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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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 Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 8:40 pm Post subject: Wikileaks Founder's Passport Confiscated. |
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Article here.
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This is a reminder that one can't run around exposing the secrets of the most powerful governments, militaries and corporations in the world without consequences (h/t):
The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.
Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.
However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy�s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter -- which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list.
The Australian document was so damaging because the Australian government claimed that the to-be-banned websites were all associated with child pornography, but the list of the targeted sites including many which had nothing to do with pornography. That WikiLeaks was then added to the list underscores the intended abuse.
Forcing Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks. One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world. Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies.
Secrecy is the crux of institutional power -- the principal weapon for maintaining it -- and there are very few entities left which can truly threaten that secrecy. As the worldwide controversy over the Iraqi Apache helicopter attack compellingly demonstrated, WikiLeaks is one of the very few entitles capable of doing so and fearlessly devoted to that mission. It's hardly surprising that those responsible would be harassed and intimidated by governmental agencies -- it'd be far more surprising if they weren't -- but it's a testament to how truly threatening they perceive outlets like WikiLeaks to be. I hope to speak with Assange later today and will provide more details as I know them. |
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Italy37612
Joined: 25 Jan 2010
Location: Somewhere
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| Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 9:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Figured something would happen to him sooner or later. I'm rather suprised he hasn't "disappeared" yet. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 8:41 am Post subject: |
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Yeah, Free Speech, who needs it ...
Most posters here support the fascist-socialist monster in some form or the other, and the end result is the same.
Liberty is an absolute.
If you support any government tax, rule, regulation or program as a desireable end, then you are a supporter of the state and of the ultimate demise of your own desired liberties.
Liberty or Statism.
There is no middle ground. |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 7:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Italy37612 wrote: |
| Figured something would happen to him sooner or later. I'm rather suprised he hasn't "disappeared" yet. |
Is the Pentagon after the founder of WikiLeaks?
Fri Jun 11, 3:50 pm ET
Where in the world is Julian Assange?
Yesterday the Daily Beast's Phil Shenon reported that Pentagon investigators are frantically searching for Assange, the white-haired and willfully inscrutable founder of WikiLeaks, in the hopes of stopping him from exposing more than 200,000 classified diplomatic cables: "Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website WikiLeaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast."
Manhunt! It has all the makings of a thriller: An elusive renegade, government agents, and thousands of poor State Department bureaucrats nervously awaiting the disclosure of their darkest secrets. But it would be a pretty short movie � if the crack Pentagon investigators charged with protecting our national security had done a simple Web search before contacting Shenon, they would have quickly found that Assange is scheduled to appear on a panel in Las Vegas this afternoon at the annual conference of the group Investigative Reporters and Editors.
(If Osama Bin Laden walked into the Pentagon, would they know it? - bac) |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 7:44 pm Post subject: |
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I guess you've seen the update:
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| UPDATE: The Daily Beast is now reporting that Assange canceled his appearance in Las Vegas "within the last several days," according to Investigative Reporters and Editors executive director Mark Horvik. That means the group has been using its Twitter feed to engage in a little disinformation. We imagine there's a disappointed Army Criminal Investigations Division agent lurking outside the Paris Las Vegas hotel right about now. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 7:50 pm Post subject: |
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| bacasper wrote: |
I guess you've seen the update:
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| UPDATE: The Daily Beast is now reporting that Assange canceled his appearance in Las Vegas "within the last several days," according to Investigative Reporters and Editors executive director Mark Horvik. That means the group has been using its Twitter feed to engage in a little disinformation. We imagine there's a disappointed Army Criminal Investigations Division agent lurking outside the Paris Las Vegas hotel right about now. |
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I hadn't seen that. I saw that Daniel Ellsberg vid above where he said that the guy tends not to show up in person but by skype. I saw the wikileaks twitter feed today when the guy said he'd be in Vegas and was quite surprised. If he really does have 250k cables (or even if not, really) he better be hiding out tight. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 8:17 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| bacasper wrote: |
I guess you've seen the update:
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| UPDATE: The Daily Beast is now reporting that Assange canceled his appearance in Las Vegas "within the last several days," according to Investigative Reporters and Editors executive director Mark Horvik. That means the group has been using its Twitter feed to engage in a little disinformation. We imagine there's a disappointed Army Criminal Investigations Division agent lurking outside the Paris Las Vegas hotel right about now. |
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I hadn't seen that. I saw that Daniel Ellsberg vid above where he said that the guy tends not to show up in person but by skype. I saw the wikileaks twitter feed today when the guy said he'd be in Vegas and was quite surprised. If he really does have 250k cables (or even if not, really) he better be hiding out tight. |
It only took the German police four years to learn to use Adobe Photoshop to unscramble CPN's face during his manhunt a couple years back. How long do you think it will take the Pentagon to learn to use Twitter?
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2010 7:40 am Post subject: |
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/22/2933892.htm?section=justin
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WikiLeaks founder drops 'mass spying' hint
WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has given his strongest indication yet about the next big leak from his whistleblower organisation.
There has been rampant speculation about WikiLeaks' next revelation following its recent release of a top secret military video showing an attack in Baghdad which killed more than a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.
Bradley Manning, a US military intelligence officer based in Iraq, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking the video but it is also claimed that Manning bragged online that he had handed WikiLeaks 260,000 secret US State Department cables.
In an interview with the ABC's Foreign Correspondent, Mr Assange said cryptically of WikiLeaks' current project:
"I can give an analogy. If there had been mass spying that had affected many, many people and organisations and the details of that mass spying were released then that is something that would reveal that the interests of many people had been abused."
He agreed it would be of the "calibre" of publishing information about the way the top secret Echelon system - the US-UK electronic spying network which eavesdrops on worldwide communications traffic - had been used.
Mr Assange also confirmed that WikiLeaks has a copy of a video showing a US military bombing of a western Afghan township which killed dozens of people, including children.
He noted, though, it was a very intricate case "substantially more complex" than the Iraq material WikiLeaks had released - referring to the gunship video.
European news media are reporting that Mr Assange has "surfaced from almost a month in hiding", speaking at a freedom of information seminar at the European parliament in Brussels.
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Daniel Ellsberg, named by Henry Kissinger as "the most dangerous man in America", told Foreign Correspondent that Mr Assange was "a good candidate for being the most dangerous man in the world, in the eyes of people like the one who gave me that award".
"I'm sure that Assange is now regarded as one of the very most dangerous men and he should be quite proud of that." |
I sure hope he has those 260k cables and just dumps them in a zipped up file and releases them. Assange is a hero. Wonder how long he'll live. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2010 9:45 am Post subject: |
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Interesting background.
Julian Assange and the Wikileaks agenda
Posted: 2010/07/13
From: Mathaba
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange came to the Centre for Investigative Journalism weekend school at City University last Friday to speak to a public audience. Assange is clearly making many more of these appearances in what might be called the Phase Two of the Wikileaks story.
In Phase One, Assange barely gave any interviews at all and was secretive about himself and his organisation. Phase Two began when Wikileaks had put more than a million documents into the public domain which organisations and governments had never intended to release and when the US government arrested one of Wikileaks alleged leakers in the American military. (Earlier posts on this here and here; whole Wikileaks story here). That phase has seen Assange come out his shell and switch from defence to attack.
Here�s a summary of what he said in opening. Wikileaks has focussed from the start, he said, on revealing documents which will have the largest effect when disclosed. Borrowing the language of economists, documents kept secret create value by defining what will have impact when revealed.
But from the start, Wikileaks saw itself in quite a different perspective from mainstream media, or from all other news media. Assange intended, he said, to set up a �real free press� for the first time � in the sense that sensitive revelations at that scale which could not be shut down have never been done before. Wikileaks invested effort, time and money from the start in setting up servers which cannot be interrupted or attacked. He also saw Wikileaks as an �advocacy group for sources.�
He indirectly justified Wikileaks refusal to discuss its personnel, operations or security methods by saying that he has a �duty� to maintain �institutional integrity�. He went further: he has �a duty to history.�
As you can sense, Julian Assange doesn�t think small. Wikileaks first focus has been countries where government was least transparent: China, Africa and some ex-Soviet states. Then they moved on to places where �the power structure is so sewn up that the press doesn�t matter much.�
That seems, broadly, to be the developed world. �It�s all bankrupt,� he said. We have to rethink our understanding of how political power works. �All current political theory is bankrupt, all political thought, because we don�t know what the hell is going on.�
You might have guessed by now that the established media are part of the problem. Journalists, he argues, are creating unreasonable public expectations. Their �original sin� is to enjoy the imbalance of power. Why does someone want to read what a jouralist has written? �They�re ignorant and you�re not. You know more.� There�s an imbalance of power.
Journalists treat readers as parents treat children. �You can�t lie but the opportunity to distort is large and prevalent.� The reader can�t see the whole picture so Wikileaks has to fill the gap. Once �primary source material� is up on the web, the �lying opportunities� shrink.
more at link |
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