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Not sure if all the info in this vid is 100% accurate...but there are definitely some things mentioned that make you go hmmmmm...[youtube:1p0l1o8z]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm4Pllm5pdE&feature=player_embedded#![/youtube:1p0l1o8z] With L.O.V.E. always.
I also wonder what other important news we missed while the world was watching Assange.
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Register or Login14 December 2010 Last updated at 23:27 Share this pageFacebookTwitterShareEmailPrintWikileaks founder Assange bailed, but release delayedJulian Assange was photographed inside a prison van on his way to courtThe founder of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been granted bail in London on conditions including cash guarantees of £240,000.But he will remain in prison pending an appeal against the bail decision lodged by Swedish prosecutors.Mr Assange is fighting extradition to Sweden, where he is accused of sexually assaulting two women earlier this year.He denies the charges, which he says are politically motivated and designed to discredit him.His lawyer Mark Stephens said the case was turning into a "show trial".A large crowd including demonstrators, reporters and a number of Mr Assange's high-profile supporters gathered outside City of Westminster Magistrates' Court for the bail hearing on Tuesday.Journalists inside the court were given permission by the judge to report on proceedings live via micro-blogging website Twitter.Mr Assange was granted bail on condition he provides a security of £200,000 to the court, with a further £40,000 guaranteed in two sureties of £20,000 each.Mr Stephens said almost half the bail money had been raised and he was confident they would have all the cash before the appeal hearing.Mr Assange must also surrender his passport, obey a curfew at an address in Suffolk, wear an electronic tag and report to a local police station every evening.Mr Stephens said the High Court would hear the challenge to the bail decision within the next 48 hours.Speaking outside court, he said: "The Swedes won't abide by the umpire's decision. They want to put Mr Assange through yet more trouble, more expense, more hurdles."They clearly will not spare any expense but to keep Mr Assange in jail."'Common sense'In his first appearance at court last week, Mr Assange was refused bail on the grounds he could flee - despite the offer of sureties from figures including film director Ken Loach.Lawyer Gemma Lindfield, representing the Swedish authorities, argued on Tuesday that the court had "already found that Mr Assange is a flight risk" and "nothing has changed since last week to allay the court's fears in this regard".But District Judge Howard Riddle disagreed, saying that questions about Mr Assange's place of residence and the circumstances of his arrival in the UK had both now been cleared up.Following the bail decision, human rights activist Bianca Jagger said: "I was very pleased with what happened and I am glad that due process has taken place. I trust the British legal system and I hope justice will be done."But she expressed concern that the case had been "politicised".Before the appeal against release was announced, Mr Loach said such a move by the Swedish authorities would "show there is some vindictiveness that goes beyond this particular case".He added: "It would show there is some political element to the case, as clearly he is entitled to be given bail."Mr Assange is accused of having unprotected sex with a woman, identified only as Miss A, when she insisted he use a condom.The Australian is also accused of having unprotected sex with another woman, Miss W, while she was asleep.The extradition case is due to return to the magistrates' court on 11 January.Earlier on Tuesday, Mr Assange's mother told Australian television station Channel 7 that she had spoken to her son in prison."I told him how people all over the world, in all sorts of countries, were standing up with placards and screaming out for his freedom and justice, and he was very heartened by that," Christine Assange said."As a mother, I'm asking the world to stand up for my brave son."'No access'Mrs Assange also read a statement from him, which she had copied down when he spoke to her from Wandsworth Prison. In it, he defended the actions of Wikileaks, adding: "My convictions are unfaltering."Mr Stephens said his client had not been given any of his post - including letters relating to legal letters - since being remanded in custody.People demonstrated in support of Mr Assange outside City of Westminster Magistrates' Court"He has absolutely no access to any electronic equipment, no access to the outside world, no access to outside media," he said.The lawyer said the only correspondence his client had received was a note telling him that a copy of Time magazine sent to him had been destroyed because the cover bore his photograph.In recent weeks, Wikileaks has published a series of US diplomatic cables revealing secret information on topics such as terrorism and international relations.The latest release, published by the Guardian newspaper, shows that the US had concerns after the 7 July bombings that the UK was not doing enough to tackle home-grown extremists.Another cable claims British police helped "develop" evidence against Madeleine McCann's parents after she went missing.
They are trying to throw J. Assange under the bus, to break him.Watching his mother speak about her concerns makes me feel uncomfortable.History is being written at the moment: WikiLeaks as a weapon and it can't be stopped, unless in totalitarian states. I hope I am right. If there are restrictions following, our freedom of interacting and being informed by a free press will be endangered. These would be times, we don't need anymore.Of course I also see the danger of releasing information which should remain secret in order for terrorists or enemies not to know some details. But this is up to government officials, how they protect their secret papers. A lot of pressure is going on behind the scenes. Where is it going to end?
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Register or Login6 December 2010 Last updated at 11:46 Share this pageFacebookTwitterShareEmailPrintA world after WikileaksWikileaks founder Julian Assange has caused outcry from governments around the worldThings will be different after Wikileaks, but not in ways we might expect, says regular commentator Bill Thompson.Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may not be Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2010 - that distinction has gone to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg - but he has certainly managed to dominate the global conversation over the past few weeks.The reverberations of Wikileaks publication of so many confidential and secret documents will be felt for many years, and he has attracted a large band of supporters, but the support for Assange is as much about his personal situation as it is an expression of support for what Wikileaks does or proposes to do.To properly understand the philosophy that underlies his activity or his long-term goals, people should read Aaron Bady's compelling analysis of Assange's politics, as published on the zunguzungu blog.Bady uses a close reading of an essay by Assange on State and Terrorist Conspiracies to argue that Assange sees modern governance as a conspiracy by those with power that goes against the interests and desires of the governed, and that Wikileaks exists in order to undermine the ability of governments to communicate secretly and diminish the power of authoritarian states.Doing this, he believes, will force openness and lead to more progressive forms of government - or at least, less repressive ones.It will also, inevitably, lead to a response from the institutions targeted, and in the last few weeks we have seen what happens when a state feels threatened.Although it is not pleasant neither is it surprising: governments, like other complex systems, will act to preserve themselves and seek to damage or neutralise opposition, and nothing the US or other governments have done so far is exceptional.Net conflictIn a statement dictated to his mother from his jail cell Assange said "we now know that Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are instruments of US foreign policy", referring to the way in which these large companies had decided not to provide service to Wikileaks.But nobody who has observed the growth of the internet could have been surprised by this.Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith wrote about this back in 2006 in their excellent book Who Rules the Internet, where they pointed out that government will always go after gatekeepers and choke points in their attempts to regulate online activity.In that same year, Visa and Mastercard refused to pass funds to the Russian music download site allofmp3.com, even though the site was legal within Russia, but that attracted little attention because it was about cheap music and not freedom of expression.Now we face a different sort of conflict, and it appears to be one that will shape the political landscape for years to come.In the finale of the film Ghostbusters the eponymous heroes are obliged to challenge the god Gozer, but before he appears they are told that they must "choose the form of your destructor".Gozer, they realise, will materialise in whatever monstrous form they imagine, and Venkman tells the others not to visualise anything. Unfortunately, it is too late - Ray has already thought of "the gentlest thing he could, something that would never hurt me" - at which point a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man appears and proceeds to wreak havoc on New York.Something similar lies behind the emergence of Wikileaks. Over the past two decades we have built the internet and the web and completed a process of digitisation that has turned most of the world's operational data into electronic form, from bank records to love letters to diplomatic cables.Status quoWe have called forth the network age, and yet carried on in our daily lives as if nothing has really changed.As a result we made this moment inevitable, even if it was impossible to predict the form our "destructor" would take.Will Wikileaks usher in a new era of control, wonders Bill ThompsonNow it has materialised as a stateless, shapeless "international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and news leaks", as Wikipedia describes it.That organisation is threatened from outside by some of the most powerful states in the world, whose capacity for action is enormous. It is also challenged from the inside, as internal mails and documents, made available online on the Cryptome site reveal.But what really matters is that the disruptive power of the internet has been conclusively demonstrated, and the old order has been provoked to respond.This is democracy's Napster moment, the point at which the forms of governance that have evolved over 200 years of industrial society prove wanting in the face of the network, just as the business models of the recording industry were swept away by the ease with which the internet could transmit perfect digital copies of compressed music files.Napster was neutered by court action in the US, but its failure inspired peer-to-peer services that were far harder to control. The sharing of music is now unstoppable, and Wikileaks and the organisations that come after it will ensure that the same is now true of secrets.Of course we should never underestimate the power of the state to reinvent itself, just as modern capitalism and constitutional monarchy seem able to do.Wikileaks has exposed the inadequacies in the way governments control their internal flow of information, and organisations dedicated to transparency and disclosure will observe the tactics used to shut it down and adapt accordingly. But the state can learn too, and has the resources to implement what it learns.I fear that Wikileaks is as likely to usher in an era of more effective control as it is to sweep away the authoritarian regimes that Julian Assange opposes.He may look to a day when the conspiratorial power of the state is diminished, but I think we are more likely to see new forms of government emerge that exploit the capabilities of the network age to ensure their power is undiminished.[/b]Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet. He is currently working with the BBC on its archive project.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login16 December 2010 Last updated at 19:22 Share this pageFacebookTwitterShareEmailPrintWikileaks founder Julian Assange freed on bailThe founder of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has vowed "to continue my work and to protest my innocence" after being freed on bail.The 39-year-old was granted bail on Tuesday but prosecutors objected.He is fighting extradition to Sweden over sex assault allegations made by two women. He denies any wrongdoing.Mr Justice Ouseley ordered Mr Assange be released on payment of £240,000 in cash and sureties and on condition he resides at an address in East Anglia.Speaking on the steps of the High Court to dozens of journalists, Mr Assange said: "It's great to feel the fresh air of London again."He went on to thank "all the people around the world who had faith" in him, his lawyers for putting up a "brave and ultimately successful fight", people who provided money in the face of "great difficulty and aversion", members of the press and the British justice system."If justice is not always an outcome, at least it is not dead yet," he added."I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter and to reveal as we get it, which we have not yet, the evidence from these allegations."Mr Assange had spent the past eight nights in prison.He will now stay at a manor home on the Norfolk-Suffolk border owned by Vaughan Smith, a Wikileaks-supporting journalist and owner of the Frontline Club in London.Mr Assange's solicitor, Mark Stephens, said after the court appearance the bail appeal was part of a "continuing vendetta by the Swedes".But the question of who decided to appeal against the granting of bail remains cloaked in contradiction.A CPS spokesman said on Thursday: "The Crown Prosecution Service acts as agent for the Swedish government in the Assange case. The Swedish Director of Prosecutions this morning confirmed that she fully supported the appeal."But earlier Nils Rekke, from the Swedish Prosecutor's Office, claimed it was "a purely British decision".Mr Assange's mother, Christine, said she was "very, very happy" with the decision and thanked his supporters."I can't wait to see my son and to hold him close. I had faith that the British justice system would do the right thing and the judge would uphold the magistrates' decision, and that faith has been reaffirmed," she said.Gemma Lindfield, representing the prosecution, had told the judge there was "a real risk" Mr Assange would abscond and pointed to his nomadic lifestyle.She said he had "the means and ability" to go into hiding among Wikileaks' many supporters in this country and abroad.But Mr Justice Ouseley pointed out Mr Assange, who is Australian, had offered to meet the police in London when he heard the Swedish matter was still live and he said: "That is not the conduct of a person who is seeking to evade justice."However, he did impose strict bail conditions including wearing an electronic tag, reporting to police every day, observing a curfew and residing at Mr Smith's home.Earlier, the judge made a ruling banning the use of Twitter to give a blow-by-blow account of Thursday's proceedings.'Politically motivated'Mr Assange has received the backing of a number of high-profile supporters, including human rights campaigners Jemima Khan and Bianca Jagger, and film director Ken Loach.Wikileaks has published hundreds of sensitive American diplomatic cables, details of which have appeared in the Guardian in the UK and several other newspapers around the world.He has been criticised in the US, where former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has said he should be hunted down like the al-Qaeda leadership.Mr Assange's supporters claim the charges are politically motivatedMr Assange argues the allegations against him are politically motivated and designed to take attention away from the material appearing on Wikileaks.One of his supporters, writer Tariq Ali, said: "I'm relieved. He should never have been denied bail in the first place."He said Mr Assange had suffered from some "vindictive and punitive" decisions and he claimed: "The Swedes are acting on behalf of a bigger power."Mr Assange is accused of having unprotected sex with a woman, identified only as Miss A, when she insisted he use a condom.He is also accused of having unprotected sex with another woman, Miss W, while she was asleep.
