without charging them with a crime.
The material Assange claims was seized included a copy of the Garani air strike video, which showed evidence of a “serious war crime” by US forces where somewhere between 80-140 civilians, including women and children, were massacred in Afghanistan.
Manning was charged with communicating this video to WikiLeaks without authorization but was acquitted of this offense.
In June 2010, Assange announced WikiLeaks would be releasing video showing what happened in the air strike. He later accused former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg of destroying a copy of the video after absconding with thousands of unpublished leaks that had been submitted to the organization for publication, which he apparently chose to delete in 2011. (As Assange writes in the complaint, “Other copies of this material have been rendered inaccessible to me by separate incidents that do not form part of this complaint.”)
Assange also expresses concern over being under physical surveillance at the annual Chaos Communication Congress meeting in December 2009. He suggests the “US military used the results of this surveillance of me to convict Bradley Manning of ‘Wanton Publication.’” Also, fully aware that WikiLeaks remains under investigation by the US Justice Department, which empaneled a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, he adds, “I understand by my lawyers that this testimony may also be used in the ongoing US Department of Justice action against myself and my publishing organization.”
Military prosecutors had Sgt. Matthew Hosburgh, who attended the meeting and produced an intelligence report on what he witnessed, testify during the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning (who now goes by Chelsea Manning).
Hosburgh stated that Assange was trying to elicit support from the audience to get anyone listening to “leak any type of information, not only classified information but proprietary trade secrets, anything of that nature.” He also said the open Internet “allows for terrorist communication.”
The affidavit further alleges that Jeremie Zimmerman, an Internet freedom activist and friend of Assange, was subjected to an intelligence gathering operation by Hosburgh. Hosburgh wrote a report, “CCC Here Be Dragons Trip Report,” that was disclosed to WikiLeaks (possibly by Manning).
Material on laptops that went missing in September 2010 contained information on the alleged US intelligence operation.
The criminal complaint highlights the FBI operation against WikiLeaks that was illegally conducted in Iceland. It presents a timeline of the extent to which WikiLeaks was targeted by the US government throughout 2010.
The alleged seizure of WikiLeaks material was obviously known to WikiLeaks for some time, but, as the press release indicates, the media organization decided to withhold details of what it believed happened “until the conclusion of the court martial of PFC Chelsea Manning.”
This was the first of four complaints the organization intends to submit in various jurisdictions in September. A second one is expected to be publicized later today.
Assange has now been living in the Ecuador embassy for well over a year. He was granted asylum from Ecuador on August 16, 2012.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 04, 2013 9:31 am
SEPTEMBER 04, 2013
Interference and Espionage
The WikiLeaks Case Against the United States
by BINOY KAMPMARK
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is also running as Senate candidate for the Australian elections this coming weekend, has shown himself to be relentless in the face of the information imperium. Seeing that it was about time he turn the tables on the intelligence services that had been monitoring him, an affidavit claiming theft of WikiLeaks property was bound to appear.
Assange is pressing the very Swedish authorities who have proven reluctant in assuaging him that an interview is far better than an extradition. The 186-page document urges a criminal investigation into a series of alleged abuses stretching years. It is a dossier of resistance, pickled in the savoury substance of defiance. This is Assange to a tee, pointing the finger at the beasts in charge. “I am informed by my legal advisers that this formal document may trigger an investigation and that independent judicial bodies may seek explanations of the responsible authorities as a result.”
The document is littered with nuggets about intelligence practices, most of them troubling. Germany and Sweden feature prominently, as they provided avenues for surveillance of WikiLeaks practices. Specifically, physical surveillance of Assange by U.S. military intelligence is said to have taken place at a Berlin conference in December 2009.
Had U.S. surveillance of Assange in Germany been unlawful, it would follow that material obtained and used in the Manning trial would have to be excluded, given the illegal means of obtaining it. This would certainly be vital in the context of any appeal.
Sweden comes across particularly badly as a haven for intelligence operations by other states. “It is quite common for foreign powers to conduct prohibited intelligence activities in Sweden and that the activities are associated with secret or conspiratorial methods that make them difficult to detect and counteract.” The statement is taken from the English summary of the Inquiry report dealing with reforming Sweden’s Espionage Act submitted to the Minister of Justice in February this year.
Of particular importance here is the suspected seizure of a suitcase on route between Stockholm and Berlin, resulting in the loss of equipment and data connected with WikiLeaks activities. “None of the entities involved, including the Swedish police, the airline SAS, the airports Arlanda and Tegel and related handling companies GlobeGround and Acciona, have offered an explanation, and in one case refused to communicate at all.” That seizure of disappearance took place, believes Assange, as part of the U.S. investigation of WikiLeaks, or possibly private intelligence firms.
According to Assange, these practices constitute a “pattern of unlawful evidence-gathering or intelligence-gathering operations by U.S. agencies in relation to myself, my staff and associated individuals in European countries and the U.S. at least since 2009.” The revelations of the affidavit are such that they might spur some countries to consider how American agencies were operating with impunity on the sovereign soil of other states. The more cynical might assume that they were perfectly complicit. The empire’s persuasiveness can be overwhelming, notably when it comes to such agencies as the Swedish SAPO.
The reportage on this, as with so much on Assange, is variable in quality, let alone accuracy. Hacks of the Murdoch empire deride and purposely misunderstand, either through design or planned idiocy. Others find mirth in the fact that one of the world’s most renowned dissidents is complaining about misplaced or stolen luggage. “Assange complains over lost luggage” is the mocking, headline response, ignoring what exactly that luggage might be.
In an age where public reason has shrunk, be it through the compression of time, the invidious sound byte, and the emergence of monochrome government, such attitudes are almost venal. What the affidavit does is bolster the claims that are already of public record – the U.S. investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks being public knowledge since it began in 2010.
The information hoarders, officials keen to keep the dossiers packed and stacked, are concerned that the game may be up. Assange is assuring them that it may well be, and will be making further submissions in Germany and Australia. May the judges and the authorities listen with concerned ears.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 08, 2014 8:59 am
Exclusive: Democracy Now! Goes Inside Embassy Refuge, Talks w/ Julian Assange About WikiLeaks, Snowden
In a Democracy Now! special, we go inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London to interview Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He has been holed up there for more than two years, having received political asylum. He faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. In the U.S., a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as classified State Department cables. In Sweden, Assange is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. Late last week, there was the first break in the latter case in two years, when a Swedish court announced it would hold a hearing on July 16 about a request by his lawyers for prosecutors to hand over new evidence and withdraw the arrest warrant. In the first of a two-part interview, Assange discusses his new legal bid in Sweden, the ongoing grand jury probe in the United States, and WikiLeaks’ efforts to assist National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
radio tv broastcast
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a Democracy Now! exclusive. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has just entered his third year inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London where he has political asylum. Assange faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. Here in the U.S., a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as State Department cables. In Sweden, he’s wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. Late last week, there was the first break in the Swedish case in two years. A Swedish court announced it would hold a hearing July 16th over a request by his lawyers for prosecutors to hand over new evidence and withdraw the arrest warrant.
Well, late last night, we flew back to New York after interviewing Julian Assange inside the embassy.
AMY GOODMAN: The Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Julian Assange is holed up—he has been here for just over two years, just celebrated his 43rd birthday inside the embassy. Here you can see the British police, and right in front of me is the balcony where Julian Assange has come out and addressed his supporters and addressed the media. The Ecuadorean flag hangs from that balcony. As to when Julian Assange will come out, well, he is concerned, if he steps foot outside, he will be arrested by the British police. So, for now, he’s inside, this nomad of the digital age.
We’re in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Julian Assange took refuge two years ago. He’s been detained in Britain for close now to four years.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Julian.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: How are you doing here? It’s been over two years that you have really not seen daylight for any extended period of time.
JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s been nearly four years that I’ve been detained without charge, in one form or another, here in the United Kingdom, first in prison, the solitary confinement, then under house arrest for about 18 months, and now two years here in the embassy. The Ecuadorean government gave me political asylum in relation to the ongoing national security investigation by the DOJ, the Department of Justice, in the United States into our publications and also into sourcing efforts. So, did I enter into a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced last year to 35 years in prison?
So, the question as to how I’m doing, of course, personally, it’s a difficult situation, in a variety of ways. I would say that when someone’s in this position, what you are most concerned about is the interruption in your family relationships. So, because of the security situation, that’s made it very hard for my children and my parents.
But if we look at the bigger picture, WikiLeaks, as an organization, has survived that attack by the U.S. government, and we’ve gone on to do further work and some quite significant work. Unlike many media organizations during that period, we have not gone bankrupt, despite a worldwide, extrajudicial banking blockade by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and so on, and none of our members of staff have been fired. So, I think if you went back and said to yourself, "What are the chances that a small investigative publisher could publish this information about the Iraq War and the State Department and the Afghanistan War and many other documents about Guantánamo, and enter into conflict with the United States government in a very serious way, would they still be publishing? Would their people be in prison?" and you would think, probably, yes. But actually, we have managed to mostly overcome, apart from my situation here, the barriers that have been put up against us.
AMY GOODMAN: So, July 16th is a significant date. You are wanted in two investigations, or you’re being investigated by the U.S. government because, as you said, of WikiLeaks, of exposing many documents—tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? How many would you say? Around the Iraq War—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Eight million so far.
AMY GOODMAN: Eight million—around the Iraq War, around the Afghanistan War, and cables of the State Department that go back for decades. You’re also wanted by Sweden for questioning, often misstated as "because you’ve been charged"—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —for questioning around sexual misconduct. And July 16th is a big date in that case. Why?
JULIAN ASSANGE: While most of our resources have been concerned with the ongoing U.S. investigation and pending prosecution, which the U.S.—which the DOJ admits to in its court filing of the 25th of April this year, continues, the Swedish investigation has obstructed my asylum. So, United Kingdom says, "Look, there’s this questioning warrant that Sweden has put out for you. They may have dropped the case," which they did and re-raised it, "but nonetheless there’s this questioning warrant, and therefore we say you cannot go to Ecuador to accept asylum until we’ve extradited you to Sweden." Now, that is actually a violation of international law. The international law is quite clear: Asylum trumps extradition, because of the nature of the relationships with the U.N. and the 1951 asylum convention. So, every time we try and we get some traction publicly and politically in the U.S. case, people say, "Oh, no, no, the whole thing is really about the Swedish case." So it’s quite important to deal with the Swedish matter and kind of show it for what it is and that it should be dropped.
There has been no movement. Although the Swedish government is obligated to somehow progress the situation, they’ve been very happy to keep it a complete stasis. They’ve refused to come here to speak to me here or pick up a telephone or to accept an affidavit. They have also refused to provide a guarantee that I will not be extradited to the United States if I offer to go to Sweden. So, that situation means we have to tackle the Swedish matter, it seems, in Sweden. The only other alternative is perhaps going to the International Court of Justice in relation to the asylum.
Anyway, so it will be the first date in nearly four—in four years that the matter has been heard about in Sweden. And my lawyers are confident that either in the lower court, and more likely the appeal court, we will be able to dismiss the case, because the law is reasonably clear. You’re meant to proceed with—the Swedish government has an obligation under its own law to proceed with maximum speed, with minimum cost, and also with bringing the minimum suspicion on the person who’s being investigated. And it is in clear violation of all those points of law.
AMY GOODMAN: This hearing that will take place on July 16th is a result of an appeal by your Swedish lawyers. Why didn’t they appeal before?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, several things have happened in the interim. Because of the abuses in this case and some other cases, new European law was introduced and pulled in—and enacted in Sweden. And it was meant to be enacted by June the 1st this year; it wasn’t. But by July the 1st it should have come on board, so just recently. So that new legislation permits people who are suspects, who had their liberty deprived in some way, to be able to access evidence that shows that they’re innocent. And so, we understand that there’s significant evidence that was collected by the police that show that I am innocent, and they have thus far refused to hand it over. But this new European law means that they have to hand it over.
AMY GOODMAN: In affidavits that I have read, your lawyers were allowed to see text messages of the women who have accused you.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, what’s hard to—you have to be careful in saying that they have accused me, because actually when you read their correspondence and their early statements, they don’t say that at all. In fact, they say that they didn’t accuse me and that the police took the matter and the state accused me, that they didn’t want any charges, that they weren’t filing a formal complaint. That’s what they say in those text messages.
AMY GOODMAN: Your lawyers weren’t able to get copies of them at this point, but they were allowed to look at them.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: One of them saying something like, "I did not want to put any charges on Julian Assange, but that the police were keen on getting a grip on him"?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, and that she was railroaded into things and really did not—she did not want what occurred to occur.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you were questioned in Sweden originally, and the chief prosecutor actually—is it the prosecutor who dropped the case against you?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The chief prosecutor of Stockholm reviewed the material very early on in the case and dropped the rape complaint, dropped it, said there’s no—said, "It’s not that I don’t believe what the women say, but there’s just no evidence that any crime has been committed." And so, the matter was dropped. Then, subsequently, a senior Swedish politician, Claes Borgström, who was running for election, then took it to Gothenburg, a city which has nothing to do with the case, and resurrected it under another prosecutor.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what could happen on July 16th?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The options for them, they can simply—they can dismiss it; they can say that the law is unclear and ask maybe European Court of Justice to give clarity on this new European law and how it is to be implemented.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s also a law here that was just passed in Britain that seems to have come about as a result of your case. Unfortunately, you’re not protected under it.
JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s a very important development. So, as a result of the abuses in my case, which were seen by the Supreme Court—there was a split in the Supreme Court.
AMY GOODMAN: Here in Britain.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Here in Britain. And subsequently, the Cambridge Journal of Comparative Law wrote two papers about what had happened. And there’s a lot of concern about this idea that you could extradite someone without even charging them. So, political pressure—there was a backbench revolt in the British Parliament, principally amongst the conservative backbench, that this was—you know, that any police officer in Europe could just ask for someone in the U.K. to be extradited without it going before a court and without them being charged. And so new legislation was introduced to prevent that happening. So, no more extradition without charge from the U.K. But there was then debate that, "Well, will this in fact protect Assange?" And so, a specific clause was entered into it that it will not be retrospective for those people where the court has decided that they will be extradited, but they haven’t been extradited yet—which just applies to me.
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for more than two years. When we come back, in this sitdown interview, I talk to Assange about my interview with the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt, about Assange’s case. And I get Assange’s response to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments calling for Edward Snowden to come back to the United States to face a trial. We also learn how Assange helped facilitate Snowden’s departure from Hong Kong. All that and more, coming up. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, just back from London. We return now to my interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London this weekend, where he has political asylum and has been living for over two years.
AMY GOODMAN: I just came from Sweden, from Almedalen, where 25,000 people gather to talk about politics, and all the parties there and the leaders are there, among them the foreign minister, Carl Bildt, and I asked him about this challenge that was just introduced to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Let’s go to a clip of that.
AMY GOODMAN: Could I ask you—we’re looking at the case of Julian Assange, and 59 legal and human rights groups have made a submission to the U.N. Human Rights Council challenging the pre-charge detention, which makes it a foreign policy issue. As foreign minister, what are your thoughts on this?
FOREIGN MINISTER CARL BILDT: None, because it’s a question for the legal authorities and not a question for me.
AMY GOODMAN: But because it’s in the U.N. Human Rights commission—
FOREIGN MINISTER CARL BILDT: Well, that doesn’t make—
AMY GOODMAN: —the Council.
FOREIGN MINISTER CARL BILDT: That doesn’t make any difference whatever, because it’s still a legal issue within the legal system. And as you have in the U.S., I guess, you have the separation between the executive and judicial branch. And the executive—that’s sort of the nature of democracy or constitutional democracy. If you’re a representative of the executive branch, you have no say—and shouldn’t have any say—in what the judicial branch is doing. And that applies here, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, saying this is a judicial issue, an issue of the judiciary, and he won’t intervene. Your comment on that?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I only wish that was the case. But, in fact, Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, a hawkish trans-Atlanticist who was hired by the Liberation of Iraq Committee, for cash, to provoke the invasion of Iraq here in Europe, and has done many similar things—this year was his 14th Bilderberger, he’s an old friend of Henry Kissinger, etc. Carl Bildt has, in fact, continually, publicly interfered and denounced WikiLeaks and me, or statements that my lawyers have made, in various ways over the past four years—not only Carl Bildt, but the rest of the Swedish Cabinet, as well. So, it’s one of these situations where when someone doesn’t want to answer a question, they rely on principles—which are good principles, of not interfering in judiciary—but on the other hand, when they want to interfere, then they do just that.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the U.S. government being involved with Sweden to a level we haven’t seen before? You have the secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton, coming to Sweden; the attorney general, Eric Holder, coming to Sweden; President Obama coming to Sweden. That’s never happened in U.S. history when it comes to Sweden.
JULIAN ASSANGE: And John Kerry, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: And John Kerry, the current secretary of state.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, yeah. The last secretary of state visit was Kissinger in 1976.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe this has to do with you?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I don’t think it’s just to do with me. There may be an element. For example, the Holder visit was unscheduled and was sudden and occurred at the time when there was a significant debate in Sweden about dropping the matter in relation to me. That’s possibly related to me. And the Hillary visit, yes, it was just a week before I was meant to be extradited to Sweden.
But I think it more likely reflects a very strong alliance between Sweden and the United States, which has developed since the end of the Cold War, and rapidly since 2006, when the center-right party, the moderates, entered into government. And that alliance we can see, for example, in that Swedish troops are under U.S. command in Afghanistan; that Sweden was the fifth into Libya; that Sweden was the number one seller of arms to the United States during the Iraq War, in absolute terms; that the National Security Agency and Sweden have an agreement, which is even stronger than the agreement between—that in aspects is even stronger than the agreement between GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, and National Security Agency to conduct bulk surveillance of traffic passing through Sweden.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, if the case dissolved in Sweden, if the allegations were dropped, could you walk outside of this embassy here on British soil?
JULIAN ASSANGE: No, but that case would stop obstructing part of the asylum. So we still have the issue as to whether the British would then activate a U.S. extradition request. The British are also conducting their own counterterrorism investigation in relation to our involvement and The Guardian's involvement in Edward Snowden's documents. And there’s also questions about the Snowden grand jury that we’re not sure about. But the most clear aspect is the WikiLeaks grand jury in the U.S., which has been the largest investigation and pending prosecution of a publisher in U.S. history, more than a dozen different agencies involved. It’s very well documented, not just by us, but by other journalists and New York Times. And, in fact, the DOJ admits it in court filings. So, that’s an issue.
Now, in 2012, when the conflict was at its height, and this embassy was completely surrounded by British police—it is still surrounded by British police. There is still a siege underway with about eight to 16 uniformed and undercover police officers around the embassy at any time. But going back to 2012, there was a siege involving, at various times of the day, over a hundred police officers. At that time, the British police were ordered to smash—ordered to smash into a diplomatic car, if I was in a diplomatic car; if I had diplomatic immunity, to arrest me. So, that’s quite extraordinary that there would be a direct instruction to violate the most tested part of international law, which is the Vienna Convention, which is the protection of embassies and diplomatic cars. It’s not like there’s any debate on whether it might be illegal and might be legal to do that under some circumstances. It’s completely illegal. And yet the British police were ordered to do it.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you sense a shift here? I mean, you have Baroness Jenny Jones, for example, who’s in charge of a police committee in the London House, saying, "Why are we spending this money?" In fact, hasn’t there been a breakdown of how much money has been spent? In U.S. dollars, something like $11 million.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, it’s come out under a Freedom of Information Act request just about two—about two weeks ago, that the U.K. had reached 6.5 million pounds, or about eleven-and-a-half million dollars. It’s now up to 6.7 million pounds. Interestingly, when there’s a request of the breakdown, because that only—that should be about 16 people full-time. When there’s a request of the breakdown, they refuse to reveal the breakdown under national security—for national security reasons. So the U.K. government—there’s something that they’re doing with that police surveillance that they say is a matter of national security.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you about this latest letter that was written to Attorney General Eric Holder, signed by many organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Anthony Romero of the ACLU, Reporters Without Borders, World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters and many others, calling on the Justice Department to officially close all criminal investigations against WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief, you, Julian Assange, and to stop harassment and other persecution of WikiLeaks for publishing in the public interest. Talk about what this means and whether you think this will happen in the United States right now, whether this investigation against you, which has come up in everything from the Manning trial—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —to other places, will stop.
JULIAN ASSANGE: I think it’s a sign of a developing mood in the United States, to see conservative organizations like Human Rights Watch, which, as you well know, has a lot of former State Department people in it, to come out with that position, that this prosecution, or this pending prosecution of WikiLeaks by the DOJ, National Security Division, is a dangerous precedent to set and would be a significant stain on the record of the Democrats. And so, I think there is a view that that should be stopped, and a number of different organizations are pushing for it. Now, of course, that always should have been the view. You can ask the question: Why wasn’t Human Rights Watch in there two years ago saying these things? Well, I think people were scared. I think they really were scared and that they thought that perhaps they could isolate us and, "OK, let the U.S. government go after WikiLeaks, just as long as we can keep our media organizations and our human rights groups, and we can stay out of the fight."
But if you look at how the Espionage Act prosecutions have developed, there is now more investigations and prosecutions by the Obama administration of people under the Espionage Act—principally, whistleblowers and journalists—than all previous presidents combined, going back to 1917—in fact, more than double. And people understand that it’s not just us. In fact, the precedent has been set that you can perhaps do this to almost anyone. And that should be checked.
AMY GOODMAN: In this letter, they go on to quote Eric Holder, the attorney general, saying, "you promised that'as long as I am attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail.'"
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: He recently said this.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, unfortunately, you can see the conditional, which is doing his job. And we’re being—interestingly, this public statement by Holder reflects a development of thought in the State Department over the past two years that we have been following quite closely. And it is to somehow say that there are certain types of reportage which are legitimate and other types of reportage which are not legitimate. And the State Department has refused to recognize us as a media organization. And it’s done that in a number of different ways, not just in its public statements by its officials over a wide variety of time, but, for example, when the Bradley Manning trial was on and Kristinn Hrafnsson, our spokesperson—the top award-winning journalist of Iceland, has won journalist of the year three times—applied for a visa to go to the trial, to the U.S. State Department, a journalist visa, it was refused. And the grounds for refusal were not specified; they refused to specify them. But they are obviously that the State Department has a policy position that it will refuse to recognize WikiLeaks as a media organization, because then this would activate their other position that they’re not going to prosecute journalists for doing their jobs.
AMY GOODMAN: Here you are, Julian Assange, in the Ecuadorean Embassy, under siege by a number of governments, under surveillance by many. And yet you manage to work with Edward Snowden, perhaps the most famous whistleblower today in the world, to help him, once he gave over his documents in Hong Kong, the former NSA contractor, to the journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, make his way to Russia, where he got political asylum. Can you explain how you did this?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I think it’s—first of all, will explain why WikiLeaks, as an organization, took on that case. Well, personally, I’ve been through a very similar—I could see the experience Edward Snowden was about to go through. I have been through a similar experience. And I’ve also watched Chelsea Manning go through an even worse experience, now sentenced to 35 years in prison and, at one stage, kept in cages in Kuwait and so on, and treated very, very badly. So, I have personal sympathy for what he was about to go through—and not just from the legal side, but also from the press side. But as a result of us having gone through it, we developed certain understandings about diplomacy, secure communications, which had long been our specialty, and we have a good kind of diplomatic network as a result of specializing in diplomatic publications. So we thought there was a chance that we could help him, and he reached out and asked for help, and we thought it was important to assist.
The other thing is about the sort of signal it sends. The U.S. government decided to smash Chelsea Manning—absolutely smash him—to send a signal to everyone: Don’t you ever think about telling people what’s really going on inside the U.S. military and its abuses. And they tried to smash also the next most visible person and visible organization, which was WikiLeaks, to get both ends—the source end and the publishing end. Now, we have mostly defended ourselves. I’m in a difficult position here, but WikiLeaks has never censored any of its publications in response to that attack. So we wanted to try and set a counterexample with Edward Snowden, that in fact you can blow the whistle, you can reveal this information to the public, which is of tremendous historical importance. It’s of importance to the ongoing development of civilization. Are we going to end up into a mass surveillance system with a very aggressive and strong military-industrial complex, or do we have an attempt to steer away from that? But if we could erect Edward Snowden as someone who blew the whistle and survived, and not even survived, but thrived and spoke about it and kept informing people of what was going on, then we wanted to do it, because that incentivized other sources coming forward.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, how did you do it?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, you know, you have to understand I need to speak carefully, because there is an ongoing Edward Snowden grand jury, which is looking at the matters of those people who assisted Edward Snowden, as well as Edward Snowden himself. But there’s a lot of surveillance of this embassy; on the other hand, we had developed certain techniques in defeating surveillance. And they’re not easy. They are hard techniques, and they do take diligence. But the reality is, the National Security Agency, for all its surveillance power, and the DOJ, for all their coercive power, in the end, they are bureaucracies. They are perfectly nasty, boring bureaucracies. And bureaucracies are inefficient, and they move slowly. And we knew this from our dealing with the State Department and the Pentagon previously.
And so, we were able to move quickly and fast and assess the situation, from a legal and political perspective, in Hong Kong and the mechanisms that would be needed to get him out, get him asylum, and the flight path that would be needed so he had protection at each step of the way and that none of the intermediary countries would grab him, due to us making pre-arrangements and also due to just the sort of where they stood geopolitically. So that’s what we did. And it’s not like it was guaranteed to work. In fact, there were certain stages where there were quite some risks. But the risks of inaction were even greater.
AMY GOODMAN: So you not only helped him from here, but Sarah Harrison, who we just recently interviewed in Germany, who is British, but concerned, if she comes back to Britain, she, too, will be arrested, actually accompanied him on that trip from Hong Kong to Russia, stayed with him at the—both at the airport for five weeks and then for months after that.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, that’s right. Yeah, so, Sarah Harrison, one of our people, who went to Hong Kong to deal with the situation both from a legal perspective and a journalistic perspective, she was acting as a secure conduit to our lawyers, who were trying to understand the asylum situation and advise him. And from a journalistic perspective, of course, it’s a very interesting story. Accompanied him to Hong Kong—sorry, accompanied him out of Hong Kong to Moscow and dealt with a very difficult situation there of gaining him asylum, and, importantly, making sure—once it became clear that it would be difficult for him to go to Latin America, making sure that the situation into which he entered into asylum in Russia was a well-negotiated one, was not one of weakness. And so she stayed there for some three or four months to make sure that he had freedom in Russia and was well respected there. And to their credit, the Russian authorities did the right thing: They gave him asylum, and they didn’t interfere or coerce with his conditions there.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is the most significant revelation that’s come out of the Snowden-leaked documents? I mean, you who know so much from the documents that you’ve released.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, because it is our specialty to understand surveillance systems of various kind, and it was my profession beforehand, the broad—many of the broad parameters, we already knew about. But the confirmation of each one of those parameters was extremely important for others to realize it. I think what is most surprising is not any one thing. It’s the scale, the incredible scale, and that at any point where you could guess, "Are they doing this, or are they not doing it?" they are doing it. So, for example, intercepting packages that are sent out in the post and backdooring them, backdooring chips. So we see the corporation list between National Security Agency and U.S. hardware manufacturers, so Intel, Qualcomm, that makes the chips for telephones and so on. That’s quite surprising. That had been rumored and speculated on, but that the actual physical hardware is backdoored before you even get it, that, I think, is—that is a bit surprising. And then the absolute numbers, the billions of interceptions that are occurring per day. Actually, people who were studying this knew that, but to see a map of the world and the different countries with how many millions or billions of intercepts per day were coming in, I think that is probably the most consequential.
AMY GOODMAN: And the latest news that’s just come out of Berlin, the arrest of a German intelligence officer for spying for the United States on the inquiry that’s been opened—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —into the whole NSA scandal?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, very interesting. No surprise at all that intelligence officers are being bribed by the United States. We have had volunteers being paid by the FBI and so on, being bribed by the United States. That’s no surprise at all. What is very interesting is that Germany has decided to make it public, that they have found someone and that they’re going to prosecute him, not just dismiss him. That’s a decision by the German government to cater to the popular will of the German population.
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange. In our next segment, we ask him about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments calling for Edward Snowden to come back to the United States to face a trial. And Julian Assange describes his surroundings. He’s been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for over two years without any direct sunlight. He describes it as a kind of space station. He has been granted political asylum in Ecuador, but he’s concerned if he steps foot outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, he’ll be arrested by British authorities. We continue our conversation with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re just back from London for our Democracy Now! exclusive, the first time a U.S. TV/radio broadcast has had a sitdown interview inside the Ecuadorean Embassy with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. We go back to that interview right now. He has been granted political asylum in Ecuador but has been living in the embassy for over two years.
AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton has been doing a number of interviews on her book-slash-pre-presidential tour, and she was interviewed by The Guardian, where she talks about Edward Snowden.
HILLARY CLINTON: If he wishes to return home, knowing that he would be held accountable but also be able to present a defense, that is his decision to make. In any case that I’m aware of as a former lawyer, he has the right to mount a defense. And he certainly has the right to mount both a legal defense and a public defense, which of course can affect the legal defense. Whether he returns or not is up to him. He certainly can stay in Russia, apparently under Putin’s protection, for the rest of his life, if that’s what he chooses. But if he’s serious about engaging in the debate, then he could take the opportunity to come back and have that debate. But that’s his decision. I’m not making a judgment one way or the other.
AMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of Hillary Clinton, that Edward Snowden should come home and, as the current secretary of state says, "man up" and face a trial.
JULIAN ASSANGE: He has no possibility to conduct a meaningful defense in the United States. That’s just a sad reflection of how the federal court system has evolved in relation to national security cases. They will make sure, A, that the case is in Alexandria, Virginia. In fact, they already have. That’s where his grand jury is. It’s where the WikiLeaks grand jury is. It is the highest density of military intelligence contractors and government employees in all of the United States. That’s why it’s there, so they always get what they want.
The state secrets privilege is used in these espionage cases, where the government tries to work out a way to present evidence that it doesn’t allow to the defense under the basis that it’s classified. So, even at the sort of procedural level, he will not be able to conduct a meaningful defense.
Then, in relation to his obligations under law for classified access, it’s a strict liability. So he can’t conduct any whistleblower defense that it was in the public interest, etc. It’s strict liability.
And then we only need to—and you go, "Well, how does that all play out in practice?" Well, actually, we’ve seen the case of Bradley Manning: 35 years for speaking to the press, no allegation that there was any money involved, no allegation that he was dealing with any opponents of the United States government, and 35 years in prison. So, those are the actual conditions that people go through in cases like this.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, when Hillary Clinton talks about his public defense, that he could mount one, when it came to Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, when Manning was being tried, we could not even hear Manning’s voice, except that, you know, a tape of his voice—
JULIAN ASSANGE: As a result of a leak. That’s right. That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: —was smuggled out of the courtroom, so we were able to play a very muffled tape. So how would Edward Snowden defend himself?
JULIAN ASSANGE: And in the Chelsea Manning case, it was even worse than that. We filed to get his—Center for Constitutional Rights, a number of cases, even to get any transcript out of that hearing. So, you’ll see a similar thing in the Snowden case, a lockdown under the basis that secrets are being discussed. And then the conditions that Snowden would be kept in in the United States would be SAMs, so special administrative measures, because it’s what they do in these national security cases. They say that there’s something in his head that’s valuable—it’s not just documents—and that by speaking, he could reveal this information. And so he’d basically be kept in incommunicado detention during the bail process, and the court case, I imagine, could go for five to seven years, even if in the end political constellations came together and he won in the Supreme Court.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, presumably, Julian Assange, this applies to you, as well. What do you think would happen if you’re extradited to the United States?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, just that. It’s not even what I think. WikiLeaks and I have a team of excellent lawyers—there’s about 30 of them now—that have been understanding the situation for several years. They include Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights and others in the United States. And their advice is that, yes, there’s a high chance that you would be subject to SAMs, special administrative measures, during the whole time that the court case went on. You obviously wouldn’t get bail as a foreigner. And yeah, so, the punishment is in the process. And the DOJ understands that. And if you look at other cases, like Thomas Drake, for example, former National Security Agency whistleblower, given 13 counts of espionage, and then, in the end, he beat it and beat them down to one count of mishandling classified information. So you see this attempt to punish people by drawing them into a long and extended, drawn-out process, and, OK, in the end maybe you’ll win it, but you don’t get all those years back again. And, you know, that I have responsibilities to the organization I’m running, to my family, and I’ve been advised to not go to the United States. And I think that’s good advice.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, where we are here, in the Ecuadorean embassy, you have described it as a kind of space station. Can you describe it for us, how you live here 24 hours a day?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s a space station in the sense that I’m sealed from the outside world and natural light, and therefore have to create my own cycle of light, like you also do in space. But, you know, it’s—
AMY GOODMAN: So you have a light machine.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. But being in a—and timers and so on. But being in an embassy is actually, in some ways, not in others, a national security reporter’s dream, because there’s no subpoenas to an embassy. You can’t subpoena. The British police can’t come in. The Ecuadorean police can’t come in. No police can come in. There can be no raids in the night or during the day. And that’s quite a comforting position for the publisher of WikiLeaks to work from. It’s not a position I would like to keep forever, obviously, but it does at least allow me to continue working—yes, with a lot of constraints about can my family safely visit, can sources safely visit, can our most sensitive staff safely visit the embassy. There’s a lot of surveillance of the embassy. Some of that has been publicly declared. There’s a lot of other surveillance of the embassy that we are aware of, in different forms, surrounding what faces onto the embassy in different ways, which I don’t want to go into what we know and what we don’t know, for obvious reasons.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re right across from Harrods, the famous department store.
JULIAN ASSANGE: There is, under the Freedom of—under, actually, the Data Protection Act, we filed a act against Harrods and got information out showing how Harrods were in fact assisting the police surveillance operation.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
JULIAN ASSANGE: By permitting the police to use various buildings and facilities that Harrods has, not just the formal building, but they have a number of buildings which face onto the embassy. Additionally, it might be something of interest that Harrods was bought out by the Qatar sovereign fund a while ago, so it is ultimately Qatar that is supporting the surveillance operation of this embassy through its collaboration with the British government.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the outside security here? We just look beyond the curtains, and we see police vans.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Around the embassy, there are a number of uniformed police and plainclothes police operating and others. The publicly admitted expenditure is now 6.7 million pounds, $11.5 million. It’s about $15,000 per day. And so, there has been some analysis of that and what that means. There’s about eight visible people around the embassy. But the salaries cover 16 people, so there’s a number of others also involved in the processing and management of the information. That doesn’t include what MI5 is doing and what GCHQ is doing.
AMY GOODMAN: And you found—the embassy here found a bug in the ambassador’s office?
JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s right. The embassy security found, at the time of the visit of—shortly before the visit of Ricardo Patiño, the Ecuadorean foreign minister, in terms of the security—getting ready for the security of the minister’s visit, yes, they found a bug planted, a GSM bug planted in a hidden socket in the ambassador’s room.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you expect there are many others?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, some parts of the embassy. Fortunately, the embassy has a 24-hour security guard—me—who never leaves the building and is always watching or alarmed in one way or another. So not all places, but, yes, others.
AMY GOODMAN: What gives you hope? And what do you see as the greatest legacy of WikiLeaks?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, hopefully the greatest legacy is still to come. But WikiLeaks started in 2007, but it was really this very public confrontation that we had in 2010, 2011, which people saw watching. So it was not—a new generation saw history unfolding in real time, before their eyes, a history that they were part of. Young people see the Internet as their place, where they exchange ideas and culture and so on. And previously, they had been politically apathetic, because they didn’t feel that they could be a part of the power process. But seeing Hillary Clinton’s personal cables and equivalents for many different countries, and the fight that we were in, and being part of that in some way, by spreading this information or talking about it with others, educated a new generation. And the Internet went from being a politically apathetic space to being a political space. And that then spread into many different things. And so, I think this is actually the most significant thing that we have done.
We have also, in terms of the publishing industry, widened the envelope of what is acceptable to publish and so on. That’s been quite important and set off a cascade of examples, which—going through allegedly Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and Jeremy Hammond and many others, to come forward and reveal abuses in government.
AMY GOODMAN: Is there another Edward Snowden in the pipeline?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I’m sure—I’m sure there will be. In fact, I’m sure there already is.
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange. We interviewed him inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London over the weekend. We just flew back. Julian Assange celebrated his 43rd birthday there on July 3rd, his third birthday inside the embassy. He’s been granted a political asylum by Ecuador, but concerned if he steps foot outside the embassy in order to get to Ecuador, he’ll be arrested by British authorities. On Wednesday, part two of our interview with Julian Assange. Special thanks to Mike Burke, John Hamilton and Denis Moynihan. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, go to our website at democracynow.org.
by bks » Wed Jul 16, 2014 9:01 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 16, 2014 12:10 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 25, 2014 5:38 pm
Julian Assange sick but cannot leave Ecuadorian embassy without US extradition guarantee, says lawyer Jennifer Robinson
Updated 19 Aug 2014, 11:12am
Julian Assange's lawyer says he will not be leaving Ecuador's embassy in London until it is guaranteed he will not be extradited to the United States.
The Australian founder of WikiLeaks overnight declared that he would leave the embassy, where he has been holed up for two years, "soon".
The 43-year-old, who is reportedly suffering from heart and lung problems, made the comments during a press conference amid speculation he was set to hand himself over.
Swedish prosecutors want to question Mr Assange over sexual assault allegations made by two female former WikiLeaks volunteers.
Mr Assange denies the allegations and has been fighting a legal battle against extradition since his arrest in Britain in 2010.
He says he fears he will be arrested and extradited to the US if he steps outside the embassy.
This morning lawyer Jennifer Robinson told ABC News Breakfast the two-year stay in the embassy had had a "significant" impact on Mr Assange's health.
"[He will leave] as soon as conditions can be negotiated that allow Julian to leave the embassy while his political asylum, to protect him from the risk of extradition to the US, [is] respected. And we haven't seen that happen yet," she said.
"We'd all like to see him out of there as soon as possible. He's been in there more than two years and the circumstances and the conditions inside the embassy aren't great.
"He hasn't been outside for two years. There's nowhere for him to exercise and that's having significant impacts on his health.
"But it remains to be seen when we'll be able to negotiate and when Ecuador will be able to negotiate conditions which would make it possible for him to leave.
"We have been asking that there be assurances given that he will not be extradited to the US, that is and has always been his main concern, and indeed is the reason for the grant of asylum that's seen him remain inside the embassy.
"It's very difficult to put a timeline to this," she continued.
"As Julian said, he'd like to be leaving the embassy soon, we'd all like to see that happen, but there are a complicated number of legal cases that are ongoing both in Sweden, and the ongoing grand jury investigation in the US which is reason for his asylum.
"We hope those assurances will be given. We'd like to see the grand jury close so he can go back to Sweden and clear his name. That would be the preferable outcome for everyone."
Ms Robertson said Mr Assange had been refused permission to travel to hospital to seek treatment for his medical conditions.
"If he is required to leave the embassy for hospital treatment he would be arrested," she said.
"This is a very serious situation and is the reason that this case has been taken up at the UN by more than 60 human rights groups around the world because of the impact on Julian's health and human rights."
Swedish prosecutor criticised
Ms Robinson says she does not understand why a Swedish prosecutor is refusing to come to London to interview Mr Assange so the case can proceed.
"We've asked for her to come to London to interview him so the matter can be progressed and he can clear his name and she has refused," she said.
"Julian's remarks also last night refer to the fact that there's an ongoing appeal in Sweden that will be heard at the end of the European summer in which we're challenging his arrest warrant.
"Should that be successful we're hoping they will be progressing his case and he will actually be able to leave the embassy."
Ms Robinson says the Swedish prosecutor is not acting in accordance with European law on human rights.
"It is a principle of European law that if you're going to invade on someone's human rights that you take the means that are least intrusive into breaching the human rights, and the prosecutor has not done that," she said.
"She has the ability under Swedish law and under mutual legal assistance to interview him in London, and indeed the Swedish supreme court judge, when he was the president of the Supreme Court of Sweden when he was here in Australia, said they could not offer a reason why she has not done that.
"It's been four years and she has an obligation under European law to take the most proportionate step - and she hasn't done so."
Ms Robinson says the case has set a precedent that has been of great concern in the UK.
"Julian's case, of course, meant that anyone can be extradited from anywhere - anyone from the UK can be extradited to anywhere in Europe without being charged, without being shown the evidence, and in circumstances where that hasn't been approved by a judge," she said.
by Belligerent Savant » Mon Sep 15, 2014 11:19 am
A programming note: today (Monday) at noon Eastern time, Julian Assange will be online here to answer reader questions about his new book, When Google Met Wikileaks. Join us then.
http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/when-goo ... wikileaks/
When Google Met WikiLeaks presents the story of a meeting between Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt,…
Read on orbooks.com
Julian Assange is the founder of Wikileaks. A wanted man, he recently began his third year living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. He joins us now to answer your questions about his new book, When Google Met Wikileaks.
Under Assange's leadership, Wikileaks released a stream of leaked classified material that gave an unprecedented look at the conduct of the U.S. government during the height of the "war on terror." Currently, he remains in legal limbo in the embassy, while his lawyers are appealing a Swedish court ruling that calls on him to be questioned by Swedish police over allegations of sexual assault in 2010.
The new book focuses on a 2011 meeting between Assange and Google chairman Eric Schmidt, and expands on the philosophical differences that arose over the future of the internet and society. Quoth the publisher: "For several hours the besieged leader of the world's most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world's largest information empire locked horns. The two men debated the political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network—from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to American companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet's future that has only gathered force subsequently."
Julian Assange will answer your questions in the discussion section below beginning at noon Eastern time. Ask your questions now.
[Photo via AP. You can purchase Assange's book here.]
Adam WeinsteinHamilton Nolan
47 minutes ago
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What is Wikileaks good for after Chelsea Manning? It seems something like a media outlet that never got another big scoop after the war logs and cables. Perhaps that's a function of the government scrutiny it earned after those leaks. If so, does that mean that Wikileaks has run its course and the open society you envision will come from other actors on the internet and off it?
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alittletruthforyou
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Julian AssangeAdam Weinstein
27 minutes ago
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Please see today's "Spy Files 4" [ https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles4/ ] In the past year, we have published a lot of material including the big open shots for the TPP and TISA and several hundred thousands cables. We're now upto more than 2 million.Also, see our release of an Australian superinjunction on reporting on an anti-corruption case involving Australia, involving Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. You can now search more than 8 million of our publications at once using WikiLeaks search: https://search.wikileaks.org/
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julianpaulassange
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Graby SauceHamilton Nolan
42 minutes ago
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Back in 2010, Russia threatened to destroy Wikileaks if it released information about the Russian FSB. You didn't release that information, and today, you and the Russians are downright chummy, with you reportedly assisting Edward Snowden in his "travels" there, in spite of Russia's considerable human rights and surveillance abuses. How do you square your relationship with Russia and your government transparency/anti-authoritarian goals?
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julianpaulassange
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3 minutes ago
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This is the usual attempt to attack the messenger because the message is indisputable. The approach would already be invalid at that level, but it is also strictly false. Many things you may perceive to be true about an individual or a nation are helpful rhetorical positions that spread around through one group or another like a virus. In the end the collection of these thought-viruses, or memes, reflects the psychological and political contours of the group in which it inhabits. We have published more than 600,000 documents relating to Russia. The US stranded him in Russia by cancelling his passport. The US State Department just keeps kicking own goals. It is not my fault, or Edward Snowden's fault that they're so incompetent.
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exoteric started this thread Today 11:54am
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exotericHamilton Nolan
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Mr. Assange,
Predictive/imposed determinism translates (for the purposes of the NSA) into a regime of political and economic unidimensionality over the entirety of the world and over all the human individuals contained within it; it is a subject that is amply discussed in academic sources, and yet there is hardly any mention of it in Wikileaks’ entire archives. On the other hand, predictive analytics/determinism forms the very substance of and the basis for the Snowden revelations; how do you explain the yawning discrepancy between the paucity of testimony of predictive/imposed determinism in the Wikileaks archives on the one hand, and its overwhelming corroboration, indeed instantiation, by Snowden’s NSA-centered revelations on the other?
Also, if you would care to comment on this quote: "[Stratfor's] reports reflect the ideas and conceptual changes of institutions linked to U.S. national security...in such [official report's] more than verifiable facts, what are observed are elaborations of strategic analysis which begin to change the focus; the staging of conceptual-operative frameworks; and the uses of terminology in preparation for near-future transformations in American geopolitical strategy."—Sergio González Rodríguez (Campo de Guerra, 2014)
Thank you.
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thehunchbackofnotredwayne
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55 minutes ago
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Have you ever rubbed another man's rhubarb?
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brownjuice567
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50 minutes ago
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Exoteric hasn't met a semicolon he didn't like.
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gemmabeta
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46 minutes ago
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Are you expecting Mr. Assange to do your homework or something?
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joshua lamorey started this thread 54 minutes ago
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joshua lamoreyHamilton Nolan
54 minutes ago
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Julian, do you think you have anything—anything at all—in common with Eric Schmidt?
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julianpaulassange
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12 minutes ago
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Plenty - I discuss it a lot in the book, e.g. : "Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity. His questions often skipped to the heart of the matter, betraying a powerful nonverbal structural intelligence. It was the same intellect that had abstracted software-engineering principles to scale Google into a megacorp, ensuring that the corporate infrastructure always met the rate of growth. This was a person who understood how to build and maintain systems: systems of information and systems of people. My world was new to him, but it was also a world of unfolding human processes, scale, and information flows. "
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alittletruthforyou
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alittletruthforyouJulian Assange
9 minutes ago
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So, he's the kind of guy who can put together and manage a groundbreaking, world-changing, highly successful organization... and you recognize that. What is it that you have in common? Another non-answer.
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ChristopherS started this thread 55 minutes ago
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ChristopherSHamilton Nolan
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Mr. Assange, thank you for taking the time to answer some questions. Today, Comcast announced that they will shut off the service of any customer that they see using Tor. How would you recommend combating such an egregious restriction on consumer freedom?
Also, more generally, how do you see the next 5 years playing out in terms of a free and open internet in the United States and abroad?
Thanks again for your time.
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julianpaulassange
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Julian AssangeChristopherS
14 minutes ago
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For now, learn how to use a Tor bridge, the way Chinese Tor users must. In the long term, it's going to be about fighting the fight for public ownership of ISPs, because clearly it is unacceptable to have Comcast as our line to the network.
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corey3rd started this thread 58 minutes ago
corey3rdHamilton Nolan
58 minutes ago
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What do you miss the most about the outside world? Do you feel like the people who are part of science experiments to see how people would react to a trip to Mars?
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julianpaulassange
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Julian Assangecorey3rd
32 minutes ago
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Scientific trip to Mars with a lot ($12m over two years) targeted government surveillance and a lot of cops. What do I miss? The same as what those sci-fi writers have been speaking about since the 1950s. My family and a few blades of grass. [See http://govwaste.co.uk]
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OroroMonroe started this thread 59 minutes ago
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What is your relationship like with Eric Schmidt today? Have you two kept the dialogue going in the years since that meeting? Would you consider him a friend?
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julianpaulassange
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Julian AssangeOroroMonroe
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The 'conflict' between Eric Schmidt and I is very interesting, but it isn't about personalities. It is is an ideological and network conflict. Organisational leaders learn to separate personal and other interests, because they have so many of the latter it would be very difficult to function without this seperation.
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alittletruthforyou
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alittletruthforyouJulian Assange
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That's a non-answer.
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mcmiller53
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mcmiller53alittletruthforyou
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And with really bad grammar and spelling issues.
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sowhatiswhat2 started this thread 59 minutes ago
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sowhatiswhat2Hamilton Nolan
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Dear Mr. Assange, through your efforts and that of wikileaks as a whole, you have led to a new era of whistleblowing that has revealed the extent of America's malfeasance across the globe. We have also seen the United States (and others) attempt to break down the safeguards that enabled individuals to leak information to you and others. Do you think after Manning and Snowden that leaks of such magnitude are still possible?
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julianpaulassange
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Not only are leaks of this magnitude still possible, they are an inevitability. And there's more coming, not less. While Washington DC has tried to set general deterants, we've set general incentives. That's why we beat them at their own game and got Snowden to safety. So he could keep his voice and through his example of relative freedom act as general incentive.
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hazelpress started this thread 33 minutes ago
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BBC News June, 2014 "According to Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, Google has within its power - whether intentionally or not - to give a winning push to a political candidate in a close election."
Does Julian Assange consider this a real possibility? Electoral fraud is as old as elections, and so, is this form of manipulation a question of not if, but when (if not already quite some time ago)? Also, if unconscious biases held by the search engine's creators could result in distortions of the engine's selectivity (something that could then effect elections), are those controlling Google vulnerable to being manipulated (perhaps without their knowledge) by interested parties into slanting the engine's behavior?
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julianpaulassange
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Yes, it is a real possibility. There are also examples of Google abusing this kind of power in my book, for e.g.; "In Autumn 2013 the Obama administration was trying to drum up support for US airstrikes against Syria. Despite setbacks, the administration continued to press for military action well into September with speeches and public announcements by both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. On September 10, Google lent its front page—the most popular on the internet—to the war effort, inserting a line below the search box reading "Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm ET.""
An archive snapshot of the page can be found at archive.today/Q6uq8.
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Wpark83 started this thread 57 minutes ago
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I feel you've done a great service to humanity for pulling the curtains back on corruption and lies. Do you have any ideas, or see any ways that the human race can change our ways to create a path towards more transparency, truthfulness, and doing what's right?
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julianpaulassange
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Julian AssangeWpark83
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One thing you can do, which is quite simple, is treat companies like Google and Facebook as the corporations they are. Lots of people - especially on the left - are aware of the ways in which corporations are exploitative and harmful. But there is a disconnect when it comes to Silicon Valley. Lots of people refuse to buy Coca Cola, but they don't see any problem with having a Gmail account. I think that is changing lately, but we need a movement to divest from these corporations - which destroy privacy - and to build an alternative internet that isn't as actively harmful to human interests.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 29, 2014 7:13 am
1:58 PM, SEPTEMBER 28 2014
Julian Assange Beamed Into Nantucket as a Hologram
by Melissa Locker
Julian Assange has figured out a way to escape his asylum in London. Sort of.
Like Tupac Shakur, will.i.am, and Jem’s backing band before him, Assange, the embattled Wikileaks founder, shed his house arrest and corporeal form today, and appeared as a hologram at The Nantucket Project.
Despite being holed up in a cozy state of asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for the past two years, Assange has managed to make his presence known at conferences around the globe. Thanks to programs like Skype, conference goers at SXSW, MIA concert attendees and reporters at press briefings have been able to interact with Assange thanks to internet connections and a video screen. The Nantucket Project is the first time that Assange has gone full hologram, though. This turn of events means that MIA’s dream of booking a holographic Assange as her opening act could soon be a reality.
The conference, a TED-type gathering of the intellectual elite of the Northeastern set, let Assange rub virtual elbows with the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, poet Billy Collins and journalist Eugene Jarecki, who interviewed Assange’s hologram.
Assange may have been happy to not have a physical body in the same room as Google chairman Eric Schmidt, though. They have been swapping barbs in the press lately as the two men drum up publicity for their books—Schmidt’s How Google Works and Assange’s, When Google Met Wikileaks, which recounts a secret meeting between the two men in 2011. Last week Assange accused Google of being the “privatized NSA” and Schmidt responded by calling Assange “paranoid”.
According to Jarecki, Assange's speech was preceded by a recreation of the opening sequence of Star Wars.“In a wink at life imitating art,” Jarecki said in a column at The Guardian. “It’s the same old story of rebels against an empire, but in this case, Assange and kindred spirits such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Aaron Swartz see themselves as a real life band of rebels, loosely arrayed against an unholy global alliance of government and economic interests.”
It’s just too bad that Assange couldn’t figure out a way to project his hologram to Venice for the wedding of his lawyer Amal Alamuddinwho married some actor this weekend.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 01, 2014 9:29 pm
Julian Assange Fires Back At Eric Schmidt And Google's 'Digital Colonialism'
Posted: 09/30/2014 11:22 am EDT Updated: 10/01/2014 1:59 pm EDT ASSANGE
ECUADORIAN SOIL -- A police officer stands just inside the lobby of 3 Hans Crescent, a nondescript apartment building just around the corner from Harrods of London and a few blocks south of Hyde Park. He's watching the door to apartment 3b, a mini-flat that has for two years been the home of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.
On the building's stoop stands another cop. Near him is parked a festive, multicolored paddy wagon. Several other officers loiter nearby, all of them charged with making sure Assange doesn't step outside the apartment, the home of the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he has asylum.
One officer tells The Huffington Post that if Assange does step out, he and his colleagues have been instructed to pick him up and taxi him to the nearest police station. The officer notes dryly that his past assignments -- guarding visiting royalty and American presidents as far back as Jimmy Carter -- have been significantly more glamorous. "I've guarded kings and queens and presidents," he says. "Julian Assange?"
Inside, the officers' unwanted charge is wary of his embassy lookouts. He moves quickly to stop a visitor from opening the flat's front door, warning that he'd be visible to the lobby's watchman. For our interview, he asks for the chair farthest from the door that offers him his daily protection.
Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden in connection with two instances of alleged sexual misconduct. He maintains that the sex with the two women was fully consensual, while his accusers say that he was deceptive when it came to wearing a condom. He has not been formally charged, and has offered either to answer investigators' questions from his Ecuadorian home, or to travel to Sweden if the Swedes will guarantee that he won't be extradited to the United States, where he's worried he'll be imprisoned. The Swedes have declined both offers.
And so Assange remains at 3 Hans Crescent, working on his legal case; speaking at events by video conference or, more recently, by hologram; writing; and doing interviews. The threat of the charges hasn't stopped admirers from visiting. Just before our interview, two French ladies tried to get a moment with the WikiLeaks founder. Today, however, Assange wants to talk about Eric Schmidt.
In June 2011, Schmidt, then CEO of Google and working on what would become his book The New Digital Age, met Assange at a cottage in England for a conversation that lasted several hours. What Schmidt may not have expected is that Assange would go on to use the episode as material for a book of his own, the recently published When Google Met WikiLeaks. The book targets Google's cooperative relationship with the U.S. government in terms of privacy, mass surveillance and Internet freedom.
Assange’s new book hit the shelves last Wednesday -- the day after Schmidt's latest book, How Google Works, was released.
The two have engaged in a bit of public sparring. "Julian is very paranoid about things. Google never collaborated with the NSA and in fact, we've fought very hard against what they did," Schmidt told ABC News last week. "We have taken all of our data, all of our exchanges, and we fully encrypted them so no one can get them, especially the government."
"He's of course writing from the, shall we say, luxury lodgings of the local embassy in London," Schmidt added.
At the luxurious flat, HuffPost asked Assange to respond.
"Eric Schmidt has a difficult job defending what Google has become and that he uses -- Google uses private collection," said Assange. "The revelations, the Snowden revelations, showed that he did hand over the information to the U.S. government. I think it’s sad he that feels it’s necessary to resort to ad hominem attacks, but I understand that he has no real arguments to defend Google’s position."
HP: What about the substance of Schmidt's defense, that Google is pretty much at war with the U.S. government and that they don't cooperate? He claims that they’re working to encrypt everything so that neither the NSA nor anyone else can get in. What would you say to that?
JA: It's a duplicitous statement. It's a lawyerly statement. Eric Schmidt did not say that Google encrypts everything so that the US government can’t get at them. He said quite deliberately that Google has started to encrypt exchanges of information -- and that’s hardly true, but it has increased amount of encrypted exchanges. But Google has not been encrypting their storage information. Google’s whole business model is predicated on Google being able to access the vast reservoir of private information collected from billions of people each day. And if Google can access it, then of course the U.S. government has the legal right to access it, and that's what's been going on.
As a result of the Snowden revelation, Google was caught out. It tried to pretend that those revelations were not valid, and when that failed, it started to engage in a public relations campaign to try and say that it wasn’t happy with what the National Security Agency was doing, and was fighting against it. Now, I’m sure that many people in Google are not happy with what has been occurring. But that doesn’t stop it happening, because Google’s business model is to collect as much information as possible and people store it, index and turn it into predictive profiles. Similarly, at Eric Schmidt’s level, Google is very closely related to the U.S. government and there’s a revolving door between the State Department and Google.
Could Google keep its current business model while also making it impossible for the NSA to access its data, or is it baked into the business model?
As long as Google is operating its current business model and runs out of the U.S. jurisdiction, it cannot protect people from the National Security Agency or the FBI, or other arms of the U.S. government.
In the past, you mentioned that Eric Schmidt and the Google leadership in the U.S. are allied ideologically when it comes to the role of technology. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Google’s foreign policy positioning is encapsulated in Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas. Google Ideas is Google's in-house think tank that specializes on Google’s geopolitical interactions with the world. Eric Schmidt has become Google’s secretary of state, a Henry Kissinger-like figure whose job it is to go out and meet with foreign leaders and their opponents and position Google in the world. The question becomes: What is the positioning?
We can see that positioning, for example, in relation to the proposed bombing of Syria, when Google took an interventionist stance and used its extremely powerful advertising network to push John Kerry's call to bomb Syria. This is not the State Department buying some Google ads. This is Google using its front page, of its own volition, to promote John Kerry's attempts to bomb Syria.
What did they do?
They put a link in bright red just before the proposed vote in Congress -- the day of John Kerry's public call for intervention in Syria. They put a bright red link on the Google home page advertising the talk.
This was a year ago?
Yeah. It had not been used for any other time. It's not that Google was advertising YouTube or anything like that. This was a one-off. We analyzed the uses of the homepage and whether that had been done for any other -- had it been done for a Michael Jackson tour? No. (Update: See below for Google's response to Assange.)
Is Google, to you, a stand-in for the broader industry? Is Facebook any better when it comes to any of this?
Facebook is a younger company. Facebook also has its similar problems, however Google has become more integrated ... People know more or less what they're dealing with when they're dealing with Facebook. But Google controls 80 percent of Android phones now sold, YouTube is buying up eight drone companies. It's deploying cars, it's running ISPs -- Internet service providers. It has a plan to create Google towns.
It has become larger now. It's now more than 110 companies, so it's large enough that it's now looking like a high-tech General Electric, as opposed to a company that just does search.
Speaking of the secretary of state, what's your take on Hillary Clinton, on how she might lead if she winds up being the Democratic nominee and the president?
I've come to know Hillary quite well as a result of reading her cables -- reading thousands of her cables. And I might not be telling anyone anything new when I say that Hillary's positions are even more hawkish than Barack Obama's. As far as Google's concerned, as we document in the book, Eric Schmidt hired Hillary's adviser Jared Cohen to be the head of Google Ideas.
I gave a description of the book -- when WikiLeaks needed to speak to Hillary for legal reasons, because we were about to release a very large batch of State Department cables -- Eric Schmidt's then-girlfriend, Lisa Shields, who does not formally work for the State Department, was appointed to be the back channel. Google and the State Department are very close at a social level among their executives. So you can't expect that Hillary will be pushing to break up Google one day, using antitrust regulation for example, which would've already happened if we look at what happened with AT&T.
Ten or 20 years from now, if Google's vision on how the Internet should operate continues to carry forward unchecked, what does the Internet look like and what does life look like as you see it?
It's not just Google, but Google represents a push towards a technocratic imperialism or digital colonialism. While it can sound a bit strange to use these terms, that's very clear from Google's book about its vision for the future of the digital age, where Google envisages pulling in everyone, even in the deepest parts of Africa, into its system of interaction. Now that system of interaction concentrates global power into those people who already have a lot of it, and that means not just companies like Google but a lot of the alliance of interests that revolve around what we traditionally call the deep state -- but it's organizations like the National Security Agency and contractors that account for more than 80 percent of operations, institutions like Google and Facebook, which directly or indirectly are involved in the worldwide collection efforts of those organizations. At a less geopolitical level and at a more personal level, the global erosion of privacy for the average person brings democratic states socially into a position of where they are more like authoritarian states. That's the big problem for the average person.
Update, Oct. 1 -- A spokesperson for Google told The Huffington Post that the Google home page had displayed a link for a Sept. 10, 2013 Google+ Hangout featuring a conversation between Kerry and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. The spokesperson told HuffPost that the following text was displayed to publicize the Hangout: "Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm ET."
The spokesperson objected to Assange's description of the link as advocacy and added that Google has used its home page in a similar manner to promote other events, including State of the Union addresses, a 2012 relief concert for Hurricane Sandy and a 2013 Hangout with Michelle Obama on healthy living.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 23, 2014 3:09 pm
Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems
By Julian Assange
Filed: 10/23/14 at 12:47 PM
When Google Met Wikileaks
Filed Under: World, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Google, Eric Schmidt
In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country house in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest.
For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world’s largest information empire locked horns. The two men debated the political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network—from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin.
They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to Western companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet’s future that has only gathered force subsequently.
Newsweek Magazine is Back In Print
In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.
Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, England, about three hours’ drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.
But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.
In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior U.S. officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.
I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.
The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google’s in-house “think/do tank.”
I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking “Generation Y” ideas man at State under two U.S. administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties.
He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened “Condi’s party-starter,” channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into U.S. policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.” On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as “terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran.”
It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen’s natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a “think/do tank” based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.
Later that year two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Describing what they called “coalitions of the connected,” Schmidt and Cohen claimed that:
Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies.…
They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].
Schmidt and Cohen said they wanted to interview me. I agreed. A date was set for June.
Jared Cohen
Executive Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas Olivia Harris/Reuters
* * *
By the time June came around there was already a lot to talk about. That summer WikiLeaks was still grinding through the release of U.S. diplomatic cables, publishing thousands of them every week. When, seven months earlier, we had first started releasing the cables, Hillary Clinton had denounced the publication as “an attack on the international community” that would “tear at the fabric” of government.
It was into this ferment that Google projected itself that June, touching down at a London airport and making the long drive up into East Anglia to Norfolk and Beccles.
Schmidt arrived first, accompanied by his then partner, Lisa Shields. When he introduced her as a vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations—a U.S. foreign-policy think tank with close ties to the State Department—I thought little more of it. Shields herself was straight out of Camelot, having been spotted by John Kennedy Jr.’s side back in the early 1990s.
They sat with me and we exchanged pleasantries. They said they had forgotten their Dictaphone, so we used mine. We made an agreement that I would forward them the recording and in exchange they would forward me the transcript, to be corrected for accuracy and clarity. We began. Schmidt plunged in at the deep end, straightaway quizzing me on the organizational and technological underpinnings of WikiLeaks.
* * *
Some time later Jared Cohen arrived. With him was Scott Malcomson, introduced as the book’s editor. Three months after the meeting Malcomson would enter the State Department as the lead speechwriter and principal advisor to Susan Rice (then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, now national security advisor).
At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts U.S. foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser. Handshakes out of the way, we got down to business.
Schmidt was a good foil. A late-fiftysomething, squint-eyed behind owlish spectacles, managerially dressed—Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity. His questions often skipped to the heart of the matter, betraying a powerful nonverbal structural intelligence.
It was the same intellect that had abstracted software-engineering principles to scale Google into a megacorp, ensuring that the corporate infrastructure always met the rate of growth. This was a person who understood how to build and maintain systems: systems of information and systems of people. My world was new to him, but it was also a world of unfolding human processes, scale and information flows.
For a man of systematic intelligence, Schmidt’s politics—such as I could hear from our discussion—were surprisingly conventional, even banal. He grasped structural relationships quickly, but struggled to verbalize many of them, often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department micro-language of his companions. He was at his best when he was speaking (perhaps without realizing it) as an engineer, breaking down complexities into their orthogonal components.
I found Cohen a good listener, but a less interesting thinker, possessed of that relentless conviviality that routinely afflicts career generalists and Rhodes Scholars. As you would expect from his foreign-policy background, Cohen had a knowledge of international flash points and conflicts and moved rapidly between them, detailing different scenarios to test my assertions. But it sometimes felt as if he was riffing on orthodoxies in a way that was designed to impress his former colleagues in official Washington.
Malcomson, older, was more pensive, his input thoughtful and generous. Shields was quiet for much of the conversation, taking notes, humoring the bigger egos around the table while she got on with the real work.
As the interviewee, I was expected to do most of the talking. I sought to guide them into my worldview. To their credit, I consider the interview perhaps the best I have given. I was out of my comfort zone and I liked it.
We ate and then took a walk in the grounds, all the while on the record. I asked Eric Schmidt to leak U.S. government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused, suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act requests. And then, as the evening came on, it was done and they were gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was left to get back to my work.
That was the end of it, or so I thought.
* * *
Two months later, WikiLeaks’ release of State Department cables was coming to an abrupt end. For three-quarters of a year we had painstakingly managed the publication, pulling in over a hundred global media partners, distributing documents in their regions of influence and overseeing a worldwide, systematic publication and redaction system, fighting for maximum impact for our sources.
But The Guardian newspaper—our former partner—had published the confidential decryption password to all 251,000 cables in a chapter heading in its book, rushed out hastily in February 2011.
By mid-August we discovered that a former German employee—whom I had suspended in 2010—was cultivating business relationships with a variety of organizations and individuals by shopping around the location of the encrypted file, paired with the password’s whereabouts in the book. At the rate the information was spreading, we estimated that within two weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors and middlemen would have all the cables, but the public would not.
I decided it was necessary to bring forward our publication schedule by four months and contact the State Department to get it on record that we had given them advance warning. The situation would then be harder to spin into another legal or political assault.
Unable to raise Louis Susman, then U.S. ambassador to the U.K., we tried the front door. WikiLeaks investigations editor Sarah Harrison called the State Department front desk and informed the operator that “Julian Assange” wanted to have a conversation with Hillary Clinton. Predictably, this statement was initially greeted with bureaucratic disbelief.
We soon found ourselves in a reenactment of that scene in Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers cold-calls the White House to warn of an impending nuclear war and is immediately put on hold. As in the film, we climbed the hierarchy, speaking to incrementally more superior officials until we reached Clinton’s senior legal advisor. He told us he would call us back. We hung up, and waited.
When the phone rang half an hour later, it was not the State Department on the other end of the line. Instead, it was Joseph Farrell, the WikiLeaks staffer who had set up the meeting with Google. He had just received an email from Lisa Shields seeking to confirm that it was indeed WikiLeaks calling the State Department.
It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, D.C., including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel.
While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his early 2013 visits to China, North Korea and Burma, it would come to be appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way or another, “back-channel diplomacy” for Washington. But at the time it was a novel thought.
I put it aside until February 2012, when WikiLeaks—along with over thirty of our international media partners—began publishing the Global Intelligence Files: the internal email spool from the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor. One of our stronger investigative partners—the Beirut-based newspaper Al Akhbar— scoured the emails for intelligence on Jared Cohen.
The people at Stratfor, who liked to think of themselves as a sort of corporate CIA, were acutely conscious of other ventures that they perceived as making inroads into their sector. Google had turned up on their radar. In a series of colorful emails they discussed a pattern of activity conducted by Cohen under the Google Ideas aegis, suggesting what the “do” in “think/do tank” actually means.
Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s “director of regime change.”
According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky.
10_23_wikileaks-01
Founder of Wikileaks Julian Assange speaking from the Ecuadorean embassy in London appears on a screen as he gives a video conference to open the Human Rights Film Festival in Barcelona on October 22, 2014. Quique Garcia/AFP/Getty
Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to “engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,” as part of a Google Ideas’ project on “repressive societies.” In internal emails Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, Fred Burton (himself a former State Department security official), wrote:
Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…
[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.
In further internal communication, Burton said his sources on Cohen’s activities were Marty Lev—Google’s director of security and safety—and Eric Schmidt himself.
Looking for something more concrete, I began to search in WikiLeaks’ archive for information on Cohen. State Department cables released as part of Cablegate reveal that Cohen had been in Afghanistan in 2009, trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto U.S. military bases. In Lebanon, he quietly worked to establish an intellectual and clerical rival to Hezbollah, the “Higher Shia League.” And in London he offered Bollywood movie executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into their films, and promised to connect them to related networks in Hollywood.
Three days after he visited me at Ellingham Hall, Jared Cohen flew to Ireland to direct the “Save Summit,” an event co-sponsored by Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations. Gathering former inner-city gang members, right-wing militants, violent nationalists and “religious extremists” from all over the world together in one place, the event aimed to workshop technological solutions to the problem of “violent extremism.” What could go wrong?
Cohen’s world seems to be one event like this after another: endless soirees for the cross-fertilization of influence between elites and their vassals, under the pious rubric of “civil society.” The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech and accountable government.
This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.
It is not just obvious neocon front groups like Foreign Policy Initiative. It also includes fatuous Western NGOs like Freedom House, where naïve but well-meaning career nonprofit workers are twisted in knots by political funding streams, denouncing non-Western human rights violations while keeping local abuses firmly in their blind spots.
The civil society conference circuit—which flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between “government and private stakeholders” at geopoliticized events like the “Stockholm Internet Forum”—simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political funding annually.
Scan the memberships of the biggest U.S. think tanks and institutes and the same names keep cropping up. Cohen’s Save Summit went on to seed AVE, or AgainstViolentExtremism.org, a long-term project whose principal backer besides Google Ideas is the Gen Next Foundation. This foundation’s website says it is an “exclusive membership organization and platform for successful individuals” that aims to bring about “social change” driven by venture capital funding. Gen Next’s “private sector and non-profit foundation support avoids some of the potential perceived conflicts of interest faced by initiatives funded by governments.” Jared Cohen is an executive member.
Gen Next also backs an NGO, launched by Cohen toward the end of his State Department tenure, for bringing Internet-based global “pro-democracy activists” into the U.S. foreign relations patronage network. The group originated as the “Alliance of Youth Movements” with an inaugural summit in New York City in 2008 funded by the State Department and encrusted with the logos of corporate sponsors. The summit flew in carefully selected social media activists from “problem areas” like Venezuela and Cuba to watch speeches by the Obama campaign’s new-media team and the State Department’s James Glassman, and to network with public relations consultants, “philanthropists,” and U.S. media personalities.
The outfit held two more invite-only summits in London and Mexico City where the delegates were directly addressed via video link by Hillary Clinton:
You are the vanguard of a rising generation of citizen activists.…
And that makes you the kind of leaders we need.
In 2011, the Alliance of Youth Movements rebranded as “Movements.org.” In 2012 Movements.org became a division of “Advancing Human Rights,” a new NGO set up by Robert L. Bernstein after he resigned from Human Rights Watch (which he had originally founded) because he felt it should not cover Israeli and U.S. human rights abuses. Advancing Human Rights aims to right Human Rights Watch’s wrong by focusing exclusively on “dictatorships.”
Cohen stated that the merger of his Movements.org outfit with Advancing Human Rights was “irresistible,” pointing to the latter’s “phenomenal network of cyber-activists in the Middle East and North Africa.” He then joined the Advancing Human Rights board, which also includes Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in occupied Afghanistan. In its present guise, Movements.org continues to receive funding from Gen Next, as well as from Google, MSNBC and PR giant Edelman, which represents General Electric, Boeing, and Shell, among others.
Google Ideas is bigger, but it follows the same game plan. Glance down the speaker lists of its annual invite-only get-togethers, such as “Crisis in a Connected World” in October 2013. Social network theorists and activists give the event a veneer of authenticity, but in truth it boasts a toxic piñata of attendees: U.S. officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists and foreign-policy tech vultures like Alec Ross (Cohen’s twin at the State Department).
At the hard core are the arms contractors and career military: active U.S. Cyber Command chieftains, and even the admiral responsible for all U.S. military operations in Latin America from 2006 to 2009. Tying up the package are Jared Cohen and the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt.
I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by the very U.S. foreign-policy types he had collected to act as translators between himself and official Washington—a West Coast–East Coast illustration of the principal-agent dilemma.
I was wrong.
* * *
Eric Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C., where his father had worked as a professor and economist for the Nixon Treasury. He attended high school in Arlington, Virginia, before graduating with a degree in engineering from Princeton.
In 1979, Schmidt headed out West to Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. before joining Stanford/ Berkeley spin-off Sun Microsystems in 1983. By the time he left Sun, sixteen years later, he had become part of its executive leadership.
Sun had significant contracts with the U.S. government, but it was not until he was in Utah as CEO of Novell that records show Schmidt strategically engaging Washington’s overt political class. Federal campaign finance records show that on January 6, 1999, Schmidt donated two lots of $1,000 to the Republican senator for Utah, Orrin Hatch. On the same day Schmidt’s wife, Wendy, is also listed giving two lots of $1,000 to Senator Hatch.
By the start of 2001, over a dozen other politicians and PACs, including Al Gore, George W. Bush, Dianne Feinstein, and Hillary Clinton, were on the Schmidts’ payroll, in one case for $100,000.
By 2013, Eric Schmidt—who had become publicly over-associated with the Obama White House—was more politic. Eight Republicans and eight Democrats were directly funded, as were two PACs. That April, $32,300 went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A month later the same amount, $32,300, headed off to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Why Schmidt was donating exactly the same amount of money to both parties is a $64,600 question.
It was also in 1999 that Schmidt joined the board of a Washington, D.C.–based group: the New America Foundation, a merger of well-connected centrist forces (in D.C. terms). The foundation and its 100 staff serve as an influence mill, using its network of approved national security, foreign policy and technology pundits to place hundreds of articles and op-eds per year.
By 2008, Schmidt had become chairman of its board of directors. As of 2013 the New America Foundation’s principal funders (each contributing over $1 million) were listed as Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the U.S. State Department and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Secondary funders include Google, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Radio Free Asia.
Schmidt’s involvement in the New America Foundation places him firmly in the Washington establishment nexus. The foundation’s other board members, seven of whom also list themselves as members of the Council on Foreign Relations, include Francis Fukuyama, one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservative movement; Rita Hauser, who served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under both Bush and Obama; Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros; Walter Russell Mead, a U.S. security strategist and editor of the American Interest; Helene Gayle, who sits on the boards of Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, the Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Unit, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the White House Fellows program and Bono’s ONE Campaign; and Daniel Yergin, oil geo-strategist, former chair of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Task Force.
Eric Schmidt
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt Petar Kujundzic/Reuters
The chief executive of the foundation, appointed in 2013, is Jared Cohen’s former boss at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton law and international relations wonk with an eye for revolving doors. She is everywhere, issuing calls for Obama to respond to the Ukraine crisis not only by deploying covert U.S. forces into the country but also by dropping bombs on Syria—on the basis that this will send a message to Russia and China. Along with Schmidt, she is a 2013 attendee of the Bilderberg conference and sits on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
There was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers “fireside chats” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines—had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within U.S. establishment networks of reputation and influence.
On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are perfectly likable people. But Google’s chairman is a classic “head of industry” player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with that role. Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life.
By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower.” They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.
* * *
Google is different. Google is visionary. Google is the future. Google is more than just a company. Google gives back to the community. Google is a force for good.
Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith. The company’s reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google’s colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under 6 billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.
Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the U.S. intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t be evil” doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. Even anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at once condemning government spying but trying to alter Google’s invasive surveillance practices using appeasement strategies.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of U.S. power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.
In 2003, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden. These were the days of the “Total Information Awareness” program. Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White House the NSA was already aiming to “collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all.”
During the same period, Google—whose publicly declared corporate mission is to collect and “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—was accepting NSA money to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge.
In 2004, after taking over Keyhole, a mapping tech startup co-funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA, Google developed the technology into Google Maps, an enterprise version of which it has since shopped to the Pentagon and associated federal and state agencies on multimillion-dollar contracts.
In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space. Google shares the photographs from the satellite with the U.S. military and intelligence communities. In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.”
In 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which was said to allow NSA analysts to “evaluate vulnerabilities” in Google’s hardware and software. Although the exact contours of the deal have never been disclosed, the NSA brought in other government agencies to help, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework” (ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies “at network speed.” Emails obtained in 2014 under Freedom of Information requests show Schmidt and his fellow Googler Sergey Brin corresponding on first-name terms with NSA chief General Keith Alexander about ESF.
Reportage on the emails focused on the familiarity in the correspondence: “General Keith…so great to see you…!” Schmidt wrote. But most reports over-looked a crucial detail. “Your insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base,” Alexander wrote to Brin, “are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable impact.”
The Department of Homeland Security defines the Defense Industrial Base as “the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements [emphasis added].” The Defense Industrial Base provides “products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.”
Does it include regular commercial services purchased by the U.S. military? No. The definition specifically excludes the purchase of regular commercial services. Whatever makes Google a “key member of the Defense Industrial Base,” it is not recruitment campaigns pushed out through Google AdWords or soldiers checking their Gmail.
In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, D.C., lobbyists—a list typically stalked exclusively by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petro-carbon leviathans. Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3 million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997, also came below Google, at $15.6 million spent, as did Northrop Grumman at $17.5 million.
In autumn 2013 the Obama administration was trying to drum up support for U.S. airstrikes against Syria. Despite setbacks, the administration continued to press for military action well into September with speeches and public announcements by both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. On September 10, Google lent its front page—the most popular on the Internet—to the war effort, inserting a line below the search box reading “Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm ET.”
As the self-described “radical centrist” New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote in 1999, sometimes it is not enough to leave the global dominance of American tech corporations to something as mercurial as “the free market”:
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
If anything has changed since those words were written, it is that Silicon Valley has grown restless with that passive role, aspiring instead to adorn the hidden fist like a velvet glove. Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated,
What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.
One way of looking at it is that it’s just business. For an American Internet services monopoly to ensure global market dominance, it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing and let politics take care of itself. American strategic and economic hegemony becomes a vital pillar of its market dominance. What’s a megacorp to do? If it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original “don’t be evil” empire.
But part of the resilient image of Google as “more than just a company” comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation. Its penchant for luring people into its services trap with gigabytes of “free storage” produces the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly contrary to the corporate profit motive.
Google is perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise—a magical engine presided over by otherworldly visionaries—for creating a utopian future. The company has at times appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into “corporate responsibility” initiatives to produce “social change”—exemplified by Google Ideas.
But as Google Ideas shows, the company’s “philanthropic” efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of U.S. influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.
Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and Internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend Internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the Internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.
If the future of the Internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in Europe—for whom the Internet embodies the promise of an alternative to U.S. cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.
A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.
by coffin_dodger » Mon Nov 17, 2014 12:15 pm
The siege of Julian Assange is a farce - a special investigation - John Pilger 17/11/14
The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.
cont - http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-siege-of-julian-assange-is-a-farce-a-special-investigation
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:12 pm
Ecuador to Take Assange Case to UN Human Rights Council
Published 10 February 2015 (20 hours 55 minutes ago)
Trapped in Ecuador’s London Embassy for almost 1,000 days, Assange's human rights will be flagged by the South American nation.
The Republic of Ecuador will take the case of its most famous asylum seeker, Julian Assange, to the U.N. Human Rights Council, according to reports this week.
Ecuador’s U.N. Ambassador Maria Fernanda Espinosa told Sputnik Novosti Monday that her country is gathering a team of lawyers to bring Assange's case to the attention of the world's most influential human rights agency at an event this March 19 or 20, which will run parallel to the 28th session of the Human Rights Council.
Assange has spent 959 days in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Ecuador offered him asylum due to fears that Sweden, where the WikiLeaks founder is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual offenses, will hand him over to U.S. authorities, who want Assange on charges of espionage for his role in publishing leaked U.S. government documents.
READ MORE: Hactivism by Justin Podur
Although Ecuador has granted Assange asylum, U.K. authorities have refused to allow him safe passage to the South American nation, which has meant he is essentially trapped in the embassy surrounded by U.K. police forces.
In related news, after an explosive revelation that the United Kingdom has spent US$15 million policing Assange, London's Metropolitan Police chief says they are reviewing their policies.
Ecuador proposes that Sweden question Assange in a video interview or take other measures to limit the time the Australian national has to spend imprisoned without charge.
READ MORE: Ecuador’s Citizens’ Revolution: A Shift in Foreign Policy
Watch teleSUR English’s exclusive interview with Assange
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 15, 2015 12:38 pm
Is Sweden's Offensive Against Assange Unraveling?
By: Preeti Kaur
Published 14 February 2015 (14 hours 47 minutes ago)
In January, Sweden’s record was reviewed by UN Human Rights Council members. Ecuador asked it to justify long periods of pre-charge detention.
On the morning of 23 October 2010, WikiLeaks co-founder – Julian Assange – shared a London press conference stage with Iraq Body Count staff, and numerous other experts. Together, they defended WikiLeaks’ decision to release the Iraq War Logs, more than 400,000 secret U.S. army field reports.
Among the field reports was a video of a U.S. helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident, it showed U.S. combatants gleefully killing individuals after they tried to surrender. Assange highlighted that the disclosed logs documented 109,000 deaths in Iraq since the U.S. led invasion of the country in 2003. The total casualties of the illegal, oil hunger induced, war included 66,000 civilians, of which 15,000 were previously undocumented.
Following the release of the Iraq War Logs, the then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said there was now a duty on the U.S. to investigate whether its officials were involved in or complicit in torture in Iraq.
Rather than respond to these calls for accountability, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden labelled Assange a “cyber-terrorist”.
Days later, the Iraq War Log revelations were overshadowed by news that Julian Assange was wanted in Sweden, to face questioning in relation to two allegations of “rape”. Despite the media frenzy, Assange has never been charged of anything. He is wanted for questioning by the Scandinavian country in relation to two sexual misconduct allegations.
In August 2010, Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne had cancelled an early arrest warrant saying there is “no suspicion” that Assange had committed “any crime whatsoever”. One of the women has since tweeted “I have not been raped” and alleged that the police have pushed through the investigation against Assange.
However, Prosecutor Marianna Ny re-opened the matter and issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol "red alert" for Assange.
Since 2010, Assange has been waiting to hear whether he will be questioned, and charged in relation to the misconduct allegations. Prosecutor Ny refuses to travel to London to question Assange, even though Swedish law allows for it and the UK government has said it would actively facilitate it.
Swedish police have traveled to other countries to interview suspects in the past, including Germany, Serbia, the U.S., and even the UK. Assange has made at least four formal offers to the prosecution to interview him in person, in writing, via telephone, or via videoconferencing.
Swedish authorities have also never explained why they will not provide Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him to the U.S.
There are real risks that Sweden may transfer Assange to the U.S. On 23 December 2014, Google finally informed WikiLeaks that it was cooperating with the U.S. Justice Department in a criminal investigation against WikiLeaks, which the department first launched in 2010.
Prosecutors are also withholding data in relation to the case from Assange’s lawyers.
Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: "The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction...”
For an example of how the U.S. treats whistle-blowers, one can look to U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning. Manning is currently serving 35 years in military prison for leaking information to WikiLeaks. Manning has been kept in “extreme” and “excessive” solitary confinement, violating her right not to be subject to torture and cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. If transferred to the U.S., Assange can expect similar treatment.
In light of these concerns, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in June 2012. He sought asylum in Ecuador, and that country granted him refugee status. However, the UK refuses to grant him safe passage out of London, so he can travel to Ecuador. Instead it has spent more than £9 million to guard the Ecuadorean Embassy. This is more than what the UK has spent on investigating its own complicity in human rights abuses in Iraq.
On Monday 26 January 2015, Sweden’s human rights record was reviewed by UN Human Rights Council members. Ecuador asked Sweden to explain how it justifies long periods of pre-charge detention, and withholding potentially crucial evidence to individuals it is investigating. There are concerns that Assange’s health is deteriorating, while kept cooped up in a small room in the Ecuadorean Embassy.
There is no excuse for the Swedish authorities not to undertake their investigation – either by travelling to the UK, or by video-conferencing. Their failure to do so, has impeded Assange’s freedoms significantly. Ecuador’s questioning at the UN Human Rights Council, seeks to put pressure on States such as Sweden: States that contend to uphold the rule of law, while limiting the rights of those that dare shed light on what took place in the shadows of the war on terror.
by Searcher08 » Sun Feb 15, 2015 7:08 pm
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