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Julian Assange costs Britain £6m in policing costs

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Guarding London building has cost 5.9m, including 1m overtime bill Met has stationed officers outside embassy since he entered in June 2012 Police would arrest him if he left and then have him sent to Sweden for trial He lives in small room in the embassy containing a bed and a treadmill

By Martin Robinson

Published: 07:55 EST, 25 April 2014 | Updated: 09:47 EST, 25 April 2014

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Shocking: Julian Assange speaks from the balcony of the Equador embassy in Knightsbridge in 2012 and police say guarding the building has now cost 6m

Guarding the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Julian Assange has claimed asylum has now cost taxpayers almost 6million, it was revealed today.

Metropolitan Police officers have been standing outside the Knightsbridge building since the WikiLeaks founder took refuge there in June 2012 - a vigil costing 11,000 per day.

The 42-year-old is wanted in Sweden after allegedly sexually assaulting two women in Stockholm in 2010.

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Julian Assange costs Britain £6m in policing costs

Cost of guarding Julian Assange soars to £6 million

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Scotland Yard said that 4.9 million of the bill resulted from the cost of diverting officers from normal duties to prevent the Australian-born 42-year-old escaping his west London sanctuary. A further 1 million has been spent on overtime.

Mr Assange has been holed up at the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden where he is wanted over sexual offence allegations.

He denies sexually assaulting two women in Stockholm in 2010 and claims the accusations form part of a smear campaign against him that could lead to him being extradited to America.

Ministers have said, however, that this country has a legal duty to enforce Swedens extradition request, which has been backed by the British courts. Met officers have been deployed outside the embassy as a result.

Baroness Jenny Jones, deputy chair of the Police and Crime Committee at the London Assembly, today condemned the cost and said it should be paid by the Government.

She said: It is complete madness when we are struggling to keep police officers on the beat. The cost is falling on the London taxpayers as a net police cost. He could stay there for years.

A Met spokesman said: The total costs provided are an estimate based on averages as actual salary and overtime costs will vary daily.

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Cost of guarding Julian Assange soars to £6 million

Assange at SXSW: ‘Who really wears the pants in the administration?’

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Julian Assange doesn't use the blustering rhetoric you might expect from the founder of the activist publishing groupWikiLeaks. Assange is responsible for leaking documents that have changed America's political landscape-- State Department cables and Iraq War logs--yet to a South by Southwest audience on Saturday, he spoke quietly and matter-of-factly even when uttering the most inflammatory statements.

"Who really wears the pants in the [Obama] administration?" Assange asked during a Skype call with the SXSW audience. "Is it the intelligence agencies or is it the civilian part of that administration?"

The obvious answer from Assange's perspective: The National Security Agency runs the show and would dig up any and all of President Obama's buried skeletons to force him out of office if he tried to disband the surveillance agency.

Assange, speaking from his home at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, said the NSA shouldn't be considered a rogue agency that will be reigned in. When an agency or individual goes against the grain, there are typically consequences handed down by the government. In the case of the NSA, however, this has yet to take place.

"Somebody is fired, somebody is forced to resign, somebody is prosecuted, an investigation is launched, or the budget is cut--none of those things has happened since the Edward Snowden revelations," Assange said.

Surveillance at the forefront of SXSW

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about the agency's surveillance programs are top of mind at this year's SXSW, which is typically a more lighthearted affair best known for helping Twitter and Foursquare to explode into the mainstream. Last year's highlights included a grumpy-looking cat. But along with Assange, this year's festival also featured Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt's thoughts on the NSA's fiber-optic wiretapping of Google data.

Snowden and reporter Glenn Greenwald are both scheduled to speak at the festival on Monday, though Snowden obviously won't be appearing in person.

Surveillance is a pervading theme at SXSW, but if the NSA runs the show and its data collection dragnet is inescapable, as Assange believes, then what hope do any Americans have of fighting back or changing the system?

But Assange still seems optimistic that change is possible. He pointed to journalists like Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who have worked with Edward Snowden to expose programs like PRISM and MUSCULAR and continue to carry out their journalistic duty even though they are essentially in exile.

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Assange at SXSW: 'Who really wears the pants in the administration?'

Julian Assange – NNDB: Tracking the entire world

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Julian Assange

AKA Julian Paul Assange

Born: 3-Jul-1971 [1] Birthplace: Townsville, Australia

Gender: Male Religion: Atheist [2] Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Hacker, Journalist

Nationality: Australia Executive summary: Founder of Wikileaks

Computer programmer and secretive hacker Julian Assange is the public spokesman for Wikileaks, an online publisher of classified documents, founded in December 2006. The site's funding is shadowy, its staff unpaid; it claims to be propagated on twenty separate servers worldwide, making it difficult to muzzle. According to Assange, the site's key collaborators know each other only by initials which might or might not represent their true names.

In its first few years, the site's major scoops included an operations manual from the US prison at Guantanamo, emails hacked from Sarah Palin's Yahoo account, interoffice communications from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, secret Scientology texts. Their biggest media splash came in April 2010 with the release of Collateral Murder, a first-person video of American soldiers killing Reuters journalists from a gunship over Baghdad. It was followed over the next few months by several large leaks, coordinated with major newspapers, of American military reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a slow leak of 250,000 classified American embassy cables.

Wikileaks is believed to have received more than a quarter of a million classified embassy cables from a 22-year-old soldier, Bradley Manning, who was casually outed after confiding in ex-hacker Adrian Lamo in May 2010 and is now facing charges in a military prison. In 2010, Wikileaks published a secret American intelligence document assessing the perceived risk the site presents to US national security. Assange has said that the site's occasional technical difficulties are a consequence of on-line attacks launched by US operatives.

Beginning in 2010, Assange battled extradition to Sweden, where he faces charges of rape and sexual assault, charges he claims are "without basis". On 30 May 2012, he lost an appeal before the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, leaving his extradition a near certainty. A few weeks later, on 19 June 2012, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has remained for more than a year.

[2] Per OkCupid profile.

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Julian Assange - NNDB: Tracking the entire world