Tag: wikileaks

Snowden wants to come in from the cold

Posted on March 4, 2015 by - News

snowdenUS spy agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is apparently negotiating a return to the US.
A Russian lawyer for Edward Snowden said the man who the US wanted to give the death penalty for leaking details of its spy schemes was working with American and German lawyers to return home.

Anatoly Kucherena, who has links to the Kremlin, was speaking at a news conference to present a book he has written about his client. Moscow granted Snowden asylum in 2013, which hacked off the US government no end. Apparently they had just found a nice out of the way place to dump his body after they “took him for a walk.”

“I won’t keep it secret that he … wants to return back home. And we are doing everything possible now to solve this issue. There is a group of U.S. lawyers, there is also a group of German lawyers and I’m dealing with it on the Russian side,” Kucherena said.

The United States wants Snowden to stand trial for leaking extensive secrets of electronic surveillance programs by the National Security Agency. Russia has repeatedly refused to extradite him.

Snowden has said in the past he would like to return home if he was assured he would be given a fair trial.

It is not clear what Snowden would get out of a return home. The US government still wants his blood and the only thing the US has promised so far is that it will not judicially murder him for treason.

Russian weather might be motivating Snowden to return, but being locked up and forgotten in a US jail must be a lot worse.

Google forced to turn over Wikileaks materials

Posted on January 26, 2015 by - News

Julian AssangeA secret search warrant from a judge in a US federal court forced Google to turn over Wikileaks’ emails and data.
But that happened in 2012, and it wasn’t tell the end of last year that Google felt able to tell Wikileaks it had given the US Justice Department including emails and IP addresses of three staffers at Wikileaks.
Wikileaks responded today by saying it was “disturbed” by the revelation.  Wikileaks said that social networking company Twitter had refused similar requests.
The judge stopped Google from telling Wikileaks about the court order but later rescinded this decision.
On its web site today, Wikileaks said its lawyers have written to Google and the Justice Department to protest the revelations.
You can find what Wikileaks has to say for itself, here.

 

Assange lobbies for a giant statue of himself

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

Julian AssangeNo-one can say that being locked up in the Ecuadorean embassy on the run from sex charges has damaged Julian Assange’s ego much.

The founder of Wikileaks wants people to invest their hard-earned dollars into the creation of a life-size bronze public artwork featuring himself, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

“A monument to courage” is a proposed statue by Italian sculptor Davide Dormino, entitled Anything to Say?, will depict the trio standing on chairs, with another empty seat beside them onto which members of the public will be encouraged to climb – allowing them to stand shoulder to shoulder with the whistleblowers.

We would have thought “oh for goodness sake” would have been a better title. Putting Assange in the same league as Manning and Snowden who actually paid the price for actually leaking documents is a bit unfair.  They are either in jail or in exile, for leaking documents. He is banged up in the embassy because he does not want to face questions about two women who laid complaints about sexual assault about  him.  He denies the charges but refuses to go court to face his accusers.

Organisers need £100,000 to complete the project, a sum they hope to raise by 1 January through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. With just 21 days to go, only £19,360 has been pledged – perhaps explaining why Assange chose to alert WikiLeaks’ 2.4 million Twitter followers to the campaign.

According to the Kickstarter page, the statue “is not a simple homage to individuals, but to courage and to the importance of freedom of speech and information”. The reason for the empty chair is that each of us can climb onto it to change our point of view.

“The work of art will travel from country to country and offer the opportunity for us to hear each other out and think.”

The idea for the statue came from Dormino and Charles Glass, an American author, journalist and broadcaster. British journalist Vaughan Smith, with whom Assange stayed while he was on bail in 2010, is organising the Kickstarter campaign. This is surprisingly forgiving of Smith, because when Assange skipped bail he left those who posted bail for him in the embarrassing position where they had to pay up.

“I got excited by it because I thought it was some art that suggested, rather appropriately, that these whistleblowers were our true friends rather than the politicians who pretend to be,” Smith told The Independent.

He added that most of the £100,000 for the project would go towards transporting the artwork around the world and that nobody was being paid for taking part. The rest of the money will go towards the statue’s creation at a foundry in Pietrasanta, Tuscany.

Oddly,Wikileaks will not get any cash out of the project and the sculpture has not worked out a way of getting a good image of Chelsea Manning, whose appearance has changed and there are not enough pictures of her.  There are shedloads of snaps of Assange.

Assange still faces extradition

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

Flag of EcuadorA Swedish court today confirmed that an arrest warrant against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange still stands, and the country wants him extradited.

Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London, faces charges of sexual assault, charges that he strenuously denies.

He jumped bail and sought sanctuary in the embassy two years ago.  He claims the reason why he’s avoiding extradition is because he fears he will be extradited to the USA to face serious secrecy charges.

The Stockholm court of appeal said that Assange is suspected of crimes of a serious nature.  It refused to withdraw the warrant because, it said, it fears he will avoid legal proceedings or punishment.

In 2012 he lost an appeal with the UK Supreme Court to avoid extradition and that’s when he took to the embassy, where Sweden, the UK and the USA have no jurisdiction.

The charges relate to accusations of sexual misconduct and rape from two women when he visited Sweden in 2010.

British police are waiting to arrest him and extradite him the moment he leaves the embassy.

Assange claims great escape

Posted on August 18, 2014 by - News

GreatEscape1WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he will “soon” get out of Ecuador’s embassy in London, although he is keeping the information how a secret, even after calling a press conference to discuss it.

Assange, who clearly does not understand the meaning of open disclosure, has been locked up in the embassy for more than two years to avoid extradition to Sweden on a sex case because he believes he is important enough for the US to bother trying to extradite him.

The US did not bother trying to extradite him when he was in the UK, which was far more likely than Sweden to hand him over.

The 43 year old, who is apparently sick with heart and lung problems, gave a press conference amid speculation in the tabloids that he was set to hand himself over.

Assange confirmed he is leaving the embassy soon, but not for the reasons that “the Murdoch press and Sky News are saying at the moment”.

Assange, was not going to tell anyone how he was getting out the embassy which made the entire press conference a waste of time. Instead the conference was yet another opportunity for the media hungry Assange to restate the same dull excuses for why he is the only person who should not face a court case when two people make a complaint about him

Police have been stationed at the compound since Assange requested political asylum from Ecuador in June 2012, ready to arrest him if he sets foot outside. He has cost the UK taxpaper a bomb and ironically that has meant that he has been effectively under house arrest.