Julian Assange (left) is happy with a new offer from Sweden, his lawyers say. He's seen here with American linguist and writer Noam Chomsky on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder sought refuge to avoid extradition. Yui Mok/PA Photos /Landov hide caption

Julian Assange (left) is happy with a new offer from Sweden, his lawyers say. He's seen here with American linguist and writer Noam Chomsky on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder sought refuge to avoid extradition.

Julian Assange's lawyers say the WikiLeaks founder is happy with a plan to have Swedish prosecutors question him in London, after Sweden softened its insistence that he be extradited to answer sexual assault allegations.

Assange has been living in Ecuador's London embassy for nearly three years.

"He is willing to co-operate fully now in conducting this interrogation," Assange's lawyer, Per Samuelson, tells the BBC World Service. "This is a great victory for him."

From London, NPR's Ari Shapiro reports for our Newscast unit:

"Since 2010, prosecutors had insisted on questioning Assange in Sweden. Now they say they will question him and administer a DNA test in London.

"That's because the charges against Assange will expire in August, under Sweden's statute of limitations. Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny said in a statement, 'Time is of the essence.'

"Assange's lawyer Per Samuelson welcomed the move, telling the AP, 'This is something we've demanded for over four years.'

"The sexual assault charges are separate from accusations that Assange broke the law by publishing thousands of secret documents about American and British surveillance programs."

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Assange And Sweden Agree: He'll Be Questioned In London

Swedish prosecutors have offered to fly to Britain to question Julian Assange over sexual assault accusations, a move that could end years of political and diplomatic deadlock.

A formal request was made Friday by Marianne Ny, who leads the team investigating the allegations against Assange, to interview the WikiLeaks founder in London and take a DNA sample.

Prosecutors previously insisted any meeting must take place on Swedish soil.

Assange has been holed up inside the Ecuadorean Embassy since June 2012 as he fights extradition to Sweden to face accusations by two women of rape and sexual molestation.

He vehemently denies the allegations and says he fears that if he travels to Sweden he would be extradited to the United States to face prosecution on espionage charges related to WikiLeaks release of hundreds of thousands of classified government documents.

Assanges lawyers have repeatedly offered to let him be interviewed by Swedish prosecutors at the Ecuadorean Embassy, which has granted him political asylum, but those offers were rejected.

However in August the statute of limitations will run out on some of the lesser crimes he is accused of, which has seemingly forced the issue back to the fore.

My attitude has been that the forms for a hearing with him at the embassy in London are such that the quality of the interrogation would be inadequate and that he needs to be present in Sweden at a trial. That assessment remains, Ny said in a statement.

Now time is running out and I therefore believe that I have to accept a loss of quality in the investigation and take the risk that the hearing will not take the investigation forward, because no other option is available as long as Assange does not make himself available in Sweden.

Another factor leading to the change of tack is a decision handed down by Swedens Court of Appeal in November. The judge rejected Assanges attempt to have the warrant for his arrest quashed but strongly criticized prosecutors for failing to move the case forward.

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Sweden bends in Julian Assange case, asks for interview in London

Sweden's Supreme Court. Photo: TT

Sweden's Supreme Court has agreed to hear Julian Assange's appeal to have the European arrest warrant against him lifted, as the Wikileaks founder continues to fight extradition to the Nordic nation following rape and sex assault allegations.

Julian Assange is wanted for questioning in Stockholm following sex allegations made by two different Swedish women in 2010, claims which he denies.

Sweden's Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it would consider the Australian's appeal against the decisions of two lower Swedish courts, which ruled that an arrest warrant against him should stand, paving the way for police to question him in Stockholm.

In a statement it said that it had reached the decision in the light of the "conduct of investigations and the principle of proportionality".

He has not left the embassy for two years and according to Samuelson "he has not taken one step outdoors. He has not even leaned out of the window".

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Assange appeal to be heard by Supreme Court

Yet another twist, if you wish to call it that, in the case of Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange: The Guardian reports that a police letter has informed him he must present himself to a London police station on Friday at 11:30 am. Since last week, Assange has been seeking political asylum at Ecuadors embassy in London, to avoid extradition to Sweden where he would face police questioning about allegations of sexual assault in August of 2010 brought by two Swedish women.

Assange has claimed that the sex was consensual and that the two womens allegations are politically motivated. He has also accused Sweden of being a Saudi Arabia of feminism.

A spokesman for Londons Metropolitan police said thata surrender notice had been served this morning upon a 40-year-old man that requires him to attend a police station at a date and time of our choosing. The police also noted that this is standard practice in extradition cases and is the first step in the removal process. If Assange fails to surrender, the spokesman said that it would be a further breach of conditions and that Assange would be liable to arrest.

Ecuador has said that Assange is under its protection while it considers his asylum application and, indeed, so long as he remains in the embassys building he is beyond the reach of the police, according to the British Foreign Office.Ecuadors ambassador to the UK left London on Sunday to return home to discuss Assanges application for asylum.

A number of well-known Americans including Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, Danny Glover, Naomi Wolf and Bill Maher have signed a lettersupporting Assanges application for political asylum in Ecuador. Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and who has long supported Assange, has also signed the letter, as have about 4,000 others. On Monday,Robert Naiman, the policy director ofJust Foreign Policy, delivered the letter to the Ecuadorian embassy.

Stating that the US government had made no secret about its hostility to Wikileaks, the letters notes that there is a strong likelihood that once in Sweden, [Assange] would be imprisoned, and then likely extradited to the United States. Assange and his supporters have said that, were he to be extradited to the US, he could be charged and found guilty under the Espionage Act and sentenced to the death penalty.

Wikileaks is responsible for the largest leak of classified US military and diplomatic documents ever.

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Assange Requests Asylum in Ecuador

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Julian Assange has been at the Ecuadorian embassy for three years They granted the 43-year-old WikiLeaks founder refugee status British police cannot enter embassy near Harrods without permission Eight officers on duty assigned to at one time to Assange surveillance Surveillanceoperation so far cost tax payer a shocking 10million Met Commissioner complained it is 'sucking' police resources Swedish investigation into Assange could lapse in five years' time By then the Metropolitan Police bill could have topped 30 million

By Richard Pendlebury for the Daily Mail

Published: 18:11 EST, 19 February 2015 | Updated: 18:48 EST, 19 February 2015

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Wanted man: Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy - and the British police waiting outside to arrest him

Each morning, the glitzy London district of Knightsbridge plays host to a variety of uniformed rituals such as the troop of Household Cavalry jangling out of the Hyde Park Barracks on their way to Horse Guards Parade.

But rather less photogenic is the line-up of Metropolitan Police officers stationed 24 hours a day outside the Ecuador embassy round the corner from Harrods.

Their cordon is unlike any other police patrol in the capital. Rather than being deployed to repel intruders, the officers are there to make sure that one particular person is arrested if ever he leaves the building.

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How WikiLeaks fugitive Julian Assange could cost Britain £30m

HAMBURG Faced with increasing encroachments on privacy and free speech, high-tech workers around the world should identify as a class and fight power together, said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday.

In a video speech to the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) here, Assange drew parallels between the labor movements of the industrial age and the technology workers of today. As workers joined into unions to fight for better working conditions, technology workers should unite to fight government encroachments on Internet and speech freedoms, he said.

System administrators, who have access to confidential government or corporate documents, have particular ability to play a role in what he painted as a new class war, he said.

We can see that in the case of WikiLeaks, or the Snowden revelations, its possible for even a single system administrator to have very significant constructive effect, he said. This is not merely wrecking or disabling, not going on strikes, but rather shifting information from an information apartheid system from those with extraordinary power to the digital commons.

Joined at this CCC talk by WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who helped Edward Snowden in his flight from Hong Kong to Russia earlier this year, and by digital activist Jacob Appelbaum, Assange painted a picture of the coming years in near-apocalyptic colors.

This is the last free generation, he said. The coming together of the systems of government and the information apartheid is such that none of us will be able to escape it in just a decade.

Fighting this system by leaking information, where possible, or otherwise working for the cause of transparency was the only way to shape government systems in a positive way, he said.

We are all becoming part of this state whether we like it or not, he said. Our only hope is to help determine what kind of state we will be a part of.

Connecting to the conference over an often-broken Skype connection, Assange was speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder has been accused of sexual assault in Sweden, and Britain has approved his extradition. He has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, which cited fears of his otherwise being extradited to the United States, but has not been granted safe passage out of the country by the United Kingdom.

Hackers and technologists should accept jobs at intelligence and other institutions, in order to bring out more documents, Assange said in his video speech.

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WikiLeaks' Assange: Sysadmins of the World, Unite! | WIRED

Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have filed an appeal to Sweden's Supreme Court seeking to quash the 2010 warrant for his arrest on accusations of rape and molestation.

Assange's lawyer Per Samuelsson said he lodged the appeal with Sweden's top court on Wednesday afternoon to end the standoff.

The Australian remains holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London to avoid arrest and extradition, while Swedish prosecutors refuse requests he be questioned there.

"We have to end this - the situation is completely stalled, and that's the point we raised in our appeal," Samuelsson said in criticising what he called the "total passivity" of prosecutors who he said "have done nothing in four years".

With the law requiring judges to decide if they are legally competent to accept the appeal, Samuelsson said "the Supreme Court now has the ball".

The arrest warrant was issued in 2010 by Swedish prosecutors investigating a case based on one woman accusing Assange of rape and another alleging sexual molestation.

Assange, 43, refused to return to Sweden to refute the charges he adamantly denies on fears Stockholm would extradite him to the US to be tried for his role in WikiLeaks' publication of huge stores of classified diplomatic, military and intelligence documents.

In 2012, he sought refuge in Ecuador's British embassy to avoid arrest and likely forced extradition to Sweden.

He has proposed to testify in the Swedish inquiry from inside that mission, but prosecutors insist Assange must return to Stockholm to be interviewed.

Little has evolved since then and after a lower Swedish court rejected the warrant appeal in November, Assange's lawyer took the motion to the Supreme Court.

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Assange tries to have warrant quashed

A police officer guards the Ecuador embassy in London. Photo: Suzanna Plunkett/ReutersSUZANNE PLUNKETT

London: British police are reviewing the operation to guard WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the UK's most senior officer has said.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told LBC radio that the force is assessing its options due to the pressure the operation at the Ecuadorian embassy in London is putting on resources.

"We won't talk about tactics but we are reviewing what options we have. It is sucking our resources," he said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange conducts a news conference at the Ecuadorian embassy. Photo: Reuters

Assange has been at the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden where the Australian faces questions over claims of sexual assaults, which he denies.

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Last week Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the cost of the operation was around the 10 million (AU$19 million) mark.

Assange came under intense scrutiny after WikiLeaks began releasing a selection of more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables passed to the whistle-blowing website back in 2010.

Assange's supporters last year pondered whether he was to end his self-imposed embassy stay amid concerns over his long-term health.

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Julian Assange 'sucking police resources': UK cop

Canada might as well not have a border, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said, when it decided to deny the asylum petition of alleged Anonymous hacker Matt DeHart and then had him turned over to U.S. authorities investigating WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

In a report by CTV, the parents of DeHart said they only learned of his deportation to the U.S. when he was already at the border. They said their son asked to call his parents in Toronto before stepping over the border. One of the Canada Border Services Agency officers had been kind enough to lend him a cellular phone. "We prayed on the phone together. He said he knew he would be OK and God would take care of him,"Paul DeHart told CTV's Canada AM on Monday.

DeHart fled to Canada in 2014 ahead of a criminal trial on child pornography charges. But such were only false accusations, he claimed, meant to be used as leverage to push a probe into espionage and national security focused on his alleged involvement with the Anonymous and WikiLeaks hacker groups. He had likewise been alleged as to have leaked a number of classified U.S. government documents. While in custody in the United States, the former American serviceman in the Air National Guard claimed he was subjected to torture. The abuse of the law in DeHarts case is obvious, shocking and wrong, Assange said in a statement.

When DeHart was eventually freed, it was then that he and his parents fled to Canada. They filed with the Immigration and Refugee Board a request for his asylum, but was denied. The IRB, in a statement issued Feb 6, said it denied the request because the claimants were not Convention refugees and are not persons in need of protection. Various human rights experts and supporters had slammed Canada for its decision.

It raises important legal questions, including the behaviour of the Canadian asylum system in relation to the United States, the status of data couriers to WikiLeaks and other publications, the status of Anonymous members, the limits of state power during espionage investigations, the abuse of medical procedures, the use of deportation instead of extradition, the exploitation of the mentally vulnerable by investigators and the use of unrelated charges of a taboo nature during a national security investigation, Sarah Harrison, acting director of Courage Foundation and also a WikiLeaks editor, said.

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Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Blasts Canada For Denying ...

WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy is a 2011 book by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. It tells the story of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the leak by Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley) of classified material to the website in 2010. It was published by Guardian Books in February 2011.[1]

The book describes Assange's childhood and details about his work creating and expanding WikiLeaks. It explains how his surname comes from his stepfather, a "touring puppet theater owner", and not his biological father, a choice that Assange made himself.[2]

After the release of the book, Assange threatened to sue The Guardian, making a Twitter post on the WikiLeaks account saying, "The Guardian book serialisation contains malicious libels. We will be taking legal action." The Hindu writer, Hasan Suroor, said Assange's concern is that the book is "critical of [Assange's] robust style and his alleged tendency to be a 'control freak'".[3] One of the points of disagreement is that the book said he had initially refused to remove the names of Afghan informants from the Afghan war logs; the book reports him as saying they would "deserve it" if they were killed.[4]

In the book, Leigh mentioned the password to a set of unredacted classified US State Department cables. WikiLeaks had earlier distributed multiple copies of files containing all these cables, and others had mirrored their files with BitTorrent. WikiLeaks blamed Leigh and The Guardian for unnecessarily disclosing the password.[5] In response The Guardian said "It's nonsense to suggest the Guardian's WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way." According to The Guardian, WikiLeaks had indicated that the password was temporary and that WikiLeaks had seven months to take action to protect the files it had subsequently decided to post online.[6] Wikileaks replied that others posted the files online, and as they were publicly available, the password was still useful. The cables contained in the file had their original form and thus they did have all the names that were erased for the safety of the informants. Specifically, the book mentions about the password:

Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper: ACollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#. Thats the password, he said. But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word Diplomatic before the word History. Can you remember that?

David Leigh, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy[7][8]

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WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy ...