WikiLeaks: Julian Assange Arrested - Cablegate

[rumborak]

I wouldn't be surprised if Assange let some money slip for this info. You can't tell me that a person with that kind of information doesn't want some "benefit" for this. Unless of course, whoever that person is already sold this data to other governments a while ago.

"We have now in our four-year history, and over 100 legal attacks of various kinds, been victorious in all of those matters."

Isn't thepiratebay.org hosted in Sweden too? Didn't protect them.

rumborak

[XJDenton]

There's a secrecy of the press law or something that protects them.

[ack44]

it's pretty obvious that the a-rabs would back usa in bombing iran, they want iran wiped off the map of the world so to speak; helps with the religious and oil problems.

 Yup, the only Arabs who like Iran are the Jihadists. But they are admired for their trolling of Israel.

[emindead]

November 29, 2010, 4:31 PM ET

WikiLeaks Using Amazon Servers After Attack
https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/29/wikileaks-using-amazon-servers-after-attack/

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

WikiLeaks, the website that published a quarter-million sensitive diplomatic cables on Sunday, is using Amazon.com Inc. servers in the U.S. to help deliver its information. It sounds like an odd choice, but it could make sense.

The site cablegate.wikileaks.org, which WikiLeaks is using for the diplomatic documents, is linked to servers run by Amazon Web Services in Seattle, as well as to French company Octopuce. Wikileaks.org, the site’s front page, links back to Amazon servers in the U.S. and in Ireland. Several Internet watchers, including technologist Alex Norcliffe, reported earlier on WikiLeaks’ use of Amazon services.

Amazon and WikiLeaks did not return requests for comment.

The choice of Amazon, a U.S. company, seems strange given the amount of criticism WikiLeaks has received from the U.S. government. Rep. Peter King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Sunday saying he supported charging WikiLeaks activist Julian Assange under the Espionage Act.

But experts said it was unlikely that Amazon would face legal action for selling services to WikiLeaks. For one thing, now that the information disclosed by the site is already public, it might not be considered contraband, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University.

“If that data happens in the moment to be in the U.S., that’s really good because we have a First Amendment,” said Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia Law School.

Mr. Moglen added that, although where hardware is located can make a difference legally, there wouldn’t be much point in getting Amazon to stop providing services to WikiLeaks. “For all practical purposes … if the law is unfavorable, that Web server process will go somewhere else,” he said.

Using Amazon’s service also makes sense in one important respect: It provides stability when WikiLeaks is attacked, as it was hours before it published the diplomatic communications.

WikiLeaks was hit with a “mass distributed denial of service attack,” the organization said on its official Twitter account Sunday. In this sort of attack, many computers generally flood a server with requests or use other techniques to prevent the server from displaying a Web page.

Arbor Networks, a security-engineering firm, reported that after the attack started, WikiLeaks redirected traffic to its “Cablegate” site from a Swedish hosting provider to the “mirror” sites in France and the U.S., which provide exact copies.

A self-described “hacktivist” known as “th3j35t3r” — or the Jester — claimed responsibility for the attack and wrote on Twitter that WikiLeaks was “threatening the lives of our troops and ‘other assets,’” Andy Greenberg at Forbes reported. Later, the Jester tweeted that the attack was not made from many computers but was a “simple” denial of service hit. On the Jester’s blog, the hacker claims to be “obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.”

[William Wallace]

https://reason.com/blog/2010/11/29/wikileaks-sharif-dont-like-it
Some interesting comments from Matt Welch at Reason, particularly this:

Leaders in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran as "evil", an "existential threat" and a power that "is going to take us to war". [...]

The cables also expose frank, even rude, remarks about Iranian leaders, their trustworthiness and tactics at international meetings. Abdullah told another US diplomat: "The bottom line is that they cannot be trusted." Mubarak told a US congressman: "Iran is always stirring trouble." Others are learning from what they describe as Iranian deception. "They lie to us, and we lie to them," said Qatar's prime ministe

This isn't my favorite because I want to bomb Iran, but because A) the oppressive, two-faced, triple-dealing House of Saud deserves each and every embarrassing diplomatic disclosure the universe can provide, particularly (though certainly not only) vis-a-vis the United States; and B) the whole thing complicates any number of simplistic Mideast/foreign policy narratives.

I am both naive and irresponsible, so it's my hunch that among the governments that suffer most from these disclosures, America's will be pretty far down on the list. A comparatively open society, even one whose government insists on acting as global cop and uses a massive secrecy apparatus for that project, cannot long support a foreign policy that is in direct contrast to stated activities and aims. And scanning the headlines on this thing so far I haven't seen any OMG-style revelations about what the United States is doing (please correct my impression in the comments). It's the regimes who lie constantly to their oppressed citizens who stand to lose the most face, I would think.

[emindead]

Assange: I'm Influenced by "American libertarianism, market libertarianism"
https://reason.com/blog/2010/11/30/assange-im-influenced-by-ameri
Matt Welch | November 30, 2010

Forbes has a big interview (click here for the full interview) up with controversial Wikileaks impresario Julian Assange. This section in particular will be of interest to Reason readers:

    Would you call yourself a free market proponent?

    Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets. Having lived and worked in many countries, I can see the tremendous vibrancy in, say, the Malaysian telecom sector compared to U.S. sector. In the U.S. everything is vertically integrated and sewn up, so you don’t have a free market. In Malaysia, you have a broad spectrum of players, and you can see the benefits for all as a result.

    How do your leaks fit into that?

    To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.

    There's the famous lemon example in the used car market. It's hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers can't get a good price, even when they have a good car.

    By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means there's a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who they’re dealing with.

    You've developed a reputation as anti-establishment and anti-institution.

    Not at all. Creating a well-run establishment is a difficult thing to do, and I've been in countries where institutions are in a state of collapse, so I understand the difficulty of running a company. Institutions don't come from nowhere.

    It's not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I've learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I'm a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.

    WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.

[emindead]

TIME Interview: Assange on Secrecy, China and WikiLeaks' Growth
By Howard Chua-Eoan - Wednesday, Dec. 01, 2010

https://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2033887,00.html#ixzz16s2wvyer

"Secrecy is important for many things," said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview with TIME over Skype on Monday. Managing editor Richard Stengel had just asked him whether there were instances when secrecy could be an asset in diplomacy or global affairs. WikiLeaks has, of course, grabbed headlines the world over by making public U.S. diplomatic cables that were supposed to stay private and secret, embarrassing the State Department as well as leaders around the world. But secrecy has its place, said Assange. "We keep secret the identity of our sources, as an example, take great pains to do it." But, he said, secrecy "shouldn't be used to cover up abuses."

Asked if he wanted to expose the secret dealings of China and Russia the way WikiLeaks has done with America, Assange said, "Yes, indeed. In fact, we believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential." He sounded heartened, if not overwhelmed, by the response to the megaleak so far. "The media scrutiny and the reaction are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it." But he believed that there was a shake-up going on, adding that "there is a tremendous rearrangement of viewings about many different countries."

In his 36-minute interview with TIME (the full audio will be available soon on TIME.com), Assange explained that exposing abuses can lead to positive change in two ways. When abusive organizations are in the public spotlight, "they have one of two choices." The first, he said, "is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public." The second choice, he says, "is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient." What he left unsaid but clearly implied was that organizations of the second type eventually fail.

And where does the U.S. fall between the two categories? He said, "It's becoming more closed" as a society and its "relative degree of openness ... probably peaked in about 1978, and has been on the way down, unfortunately, since." That, he said, was a result of, among other things, America's enormous economy, which calibrates power in the U.S. in economic, or as he says, "fiscal," terms. He points out that, today, China may be easier to reform than the U.S. "Aspects of the Chinese government, [the] Chinese public-security service, appear to be terrified of free speech, and while one might say that means something awful is happening in the country, I actually think that is a very optimistic sign because it means that speech can still cause reform and that the power structure is still inherently political as opposed to fiscal. So journalism and writing are capable of achieving change and that is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it." On the other hand, in the U.S. and much of the West, he said, "the basic elements of society have been so heavily fiscalized through contractual obligations that political change doesn't seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn't result in change."

Assange appears to believe that the U.S. has not become "a much worse-behaved superpower" because its federalism, "this strength of the states," has been a drag on the combination of the burgeoning power of the central government and a presidency that can only expand its influence by way of foreign affairs. (Given the same economic and geographical advantages as America's, Russia, he says, would not have turned out as beneficent.) Still, though he cites the Bill of Rights approvingly, he is not overly impressed with the U.S. During the interview, when Stengel asked him about the idea of American exceptionalism, saying, "You seem to believe in American exceptionalism in a negative sense, that America is exceptional only in the harm and damage it does to the world," Assange said those views "lack the necessary subtlety." He does conclude, however, that "the U.S. is, I don't think by world standards, an exception; rather it is a very interesting case both for its abuses and for some of its founding principles."

Assange talked about WikiLeaks' own founding principles — and the evolution of the original conception of how the online conduit for whistle-blowing documents would work. In the beginning, in 2006, given the huge amounts of raw, "quality, important content" the site was providing, he said, "we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on." Analyzing secret Chinese data or internal documents from Somalia, he said, was "surely" more interesting than blogging about "what's on the front page of the New York Times, or about your cat or something."

But, he said, "when people write political commentary on blogs or other social media, it is my experience that it is not, with some exceptions, their goal to expose the truth. Rather, it is their goal to position themselves amongst their peers on whatever the issue of the day is. The most effective, the most economical way to do that, is simply to take the story that's going around, [which] has already created a marketable audience for itself, and say whether they're in favor of that interpretation or not."

Instead, it is the people "funded after a career structure" that incentivizes analysis who are the primary consumers of WikiLeaks. "The heavy lifting — heavy analytical lifting — that is done with our materials is done by us and is done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human-rights activists. It is not done by the broader community." The social networks come in only after "a story becomes a story," becoming then "an amplifier of what we are doing." He doesn't denigrate the role of social networks or WikiLeaks' need for them. In the ecological cycle of news on the Web and the world, they have become "a supply of sources for us."

[hefdaddy42]

He's a crazy person.

[zerogravityfat]

The guy has his own Dr. Evil lair, you can't beat that, check this shit out:

https://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalDetay&ArticleID=1030910&Date=01.12.2010&CategoryID=81

[blackngold29]

Yeah, he's a pretty odd guy. It's at least verging on censorship though, the way the government has been talking about this stuff. If you haven't figured out by now that pretty much everything you do could end up online by now, I don't know where you've been living.

[antigoon]

Matthew Ingram wrote an interesting article about censoring WikiLeaks and its status as a media outlet.

https://gigaom.com/2010/12/04/like-it-or-not-wikileaks-is-a-media-entity/

So what makes WikiLeaks different from the New York Times? There are the obvious things, of course — the latter publishes a print newspaper, is a member of a variety of self-regulatory bodies involving the media, and is a venerable institution with a long history of journalistic integrity. WikiLeaks, meanwhile, is a shadowy organization with an uncertain history, opaque motivations and publishes only online. That said, why are we so eager to protect one and not the other? WikiLeaks’ stated intention is to bring transparency to the political process and expose wrongdoing. Isn’t that the same thing the Times does? And yet one is being hounded by government agents, forced to remove its documents from Amazon’s servers and blocked from using PayPal, while the other is free to publish whatever it wants. What if the Times were to store some of its content on Amazon’s EC2 servers or use PayPal for transactions — would it be subject to the same treatment? And if not, why is WikiLeaks?

Some would argue that we don’t need entities like WikiLeaks, because traditional publishers like the New York Times are good enough. And it’s true that leakers took their information to newspapers before WikiLeaks came along — but it’s also true that many of them refused to publish it. And in some cases, information that should not have been published actually took the spotlight away from the truth, as in the case of the Times’ reporting leading up to the Iraq War. An independent source of documents like WikiLeaks (which journalism professor Jay Rosen has called the world’s “first stateless news organization”) would have been a very valuable thing to have during that time.

The fact is that freedom of the press, like freedom of speech in general, is a crucial part of the fabric of a free society. Every action that impinges on those freedoms is a loss for society, and a step down a slippery slope — and that applies to everything that falls under the term “press,” regardless of whether we agree with its methods or its leaders. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, online speech is only as strong as the weakest intermediary. Any action that the government or its representatives take against a publisher like WikiLeaks should have to meet a very high bar indeed — and as Dan Gillmor argues, everyone working at the New York Times or any other media outlet should feel a shiver when they see Joe Lieberman attacking WikiLeaks, because it could just as easily be them in the spotlight instead of Julian Assange.

[zerogravityfat]

basically what i said, you can't punish the whistle blowing media or the media is not free.

[emindead]

One of the interesting things I've been reading is that if it not were for those five Western respectable Newspapers (England's The Guardian, Spain's El País, The New York Times, France's Le Monde, and Germany's Der Spiegel) that published these Cables and previous news they wouldn't have been accepted as legitimate by the rest of the world. WikiLeaks made a really wise move there.

[emindead]

Obama should resign if approved UN spying: WikiLeaks founder
https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5igLhpFXyv-VRG5thAgiJk0OORBNw?docId=CNG.7936abe2aac85ef50ca11a2d6b6c031b.dc1
(AFP) – 2 hours ago

MADRID — President Barack Obama should resign if it can be shown that he approved spying by US diplomatic figures on UN officials, the founder of WikiLeaks said in an interview published Sunday.

"The whole chain of command who was aware of this order, and approved it, must resign if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law. The order is so serious it may well have been put to the president for approval," Julian Assange told Spanish daily El Pais.

"Obama must answer what he knew about this illegal order and when. If he refuses to answer or there is evidence he approved of these actions, he must resign," he added during an Internet chat interview published online.

WikiLeaks threw US diplomacy into chaos when it started releasing more than 250,000 classified State Department cables on November 28, creating an international firestorm as American diplomats' private assessments of foreign leaders and politics have been publicly aired.

According to one of the documents, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for UN personnel's telephones, emails, credit card details and frequent flier numbers.

The United States and other governments said the release of the documents broke their laws.

Assange gave the interview to El Pais on Saturday from an undisclosed location. The 39-year-old Australian is believed to be in Britain, and a report said he could be arrested this week.

WikiLeaks has come under intense pressure to close since it began releasing the trove of US State Department cables.

The site has already been forced to change its domain name and hop-scotch to servers around the globe as successive companies and countries bent to US arguments branding its divulgations over the past week "illegal".

It has also come under repeated cyber-attack, through a tactic known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) in which thousands of computers connect to its servers in a concerted attempt to knock them off-line.

Mirror websites, which replicate WikiLeaks's data, have sprung up on servers in various countries.

Interpol, meanwhile, has issued a "red notice" against Assange alerting all police forces that he is a wanted person in Sweden, which wants to question him "in connection with a number of sexual offenses", charges he denies.

"The organisation is strong. We have a lot of support, however we also have many attacks of different forms. From ongoing mass DDoS attacks to smears and the legal issues," said Assange.

He said WikiLeaks had "dozens" of people who were helping the organisation deal with the cyber-attack and set up the mirror websites "but it takes a lot of time for us to manage the process".

"We are automating that process and will soon have hundreds. If there is a battle between the US military and the preservation of History, we have insured History will win."

Assange said he and others who work for WikiLeaks had received "hundreds" of "specific" death threats from "US military militants".

"That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on. Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending to our lawyers and my children," he added.

Assange said he believed the "ripples are just starting to flow throughout the world" from the release of the State Department cables.

"But I believe geopolitics will be separated into pre and post cablegate phases," he said.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved.

[Adami]

If leaders had to resign for not being pure moral people, then each leader in the world would last about 13 minutes before being replaced.

[emindead]

So be it... Jedi.

[j]

Anybody hear Mike Huckabee say that the party who supplied the recent information to Wikileaks should be executed?

-J

[emindead]

Something I didn't realize:

https://www.fair.org/blog/2010/12/01/wikileaks-hasnt-leaked-anything/

WikiLeaks Hasn't 'Leaked' Anything
12/01/2010 by Jim Naureckas

   

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.
    --Joe Klein, Swampland (12/1/10)

Actually, Julian Assange didn't leak anything--he can't, because he didn't have access to classified documents. Someone (or someones) who did have such access leaked those documents to Assange's WikiLeaks, which, as a journalistic organization, made them available to the world, both directly and through other media partners.

This distinction, which is widely ignored in commentary on WikiLeaks, is actually quite important, because the ethical obligations of a government official with a security clearance are quite different from those of a media outlet. An official makes a promise to protect classified information, and should break that promise only when the duty to keep one's promises is outweighed by the public interest in disclosing wrongdoing. Journalists, on the other hand, are not in the business of protecting secrets, and should have a general presumption in favor of informing the public unless disclosure would cause specific foreseeable harms. The two ethical situations are pretty much opposite.

[antigoon]

Right. Leaking the material is illegal. WikiLeaks is just disseminating the information it's given.

[AcidLameLTE]

Surely you can't claim this is irresponsible behaviour by Wikileaks:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11923766

List of facilities 'vital to US security' leaked

A long list of key facilities around the world that the US describes as vital to its national security has been released by Wikileaks.

The US State Department in February 2009 asked all US missions abroad to list all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security.

The list includes pipelines, communication and transport hubs.

Several UK sites are listed, including cable locations, satellite sites and BAE Systems plants.

This is probably the most controversial document yet from the Wikileaks organisation.

The definition of US national security revealed by the cable is broad and all embracing.

There are obvious pieces of strategic infrastructure like communications hubs, gas pipelines and so on. However, other facilities on the list include:
Cobalt mine in Congo
Anti-snake venom factory in Australia
Insulin plant in Denmark

The US missions were asked to list all installations whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security or national security of the United States.

In Britain, for example, the list ranges from Cornwall to Scotland, including key satellite communications sites and the places where trans-Atlantic cables make landfall.

A number of BAE Systems plants involved in joint weapons programmes with the Americans are listed, along with a marine engineering firm in Edinburgh which is said to be "critical" for nuclear powered submarines.
'Targets for terror'

The geographical range of the document is extraordinary.

If the US sees itself as waging a "global war on terror" then this represents a global directory of the key installations and facilities - many of them medical or industrial - that are seen as being of vital importance to Washington.

No wonder then that the Times newspaper in London has published the story under the headline "Wikileaks lists 'targets for terror' against the US".

Some locations are given unique billing. The Nadym gas pipeline junction in western Siberia, for example, is described as "the most critical gas facility in the world".

It is a crucial transit point for Russian gas heading for western Europe.

In some cases, specific pharmaceutical plants or those making blood products are highlighted for their crucial importance to the global supply chain.

Of course the critical question is that raised by the Times newspaper's headline: Is this really a listing of potential targets that might be of use to a terrorist?

The cable contains a simple listing. In many cases towns are noted as the location but not actual street addresses.

That, of course, is not going to hinder anyone with access to the internet.

There are also no details of security measures at any of the listed sites.

What the list might do is to prompt potential attackers to look at a broader range of targets, especially given that the US authorities classify them as being so important.

It is not perhaps a major security breach, but many governments may see it as an unhelpful development.

It inevitably prompts the question as to exactly what positive benefit Wikileaks was intending in releasing this document.

Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind condemned the move.

"This is further evidence that they have been generally irresponsible, bordering on criminal," Sir Malcolm said. "This is the kind of information terrorists are interested in knowing."

[ack44]

trans-Atlantic

Nugget.

Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind condemned the move.

"This is further evidence that they have been generally irresponsible, bordering on criminal," Sir Malcolm said. "This is the kind of information terrorists are interested in knowing."

 Lol. Yep, it's information that terrorists wanted to know... without global intelligence finding out that they know. Now that the information is public, it's useless for them. No dumbfuck terrorist would try to target any of these disclosed spots.

[XJDenton]

You reckon? These are the same kind of people who think a good way to bypass airline security is to hide a bomb in a shoe.

[hefdaddy42]

Why is Wikileaks all of a sudden considered a "journalistic organization"?  What journalism do they do?  They just sit around and wait for people to bring them information.  That's not journalism.

[ack44]

They're not journalistic, they're journalistical! 

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Journalistical

[XJDenton]

Something I didn't realize:

https://www.fair.org/blog/2010/12/01/wikileaks-hasnt-leaked-anything/

WikiLeaks Hasn't 'Leaked' Anything
12/01/2010 by Jim Naureckas

   

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.
    --Joe Klein, Swampland (12/1/10)

Actually, Julian Assange didn't leak anything--he can't, because he didn't have access to classified documents. Someone (or someones) who did have such access leaked those documents to Assange's WikiLeaks, which, as a journalistic organization, made them available to the world, both directly and through other media partners.

This distinction, which is widely ignored in commentary on WikiLeaks, is actually quite important, because the ethical obligations of a government official with a security clearance are quite different from those of a media outlet. An official makes a promise to protect classified information, and should break that promise only when the duty to keep one's promises is outweighed by the public interest in disclosing wrongdoing. Journalists, on the other hand, are not in the business of protecting secrets, and should have a general presumption in favor of informing the public unless disclosure would cause specific foreseeable harms. The two ethical situations are pretty much opposite.

Whilst I don't neccessarily agree with thier decision to post the material thy did in some cases, I do think this is worth remembering, especially as there are some idiots calling for Julian's execution.

[ack44]

https://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/blog-1587-hackers-strike-back-at-bank.html

fuck

[ddtonfire]

"Operation Payback"? They could have at least come up with a better name.

[AcidLameLTE]

Shit name for a shit operation, I guess.

[ack44]

[AcidLameLTE]

Nope. I just think they're just wasting their time. All they do is take temporarily take down someone's website every now and again with a DDOS attack. Which, might I add, is not hacking.

[emindead]

Well, I guess I will do it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11937110

7 December 2010 Last updated at 13:08 GMT


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrested in London

The founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been arrested by police in London.

The 39-year-old Australian, who was the subject of a European arrest warrant, denies allegations he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden.

Mr Assange is due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates' Court later.

A Wikileaks spokesman said Mr Assange's arrest was an attack on media freedom but it would not stop the release of more secret files.

Kristinn Hrafnsson told Reuters on Tuesday: "Wikileaks is operational. We are continuing on the same track as laid out before.

"Any development with regards to Julian Assange will not change the plans we have with regards to the releases today and in the coming days."

Secret locations

He said Wikileaks was being operated by a group in London and other secret locations.

Scotland Yard said Mr Assange was arrested by appointment at a London police station at 0930 GMT.

Mr Assange is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of rape, one of unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation, alleged to have been committed in August 2010.

If the district judge rules the arrest warrant is legally correct, he could be extradited to Sweden.

But the process could take months.

Police contacted his lawyer, Mark Stephens, on Monday night after receiving a European arrest warrant from the Swedish authorities.

An earlier warrant, issued last month, had not been filled in correctly.

Mr Stephens said his client was keen to learn more about the allegations and anxious to clear his name.

He said: "It's about time we got to the end of the day and we got some truth, justice and rule of law.

"Julian Assange has been the one in hot pursuit to vindicate himself to clear his good name."

Mr Stephens said Mr Assange had been trying to meet the Swedish prosecutor to find out the details about the allegations he faces.

Mr Assange has come in for criticism in the last week for the revelations made on Wikileaks.

On Monday Foreign Secretary William Hague criticised the website for publishing details of sensitive sites, including some in the UK, saying they could be targeted by terrorists.

Former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has described Mr Assange as "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands".

Wikileaks was forced to switch to a Swiss host server after several US internet service providers refused to handle it.

It has also come under cyber attack and several companies, including PayPal and Amazon, have refused to supply it.

Mr Assange is expected to appear before a district judge at City of Westminster Magistrates Court before 1230 GMT, unless special permission is given for a later hearing.

City of Westminster deals with most extradition cases but there are huge differences in the time it takes.

Extradition can be extremely swift if the accused waives his legal rights.

But some cases, such as the extradition of computer hacker Gary McKinnon to the United States, have been going on for years because of legal challenges.

A European arrest warrant is designed to speed up the process but there can be delays.

Last week a district judge finally agreed to extradite British businessman Ian Griffin to France 18 months after he was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend in a Paris hotel.

Gerard Batten, a Ukip MEP, said the Assange case highlighted the dangers of the European arrest warrant because the judge has no power to listen to the evidence to judge if there is a prime facie case.

He said: "What concerns me is that it could be used against political dissidents. I don't know of the quality of the evidence in Mr Assange's case but it does seem that he is involved in political turmoil and intrigue and there are a lot of people keen to shut him up and there is nothing a court in the UK can do to look at the evidence before they extradite him."

Mr Assange is an Australian citizen and his supporters have written an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard asking her to protect him.

One of the signatories, prominent barrister, Julian Burnside QC said: "First and foremost Julian Assange is an Australian citizen who is entitled to the protection of his country and does not deserve to be betrayed by his country.

"Julia Gillard has been making it virtually impossible for Assange to return to Australia where he is entitled to be. And she has even threatened to cancel his passport. That is an outrageous stance to take."

Analysis
Clive Coleman BBC News

Following his arrest, Mr Assange will be brought before a court as soon as possible. That may be on Tuesday afternoon. If the court is satisfied the arrest warrant is valid, a date will be set for a full hearing, which is not likely to take place for some weeks.

Mr Assange will be able to raise his arguments against extradition at this stage.

The 'fast-track' European arrest warrant system is based on the concept that all the participating countries have legal systems which meet similar standards, and fully respect human rights. In other words, it is assumed that a person will get an equally fair trial in any of these countries.

If the accusation from the requesting state is valid, the grounds for opposing extradition are very limited.

[ack44]

Ugh, so blatant.

[zerogravityfat]

This is not doing much around here, but in Turkey it's giving the pm a serious headache about his outed accounts in swiss banks, I'm hoping it will be enough to losing him the elections.

[emindead]

But isn't the Turkish PM really popular? He's the runner-up, for now, in the Time's Person of the Year.

[emindead]

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/dont-shoot-messenger-for-revealing-uncomfortable-truths/story-fn775xjq-1225967241332
December 08, 2010 12:00AM

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

► The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

► King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.

► Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available.

► Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".

► Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence, sharing is kept from parliament.

► The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.