WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

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I personally think that if the US wanted him as bad as many here have said the US wants him, they would have taken him already. If they were going to bust him on bogus charges, and ask for extradition, it only hurts them to drag this process out.

Once again, as you say, your opinion, Art.
But mine is very different to yours.

If they opt for #3, I doubt Assange will go back to Australia where the government has already announced they are investigating whether or not he has violated Australian law.

There's been quite a backlash.

If Julian Assange wanted to return to Australia, eventually, my understanding is that he would be legally entitled to do so. And if the federal police were going to find something to pin on him, I think they would have found something by now.

I can't help but wonder if you're so caught up in these notions of conspiracy that you have to see Assange convicted to fulfill some sort of internal validation prophecy.

Because the term "backlash" has been used many times in this thread, how are we defining it?

But it is just your opinion at this stage, Art.
What evidence do you have to base it on?
I'd like to hear them.

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I can't help but wonder if you're so caught up in these notions of conspiracy that you have to see Assange convicted to fulfill some sort of internal validation prophecy.

And I wish you would desist from speculating on my motives for my views.
Are you going to start "badgering" about this, too?

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Because the term "backlash" has been used many times in this thread, how are we defining it?

You can " define it" anyway you choose.

I have posted enough material here & elsewhere on A2K to demonstrate there has been considerable opposition to the Australian government's original stance on Julian Assange.

I'm not interested in going over all that again at your request if you haven't bothered to read what I've posted.

Just say what you want to say & I will say what I want to say, OK?

My opinion on why he'll not go to jail?

I personally think that if the US wanted him as bad as many here have said the US wants him, they would have taken him already. If they were going to bust him on bogus charges, and ask for extradition, it only hurts them to drag this process out.

This has largely been a thread about people's motives olga. Plenty of speculation. I suppose you should not be speculating on the motives of others if you find it so impolite?

Don't lecture about badgering.

(02:55:07 PM) Manning: wl.org submission system
(02:55:23 PM) Lamo: in the massive queue?
(02:55:54 PM) Manning: lol, yeah, it IS pretty massive…
(02:55:56 PM) Manning: buried
(02:56:04 PM) Manning: i see what you mean
(02:56:35 PM) Manning: long term sources do get preference… i can see where the “unfairness” factor comes in
(02:56:53 PM) Lamo: how does that preference work?
(02:57:47 PM) Manning: veracity… the material is easy to verify…

...........
(2:04:29 PM) Manning: im a source, not quite a volunteer
(2:05:38 PM) Manning: i mean, im a high profile source… and i’ve developed a relationship with assange… but i dont know much more than what he tells me, which is very little
(2:05:58 PM) Manning: it took me four months to confirm that the person i was communicating was in fact assange

Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice

Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly "discovering" that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent "virtual" computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing – one day it will rain on your parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information". This led the New Yorker's Amy Davidson to ask whether "Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us"..........

Who's Afraid Of Wikileaks?
By Ben Eltham


The commentators and pollies lining up to condemn Wikileaks are showing their true colours. Will this all lead to a new contract between citizens, the state and the media, asks Ben Eltham

As The Guardian’s John Naughton has pointed out, there is a delicious irony to the relatively indiscriminate way in which Wikileaks has attacked the sacred cows of the left and the right. It was Wikileaks, remember, that published the hacked emails of UK climate researchers — leaks which commentators and politicians on the right were happy to seize upon as incontrovertible evidence of a giant cover-up in climate science.

Now that Wikileaks has turned the blowtorch on the cherished organs of US national security, those same right wing commentators are calling for punitive action to shut down the organisation.

Many on the left have been equally discomforted, as the confused and savage reaction of many in the Australian Labor Party demonstrates. As Simon Longstaff argued yesterday on The Drum, "it would seem incumbent on those who criticise Wikileaks to renounce the use of leaks in general".

As with every revolution, Wikileaks has also forced politicians, corporations and officials to make snap decisions about where they stand — and with whom they stand. In the case of US internet firms like Amazon and PayPal, that decision was to side quickly and decisively with the US government. Further down in his article, Naughton makes the point that:

the attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on … you should not put your faith in cloud computing - one day it will rain on your parade.

The other really penetrating account of Wikileaks comes from European media theorists Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens. In "Twelve Theses on Wikileaks", they make a number of telling observations — including that some of the most uncomfortable Wikileaks revelations involve the rapidly declining potency of the media itself. They write:

The steady decline of investigative journalism caused by diminishing funding is an undeniable fact. Journalism these days amounts to little more than outsourced PR remixing. The continuous acceleration and over-crowding of the so-called attention economy ensures there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are increasingly disinclined to see the workings and the politics of the global neoliberal economy discussed at length. The shift from information to infotainment has been embraced by journalists themselves, making it difficult to publish complex stories. WikiLeaks enters this state of affairs as an outsider, enveloped by the steamy ambiance of "citizen journalism", DIY news reporting in the blogosphere and even faster social media like Twitter.

Or, as Assange told the Sydney Morning Herald back in June, "how is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It’s disgraceful."

Instead, of course, much of the media coverage has concentrated on Julian Assange’s sensational personal conduct, and the sexual assault allegations levelled against him by two Swedish women.

This is a different — although obviously connected — issue. It should be possible to distinguish the Wikileaks website and organisation from the personal conduct of Julian Assange. If allegations presented to the British court by Swedish authorities are true — allegations which have yet to be tested — Assange has committed a crime.

It is frankly disturbing to see many on the left who one would expect to see defending the rights of women, like Naomi Wolf (Naomi Wolf!) make disparaging remarks about the seriousness of these allegation. One of the allegations is for a rape under Swedish law: a non-consensual sex act in which Assange allegedly forced the claimant’s legs open and of ‘"[used] his body weight to hold [her] down in a sexual manner." The facts of this matter can and should be established in a free and fair judicial process. But as a matter of principle, no should still mean no.......

Personally if Assange raped both or either woman he's a **** who should go to prison for rape.

I don't see the connection with the rightness or wrongness of the leaks.

WikiLeaks latest and bail appeal against Julian Assange: live updates

• UK, not Sweden, decided to oppose bail for Assange

• US prosecutors build a conspiracy case against Assange

• Latest cables show BP suffered another blowout

• Full coverage of the WikiLeaks cables

Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice

So the bail decision was not at the behest of Swedish prosecutors, at all.
The decision to keep him in jail was taken by British authorities.

Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice

Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for stealing content from other websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'thief') and pedia meaning 'children'; literally stealing content for perverting children's brains. Its logo is a spherical magical puzzle globe, named Merlin after the loyal wizard of King Arthur's court, which serves as a spoof of Uncyclopedia's hollow potato logo.

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WikiLeaks latest and bail appeal against Julian Assange: live updates

• UK, not Sweden, decided to oppose bail for Assange

• US prosecutors build a conspiracy case against Assange*

• Latest cables show BP suffered another blowout

• Full coverage of the WikiLeaks cables

* i read this as "if manning is ever gonna see the light of day again he'd better start concocting some kind of fabrication about how assange forced him to get those documents"

WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in Portland, Oregon in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."
Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual "card stacks" supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text."
In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning. There may be greater use of wikis behind firewalls than on the public Internet.
On March 15, 2007, wiki entered the online Oxford English Dictionary.