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Ex-Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer found guilty in WikiLeaks trial, avoids jail

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Found guilty of breaching secrecy laws ... Former Swiss private banker Rudolf Elmer arrives before a trial at the high court in Zurich. Photo: Reuters

Zurich: A former Julius Baer banker found guilty on Monday of breaching Swiss banking secrecy laws by handing over data about offshore clients to WikiLeaks will avoid jail time.

The trial of Rudolf Elmer, 59, a self-described "Gandhi of Swiss tax law", comes as banking secrecy in Switzerland is crumbling under international pressure from countries trying to recoup lost tax revenue.

The former senior executive at Zurich-based Baer's Cayman Islands office was accused of passing confidential information to WikiLeaks on two occasions, one in 2008 and another in 2011.

Elmer was found guilty of the charges relating to 2008 but not guilty in relation to 2011. He was also found guilty of forging a letter from Baer to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2007.

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He was ordered to pay costs towards the trial and was given a three-year suspended fine of up to 45,000 Swiss francs ($63,052). The prosecution had sought a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence, while Elmer's lawyer Ganden Tethong had argued for her client to be acquitted.

"The rationale from the court today has not convinced me," Tethong told reporters after the verdict. "I find (the prosecution) did not bring forward anything that would contradict what I argued."

Tethong said she would appeal the ruling.

During the trial, which began in December but was halted when Elmer collapsed outside the Zurich courtroom, Tethong argued that Elmer had not broken any Swiss laws because he had not obtained the information as an employee of a Swiss bank.

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Ex-Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer found guilty in WikiLeaks trial, avoids jail

LETTERS: Call it what it is: Treason

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An Ohio man and radicalized Muslim convert, Christopher Cornell, was arrested for plotting to attack the Capitol.

This is a treasonous plot to overthrow our government, but he will undoubtedly not be charged with treason. Others who should be charged with teason include Major Nidal Hasan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, American Muslim imams who support arming the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and all the American citizens who went to fight with ISIS.

But they wont be.

This is particularly the case with President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in office, who fail to support and defend the Constitution and the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. No one has been charged with treason for many years.

Why?

This is a serious matter that should be looked into by our elected representatives and the media. Our survival is at stake.

Daniel B. Jeffs

Apple Valley

Keystone pipeline myths

I would like to clear up a few of the comments made by John Berry [Aguilar fails to act on his promises, Letters, Jan. 13].

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LETTERS: Call it what it is: Treason

How Vivienne Westwood fell in love with Prince Charles

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For a designer who has long used the establishment as a frame of reference for reaction, Vivienne Westwood the anti-monarchist, anti-establishment, godmother of punk dedicating her autumn/winter 2015 collection to Prince Charles in celebration of his environmental work was always going to polarise fans.

I want to pay tribute to Prince Charles, wrote Westwood on a set of briefing notes (emblazoned with an image of Charles in a beret) given to guests at her autumn/winter 2015 menswear show in Milan. If Prince Charles had ruled the world according to his priorities during the last 30 years, we would be alright and we would be tackling climate change.

The T-shirts, worn under blazers and by Westwood herself, are part of a Westwood perennial of using fashion as a political vehicle; fans might recall tops embellished with I Am Not a Terrorist for civil-rights charity Liberty, and an entire collection in 2013 dedicated to Chelsea Manning. The rest of the collection, though, was relatively staid for the designer, referencing traditional royal sartorial norms: sharp Savile Row-style tailored suits, trad brocade florals on blazers and coats in a houndstooth print.

Given Westwoods history with the royal family she has twice attended Buckingham Palace with no knickers on, and has regularly goaded the establishment in various ways over the past forty years this homage might seem implausible. But she recently set her targets on the environment, and previously endorsed Prince Charles, saying he had done an amazing amount in this world.

Charles has long been an outspoken environmentalist, and was recently handed increasing responsibility of the Queens Sandringham estate as part of the gentle succession. He is expected to use the land to implement more changes, including organic farming, an activity Westwood has backed with equal candour.

Its evidence of the designers continued move away from her roots. After all, along with her partner Malcolm Mclaren, she played a pivotal role in establishing the punk scene in the late 1970s and has previously described her motivation for adopting anti-establishment messages into her collections as an heroic attempt to confront the older generation. But as Westwood knows, the medium is the message and what better way to send it home that by subverting expectation?

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How Vivienne Westwood fell in love with Prince Charles

514ParisISAttentäterAlkaidaErkannt3ndDayGeiselNahmeInDruckereiLIVEDieJagdTrauerTVPresseJesuisCharlie – Video

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514ParisISAttentterAlkaidaErkannt3ndDayGeiselNahmeInDruckereiLIVEDieJagdTrauerTVPresseJesuisCharlie
Paris IS Attentter Alkaida Erkannt 3ndDay GeiselNahmeIn Druckerei LIVE DieJagd -Trauer TV Presse Je suis Charlie.

By: Edward Snowden GermanyTVPresseArchiv

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514ParisISAttentäterAlkaidaErkannt3ndDayGeiselNahmeInDruckereiLIVEDieJagdTrauerTVPresseJesuisCharlie - Video

New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for …

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Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, "looking for interns who want to break things."

Politerain is not a project associated with a conventional company. It is run by a US government intelligence organization, the National Security Agency (NSA). More precisely, it's operated by the NSA's digital snipers with Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the department responsible for breaking into computers.

Potential interns are also told that research into third party computers might include plans to "remotely degrade or destroy opponent computers, routers, servers and network enabled devices by attacking the hardware." Using a program called Passionatepolka, for example, they may be asked to "remotely brick network cards." With programs like Berserkr they would implant "persistent backdoors" and "parasitic drivers". Using another piece of software called Barnfire, they would "erase the BIOS on a brand of servers that act as a backbone to many rival governments."

An intern's tasks might also include remotely destroying the functionality of hard drives. Ultimately, the goal of the internship program was "developing an attacker's mindset."

The internship listing is eight years old, but the attacker's mindset has since become a kind of doctrine for the NSA's data spies. And the intelligence service isn't just trying to achieve mass surveillance of Internet communication, either. The digital spies of the Five Eyes alliance -- comprised of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- want more.

The Birth of D Weapons

According to top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seen exclusively by SPIEGEL, they are planning for wars of the future in which the Internet will play a critical role, with the aim of being able to use the net to paralyze computer networks and, by doing so, potentially all the infrastructure they control, including power and water supplies, factories, airports or the flow of money.

During the 20th century, scientists developed so-called ABC weapons -- atomic, biological and chemical. It took decades before their deployment could be regulated and, at least partly, outlawed. New digital weapons have now been developed for the war on the Internet. But there are almost no international conventions or supervisory authorities for these D weapons, and the only law that applies is the survival of the fittest.

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw these developments decades ago. In 1970, he wrote, "World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." That's precisely the reality that spies are preparing for today.

The US Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force have already established their own cyber forces, but it is the NSA, also officially a military agency, that is taking the lead. It's no coincidence that the director of the NSA also serves as the head of the US Cyber Command. The country's leading data spy, Admiral Michael Rogers, is also its chief cyber warrior and his close to 40,000 employees are responsible for both digital spying and destructive network attacks.

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New Snowden Docs Indicate Scope of NSA Preparations for ...

The precarious cybersecurity balancing act

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When British Prime Minister David Cameron publicly called on the worlds biggest technology firms to assist law enforcement agencies in breaking digital encryption, he became the latest politician to assert that it is possible to balance Internet security and surveillance.

Whether that balance actually exists, however, is the subject of intense debate.

Prime Minister Cameron travelled to Washington late last week to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama. One of the major topics of conversation between the two leaders is digital security a group of 12 U.K.-based cybersecurity firms is also travelling with the Prime Minister.

The U.K. is already leading the way in cybersecurity and this government is committed to ensuring it continues to be a leader in this multibillion dollar industry, the Prime Minister said in a statement on the eve of his U.S. trip.

But what was originally planned as a discussion about British plans to strengthen digital security has suddenly become, in many security experts view, a discussion about doing the exact opposite. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris shootings one of the worst acts of terrorism in postwar French history Mr. Cameron has publicly called for technology companies to co-operate with efforts to allow British law enforcement agencies to crack encryption, the fundamental building block of digital privacy.

Its really odd in one breath to talk about improving cybersecurity and then in another breath call on companies to weaken security by weakening encryption, said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union.

There is no way to design the system to keep the Chinese and North Koreans out but let the North Americans and British in.

Encryption is, at its most basic level, a means of keeping information secret using very large numbers. Just as a 15-digit PIN is harder to guess than a four-digit PIN, high-grade encryption algorithms that manipulate larger numbers are usually harder to break. As such, all things being equal, encryption is not only a fairly effective means of keeping data private, its effectiveness can also be mathematically measured.

But ever since the Edward Snowden leaks revealed widespread claims of authorized and unauthorized government surveillance of many of the worlds most popular digital services and social networks, the technology giants responsible for those services have taken great pains to improve their encryption standards.

(The motivation for doing so is, primarily, financial companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple stand to lose billions if enterprise customers such as banks and other large corporations no longer trust their systems to keep sensitive information private.)

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The precarious cybersecurity balancing act


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