Monthly Archives: March 2015

Julian Assange likely to remain at Ecuadorean embassy in London

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is likely to remain at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has taken refuge as long as U.S. authorities pursue a criminal investigation of his anti-secrecy group, one of his lawyers said.

Speculation rose that he might leave the embassy after Swedish authorities last week offered to question him there over allegations of sexual misconduct, dropping their insistence that he go to Stockholm for questioning about a 2010 incident.

He refused to return to Sweden, arguing that the Swedes would send him on to the United States to face possible trial. Assange, 43, denies the allegations, which are not related to WikiLeaks publication of U.S. military and diplomatic documents five years ago.

Michael Ratner, a U.S. lawyer who represents Assange and WikiLeaks, said if Assange left the embassy, where he has been holed up for just over 1,000 days, he was likely to be arrested by British authorities and risked being extradited to America.

Even were the Swedish case to be disposed of, the U.K. would arrest Assange upon leaving the embassy for claimed violations of bail conditions or something similar, Ratner told Reuters. Washington would almost certainly seek his extradition, he said.

Ratner said a recent federal court ruling disclosed that the FBI and U.S. Justice Department were conducting a multi-subject investigation of WikiLeaks and he said it had been going on for at least five years.

Another legal source close to Assange said he would remain in the Ecuadorean Embassy until the U.S. ended a grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys office in Alexandria, Virginia, said the investigation into WikiLeaks remained open. Other U.S. law enforcement sources said criminal charges had not yet been filed against Assange.

The sex allegations against Assange, who is an Australian, were lodged against him by two female WikiLeaks supporters who hosted him during a visit to Sweden.

British authorities have declined to say what they might do if Sweden were to close its investigation of Assange and he were to try to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

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Julian Assange likely to remain at Ecuadorean embassy in London

US Reportedly Threatened to Withhold Intelligence If Germany Gave Snowden Asylum – Video

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US Reportedly Threatened to Withhold Intelligence If Germany Gave Snowden Asylum
Make Sure to Subscribe to the New J.KNIGHT Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnLrtqd5qxC_f1lOnrybpnA There #39;s now a pretty clear reason why Edward Snowden hasn #39;t found asylum in ...

By: Dahboo777

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US Reportedly Threatened to Withhold Intelligence If Germany Gave Snowden Asylum - Video

Let’s Give Edward Snowden the Same Deal General Petraeus …

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General David H. Petraeus and Edward Snowden (Laura Poitras/Praxis Films)

General David Petraeus has agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified material and will serve no jail time for his actions. Lets give the same deal to Edward Snowden.

True, their crimes are different: Petraeus gave classified info to his biographer and girlfriend, Paula Broadwell. Snowden gave classified info to the American people.

Theres another difference: as The Washington Post reported, Petraeus initially lied to FBI investigatorshe told them he had never provided Broadwell with classified information. That was in an interview at CIA headquarters. Snowden in contrast told the truth about what he did, and why he did it. That was in an interview in Laura Poitrass Oscar-winning film Citizenfour.

And theres one more big difference: Snowden has done a lot more to defend Americans freedom than Petraeus ever did. In fact you might say Petraeus made America weaker as US commander in the Iraq war starting in 2007, a war that created more enemies for the US.

Petraeuss deal, as The New York Times noted, allows him to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a worldwide speaker on national security issues. A similar deal for Snowden would probably make him a worldwide speaker on national security issues, but without the lucrative element.

I'm not the first person to make this suggestion: Jesselyn Radack wrote about it in Foreign Policy (and she credits Peter Maass in The Intercept).

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And while were giving Snowden the same deal that Petraeus got, lets release Stephen Kim, whos serving thirteen months in prison for talking to a Fox News reporter about a single classified report on North Korea. Lets apologize to, and compensate, former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who served almost two years in federal prison from 2013 to 2015 for disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer to a freelance reportera name that was not published. While were at it, lets punish the torturers, not the people who leaked information about torture.

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5 Unsettling Works of Encryption Art

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Encryption is the process of encoding a message, and today we have incredibly sophisticated software and algorithms that make our encrypted messages almost impossible to decode. But how does it work? These art projects answer that question by exploring how encryption has become part of daily lives.

Once the domain of spies and engineers, encryption is now part of the art world. Artists are co-opting crypto tools to build installations, objects and sculptures that explore anonymity and digital surveillance.

Often the hardware and network infrastructure of encryption is invisible to us. These artists aim to change that by showing us what it really looks like, and how it really worksand in the process prove just how critical crypto really is.

In 2013, Der Spiegel published a long catalog of tools that the NSA uses to carry out digital surveillance. That leak served as a blueprint for artist Francesco Tacchini, who decided to reverse engineer two of those tools.

One, called CANDYGRAM, is used by the NSA to create a fake cell towerhelpful for tracking surveillance targets via their phones. Another, SPOOK-I, uses frequencies that humans can't hearbut that any gadget with a microphone can pick up. It "surreptitiously switches a target device's traffic from a cellular network's area of influence onto a surveilled radio frequency," according to the NSA's documents.

Tacchini describes his piece, SPOOK-I, as a joint "wireless jammer and sniffer." When you walk into the gallery, it jams your phone's Wi-Fi signal and throws your name up on a nearby wall. Soon, you'll receive an email from an @nsa.gov email reading "this device is now under surveillance: you have been added onto a radio frequency controlled by the US National Security Agency." Things only get weirder from there. Read more here, or over on Creative Applications.

If you've seen an aerial shot of the NSA headquarters recently, you probably have Trevor Paglen to thank. The artist (who you might better know from his work The Last Pictures), has spent the last few years focused on the agencies that surveil us, including renting a helicopter to take unprecedented aerial photos of the banal suburban headquarters of the NSA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

In his latest gallery show at Altman Siegel in San Francisco, Paglen is showing off something called an Autonomy Cube.

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5 Unsettling Works of Encryption Art