U.S. Demands to Assassinate Assange

High-level U.S. government officials, including Clinton and Biden, demand for the assassination of Assange and to list WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization. In this country, do we prosecute whistleblowers ?

Hilarious Parody of Petraeus Scandal

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Britain And Ecuador In Diplomatic Crisis Over Julian Assange

British authorities threaten to raid the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to get Assange

The wire services of Reuters is reporting that a major diplomatic crisis escalated on Wednesday in London over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after UK authorities indicated that they would storm Ecuador's London embassy if Ecuadorian diplomats did not turn over Mr. Assange, who has been taking refuge there for two months.

In response, the Ecuadorian government quickly raised legal and diplomatic concerns over the British threats. Reuters reported that Ecuadorean government officials said such a raid would be considered a "hostile and intolerable act," and it would violate the sovereignty of Ecuador's government, and, by extension, its Embassy in London.

"We want to be very clear, we're not a British colony. The colonial times are over," Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said in an angry statement after a meeting with President Rafael Correa, Reuters reported.

The Ecuadorian Embassy in London posted the following statement yesterday on it's mission's website :

“We are deeply shocked by British government’s threats against the sovereignty of the Ecuadorian Embassy and their suggestion that they may forcibly enter the embassy.

This is a clear breach of international law and the protocols set out in the Vienna Convention.

Throughout out the last 56 days Mr. Julian Assange has been in the Embassy, the Ecuadorian Government has acted honourably in all our attempts to seek a resolution to the situation. This stands in stark contrast to the escalation of the British Government today with their threats to breakdown the door of the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Instead of threatening violence against the Ecuadorian Embassy the British Government should use its energy to find a peaceful resolution to this situation which we are aiming to achieve.“

The Associated Press wire service has already reported that British police have made arrests of peaceful activists outside the Ecuadorian Embassy.

War on Whistleblowers

Manning and Assange are each just "test case" for Governments' hostile treatment and retaliation against Whistleblowers.

The pre-trial hearings in the case of Bradley Manning, accused of the biggest classified data leak in U.S. history, have kicked off in Maryland. But there's growing concern over their fairness, with the U.S. government withholding more than 200 thousand relevant documents from Manning's defense.

By neglecting whistleblower protection laws and escalating the Manning and Assange cases, the US government is setting a precedent to be applied to journalists, future whistleblowers, activists and bloggers, activist Sibel Edmonds told RT. ­Edmonds is the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers coalition, an independent alliance. The activist believes Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are just the beginning.

ASIO Spied On Julian Assange

Quoted entirely from The Age :

Assange told of ASIO snooping

Philip Dorling
March 16, 2011

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange is believed to have been tipped off more than seven months ago about Australian intelligence scrutiny of his whistleblowing activities.

Senior government ministers yesterday claimed to have no knowledge of co-operation between Australian intelligence agencies and the United States government concerning Assange after WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of secret documents leaked from the US Defence Department.

But sources within Wikileaks have told The Age that an Australian intelligence official privately warned Wikileaks on August 11 last year that Assange was the subject of inquiries by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and that information relating to him and others associated with Wikileaks had been provided to the US in response to requests through intelligence liaison channels.

The Australian intelligence official is also claimed to have specifically warned that Assange could be at risk of ''dirty tricks'' from the US intelligence community, including the possibility of sexual entrapment.

The information is said to have been provided to WikiLeaks by means of a submission through the website's electronic ''drop box'' on the day Assange flew from London to Stockholm to speak on freedom of the press.

Nine days later, on August 20, a Swedish newspaper reported that Assange was wanted by Swedish police for questioning in relation to sexual assault allegations involving two women in Stockholm. Assange immediately tweeted on the WikiLeaks Twitter page: "We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks'. Now we have the first one.''

Subsequently, on August 23, Assange said in a telephone interview with Arab news channel Al Jazeera: ''We were warned on the 11th [of August] by Australian intelligence that we should expect this sort of thing.''

Assange is appealing a British court decision to uphold an arrest warrant for him to be extradited to Sweden for questioning about the sexual assault allegations. He and his lawyers have retreated from earlier claims that the allegations are the product of a conspiracy involving foreign intelligence agencies.

WikiLeaks also learnt its Australian intelligence source was aware of the group's intention to seek legal advice from a prominent Melbourne lawyer - information not public at the time and known only to people within WikiLeaks.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard was confronted with a video message from Assange when she appeared on ABC TV's Q&A program on Monday.

Assange asked the Prime Minister whether her government had exchanged information about Australian citizens, specifically people linked to WikiLeaks, with foreign powers.

He asked that if she could not give a straight answer to the question, whether the Australian people should consider her to have engaged in treason.

Ms Gillard replied ''I honestly don't know what he's talking about,'' adding that no one had asked her about Assange during her recent visit to Washington.

''So I'm afraid I can't help him with a full and frank exchange about people who work with WikiLeaks.''

Mr Gillard did acknowledge Australia regularly exchanges information about Australian citizens with other countries in relation to law enforcement matters, but she said in regard to WikiLeaks, ''to my knowledge, it hasn't happened''.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister yesterday declined to say whether Ms Gillard had initiated any inquiries to determine whether Assange's claim was correct.

A spokesperson for Attorney-General Robert McClelland said that the Attorney-General was unaware of information sharing concerning Assange, but said it was ''entirely appropriate'' for the US to investigate the leakage of classified information.

Julian Assange Appeared by Video on Q&A News Program with Prime Minister Julia Gillard

Julian Assange grills Julia Gillard on live television

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard appears on live Australian television program ''Q & A'' and is surprised with a video question from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Epic win. Clip aired on 14 Mar 2011.

Check out an article from The Age, which reports that ASIO was spying on Mr. Assange -- and then sharing that intelligence with the United States.

Twitter WikiLeaks Legal and Subpoena Update

In violation of due process rights, U.S. Magistrate Theresa Buchanan backs U.S. Department of Justice request for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's friends' online records.

The U.S. Magistrate with judicial power over the U.S. government investigation into WikiLeaks has issued a new court order, which affirms a previous secret court order demanding WikiLeaks-related discovery from user accounts on social media journalism sites, such as Twitter, which have no known connection to WikiLeaks other than for typical online social networking activities, such as ''following.''

The Hon. Buchanan denied legal challenges to her previous court order by prominent owners of Twitter accounts. The magistrate said that U.S. government prosecutors were not seeking the "content of the communications," according to Reuters.

Even though Twitter account owners may follow each other on the website, it does not mean that the account owners are, by association, automatically engaged in questionable online behaviour, some online privacy activists say. There is a freedom of assembly in the United States, whether it be in an assembly hall or over a social media website.

In a further worrisome development, the magistrate also invalidated legal arguments that if Twitter were to provide to prosecutors the Internet Protocol addresses of Twitter account owners, then the act of unreasonable disclosure would constitute a "violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure because it revealed their location," reported Reuters.

"Buchanan originally signed an order for prosecutors seeking about seven months of information from Twitter, including who they communicated with, who they followed, and who followed them. They also requested information about how they logged in, which could identify their location at the time," wrote the Reuters reporter Jeremy Pelofsky.

As reported before, what would the U.S. government be gaining from conducting a court-sanctioned surveillance for this kind of social media account information? Not for nothing, by focusing on subscribers and connection records, among other things, the U.S. government is casting a wide, indiscriminate net into cyberspace, and it is hoping to pull in something -- legal or otherwise, relevant or otherwise, applicable or otherwise. There is no focus to the court order ; its only objectives are to spy and to collect surveillance over both foreigners, over which the U.S. may have no jurisdiction, and citizens, who are being denied due process.

DreamWorks options movie rights to WikiLeaks books

From Yahoo! News :

The DreamWorks studio has optioned movie rights to a pair of books about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his controversial Website that is bent on revealing government secrets, company officials said on Thursday.

One of the books is "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy" by journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian, the British newspaper said in an article. The other is "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website" by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a defector from the organization. Read more.

WikiLeaks Twitter Subpoena Targets Foreigners

A U.S. Court in Virginia issues Order for Production of Information that Ensnares Citizens of Australia, Iceland, and The Netherlands.

The issuance of a court order to Twitter confirms that prosecutors working for the United States Department of Justice are investigating WikiLeaks over the publications of thousands of classified U.S. embassy cables.

The court order specifically names three foreigners. It is unknown if a domestic U.S. court may extend its jurisdiction to cover the internet accounts of foreigners.

According to an analysis published by The New York Times on the subject of the application or validity of the U.S. court order on foreign individuals, Justice Department prosecutors might be violating the right of free speech of the foreign individuals. The three foreign individuals, who are the target of the Twitter court order, are : Julian Assange, the spokesperson and editor-in-chief for WikiLeaks; Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks activist who is also a member of Iceland’s Parliament; and Rop Gonggrijp, a computer programmer.

''This raised the possibility of a diplomatic quarrel between the United States and allied nations whose citizens were among those covered by the subpoena. They could argue that American laws were being used to stifle free communications between individuals who were not American citizens, and who were not in the United States at the time of the messages.''

It is unclear whether court orders pursued by Justice Department prosecutors in their retaliatory persecution of WikiLeaks can apply U.S. law to foreigners. Indeed, according to The Times, in the case of Ms. Jonsdottir, ''Iceland’s foreign minister ... has requested a meeting with the American ambassador to Iceland to ask, among other things, whether a grand jury inquiry prompted the subpoena.''

If the legal underpinning of the court orders can be called into question, then do the investigations by U.S. prosecutors constitute acts of retaliation against foreign political dissidents and WikiLeaks ?

WikiLeaks Twitter Subpoena Scandal

UPDATE : The Guardian newspaper : WikiLeaks Demands That Google And Facebook Unseal U.S. Subpoenas

WikiLeaks is reportedly demanding that Google and Facebook unseal any secret court orders that the websites received in connection with the U.S. government's retaliation against WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks' demand followed news that was reported that a court in Virginia had issued a secret order to Twitter to produce personal information belonging to accounts of five individuals associated with WikiLeaks.

All of the secret court orders are providing ''strong evidence'' that the U.S. government has empaneled a grand jury to begin a broad, large-scale data mining operation that seeks to collect surveillance in a retaliatory act against WikiLeaks. In late November, WikiLeaks began a coördinated reporting collaboration with several respected journalism outlets, including The New York Times, to publish thousands of United States embassy cables.

In A Clear First Amendment Violation, The U.S. Government Has Issued A Judicial Order To Twitter In An Effort To Collect Information About WikiLeaks And Its Supporters.

Officials from the United States Department of Justice have applied for, and received, a judicial order that has been issued to the social media website, Twitter, in an effort to collect information about political dissidents. In some countries, activists are under constant harassment from their governments.

In growing numbers of mainstream media reports, the news has been reporting that the U.S. government has served Twitter with what are being described as ''subpoenas'' for the private messages, contact information, and other personal forms of information belonging to Julian Assange, who is the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks. Other targets of the subpoenas include Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, and Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is a member of parliament in Iceland. Ms. Jonsdottir was also a former WikiLeaks volunteer. Also mentioned in the judicial order are other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp.

According to Salon.com, the information demanded by the WikiLeaks subpoenas issued by the U.S. Department of Justice is ''sweeping in scope.'' Salon.com has posted online the Department of Justice order for the Twitter information.