News on Assange and WikiLeaks
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
How pioneering WikiLeaks collaboration ended in distrust and legal threats | Ian Katz | Media | The Guardian
Julian Assange with the Guardian the day the Afghan war logs were published. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images There are memorable episodes in the gestation of any big story: the breathless reporter arriving in the office with news of his or her catch, the fearsome legal threat landing in your inbox, the thrilling moment a scoop is unleashed into the world. For me though, the enduring, and still stomach-churning, memory from months of work on the WikiLeaks disclosures was the day I accidentally leaked the biggest leak in decades to the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson. If that sounds like an act of incompetence to rival putting 250,000 diplomatic cables on a database accessible by two million people, let me offer a few facts in mitigation. The Guardian has its own Nick Robinson, a senior production journalist.
Assange fights extradition at U.K. hearing - U.S. news - WikiLeaks in Security - msnbc.com
LONDON — The lawyer for Julian Assange argued Monday the embattled WikiLeaks founder would face a secret trial that violates international standards of fairness if sent to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations. Assange could also end up being extradited to the United States, where he could be executed, the lawyer warned at the first of a two-day extradition hearing. Assange, who has been free on bail under strict conditions since December, said at the end of the day he was confident the hearing would dispel the rape allegations hanging over him. "For the past five-and-a-half months, we have been in a condition where a black box has been applied to my life.
Julian Assange - Blackboard
Assange's parents ran a touring theatre company. In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician who belonged to a controversial New Age group led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His mother then took both children into hiding for the next five years.The Pirate Party will host several new WikiLeaks servers. This was agreed during Julian Assange’s visit to Stockholm last weekend, and the Pirate Party is happy to announce that everything has been finalized. The contribution of WikiLeaks is tremendously important to the entire world, says Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party in Sweden.
Swedish Pirate Bay to Host New Wikileaks Servers
7. Calling Assange a terrorist . Last week Vice-President Joe Biden, part of an administration that's overseen the escalation of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, joined Mitch McConnell and Sarah Palin in calling Assange a "terrorist." As far as we know, Assange's leaks haven't killed anyone.
Smears & Misconceptions
I’d like to ask Chuck Todd: if Bush had John Yoo write a memo opining that it was perfectly legal for Bush to deploy hit squads within the U.S. to assassinate American citizens without any due process, would it be wrong to investigate and prosecute that, too, on the ground that everyone had permission slips from a DOJ lawyer and that’s just what lawyers do? The current President has, of course, obtained his own DOJ permission slip to assassinate American citizens without due process. Since that permission slip is too secret for us to see, we do not know whether the authorized assassination power is confined to foreign soil or extends to the U.S., although once one embraces the Bush-Cheney-Yoo theory that the entire world is a “battlefield,” there is no coherent way to limit those asserted powers to foreign soil.
Anti-WL lies & propaganda
The Julian Assange before WikiLeaks - Oneindia News
Melbourne, Dec 11 (ANI): He has been labelled as 'the most dangerous man alive' by his increasing army of enemies and an 'apostle of free speech' by his followers. Now in a rare interview, a friend of Julian Assange has described what he was like in the years before WikiLeaks. He was apparently a brilliant, socially awkward crusader, a 'hard-core geek' who would rather interact with a machine than a person but who was also determined to change the world, reports News.com.au. Assange was described as a humanist, a man who serves no masters, a Renaissance man with 21st-century tools at his disposal, who 'decided early on that the world is not as fair a place as it could be, but that Internet provides a way of creating a more level playing field in terms of justice'. When asked about Assange's political beliefs, the friend said he flirted with the Left but became disillusioned.Runner-Up: Julian Assange - Person of the Year 2010 - TIME
Clarification Appended: Jan. 4, 2011 On Dec. 9, 2006, an unsolicited e-mail arrived for Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower of Vietnam War renown. The return address said only "WikiLeaks," and the signature at bottom, "WL."
Just a few months ago, most people had never heard of a Web site called WikiLeaks, or of its mysterious and eccentric founder, Julian Assange. But in that short period of time both have managed to rattle the worlds of journalism, diplomacy, and national security. WikiLeaks, which solicits and publishes secrets and suppressed material from whistleblowers around the world, has been under cyber attack from governments that want to shut it down.
Assange Denies Charges Central to U.S. Leak Case - 60 Minutes - CBS News
When online troublemaker Julian Assange co-founded Wikileaks, the net's premiere document-leaking site last year, some were skeptical that the service would produce anything of interest. Now, after 18 months of publishing government, industry and military secrets that have sparked international scandals, led to takedown threats and briefly gotten the site banned in the United States, Assange says Wikileaks is just getting started changing the world. "In every negotiation, in every planning meeting and in every workplace dispute, a perception is slowly forming that the public interest may have a silent advocate in the room," Assange writes. Launched in January 2007, Wikileaks was conceived as a safe place for whistle-blowers to reveal their secrets to the world. Today, nobody doubts that the site has had an enormous impact -- much of it good. But critics charge that Wikileaks' hands-off policy of publishing nearly everything that comes its way has turned the site into a free-for-all.
Immune to Critics, Secret-Spilling Wikileaks Plans to Save Journalism ... and the World