Wikileaks and Assange?

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Who else is following, ( and/or obsessing about :lol ), the Wikileaks and Assange story?

[ Edit: Another thread, on whether "Assange is Aspergers" or not has veered into an excellent discussion of the Assange and Wikileaks story too, from: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp3248808.html#3248808 ]

I only noticed the whole thing about 12 days ago! ( I don't watch the news much ).

But it's both absolutely fascinating and also really disturbing, about not only the war crimes and other abuses, corruption, etc exposed by Wikileaks, but also with respect to the freedom of speech/expression issue.

Julian Assange ( "leader"/founder of Wikileaks ) is being held in jail in the UK, for the tenth day running, ( in solitary confinement, with no access to internet or media ), by the British Govt/Courts *supposedly* because he is wanted for questioning by Swedish authorities about possible sexual misconduct allegations, ( under the recent European Arrest Agreement laws ), at the same time as the USA govt struggle to find/formulate a crime that they can charge him with and which would serve as grounds for an extradition to the USA.

Assange was granted bail by a British magistrate judge, under strict conditions, ( electronic tag, curfew/partial house arrest, and on receipt of £240,000 sureties in cash from various backers, John Pilger among them ), in a court on Tuesday, but this decision was appealed two hours later by the British Crown Prosecutors, ( supposedly on behalf of the Swedish authorities, who have not actually charged him with anything, simply want to see him for questioning ), and the Appeal Hearing is currently in progress under the Judge Ouseley.

What do people think is going on here? What do people think of Assange, and of Wikileaks in general, the USA's role in this, and the future of freedom of speech and the internet as a medium for that freedom?

PS. Who has heard about Bradley Manning, the young man in the USA who provided Wikleaks with the USA Diplomatic Cables in the first instance, and the video ( "Collateral Murder" ) of the killing of two Reuters reporters, an father and child and three other civilians by USA soldiers from an Apache aircraft? He has been in solitary confinement for the last five months since being charged with the leak, confinement in which he is forbidden to exercise, and has little or no reading material, etc.

Some links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKSvogif ... re=related ( second part of an interview with Assange on the leaked war videos ).

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 54109.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... aks-cables

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... with-leaks

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/12/ ... -internet/

http://studentactivism.net/2010/12/11/t ... leaks-why/

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... 14/manning

http://www.bradleymanning.org/about/

http://www.avaaz.org/en/wikileaks_petition/?rc=fb
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Last edited by ouinon on 18 Dec 2010, 8:30 am, edited 2 times in total.

PS. Assange has been released on bail, under strict conditions as detailed above ( electronic tag, curfew, daily visit to police station, and £240,000 in cash as surety ).

Next court appearance, for the extradition to Sweden for questioning, is in January sometime.

Apparently it may take some hours to process his release.
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Latest from the Guardian:

Hmm. I hope that the USA won't get an extradition order out in the meantime.

I like the bit about not being able to read a map, another piece of evidence for the theory ( discussed in this thread in General Discussion: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt146011.html ), that he is Aspergers/on the Autism Spectrum.
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All I have to say is Assange is a hero, and wikileaks keeps governments in check.

Assange should have been TIME's person of the year.

I picked Very interested, and pro-Wikileaks. I've followed the story before, but when he got arrested I was glued to any screen with internet, just waiting for updates and info. It was pretty much all I thought about for two days. I agree it's highly disturbing for a person to be treated like Assange is, all he did was provide information to the world, information that we all deserve to know. He exposed the atrocities that governments around the world do, but people are for some reason angry with him, not the governments, as if HE was the one experimenting on children in Africa. To me, he's definitely the person of the year (but no, let's give the title to the Facebook guy instead )

Totally agree.

Latest from The Guardian; surety arrangements more complicated, and difficult to satisfy, under the new bail agreement than under the one given on Tuesday:

ie. Assange is not yet officially free on bail.
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Me too, I've been glued to internet updates for hours almost every day, clicking from link to link, since I actually registered the story/case. I had a lot of catching up to do tho', because I simply hadn't noticed it at all before! :lol

I am impressed by how convincing and quietly effective Assange is in person, ( in videos of interviews with him ), because his appearance in photos/stills wasn't terribly appealing.

It's almost astonishing to see such a public figure, one making such an impact, with no "spin", no annoying physical mannerisms, no politician-style smarm, just totally "straight" and serious.
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Well, this is the excuse they have been looking for to regulate free speech on the Internet. Print out things while you still can. They have been hammering the agenda for the last two years in America.

I don't think that "they" needed an excuse; "they" have been regulating it increasingly for a few years already anyway, as became obvious when Amazon, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard among other large corps withdrew services ( servers, money-transfer agencies, publicity/networking, etc ), from Wikileaks this last month or two.

The internet is increasingly in the grip of very large companies like them, Shell, BP, and others too, whose interests are so closely aligned with the largely right-wing, or at best middle-of-the-road, govts of the USA and UK, that trying to say anything which they don't agree with is very difficult, and "being heard" more so if not impossible.

And the big newspapers, TV chains, etc, those with high visibility, have been increasingly in govt and big business pockets for several years now too.

Wikileaks has exposed just how regulated the media, whether TV, newspapers, or the internet, already are. In fact if Wikileaks had left it any later they might not have managed to stay online as they have done at all.

Just one example of such censorship: Facebook recently removed the FB "Support Bernard Manning" page, before reinstalling it but after freezing administrators powers, so that its administrators can no longer post on it.

Aswell as blocking Wikileaks own accounts, PayPal blocked the accounts of some individuals who had made payments to Wikileaks, and Visa and Mastercard refused to process payments to Wikileaks while continuing to process thousands/millions of payments to pornography sites aswell as to the KKK and racist white-imperialist organisations.

Much of the internet is already under the control of global corporations who are not interested in helping anyone speak out *effectively* or *powerfully* against their empire(s).

One of the links I posted in my opening post is to an article about how Twitter changed its "trending" algorithm(s) since the Iraq crisis, such that issues like Wikileaks, anything important which might emerge in one section of the population to start with and risks "interesting" other groups if tagged/identified as a "trend", no longer appears/"counts". Here is the link again: http://studentactivism.net/2010/12/11/t ... leaks-why/

Elected govt barely needs to do any regulating at all. The online newspapers and networking sites have managed to obscure this particular issue very successfully already ... Wikileaks remains such a small and single-group issue/hot-topic that it isn't trending on Twitter, and it is almost invisible on most of the online newspaper sites.

How many people here have heard of it, or care about it? There were less than a 100 supporters outside the Assange court hearing today.

Another example of how partial and biased the internet already is: what was supposed to be a National Day of Protest Against the Welfare and Housing Benefit Cuts in the UK yesterday went totally unremarked by all online news sources/national newspapers. It was invisible, "non-existent".
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I think it's hypocritical that when he exposed things on Kenya western governments/institutions did nothing but praise him, but now that he's exposing things about the US and the Afgan war they're having a major fit. I think its shameful that he was arrested. Where is free speech? Over the internet or in a newspaper it shouldn't make any difference, and it sets a bad example when the supposedly 'free' world does things that it usually accuses governments like Iran and China of doing. It would be best just to conduct business honestly so there is nothing to hide.

According to the Guardian Assange has just been released

+100000 on this.

This is gonna go down in history, it'll be in the text books 50 years from now.

Yay! Just in time to get to the place of curfew before the curfew falls! With just one brief big thank you ( I listened to it on Audioboo :lol ), to everyone who supported him in any way and a clear ref to Manning in solitary confinement too, when he says that "other people, in prison, in worse conditions ... need our attention too" before whizzing off.


Totally agree. I didn't know about the earlier Kenya leaks and the very different reactions to them. Interesting, damning too, as you say.
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Mildly interested, neither pro or con.

Nice pic of him leaving the Court House with rare smile: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Gua ... -o-007.jpg :lol
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A couple more links to excellent articles/blogs about the freedom of speech aspect of the Wikileaks case:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ric-holder

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-h ... 97436.html

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html

I am very glad/relieved that Assange has been released on bail for the moment, because to have carried on holding him would have been unusually harsh for someone not even officially accused of anything yet, ( and would have therefore been very suspect in view of the threats/menaces which have been made against him in the USA by politicians and high ranking journalists, and the attempts being made by the USA govt to formulate some sort of charge to make against him ).

However I did want to say that I do not ( at the moment ) subscribe to the view held by some that the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden are necessarily untrue, trumped up and/or part of a "CIA honey-trap", nor that the Swedish govt is in cahoots with the USA over this. I think that it is quite possible that Assange may have been guilty of some misconduct, and would like to see the allegations dealt with in fair trial, proper questioning/due process etc.

But, as Johann Hari said in his article; http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 54109.html , I don't think that the investigation into that behaviour, or any future charges/trial of that conduct, should deflect from the issue of freedom of speech and Wikileaks, nor should it excuse or serve as justification for or "hook" for imprisoning Assange, nor maligning or dismissing the work of Wikileaks.
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