WikiLeaks will continue to expose secrets despite gov. persecution
WikiLeaks has grown stronger over the last two years despite attempts by the US government to build a legal case against the organization and founder Julian Assange, according to WikiLeaks...
By: RT America
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WikiLeaks will continue to expose secrets despite gov. persecution - Video
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appeared via Skype at the SXSW Interactive festival earlier this year. Daniel Terdiman/CNET
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange marked the second year to the day on Thursday as an occupant of the Ecuadorian embassy at 3 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, London.
Assange, whose Wikileaks site has published more than 8 million anonymously leaked documents since 2006, took the opportunity with his US- and UK-based lawyers to speak to the press on a conference call from the embassy about his legal struggles with the US, UK, and Swedish governments.
The 42-year-old Australian native railed against the four-year-long US criminal investigation of Wikileaks, claiming that it's the largest Department of Justice investigation of a publisher since the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917.
"It is against the stated principles of the United States and the values supported by its people to have a four-year pre-law investigation against a publisher," Assange said. "It is not correct for [US Attorney General] Eric Holder and the DOJ to use weasel words for stating that they will not prosecute a reporter for reporting."
Assange said that by investigating Wikileaks, the US government wants to create a schism between national security reporters and "those reporters who report the details of a press conference."
"I call on Eric Holder today to immediately drop the national security investigation against Wikileaks," he said.
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment. Despite allegations, Assange has not been charged with a crime by authorities in the US or UK related to espionage, or by the Swedish authorities seeking his extradition over rape allegations.
Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy on June 19, 2012, seeking political asylum from a British court order to extradite him to Sweden over allegations that he sexually assaulted two women there. Assange's attorneys stressed that since then they have been willing to have Assange interviewed over the phone or by video conference, but that Swedish officials refuse to meet with him except on Swedish soil.
"If he goes to Sweden it will likely be a one-way ticket to the United States," said Michael Ratner, the US-based attorney for Assange and Wikileaks. Assange receives support from and is a trustee of the Courage Foundation, which also provides legal and financial support to Edward Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower. Assange says he assisted Snowden when communicating from Hong Kong.
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Wikileaks' Julian Assange: I'm still here
Julian Assange.
Today marks the second anniversary of Assange entering the diplomatic mission to seek political asylum, which he was granted in mid-August 2012.
WikiLeaks legal adviser Jen Robinson used the anniversary to announce a new bid to get Sweden to drop its four-year investigation into allegations of sexual assault against Assange.
Next Tuesday lawyers in Stockholm will file a challenge to a Swedish detention order "on the basis that new information has been received about the case", Ms Robinson told reporters during a phone conference.
She noted that since the UK courts agreed to extradite Assange the British law had changed "to prevent people being extradited without charge".
Assange fears if he goes to Sweden he'll be extradited to the United States and charged over WikiLeaks' release of classified documents.
The 42-year-old says even if the Swedish warrant was dismissed he still risks being extradited from Britain to the US.
"However, the removal of the Swedish matter will prevent what has been an extremely distracting political attack, which has been to try and draw attention away from what is the largest ever criminal investigation by the (US) Department of Justice into a publisher, and into me, personally," Assange said on Wednesday.
Removing Sweden from the equation would make it easier to find out if the British government supported his extradition to the US, the former computer hacker said.
This time last year Assange launched a blistering attack on the Gillard government in Australia saying it "bent over more than any other country in the world" to appease the US.
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Assange marks two years in London embassy
It's been two years since the founder of WikiLeaks committed himself to an indefinite sentence inside the Ecuadorian embassy. And he shows no sign of giving himself parole. The statue of limitations on the sexual offences case in Sweden, from Assange is a fugitive, expires in August 2020, so he may yet have another six years at least to serve there. But how does the Australian campaigner keep from going stir-crazy?
MORNING Assange workd 17-hour days and has always been a night owl, keeping "hackers' hours" of late night nights and sleeping in. He is a light sleeper, and the location of the embassy in the heart of Kensington has been a problem for him. Harrods is close by 3 Hans Crescent and the early morning deliveries played havoc with his sleep.
"I couldnt sleep because of the Harrods loading bay and the cops always doing shift changes outside," Assange told the Australian magazine Who.
"And the quietest room is the womens bathroom, the only room thats easy to sleep in. So I thought Id try and somehow get hold of it and renovate it. Eventually, somewhat reluctantly, the staff relented. They ripped out the toilet. Theyve been very generous."
THE DAY'S PROJECTS Assange's converted bathroom-office has modest living quarters, with a bed, a small kitchenette, a computer with internet connections and a shower. On the wall is reportedly a picture of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, mocked up to look like Shephard Faireys Barack Obama Hope poster.
Author Andrew O'Hagan, Assange's ex-ghost writer, wrote in his marathon essay for the London Review of Books that Assange is not a tidy house guest, but the debris around his workspace is often mainly the litany of gifts sent by supporters. "When I first went to see him he was in a corner room at the back of the embassy, surrounded by hampers from Harrods across the way well-wishers presents to the incarcerated and sitting at a grubby desk covered in snacks and papers," O'Hagan wrote. He was later moved to a new, bigger room "but standard-issue, messy, depressing, smelling of laborious boring hours".
Assange has multiple mobile phones and laptops, and a continuously whirring shredder that destroys "anything that might leave a paper trail", the Mail reported after visiting the campaigner.
EVENINGS Assange works a 17-hour day, seven days a week, running the WikiLeaks operations and its Twitter account, according to multiple reports. At 4 o'clock every afternoon a small group of supporters hold a vigil for Assange outside the embassy. They try and keep my spirits up, he told the Mail. And they do.
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Julian Assange's Life Inside A Converted Women's Toilet At The Ecuadorian Embassy
NORFOLK---On paper, the charges read like an intricate espionage case - top-secret documents containing information about military movements and bomb-making methods, smuggled off Navy computers, potentially putting national security and U.S. forces in harm's way.
But explosive ordnance disposal technician Chief Petty Officer Lyle White is no Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, defense lawyer Grover Baxley told a military judge Wednesday, referring to two high-profile cases involving major leaks of classified material.
White is a combat veteran and a Bronze Star recipient with more than 20 years of service who exercised bad judgment when he took classified documents home. It was an act of laziness, Baxley said, "with no criminal intent, no nefariousness."
White pleaded guilty under a pretrial agreement Wednesday to violating three military regulations: improperly storing classified documents on a non-secure site - namely an external hard drive found at his Virginia Beach home; maintaining possession of the documents; and deliberately removing them from his Navy office without the authority to do so.
He told the court that he understood the regulations and knew he wasn't supposed to take the documents. But he said they were useful for training purposes, so he kept them for his own reference, and didn't share them with anyone.
He now realizes how the information they contained - which included troop movements and bomb analyses - could have exposed U.S. military methodology and put service members' lives in danger, he said.
"By mishandling classified information, I set a horrible example for the people that were looking for guidance, as well as letting my superior officers down," he said in a statement that he read aloud. "My misconduct and its consequences haunts me every day."
White said exchanges of documents with fellow explosive-ordnance disposal sailors started while they were deployed in Iraq in 2007-08. The sailors would share information and lessons learned.
By the end of 2009 - after he'd deployed to Iraq again - he'd collected hundreds of files. That December, he consolidated most of them onto a single hard drive, which he took home.
Four months later, Navy criminal investigators raided his home and found the hard drive in a duffel bag, as well as electronic copies of two other classified documents. The charges related to 25 classified files.
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Sailor pleads guilty to mishandling documents
Al Gore Publicly Supports Edward Snowden
Al Gore came out publicly in support of Edward Snowden reminding everyone how the NSA #39;s unconstitutional program of Total Information Awareness came about wh...
By: TheLipTV
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Al Gore Publicly Supports Edward Snowden - Video
Glenn Greenwald on the Media Malignment of Edward Snowden
Glenn Greenwald speaks about Edward Snowden at the Nourse Theater, San Francisco on Wednesday, Jun 18, 2014.
By: Manatease
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Glenn Greenwald on the Media Malignment of Edward Snowden - Video
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald
Metropolitan, 259 pp., $27.00
by Luke Harding
Vintage, 346 pp., $14.95 (paper)
a Frontline documentary directed by Michael Kirk
by the Presidents Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies: Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Peter Swire
Princeton University Press, 239 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Within days of the publication of No Place to Hide by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a photograph began circulating on the Internet that showed National Security Agency operatives surreptitiously implanting a surveillance device on an intercepted computer. After nearly a year of revelations about the reach of the NSA, spawned by Edward Snowdens theft of tens of thousands of classified documents, this photo nonetheless seemed to come as something of a surprise: here was the United States government appropriating and opening packages sent through the mail, secretly installing spyware, and then boxing up the goods, putting on new factory seals, and sending them on their way. It was immediate in a way that words were not.
That photo itself was part of the Snowden cache, and readers of Greenwalds book were treated to the NSAs own caption: Not all SIGINT tradecraft involves accessing signals and networks from thousands of miles away, it said.
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Partial Disclosure
New Zealanders believe Edward Snowden ahead of John Key when it comes to the US spying on us, the Green Party said today.
John Key has previously downplayed New Zealanders concerns that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been involved in spying on New Zealanders, but the results of a Stuff Ipsos poll released today shows 71.6 per cent of Kiwis believe United States spy agencies are gathering data on New Zealanders and 61.8 per cent of those people do not support the US being able to do so.
"New Zealanders know the NSA does not discriminate about who they spy on. The Governments active involvement in the 5 Eyes network means we are part of both a spying and spied on ring," said Green Party security intelligence spokesperson Steffan Browning.
"New Zealanders have looked at the facts and concluded that John Key isnt being totally upfront about the information being shared in 5 Eyes. They believe Snowden over the PM.
"Not only do New Zealanders not believe the Prime Minister about spying, they also think that the US spying on us is wrong.
"The evidence of spying on New Zealanders is stacking up against John Key. President Barack Obama has said the US doesnt have a "no spying" agreement with any country but Key continues to insist the NSA doesnt spy on us.
"Previous leaks from whistle-blower Edward Snowden have revealed that the personal data of citizens from the US, the UK and Australia is being shared amongst the 5-Eyes network. We also know from previous leaks that the NSA are willing and able to carry out mass surveillance on New Zealanders.
"John Keys credibility on spying has taken a further knock today with his ambiguity around New Zealands reintegration into the 5 Eyes information sharing network while he has been the Prime Minister.
"It looks like John Key has had another brain fade about changes made in 2009 that opened the flow of information that the 5 Eyes network shared with his Government. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence could remember New Zealands reintegration in 2009 but John Key couldnt.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Monday will mark one year since Edward Snowden made headlines by identifying himself as the source of classified information leaked from the National Security Agency. The U.S. government claimed the revelations would jeopardize national security, making valuable information available to the nations enemies.
In the past year, Snowden has spoken virtually at South by Southwest conferences and sat down a few weeks for an interview with NBC anchor Brian Williams from Russia, where he currently has asylum. For more now were joined from Washington by Shiobhan Gorman, intelligence correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. So whats Snowdens status now? Has position of the US government changed at all in this year?
SHIOBHAN GORMAN: The position of the U.S. government hasnt changed in terms of his status, although we have seen some pretty significant policy shifts, over the last year particularly as it has to do with the N.S.A. phone data program.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Right, and so in the last year, has the government changed the way it gathers its intelligence. Or how has the intelligence gathering apparatus changed as a result of these operations?
SHIOBHAN GORMAN: Well I think, it remains to be seen what will change in terms of actual intelligence collection. There was quite a bit of outcry about the monitoring of foreign leaders. There were some 35 foreign leaders that the National Security Agency was monitoring, eavesdropping on. And I think the most notable was German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And that has either you know been reevaluated, or in many cases ceased.
And the president in January did announce a set of changes, some which were to be implemented immediately, which had to do with some smaller alterations about the way the national security agency was collecting American phone data. As well as extending privacy protections to foreigners, in terms of the way the N.S.A. handles its surveillance data.
But the big question mark is still, what sort of reforms will see to the actual N.S.A. phone data program because there is now legislation pending on Capitol Hill that would implement some of the changes the president has recommended, which would primarily have phone companies conducting searches of American phone data, instead of the National Security Agency. Then it would provide the results to the National Security Agency.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And that made its way in sort of a bipartisan manner through the house. What are the chances of that actually passing through the senate and possibly getting signed into law?
SHIOBHAN GORMAN: Well its interesting there was a hearing last week that was sort of the first public vetting that the Senate Intelligence Committee did of the house proposal that passed. And we saw a lot of skepticism actually, both from democrats and republicans, generally for different reasons, but it suggests that the passage might not be instantaneous or smooth. Although I do think that people expect something to pass at some point. Especially because the law that authorizes that particular program does expire in about a year.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So how worried are U.S. officials that you speak with? I mean it seems that over the past year weve had a series of different shoes drop. Are they concerned about what else may come out in the next few weeks or months?
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What has the U.S. learned from the Snowden leaks?