Controversy erupted earlier this week after the journalism department of Argentina's National University of La Plata awarded Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for freedom of expression. Proponents of media freedom have harshly criticized Correa for his treatment of the Ecuadorean press. But such criticisms fail to acknowledge the reasons underlying the media policies of President Correa, whose government recently granted political asylum to government transparency advocate and WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange.
AFP news agency has reported that Julian Assange will meet this Thursday in London with French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, co-Chairman of France's Left Party (PG). A press conference will be held at Ecuador's London embassy after the meeting.
Promoting what he calls a "citizens' revolution," Mélenchon and his Left Front movement advocate a populist approach to governance. In an interview earlier this year, Mélenchon explained:
"The politics of the established order speaks to no one except the powerful. It speaks a dead language in which there are no people, no love, no fraternity, no poetry, no taste of the future, no passion for science. The only thing that counts is the balance sheet, and on the condition that public spending is reduced. We have dared to change all that. We have somehow broken the inhuman law of silence. And reintroduced human questions, by asking how to address them. We came to the realization that the possible was not far from the desirable. And that sometimes the possible can be greater than what people dare to dream. People had been taught to stunt their dreams. We, by contrast, tell them to let them flourish. This is actually another way of doing politics."
A new WikiLeaks documentary is scheduled to premiere at the Sundance film festival early next year. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks will screen at the Salt Lake City, Utah festival which takes place January 17-27, 2013.
According to the Sundance website:
"The definitive story of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks, WE STEAL SECRETS explores the people and events behind the upstart website that rocked the U.S. government, ushered in a new era of transparency and ignited an information war."
Trevor Groth, Sundance Director of Programming states:
"The films in the Premieres and Documentary Premieres sections offer compelling portraits of worlds and people ranging from the beloved to the misunderstood to the unknown. Expertly crafted by some of the most esteemed filmmakers in the world these films have the power to delight audiences at the Festival and impact our culture at large."
The complete Sundance lineup can be viewed here.
Julian Assange was asked to present at the European Parliament S&D party seminar on Corruption in member states of the European Union. Bivol made a presentation in this seminar entitled Government Level Corruption and Ties to Organized Crime. Julian Assange spoke as part of this presentation on the wider corruption revealed in Cablegate, and legal cases that have used the cables as evidence.
In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with WL Central, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has accused the current Gillard government of acting as though Julian Assange "doesn't exist, that he's not an Australian citizen." Mr Fraser slams the existing relationship between Australia and the United States as "far, far too close" and claims Australia is "a strategic colony of the United States, under current circumstances."
*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*
Ft. Meade, MD November 29, 2012 - Yesterday at Bradley Manning's Article 13 hearing, professional military psychiatrist Captain Kevin Moore testified that Bradley Manning's pretrial confinement conditions at Quantico military brig were worse than that of any other long-term pretrial prisoner he'd observed. He added that Bradley's restrictive conditions, including being held in a 6x8 foot cell, having access to only 20 minutes of sunshine and exercise per day, and being deprived of basic items such as clothing and toilet paper for periods of time, were most comparable to yet still more severe than conditions of prisoners he'd observed on death row.
Anonymous Operation Syria - Press Release
Thursday - November 29, 2012 7:00 PM ET USA
Greetings World --
Today, at precisely 10:30 AM ET all Internet traffic into and out of Syria ceased. Within a half hour of this sudden shut down, the PBX land-lines were degraded by 90% and Mobile connectivity was degraded by 75%. The nation of Syria has gone dark. And Anonymous knows all to well what happens in the dark places.
European Commission documents released today by WikiLeaks show that hard-right U.S. politicians were directly behind the extrajudicial banking blockade against WikiLeaks. In the heavily redacted documents, MasterCard Europe admits that Senator Joseph Lieberman and Congressman Peter T. King both "had conversations" with MasterCard in the United States. Lieberman, the chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, boasted of instigating Amazon's cutting of service to WikiLeaks - an action condemned by the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers on 7 December 2011.
On November 27, 2012, Julian Assange will give a keynote speech regarding "A Vision of the Future Society" at ConventionCamp 2012, an Internet conference in Hanover, Germany.
Ingo Stoll, organizer and managing director of the agency neuwaerts, commented on the choice of Assange for the keynote speech:
"The internet and the digital revolution have initiated a fundamental change in our society. The established institutions have already been struggling for a long time for their retention of power in being the opinion and interpretation leaders. So far, nobody has challenged these institutions as much as WikliLeaks and in person Julian Assange. Who else could be more suitable for speaking about our key issue of ... 'real change' far away from Twitter, Facebook, etc.? We are interested in his vision of the future society. And we believe that with his ... views he will ... make the 1,500 attendees step out of the comfort zone of their own thoughts."
Assange is scheduled to appear via video stream at 9:45AM. An exclusive interview will follow the keynote.
Today OR Books released Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, a new title by WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and fellow internet visionaries Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann.
Cypherpunks comes roughly a year after the publication of Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography -- which erupted in controversy when the publishing company Canongate released a draft of the manuscript against Assange's wishes.
Cypherpunks are activists who promote the use of cryptography (writing in code) as a means of positive social change.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, has figured largely in the cypherpunk movement since the 1980s.
Wau-Holland-Stiftung (WHS), named in memory of the German philosopher and net activist Wau Holland, has been collecting donations for WikiLeaks since 2009. In the immediate aftermath of WikiLeaks publication of the US diplomatic cables in 2010, not only did PayPal arbitarily shut down the WHS donations account, but the tax-exempt status of the Foundation was challenged as well.
This situation has now been rectified.
The South American media has reverberated lately with reports that the CIA has been using drug money in efforts to destabilize the government of Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa. If these stories are accurate, then the plan's exposure and apparent failure may illustrate the impotence of traditional U.S. interventionism in the new South America, which increasingly rejects traditional political and economic servitude to its northern and European neighbors.
In a landmark decision today the European Parliament initiated the drafting of legislation that would stop the arbitrary banking blockades against WikiLeaks and other organizations facing economic censorship. This is an important signal from the European lawmakers. It is a recognition of the seriousness of the precedents set in December 2010, still in force, when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and Bank of America launched a unilateral, extrajudicial banking blockade against donations to WikiLeaks.
After being offline since 3 August, wikileaks.org came back tonight under the protection of CloudFlare. The donations channels are again open.
The WikiLeaks Collateral Murder website is now http://collateralmurder.org and is being protected by CloudFlare. The TrapWire surveillance technology revealed in the Global Intelligence Files continues to make headlines.
By Nikolas Kozloff.
Due to competing interests, the emerging world power's foreign policy is being pulled between pragmatism and idealism.
By Nikolas Kozloff.
In the wake of Paraguay's suspicious impeachment of President Fernando Lugo, which observers have likened to a kind of "quasi-coup," some may wonder whether underhanded corporate forces may have played a role in the political crisis. Such suspicions were heightened recently when the new de facto regime led by Federico Franco, Lugo's former conservative Vice President, inked a deal with Texas-based PetroVictory/Crescent Global Oil to open up the remote Chaco region to petroleum exploration. Supporters of Lugo's highly dubious ouster claim that Crescent could help to ease Paraguay's dependence on foreign oil. Richard González, Crescent's CEO, announced that the company would invest $10 million in the Chaco and start exploratory drilling within the next few months.
WikiLeaks has been under sustained DDoS attacks for five days now. The first notice came on August 3, 2012, with the following tweet:
WikiLeaks.org is down for unknown reasons. We are investigating. wikileaks.org is still up.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 3, 2012
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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