WikiLeaks: Julian Assange Arrested - Cablegate

[rumborak]

Emin, not sure what you read into this cable. All this cable shows is that the governor of the Bank of England knew about the state of his assets, and wanted to avert what later, after Lehman Brothers collapsed, was no longer avertable.

rumborak

[emindead]

The guy is pretty good at his game... but like I said, this was a six months prior forecast. Look at it this way, when the Queen asked why 'no one saw this coming' they all answered with a lie; they said it was impossible to foresee.

And well, also, Brown wasn't the mind behind the bailout. This Mervin guy was. The point is that it's not impossible to forecast economical and financial disasters like we were told.

[emindead]

OK, as for a personal, Colombian, view regarding the leaks:

What they show is that Colombia has been too keen towards the USA. We've been always asking for a bone. Our International Relationship, since before Theodore Roosevelt, has been to do everything so it pleases the USA. To me this is absolutely pathetic.

Deep in our minds everybody we knew this was true, but we couldn't precisely point where was it. Thanks to the Leaks we now see how we (Colombians) shared every bit of information we had, every opinion, every strategy, every favour, every condition of the delicate investigations of our personal issues, with the the US. And the US basically responding "still not enough so it can concern us, keep sending info".

Sometimes, the lame remarks that Hugo Chávez said in the past that Mexico and some other countries including Colombia are puppies from the Empire (USA) it was quite offensive... yet true.

One of the positive sides of these Leaks is that at least some of the people will be now well informed and start choosing leaders and politicians who are not so subjugated to the demands of our "friends" up there in the North, and we start with a new approach towards our foreign policy. One much less naïve.

[El Barto]

Regarding Anna Nichole Smith:

Not since Category 4 Hurricane Betsy made landfall in 1965 has one woman done as much damage in Nassau

 


And yeah, Em, one of the things people tend to overlook is that this isn't just about Amerika.  Bitching about damage done to us while ignoring possible benefits to others is exactly the sort of self-righteous bullshit that causes a big chunk of the world to resent us. 

[ack44]

I have a feeling that 2011 will be big on censorship.

https://www.technology-digital.com/sectors/mobile-computing/apple-buckles-under-pressure-and-bans-wikileaks-app

[ack44]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/julian-assange-i-own-all-of-the-wikileaks-documents/68941/
Haha, this is awesome. Assange, you're losing your fans.

[ack44]

This is absolutely disgusting - not that this whistleblower is going to trial, but that it's "coinciding" with the U.S.'s crackdown on WikiLeaks-related people and that European countries are acting like puppet states.

A Swiss banker whose actions caused a U.S. judge to briefly shut down WikiLeaks three years ago faces trial for allegedly distributing confidential documents showing how his former employer helped rich clients to dodge taxes.

The case appears to be the first time a WikiLeaks informant will go on trial. It comes as the U.S. government also is trying to prosecute individuals linked to the website for publishing secret military and diplomatic files.

Rudolf Elmer, a former employee of Swiss-based Bank Julius Baer, has been ordered to appear before a Zurich regional court Jan. 19 to answer charges of coercion and violating Switzerland's strict banking secrecy laws. If convicted he could be sentenced to up to three years in prison and a fine.

Elmer said he will admit certain counts of coercion, but insisted he didn't break Swiss banking secrecy laws because the files he distributed belonged to a Julius Baer subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, where he worked for the bank for eight years.

"This data wasn't subject to Swiss banking secrecy," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Monday.

Swiss financial newspaper Cash was among those that in 2005 received a copy of a CD containing 170 megabytes of data on the Julius Baer's Cayman operations. The files reportedly showed the bank helped its clients set up secret offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes.

Elmer denied giving the files to Cash, but said he did distribute the CD to several media outlets and tax authorities. He later uploaded some of the same information to WikiLeaks, prompting a U.S. judge to shut down the website after Julius Baer claimed Elmer had engaged in "unlawful dissemination of stolen bank records and personal account information of its customers."

The bank quietly dropped its U.S. lawsuit when the suspension order was lifted two weeks later following complaints from free speech groups and media organizations, including The Associated Press.

Jan Vonder Muehll, a spokesman for Julius Baer, confirmed Monday that the bank is one of the plaintiffs in the case against Elmer next week before the Zurich court. But he said the trial would focus on the earlier release of data to Swiss media, not their publication on WikiLeaks.

The 2008 shutdown saw a surge in support for WikiLeaks, which until then had been virtually unknown to a wider public. The site has managed to stay online almost continuously since, despite growing pressure on its Internet service providers following the recent publication of thousands of leaked U.S. war records and diplomatic cables.

U.S. authorities are currently trying to build a legal case against WikiLeaks and some of its collaborators, claiming the release of the files puts lives at risk.

https://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9KLHDFO0.htm

[emindead]

Russian WikiLeaks comes under attack over photos allegedly showing Putin's 'palace'

https://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/russian-official-praised-assange-russia-blocks-wikileaks-photos-putins-mansion/
By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 -- 1:50 pm

putin 1021 Russian WikiLeaks comes under attack over photos allegedly showing Putins palaceIt was just over a month ago when a high-ranking, unnamed Russian official told a state-controlled media outlet that Julian Assange, founder of secrets outlet WikiLeaks, deserved a Nobel Prize for his work exposing the US empire's secrets.

Perhaps they spoke too soon.

A Russian-language version of WikiLeaks came under cyber attack and was inaccessible to Russian visitors Wednesday after the site published leaked photographs allegedly depicting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's lavish, sprawling estate.

The images appeared to have been taken by one or more individuals connected to workers building the still-under-construction mansion, and showed what appeared to be two different people whose identifying features were blacked out posing on and around expensive pieces of furniture.

Russian media had in recent days been discussing the alleged value of Puntin's so-called "pleasure complex," with one estimate suggesting the cost exceeded $1 billion.

Much of the funding came in the form of gifts from Russia's business elite, according to Russian whistleblower Sergey Kolesnikov, whose tale was told by The Washington Post in late December.

The Post called Putin's estate a "palace" on the Black Sea, under construction since 2005.

The leader of Russia's Pirate Party, Pavel Rassudov, who spoke to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, said the outage was likely "due to a [Distributed Denial of Service] attack."

"We are looking into the causes of these problems," he said.

RuLeaks.net, which was not actually operated by Assange or his team, opened earlier this month and asked Russians to begin sending information on public corruption.

In US diplomatic cables published by Assange's WikiLeaks, Russia was branded a "mafia state," and media estimates put annual profits by government officials from bribery alone at nearly $300 billion.

In one leaked cable, a Spanish prosecutor was quoted saying that in Russia, "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the Government and OC [organised crime] groups."

WikiLeaks has promised further revelations that detail not just US activities, but Russian corruption as well.

"Russian readers will learn a lot about their country" from upcoming document releases, a WikiLeaks spokesman told Russian daily newspaper Kommersant in late Oct. "We want to tell people the truth about the actions of their governments."

A number of the photos appear below. More were available on RuLeaks.net.

Raw Story was unable to confirm that the images actually depicted Putin's mansion.

[Adami]

Hell I'd live there.

[ack44]

Damn Kremlin hypocrites. Expose the fuck out of your government, Russians.

[Chino]

Reminds me of the mansion in Richie Rich, just not quite as awesome.

[ack44]