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Assange v Swedish Prosecution Authority – Wikipedia, the …

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Julian Assange v Swedish Prosecution Authority is the set of legal proceedings in the United Kingdom concerning the requested extradition of Julian Assange to Sweden to further a 'preliminary investigation'[1] into accusations of his having committed sexual offences.

On 20 August 2010, two women, a 26-year-old living in Enkping and a 31-year-old living in Stockholm,[2][3] went together to the Swedish police in order to track him down and persuade him to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases after having separate sexual encounters with him.[4] The police told them that they could not simply tell Assange to take a test, but that their statements would be passed to the prosecutor.[5] Later that day, the duty prosecutor ordered the arrest of Julian Assange on the suspicion of rape and molestation. [6]

The next day, the case was transferred to Chefsklagare (Chief Public Prosecutor) Eva Finn. In answer to questions surrounding the incidents, the following day, Finn declared, "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape." However, Karin Rosander from the Swedish Prosecution Authority, said Assange remained suspected of molestation. Police gave no further comment at that time, but continued the investigation.[7]

After learning of the investigation, Assange said, "The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing."[8]

The preliminary investigation concerning suspected rape was discontinued by Finn on 25 August,[6] but two days later Claes Borgstrm, the attorney representing the two women, requested a review of the prosecutor's decision to terminate part of the investigation.[6][9]

On 30 August, Assange was questioned by the Stockholm police regarding the allegations of sexual molestation.[10][11] He denied the allegations, saying he had consensual sexual encounters with the two women.[8][12][13]

On 1 September 2010, verklagare (Director of Public Prosecution) Marianne Ny decided to resume the preliminary investigation concerning all of the original allegations. On 18 August 2010, Assange had applied for a work and residence permit in Sweden.[14][15] On 18 October 2010, his request was denied.[14][15][16] He left Sweden on 27 September 2010.[17] The Swedish authorities have asserted that this is the same day that they notified Assange's lawyer of his imminent arrest.[18]

On 18 November 2010, Marianne Ny ordered the detention of Julian Assange on suspicion of rape, three cases of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. The Stockholm District Court acceded to the order and issued a European Arrest Warrant to execute it.[6] The warrant was appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal which upheld it but lowered it to suspicion of rape of a lesser degree, unlawful coercion and two cases of sexual molestation rather than three,[19][20] and the warrant was also appealed to the Supreme Court of Sweden,[21] which decided not to hear the case. At this time Assange had been living in the United Kingdom for 12 months. An extradition hearing took place in an English court in February 2011 to consider an application by Swedish authorities for the extradition of Assange to Sweden. The outcome of the hearing was announced on 24 February 2011, when the extradition warrant was upheld. Assange appealed to the High Court, and on 2 November 2011, the court upheld the extradition decision and rejected all four grounds for the appeal as presented by Assange's legal representatives. 19,000 costs was also awarded against Assange. On 5 December 2011, Assange was refused permission by the High Court to appeal to the Supreme Court. The High Court certified that his case raised a point of law of general public importance. The Supreme Court subsequently granted permission to appeal,[22] and heard the appeal on 1 and 2 February 2012.[23] The court reserved its judgment and dismissed the appeal on 30 May 2012.[24] Assange has said the investigation is "without basis". He remained on conditional bail in the United Kingdom[10][25][26] until on 19 June 2012 Assange sought refuge at Ecuador's Embassy in London and was granted temporary asylum. On 16 August 2012 he was granted full asylum by the Ecuadorian government.

On 18 November 2010, the Stockholm District Court ordered Assange detained in absentia, on request by prosecutor Marianne Ny. As basis for the ruling, the court stated Julian Assange to be suspected on reasonable grounds to have committed rape[27] (vldtkt), unlawful coercion[27] (olaga tvng), and three cases of sexuellt ofredande[4] which has been variously translated as "sexual molestation",[28] "sexual assault",[29] "sexual misconduct", "sexual annoyance", "sexual unfreedom", "sexual misdemeanour", and "sexual harassment".[16][30][31][32]

As special reasons for the detention, the court named a risk of the suspect absconding or avoiding justice; that the penalty for the alleged crimes is at least two years imprisonment; and the lack of any obvious reason not to detain.[33]

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» Amnesty Intl interviews Chelsea Chelsea Manning Support …

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November 18, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network

An interview with Chelsea Manning is the cover story of leading human rights organization Amnesty Internationals Nov/Dec magazine, WIRE. The interview, titled, Why Speaking Out Is Worth the Risk, touches on why exposing the truth can be worth the often harsh consequences that whistle-blowers face. For Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, she thought do [I] really want to find [my]self asking whether [I] could have done more 10-20 years later?. Read the full interview below, or click here.

Why Speaking Out is Worth the Risk WIRE, Amnesty International, Nov-Dec 2014

Why did you decide to leak documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? These documents were important because they relate to two connected counter-insurgency conflicts in real-time from the ground. Humanity has never had a record this complete and detailed of what modern warfare actually looks like. Once you realize that the co-ordinates represent a real place where people live; that the dates happened in our recent history; that the numbers are actually human lives- with all the love, hope, dreams, hatred, fear and nightmares that come with them- then its difficult to ever forget how important these documents are.

What did you think the consequences might be for you personally? In 2010, I was a lot younger. The consequences felt very vague, I expected the worst possible outcome, but I didnt have a strong sense of what that might entail. But I expected to be demonized and have every moment of my life examined and analyzed for every single possible screw-up that Ive ever made- every flaw and blemish- and to have them used against me in the court of public opinion, I was especially afraid that my gender identity would be used against me.

What was it like to feel the full force of the US justice system and be presented as a traitor? It was particularly interesting to see the logistics involved in the prosecution: the stacks of money spent; the gallons of fuel burned; the reams of paper printed; the lengthy rolls of security personnel, lawyers and experts- it felt silly at times. It felt especially silly being presented as a traitor by the officers who prosecuted my case. I saw them out of court at least 100 days before and during the trial and developed a very good sense of who they were as people. Im fairly certain that they got a good sense of who I am as a person too. I remain convinced that even the advocates that presented the treason arguments did not believe their own words as they spoke them.

Many people think of you as a whistleblower. Why are whistleblowers important? In an ideal world, governments, corporations, and other large institutions would be transparent by default. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal. Many institutions begin a slow creep toward being opaque and we need people who recognize that. I think the term whistleblower has an overwhelmingly negative connotation in government and business, akin to tattle-tale or snitch. This needs to be addressed somehow. Very often policies that supposedly protect such people are actually used to discredit them.

What would you say to somebody who is afraid to speak out against injustice? First, I would point out that life is precious. in Iraq in 2009-10, life felt cheap. It became overwhelming to see the sheer number of people suffering and dying, and the learned indifference to it by everybody around me, including the Iraqis themselves. That really changed my perspective on my life, and made me realize that speaking out about injustices is worth the risk. Second, in your life, you are rarely given the chance to make a difference. Every now and then you do come across a significant choice. Do you really want to find yourself asking whether you could have done more, 10-20 years later? These are the kind of questions I didnt want to haunt me.

Why did you choose this particular artwork to represent you? Its the closest representation of what I might look like if I was allowed to present and express myself the way I see fit. Even after I came out as a trans woman in 2013, I have not been able to express myself as a woman in public. So I worked with Alicia Neal, an artist in California, to sketch a realistic portrait that more accurately represents who I am. Unfortunately, with the current rules at military confinement facilities, it is very unlikely that I will have any photos taken until I am released- which, parole and clemency notwithstanding, might not be for another two decades.

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Laura Poitras talks ‘CITIZENFOUR’ and why Edward Snowden is in Moscow

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Theres a scene in Laura Poitras documentary, CITIZENFOUR, where 29-year-old American intelligence employeeEdward Snowden is hunkered down in a Hong Kong hotel room with London Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald andEwen MacAskill when the fire alarm goes off. Snowden, who was surreptitiously meeting with Poitras and the reporters in May2013 to expose the massiveintelligence capability of the U.S. government, freezespractically terrified. Hed just unplugged the rooms phone andwarned his new friends that intelligence agencies can easily use them as microphones, and you can tell that hes not one who believes in coincidences. Maybe they got mad that they couldnt listen in to us via the phone any more, he says, while Greenwald looks at him to see if hes joking.

Snowden isnt joking.

After the Snowden revelations broke, shocking the world with American secrets of comprehensive and invasive global surveillance thatwounded American prestige and diplomacy, Snowdens caution suddenly didnt seem so far-fetched.

Poitras, who narrates CITIZENFOUR, so called because thats how Snowden signed his initialanonymous emails to her, had already directed two acclaimed documentaries about post-9/11 America, My Country, My Country and The Oath. Her films may have irritated some powerfulpeople; she was added to a U.S. government watch list that caused her to be detained frequently when she traveled. By the time she beganworking on a third film about global security issues, she had moved to Germany, mostly to guarantee that her sources identity and information wouldnt be compromised by recurring American travel interrogations. She was already editing footage in Berlin when she received the email that would change everything.

Amazingly, Poitras camera is there at the moment when Snowden explains why he decided to go public, to be a heroic whistleblower on a still-unquantifiable abuse of poweror, depending on your perspective, a traitor who stole and gave awayinvaluable American spy secrets.

CITIZENFOUR, which is already playing in theaters, was recentlynamed to the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary, and is considered a leading candidate to take home the prize. Poitras, in New York to accept the Best Documentary prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Gotham Awards, spoke to EW about being a witness to history.

EW: Take me back to January 2013, when the first CITIZENFOUR email arrives. You had been swimming in these watersinvestigating government surveillance, landing on government watch listsand this almost too-good-to-be-true anonymous source seeks you out. There had to be a certain amount of skepticism, that this might be entrapment, in some way.LAURA POITRAS: I had all those concerns. For sure. Partly because Im a filmmaker and a visual journalist, and usually, the way that I work is that Im the one who seeks out people. I dont get anonymous emails and tips. Its not the kind of work that I do, so it was completely out of the blue. And it just raised questions like, Why would I be the person to be contacted? I was very aware of the case of the Anonymous hacker Sabu, who flipped and became an FBI agent and was trying to entrap people in exactly those kind of ways. So I was on the lookout for anything that was a tell, any inappropriate asks. I laid out all my skepticisms, and [Snowden]came back with, You know that Im not going to entrap you because Im never going to ask anything of you.I was completely on the lookout for it, but there were never any asks. It took me a while to sort of wrap my head around it, but it makes sense to me now, in retrospect. I had published a piece about William Binny in The New York Times, where I did talk about being on the watch list, so I think that combinationknowing that I was interested in the topic and that I was also targetedwere the two things that somehow registered when he was thinking about who to contact.

You end up on this journey with journalist Glenn Greenwald to meet Snowdenin Hong Kong and the details are just lovely: Hes going to be playing a Rubiks Cube when you arrive in the hotel lobby, and youre going to have a scripted exchange that will cue you both in that you are who youre supposed to be. Even though its just a character in a movie, Hal Holbrooks Deep Throat in All the Presidents Men is what Im envisioning. Perhaps when youre emailing, youre thinking its some 55 year-old guysomeone more like William Binnysomeone whos been through the wars. But instead, you get a 29-year old kid. In a T-shirt.

Was that an uh-oh moment? Your mind-set was exactly like what mine was. I totally expected I was going to meet somebody older, that he had been through a lot, seen a lot. Probably not as old as Binny, because it was clear that he was also really, really technically computer savvy. But 40s, late 40s or something. I had completely burned into my head an idea of this person that was not the person that I met. I was actually profoundly shocked. So there was definitely a readjustment period.

Do you think he sensed that? At some point after we started the interview, he got up to use the restroom, and Glenn and I turned to each other and went, What the fk? We were shocked. And then he came back and we sort of laughed about it. But it made sense, once we sort of wrapped our heads around itthis is someone who really grew up with the Internet and what he saw he felt was so not right was because of his relationship to the promise of the Internet.

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Laura Poitras talks ‘CITIZENFOUR’ and why Edward Snowden is in Moscow

Red Hat and Huawei Woo Telcos With Open Source Software

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Big telecom companies like AT&T have made it clear to information-technology vendors they want more flexible options for their massive networks to meet demand for new services and lower costs. Theyve vowed to remake their networks using bare-bones computing equipment controlled by open-source software.

Now Red Hat and Huawei are teaming up to give the demanding telcos what they want.

Red Hat and Huawei sellers of computer-server software and telecom equipment, respectively are pushing an emerging open-source technology called Open Stack as an alternative to traditional telecom networking systems. Open Stack is making inroads as a way to manage large numbers of computer servers. The partnership aims to move its underlying concept into the networks that direct Web traffic within computer server-rooms and out to consumers.

Telecom companies are among the worlds biggest spenders on technology hardware, software and services. AT&T, for example, recently said it plans $18 billion in capital spending next year on facilities like its telecom network and computing equipment nearly double Google s capital spending this year. Such flush budgets mean that telcos technology choices have major ramifications for IT vendors.

If Red Hat and Huawei are successful, their alliance could pose a risk to companies such as Cisco and Ericsson, whose equipment is widely used by telecom carriers. Those companies traditional gear is based on proprietary technologies that are often time-consuming to reconfigure and hard to change out in favor of alternative vendors.

AT&T and its peers are among the biggest supporters of Open Stack, which is backed by Red Hat, Rackspace and others. Part of Red Hats goal in partnering with Huawei is to make Open Stack, a young technology that isnt easy to use, more relevant to demanding network situations, including telecommunications.

Open Stack is still too general-purpose a platform for them, said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of Red Hats infrastructure business.

Cisco and other big telecom vendors also are also moving to offer OpenStack options to telecom firms and other customers. Red Hats partnership with Huawei is similar to one Red Hat announced earlier this year with Cisco.

OpenStack is the latest example of big changes brought on by open-source software, whose computer code can be viewed, modified, and shared freely by users. Open source software appeals to big businesses because its less expensive and easier to customize than proprietary software. Giant companies want more and more open source options, as they believe it can help them develop new services faster, according to industry experts.

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Red Hat and Huawei Woo Telcos With Open Source Software

GCHQ boffins quantum-busted its OWN crypto primitive

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Remote control for virtualized desktops

While the application of quantum computers to cracking cryptography is still, for now, a futuristic scenario, crypto researchers are already taking that future seriously.

It came as a surprise to Vulture South to find that in October of this year, researchers at GCHQ's information security arm the CESG abandoned work on a security primitive because they discovered a quantum attack against it.

Presented to the ETSI here, with the full paper here, the documents outline the birth and death of a primitive the CESG called Soliloquy.

Primitives are building blocks in the dizzyingly-complex business of assembling a cryptosystem: individual modules that are expected to be very well-characterised before they're accepted into security standards (and, in the case of crypto like RC4, dropped when they're no longer safe).

Given that improving computer power is one of the ways a primitive can be broken, there's a constant background research effort into both creating the primitives of the future, and testing them before they're adopted and that's where Soliloquy comes in.

As the CESG paper states, Soliloquy was first proposed in 2007 as a cyclic-lattice key exchange primitive supporting between 3,000 and 10,000 bits for the public key. Between 2010 and 2013 presumably as part of their effort to case-harden the primitive before releasing it into the wild the boffins (Peter Campbell, Michael Groves and Dan Shepherd) developed what they call a reasonably efficient quantum attack on the primitive, and as a result, they cancelled the project.

The quantum algorithm they describe would work by creating a quantum fingerprint of the lattice Soliloquy creates; discreteise and bound the control space needed; and run a quantum Fourier transform over that control space, iteratively to get lots of samples approximating the lattice.

That's where the quantum attack is complete: after that, the samples would get fed into a classical lattice-based algorithm to recover the values you want in other words, the key.

The main challenge, the authors write, is to define to define a suitable quantum fingerprinter that could handle the control space.

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GCHQ boffins quantum-busted its OWN crypto primitive

7-year-old boy cleverly thwarts Apple’s iPhone security measures

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Matthew Green, cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins, knows all about iPhone security and apparently so does his 7-year-old son, Harrison. According to CNN Money, the child was able to bypass Apple's Touch ID security measures and access Angry Birds Transformers using a simple physical attack.

But Tuesday morning at dawn, little Harrison crept into his parents' bedroom and walked over to his dad's side of the bed. He quietly reached for his father's iPhone, grabbed his right hand and pressed his large thumb onto the fingerprint scanner.

Apple recently increased iPhone and iPad security in iOS 8, encrypting data by default and protecting it in such a way that nobody, except the original owner, can access it via passcode or the biometrics of Touch ID. This improved security has caught the attention of the FBI, which claims these new security measures will hinder investigations and assist criminals. A recent court decision lessened the impact of this security, ruling that Touch ID was not protected by the Fifth Amendment.

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7-year-old boy cleverly thwarts Apple's iPhone security measures


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