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Judge tells Julian Assange to have ‘courage’ to face court …

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Julian Assange should have the "courage" to face court after losing his latest bid to have his UK arrest warrant dropped, a judge has said.

Assange's legal team had claimed it was no longer in the public interest to pursue him for failing to answer bail as he fought extradition to Sweden in 2012.

But in a ruling at Westminster Magistrates' Court, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot said Assange believed he was "above the normal rules of law" and arresting him was a "proportionate response".

"Defendants on bail up and down the country, and requested persons facing extradition, come to court to face the consequences of their own choices," the judge said.

"He should have the courage to do the same."

She added: "He appears to consider himself above the normal rules of law and wants justice only if it goes in his favour."

After the ruling, Assange said he "surprised" at the decision and claimed the judgment contained "factual errors".

It was Assange's second failed attempt to have the arrest warrant dropped in a week.

Last week the same judge rejected his lawyers' claim that the warrant issued in 2012 was no longer valid because an investigation into rape claims had been dropped by Swedish authorities.

Assange has been living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than five years, fearing extradition to the United States for questioning over the activities of WikiLeaks if he leaves.

He has accused the UK government of a "cover up" to keep him detained and claimed his case had exposed "improper conduct" by the Crown Prosecution Service.

His barrister Mark Summers QC has alleged that emails showed a CPS lawyer apparently persuading the Swedish prosecutor not to drop the case.

He previously told the court that Assange had health problems, including depression, and that his years inside the embassy were more than adequate punishment for his bail offence.

The 46-year-old sought asylum in the embassy because he feared Swedish police would eventually send him to the US over WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of secret military documents in 2010.

The site released confidential information on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, provoking fury among US intelligence and defence chiefs.

Assange's lawyers believe there is a secret US indictment that will end up with him in an American court.

The UK government has not confirmed whether an extradition request exists.

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Judge tells Julian Assange to have 'courage' to face court ...

Julian Assange accused of cowardice by British judge – BI

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Julian Assange addressing supporters outside Ecuador's London embassy in May 2017. AP

A British judge has called out Julian Assange for cowardice after he decided not to come to a court hearing in which he asked police to give up trying to arrest him.

Emma Arbuthnot, who heard Assange's case at Westminster Magistrates Court in central London, said in a ruling that he "should have the courage" to appear in court like anybody else accused of wrongdoing.

Assange has been hiding out in Ecuador's London embassy for the past five and a half years in an effort to avoid an arrest linked to claims of sexual misconduct in Sweden.

He would likely be arrested if he were to leave and try to go to court, which is the course of action Arbuthnot appears to be recommending.

His lawyers were in court to ask Arbuthnot to cancel the arrest warrant against Assange, on the grounds that it was no longer in the public interest to uphold it. The application was declined.

In a document explaining her decision, Arbuthnot attacked Assange's character. She accused him of considering himself "above the normal rules of law" and challenged him to personally appear in court.

Here's the relevant passage:

"The impression I have, and this may well be dispelled if and when Mr Assange finally appears in court, is that he is a man who wants to impose his terms on the course of justice, whether the course of justice is in this jurisdiction or in Sweden.

"He appears to consider himself above the normal rules of law and wants justice only if it goes in his favour. As long as the court process is going his way, he is willing to be bailed conditionally but as soon as the Supreme Court rules against him, he no longer wants to participate on the court's terms but on his terms.

"I have had to consider whether it is proportionate not to withdraw the warrant for his arrest. On the one hand he is a man who has failed to attend court and has thwarted the course of justice but on the other he has been unable to leave a small flat for a number of years and is suffering physically and mentally as a result.

"Having weighed up the factors for and against and considered [Assange lawyer] Mr Summers' arguments I find arrest is a proportionate response even though Mr Assange has restricted his own freedom for a number of years.

"Defendants on bail up and down the country, and requested persons facing extradition, come to court to face the consequences of their own choices. He should have the courage to do so too."

Assange argues that he is being wrongly detained, and fears that handing himself over to British police would ultimately end in his extradition to the United States, where he could face harsh punishment for publishing state secrets.

Arbuthnot's ruling considered whether that was a credible fear, and concluded that "no evidence" that he would have been extradited without numerous other chances to defend himself.

Assange tweeted a number of times during the hearing. He can choose to appeal Tuesday's ruling, according to Sky News.

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Julian Assange accused of cowardice by British judge - BI

Export of cryptography from the United States – Wikipedia

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The export of cryptographic technology and devices from the United States was severely restricted by U.S. law until 1992, but was gradually eased until 2000; some restrictions still remain.

Since World War II, many governments, including the U.S. and its NATO allies, have regulated the export of cryptography for national security reasons, and, as late as 1992, cryptography was on the U.S. Munitions List as an Auxiliary Military Equipment.[2]

Due to the enormous impact of cryptanalysis in World War II, these governments saw the military value in denying current and potential enemies access to cryptographic systems. Since the U.S. and U.K. believed they had better cryptographic capabilities than others, their intelligence agencies tried to control all dissemination of the more effective crypto techniques. They also wished to monitor the diplomatic communications of other nations, including those emerging in the post-colonial period and whose position on Cold War issues was vital.[3]

The First Amendment made controlling all use of cryptography inside the U.S. illegal, but controlling access to U.S. developments by others was more practical there were no constitutional impediments.

Accordingly, regulations were introduced as part of munitions controls which required licenses to export cryptographic methods (and even their description); the regulations established that cryptography beyond a certain strength (defined by algorithm and length of key) would not be licensed for export except on a case-by-case basis. This policy was also adopted elsewhere for various reasons.

The development and public release of Data Encryption Standard (DES) and asymmetric key techniques in the 1970s, the rise of the Internet, and the willingness of some to risk and resist prosecution, eventually made this policy impossible to enforce, and by the late 1990s it was being relaxed in the U.S., and to some extent (e.g., France) elsewhere. As late as 1997, NSA officials in the US were concerned that the widespread use of strong encryption will frustrate their ability to provide SIGINT regarding foreign entities, including terrorist groups operating internationally. NSA officials anticipated that the American encryption software backed by an extensive infrastructure, when marketed, was likely to become a standard for international communications.[4] In 1997, Louis Freeh, then the Director of the FBI, said

For law enforcement, framing the issue is simple. In this time of dazzling telecommunications and computer technology where information can have extraordinary value, the ready availability of robust encryption is essential. No one in law enforcement disputes that. Clearly, in today's world and more so in the future, the ability to encrypt both contemporaneous communications and stored data is a vital component of information security.

As is so often the case, however, there is another aspect to the encryption issue that if left unaddressed will have severe public safety and national security ramifications. Law enforcement is in unanimous agreement that the widespread use of robust non-key recovery encryption ultimately will devastate our ability to fight crime and prevent terrorism. Uncrackable encryption will allow drug lords, spies, terrorists and even violent gangs to communicate about their crimes and their conspiracies with impunity. We will lose one of the few remaining vulnerabilities of the worst criminals and terrorists upon which law enforcement depends to successfully investigate and often prevent the worst crimes.

For this reason, the law enforcement community is unanimous in calling for a balanced solution to this problem.[5]

In the early days of the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies developed an elaborate series of export control regulations designed to prevent a wide range of Western technology from falling into the hands of others, particularly the Eastern bloc. All export of technology classed as 'critical' required a license. CoCom was organized to coordinate Western export controls.

Two types of technology were protected: technology associated only with weapons of war ("munitions") and dual use technology, which also had commercial applications. In the U.S., dual use technology export was controlled by the Department of Commerce, while munitions were controlled by the State Department. Since in the immediate post WWII period the market for cryptography was almost entirely military, the encryption technology (techniques as well as equipment and, after computers became important, crypto software) was included as a Category XIII item into the United States Munitions List. The multinational control of the export of cryptography on the Western side of the cold war divide was done via the mechanisms of CoCom.

By the 1960s, however, financial organizations were beginning to require strong commercial encryption on the rapidly growing field of wired money transfer. The U.S. Government's introduction of the Data Encryption Standard in 1975 meant that commercial uses of high quality encryption would become common, and serious problems of export control began to arise. Generally these were dealt with through case-by-case export license request proceedings brought by computer manufacturers, such as IBM, and by their large corporate customers.

Encryption export controls became a matter of public concern with the introduction of the personal computer. Phil Zimmermann's PGP cryptosystem and its distribution on the Internet in 1991 was the first major 'individual level' challenge to controls on export of cryptography. The growth of electronic commerce in the 1990s created additional pressure for reduced restrictions.

In 1992, a deal between NSA and the SPA made 40-bit RC2 and RC4 encryption easily exportable using a Commodity Jurisdiction (which transferred control from the State Department to the Commerce Department). At this stage Western governments had, in practice, a split personality when it came to encryption; policy was made by the military cryptanalysts, who were solely concerned with preventing their 'enemies' acquiring secrets, but that policy was then communicated to commerce by officials whose job was to support industry.

Shortly afterward, Netscape's SSL technology was widely adopted as a method for protecting credit card transactions using public key cryptography. Netscape developed two versions of its web browser. The "U.S. edition" supported full size (typically 1024-bit or larger) RSA public keys in combination with full size symmetric keys (secret keys) (128-bit RC4 or 3DES in SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0). The "International Edition" had its effective key lengths reduced to 512 bits and 40 bits respectively (RSA_EXPORT with 40-bit RC2 or RC4 in SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0), by zero-padding 88 bits of the normal 128-bit symmetric key[6]. Acquiring the 'U.S. domestic' version turned out to be sufficient hassle that most computer users, even in the U.S., ended up with the 'International' version,[7] whose weak 40-bit encryption could be broken in a matter of days using a single computer. A similar situation occurred with Lotus Notes for the same reasons.

Legal challenges by Peter Junger and other civil libertarians and privacy advocates, the widespread availability of encryption software outside the U.S., and the perception by many companies that adverse publicity about weak encryption was limiting their sales and the growth of e-commerce, led to a series of relaxations in US export controls, culminating in 1996 in President Bill Clinton signing the Executive order 13026[8] transferring the commercial encryption from the Munition List to the Commerce Control List. Furthermore, the order stated that, "the software shall not be considered or treated as 'technology'" in the sense of Export Administration Regulations. The Commodity Jurisdiction process was replaced with a Commodity Classification process, and a provision was added to allow export of 56-bit encryption if the exporter promised to add "key recovery" backdoors by the end of 1998. In 1999, the EAR was changed to allow 56-bit encryption and 1024-bit RSA to be exported without any backdoors, and new SSL cipher suites were introduced to support this (RSA_EXPORT1024 with 56-bit RC4 or DES). In 2000, the Department of Commerce implemented rules that greatly simplified the export of commercial and open source software containing cryptography, including allowing the key length restrictions to be removed after going through the Commodity Classification process.[9]

This section needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (October 2016)

As of 2009[update], non-military cryptography exports from the U.S. are controlled by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security.[10] Some restrictions still exist, even for mass market products, particularly with regard to export to "rogue states" and terrorist organizations. Militarized encryption equipment, TEMPEST-approved electronics, custom cryptographic software, and even cryptographic consulting services still require an export license[10](pp.67). Furthermore, encryption registration with the BIS is required for the export of "mass market encryption commodities, software and components with encryption exceeding 64 bits" (75 FR 36494). In addition, other items require a one-time review by, or notification to, BIS prior to export to most countries.[10] For instance, the BIS must be notified before open-source cryptographic software is made publicly available on the Internet, though no review is required.[11] Export regulations have been relaxed from pre-1996 standards, but are still complex.[10] Other countries, notably those participating in the Wassenaar Arrangement,[12] have similar restrictions.[13]

U.S. non-military exports are controlled by Export Administration Regulations (EAR), a short name for the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 15 chapter VII, subchapter C.

Encryption items specifically designed, developed, configured, adapted or modified for military applications (including command, control and intelligence applications) are controlled by the Department of State on the United States Munitions List.

Encryption export terminology is defined in EAR part 772.1.[14] In particular:

Export destinations are classified by the EAR Supplement No. 1 to Part 740 into four country groups (A, B, D, E) with further subdivisions;[15] a country can belong to more than one group. For the purposes of encryption, groups B, D:1, and E:1 are important:

The EAR Supplement No. 1 to Part 738 (Commerce Country Chart) contains the table with country restrictions.[16] If a line of table that corresponds to the country contains an X in the reason for control column, the export of a controlled item requires a license, unless an exception can be applied. For the purposes of encryption, the following three reasons for control are important:

For export purposes each item is classified with the Export Control Classification Number (ECCN) with the help of the Commerce Control List (CCL, Supplement No. 1 to the EAR part 774). In particular:[10]

An item can be either self-classified, or a classification ("review") requested from the BIS. A BIS review is required for typical items to get the 5A992 or 5D992 classification.

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Export of cryptography from the United States - Wikipedia

Judge refuses to withdraw Julian Assange arrest warrant …

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WikiLeaks founder continues to face arrest if he leaves Ecuadorian embassy as judge rejects request to quash warrant

Julian Assange will continue to face detention if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in London after a British judge upheld a warrant for his arrest.

Handing down her judgment at Westminster magistrates court, the senior district judge Emma Arbuthnot said she was not persuaded by the argument from Assanges legal team that it was not in the public interest to pursue him for skipping bail.

She said: I find arrest is a proportionate response even though Mr Assange has restricted his own freedom for a number of years.

Defendants on bail up and down the country, and requested persons facing extradition, come to court to face the consequences of their own choices. He should have the courage to do the same. It is certainly not against the public interest to proceed.

Assange, 46, skipped bail to enter the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault and rape, which he denies.

Though Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation against him, he faces arrest if he leaves the building in Knightsbridge, west London, for breaching his former bail conditions in the UK.

Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder had asked for the warrant to be withdrawn since Sweden no longer wants him extradited, but the judge rejected their request last week. Representing Assange, Mark Summers QC went on to argue that arresting him was no longer proportionate or in the public interest.

Summers said that the years Assange has spent inside the embassy were adequate, if not severe punishment for his actions, and cited a report by a UN committee that said the Australian national was being arbitrarily detained.

But the judge said on Tuesday: Firstly, he can leave the embassy whenever he wishes; secondly, he is free to receive, it would seem, an unlimited number of visitors and those visits are not supervised; thirdly, he can choose the food he eats, the time he sleeps and exercises.

He can sit on the balcony (I accept probably observed by the police and his supporters) to take the air. He is not locked in at night.

I suspect if one were to ask one of the men incarcerated in Wandsworth prison whether conditions in the Ecuadorian embassy were akin to a remand in custody, the prisoner would dispute the working groups assertions.

Summers also argued Assange was justified in seeking refuge in the embassy because he had a legitimate fear that US authorities were seeking to arrest him for WikiLeaks publication of secret documents.

He said Assange had made attempts to cooperate with the investigation in Sweden but had been refused, and that emails uncovered by a freedom of information (FoI) request showed the Swedish prosecutor had been advised by a case lawyer at the Crown Prosecution Service that Assange should be interviewed in Sweden.

It [the correspondence] records that the CPS had already advised that it would not be prudent for Sweden to try to interview Mr Assange in the UK, he said.

In October 2013, Summers added, Sweden advised the CPS lawyer that it was time to withdraw the European arrest warrant on the grounds of proportionality, but it was four years before it eventually was.

Obviously these emails are of interest to the court, Arbuthnot said last week. But on Tuesday she said: I accept that Mr Assange had expressed fears of being returned to the United States from a very early stage in the Swedish extradition proceedings but, absent any evidence from Mr Assange on oath, I do not find that Mr Assanges fears were reasonable.

I do not accept that Sweden would have rendered Mr Assange to the United States.

If that happened there would have been a diplomatic crisis between the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States which would have affected international relationships and extradition proceedings between the states.

Assange also suspects there is a secret US grand jury indictment against him and American authorities will seek his extradition.

Assanges lawyer Jennifer Robinson said before Tuesdays hearing that the US government had made clear its intention to bring a prosecution against WikiLeaks.

The UK FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] refuses to confirm or deny whether there is an extradition request for Mr Assange, she said. In our recent FoI challenge against the CPS [...] the CPS refused to disclose certain material because it would tip off Mr Assange about a possible US extradition request. It is time to acknowledge what the real issue is and has always been in this case: the risk of extradition to the US.

Gareth Peirce, one of Assanges legal team, said it would be possible to appeal against the decision.

Speaking outside the court, she said: Whether it is pursued is another question. The history of the case from start to finish is extraordinary. Each aspect of it becomes puzzling and troubling as it is scrutinised.

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Chelsea Manning files for U.S. Senate run – POLITICO

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Chelsea Manning, whose 35-year prison sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama during his final days in office, has remained an outspoken activist. | Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for OUT Magazine

By BRENT D. GRIFFITHS

01/13/2018 04:51 PM EST

Updated 01/14/2018 12:21 PM EST

Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman who was convicted in 2013 of leaking thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, has filed paperwork to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland.

Manning, whose 35-year prison sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama during his final days in office, has remained an outspoken activist on intelligence and transgender-rights issues. Her case remains deeply controversial, particularly among conservatives, who criticized Obama's decision.

Story Continued Below

Manning would be a primary challenger to Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Cardin has served two terms in the Senate and served two decades in the House. He won reelection in 2012 by just over 30 points.

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President Donald Trump has called Manning an "ungrateful traitor."

On Sunday, Manning officially announced her campaign with an ad featuring scenes of Manning in Maryland interspersed with images of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and protesters clashing with police.

"We need to stop expecting that our systems will somehow fix themselves," she said. "We need to actually take the reins of power from them."

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Chelsea Manning files for U.S. Senate run - POLITICO

Mining – Bitcoin Wiki

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Introduction

Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions (and a "mining rig" is a colloquial metaphor for a single computer system that performs the necessary computations for "mining").This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks.The block chain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place.Bitcoin nodes use the block chain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.

Mining is intentionally designed to be resource-intensive and difficult so that the number of blocks found each day by miners remains steady. Individual blocks must contain a proof of work to be considered valid. This proof of work is verified by other Bitcoin nodes each time they receive a block. Bitcoin uses the hashcash proof-of-work function.

The primary purpose of mining is to allow Bitcoin nodes to reach a secure, tamper-resistant consensus.Mining is also the mechanism used to introduce Bitcoins into the system:Miners are paid any transaction fees as well as a "subsidy" of newly created coins.This both serves the purpose of disseminating new coins in a decentralized manner as well as motivating people to provide security for the system.

Bitcoin mining is so called because it resembles the mining of other commodities:it requires exertion and it slowly makes new currency available at a rate that resembles the rate at which commodities like gold are mined from the ground.

Mining a block is difficult because the SHA-256 hash of a block's header must be lower than or equal to the target in order for the block to be accepted by the network. This problem can be simplified for explanation purposes: The hash of a block must start with a certain number of zeros. The probability of calculating a hash that starts with many zeros is very low, therefore many attempts must be made. In order to generate a new hash each round, a nonce is incremented. See Proof of work for more information.

The difficulty is the measure of how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the easiest it can ever be. The rate is recalculated every 2,016 blocks to a value such that the previous 2,016 blocks would have been generated in exactly one fortnight (two weeks) had everyone been mining at this difficulty. This is expected yield, on average, one block every ten minutes.

As more miners join, the rate of block creation increases. As the rate of block generation increases, the difficulty rises to compensate, which has a balancing of effect due to reducing the rate of block-creation. Any blocks released by malicious miners that do not meet the required difficulty target will simply be rejected by the other participants in the network.

When a block is discovered, the discoverer may award themselves a certain number of bitcoins, which is agreed-upon by everyone in the network. Currently this bounty is 12.5 bitcoins; this value will halve every 210,000 blocks. See Controlled Currency Supply.

Additionally, the miner is awarded the fees paid by users sending transactions. The fee is an incentive for the miner to include the transaction in their block. In the future, as the number of new bitcoins miners are allowed to create in each block dwindles, the fees will make up a much more important percentage of mining income.

Users have used various types of hardware over time to mine blocks. Hardware specifications and performance statistics are detailed on the Mining Hardware Comparison page.

Early Bitcoin client versions allowed users to use their CPUs to mine. The advent of GPU mining made CPU mining financially unwise as the hashrate of the network grew to such a degree that the amount of bitcoins produced by CPU mining became lower than the cost of power to operate a CPU. The option was therefore removed from the core Bitcoin client's user interface.

GPU Mining is drastically faster and more efficient than CPU mining. See the main article: Why a GPU mines faster than a CPU. A variety of popular mining rigs have been documented.

FPGA mining is a very efficient and fast way to mine, comparable to GPU mining and drastically outperforming CPU mining. FPGAs typically consume very small amounts of power with relatively high hash ratings, making them more viable and efficient than GPU mining. See Mining Hardware Comparison for FPGA hardware specifications and statistics.

An application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, is a microchip designed and manufactured for a very specific purpose. ASICs designed for Bitcoin mining were first released in 2013. For the amount of power they consume, they are vastly faster than all previous technologies and already have made GPU mining financially.

Mining contractors provide mining services with performance specified by contract, often referred to as a "Mining Contract." They may, for example, rent out a specific level of mining capacity for a set price at a specific duration.

As more and more miners competed for the limited supply of blocks, individuals found that they were working for months without finding a block and receiving any reward for their mining efforts. This made mining something of a gamble. To address the variance in their income miners started organizing themselves into pools so that they could share rewards more evenly. See Pooled mining and Comparison of mining pools.

Bitcoin's public ledger (the "block chain") was started on January 3rd, 2009 at 18:15 UTC presumably by Satoshi Nakamoto. The first block is known as the genesis block. The first transaction recorded in the first block was a single transaction paying the reward of 50 new bitcoins to its creator.

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Mining - Bitcoin Wiki

Judge Upholds U.K. Warrant Against Julian Assange : The Two …

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Julian Assange speaks to the media from the balcony of the Embassy of Ecuador on May 19, 2017, in London. Jack Taylor/Getty Images hide caption

Julian Assange speaks to the media from the balcony of the Embassy of Ecuador on May 19, 2017, in London.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lost an attempt Tuesday to have his U.K. arrest warrant dropped. He could still be arrested for leaving Ecuador's embassy in London, where he has lived for years.

British Judge Emma Arbuthnot said she was "not persuaded" the warrant should be withdrawn, according to The Associated Press.

Assange is a hero among hackers or undermines national security, depending on whom you ask. He drew international attention in 2010 for leaking thousands of classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents, which infuriated American officials. He has been holed up in the embassy as he faced separate charges.

The Australian was being investigated for rape in Sweden, which he has denied. That investigation was dropped last year after the prosecutor said leads had been exhausted. But the London Metropolitan Police said they would continue to enforce an outstanding arrest warrant, which was issued after he failed to appear in court in 2012. Assange had stayed at the embassy, fearing that extradition to Sweden could lead to an extradition by the U.S.

Last month, Ecuador granted citizenship to Assange after officials decided his living situation was unsustainable.

In 2016, a U.N. panel said that Sweden and the U.K. were arbitrarily detaining Assange, NPR's Leila Fadel reported.

There are no formal charges against Assange in the U.S., though news reports last year suggested the Justice Department was looking into it.

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We need to talk about Chelsea Manning – The Verge

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When whistleblower Chelsea Manning was released from prison last May, I penned an essay for The Verge titled One of Us about how she had become a hero, even a saintly figure to many trans women in particular. It was a testament to her courage and dignity amid Kafkaesque injustice, something I still admire in Manning. Many of us on the political left, desperate for a heroine in difficult times, were eager to put Manning on a pedestal elevating her to the sort of suffocating heights that almost inevitably precede a fall. Looking back on it now, it revealed a lot about the accelerant of social media, race, and gender, and how all three intersect with cults of celebrity.

Ive been reflecting on this a lot since the recent revelations that Manning had spent time with members of the white supremacist alt-right including sharing an escape room experience and visiting ones home to play board games. Her questionable fraternizing became public knowledge after she tweeted that she had crashed an alt-right party celebrating the first anniversary of Trumps presidency, because she had learned in prison that the best way to confront your enemies is face-to-face in their space. But critics quickly noted that this confrontation had not seemed very confrontational, and she had been photographed laughing, drink in hand, with Gavin McInnes, the founder of the white nationalist youth gang The Proud Boys. Even Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich claimed that he and Manning had shaken hands at the event.

In response to the immediate backlash including accusations that she was a turncoat Manning spoke with The Daily Beast, insisting she was not socializing but instead gathering intelligence on the extreme right (a tactic sometimes used by anti-fascist activists). I viewed this as an opportunity to use the celebrity and fame Ive gotten since getting out of prison to gather information and to ultimately find ways in which we who are against the alt-right can undermine the alt-right, she told The Daily Beast.

The reaction to this was as complex as it was furious and fiercely polarizing, shattering the fragile coalition of enthusiastic leftists and respectful but lukewarm liberals whose support Manning had enjoyed. Many queer women of color, myself included, were furious with Manning for her navet in engaging with white nationalists as a celebrity. White trans women radicals, meanwhile, by and large, closed ranks around her, insisting she had done nothing wrong and was, rather, a tactical genius. Many trans veterans, who never liked Manning to begin with, are crowing. Many mainstream liberals, including erstwhile supporters, have thrown her overboard entirely. Conspiracy theorists like Louise Mensch have argued Manning must be a Russian agent.

After a week, Manning herself seemed worn down by the fury:

But the fiascos implications go beyond Manning to the dissociative effects of hero worship, especially on social media; how they turn people into icons and symbols who are not permitted to be fully human, particularly when theyre asked to carry the unbearable weight of an oppressed communitys hopes and dreams.

When I wrote One of Us, Manning had just been released; I wanted to celebrate her new lease on life, and all I wished it could offer her.

The greatest gift we could give her is the ordinariness that is normally accorded to anonymity among the masses, a sense that she is not a holy woman whose every appendage is an icon to be treasured in some reliquary. One of us will have to mean something Chelsea Manning can rest in, can be herself in, can be flawed and silly in. Thats what she deserves, and it is what I hope to play some small part in giving her.

Instead, Manning underwent an apotheosis. But if we made her into an angel, blessing us all with her emoji-sprinkled tweets, it was because so many others cast her as a demon. This polarization was yet another variation on the ancient tug of war between Madonna and Devil that governs the image of all women; neither image is human, neither can contain our failures. For trans women, theres added pressure. Were disordered and diseased in the minds of some, fit only to be criminalized and institutionalized. The idealization of our luminaries can be more intense precisely because they radiate proof against such bigotry. They have to carry not just the weight of celebrity, but the image of an entire community that treats them as an emissary to a hostile world.

Social media only magnifies this objectification. At a certain level of fame, people become memetic ideas and symbols, content to be consumed, rather than fallible human beings. This isnt a new phenomenon for celebrities, but as with so much else, the internet democratizes this impulse and accelerates it to light speed. Every time we built Manning up as an icon with every like, every meme, every beatific tweet about how she could do no wrong we ensured that her inevitable fall would be that much more painful. Aided by social media, her Biblical arc, from Creation to Fall, only took eight months.

Ill never forget the furious reaction in some corners of the trans community when actress Laverne Cox repudiated a video where she read a letter from an incarcerated trans woman. Although she had intended to highlight the horrific conditions many trans people experience during incarceration, she later learned that the letter-writer had been convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of a child. One white trans man, a prominent figure in the small world of trans professionals, scorned her loudly and publicly for this decision. In his mind, she had caved to a pressure campaign from reactionary groups that wanted to tar all trans people as criminal and pedophilic. How can we ever trust Cox again? he thundered.

I remember feeling a bit put off by the mans fury. Why were you trusting her at all? I wondered. I reserve trust for friends and loved ones. Celebrities are merely people whose actions I have opinions about. But it hit on a critical dynamic in marginalized communities where our exemplars are not just seen as successful people, but avatars of our hopes and dreams, with expansive responsibilities to their community. We invest trust in them to stand for us because theyre one of us, a symbolic role that asks one person to contain all our humanities, with little room left for that of the host.

There is nothing to suggest Mannings radical convictions are anything less than sincere, but her actions were devastatingly naive. Nor was there much to be gained from her reconnaissance, per her reflections at The Daily Beast, save that [alt-right personalities] dont actually believe the things that they say. I just feel theyre opportunists and that they exploit their Twitter followers fears. This is likely true, but also not very pertinent. Alt-right extremists often use the intimation that theyre just kidding or trolling to slither out of being held accountable for their actions, as a leaked copy of the style guide for the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer makes painfully clear. Whether a mouthpiece believes what he says is irrelevant, their fans do believe it, and therein lies the harm.

Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, rule one of spying is that no one knows who you are. Leftist infiltration of fascist movements is a time-honored tradition, but such functions are best performed by activists who are not public figures; its not a job for the face of the movement.

On the night of the revelations, it was Mannings celebrity that opened the door for the alt-right to have a social media field day, alternately spreading transphobic abuse and loudly declaring that Mannings operation proved they werent hateful bigots after all. (We treated her well and didnt call her a man!) It was an embarrassing, easily avoided spectacle that created a massive headache for everyone in LGBT and radical politics. And, regardless of her intentions, she hurt people who looked up to her. As mistakes go, hanging out with extreme nationalists is quite severe.

What might lead her to take such a path? Her personality, celebrity, and prior incarceration may all have played roles. Celebrity culture can seduce a person into a lonely, distorted feeling of indispensability. When Manning saw the terrorism summoned by the alt-right and their Nazi allies at Charlottesville she felt she needed to do something; when she devised a plan, she carried it out alone. She left the network behind. In RPG terms, she split the party.

Had Manning stepped back and truly assessed her role as a node in a network, she might have realized that she could not do this alone, that there were a variety of jobs to be done, and that she was better suited to rallying people than personally infiltrating extremist groups.

And fame can be disorienting even without the utterly dehumanizing and stultifying effects of incarceration; Manning endured seven years of imprisonment, which totally disconnected her from the rapidly evolving online discourse around the extreme right. The 24/7 news stream of communication and debate those of us on the outside were taking for granted was denied to her. Then, suddenly, she was assigned a place of leadership in a world that was very different from the one she had left behind.

The thing people need to understand about Chelsea is shes still adapting to her role as a celebrity after years and years of being a prisoner and a soldier, a source close to Manning told me. Shes a human being and she struggles just like everyone else, but she also sees how high the stakes have become and feels like she cant just sit around while things get worse.

And yet, is dont hang out with fascists and let them use you really such a hyper-new norm in political discourse? For many queer women of color, it seemed there was an additional factor that could help explain the debacle idealistic white privilege gone awry. If you arent in a racial or ethnic group targeted by the extreme right, its a lot easier to indulge a certain innocence about the sheer depravity of these sorts of extremists. For the rest of us, knowing what theyre really about, and why you cant play nice with them, is drilled into us from birth.

I think Chelsea made a colossal error of judgment, not that shes a secret white supremacist, said Angela (a pseudonym), a trans woman of color and a prominent community organizer. She saw evil, decided she had to do something about it, and then rushed in Like a lot of young white radicals, she just didnt think the implications and consequences through. I do think the alt-righters were definitely trying to recruit her, or, failing that, wreck her credibility, and she played right into their hands poor judgment that did real harm.

Manning admitted as much, telling The Daily Beast, regardless of good intentions, I leveraged my privilege to gain access to spaces others couldnt dream of entering safely. Giving a propaganda tool to the extreme right, of course, is difficult to forgive for those of us whom they want to peacefully ethnically cleanse.

Still, there have been no shortage of defenders insisting that Manning did nothing wrong. When the photo of Manning at the escape room surfaced, for example, some leftists called it a terrible photoshop. It was later confirmed by The Guardian and Manning herself to be genuine. While its critical to stand with her against the deluge of transphobia that has been unleashed on her in the aftermath or the fatuous claims that shes a traitor or a Russian agent Manning is poorly served by enablers who insist that there was nothing for her to be sorry about.

She is not a demon beyond forgiveness; shes a person. But that means that she has to accept and learn from her mistakes. Those of us who support her, in turn, should also think critically about our own need to build up our heroes into infallible paragons. If she is to grow as a thinker and activist then she needs constructive critique from her fellow radicals, not a fantasy of infallibility.

I am not exempt from this reckoning. Was my own Manning essay hero-worship? Did I contribute to all those Chelsea is perfect memes that blossomed on Twitter? If Im honest, yes. Despite what I wrote at the end of One of Us, I knew she wouldnt retreat to happy obscurity and I was secretly glad she didnt. It felt like the trans community needed an angel of radical hope in the age of Trumps aggressive attacks on our humanity. But her canonization had consequences; were experiencing them now.

The way out of this wilderness is, as always, to keep the flawed humanity of heroes foremost in our minds. We can look up to them as role models, perhaps, and celebrate their successes, but it is too much to ask that we trust them or treat them as extensions of ourselves. The arms-length approach to activist celebrity now seems like the best model for all varieties of fame, one where a prominent figure is respected but never treated as familial or deific.

To do otherwise, I now realize, is to set ourselves up for a lifetime of little treasons. How else does one feel when a jealously guarded possession seems to rebel? I know I held so very tightly to my heroes adult-sized teddy bears to cling to during political storms but this is untenable, and unfair. To myself, to my community, and to them.

In the end, I can only speak for myself when I say this: Chelsea, I forgive you, and I let you go.

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We need to talk about Chelsea Manning - The Verge

British judge upholds arrest warrant for Julian Assange | Fox …

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LONDON A British judge on Tuesday upheld a U.K. arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, leaving him still a wanted man in the country where he has spent more than five years inside the Ecuadorean Embassy.

Judge Emma Arbuthnot rejected a call from Assange's lawyers for the warrant to be revoked because he is no longer wanted for questioning in Sweden over alleged sex crimes. It was issued in 2012 for jumping bail.

"I am not persuaded the warrant should be withdrawn," Arbuthnot told lawyers, journalists and Assange supporters gathered at London's Westminster Magistrates' Court.

Assange, 46, has been holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London since he took refuge there in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden. Swedish prosecutors at the time were investigating allegations of sexual assault and rape made by two women in 2010.

Swedish prosecutors dropped the case last year, saying there was no prospect of bringing Assange to Sweden in the foreseeable future. But Assange was still subject to the British warrant for breaching his bail conditions in 2012.

Arbuthnot said in her ruling that "the administration of justice can be undermined by defendants who fail to attend" court while free on bail.

"Mr. Assange is not present in court today," she noted.

The judge said that if Assange came to court, he would be able to argue his case and "put an argument for reasonable cause" for breaching his bail conditions.

After the ruling, Assange's lawyer, Mark Summers, tried to persuade the judge to hold a hearing on the bail-jumping case in Assange's absence. She didn't immediately agree.

Had the judge ruled in Assange's favor, he would have been free to leave the embassy without being arrested on the British warrant.

However, Assange suspects there is a secret U.S. indictment against him for WikiLeaks' publication of leaked classified American documents, and that the U.S. authorities will seek his extradition.

Earlier this month, Ecuador said it had granted the Australian-born hacker citizenship, as the South American country tried to unblock the stalemate that has kept Assange as its houseguest for five-and-a-half years.

Ecuador also asked Britain to grant him diplomatic status. Britain refused, saying "the way to resolve this issue is for Julian Assange to leave the embassy to face justice."

British prosecutors had opposed the removal of the warrant, saying Assange shouldn't be immune from the law simply because he has managed to evade justice for a long time.

Extradition lawyer Rebecca Niblock of Kingsley Napley said before the ruling that Assange's legal argument was a longshot.

"Failing to surrender to bail is like insulting the court's authority" and unlikely to go down well with the court, she said.

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Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder faces decision on …

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JULIAN Assange could walk free from the Ecuadorean Embassy where he has been holed up for more than five years, following a key judgment due on Tuesday, UK time.

The decision on whether a UK arrest warrant for Assange should be dropped could mean the Australian activist would be able to leave the Knightsbridge embassy as its the only remaining action hes got against him according to the UK Crown Prosecution Service.

It comes amid reports the WikiLeaks founder could have up to $25 million stashed in anonymous bitcoin accounts and has led to speculation over what he might do next.

Assanges UK-based lawyer Jennifer Robinson said regardless of Tuesdays decision, the central concern remains the risk of extradition to the US which the UK government has refused to confirm or deny is a possibility.

No one can credibly deny that risk. The US Attorney-General has said it is still a priority to prosecute Mr Assange, she told news.com.au ahead of the judgement.

The head of the CIA has described WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence agency. In these circumstances, we remain concerned about the risk of extradition to the US.

She said the team will continue to seek assurances he will not be sent overseas and remain very concerned about the health impact of having lived more than five years without access to outdoor space.

There is a grave threat to free speech. The US is seeking to criminalise the publication of information in the public interest by equating it with espionage. This must be resisted by all who believe in free speech, she said.

The comments follow a January 26 hearing in which Assanges lawyers argued the charges against him for skipping bail should be dropped because the original arrest warrant from Swedish authorities they related to has expired. The UK Crime Prosecution Service argued the 2012 warrant should stand and Assange should not be rewarded for simply outlasting authorities.

Outside the brick embassy with snowflakes swirling on a freezing February day, a huddle of Ecuadorean tourists who had come to see a slice of home were divided on the Australians fate.

I think it was good that he found a place to stay. We dont know why hes still here, said David, 33, from Quito. He said despite the ongoing legal drama in Britain, many at home are indifferent to the situation.

We dont care actually. People there are not so worried about international stuff. Its not an issue were talking about every day.

His friend Jose, 33, disagreed, saying most people dont agree with recent reports he had been granted an Ecuadorean passport and after posting a picture of himself in a football shirt on Twitter as Ecuador sought to resolve the situation.

He doesnt even speak Spanish. How can you get a passport from that country? I prefer that [he comes out]. It would be better for him and for our country, he said.

Others seemed incredulous the internet activist was still inside despite frequently passing the address.

To be honest I really thought he was gone, said John, 55, a black cab driver idling outside. To be stuck in a room for all that time is rough, but if hes got allegations of sexual assault he should have faced them.

Pascal, 21, who works at a European-style cafe serving croissants and luxury coffee within eyesight of Assanges balcony, said the five-year stay has been sentence enough.

It would have felt like [prison] to him, he said. Its a different kind of bars. Its prison its essentially the same.

Assange has not indicated what he would do if the judgement is in his favour, however if his tweets about bitcoin are to be believed, he could be rich enough to buy his own island to retire to.

In October, he claimed WikiLeaks had made a 50,000 per cent return after investing in bitcoin in 2010, with recent reports his fortune may have soared to $25 million or more. Hes also been able to maintain a strong profile in recent years and appear in keynote speeches via video link.

Last week he tweeted a link to an interview featuring musician David Thrussell who called Australia a nation of sheep where you could light their asses on fire and they would not notice with the comment the truth about Australia.

While a win would technically mean he could leave, its likely Assange would continue to seek legal assurances he would not be extradited upon release. A loss would mean a return to the status quo where he could face arrest for skipping bail and remain subject to covert surveillance from British authorities.

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Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder faces decision on ...


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