Who is Julian Assange? (WikiLeaks founder)

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkpoint-washington/2010/07/who_is_julian_assange_of_wikil.html?hpid=topnews

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz0unlrj5R3

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz0uoQcbANp





I guess when they make a film about him, Julian Sands can portray him?

This post is, of course, tangible to Sunday's release by Wikileaks of over 91,000 classified Afghan war documents.

The secret documents released by the group WikiLeaks.org reveal, in often excruciating detail, the struggles U.S. troops have faced in battling an increasingly potent Taliban force and in working with Pakistani allies who also appear to be helping the Afghan insurgency.

The more than 91,000 classified documents -- most of which consist of low-level field reports -- represent one of the largest single disclosures of such information in U.S. history. WikiLeaks gave the material to the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks ago on the condition that they not be published before Sunday night, when the group released them publicly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072601570.html?hpid=topnews

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/world/10wiki.html?_r=1&hp


December 9, 2010

Hacker Threatens More Attacks on WikiLeaks Foes

By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA

LONDON — In a campaign that had some declaring the start of a “cyberwar,” hundreds of Internet activists mounted retaliatory attacks on Wednesday on the Web sites of multinational companies and other organizations they deemed hostile to the WikiLeaks antisecrecy organization and its jailed founder, Julian Assange.

Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies,” as defined by the organization’s impassioned supporters around the world, caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly.

Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the Web site of MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Mr. Assange’s group. Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the Web sites of the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct are the basis of Sweden’s extradition bid.

On Thursday, Gregg Housh, an activist with the loosely affiliated group of so-called hacktivists, said the group was redoubling its efforts to bring down PayPal, which is better protected than some other sites. The assertion was backed up by an independent security analyst who closely monitors the Internet and saw evidence of the onslaught.

No other major Web sites appeared to be suffering disruptions in service early Thursday, however, suggesting that the economic impact of the attacks was limited.

The Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described “cyberanarchists,” antigovernment and anticorporate activists who have made an icon of Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian.

The speed and range of the attacks Wednesday appeared to show the resilience of the backing among computer activists for Mr. Assange, who has appeared increasingly isolated in recent months amid the furor stoked by WikiLeaks’s posting of hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Assange has come under renewed attack in the past two weeks for posting the first tranche of a trove of 250,000 secret State Department cables that have exposed American diplomats’ frank assessments of relations with many countries, forcing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to express regret to world leaders and raising fears that they and other sources would become more reticent.

The New York Times and four other news organizations last week began publishing articles based on the archive of cables made available to them.

In recent months, some of Mr. Assange’s closest associates in WikiLeaks abandoned him, calling him autocratic and capricious and accusing him of reneging on WikiLeaks’s original pledge of impartiality to launch a concerted attack on the United States. He has been simultaneously fighting a remote battle with the Swedish prosecutors, who have sought his extradition for questioning on accusations of “rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion” made by the Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the cases.

American officials have repeatedly said that they are reviewing possible criminal charges against Mr. Assange, a step that could lead to a bid to extradite him to the United States and confront him with having to fight for his freedom on two fronts.

The cyberattacks in Mr. Assange’s defense appear to have been coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely affiliated group of activist computer hackers who have singled out other groups before, including the Church of Scientology. Last weekend, members of Anonymous vowed in two online manifestos to take revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks.

Anonymous claimed responsibility for the MasterCard attack in Web messages and, according to Mr. Housh, the activist associated with the group, conducted waves of attacks on other companies during the day. The group said the actions were part of an effort called Operation Payback, which began as a way of punishing companies that tried to stop Internet file-sharing and movie downloads.

Mr. Housh, who disavows a personal role in any illegal online activity, said that 1,500 supporters had been in online forums and chat rooms organizing the mass “denial of service” attacks. His account was confirmed by Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., firm that tracks malicious activity on computer networks.

Most of the corporations whose sites were targeted did not explain why they severed ties with WikiLeaks. But PayPal issued statements saying its decision was based on “a violation” of its policy on promoting illegal activities.

Paul Mutton, a security analyst at netcraft, a British Internet monitoring firm, confirmed Mr. Housh’s account of the renewed attack on PayPal Thursday and said it had caused sporadic outages through the day. A spokesman for PayPal was not immediately reachable to confirm or deny the accounts.

The sense of an Internet war was reinforced Wednesday when netcraft reported that the Web site being used by the hackers to distribute denial-of-service software had been suspended by a Dutch hosting firm, Leaseweb.

A sense of the belligerent mood among activists was given when one contributor to a forum the group uses, WhyWeProtest.net, wrote of the attacks: “The war is on. And everyone ought to spend some time thinking about it, discussing it with others, preparing yourselves so you know how to act if something compels you to make a decision. Be very careful not to err on the side of inaction.”

Mr. Housh acknowledged that there had been online talk among the hackers of a possible Internet campaign against the two women who have been Mr. Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case, but he said that “a lot of people don’t want to be involved.”

A Web search showed new blog posts in recent days in which the two women, identified by the Swedish prosecutors only as Ms. A. and Ms. W., were named, but it was not clear whether there was any link to Anonymous. The women have said that consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual when he stopped using condoms.

The cyberattacks on corporations Wednesday were seen by many supporters as a counterstrike against the United States. Mr. Assange’s online supporters have widely condemned the Obama administration as the unseen hand coordinating efforts to choke off WikiLeaks by denying it financing and suppressing its network of computer servers.

Mr. Housh described Mr. Assange in an interview as “a political prisoner,” a common view among WikiLeaks supporters who have joined Mr. Assange in condemning the sexual abuse accusations as part of an American-inspired “smear campaign.”

Another activist used the analogy of the civil rights struggle for the cyberattacks.

“Are they disrupting business?” a contributor using the name Moryath wrote in a comment on the slashdot.org technology Web site. “Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.”

John Markoff and Ashlee Vance contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

December 9, 2010, 8:54 AM

Latest Updates on the WikiLeaks Saga
By ROBERT MACKEY

On Thursday, the fallout from the publication of secret American diplomatic cables obtained and distributed by the WikiLeaks Web site continues, one day after cyber attacks by the group’s defenders took down the Web sites of first MasterCard and then Visa.
10:38 A.M. 'Operation Payback' Announces Imminent Attack on Amazon

According to what seems to be a new Twitter account set up by the Internet activists who attacked the Web sites of MasterCard and Visa on Thursday, to protest their anti-WikiLeaks behavior, their next target is Amazon.com.

A message saying that Amazon's Web site would be attacked in two hours was posted about two hours ago on the Operation Payback Twitter feed (which is decorated with the pirate ship logo of Pirate Bay, a file-sharing Web site the activists formed in defense of)


Amazon was the first major corporation to stop providing Web services to WikiLeaks, after the online media organization began publishing leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. Amazon stopped renting server space to WikiLeaks after the company received a phone call from the office of an influential American Senator, Joe Lieberman - as the Taiwanese animators at the Web site Apple Daily have explained in their own not strictly factual way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0xLyoc9DxU&feature=player_embedded

10:18 A.M. WikiLeaks Statement on 'Operation Payback' Attacks
As The Lede noted yesterday, WikiLeaks refused to condemn the cyber attacks launched by its defenders, but said it had no connection to the activists carrying them out. Here is the full text of the online media organization's statement, which was posted on their Web site, Wikileaks.ch, on Wednesday, according to James Ball, a journalist who works with the group:

Wikileaks is aware that several government agencies and corporations, including the Swedish prosecutor, Mastercard, PayPal and State.gov have come under cyber-attack in recent days, and have often been driven offline as a result.

The attacks are of a similar nature to those received - and endured - by the Wikileaks website over the past week, since the publication of the first of 250,000 US Embassy Cables.

These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous' actions.

Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: "We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets."

10:02 A.M. Russia Suggests Nobel Prize for WikiLeaks Founder
While Russia plans to join China in boycotting Friday's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, to avoid honoring Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese political prisoner who won, a source in the Russian president's office has suggested that the jailed founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, should perhaps be nominated for next year's prize.

As Luke Harding of the Guardian reports:

In what appears to be a calculated dig at the U.S., the Kremlin yesterday urged non-governmental organizations to think seriously about "nominating Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate".

"Public and non-governmental organizations should think of how to help him," the source from inside president Dmitri Medvedev's office told Russian news agencies. Speaking in Brussels, where Medvedev was attending a Russia-E.U. summit yesterday, the source went on: "Maybe, nominate him as a Nobel Prize laureate."
Reports on the comments first surfaced on Russian government news sites on Wednesday.

On Thursday, as WikiLeaks defenders attacked Web sites that refused to help the online media organization in the name of free speech, the BBC reported that its Web site had been blocked in China. Western correspondents also said that television screens had gone black inside China as news of the Nobel Prize ceremony was broadcast on international satellite channels.

Mark MacKinnon, East Asia correspondent for Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Twitter:

CNN report on Nobel Prize blacked out. Returned for comments from Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, then black again as Liu Xiaobo's face shown.

Communist Party censors treating Nobel Peace Prize story with hysterical overreaction usually reserved for Tiananmen Square anniversary. ...

What gets me about blocking CNN and BBC in China is that it's mostly foreigners who watch these channels.

Memo to whoever makes my TV screen go black: We know about Liu Xiaobo. Your magic button can't undo that. Nor can it make me hate Norwegians.
9:23 A.M. Icelandic Company Facilitates Donations to WikiLeaks
From Iceland, Ice News reports that a Web services company that has been defending WikiLeaks, DataCell, has now moved on to helping supporters donate money to the online media organization without using credit cards. IceNews has this summary of an interview with a DataCell executive in the Icelandic newspaper DV:

Olafur V. Sigurvinsson, co-founder of the Swiss-Icelandic web host DataCell, says that donations to WikiLeaks have only been increasing over the last few days.

After both Visa and MasterCard stopped allowing donations to the whistle-blowing website, DataCell started helping people to donate directly by bank transfer. "The credit card companies are just not a part of the transactions. There are just as many donations as before, if not more, but they are just transferred direct," Sigurvinsson told [the Icelandic newspaper] DV. "We have assisted some 2,000 people with that just today."

He added that emails have been pouring in all day and that people are very upset because there is nothing illegal about WikiLeaks. "It is simply a human rights organization with freedom of speech at its core and there are lots of people who have Visa cards and want to spend their money supporting exactly this issue. It is understandably irritating when some credit card company somewhere decides what you are allowed to spend your money on. Will they ban us from buying chocolate next?"

9:18 A.M. Morozov Speaks

Evgeny Morozov, the author of the forthcoming "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom," whose Twitter feed is an invaluable resource to anyone following the debate/war over WikiLeaks, has been "Parsing the Impact of Anonymous," for Foreign Policy. He writes:

The impact of the recent wave of cyber-attacks launched by Anonymous on a handful of companies that dropped WikiLeaks as their client - Amazon, EveryDNS, MasterCard, Visa and others - is hard to gauge. I'm certain these attacks won't make any of these firms to reconside, strike peace with WikiLeaks, and offer them some vouchers in compensation. But could the attacks serve as a deterrent to other firms that have been considering dropping WikiLeaks?

Perhaps - but I don't know how many such companies there are. Right now, WikiLeaks is heavily dependent on Twitter and Facebook as their primary channels for external communications; it's these two firms that need to be watched most closely.
Mr. Morozov notes, though, that the attacks on credit card companies by the hacker group defending WikiLeaks, Anonymous, could risk changing the terms of the debate from freedom of expression to the security of the global financial system:

While the attacks targeted only the public web-sites of these companies - rather than the underlying infrastructure that allows card transactions to be processed - such subtleties are likely to get lost in the public debate. As far as policymakers are concerned, these attacks would be viewed as striking at the very of the global economy (even if they obviously aren't in reality). It's still not clear to me whether any credit card data has been leaked or compromised as a result of such attacks, even though Anonymous posted some links to such data on their Twitter feed. This too won't matter, as most people would assume that data has, in fact, been stolen. [...]

As far as long-term developments are concerned, I think that much depends on whether the WikiLeaks saga would continue being a debate about freedom of expression, government transparency or whistle-blowing or whether it would become a nearly-paranoid debate about the risks to national security. Anonymous is playing with fire, for they risk tipping the balance towards the latter interpretation - and all the policy levers that come with it.

8:52 A.M. Anonymous Speaks

As my colleagues John Burns and Ravi Samaiya report, on Thursday the BBC broadcast a radio interview with a 22-year-old British Internet activist who identified himself as a member of Anonymous, a group that has taken credit for attacks this week on the Web sites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and a Swiss bank, after those companies stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks. (The Times interviewed another Anonymous activist on Wednesday.)

The 22-year-old activist, who goes by the nickname Coldblood, also spoke to Josh Halliday of the Guardian on Wednesday and again on Thursday. Audio of their discussion on Thursday (embedded below) was posted on AudioBoo and on the Guardian's WikiLeaks live blog.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates

Rep. Paul Quotes Classified Cable on House Floor

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2011/01/paul_classified.html

Rep. Paul Quotes Classified Cable on House Floor

January 31st, 2011 by Steven Aftergood

Last Wednesday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) read brief excerpts from a classified U.S. State Department cable on the House floor. The cable was written in 1990 by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie and described her conversation with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein shortly prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It was released January 1 by WikiLeaks.

Since the cable specified that its “entire text” is classified secret, this means that by reading a passage or two from the document, Rep. Paul was technically publicizing classified information and introducing it into the Congressional Record.

This action was not nearly comparable in significance or audacity to Sen. Mike Gravel reading the Pentagon Papers into the public record in 1971. It would hardly be noteworthy at all except for the contrast it presents with current congressional guidance to avoid the material released by WikiLeaks altogether. The Senate Office of Security, for example, has directed that Senate employees should not even visit the WikiLeaks website, much less circulate its contents.

Like other members of the House of Representatives, Rep. Paul has taken an oath (under House Rule XXIII, clause 13) that “I will not disclose any classified information received in the course of my service with the House of Representatives, except as authorized by the House of Representatives or in accordance with its Rules.”

Presumably, Rep. Paul could say that he did not receive the classified cable “in the course of my service with the House of Representatives” and that it is therefore outside the scope of his oath.

“The secrecy of the [Glaspie cable] was designed to hide the truth from the American people and keep our government from being embarrassed,” Rep. Paul said, assigning malicious intent to the classification of the document.

But since many unembarrassing and uninformative documents are also classified, a better explanation might be that the application of classification controls today is indiscriminately broad, and that classification status is not a reliable indicator of sensitivity.

(…)

(I still think Julian Sands will be the perfect candidate to play Assange, when they make a movie about him.)

jojodjango wrote:





I guess when they make a film about him, Julian Sands can portray him?

Bill Maher too...