WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

If the US would just assure us that he would not be extradited from Sweden, that would be reassuring.
Also, Sweden is refusing to give assurance that he will not be extradited to the US, if he goes there to face charges.
And you can't see what the concern is?
It would be so easy for both governments to defuse any so-called "conspiracy theories" (in light of the Stratfor emails) by simply stating that he will not be extradited to the US.
As simple as that.
Why won't they do it?
.

Robert, all of what you are saying relies upon those who want him gone, to be acting legally and with humanity.

Assuming that the alphabet soup orgs will do that, in a declared time of war, is not just presumptious, but ridiculous.

You keep going back to the Swedish girlfriends. They weren't streetwalkers, they were his girlfriends. Did you watch the video that msolga linked up for you? The charges aren't just ludicrous; they are insulting to anyone that takes the time to even cursorily peruse them.

The media knows how to get to you, and it's worked. I applaud your stance in sticking up for women, against sexual predators. Unfortunately, that is not the case that we have here.

If it was a serious case, the Swedes would have sent a representative to talk over the situation with Assange. They have not bothered.

Now, considering the animosity already evidenced against Assange, put yourself in his shoes for a moment. Would you be rocking up to an international airport, and pretending you'd end up at your ticket destination?

Why do you keep responding to me, asking me questions I have already answered* and ignoring my requests to not be drawn into arguments with you?

*the answer to your question is in a link I already gave you. There is no such legal instrument and that demand is nonsensical:



Furthermore, it would be easier for the US to extradite him from the UK instead of Sweden, so if the US really wanted to do so doing it while he was in the UK was a better opportunity than trying to get him via Sweden, where it would have faced additional legal challenges. The conspiracy theory just doesn't make any sense.

Again, I urge you to watch this ABC 4 Corners program, Robert.
It was produced by the national broadcaster in Oz, a very respectable media organisation ... hardly some crank group!

Sex, Lies and Julian Assange:
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/07/19/3549280.htm

Nope, just needs a bit more critical thinking on the subject than you are capable of. Your conspiracy theory just doesn't make sense and you just instinctively dismiss any criticism of Assange with that logical fallacy (it's an ad hominem, you just attack the messengers each time).



I have seen the documentary, if that is what you are talking about. I don't think trial by some documentary is a way to judge sex crimes either. And the notion that just because they weren't prostitutes means they weren't raped is troglodytic. You have blindly made up your mind about the veracity of the charges but that you aren't willing to have them have their day in court is my qualm. Who cares what you or I think happened that is not a civilized way to adjudicate such a thing. My qualm is with the willingness to give him a pass on facing justice because of such fanciful and idiotic conspiracy theories.

I find this position reprehensible. Throw the girls under the bus because of your blind ideology and belief that the real world certainly reconciles with it.

A pity, because I share both of your ideology on the matter, just not the willingness to throw reason out the window and blindly support the people who don the mantle of the causes we support.



You know the damn media, they have charts on just how to convince me that rape is something better judged in court than on internet forums.



Says* the guy on the internet forum, in the most appropriate place to judge sexual crimes. Jesus, *******, Christ.

*in an ipse dixit, or bare assertion fallacy



This is just a plain falsehood. One I have already posted the refutation for. He is wanted for arrest, not questioning. He doesn't get to negotiate this.



http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2012/08/legal-myths-about-assange-extradition



I can make one of those loaded questions too: Consider the possibility that he is guilty of what he is accused of in Sweden. Would you then be "rocking up to an international airport" ready to have the world know that the women you threw under the bus as being part of a global conspiracy to get him were right and he really is the cretin they claimed and a liar about all this stupid conspiracy stuff on top of it?

Robert Gentel wrote;

You presented a laudable case, right up until the last line, Robert.

"all this conspiracy stuff" has been found in government documents. None of it has been fabricated, and certainly none of it has been denied. I do understand that video evidence has been edited to show the worst, but that happens in the MSM all the time.

Documented evidence, some of which has been redacted to protect various people, all came from government sources.

Yet you want to call it "conspiracy theory stuff"???

What would lead you down that path, Robert? Frustration, perhaps??

Yeah, I'm just frustrated and manipulated by the "main stream media" into believing that the appropriate venue for adjudication of criminal responsibility is a court of law, not some documentary, not nationalist popular opinion. Rule of law was sold to me by their clever manipulative minds and is actually a pretty horrible idea....

Just like I don't think Lance Armstrong should be able to don the mantle of his cause to try to deflect the accusations against him Assange should not be allowed to elude his day in court just because he can convince people of a ridiculous notion that he should not have to do so because of some grand conspiracy.

That is what frustrates me, the stupid blind refusal to even let the man have his day in court. Your mind is made up, and you don't even want Mr. Aussie Hero to have to do that because he shares your world-view and it just wouldn't do to have such an ideological twin have to endure the inconveniences of a court of law. Just invoking the American boogeyman is enough and the women are lying tramps.

It really is frustratingly foolish for folks to forward this far-fetched fantasy. I'll give you that.

As for the notion that this whistle blowing just can't possibly go on without Aussie hero Julian, and that places like the NYT et all are not suitable places for such information, please see:

Pentagon Papers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

Deep Throat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat

Or even just recent more minor examples such as the recent NYT coverage of Obama's drone war. Obama's was furious about the information they were able to get in a series of great investigative journalism that outed to the public Obama's personal role in each drone killing.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all

You can also just post your information anonymously on one of thousands of places online to do so (you can just make a new twitter of FB account, you can go to pastebin like I said earlier) and anyone can get a website up pretty easily to do this.

There are plenty of alternative sources for continued investigative journalism. Wikileaks did not invent it and it will not die with Wikileaks either.

The world is full of great journalists and organizations and hackers (want the information out? Anonymous is full of hackers that would help) and Wikileaks is merely one recipient of a big journalist scoop courtesy of brave folks like Bradley Manning. There are scores of other willing publishers of such information (witness the media frenzy on wikileaks material) the real limitation is folks willing to leak it. The limitation is not the medium but the information. And we should be talking about supporting folks like Manning and helping him get his sentence commuted instead of letting Assange piggy-back on the cause to deflect from charges of personal misconduct.

Making Assange out to be the inventor of this all and the only hope for investigative journalism is just unreasonable hero worship. No man is above the law but this man's supporters make him out to be the inventor of whistle blowing, deifying him to a position where he really shouldn't have to answer to pesky things like being wanted for charges of rape.

Firstly, Robert, I've been out of circulation for some years now, and I've only recently taken up the baton for exposing the corruption inherent in our supposed democracies. Your's being a democratic republic, of course.

Only recently did I actually realise that Assange was Australian. He certainly doesn't look like a typical Aussie. Nevertheless, his aquisition of these documents, the source of which you are still claiming to be conspiracy-based, is not in any way based on where he is from, and neither is my support for his cause.

He could be from Finland, for all I care. It's the CONTENT of his aquired documentation that interests me deeply, as it should to anyone who values their future as a resident of the western world. What scares most people about the documentation that he has aquired and shared with us, is that it is NOT a conspiracy theory. It shows quite clearly how successfully we have all been lied to, and continue to be lied to.

And yet, you expect me to now believe a new set of lies, generated by the same liars, who are hell-bent on getting rid of the source of their embarrassment, not in Assange, but in the documents of theirs, that he has aquired and is now sharing with us.

That is why both he AND his website, have been clandestinely declared enemies of the state.

Back to you.

So you are saying the women are lying about their allegations? That there should be no court case because you are already convinced, and ironically through the information you read in the "main stream media", that he is innocent?

If you believe it's all lies I find that something marginally reasonable to disagree about but believing it so with the degree of conviction that you are ok with him evading a court's opportunity to decide on the matter is just not within the same ballpark as what I would consider reasonable.

I would love to see him have his month in court, because that is how long these convoluted cases take.

The risk is, once he falls into the hands of the US alphabet soup group, he may possibly never be seen again.

I've read enough about the women's testimony to not be worried about the outcome. The worry is getting him TO the court.

If by "US alphabet soup group" you mean some kind of CIA rendition why wouldn't they have just done that in the UK? While he was staying house to house with different supporters? Or before all these charges when he was traveling freely? Why does the CIA need Assange to get extradited to Sweden in order to illegally kidnap him?

The not-so-secret (because most Aussies believe a version of it) CIA conspiracy:

1) convince some girls to have sex with him (just to get the plan going, of course, and they will have to put up with vile threats from Assange supporters and accusations they are lying but that is a small price to pay for the perfect plan to nail Assange and wipe that smug persecution complex right off his face)
2) convince them to bring fake rape charges as a small bit part in a long-con to get him later (though it is a bit odd that we don't just have the girls help us kidnap him now, I guess that would be too easy)
3) let him travel around a bit, and let it sit, our plans to kidnap him just wouldn't be complete without a bunch of easy chances to do so being passed up while the slow wheels of justice do their thing
4) let him get to the UK and refuse to answer the charges from there, might as well get a mexican standoff going
5) let him appeal the extradition in the UK on various grounds
6) let him hang out house to house so he lets his guard down, so we can get him later
7) once he has exhausted his appeals and is to be extradited...

We either nab him at the airport (we all know that's the only place in all that sequence where a kidnapping can occur) or, if that fails, we just then extradite him from Sweden, even though there's no real legal basis for that and it would have been easier to do from the UK.

The genius of this plan is that it's just nonsensical enough that he'll never see it coming. Except that he is the one that came up with this and it is basically his defense against answering rape allegations in the appropriate venue.

"They" (and it's not the CIA you have to worry about) need him alive, and responsive. His website ( I had a look today for the first time to see if ANON's claims of a java Pay Now banner were false) is set up by some of the smartest hackers in the world, so it's pretty much a fort knox of sorts. To get rid of it, they need Julian, and they need his assistance.

Drugs will only do so much. Oh, but does this kind of talk offend your sensibilities, Robert? Surely in such a developed nation there could be no way that anyone could give you psychadelic drugs to make you talk?

Let's instead focus upon the two former lovers, who possibly profitted greatly from making statements against Julian. I see them every week in the press, protesting loudly about their lament at their loss of dignity, and their shame at their forced public disclosure. Can't remember their names, though. Can you help me out there, Robert?

Because I think you are seeing things very conveniently, to suit your own biases about Julian Assange. And I think that the situation is much more complex than your "answers" address.

And also because the Swedish government has obliged deportation/extradition requests from the US before. I doubt that this case would be considered "legal" or right by the Swedish legal system or international law, or human rights organisations, either.:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_and_Muhammad_al-Zery

Why would the Swedish government not be so obliging to the US in Assange's case, given that he has been described as an "enemy of the state"? The same category as Al-Qaeda & the Taliban. (Ridiculous!)

I will put it as simply as I can:

If someone (Assange) cannot legitimately ask for a simple guarantee that he will not be extradited to a second country (the US) for entirely different & completely unrelated reasons to questioning he is required to undergo in the first country (Sweden) ... well heck, who could blame that person for not cooperating if he can't receive that guarantee?
(Remember, he has not been charged with any offence to date. To the best of my knowledge he is wanted for questioning in Sweden)

Especially when the implications of the charges in the second country (the US) are so horrendous - if you believe the Stratfor emails. And why shouldn't we? They've been published& taken seriously by "respectable" media in my country & in by international media as well.
Especially since these charges against Assange have not been openly declared, nor officially denied by the US administration.

It seems to me that that this matter could be very easily cleared up if both countries (the US & Sweden) could give the necessary assurances that extradition to the US will definitely not happen.
What's stopping them?


At the very least, Sweden could interview Assange abroad, at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. To establish whether there actually are grounds, or not, for charges to be laid against him to answer in a Swedish court of law.
Despite the earlier denials, it's a fact that Sweden authorities have interviewed people wanted for questioning abroad before now. They just don't want to do so in this case.

That is absolute nonsense. If they wanted the domain down they could just seize it just like they do with poker sites or like they did with mega upload.

This is an area I have a lot of expertise in and it's just absolute nonsense that he is needed alive to dismantle his site or that the site is any kind of "fort knox" of websites.

The technology just doesn't work the way you are claiming. You aren't just stringing me on intentionally, seeing how ludicrous a position you can get me to argue with you about, are you?



Talk about what? The US knows all he knows (it leaked from the US government, after all) and where he got it (they have the guy locked up). This fantasy of yours makes less and less sense the more you talk about it.



So not only do you want to call them liars you want me to name the potential rape victims? I'll pass. I don't look good in tin foil hats.

You're starting to put words into my mouth, Robert. Not fair.

You say that your main concern is with the plaintifs in two molestation cases, and yet you don't know their names, or the circumstances surrounding their claims?

If, as you claim, you think that wikileaks' website could be easily taken down, then explain why it hasn't happened. It's bullet-proof, unlike several government sites that have been done over as recently as last week.

The "technology" doesn't work the way that I'm claiming, because I made no claims. The fact that you aren't yet up with what these guys are capable of, is not my concern. The site remains.

On the leaked documents; in your last post they were "those stupid conspiracy theories" and in this post "The US knows all he knows (it leaked from the US government, after all)"

Those are your words, aren't they, Robert? The post I'm responding to, right? But you're still claiming this is "some fantasy of mine"??? You're classic, you know that?

Not only do you look great in a tinfoil hat, you'd be great as the defense counsel for two girls who you've done no research about whatsoever. You've reached a conclusion based on lies, from now-established liars, and you're convinced of the accuracy of those lies.

Welcome to Amurika, Robert.

And you've had your say about it, and I have replied to you at much more length than I had any desire to. Why do you insist on talking to someone who has repeatedly expressed robust disinterest in doing so? You are the only person on the internet with the perfect storm of characteristics that has ever made me use an ignore feature. I've told you that after years of never being able to find ways to agree to disagree with you without a lot of unwanted drama, I'd rather just avoid it altogether. But despite years of not replying you keep trying to bait me into a discussion. This obdurate nature of yours is one of the reasons I don't want to go back to beating dead horses with you. You've had your say. You think this is some conspiracy. You've posted the same crappy (full of weasel words) documentary over and over as if that somehow should mean he doesn't need to go to trial.

That's fine, but I don't think he should be let go on the basis of documentaries either, no matter how convincing they are in the court of public opinion. I think he should face justice and think the notion that this is a conspiracy is just risible. I've had plenty to say on why here and so have you and let's agree to disagree and hopefully agree to do so with even greater future infrequency. I certainly am not going to learn anything from you and you certainly aren't ever going to learn anything from me, there are more edifying pastures out there for both of us.

I don't see where I have.



That is not what I said. I said that is not appropriate to name potential rape victims. What is so hard to understand about that to you?



Because there is no legal basis to do so. If there were it would be just taken down, the US controls the domain registry it uses. They could just seize it like they did to megaupload.com (go there and see what it looks like).

The US has the technical ability and the authority to do that at any time it pleases with the site, what it lacks is the legal basis to do so.




You have no idea what you are talking about, but I do. I have built websites, I have hacked them, I have defended them against hacks. I happen to understand what you are talking about very well and it's completely nonsensical.

Anyone who knows a shred about how the internet works can confirm what I am telling you, Assange does not have some kind of "fort knox" that the USA needs to capture him alive and drug him in order to take down. They can just seize the domain name at the registrar anytime they want.

You are talking our your rear here and aren't willing to admit it, and would rather waste both of our time. You are probably mixing up the claimed "dead man's switch" anyway, but this is increasingly obvious that we are reaching diminishing returns.



You are one of those people who don't let not knowing a damn thing about what you are talking about get in your way. In any case the site has faltered on many occasions. See here:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/03/wikileaksorg-blank-dns-host-abandons-site/

You are just full of it, and can't help but know you don't know what you are talking about now, but won't let that stop you. You can carry on without me.

More obfuscation Robert? More avoidance of the real issues?

I don't have to be an "x-spurt" on anything to know about web hosting, and I've created blogs and php-bb's just like the one we are posting on. Websites on moodle for education lessons, and reply-only multiple-choice questionaires. You think you're the only one here who's played around with 'puters?

Read this, and get back to me.



The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against WikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.

The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.

Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with them.

On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch.

Julian Assange this morning said the development is an example of the "privatisation of state censorship" in the US and is a "serious problem."

"These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States," he warned.

The California-based internet hosting provider that dropped WikiLeaks at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday), Everydns, says it did so to prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense cyber attacks targeted at WikiLeaks.

The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name – wikileaks.ch, with the Swiss suffix. However, the new address still only points to an IP address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.

The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.

Late yesterday evening Tableau Software, a company which published data visualisations, pulled one of its images picturing the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables at the request of Senator Lieberman. Writing on the company's blog, Elissa Fink said: "Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organisations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website."

Mark Stephens, the London-based lawyer acting on behalf of Assange, wrote on Twitter after the shutdown: "Pressure appears to have been applied to close the WikiLeaks domain name."

Andre Rickardsson, an expert on computer security at Sweden's Bitsec Consulting, told Reuters: "I don't believe for a second that this has been done by everydns themselves. I think they've been under pressure," he said, apparently referring to US authorities.

A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain – wikileaks.dd19.de – also appeared on Friday morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.

In a statement on its website, the free everydns.net service said that the "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks by unknown hackers – who are trying to knock WikiLeaks off the net – meant that the leaks site was interfering with the service being provided to other users. That in turn meant that WikiLeaks had broken everydns.net's terms of service, and it cut the site off at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday).

DNS services translate a website name, such as guardian.co.uk, into machine-readable "IP quads" – in that case 77.91.249.30, so that http://77.91.249.30 will show the Guardian site. If the DNS fails, the site is only reachable via IP address – but WikiLeaks has not yet provided one via Twitter or other means.

Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".

WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."

The move comes after several days of WikiLeaks coming under a determined DDOS attack, apparently from hackers friendly to the point of view of the US government, which has disparaged the site's leaking of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

US companies have also come under intense political pressure to remove any connection to, or support for, WikiLeaks. Amazon ended its hosting of the cables on its EC2 cloud computer service earlier this week, but last night insisted in a blogpost that its decision was not due to pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, who has called for the removal of the data – and who has influenced at least one other US company to withdraw support for WikiLeaks data.

In a blogpost late on Thursday, Amazon said reports that government inquiries prompted it to remove the data were "inaccurate".

Amazon said:

"[Amazon Web Services] does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity". It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

It noted that:

"When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn't rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won't injure others, it's a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere."

But as commentators have pointed out, that stance is contradicted by the fact that Amazon has previously hosted the "war logs" from WikiLeaks which contained data about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service. WikiLeaks itself said on Twitter that the ending of DNS services was allegedly due to "claimed mass attacks" and called for further donations to "keep us strong".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-knocked-off-net-dns-everydns

This is not a blog we are on, nor is it phpbb. Anyway, you clearly don't understand how the internet works and decided to make it obvious today to all those who do with the "fort knox" nonsense and needing to get Assange alive to drug him fantasy.

Incidentally, the article you are asking me to read it is just a rehash of the very same events in the article I just posted to you (that's why they are both from the same day in 2010, for example). You are just making it even more obvious that you don't quite grasp the technology behind the claims you are making.