The Wikileaks Question

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Police arrest five over Anonymous WikiLeaks attacksMetropolitan police arrest five people alleged to be involved in Anonymous hacking group that launched online attacks last month


Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 January 2011 13.55 GMT

Five people from across the UK were arrested early today in connection with a spate of online attacks last month in support of the whistleblowers' site WikiLeaks.

Police said the five males, aged between 15 and 26, are being held after a series of arrests in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Herfordshire, Surrey and London.

Three teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 19, were arrested in a series of coordinated raids at 7am along with two men aged 20 and 26. All five are being held in custody at local police stations.

The five were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the loose-knit group of "hacktivists" known as Anonymous, who temporarily crippled the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal after those companies cut off financial services to WikiLeaks. The attacks followed WikiLeaks' release of US diplomatic cables from late November.

Today's arrests were coordinated by the Metropolitan police working in conjunction with other UK forces and international agencies.

"They are part of an ongoing [Metropolitan police] investigation into Anonymous which began last year following criminal allegations of DDoS attacks by the group against several companies," Scotland Yard said.

"This investigation is being carried out in conjunction with international law enforcement agencies in Europe and the US."

The so-called "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attacks, which bring down sites by bombarding them with repeated requests to load web pages, are illegal in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act.

Anonymous leapt to the support of WikiLeaks after Amazon and other companies terminated business links with the site. The 1,000-strong group of activists launched what they called Operation Payback, vowing to give perceived anti-WikiLeaks firms a "black eye".

More recently, the group has turned its attention to supporting the political uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, temporarily disabling access to 10 Tunisian government websites and four Egyptian government sites. Anonymous says the cyber attacks are in retaliation for government censorship in both countries. Facebook, Twitter and other information-sharing sites have been routinely blocked by the authorities in Tunisia and Egypt.

More details soon...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... us-hacking

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Anonymous hacking suspects released on bail
WikiLeaks supporters declare arrests as 'declaration of war', as the FBI issues 40 search warrants in the US

Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 January 2011 14.04 GMT


The five people arrested in the UK in connection with a spate of online attacks in support of WikiLeaks were today released on police bail, while in the US the FBI has issued search warrants as part of its investigation into online group Anonymous.

The FBI yesterday issued more than 40 search warrants across the US as part of its Anonymous probe, where the distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks the group carried out on the websites of companies including MasterCard and Visa are punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Last night Anonymous issued a statement branding the UK arrests "a serious declaration of war" against the group of internet "hacktivists".

Yesterday's arrests are the first in the Metropolitan police's central e-crime unit investigation in the UK.

Three teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 19, were held along with two others in a series of raids in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and London early yesterday. The teenagers have to return to their local police station on 13 April and the two men the following day.

Chris Wood, the 20-year-old Anonymous member who spoke extensively to the Guardian under his online alias Coldblood last month, is understood to be one of those arrested in yesterday's raids.

Police are said to have seized Wood's computers, mobile phones, hard drives and other storage devices in the arrest, and did not disclose when they would be returned.

The five were arrested in connection with the thousand-strong group known as Anonymous, which last month launched a series of crippling attacks on the websites of companies that had withdrawn support for WikiLeaks, along with a number of government sites in Tunisia and Egypt.

DDoS attacks, which bring down sites by bombarding them with repeated requests to load webpages, are illegal in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act and carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a £5,000 fine.

"You can easily arrest individuals, but you cannot arrest an ideology. We are united by a common objective and we can and will cross any borders to achieve that," Anonymous said in its statement.

"So our advice to you, the UK government, is to take this statement as a serious warning from the citizens of the world. We will not rest until our fellow anon protesters have been released."

A Europe-wide investigation being carried out in conjunction with Scotland Yard has so far led to two Dutch suspects being arrested and subsequently released.

Anonymous was catapulted into public spotlight last month when it managed to bring down the websites of some of the world's most powerful financial institutions, including Visa and MasterCard. The group targeted these companies after they cut off ties with WikiLeaks, following the whistleblowers' site's release of confidential US diplomatic cables.

The group is understood to have grown significantly in number and firepower since its support of WikiLeaks, with the overwhelming majority of users simply volunteering their computer to be used in the attacks. Most of those involved in Anonymous operations do not disguise their internet protocol (IP) address, meaning they can be easily identified by police authorities.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... -wikileaks

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WikiLeaks: The Guardian's role in the biggest leak in the history of the world
In an extract from WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's war on secrecy, the Guardian's editor-in-chief explains why Assange remains such an important figure – and why the story is destined to run and run

Alan Rusbridger guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 January 2011 20.02 GMT

Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange. It was a memorable kind of name. All editors receive a daily mix of unsolicited tip-offs, letters, complaints and crank theories, but there was something about the periodic WikiLeaks emails which caught the attention.

Sometimes there would be a decent story attached to the emails. Or there might be a document which, on closer inspection, appeared rather underwhelming. One day there might arrive a diatribe against a particular journalist – or against the venal cowardice of mainstream media in general. Another day this Assange person would be pleased with something we'd done, or would perambulate about the life he was living in Nairobi.

In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing. In August 2007, for instance, we splashed on a remarkable secret Kroll report which claimed to show that former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds and hiding them away in foreign bank accounts in more than 30 different countries. It was, by any standards, a stonking story. This Asssange, whoever he was, was one to watch.

Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states. It's doubtful whether his name would have meant anything to Hillary Clinton at the time – or even in January 2010 when, as secretary of state, she made a rather good speech about the potential of what she termed "a new nervous system for the planet".

She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing – "the samizdat of our day" that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would "target the independent thinkers who use the tools". She had regimes like Iran in mind.

Her words about the brave samizdat publishing future could well have applied to the rather strange, unworldly Australian hacker quietly working out methods of publishing the world's secrets in ways which were beyond any technological or legal attack.

Little can Clinton have imagined, as she made this much praised speech, that within a year she would be back making another statement about digital whistleblowers – this time roundly attacking people who used electronic media to champion transparency. It was, she told a hastily arranged state department press conference in November 2010, "not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community." In the intervening 11 months Assange had gone viral. He had just helped to orchestrate the biggest leak in the history of the world – only this time the embarrassment was not to a poor east African nation, but to the most powerful country on earth.

It is that story, the transformation from anonymous hacker to one of the most discussed people in the world – at once reviled, celebrated and lionised; sought-after, imprisoned and shunned – that this book sets out to tell.

Within a few short years of starting out Assange had been catapulted from the obscurity of his life in Nairobi, dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America's military and foreign policy operations. From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America's public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn't dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn't make it up.

Since leaving Nairobi, Assange had grown his ambitions for the scale and potential of WikiLeaks. In the company of other hackers he had been developing a philosophy of transparency. He and his fellow technologists had already succeeded in one aim: he had made WikiLeaks virtually indestructible and thus beyond legal or cyber attack from any one jurisdiction or source. Lawyers who were paid exorbitant sums to protect the reputations of wealthy clients and corporations admitted – in tones tinged with both frustration and admiration – that WikiLeaks was the one publisher in the world they couldn't gag. It was very bad for business.

At the Guardian we had our own reasons to watch the rise of WikiLeaks with great interest and some respect. In two cases – involving Barclays Bank and Trafigura – the site had ended up hosting documents which the British courts had ordered to be concealed. There was a bad period in 2008/9 when the high court in London got into the habit of not only banning the publication of documents of high public interest, but simultaneously preventing the reporting of the existence of the court proceedings themselves and the parties involved in them. One London firm of solicitors over-reached itself when it even tried to extend the ban to the reporting to parliamentary discussion of material sitting on the WikiLeaks site.

Judges were as nonplussed as global corporations by this new publishing phenomenon. In one hearing in March 2009 the high court in London decided that no one was allowed to print documents revealing Barclays' tax avoidance strategies – even though they were there for the whole world to read on the WikiLeaks website. The law looked a little silly.

But this new form of indestructible publishing brought sharp questions into focus. For every Trafigura there might be other cases where WikiLeaks could be used to smear or destroy someone. That made Assange a very powerful figure. The fact that there were grumbles among his colleagues about his autocratic and secretive style did not allay the fears about this new media baron. The questions kept coming: who was this shadowy figure "playing God"? How could he and his team be sure of a particular document's authenticity? Who was determining the ethical framework that decided some information should be published, and some not? All this meant that Assange was in many respects – more, perhaps, than he welcomed – in a role not dissimilar to that of a conventional editor.

As this book describes, the spectacular bursting of WikiLeaks into the wider global public eye and imagination began with a meeting in June 2010 between the Guardian's Nick Davies and Assange. Davies had sought out Assange after reading the early accounts that were filtering out about the leak of a massive trove of military and diplomatic documents. He wanted to convince Assange that this story would have more impact and meaning if he was willing to ally with one or two newspapers – however traditional and cowardly or compromised we might be in the eyes of some hackers. An agreement was struck.

And so a unique collaboration was born between (initially) three newspapers, the mysterious Australian nomad and whatever his elusive organisation, WikiLeaks, actually was. That much never became very clear. Assange was, at the best of times, difficult to contact, switching mobile phones, email addresses and encrypted chat rooms as often as he changed his location. Occasionally he would appear with another colleague – it could be a journalist, a hacker, a lawyer or an unspecified helper – but, just as often, he traveled solo. It was never entirely clear which time zone he was on. The difference between day and night, an important consideration in most lives, seemed of little interest to him.

What now began was a rather traditional journalistic operation, albeit using skills of data analysis and visualisation which were unknown in newsrooms until fairly recently. David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, spent the summer voraciously reading his way into the material. The Guardian's deputy editor in charge of news, Ian Katz, now started marshalling wider forces. Ad hoc teams were put together in assorted corners of the Guardian's offices in King's Cross, London, to make sense of the vast store of information. Similar teams were assembled in New York and Hamburg – and, later, in Madrid and Paris.

The first thing to do was build a search engine that could make sense of the data, the next to bring in foreign correspondents and foreign affairs analysts with detailed knowledge of the Afghan and Iraq conflict. The final piece of the journalistic heavy lifting was to introduce a redaction process so that nothing we published could imperil any vulnerable sources or compromise active special operations. All this took a great deal of time, effort, resource and stamina. Making sense of the files was not immediately easy. There are very few, if any, parallels in the annals of journalism where any news organisation has had to deal with such a vast database – we estimate it to have been roughly 300 million words (the Pentagon papers, published by the New York Times in 1971, by comparison, stretched to two and a half million words). Once redacted, the documents were shared among the (eventually) five newspapers and sent to WikiLeaks, who adopted all our redactions.

The extent of the redaction process and the relatively limited extent of publication of actual cables were apparently overlooked by many commentators – including leading American journalists – who spoke disparagingly of a "willy nilly dump" of mass cables and the consequent danger to life. But, to date, there has been no "mass dump". Barely two thousand of the 250,000 cables have been published and, six months after the first publication of the war logs, no one has been able to demonstrate any damage to life or limb.

It is impossible to write this story without telling the story of Julian Assange himself, though clearly the overall question of WikiLeaks and the philosophy it represents is of longer lasting significance. More than one writer has compared him to John Wilkes, the rakish 18th-century MP and editor who risked his life and liberty in assorted battles over free speech. Others have compared him to Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers leak, described by the New York Times's former executive editor, Max Frankel, as "a man of incisive, devious intellect and volatile temperament".

The media and public were torn between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as a James Bond villain. Each extremity projected on to him superhuman powers of good or evil. The script became even more confused in December when, as part of his bail conditions, Assange had to live at Ellingham Hall, a Georgian Manor set in hundreds of acres of Suffolk countryside. It was as if a Stieg Larsson script had been passed to the writer of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes.

Few people seem to find Assange an easy man with whom to collaborate. Slate's media columnist, Jack Shafer, captured his character well in this pen portrait:

"Assange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or newspaper syndicate when that's advantageous. Like a PR agent, he manipulates news organisations to maximise publicity for his 'clients', or, when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs like an agent provocateur. He's a wily shape-shifter who won't sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the terms of the deal."

We certainly had our moments of difficulty and tension during the course of our joint enterprise. They were caused as much by the difficulty of regular, open communication as by Assange's status as a sometimes confusing mix of source, intermediary and publisher. Encrypted instant messaging is no substitute for talking. And, while Assange was certainly our main source for the documents, he was in no sense a conventional source – he was not the original source and certainly not a confidential one. Latterly, he was not even the only source. He was, if anything, a new breed of publisher-intermediary – a sometimes uncomfortable role in which he sought to have a degree of control over the source's material (and even a form of "ownership", complete with legal threats to sue for loss of income). When, to Assange's fury, WikiLeaks itself sprang a leak, the irony of the situation was almost comic. The ethical issues involved in this new status of editor/source became more complicated still when it was suggested to us that we owed some form of protection to Assange – as a "source" – by not inquiring too deeply into the sex charges leveled against him in Sweden. That did not seem a compelling argument to us, though there were those – it is not too strong to call them "disciples" – who were not willing to imagine any narrative beyond that of the smear.

These wrinkles were mainly overcome – sometimes eased by a glass of wine or by matching Assange's extraordinary appetite for exhaustive and intellectually exacting conversations. As Sarah Ellison's Vanity Fair piece on the subject concluded: "Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years."

The challenge from WikiLeaks for media in general (not to mention states, companies or global corporations caught up in the dazzle of unwanted scrutiny) was not a comfortable one. The website's initial instincts were to publish more or less everything, and they were at first deeply suspicious of any contact between their colleagues on the newspapers and any kind of officialdom. Talking to the State Department, Pentagon or White House, as the New York Times did before each round of publication, was fraught territory in terms of keeping the relationship with WikiLeaks on an even keel. By the time of the Cablegate publication, Assange himself, conscious of the risks of causing unintentional harm to dissidents or other sources, offered to speak to the State Department – an offer that was rejected.

WikiLeaks and similar organisations are, it seems to me, generally admirable in their single minded view of transparency and openness. What has been remarkable is how the sky has not fallen in despite the truly enormous amounts of information released over the months. The enemies of WikiLeaks have made repeated assertions of the harm done by the release. It would be a good idea if someone would fund some rigorous research by a serious academic institution about the balance between harms and benefits. To judge from the response we had from countries without the benefit of a free press, there was a considerable thirst for the information in the cables – a hunger for knowledge which contrasted with the occasional knowing yawns from metropolitan sophisticates who insisted that the cables told us nothing new. Instead of a kneejerk stampede to more secrecy, this could be the opportunity to draw up a score sheet of the upsides and drawbacks of forced transparency.

That approach – a rational assessment of new forms of transparency – should accompany the inevitable questioning of how the US classification system could have allowed the private musings of kings, presidents and dissidents to have been so easily read by whoever it was that decided to pass them on to WikiLeaks in the first place.

Each news organisation grappled with the ethical issues involved in such contacts – and in the overall decision to publish – in different ways. I was interested, a few days after the start of the Cablegate release, to receive an email from Max Frankel, who had overseen the defence of the New York Times in the Pentagon papers case 40 years earlier. Now 80, he sent me a memo he had then written to the New York Times public editor. It is worth quoting as concise and wise advice to future generations who may well have to grapple with such issues more in future:


1. My view has almost always been that information which wants to get out will get out; our job is to receive it responsibly and to publish or not by our own unvarying news standards.

2. If the source or informant violates his oath of office or the law, we should leave it to the authorities to try to enforce their law or oath, without our collaboration. We reject collaboration or revelation of our sources for the larger reason that ALL our sources deserve to know that they are protected with us. It is, however, part of our obligation to reveal the biases and apparent purposes of the people who leak or otherwise disclose information.

3. If certain information seems to defy the standards proclaimed by the supreme court in the Pentagon papers case ie that publication will cause direct, immediate and irreparable damage we have an obligation to limit our publication appropriately. If in doubt, we should give appropriate authority a chance to persuade us that such direct and immediate danger exists. (See our 24-hour delay of discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba as described in my autobiography, or our delay in reporting planes lost in combat until the pilots can perhaps be rescued.)

4. For all other information, I have always believed that no one can reliably predict the consequences of publication. The Pentagon papers, contrary to Ellsberg's wish, did not shorten the Vietnam war or stir significant additional protest. A given disclosure may embarrass government but improve a policy, or it may be a leak by the government itself and end up damaging policy. "Publish and be damned," as Scotty Reston used to say; it sounds terrible but as a journalistic motto it has served our society well through history.


There have been many longer treatises on the ethics of journalism which have said less.

One of the lessons from the WikiLeaks project is that it has shown the possibilities of collaboration. It's difficult to think of any comparable example of news organisations working together in the way the Guardian, New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde and El País have on the WikiLeaks project. I think all five editors would like to imagine ways in which we could harness our resources again.

The story is far from over. In the UK there was only muted criticism of the Guardian for publishing the leaks, though their restraint did not always extend to WikiLeaks itself. Most journalists could see the clear public value in the nature of the material that was published.

It appears to have been another story in the US, where there was a more bitter and partisan argument, clouded by differing ideas of patriotism. It was astonishing to sit in London reading of reasonably mainstream American figures calling for the assassination of Assange for what he had unleashed. It was surprising to see the widespread reluctance among American journalists to support the general ideal and work of WikiLeaks. For some it simply boiled down to a reluctance to admit that Assange was a journalist.

Whether this attitude would change were Assange ever to be prosecuted is an interesting matter for speculation. In early 2011 there were signs of increasing frustration on the part of US government authorities in scouring the world for evidence to use against him, including the subpoena of Twitter accounts. But there was also, among cooler legal heads, an appreciation that it would be virtually impossible to prosecute Assange for the act of publication of the war logs or state department cables without also putting five editors in the dock. That would be the media case of the century.

And, of course, we have yet to hear an unmediated account from the man alleged to be the true source of the material, Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old US army private. Until then no complete story of the leak that changed the world can really be written. But this is a compelling first chapter in a story which, one suspects, is destined to run and run.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/ja ... rusbridger

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No link between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, say military sources
NBC News reports no collusion between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, according to military sources

US investigators have been unable to find evidence directly linking WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, the army private suspected of passing on confidential documents to the whistleblowing website, according to a report last night.

Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News's chief Pentagon correspondent, reported sources inside the US military as saying they could detect no contact between Manning and Assange.

According to NBC News:

The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.

If accurate, then US authorities have no realistic chance of successfully prosecuting or extraditing Assange for the leak of thousands of classified documents.

NBC also reported that the commander of Manning's military jail at the Quantico US Marine base exceeded his authority in placing the private on suicide watch last week, and that army lawyers had the restrictions removed:

Military officials said Brig Commander James Averhart did not have the authority to place Manning on suicide watch for two days last week, and that only medical personnel are allowed to make that call.

The official said that after Manning had allegedly failed to follow orders from his Marine guards. Averhart declared Manning a "suicide risk." Manning was then placed on suicide watch, which meant he was confined to his cell, stripped of most of his clothing and deprived of his reading glasses — anything that Manning could use to harm himself. At the urging of US Army lawyers, Averhart lifted the suicide watch.

Manning remains in solitary confinement in his cell for 23 hours each day, with only one hour for exercise and one hour watching television.

Manning's treatment has attracted criticism from human rights watchdog Amnesty International, which describes his conditions as "inhumane":

Manning is classed as a "maximum custody" detainee, despite having no history of violence or disciplinary offences in custody. This means he is shackled at the hands and legs during all visits and denied opportunities to work, which would allow him to leave his cell.

ABC's Jake Tapper raised questions about Manning's treatment during Monday's press briefing with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs:

Jake Tapper, ABC: A quick question about Bradley Manning, suspected of leaking information. Is the administration satisfied that he's being kept in conditions that are appropriate for his accused crime and that visitors to Bradley Manning are treated as any visitors to any prison are treated?

Robert Gibbs: I haven't, you know, truthfully, Jake, have not heard a lot of discussion on that inside of here. I'm happy to take a look at something. In terms of a specific question about that, I think that I would direct you to the authorities that are holding him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard ... -wikileaks

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Julian Assange: 'How do you attack an organisation? You attack its leadership'
As his court case looms, Julian Assange is facing a rising tide of hostility. In this exclusive interview he insists: 'We have not once, in four years of publishing, got it wrong'

Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, Sunday 30 January 2011

Julian Assange awakes to talk, from the nap he has stolen in an armchair at the Norfolk country house where he is staying. He has been up all night disseminating, on his WikiLeaks site, US State Department cables and documents relevant to the momentous events unfolding in Egypt, and they make remarkable reading.

The American diplomats writing the cables leaked to Assange report many of the reasons for the Egyptian uprising: torture of political dissidents, even common criminals, to obtain confessions; widespread repression and fear; and – of special interest to anyone who follows WikiLeaks – the increasingly important role of internet activism, opposition blogging and communication with democratic movements within and without the country over the web.

As ever with the diplomatic memorandums published by WikiLeaks – an act of dissemination for which Assange has become public enemy number one in the US – the cables are, ironically, testimony to the professionalism and straight- talking of the US State Department. Assange concedes that the cables contain "a relative honesty and directness, and quite a lot of wannabe Hemingway".

This is exactly what WikiLeaks considers itself established to do, exactly the kind of moment in history that Assange's organisation feels it can illuminate for the world – and to which it may even have contributed, he claims, "by creating an attitude towards freedom of expression", and by being read by Egyptians themselves. This should be one of the great days in the history of his organisation: Assange and a group of his colleagues huddled over a thicket of laptop computers, downloading, following events, sharing news and occasionally whooping at it. It is one hell of an hour in WikiLand, but a weird one, too, for other things are also on Assange's mind.

Tomorrow a book he considers to be an attack on him will be published by journalists with whom he once closely collaborated at the Guardian, sister newspaper to the Observer. Neither the Guardian nor Assange now speaks of one another with affection. The front page of the International Herald Tribune on the kitchen table next door carries an article of record length by the executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, charting what Keller sees as an odyssey through the dealings with a difficult man, after which a "period of intense collaboration and regular contact with our source" came to a close – and an acrimonious one at that. Keller's article appears reasoned, I say to Assange, who retorts that he finds it "grotesque".

Moreover, in eight days' time Assange must face an extradition hearing instigated by authorities in Sweden, wishing to question him over alleged sex offences, a subject that his lawyers had advised him not to speak about in this interview. The hearings in London are due for 7-8 February – and on the first night, "right in the middle of the hearings", says Assange, "BBC Panorama will broadcast a sleazy piece" about Wiki-Leaks. "It's a mad scramble to get books out that self-justify their roles in all this," claims Assange, "instead of getting on with the job of writing about the information and the cables themselves." It was not, he concedes, always this way.

I first met Julian Assange in late summer last year, when he was staying at the Frontline Club for journalists in London. We had convened to discuss, for an article in Frontline's quarterly broadsheet, what was then the biggest single leak of official material in history, pertaining to the war in Iraq. In partnership with Iraq Body Count – considered to be (and criticised by the left for being) the more exacting and forensic of groups seeking to quantify the toll of Tony Blair's and George W Bush's war – WikiLeaks revealed, via the Guardian and other outlets of its choosing, 16,000 previously unrecorded civilian deaths between January 2004 and the end of 2009, recorded in thousands of leaked US army reports.

Assange had, among many other interesting things to say, a cogent observation about warfare: "What these documents show is that the bulk of civilian deaths are the 'car crashes' of war, not the 'bus crashes' of war that are picked up by the media. It is the vast number slain in incremental events killing one, two or three people which go unreported, as opposed to the deaths of 20 or more, which are reported. The number of 'small kills' is huge – a family here, a kid there, someone in a house, someone caught in a crossfire. It is the everyday squalor of war that takes the life of most."

This finding was riveting for two reasons. First, because it authenticated my own experience in trying to demonstrate the calamitous levels of civilian casualties during the Iraq invasion in spring 2003. In the hospital in Nasiriyah from which Private Jessica Lynch had been "rescued" by US forces (with the help of Iraqi medical staff), I found the wounded Kaham Kassim and his wife, two of whose children were shot dead by US troops at a roadblock as they tried to flee town. A third – a five-year-old girl, Zainab – was dying when she and her parents were turned out of beds in a barracks to make way for wounded soldiers. I found several similar cases.

The other intriguing reason was the way Assange had arrived at his conclusion, which seemed more scientific than journalistic. He asked me to bear in mind that his background was as a computer hacker and specialist in quantum mechanics. He was fascinated by the "media information flow economy".

People forget Assange is as interested in physics as he is in ideology, and that much of his work has been motivated by an application of the laws of mechanics to information. At that first meeting, he pulled a book off the shelf and talked at length about the many propulsions and interests that had got it there – "multiple reasons why the book has arrived on that shelf". There was also "a miasma of interests behind the spread of information," he said, "and the reasons why a piece of information reaches you."And the conversation went on for seven hours in that compelling vein.

Those were the days when Assange would invite you to return and visit him in his room at Frontline when some elaboration on a point he had made came to mind. Before it all got nasty, before solitary confinement and forests of television cameras parked outside the Norfolk house belonging to Vaughan Smith – Assange's guarantor of an address on bail. Before Assange became uncomfortable with questions based on articles by Keller that throw his thought patterns off course. Before Assange came to feel vilified and betrayed by the media.

Yet there was still time to talk, on Friday, with the sun streaming into Ellingham Hall – though it felt mean to drag Assange away from Egypt.

One of the main points raised in Keller's article is that the New York Times' voyage through WikiLeaks' information put the paper on a high wire – or in a "clash of values" – between its commitment to publishing material of public interest and Keller's staff's "large and personal stake in the country's security" and loyalty to the US, especially in the face of terrorism aimed "not only against our people and our buildings but also at our values".

There have been suggestions elsewhere that WikiLeaks has supplied grist to the mill of America's enemies and even endangered the lives of those who are identified in material it has disseminated itself – identities that Keller's paper was careful to redact.

"How do you best attack an organisation?" retorts Assange rhetorically. First, "you attack its leadership… with the dozens of wildly fabricated things said about me in the press – such as that I was living in luxury in South Africa. I have never been to South Africa." Second, "you attack the cash flow": Assange recounts the "extra-legal" sanctions by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and others that have "cost us 90% of our revenue". And then "you attack our moral standing. There have even been claims we have killed people. Although no person is infallible, we have to date a perfect record in two important respects. One: we have not once, in our four years of publishing, got it wrong. We have never published something that was false and said that it was true. Two: despite our publication of serious material on over 100 countries, no one has come to any harm; neither is there any specific claim that anyone has."

Two of WikiLeaks' sources are in jail, however: Bradley Manning, alleged source of the army diary leaks, and Rudi Elmer, the former Swiss banker who handed Assange two disks of allegedly confidential financial information in London two weeks ago. Elmer was re-arrested in Zurich last week and is now being held without charge in solitary confinement. "I can't talk about our sources," says Assange, "but I can talk about what is happening to them. Manning, over 240 days in solitary, harsh solitary conditions, and still not tried." In both cases, "there's an immediate decision to find someone to blame for the exposures, rather than find culprits responsible for the crimes. It is a matter of 'save face, or you will lost control'."

Another criticism often levelled at WikiLeaks is that bursting the banks of information in this way will only lead to the construction of new flood defences by powerful institutions; in other words to more, not less, secrecy.

"The reaction by large corporations and government power," says Assange, "to a substantial increase in disclosure to the public was thought about in depth in 2006, when we launched WikiLeaks." The idea that powerful institutions would "go off record" in such a way is fanciful, he argues; discovering their behaviour will always be possible by obtaining internal records. "For instance, when I obtained the manual for standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay, I was surprised to see that it included not only many inhumane practices, but it instructed guards to falsify records to the Red Cross. [Because] there is no way for the centre of an organisation to reliably have its peripheral elements reliably carry out its orders… there is a clear, authorised paper trail. Any form of large-scale abuse must be systemised." And the acquisition of that paper trail, he argues, is the way to expose the abuse.

In this situation, organisations have two choices, says Assange. One is to "engage in plans that the public will support if they are revealed", meaning that they will have nothing to fear from transparency. The other is to "spend additional resources to keep those plans secret". The second, more common, course entails a toll on the economic logic of the organisation, which Assange calls a "secrecy tax". Also, "when an organisation acts in a more clandestine manner", he says, "its own internal efficiency decreases, because information cannot flow quickly through the organisation. This is another form of secrecy tax." For organisations to be efficient, they should be transparent, he insists.

I put it to him that all this is heading in the right direction from the point of view of persuading organisations of the virtues of transparency. "It's not optimism", he says, suddenly animated, "it's part of the plan!"

Of all the thousands of columns about WikiLeaks, few opened up the discourse more than David Rieff in the New Republic last December, which invoked cyber-baron Bill Gates's doctrine of "universal connectivity" on the web almost as a new ideology. Rieff makes an analogy between the WikiLeaks saga and the legal and popular challenges to Microsoft over the restrictions to "universal connectivity" built into its products, saying "the state is like Microsoft, with its closed-source technology, while WikiLeaks is the open-source alternative".

Assange says: "We called their bluff regarding how much 'universal connectivity' the political system really wanted after the cold war". He talks about "an unusual alliance" during the cold war between liberalism and the "military-intelligence-diplomatic sphere", both of which sought to illustrate freedom of expression as epitomising "our cultural values… in pointing out the lack of freedoms in the Soviet Union".

But the end of the cold war coincided with "new technology permitting more to be published, more cheaply, to a wider audience than ever before" – so there ensued a "clash between the surface ideology and the real underlying self-interest"; between "the rise of the internet on one hand… and, on the other, the government's natural interest to tolerate as little dissent as possible".

And so it would go on if Assange were not distracted by what he sees as the forthcoming blizzard of books and TV programmes about him and the speed with which he has become a bête noire of the Anglo-American media.

"I think he's held a mirror up to the media," says Vaughan Smith, his host, "to the idea of the media as priesthood, and I don't think we come out of it very well." Smith, the owner and founder of the Frontline Club, was challenged by some of its divided membership at a meeting last week over his shelter of and perceived support for Assange, though most supported it.

Assange points out that "non-Anglo media organisations are broadly supportive", citing an editorial in Spain's El País, a book in Germany called WikiLeaks: Enemy of the State and the fact that Le Monde in France named him man of the year. But today even these discourses must come to an abrupt stop, as Assange's principal aide bursts into the room – "Quick, quick! The people have taken over Alexandria!" – and Assange, though sleepless, leaps from his chair.

With some relief, it seems, he grabs a laptop, swivels round to sit on the floor and taps, taps, excitedly…

WIKILEAKS: FOUR YEARS OF REVELATIONS


December 2006 WikiLeaks appears on the internet, aiming to expose "oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East" as well as "reveal unethical behaviour [by] governments and corporations".

December 2007 Publishes US army manual on Guantánamo Bay, showing that prisoners were denied access to the International Committee of the Red Cross for up to four weeks.

November 2008 Personal details released of more than 13,000 members of the BNP.

November 2009 More than 1,000 emails sent by staff at the University of East Anglia's climate research unit leaked.

July 2010 Tens of thousands of classified US military documents logging daily events in the war in Afghanistan released.

October Nearly 400,000 classified US military documents from the Iraq war – detailing attacks, deaths, rights abuses and military gaffes – uploaded.

November US embassy cables: more than 250,000 diplomatic cables published via media partners (including the Guardian and Observer) in Europe and the US.

December Julian Assange arrested in London. A group of cyber activists under the name Anonymous temporarily bring down the websites of credit card giants MasterCard and Visa after they stop processing donations to WikiLeaks.

January 2011 Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer is arrested after handing over the details of hundreds of offshore bank accounts to Assange. The details are yet to be published online.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/ja ... -interview

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[vanlose kid]

WikiLeaks founder says enjoys making banks squirm


NEW YORK | Fri Jan 28, 2011 7:16pm EST
(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he enjoys making banks squirm thinking they might be the next targets of his website which has published U.S. diplomatic and military secrets.

"I think it's great. We have all these banks squirming, thinking maybe it's them," Assange told the CBS television program "60 Minutes" in an interview.

CBS released a partial transcript on Friday ahead of Sunday's broadcast of the full segment.

Bank of America Corp shares fell more than 3 percent on November 30 on investor fears that the largest U.S. bank by assets would be the subject of a document release.

Interviewer Steve Kroft asked Assange whether he had acquired a five-gigabyte hard drive belonging to one of the bank's executives, as Assange had previously asserted.

"I won't make any comment in relation to that upcoming publication," said Assange, who is under a form of modified house arrest in England, awaiting an extradition hearing to Sweden for questioning over alleged sex offences that he denies.

Assange had told Forbes magazine that WikiLeaks planned a "megaleak" by releasing tens of thousands of internal documents from a major U.S. bank in early 2011 that he expected would lead to investigations of the bank.

In an October 2009 interview, Assange told Computerworld that WikiLeaks had obtained five gigabytes of data from a Bank of America executive's hard drive.

The Forbes interview came just after WikiLeaks released 250,000 U.S. government diplomatic cables. Previously, WikiLeaks had made public nearly 500,000 classified U.S. files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Major headlines were generated by some of the cables, which revealed that Saudi leaders had urged U.S. military action against Iran and detailed contacts between U.S. diplomats and political dissidents and opposition leaders in some countries.

Assange told "60 Minutes" he fully expected U.S. retaliation but that the American government was incapable of taking his website down.

"The U.S. does not have the technology to take the site down . ... Just the way our technology is constructed, the way the Internet is constructed," Assange said.

"We've had attacks on particular domain names. Little pieces of infrastructure knocked out. But we now have some 2,000 fully independent in every way websites, where we're publishing around the world. It is -- I mean, it's not possible to do."

WikiLeaks says it is a nonprofit organisation funded by human rights campaigners, journalists and the general public. Launched in 2006, it promotes the leaking of information to fight government and corporate corruption.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/ ... 4B20110129

*

[Laodicean]

60 Minutes Interview Part 1

60 Minutes Interview Part 2

[vanlose kid]

Assange's Swedish sex crimes file is leaked online
(AP) – 16 hours ago

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Leaked Swedish police documents on the Julian Assange sex cases raise key questions for both sides about the allegations.
Was one of the WikiLeaks founder's Swedish lovers asleep during intercourse? Did she consent to unprotected sex? Those answers will determine whether rape was committed under Swedish law.

The 39-year-old Australian denies any wrongdoing in separate encounters with two Swedish women last summer, and is fighting Swedish attempts to have him extradited from Britain to face questioning in the cases. He will appear in court in London on Monday and Tuesday in that extradition case.
In leaked police documents that emerged this week on the Internet, the Swedish woman accusing Assange of rape woke up as he was having sex with her, but let him continue even though she knew he wasn't wearing a condom.

She says she insisted that Assange wear a condom when they had sex in her apartment in the Swedish city of Enkoping on Aug. 16, and that he reluctantly agreed. The incident labeled as rape happened the next morning, when the woman claims she was woken up by Assange having unprotected sex with her.
"She immediately asked: 'Are you wearing anything?' and he answered 'You,'" according to a police summary of her deposition. "She said to him 'You better don't have HIV' and he answered 'Of course not.' She felt it was too late. He was already inside her and she let him continue."

Having sex with a sleeping person can be considered rape in Sweden, but the details in the leaked transcript could explain why different prosecutors have made different assessments of the incident.

One Stockholm prosecutor threw out the rape case altogether. A more senior prosecutor later reinstated it, and asked for Assange's extradition from Britain so she could question him in the case.

It's unclear who leaked the police documents, some of which have been publicly released before but with key portions blocked out. It's also not clear which side the full police documents would help more.

"It is a complicating factor that this person when she wakes up in one way or another gives her consent," said Nils-Petter Ekdahl, a judge and expert on Sweden's sex crimes legislation. "Does the consent also apply to what happened when one was sleeping? This question has not been tested by the justice system."

The documents included a cover letter signed by Assange's Swedish lawyer, Bjoern Hurtig.

"I can just say that I sent them to my client through his lawyer in London. But how it ended up on the Internet I don't know," Hurtig told The Associated Press. "It's incredibly unfortunate."

Assange is also accused of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion against another Swedish woman with whom he had sex in the same week. The leaked documents show she accuses him of deliberately damaging a condom during consensual sex, which he denies.

Assange met both women in connection with a seminar he gave on free speech in Stockholm after he and WikiLeaks made headlines around the world with the release of thousands of secret U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

His supporters say the allegations are trumped up and possibly politically motivated, charges that the women's lawyers have denied.

WikiLeaks has deeply angered the U.S. and other governments by publishing tens of thousands of secret military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as a massive trove of U.S. diplomatic cables.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... bd093e5f83

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Assange's extradition may turn on a crayfish party
February 5, 2011


Will the most high-profile rape case in the world hinge on the events at a beer and lobster night? It certainly looks that way. On Monday the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will appear in Belmarsh Magistrates Court, London, as the Swedish prosecution service attempts to extradite him for further questioning on four sex crime accusations. He is yet to be charged with anything.

A summary legal defence paper made public by his lawyers in January says Assange will oppose the request on just about all grounds - arguing not only that the accusations against him do not amount to a crime in Britain, but that the extradition is politically motivated. Crucially, his legal team will argue that the process of investigation has been so shoddy and compromised that any attempt to prosecute him would collapse immediately.

They may have plenty to go on, given some of the material contained in the forhor, the 100-plus page record of interview. Although it is fair to say that the report, which has been seen by the Herald, paints a portrait of Assange that is far from flattering, it also contains enough flat contradiction of the existing prosecution argument to push a British court to conclude that extradition would amount to a denial of natural justice.


The accused and his accusers ... Anna Ardin, Julian Assange and Sodia Wilen. Photo: AFP

Assange was first accused of rape and sexual misconduct on August 20, after two women he had been sexually involved with went to a police station to report a series of allegations - chiefly that Assange had used force and surprise to ensure that sex occurred without a condom. The rape accusations were cancelled 24 hours later by a senior prosecutor, and reinstated weeks later, following a request by Claes Borgstrom, a senior Swedish political figure - indeed the co-sponsor of the sex crimes act Assange would be charged under - who had become the women's lawyer.

The case would become public almost immediately. One accuser, Anna Ardin, had been the organiser of a speaking engagement by Assange in Stockholm, and had offered Assange accommodation. The right-wing Swedish daily Espressen would later report Ardin's accusations: a sexual encounter the night before Assange's lecture had become coercive, and Ardin had later asked Assange to move out. Simultaneously, Assange was having a brief affair with a photographer who had attended his lecture, and whom he neglected to call for a couple of days. When the two women got in touch at the end of the week, and compared stories of insistent unsafe sex, they went to the police.

This version would soon become muddied by reports that potential evidence had been deleted from the internet: tweets that contradicted Ardin's story that she did not feel safe around Assange after their first sexual encounter, the removal of a blog post by Ardin, a former university gender equality officer, which detailed a seven-step plan to take revenge on cheating lovers, and the alteration of a record of events on a blog edited by Ardin, to fit new complaints to police.

The full police report further complicates the picture. Perhaps the most central issue is the first complainant's shifting story as to whether the sexual encounter with Assange the night before the lecture had caused her to fear him. The next day Ardin had organised a ''crayfish party'' - a traditional Swedish summer get-together - for Assange; it was from this event that she sent the tweet that was later deleted, saying that it was 2am and she was partying with the ''most important people in the world''.

She would claim she had asked Assange to leave - yet two witness statements in the police record say that she resisted multiple alternative offers to house Assange elsewhere than her 5 metre by 5 metre bedsit, with its sole double bed. Though she would later claim to have no knowledge of Sofia Wilen, the second complainant, witnesses recorded her as remarking that Assange had ''gone to have sex with the cashmere sweater girl'' - a mildly disparaging nickname that Ardin and her friends had developed for Wilen.

Indeed, initially, Ardin made no complaint to the police of coercive sex at all, merely reporting two unwanted sexual advances that would be charged as misdemeanours in Sweden, and unprosecutable elsewhere. Her accusation of sexual coercion appeared after the senior prosecutor had thrown out the one felony charge, and it was at that point that online accounts were altered. But it was the accusation of the second complainant, Wilen - that Assange had had unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping - that triggered a rape investigation.

But Wilen's account of events does not make it easy for prosecutors. After the sex, she says that she and Assange joked about her being pregnant. They both joked that they would call the child ''Afghanistan''. Hours later, after Assange had left, saying he'd call (he didn't), and following consultation with friends, Wilen decided to report that she'd been raped, and went to a hospital to have a rape-kit prepared. The account offers usable material to both defence and the police, but it may be moot - messages attached to the file record that Wilen has failed to sign the interview record, and may no longer wish to see Assange charged. All of which makes for a messy crayfish party indeed.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/assanges-ex ... rom=smh_sb

*

[JackRiddler]

.

And now for a catch-up of accumulated Wikileaks items (on the affair, not the cables, for the most part).

I've fallen behind myself, having had a big job to do for more than a month, and very happy to follow what's been happening in EGYPT!

After another month of releases, we're still only up to 1.5 percent of the total accessible via the Wikileaks Cablegate page.

February 11, 2011:
Currently released so far... 3895 / 251,287

Where are the bank leaks? All that happened is that this Elmer fellow held a press conference with Assange to hand over more stuff from the Swiss banks --

(ON EDIT: And apparently was arrested on his return to Switzerland, where he is now in solitary, as I just read above)

--but what about the big Bank of America (or other US bank) all-at-once leak promised for January? If they don't magnage to get it out, it will be the first one they announced but did not deliver. (Or are they waiting for Mubarak's fall, hopefully, to clear media attention?)

.

Probably the biggest thing I saw was the one about an alleged "fifth team" of "hijackers" on Qatari passports who traveled to the 9/11 crime scenes in advance and who were on the AA plane that later flew the Flight 77 route on 9/11 and crashed into the Pentagon...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikilea ... R-IMO.html

But they flew back to the Gulf the day before. This doesn't sound like hijackers but like planners or controllers or surveillance of the alleged hijackers. The FBI is now supposedly looking for them, supposedly for first time ever... hmmmmmmm!

.

I have no idea what's been going on with the Twitter subpoenas and other developments, except for stories indicating that the government's plans for prosecution of Assange on the basis of the Espionage Act seem to have fallen apart.

They're getting a favor from Egypt to take the focus off. Um, wait. Maybe I should reconsider my silly statement? It's more like the State Department is a homeowner in a losing battle against Wikitermites, and "the favor" of Egypt is a wrecking ball smashing in through the front wall.

.

Anyway, some items, all archived here with original links for strictly non-commercial, fair-use purposes of education, discussion and debate:

Supporters of Julian Assange take to Sydney streets
From:AAP January 15, 2011 3:47PM

MORE than a thousand advocates of free speech have taken to the streets of Sydney in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Australian-born Mr Assange has enraged the United States by leaking American diplomatic cables that embarrassed world leaders.

He is currently on bail in England as he fights attempts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning on allegations of sexual assault.

NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge told the crowd of more than 1000 people in central Sydney on Saturday that the Australian government should support Mr Assange after Prime Minister Julia Gillard dubbed the website "unlawful".

"The actions of WikiLeaks are not only lawful, they're essential for fostering free speech in the 21st century. That's why we're here to support those actions."

Mr Shoebridge said that from a Greens' perspective, the whaling leaks were the most significant.

US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show that as late as February 2010, Australia was willing to compromise with Japan if the deal resulted in a reduced level of whaling.

"Here they are in the major Australian newspapers, they're speaking in support of an absolute ban on whaling," he said.

"Yet we now know that in the dark corridors they're shuffling along trying to cut a deal with the Japanese government which would continue to see the slaughter of whales."

Protesters collected money for Queensland's flood victims as they marched down Sydney's George Street.

LINK
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaki ... 5988327985

...............................................

Published on Truthout (http://www.truth-out.org)

John Pilger's Investigation Into the War on WikiLeaks and His Interview With Julian Assange
John Pilger | Friday 14 January 2011



The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.

In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the First World War, or one of the "war on terror" conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a "deliberate set up," pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other pillars of American power.

"This is not good news," Assange told me when we spoke this past week, his voice dark and concerned. He says he can have "bad days - but I recover." When we met in London last year, I said, "You are making some very serious enemies, not least of all the most powerful government engaged in two wars. How do you deal with that sense of danger?" His reply was characteristically analytical. "It's not that fear is absent. But courage is really the intellectual mastery over fear - by an understanding of what the risks are and how to navigate a path through them."

Regardless of the threats to his freedom and safety, he says the US is not WikiLeaks' main "technological enemy." "China is the worst offender. China has aggressive, sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We've been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site."

It was in this spirit of "getting information through" that WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, but with a moral dimension. "The goal is justice," wrote Assange on the homepage, "the method is transparency." Contrary to a current media mantra, WikiLeaks material is not "dumped." Less than one percent of the 251,000 US embassy cables have been released. As Assange points out, the task of interpreting material and editing that which might harm innocent individuals demands "standards [befitting] higher levels of information and primary sources." To secretive power, this is journalism at its most dangerous.

On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch." US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy the feeling of "trust," which is WikiLeaks' "center of gravity." It planned to do this with threats to "exposure [and] criminal prosecution." Silencing and criminalizing this rare source of independent journalism was the aim: smear the method. Hell hath no fury like imperial Mafiosi scorned.

Others, also scorned, have lately played a supporting part, intentionally or not, in the hounding of Assange, some for reasons of petty jealousy. Sordid and shabby describe their behavior, which serves only to highlight the injustice against a man who has courageously revealed what we have a right to know.

As the US Justice Department, in its hunt for Assange, subpoenas the Twitter and email accounts, banking and credit card records of people around the world - as if we are all subjects of the United States - much of the "free" media on both sides of the Atlantic direct their indignation at the hunted.

"So, Julian, why won't you go back to Sweden now?" demanded the headline over Catherine Bennett's Observer column on 19 December, which questioned Assange's response to allegations of sexual misconduct with two women in Stockholm last August. "To keep delaying the moment of truth, for this champion of fearless disclosure and total openness," wrote Bennett, "could soon begin to look pretty dishonest, as well as inconsistent." Not a word in Bennett's vitriol considered the looming threats to Assange's basic human rights and his physical safety, as described by Geoffrey Robertson QC, in the extradition hearing in London on 11 January.

In response to Bennett, the editor of the online Nordic News Network in Sweden, Al Burke, wrote to the Observer explaining, "plausible answers to Catherine Bennett's tendentious question" were both critically important and freely available. Assange had remained in Sweden for more than five weeks after the rape allegation was made - and subsequently dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm - and that repeated attempts by him and his Swedish lawyer to meet a second prosecutor, who reopened the case following the intervention of a government politician, had failed. And yet, as Burke pointed out, this prosecutor had granted him permission to fly to London where "he also offered to be interviewed - a normal practice in such cases." So, it seems odd, at the very least, that the prosecutor then issued a European arrest warrant. The Observer did not publish Burke's letter.

This record straightening is crucial because it describes the perfidious behavior of the Swedish authorities - a bizarre sequence confirmed to me by other journalists in Stockholm and by Assange's Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig. Not only that, Burke cataloged the unforeseen danger Assange faces should he be extradited to Sweden. "Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England," he wrote, "clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is ample reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights."

These documents have been virtually ignored in Britain. They show that the Swedish political class has moved far from the perceived neutrality of a generation ago and that the country's military and intelligence apparatus is all but absorbed into Washington's matrix around NATO. In a 2007 cable, the US Embassy in Stockholm lauds the Swedish government dominated by the conservative Moderate Party of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as coming "from a new political generation and not bound by [anti-US] traditions [and] in practice a pragmatic and strong partner with NATO, having troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Afghanistan."

The cable reveals how foreign policy is largely controlled by Carl Bildt, the current foreign minister, whose career has been based on a loyalty to the United States that goes back to the Vietnam War when he attacked Swedish public television for broadcasting evidence that the US was bombing civilian targets. Bildt played a leading role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobby group with close ties to the White House of George W. Bush, the CIA and the far right of the Republican Party.

"The significance of all this for the Assange case," notes Burke in a recent study, "is that it will be Carl Bildt and perhaps other members of the Reinfeldt government who will decide - openly or, more likely, furtively behind a façade of legal formality - on whether or not to approve the anticipated US request for extradition. Everything in their past clearly indicates that such a request will be granted."

For example, in December 2001, with the "war on terror" under way, the Swedish government abruptly revoked the political refugee status of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari. They were handed to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport and "rendered" to Egypt, where they were tortured. When the Swedish ombudsman for justice investigated and found that their human rights had been "seriously violated," it was too late.

Independent journalism is important. Click here to get Truthout stories sent to your email.

The implications for the Assange case are clear. Both men were removed without due process of law and before their lawyers could file appeals to the European Human Rights Court and in response to a US threat to impose a trade embargo on Sweden. Last year, Assange applied for residency in Sweden, hoping to base WikiLeaks there. It is widely believed that Washington warned Sweden through mutual intelligence contacts of the potential consequences. In December, prosecutor Marianne Ny, who reactivated the Assange case, discussed the possibility of Assange's extradition to the US on her web site.

Almost six months after the sex allegations were first made public, Assange has been charged with no crime, but his right to a presumption of innocence has been willfully denied. The unfolding events in Sweden have been farcical, at best. The Australian barrister James Catlin, who acted for Assange in October, describes the Swedish justice system as "a laughing stock ... There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along." He says that Assange, apart from noting contradictions in the case, has not publicly criticized the women who made the allegations against him. It was the police who tipped off the Swedish equivalent of the Sun, Expressen, with defamatory material about them, initiating a trial by media across the world.

In Britain, this trial has welcomed yet more eager prosecutors, with the BBC to the fore. There was no presumption of innocence in Kirsty Wark's "Newsnight" court in December. "Why don't you just apologise to the women?" she demanded of Assange, followed by: "Do we have your word of honour that you won't abscond?" On Radio 4's "Today" program, John Humphrys, the partner of Bennett, told Assange that he was obliged to go back to Sweden "because the law says you must." The hectoring Humphrys, however, had more pressing interests. "Are you a sexual predator?" he asked. Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded to know how many women he had slept with.

"Would even Fox News have descended to that level?" wondered the American historian William Blum. "I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: 'You mean including your mother?'"

What is most striking about these "interviews" is not so much their arrogance and lack of intellectual and moral humility; it is their indifference to fundamental issues of justice and freedom and their imposition of narrow, prurient terms of reference. Fixing these boundaries allows the interviewer to diminish the journalistic credibility of Assange and WikiLeaks, whose remarkable achievements stand in vivid contrast to their own. It is like watching the old and stale, guardians of the status quo, struggling to prevent the emergence of the new.

In this media trial, there is a tragic dimension, obviously for Assange, but also for the best of mainstream journalism. Having published a slew of professionally brilliant editions with the WikiLeaks disclosures, feted all over the world, The Guardian recovered its establishment propriety on 17 December by turning on its besieged source. A major article by the paper's senior correspondent Nick Davies claimed that he had been given the "complete" Swedish police file with its "new" and "revealing" salacious morsels.

Assange's Swedish lawyer Hurtig says that crucial evidence is missing from the file given to Davies, including "the fact that the women were re-interviewed and given an opportunity to change their stories" and the tweets and SMS messages between them, which are "critical to bringing justice in this case." Vital exculpatory evidence is also omitted, such as the statement by the original prosecutor, Eva Finne, that "Julian Assange is not suspected of rape."

Having reviewed the Davies article, Assange's former barrister James Catlin wrote to me: "The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake." I would add: so is his life.

The Guardian has profited hugely from the WikiLeaks disclosures, in many ways. On the other hand, WikiLeaks, which survives on mostly small donations and can no longer receive funds through many banks and credit companies thanks to the bullying of Washington, has received nothing from the paper. In February, Random House will publish a Guardian book that is sure to be a lucrative best seller, which Amazon is advertising as "The End of Secrecy: the Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks." When I asked David Leigh, the Guardian executive in charge of the book, what was meant by "fall," he replied that Amazon was wrong and that the working title had been "The Rise (and Fall?) of WikiLeaks." "Note parenthesis and query," he wrote, "Not meant for publication anyway." (The book is now described on the Guardian web site as "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy.") Still, with all that duly noted, the sense is that "real" journalists are back in the saddle. Too bad about the new boy, who never really belonged.

On 11 January, Assange's first extradition hearing was held at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, an infamous address because it is here that people were, before the advent of control orders, consigned to Britain's own Guantanamo, Belmarsh prison. The change from ordinary Westminster magistrates' court was due to a lack of press facilities, according to the authorities. That they announced this on the day Vice President Joe Biden declared Assange a "high tech terrorist" was no doubt coincidental, though the message was not.

For his part, Assange is just as worried about what will happen to Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower, being held in horrific conditions which the US National Commission on Prisons calls "tortuous." At 23, Private Manning is the world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to "a moral choice." His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.

"Government whistleblowers," said Barack Obama, running for president in 2008, "are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal." Obama has since pursued and prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in American history.

"Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step," Assange told me. "The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States. In fact, I'd never heard his name before it was published in the press. WikiLeaks technology was designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never knew the identities or names of people submitting material. We are as untraceable as we are uncensorable. That's the only way to assure sources they are protected."

He adds: "I think what's emerging in the mainstream media is the awareness that if I can be indicted, other journalists can, too. Even the New York Times is worried. This used not to be the case. If a whistleblower was prosecuted, publishers and reporters were protected by the First Amendment that journalists took for granted. That's being lost. The release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, with their evidence of the killing of civilians, hasn't caused this - it's the exposure and embarrassment of the political class: the truth of what governments say in secret, how they lie in public; how wars are started. They don't want the public to know these things and scapegoats must be found."

What about the allusions to the "fall" of WikiLeaks? "There is no fall," he said. "We have never published as much as we are now. WikiLeaks is now mirrored on more than 2,000 websites. I can't keep track of the of the spin-off sites: those who are doing their own WikiLeaks ... If something happens to me or to WikiLeaks, 'insurance' files will be released. They speak more of the same truth to power, including the media. There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and Newscorp."

The latest propaganda about the "damage" caused by WikiLeaks is a warning by the US State Department to "hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and business people identified in leaked diplomatic cables of possible threats to their safety." This was how The New York Times dutifully relayed it on 8 January, and it is bogus. In a letter to Congress, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has admitted that no sensitive intelligence sources have been compromised. On 28 November, McClatchy Newspapers reported, "US officials conceded they have no evidence to date that the [prior] release of documents led to anyone's death." NATO in Kabul told CNN it could not find a single person who needed protecting.

The great American playwright Arthur Miller wrote: "The thought that the state ... is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." What WikiLeaks has given us is truth, including rare and precious insight into how and why so many innocent people have suffered in reigns of terror disguised as wars and executed in our name; and how the United States has secretly and wantonly intervened in democratic governments from Latin America to its most loyal ally in Britain.

Javier Moreno, the editor of El Pais, which published the WikiLeaks logs in Spain, wrote, "I believe that the global interest sparked by the WikiLeaks papers is mainly due to the simple fact that they conclusively reveal the extent to which politicians in the West have been lying to their citizens."

Crushing individuals like Assange and Manning is not difficult for a great power, however craven. The point is, we should not allow it to happen, which means those of us meant to keep the record straight should not collaborate in any way. Transparency and information, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, are the "currency" of democratic freedom. "Every news organisation," a leading American constitutional lawyer told me, "should recognize that Julian Assange is one of them and that his prosecution will have a huge and chilling effect on journalism."

My favorite secret document - leaked by WikiLeaks, of course - is from the Ministry of Defense in London. It describes journalists who serve the public without fear or favor as "subversive" and "threats." Such a badge of honor.

Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/the-war-wikile ... sange66847

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

http://www.truth-out.org/print/66847

...............................................


On other thread, thanks to Plutonia, we had word of a Glenn Greenwald tweet:

Government admits (1) it has no evidence linking Manning to Assange, and (2) it punitively put Manning on suicide watch http://is.gd/etUxiZ

And this:

U.S. can't link accused Army private to Assange

January 24, 2011

U.S. military officials tell NBC News that investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between a jailed army private suspected with leaking secret documents and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.

U.S. military officials tell NBC News that investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between a jailed army private suspected with leaking secret documents and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Full story

Assange, an Australian national, is under house arrest at a British mansion near London, facing a Swedish warrant seeking his extradition for questioning on charges of rape. Assange has denied the allegations.

WikiLeaks' release of secret diplomatic cables last year caused a diplomatic stir and laid bare some of the most sensitive U.S. dealings with governments around the world. It also prompted an American effort to stifle WikiLeaks by pressuring financial institutions to cut off the flow of money to the organization.

U.S. Attorney General Eric holder has said his department is also considering whether it can prosecute the release of information under the Espionage Act.

Assange told msnbc TV last month that WikiLeaks was unsure Army PFC Bradley Manning is the source for the classified documents appearing on his site.

"That's not how our technology works, that's not how our organization works," Assange said. "I never heard of the name of Bradley Manning before it appeared in the media."

He called allegations that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning "absolute nonsense."

Officials: No torture of Manning
On Monday, U.S. military officials also strongly denied allegations that Manning, being held in connection with the WikiLeaks' release of classified documents, has been "tortured" and held in "solitary confinement" without due process.

The officials told NBC News, however, that a U.S. Marine commander did violate procedure when he placed Manning on "suicide watch" last week.

Military officials said Brig Commander James Averhart did not have the authority to place Manning on suicide watch for two days last week, and that only medical personnel are allowed to make that call.

The official said that after Manning had allegedly failed to follow orders from his Marine guards. Averhart declared Manning a "suicide risk." Manning was then placed on suicide watch, which meant he was confined to his cell, stripped of most of his clothing and deprived of his reading glasses — anything that Manning could use to harm himself. At the urging of U.S. Army lawyers, Averhart lifted the suicide watch.

U.S. Marine and Army officials say Manning is being treated like any other maximum security prisoner at Quantico, Va. He is confined to his single-person cell 23-hours per day, permitted one hour to exercise, permitted reading material and given one hour per day to watch television.

Manning spends much of his day reading while sitting cross-legged on the bunk in his cell. His hour of television is spent watching the news, military officials told NBC News.

Anti-war groups, a psychologist group as well as filmmaker Michael Moore and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg have called for Bradley to be released from detention.

................................

December 28, 2010
Where's the Bad? In the Whistleblowers or the Laws?
Invoking the Espionage Act Against Assange

By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN

There have been some suggestions in the press that Wikileaks founder could and should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. While this law has been on the books for almost 100 years and no court has ever declared any part of it unconstitutional, either facially or as applied, it is a troubling law that falls into the same category as the material support of terrorism laws, conspiracy law, and RICO -- all prosecutorial favorites because they are far easier to obtain convictions with than other kinds of laws.

These laws are all troubling for similar reasons. They criminalize behavior that could as easily be viewed as First Amendment-protected behavior: speech, association, and freedom of the press.

There are rumors that the Department of Justice has been trying to press Bradley Manning to testify that Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, conspired with him to release tens of thousands of Iraq war-related doucments and U.S. Department of State cables via Wikileaks.

Conspiracy law has a long history and is a powerful prosecutorial tool that has troubled many lawyers and judges. A conspiracy is an agreement, express or implied, to commit a crime. Under federal law, there must be an overt act for someone to be convicted as a co-conspirator, but the accused need not have participated in the crime itself; he needs only to have agreed to participate.

Judge Learned Hand once described conspiracy as the "darling of the modern prosecutor's nursery. (Harrison v. U.S. (2d Cir., 1925)). More recently, a legal scholar noted: "The difficulty in demonstrating an agreement [in conspiracy] has proven to be the prosecutor's greatest advantage because 'in their zeal to emphasize that the agreement need not be proved directly, the courts sometimes neglect to say that it need be proved at all.'" (Joshua Dressler, Understanding Criminal Law (1995), p. 398, quoting "Developments in the Law - Criminal Conspiracy," vol. 72, Harvard Law Review, p. 933 (1959)).

Conspiracy laws "have frequently been used to deter the exercise of various civil rights and civil liberties, such as freedom of association and freedom of speech, as in many of the World War I espionage prosecutions." (Jethro Lieberman, A Practical Companion to the Constitution (1999), p. 117.) According to this commentator, had conspiracy "been invented in the twentieth century, the courts might well have voided it for violating due process. But because of its ancient lineage and because it has proved so powerful a device for securing convictions in criminal cases, the courts have consistently refused to find a constitutional flaw in its central feature."

Conspiracy law rides the narrow edge of legal legitimacy. When it is combined with other constitutionally suspect laws, concerns increase about the constitutional and moral legitimacy of the prosecution. Legally illegitimate prosecutions undermine the rule of law and the legitimacy of the DOJ, and consequently of the Executive. Initially, Attorney General Eric Holder was said to be looking to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act. More recently, he signaled that his office was looking at other statutes.

Section (c) of the Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. § 793) makes it a felony punishable for up to 10 years when a person "receives or obtains or agrees or attempts to receive or obtain from any person, or from any source whatever, any document" ... "respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation." Conspiracy to engage in any action found to violate the Act receives the same punishment.

The Espionage Act has a long, troubling history. It has been used all too often to quell speech and association of political undesirables, which has raised repeated doubts of its constitutionality, but it has never been found unconstitutional. The landmark case of Schenk v. U.S. (1919) was an Espionage Act case where the so-called "clear and present danger" test was articulated. That test was modified some 50 years later in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) to the "imminent lawless action" test. Other cases (namely, New York Times Co. v. United States, and United States v. The Progressive, Inc.) have raised doubts about the Act's constitutionality, but it remains on the books, still and once again raising the specter of illegitimate prosecutions to the discredit of the DOJ and the Executive. Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noted they "agree with other legal commentators who have warned that a prosecution of Assange, much less of other readers or publishers of the cables, would face serious First Amendment hurdles, and would be "extremely dangerous" to free speech rights." (EFF links to a report by the Congressional Research Service which is important reading for anyone interested in understanding these laws.)

In addition to the specter of constitutionally problematic laws and illegitimate prosecutions, one must ask, as a preliminary question, why the DOJ must search for a law with which to prosecute Assange. Why is our government openly admitting to trying to find a law under which to prosecute someone they disfavor? Isn't there something wrong with that picture? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? The government is supposed to use the laws to prosecute those who have broken them, not sua sponte (spontaneously, of their own accord) come up with something to fit an act of which they don't approve. On that note, why is Congress considering passing a new law so prosecutors can go after publishers? Doesn't the Constitution (Art. 1, para. 10) prohibit ex post facto laws - laws passed after the occurrence of a fact or commission of an act which retrospectively change the legal consequences of such facts or acts? We're not supposed to go around punishing people for things that aren't legally prohibited. And wouldn't prosecuting publishers be a horrendous invasion of the First Amendment freedom of the press?

In June of this year, the Supreme Court made a ruling which should give us pause when we consider the Wikileaks situation. The court ruled that a law which prohibits providing "material support" to foreign terrorist organizations was constitutional, even where the "support" was peace training. The court ruled that "even well-intentioned aid to terrorist organizations is likely to backfire."

It has been one of our founding principles that intent matters when it comes to criminal liability. Now suddenly the Supreme Court is saying intent doesn't matter. If that is the case, any of us could be brought up on charges of terrorism or espionage. Increasingly in the past ten years, bad new laws have been promulgated and bad old laws have been dusted off and used to prosecute more and more people for legitimate speech and association. This is why we have a Constitution. We should look to it.


Jennifer Van Bergen, J.D., M.S.I.E., is the founder of the 12th Generation Institute, and author of THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE BUSH PLAN FOR AMERICA (Common Courage Press, 2004) and Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious (Michael Weise Productions, 2007). She is currently working under contract with Bucknell University Press on a biography of Leonora Sansay, an early American novelist who was involved in the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, and on a screenplay about the conspiracy. She can be reached at jennifer.vanbergen@gmail.com.

http://counterpunch.org/vanbergen12282010.html

................................



Again, no clue how the Twitter matter has developed, even as Holder's case falls apart...

Iceland summons US envoy over demand for MP's Twitter details

Reykjavik calls for explanation of Justice Department's move to access account of politician caught up in WikiLeaks inquiry

Dominic Rushe
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 January 2011 18.44 GMT


Birgitta Jonsdottir - Iceland MP and former WikiLeaks collaborator. The US Justice Department is seeking access to her Twitter account as it tries to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images


The American ambassador to Iceland has been summoned to explain why US officials are trying to access the Twitter account of an Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks collaborator.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, revealed last week that the US justice department had asked Twitter to hand over her information. The US authorities are trying to build a criminal case against the website after its huge leaks of classified US information.

"[It is] very serious that a foreign state, the United States, demands such personal information of an Icelandic person, an elected official," the interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, told Icelandic broadcaster RUV. "This is even more serious when put [in] perspective and concerns freedom of speech and people's freedom in general," he added.

Iceland's foreign ministry has demanded a meeting with Luis Arreaga, the US ambassador to Reykjavík. No one at the US embassy in Reykjavík was available for comment.

Jónsdóttir is one of the site's contributors whose communications are being investigated by US authorities. A court order last week revealed that they are also seeking Twitter data from the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and Bradley Manning, the US serviceman accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of sensitive government cables published by WikiLeaks.

The court issuing the subpoena said it had "reasonable grounds" to believe Twitter held information "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation". A Twitter spokesman said it was company policy to inform users if there was an investigation when legally possible.

WikiLeaks has demanded that Google and Facebook reveal which of their users are under similar scrutiny.

Jónsdóttir told the Guardian: "I am very pleased that we are going to have this meeting. There are a few things here that need to be straightened out and I am very grateful that this issue is being treated as seriously as it should be."

She said she was talking to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and would attempt to stop the justice department's move.

Most messages on Twitter are public but users can send private messages. The court order is also seeking details of source and destination internet protocol addresses used to access the accounts. These would enable investigators to identify email addresses and how the named individuals communicated with each other.

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, has said he believes Assange could be prosecuted under US espionage laws. Holder said the leaks had endangered US national security. "The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way," he said.

• this article was amended on 18 January 2011. The original referred to the Electronic Freedom Foundation. This has been corrected.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ja ... -wikileaks

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U.S. Twitter Subpoena Is Harassment, Lawyer Says
By Erik Larson - Jan 10, 2011

U.S. prosecutors’ demand that the microblogging service Twitter Inc. hand over data about users with ties to WikiLeaks amounts to harassment, said a lawyer for Julian Assange, the website’s founder.

The Justice Department subpoena, approved last month in federal court and later unsealed, also violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable government searches, Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens said today in a telephone interview in London. WikiLeaks is an organization that publishes leaked documents on its website.

“The Department of Justice is turning into an agent of harassment rather than an agent of law,” Stephens, of the firm Finers Stephens Innocent LLP, said. “They’re shaking the tree to see if anything drops out, but more important they are shaking down people who are supporters of WikiLeaks.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Nov. 29 that the Justice Department is investigating the posting by WikiLeaks of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic communications and military documents. Lawyers have said the U.S. will likely charge Assange with espionage.

“To help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so,” Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said in an e-mail.

Penner declined to comment specifically on the WikiLeaks subpoena.

‘Grossly Overbroad’

The agency’s subpoena of Twitter is “grossly overbroad” and would give prosecutors access to data on a member of Iceland’s parliament and more than 634,000 people who follow WikiLeaks’ so-called tweets on the site, Stephens said. Similar information was sought from Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and EBay Inc.’s Skype unit, he said.

“What they will then do is take that data and analyze it in conjunction with data they get from Google, Facebook and the other social media, so that they can ascertain individuals that they feel they want to pay more attention to,” Stephens said.

Stephens regularly represents media organizations, including Bloomberg News.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

December Subpoena

Online magazine Salon posted a copy of the Jan. 5 order from Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, unsealing the December subpoena.

Assange, an Australian who was arrested last month in London and is free on bail, is facing extradition to Sweden to face unrelated allegations of sexual misconduct against two women. A hearing in the case is scheduled for tomorrow.

Stephens, who is representing Assange as he fights the extradition, has previously suggested the case is politically motivated and somehow related to WikiLeaks.

Sally Aldous, an outside spokeswoman for Facebook declined to comment. Calls to the U.K. press offices for Google and EBay weren’t immediately returned.

To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Larson in London at elarson4@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net.
®2011 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.


LINK
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-1 ... -says.html

[JackRiddler]

consortiumnews.com

How WikiLeaks Unhinged Washington

By Linda Lewis and Coleen Rowley
January 11, 2011

Editor’s Note: The WikiLeaks disclosures have prompted a new round of craziness within the U.S. government – from the Justice Department devising novel theories for prosecuting people (even non-Americans) who publish Washington’s secrets to new strategies for ferreting out disgruntled employees who might be inclined to leak.



In Washington’s Brave New World, pop-psychology concepts, including some from the father of the “learned helplessness” theory that inspired the Bush-Cheney “enhanced interrogations,” are being tried out for use against federal workers, as ex-government officials Linda Lewis and Coleen Rowley discuss in this guest essay:

As Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano recently admitted, the notion of "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is so totally passé.

(She didn't explain why, if Bush's old rationale is no longer valid, we still keep the wars going in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq, etc.)

Her statement, however, did underscore that a significant portion of the 854,000 intelligence operatives, analysts, agents, private contractors and consultants now operating in "Top Secret America" have already turned the "war on terror" inward, targeting their fellow Americans, no longer focusing just on Muslims and mosques but on infiltrating peace, environmental, civil liberties and social justice groups.

Even more ludicrously off-base, the White House and its paranoid Barney Fife bureaucrats have set their sights on the "insider threat" lurking within Top Secret America itself.

Under the guise of sealing the government from more WikiLeaks, Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob J. Lew issued a memo on Jan. 3 to all government agencies providing pages of suggested security procedures and checklists.

He also recommended "all agencies institute an insider threat detection awareness education and training program" to "gauge trustworthiness" of their government employees. Some of OMB's suggestions:

• Are you practicing "security sentinel" or "co-pilot" policing practices?

• What metrics do you use to measure "trustworthiness" without alienating employees?

• Do you use psychiatrist and sociologist to measure relative happiness as a means to gauge trustworthiness and despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness?

Use and Abuse of Security Clearances

Security clearance laws have long been used by federal agencies as an end-run around laws that protect civil servants, whistleblowers, minorities and persons with disabilities from discrimination and reprisal.

Individuals who exercise their rights under those laws frequently have become targets of reprisal that purposely seeks to create anxiety, pain and depression (conditions that also may accompany physical disabilities).

The emotional trauma that employees experience may then be used as a pretext for requiring a psychiatric evaluation that may unfairly result in the loss of their clearance and subsequent termination for not having the clearance required by their position.

Evaluators hired by the government may lack suitable qualifications and are themselves vulnerable to reprisal if they fail to provide the diagnosis desired by the agency.

It's difficult to see how a program that urges agencies to evaluate employees' "trustworthiness" based on their level of "happiness," "despondence," and "grumpiness" will not only have an adverse impact on whistleblowers, minorities and persons with disabilities but on the general workforce.

Forcing psychiatric assessments of those employees will further stigmatize groups that already struggle for acceptance, and will destroy the careers of some of the nation's brightest and best public servants.

A good example of the counter-productiveness of the common tendency to shoot the messenger was the FBI Laboratory's attempted destruction of FBI Chemist Frederic Whitehurst in the mid-1990s for having the audacity to question why his FBI employer refused to seek proper scientific accreditation for an operation they simultaneously vaunted as the "foremost forensic lab" in the country.

Whitehurst rocked the boat, too, when he challenged the cherished FBI tradition that higher-level FBI officials in the chain of command should not be re-writing any scientific reports of their (often better scientifically-qualified) underlings in order to better favor prosecutive goals.

It took years but Whitehurst was eventually vindicated, the scientific testing/report writing was corrected, and the FBI Lab ended up receiving proper accreditation, making its work product more credible.

Hoover's old ways of operating the FBI lab now seem nutty, but this wasn't the case at the time of Whitehurst's challenges. Back then, Whitehurst was made to seem the disloyal nut. He was suspended, escorted from the FBI building and stripped of his gun and gold badge.

The impact of security clearance policies extends far beyond agencies like the FBI and CIA.

Since the 9/11 attacks, agencies with regulatory functions -- the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), for example -- have issued increasing numbers of security clearances, whether the position involves homeland security or meat inspection.

The OMB memo does not describe what happens when an employee has been labeled an "insider threat" for failing the happiness test. Does the agency pull the employee's clearance on such thin evidence?

The Executive Order that provides guidance for adjudication of security clearances does not mention a requisite number of smiles. Or, will the employee be jailed without due process, as the government now does with those it deems outsider threats?

Perhaps "Positive Psychology" Guru Martin Seligman (nicknamed "Dr. Happy") will be able to sell a civilian form of his $125 million "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness" (CSF) "holistic testing" and "learned optimism-resiliency" training to the rest of the U.S. government.

What kind of government will we have when all this pixie dust has settled? Will we have a diverse and creative workforce, courageously challenging complacency and corruption? Or will we have a Stepford workforce where smiling obedience is the only skill that matters?

(Seligman's earlier theories about how easy it is to instill "learned helplessness" became the basis for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques used on detainees in the “war on terror.” Now Seligman is peddling "learned optimism.")

Does OMB's Guidance Make Sense?

Donald Soeken, LCSW-C, Ph.D. retired 06 Captain, U.S. Public Health Service, and Director, Whistleblower Support Center and Archive, has challenged these methods. His testimony on misuse of psychiatric exams led Congress to ban them in 1984.

Since January 1984, the government-forced psychiatric fitness-for-duty exam is not even legal to use as a tool to evaluate the mental health of most federal employees. For individuals with security clearances, the government still uses the exam, however.

The basic problem is not the exam itself, but that it is unethical to use it when an individual is being forced to take the exam. Psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, and social workers who perform the exam are committing malpractice because their ethics code requires them to "do no harm."

The doctor-patient relationship does apply when a government employee talks to a psychological evaluator and it is unethical to perform such an exam if the information is later divulged without the proper permission to release the information. If the information is released, the personnel office of the agency can then use the exam in any way that they are being told to use it.

The forced exam is often given to persons who are whistleblowers, have a personality clash with their manager, or anyone else that management determines is a problem.

Anyone required to take such an exam should refuse with their lawyer's intervention. If all attempts to stop the exam fail, then the employee should have his/her lawyer or a licensed psychotherapist present at the exam.

These exams are like the old Soviet style psychiatry and all past congressional hearings since 1978 have found them to be of little value and have indicated they should not be performed on government employees.

One psychologist who worked at the National Security Agency told me that the exams cannot determine who is a potential government spy. Other methods are more effective for that purpose whereas the forced psychiatrist fitness-for-duty exam is of no value in determining who might give information to a foreign government.

Such exams would be of no utility in determining who might go to the press to expose waste, fraud, or abuse of power. These exams are permanently harmful to the mental health of the individuals who take them.

Do Grumpy Workers Become Spies?

How nonsensical is it to try to zero in on "grumpy" workers in the government's massive national security apparatus as the new "insider threat"?

Even when so many in the Post Office were "going postal," OMB didn't lose its mind and grasp at straws like this.

The MSNBC article that broke the story about the new policy quoted Steven Aftergood, a national security specialist for the Federation of American Scientists, as saying, "This is paranoia, not security."

Aftergood also questioned whether the guidance in the OMB memo – based as it is on programs commonly used at the CIA and other intelligence agencies to root out potential spies – would work at other agencies.

What Aftergood didn't say was that the CIA and FBI were dismal failures in detecting their own top-level spies during the prior three decades. For instance, CIA official Aldrich Ames spied for the Soviet Union with impunity from 1985 to 1993 – he even passed two CIA polygraphs.

CIA Chief of Station Harold James Nicholson was eventually tripped up when he failed a polygraph but is believed to have acted as a Soviet-Russian spy from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Incredibly enough, only a few months ago, CIA spy Nicholson was convicted a second time for operating his son as a Russian agent to collect the "pension" he was due for his prior spy work for the Russians.

FBI Supervisor Earl Edwin Pitts conveyed classified documents and "everything else he was aware of" to the Russians from 1987 to 1992.

Finally, there is the broadly smiling example of GS-15 FBI Unit Chief Official Robert Hanssen, who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001. Hanssen, a fervent Catholic, extensively involved in Opus Dei, would have undoubtedly aced the military's new "spiritual fitness" portion of its new CSF test.

He was seen as so apple pie and in tune with the FBI mission that he was given the task of looking for the spies in the FBI. That meant he was assigned to look for himself. (For obvious reasons, Hanssen ensured that he did not unmask himself, but instead turned over the entire study, including the list of all Soviets who had contacted the FBI about FBI moles, to the KGB in 1988.)

The happily self-enriching Hanssen enjoyed a perfectly unfettered, successful spy career spanning three decades despite the factually based complaints made about him by other FBI officials, including his own brother-in-law.

So just examining these famous case histories – but of course limited to these four who were eventually exposed – the FBI and CIA were anything but effective in "rooting out" their insider threats during the decades these four were making money off the Soviets!

More importantly and counter to OMB's simplistic advice, the FBI's and CIA's own traitor-spies did not, by all accounts, appear to be anything but well adjusted, spiritually fit and as happy as one can be with a government job!

Albeit they all shared certain money-hungry, capitalistic tendencies. And Ames had an exceptionally bad drinking problem. But OMB knows if it was to put alcoholism down as one of its "insider threat" warning signs, the false positives in Washington D.C. alone could decimate the U.S. government.

Just looking at the smiling faces of the CIA-FBI spies, OMB would have a hard time seeing the grumpy, despondent traitor who lurked behind the facades with one notable exception, the rather glum Pitts (who everyone acknowledged was weird in just quietly doing his job and keeping to himself).

But even Pitts ostensibly enjoyed a happy marriage to a female FBI agent – an early form of the "co-pilot policing" mentioned in the OMB memo!

Banishing Grumpiness

So outing all the grumpy government workers is not going to be easy! But OMB has set its sights not only on current employees but all prospective government employees, like the college kids majoring in political science, history, law or international relations.

Our bureaucrats want to find ways of detecting those unduly curious college kids who may already have peeked at WikiLeaks. WikiLeak peekers and critical thinkers undoubtedly would pose some questions about (if not an actual "insider threat" to) the massively expansive and expensive national security apparatus and government hierarchies that rely on blind obedience.

Even worse, OMB says agencies should monitor their retirees, too!
As most recipients of government pensions are well aware, any number of creative pretexts are constantly bandied about to reduce the funding that goes into government pensions. So that part of Lew's Memo mentioning retirees like ourselves who might have seen a WikiLeak or two caught our attention.

As people who depend on our little government pensions, we admit to nothing but how many government retirees have found it hard to immediately press "delete" whenever a mention of WikiLeaks has come up in Google News or while channel surfing these last few months.

To be sure, a real issue may exist as to the top-level elite government "retirees," the three- or four-star generals and above and the "Senior Executive Service" high-level "retirees" who simply go through revolving doors from government "public service" to privatized national security corporations.

News articles report that it only takes these head honchos one hour after public "retirement" to pick up their new private jobs, albeit at several times the pay-grade, doing the same thing.

Those "retirees" never lose their security clearances or any access to their top secret info, so the Lew Memo security provisions should logically apply to that type of "retiree."

Instead we worry Lew (himself in the high-level revolving door category) is probably siccing his dogs on real retirees like ourselves who did indeed sever all of our prior agency ties and did give up our classified access but still sometimes feel compelled to write a letter to the editor and/or an opinion piece to try and engage more of our fellow citizens about the problems of the day.

Are we going to be lumped into the new "insider threat"? Is Lew threatening real government retirees with losing our pensions if we publish our opinions in support of WikiLeaks and more transparency in government?

What's the answer?

Adhering to these pages of new paranoid-driven security procedures and instituting widespread monitoring of government employees, students and retirees, just because some Washington D.C. officials got embarrassed by WikiLeaks, is likely to quickly prove a big drag in more ways than one.

The massive internal searching and monitoring will undoubtedly bring morale down the very first time a good Homeland Security Warrior is stopped and gets his lunch pail searched on his or her way out the door after the bell rings for the day.

Even the most loyal of the "us" in "us versus them" may come to see how the tables have been turned. That is apt to produce even more grumpiness!

The potentially demoralizing situation that awaits the civilian government agencies is therefore ripe for the pop psychology answer: the "power of positive thinking."

Already the U.S. military has given Martin “Dr. Happy” Seligman's "Soldier Fitness Tracker and Global Assessment Tool", which purports to measure soldiers' "resilience" in five core areas: emotional, physical, family, social and spiritual.

Soldiers fill out an online survey made up of more than 100 questions, and if the results fall into a red area, they are required to participate in remedial courses in a classroom or online setting to strengthen their "resilience" in the disciplines in which they received low scores.

More than 800,000 Army soldiers have already served as guinea pigs, having taken the CSF "test" thus far and the military has successfully inculcated 2,000 "Master Resiliency Trainers."

So it's not a stretch to predict expansion of Dr. Happy's pop psychology onto the civilian side of government. This screening might even eventually be used to root out the more independent thinkers in the U.S. population as a whole.

Whether it turns out that easy to evaluate and manipulate people's emotions, we doubt the OMB guidance or any pop psychology would have deterred true insider threats like Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, or any of the other national security agent spies.

Given the underlying ills, it remains to be seen whether such costly therapy can somehow alleviate PTSD, reduce soldiers' suicides, prevent grumpiness in government employees and/or keep whistleblowers from trying to reveal wrongdoing.

Linda Lewis worked for 13 years for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a planner and analyst specializing in weapons of mass destruction before retiring in 2005.

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI's pre 9-11 failures. She retired at the end of 2004, and now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.

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LINK
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2011/011111b.html

.....................................

Prominent people who are OK with murdering Julian Assange.

http://www.peopleokwithmurderingassange.com

RUSH LIMBAUGH
(Right-wing radio talk show host)
"This guy Assange could have been stopped, come on, folks. People have been shot for far less than this."

"(laughing) Ah, folks, even Greg Palkot of Fox News interviewed Assange, which means that Roger Ailes knows where he is. Ailes knows where Assange is. Give Ailes the order and there is no Assange, I'll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it."

"Back in the old days when men were men and countries were countries, this guy would die of lead poisoning from a bullet in the brain."

WILLIAM KRISTOL
Editor of the Weekly Standard)
"Why can't we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can't we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are?"

G. GORDON LIDDY
(Former White House Adviser, talk show host)
"This fellow Anwar al-Awlaki – a joint U.S. citizen hiding out in Yemen – is on a 'kill list' . Mr. Assange should be put on the same list."

DEROY MURDOCK
(Columnist for National Review)
"If convicted, should be placed against a wall and executed by firing squad. (If extradited here, Assange deserves the same sendoff.)"

SARAH PALIN
(Former US Vice Presidential Candidate)
"Julian Assange should be targeted like the Taliban"

THOMAS FLANAGAN
former advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper)
"I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. (laughs) I think Obama should put out a contract or use a drone or something…. I wouldn’t feel happy, uh, unhappy, if Assange disappeared."

BOB BECKEL
(FOX News commentator)
"A dead man can't leak stuff...This guy's a traitor, he's treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I'm not for the death penalty, so...there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."

ERIC BOLLING
(FOX News commentator)
" should be underground -- six feet underground. ... He should be put in jail or worse, hanged in a public forum."

TODD SCHNITT
(Radio Host)
"ASSANGE IS A TERRORIST, AN ENEMY COMBATANT, AND NEEDS TO BE TREATED AS SUCH”, SCHNITT HAS SAID REPEATEDLY ON HIS PROGRAM WHICH AIRS WEEKDAYS FROM 3:00pm-6:00pm EST."

JEFFREY KUHNER
(Washington Times columnist)
"Headline: Assassinate Assange? Body: Julian Assange poses a clear and present danger to American national security ... The administration must take care of the problem - effectively and permanently."

JOHN HAWKINS
(Far-right blogger)
"Julian Assange is not an American citizen and he has no constitutional rights. So, there's no reason that the CIA can't kill him. Moreover, ask yourself a simple question: If Julian Assange is shot in the head tomorrow or if his car is blown up when he turns the key, what message do you think that would send about releasing sensitive American data?"

RALPH PETERS
(U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and author)
"Julian Assange is a cyber terrorist in wartime, he's guilty of sabotage, espionage, crimes against humanity -- he should be killed, but we won't do that."

"I do not believe in leaks. I would execute leakers. They're betraying our country."

STEVE GILL
Right-wing Nashville radio host)
"Folks like Julian Assange should be targeted as terrorists. They should be captured and kept in Guantanamo Bay, or killed."

[JackRiddler]

.

"The loser at a free weblog now has spin control on those cables, just like everyone else."
-- nathan28

REPEAT:

Where to research the cables (best as I know)

1. Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables
Of the newspaper sites, in English go with The Guardian. They are a full partner and have been doing constant, massive coverage. (The Times site is a joke and shamelessly spun to minimize releases and maximize pro-war propaganda.) This is not an endorsement, it's merely a fact that the Guardian has been been best so far, despite problems.

2. Wikileaks: http://wikileaks.ch / (go to "cablegate" section)

3. Search-able database of cables that is synched with Wikileaks releases: http://www.dazzlepod.com/cable /

4. Wikileaks the forum: http://www.wikileaksforum.net /

5. Crowdjournalizing the raw cables... very slowly: http://operationleakspin.org /

On RI, the cable story agglomeration thread:
Cables Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels WIKI!
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30359

Thread collecting major cable stories through January 9, 2011:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... =439x65699

That last one is big and will do until a more systematic compilation comes along.

.

Perhaps the best article on Wikileaks so far:

Wikileaks and the Worldwide Information War
Power, Propaganda, and the Global Political Awakening
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Research, December 6, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=22278

SVT documentar, "Wikirebel"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvmfOaZ34Pk

Thanks to plutonia for several of those.

.

[norton ash]

Prominent people who are OK with murdering Julian Assange.

Someone should remind all those right-wingers that the bible they thump is the product of a LEAK. (Don't worry, they got the fucker that did it. Couldn't stop the information, though.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

In 1535, Tyndale was arrested by church authorities and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde outside Brussels for over a year. He was tried for heresy, strangled and burnt at the stake. The Tyndale Bible, as it was known, continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across Europe.

The fifty-four independent scholars who revised extant English bibles, drew significantly on Tyndale's translations to create the King James Version (or final "Authorised Version") of 1611 (still in mainstream use today). One estimation suggests the King James New Testament is 83.7 % Tyndale's and the Old Testament 75.7 %.[2]

[vanlose kid]

really...

Assange abused my cat: WikiLeaks insider
Agence France-Presse
Berlin, February 10, 2011
First Published: 18:21 IST(10/2/2011)
Last Updated: 18:57 IST(10/2/2011)


Daniel Domscheit-Berg accuses WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of many things in his book presented on Thursday, but perhaps the oddest allegation is that he abused the former insider's cat.

"Julian was constantly battling for dominance, even with my tomcat Herr Schmitt," Domscheit-Berg says in his book "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website."

"Ever since Julian lived with me in Wiesbaden he (the cat) has suffered from psychosis. Julian would constantly attack the animal. He would spread out his fingers like a fork and grab the cat's throat."

The "mad Australian" did not always come off best during his stay in 2009, however, with Herr Schmitt sometimes managing to "dispatch Julian with a quick swipe of the paw."

"It must have been a nightmare for the tomcat," he said in the German-language version of the book, due to be published in more than a dozen countries from Friday.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Assange-a ... 60787.aspx

*

he should never have messed with the US, man... he only did it for fame and notoriety.

WikiLeaks defector blasts Assange in book
From Diana Magnay, CNN
February 10, 2011 -- Updated 1422 GMT (2222 HKT)


Berlin (CNN) -- WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange went from being "imaginative, energetic (and) brilliant" to a "paranoid, power-hungry, megalomaniac," a former colleague charges in a new book out Thursday.

Assange also has "a very free and easy relationship with the truth," Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims in the book, "Inside WikiLeaks."

WikiLeaks also lost key software that lets users submit documents anonymously when Domscheit-Berg and another colleague left, he says.
WikiLeaks blasted the defector in a statement shortly before the book launch.

Domscheit-Berg "damaged" WikiLeaks infrastructure and "stole material," WikiLeaks said Wednesday, and the website said it is taking legal action against him-- though Domscheit-Berg denied that.

WikiLeaks, which publishes secret documents, downplayed the defector's role in the organization, saying he was "a spokesperson for WikiLeaks in Germany at various times."

It denied he was ever a "programmer, computer scientist, security expert, architect, editor, founder (or) director" of WikiLeaks.

"Domscheit-Berg's roles within WikiLeaks were limited and started to diminish almost a year ago as his integrity and stability were questioned," the website said.

Domscheit-Berg rejected that claim in a press conference Thursday, calling himself "the only person who was intensively involved in this organization for such a long time."

Last September, Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks, citing shortcomings and clashes with Assange. He and other former WikiLeaks employees have now set up OpenLeaks, which they describe as a more transparent secret-sharing website.

OpenLeaks, its founder says, has a "technical mechanism whereby sources can be protected" and decide for themselves to which outlets they want to release their information.

The defector paints a picture of Assange as becoming increasingly authoritarian over time, saying Assange would threaten him.

Domscheit-Berg claims Assange read the USA Patriot Act to him when he tried to dismiss him, using military terminology to designate him a traitor. Assange, he said, had started assuming the characteristics of the kinds of institutions he was trying to bring down.

The author says in his book, however, that Assange wasn't necessarily anti-American, even though all of WikiLeaks' major publications last year were aimed at the United States. Instead, Assange was motivated by a frustration with U.S. foreign policy and his desire to seek the biggest possible adversary.

"He had to single out the most powerful nation on earth," Domscheit-Berg writes. "Your own stature, it has been written, can be measured by that of your enemies. Why should he expend his fighting energy in Africa or Mongolia and get into quarrels with the Thai royal family?

"It would have been a far less attractive prospect to end up in some jail in Africa, or wearing concrete boots at the bottom of some Russian river, than to inform the world that he was being pursued by the CIA. And it wouldn't have gotten him on the nightly news."

Domscheit-Berg also says he took about 300,000 documents when he left WikiLeaks, claiming it would be "irresponsible" to leave them with Assange. He did not disclose the contents or origin of the papers. The trove would represent a fairly small percentage of what WikiLeaks says it has in its possession.

Domscheit-Berg said he was "sorry" about how things worked out between him and Assange, saying, "We had extremely great times. We achieved great things together."

WikiLeaks gained international prominence after leaking thousands of papers about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and is currently releasing a huge cache of secret American diplomatic papers.

Assange is fighting extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning on sex charges unrelated to the work of the website.
There are already several books purporting to expose WikiLeaks' own secrets.

Two journalists from The Guardian newspaper in Britain, David Leigh and Luke Harding, have written "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy." It profiles Assange, whom it calls "one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity," and it also discusses WikiLeaks' release of the U.S. diplomatic cables and Afghan war documents.

Two journalists from Germany's Der Spiegel magazine have written a book called "Staatsfeind WikiLeaks," or "WikiLeaks, Enemy of the State," describing their encounters with the site's founder.

Both The Guardian and Der Spiegel have had agreements with WikiLeaks on publishing leaked documents.

The New York Times offers an e-book called "Open Secrets" that it bills as the "definitive chronicle" of the documents' release and the controversy that ensued.

Greg Mitchell, who writes a media blog for The Nation, has written "The Age of WikiLeaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate (and Beyond)," charting the rise and impact of the site.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europ ... ks/?hpt=T2

*

[JackRiddler]

.

Minions of an evil but too-big-to-fail totalitarian institution learned today that it's tough to make plans against leakers in secret. If any one-person operation on this planet is made to jiu-jitsu the following into a bodyslam for the corporate spooks, it's Glenn Greenwald.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201102 ... wald.shtml

Leaked HBGary Documents Show Plan To
Spread Wikileaks Propaganda For BofA...
And 'Attack' Glenn Greenwald

from the this-is-like-out-of-a-bad-movie dept

Sometimes reality can be more entertaining than fiction. You may have followed the recent story involving a security firm called HBGary Federal, in which the company's CEO, Aaron Barr, told the Financial Times this weekend that he had secretly "infiltrated" the non-group Anonymous and identified its leadership... and that he was planning to hand over the info to law enforcement. Of course, it was pretty questionable how accurate the information is, considering Anonymous isn't actually a "group" with a hierarchy at all. It wouldn't be surprising to find out that there were some folks who were heavily active, but that's different than claiming there's "leadership." Either way, Anonymous did what Anonymous does when someone does something it doesn't like: they hacked. Beyond taking over Barr's Twitter account and revealing all sorts of private info and taking over various web servers connected to HBGary Federal, it also released 44,000 of the company's emails.

Once again, as I've said before, I really don't think this is a good idea. The potential backlash can be severe and these kinds of attacks can create the opposite long-term incentives that the folks involved think they're creating. It also gets people a lot more focused on the method rather than the message and that seems unfortunate.

Still, the leaked emails are turning up some gems, with a key one being that Bank of America (widely discussed as Wikileaks' next target) had apparently been talking to HBGary Federal about how to disrupt Wikileaks. That link, from The Tech Herald, includes tons of details. The full proposal (embedded below) feels like something straight out of a (really, really bad) Hollywood script.

It appears that the law firm BofA was using as a part of its Wikileaks crisis response task force, Hunton and Williams, had reached out to firms asking for research and a plan against Wikileaks. HBGary Federal, along with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies put together their pitch. According to the emails discussing this, the firms tried to come up with a plan as to how they could somehow disrupt Wikileaks, see if there was a way to sue Wikileaks and get an injunction against releasing the data.

There are two key slides in the presentation. The first is a totally bizarre plan of attack on Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been an outspoken supporter of Wikileaks. However, these three companies seem to think that they can pressure him to give up supporting Wikileaks in this case and that will somehow solve a big part of the issue.

[[The graphic here in the original is now offline! Praise will accrue to anyone who finds it!]]

According to the Tech Herald, the word "disrupted" in the final presentation was actually written as "attacked" in earlier drafts of the presentation. This suggests some pretty confused thinking on the part of these firms. The idea that Wikileaks would "fold" without people like Glenn supporting them seems pretty silly, as does the idea that Glenn would suddenly give up the cause. Still, it's pretty freaking ominous for the firm to seriously be suggesting that it can somehow put pressure on Greenwald that would lead him to "choose professional preservation over cause." It makes you wonder just what level of underhanded tricks they were thinking about pulling.

Later on in the presentation is the plan to further disrupt Wikileaks, which is basically to create a propaganda campaign around the organization -- as if the press wasn't doing that already. They also have the idea to upload bogus info to Wikileaks, hope the bogus info gets released and then discredit Wikileaks by showing that it publishes bogus info.

[[another missing slide here!]]

Who knows? Perhaps this very presentation is faked and is all a part of HBGary's nefarious plan (since the document is available via Wikileaks...). Either way, the whole thing reeks of the types of organizations that think they're fighting a single, centralized foe, rather than a distributed movement that is interested in transparency. All of these attacks -- even if successful -- wouldn't do much harm to the overall efforts to increase transparency. Even if they succeeded in quieting Greenwald, others would continue to report on this. Even if they discredited Wikileaks itself (and many have tried), others have been springing up nearly every day to take its place.

It's not known whether or not BofA actually agreed to this proposal (or ever actually knew about it), though apparently HBGary Federal employees were hopeful they'd get the deal to provide these services. If so, going on to blab in the press about infiltrating Anonymous probably wasn't the best way of keeping out of the spotlight on these issues...

...........................................

Firm hacked by ‘Anonymous’ plotted against WikiLeaks on bank’s behalf: report

By Eric W. Dolan
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 -- 1:33 pm


Three data intelligence firms concocted a plan to attack WikiLeaks on behalf of Bank of America, according to a published report.

The three firms, Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, planned to "disrupt" Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald's support of WikiLeaks, create a disinformation campaign to discredit the secrets outlet, sow discord among WikiLeaks volunteers, and use cyber attacks to target the website's infrastructure.

The proposed assault on WikiLeaks, The Tech Herald reported, was revealed after the "non-group" of hacktivists known as "Anonymous" gained access to more than 44,000 emails from HBGary Federal's COO, Aaron Barr, after he said he had identified "core leaders" of the group. Barr also said he had information that could potentially lead to their arrest. The emails were released to the public in a 4.71 gigabyte Torrent file.

The emails show the proposal was developed at the request of the Hunton and Williams law firm, which had a meeting with Bank of America on December 3 to discuss legal action against WikiLeaks.

"They basically want to sue them to put an injunction on releasing any data," an email between the intelligence firms said. "They want to present to the bank a team capable of doing a comprehensive investigation into the data leak."



On November 30, just hours after Raw Story first unearthed evidence that WikiLeaks held data exposing corruption at Bank of America, bank executives held a late-night conference call to discuss damage control, the New York Times reported.

The bank's chief risk officer Bruce Thompson has since led a team of 15 to 20 senior officials at Bank of America to probe which executive's hard drive the anti-secrecy outlet might possess. The Times reported that the investigation involved "scouring thousands of documents" and tracing computers that had gone missing or were vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

The leaked emails also revealed that HBGary Federal planned to meet with Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm brought in to help manage the bank's internal review, a month after the proposal for attacking WikiLeaks was created.

The emails do not show what the fate of the proposal was, aside from a message that vaguely expressed hope HBGary was going to "close the BOA deal." Nor is there any information at the time of this story's publication to suggest that Bank of America was directly involved in developing the plot against WikiLeaks.

In addition to releasing internal emails to the public Sunday, "Anonymous" also hijacked HBGary Federal's website and associated Twitter accounts.

Their website was reduced to a single page that said the company was "working with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities and redirecting internal resources to investigate and respond appropriately" to the cyber attacks against them.

"Do I regret it now? Sure," Barr told Forbes Monday. "I knew some folks would take my research as some kind of personal attack which it absolutely was not. I thought they might take down our Web site with a DDoS attack. I did not prepare for them to do what they did."

Barr added that he had to unplug his home router because "Anonymous" was trying to crack it.

Raw Story attempted to contact Barr and Bank of America, but emails and phone calls to both companies' offices went unreturned at time of this story's publication.

A copy of the companies' report is available here (pdf file).
http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf

With prior reporting by Sahil Kapur.

LINK TO ARTICLE
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/data ... wikileaks/

Okay, so I downloaded the PDF from Raw Story and uploaded it to my own site, here:
http://summeroftruth.org/_RIstorage/Wik ... nse_v6.pdf

Now for some of the slides, which give important insight into the mentality, the sense of privilege that goes into an attack on the netroots (like ourselves!), with a barely-coded readiness to commit violence amongst the spooked-up thugs who provide protection for the corporate behemoths:



Primary Target: Start with Name, Date of Birth, Spouse and CHILDREN.
(That's where the leverage is, right?)


Secondary Target: Greenwald of "the liberal bent" - force him to choose "preservation over cause."


"Combating this threat requires..." "insider threats" (from whom to whom? ambiguous!) and "targeting analysis."


More "Strategy" - Divide and Conquer!


We Are the State!?
Now this is the most disturbing one with its implication that there is no special dividing line between spooks of the private-corporate and national security state: "...we must employ the best investigative team, currently employed by the most sensitive of national security agencies." This makes it sound like the "targeting" and neutralization of Wikileaks, Assange and Greenwald will be carried out by government spooks while moonlighting from their day jobs at the agencies, as is allowed at the CIA at least.


Find His Friends And Break Their Legs?


"Attack Vectors"


All that's missing is an ARG script. Or, perhaps, a car trunk upholstered in plastic garbage bags is more their style. They do claim to offer a full spectrum of services to power.

.

[Plutonia]

.
If any one-person operation on this planet is made to jiu-jitsu the following into a bodyslam for the corporate spooks, it's Glenn Greenwald.

This^

*Breathlessly waiting GG's shitstorm kung fu*