Wikileaks documenten #20: Stratfor Leaks

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Assange verliest beroep, hof houdt vast aan arrestatiebevel

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Julian Assange is er niet in geslaagd het arrestatiebevel tegen hem te laten intrekken. Het Zweedse gerechtshof zag vandaag niets in de twee argumenten die de WikiLeaks-oprichter hiervoor aandroeg.

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Maar het gerechtshof zegt dat er “geen reden” is het bevel in te trekken louter omdat Assange in die ambassade zit en het bevel dus niet kan worden uitgevoerd. Wel ging het hof in op het “falen van de aanklagers” bij het onderzoeken van alternatieve manieren die het mogelijk zouden moeten de klokkenluider te ondervragen.

De advocaten van Assange lieten weten in beroep te gaan bij het hooggerechtshof in Zweden. Ze zien de woorden van het hof als “een waarschuwing” voor het openbaar ministerie en steunbetuiging voor kamp-Assange, meldt Reuters.

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Amazon’s frightening CIA partnership: Capitalism, corporations and our massive new surveillance state

When Internet retailer and would-be 21st century overlord Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks off its servers back in 2010, the decision was not precipitated by men in black suits knocking on the door of one of Jeff Bezos’ mansions at 3 a.m., nor were any company executives awoken by calls from gruff strangers suggesting they possessed certain information that certain individuals lying next to them asking “who is that?” would certainly like to know.

Corporations, like those who lead them, are amoral entities, legally bound to maximize quarterly profits. And rich people, oft-observed desiring to become richer, may often be fools, but when it comes to making money even the most foolish executive knows there’s more to be made serving the corporate state than giving a platform to those accused of undermining national security.

The whistle-blowing website is “putting innocent people in jeopardy,” Amazon said in a statement released 24 hours after WikiLeaks first signed up for its Web hosting service. And the company wasn’t about to let someone use their servers for “securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs,” even if much of that data, leaked by Army private Chelsea Manning, showed that its rightful possessors were covering up crimes, including the murder of innocent civilians from Yemen to Iraq.

The statement was over the top — try as it might, not even the government has been able to point to a single life lost due to Manning’s disclosures — but, nonetheless, Amazon’s capitalist apologists on the libertarian right claimed the big corporation had just been victimized by big bad government. David Henderson, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, explained that those calling for a boycott of Amazon were out of line, as the real enemy was “megalomaniacal Senator Joe Lieberman,” who had earlier called on Amazon to drop WikiLeaks (and is, admittedly, a rock-solid choice for a villain).

“The simple fact is that we live in a society whose governments are so big, so powerful, so intrusive, and so arbitrary, that we have to be very careful in dealing with them,” Henderson wrote. That Amazon itself cited a purported violation of its terms of service to kick WikiLeaks off its cloud was “a lie,” according to Henderson, meant to further protect Amazon from state retribution. Did it make him happy? No, of course not. “But boycotting one of the government’s many victims? No way.”

But Amazon was no victim. Henderson, like many a libertarian, fundamentally misreads the relationship between corporations and the state, creating a distinction between the two that doesn’t really exist outside of an intro-to-economics textbook. The state draws up the charter that gives corporations life, granting them the same rights as people — more rights, in fact, as a corporate person can do what would land an actual person in prison with impunity or close to it, as when Big Banana was caught paying labor organizer-killing, right-wing death squads in Colombia and got off with a fine.

Corporations are more properly understood not as victims of the state, but its for-profit accomplices. Indeed, Amazon was eager to help the U.S. government’s campaign against a website that — thanks almost entirely to Chelsea Manning — had exposed many embarrassing acts of U.S. criminality across the globe: the condoning of torture by U.S. allies in Iraq; the sexual abuse of young boys by U.S. contractors in Afghanistan; the cover-up of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, including one that killed 41 civilians, 21 of them children. The decision to boot WikiLeaks was, in fact, one that was made internally, no pressure from the deep state required.

“I consulted people I knew fairly high up in the State Department off the record, and they said that they did not have to put pressure … on Amazon for that to happen,” said Robert McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, in an appearance on “Democracy Now!.” “It was not a difficult sell.”

And it paid off. A little more than a year later, Amazon was awarded a generous $600 million contract from the CIA to build a cloud computing service that will reportedly “provide all 17 [U.S.] intelligence agencies unprecedented access to an untold number of computers for various on-demand computing, analytic, storage, collaboration and other services.” As The Atlantic noted, and as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed, these same agencies collect “billions and perhaps trillions of pieces of metadata, phone and Internet records, and other various bits of information on an annual basis.”

That is to say: On Amazon’s servers will be information on millions of people that the intelligence community has no right to possess — Director of National Intelligence James Clapper initially denied the intelligence community was collecting such data for a reason — which is used to facilitate corporate espionage and drone strikes that don’t just jeopardize innocent lives, but have demonstrably ended hundreds of them.

Instead of helping expose U.S. war crimes, then, Amazon’s cloud service could be used to facilitate them, for which it will be paid handsomely — which was, in all likelihood, the whole point of the company proving itself a good corporate citizen by disassociating itself from an organization that sought to expose its future clients in the intelligence community.

“We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA,” Amazon said in a 2013 statement after winning that long-sought contract (following a protracted battle for it with a similarly eager tech giant, IBM).

If it were more honest, Amazon might have said “We look forward to a successful relationship with the [coup d’état-promoting, drone-striking, blood-stained] CIA.”

And if it were more honest, Amazon could have said the same thing in 2010.

So long as there are giant piles of money to be made by systematically violating the privacy of the public (the CIA and NSA together enjoy a budget of over $25 billion), corporations will gladly lie in the same bed as those who created them, which is, yes, gross. Protecting consumer privacy is at best an advertising slogan, not a motivating principle for entities whose sole responsibility to shareholders is to maximize quarterly profits. This isn’t an admission of defeat — and when companies fear state-sanctioned invasions of privacy will cost them customers in the private sector or contracts with foreign states, they do sometimes roll back their participation — but a call to recognize the true villain: If we desire more than just an iPhone with encryption, we must acknowledge the issue is not just a few individual megalomaniacs we call senators, but a system called capitalism that systemically encourages this behavior.

In the 1970s, following the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the Church Committee exposed rampant spying on dissidents that was illegal even according to the loose legal standards of the time. Speeches were made, reforms were demanded and new laws were passed. The abuses, it was claimed, were relegated to history. What happened next? Look around: The total surveillance we enjoy today, enabled by high-tech military contractors including AT&T and Google and Verizon and every other nominally private tech company that capitalism encourages to value profits over privacy — a public-private partnership that grants those in power a means of spying on the powerless beyond the wildest dreams of any 20th century totalitarian. Sure, ostensibly communist states can of course be quite awful too, but the difference is that, in capitalist nations, the citizens actually place the eavesdropping devices in their own homes.

Now, whether the reforms of the 1970s were inadequate or were just plain ignored by those who were to be reformed is sort of beside the point; the status quo is what it is and, at least if one values privacy and the ability to organize and engage in political discussion and search the Internet without fear a spy agency or one of its contractors is monitoring it all in real-time, it sure isn’t good. So when groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and progressive magazines such as The Nation call for “another Church Committee,” the question we ought to ask them is: “Fucking really?”

Abolishing capitalism is indeed a utopian goal, but when corporations routinely go above and beyond their legal duties to serve the state — granting police and intelligence agencies access to their customers’ data without so much as a judge’s rubberstamp on a warrant — expecting meaningful change from a few hearings or legislative reforms will only leave the reformers disappointed to find their efforts have just led to dystopia. So long as there’s money to be made serving the corporate state, that is what corporations will do; there’s no need to resort to conspiracy for it’s right there in their corporate. And that’s not to be defeatist, but to suggest we ought to try a different approach: we ought to be organizing to put a stop to public-private partnerships altogether.

Right-wing libertarians and other defenders of capitalism are absolutely right when they say that the profit motive is a mighty motive indeed — and that’s precisely why we should seek to remove it; to take away even just the prospect of a federal contract. If the demands of privacy advocates are limited by myopic concerns of what’s politically possible here and now, all they will have to show for their advocacy will be a false sense of achievement. The problem isn’t, as some imagine it, a state spying without appropriate limits, but the fact that capitalism erases the distinction between public and private, making it so non-state actors gleefully act as the state’s eyes and ears. This isn’t about just Google or the government, but both: the capitalist state. And until we start recognizing that and saying as much, the result of our efforts will be more of the same.

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In de gaten houden Assange kost de Britten al 13 miljoen

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Sinds Assange in de ambassade zit, staan continu agenten bij het pand in de wijk Knightsbridge. 'We zijn aan het kijken welke opties we hebben', zegt politiecommissaris Bernard Hogan-Howe vandaag tegen de radiozender LBC. 'Het put onze middelen uit. We bekijken ook hoe we dit anders kunnen doen in de toekomst.'

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Julian Assange to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London

Lawyers for Wikileaks founder welcome prosecutor’s decision to interview Assange at Ecuadorian embassy in bid to break deadlock

Lawyers for Julian Assange have claimed victory after a Swedish prosecutor bowed to pressure from the courts and agreed to break the deadlock in his case by interviewing the WikiLeaks founder in London.

Marianne Ny, who heads the investigation into accusations of rape, coercion and sexual molestation against Assange, made a formal request to interrogate him in the Ecuadorian embassy – the first sign of movement in a case that has been frozen since August 2012.

The prosecutor will also ask the UK government and Ecuador for permission to carry out the interviews at the embassy in London, where Assange has been staying for more than two-and-a-half years to avoid extradition to Sweden, from where he fears being handed over to the US to face espionage charges.

Ny said she had changed her mind because the statute of limitations on several of the crimes of which Assange is suspected runs out in August 2015.

“My attitude has been that the forms for a hearing with him at the embassy in London are such that the quality of the interrogation would be inadequate and that he needs to be present in Sweden at a trial. That assessment remains,” Ny said in a statement.

“Now time is running out and I therefore believe that I have to accept a loss of quality in the investigation and take the risk that the hearing will not take the investigation forward, because no other option is available as long as Assange does not make himself available in Sweden,” she said.

Per Samuelson, a Stockholm lawyer for Assange, said: “It is a victory for us. We have been asking for this to happen for over four years. That is the route to acquittal.”

There were “minor details” to be discussed between Assange and the prosecutor over how the interrogations will be conducted, Samuelson said, “but there are no major questions as I see it”. Assange welcomed the development but was irritated it had taken so long, Samuelson said. They are due meet in London on Saturday.

The British Foreign Office said in November it would welcome a request by the Swedish prosecutor to question Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador’s government has also repeatedly stated that it approves of such a step. Assange has been wanted in Sweden since the accusations were made against him in August 2010.

His lawyers, who are currently appealing against his arrest warrant in Sweden’s highest court, have complained bitterly about the prosecutor’s refusal to travel to London to speak to him – an essential step under Swedish jurisprudence to establish whether Assange can be formally charged.

The prosecutor’s refusal, they say, has condemned Assange to “severe limitations” on his freedom that are “disproportionate” to the accusations against him.

Ny has objected that interrogating Assange abroad would be complicated and largely pointless because – should sufficient grounds emerge – he would still have to travel to Sweden for trial. However, she is obliged to drop the case against him unless she believes there are reasonable grounds for suspicion of his guilt.

The prosecutor’s apparent U-turn on Friday came just days after a supreme court judge in Stockholm wrote to the prosecutor general, directing him to give his opinion concerning Assange’s appeal, “especially regarding the investigatory procedure and the principle of proportionality”.

Further pressure on the prosecutor came in November when the appeal court, while rejecting Assange’s arguments, nonetheless directed sharp criticism at Ny for failing in her “obligation” to move the case forward.

Swedish legal opinion at a senior level has swung against the prosecutor’s position. Anne Ramberg, head of Sweden’s Bar Association, said on Friday she welcomed the decision to go to London, but added: “It should have been taken long before.”

Karin Rosander, Ny’s spokeswoman, said the decision to go to London was entirely her own. She said: “Swedish prosecutors are independent in their decision-making and nobody, not even the prosecutor-general, can order a prosecutor what steps to take.”

Elisabeth Massi Fritz, a lawyer for one of the women in the case, said she had changed her mind on questioning Assange in London, and her client had also requested the move. “If Swedish investigators and prosecutors are present when Assange is interviewed, then it will be a good interrogation of high quality,” she said.

Last year, Fritz dismissed as “empty and ill-informed speculation” calls by Swedish politicians and top legal figures to do go to London.

Questioning the prosecutor’s reluctance to travel to London, several Swedish legal figures have pointed to the occasion in 2012 when the entire Stockholm district court moved to Kigali for several weeks to interview witnesses to the Rwandan genocide, with more witnesses heard in Stockholm by video link from Kigali.

The proposed interviews in London will be conducted by the deputy prosecutor in the case, Ingrid Isgren, and a police investigator. The statute of limitations on the rape accusations against Assange expires in August 2020.

Sweden’s supreme court is due to rule on the case later this month or next.

The prosecutor’s change of heart was “demonstrably cynical” in waiting until shortly before the statute of limitations expired to keep Assange “trapped in the UK”, said journalist John Pilger for the Julian Assange Legal Defense Fund.

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Jacob Appelbaum's legal disclosure from Google about Wikileaks Grand Jury investigation

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This Google legal disclosure is 306 pages long. Holy cow.
^{Fri, Jun 19 2015 00:56:33}

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Ten pages into this legal document and I'm convinced that I'm never going to return to my home country. What the actual fuck.
^{Fri, Jun 19 2015 01:04:49}

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Google says government forced it to hand over Jacob Appelbaum's data for WikiLeaks grand jury - Boing Boing

“Google released another legal disclosure notice related to the United States government’s ongoing grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks,” Kevin Gosztola writes at Firedoglake.

Google recently told Jacob Appelbaum, who has worked with WikiLeaks, that Google was ordered by the U.S. government to provide data from his account to federal investigators.

From Firedoglake:

. Google’s full legal disclosure to Appelbaum consisted of 306 pages of documents. He did not post the disclosure in its entirety but shared screen shots of parts of the disclosure through his Twitter account.

. On April 1, the government apparently determined there was some information that could be disclosed to Appelbaum.

. The government seems to confirm in legal documents that it does not consider WikiLeaks to be a journalistic enterprise. It also writes, “The government does not concede that the [redacted] subscriber is a journalist,” referring to Appelbaum.

. Nevertheless, the government broaches the issue and insists “newsmen” may be subject to grand jury investigations of this intrusive nature.

“Google Reveals It Was Forced to Hand Over Journalist’s Data for WikiLeaks Grand Jury Investigation” [Firedoglake]

Applebaum's tweets on Google's disclosure follow:

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Saoediërs waarschuwen voor ‘nepdocumenten’ na Wikileaks



Een rekening van een paar miljoen dollar voor een limo van een lid van de Saoedische koninklijke familie in Genève, manipulatie van media wereldwijd en zoveel mogelijk Iran dwarsbomen. Dat zijn tot nu toe enkele van de verhalen die zijn voortgekomen uit de ruim 61.000 Saoedische documenten die klokkenluidersite Wikileaks gisteren heeft gepubliceerd. Nu waarschuwt de regering in Saoedi-Arabië haar burgers tegen verspreiding van ‘documenten die mogelijk vervalst zijn’, meldt persbureau Reuters.

De waarschuwing lijkt een reactie op ‘The Saudi Cables’, in het kader waarvan Wikileaks zegt de vertrouwelijke diplomatieke boodschappen van het Saoedische ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken te publiceren. De authenticiteit van de documenten is niet in die woorden door de autoriteiten ontkend. Het is onduidelijk of op verspreiding van nepdocumenten een straf staat of komt te staan.

Wie op de zoekterm ‘Netherlands’ zoekt, krijgt achttien resultaten. Een brief van de Nederlandse ambassade in Riad bijvoorbeeld, en een formulier van de luchtvaartautoriteit waarop een militair transportvliegtuig, onderdeel van ISAF, vermeld staat met kennelijk ‘gevaarlijke goederen’ aan boord.

Hoe Wikileaks aan de gevoelige informatie komt, maakte de organisatie niet bekend. Maar in een persbericht werd verwezen naar een Saoedische verklaring in mei, waarin stond dat er een schending was geweest van de computernetwerken van de overheid. De cyberaanval werd ‘opgeëist’ door een groep die zichzelf Yemeni Cyber Army noemt.

Saoedi-Arabië, de grootste olie-exporteur en een absolute monarchie met amper persvrijheid, staat bekend om de harde aanpak van activisten en critici. Zo werd de Saoedische mensenrechtenadvocaat Walid Abu al-Khair (35) veroordeeld tot vijftien jaar cel wegens ‘opruiing’. autoriteiten. Blogger Raif Badawi kreeg duizend zweepslagen opgelegd alsmede tien jaar celstraf en een boete van 220.000 euro wegens belediging van de Islam.

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Assange: Wikileaks heeft meer documenten over NSA-spionage



Klokkenluidersite Wikileaks heeft documenten in bezit die van groter politiek belang zijn dan de onthullingen, gisteren, over spionage van Franse presidenten door de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst NSA. De economische en politieke belangen van Frankrijk alsook zijn soevereiniteit staan op het spel, zo waarschuwde Wikileaks-oprichter Julian Assange vanavond in een interview met de Franse tv-zender TF1.

Assange roept de Franse regering op nu in te grijpen. De “tijd is gekomen” voor Frankrijk om een parlementaire enquête in te stellen om de spionagepraktijken te onderzoeken en de schuldigen te vervolgen, zei hij. Uit de documenten zou onder meer blijken dat er sprake is geweest van economische spionage.

Volgens de documenten die via Mediapart en Libération werden gepubliceerd, werden Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) en François Hollande (2012-heden) gedurende zes jaar bespioneerd. Dit gebeurde tussen 2006 en mei 2012. Voor zover bekend stopte het afluisteren na de eerste maand dat Hollande als president was ingezworen. Welke informatie de NSA precies heeft verkregen is onduidelijk, maar het betrof in ieder geval geen staatsgeheimen.

Assange, die sinds 2012 schuilt in de Ecuadoraanse ambassade in Londen om uitlevering aan Zweden te vermijden, gaf zijn interview met TF1 vanuit de ambassade. Afgelopen vrijdag publiceerde Wikileaks al een reeks van tienduizenden vertrouwelijke Saoedische documenten. Daaruit bleek onder meer dat Nederland tevergeefs op het hoogste niveau heeft geprobeerd de immuniteit te laten opheffen van een Saoedische ex-ambassadeur die werd verdacht van mensenhandel.
Bron: NRC

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Sweden and Ecuador edge closer to end of Julian Assange standoff | Media | The Guardian

Swedish government agrees to direct talks with Ecuador which may lead to WikiLeaks founder being interviewed in London

Sweden has offered to negotiate an agreement with Ecuador to enable Swedish prosecutors to interview Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, potentially ending the standoff between the two countries but almost certainly too late to prevent some allegations against the WikiLeaks founder from expiring.

Sweden’s government had agreed to open direct talks with Ecuador to explore the possibility of “a general agreement” on legal assistance in criminal matters, the Swedish justice ministry said.

“The coming discussions will show if this is a way forward,” said Cecilia Riddselius, the senior justice ministry official responsible for the case.

The move marks an apparent concession by Sweden after sharp official exchanges between the two countries in which each accused the other of blocking progress. On Friday, Riddselius said demands by Ecuador were “in complete violation of our principles of justice”.

Related: Julian Assange: Ecuador and Sweden in tense standoff over interview

Meanwhile, the British government has grown increasingly irked by the stalemate, which has cost the Metropolitan police more than £10m in policing the embassy in Kensington.

“We are frustrated that the interview has not yet taken place,” the Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire said. “This remains a deeply unsatisfactory and costly situation.”

Sweden’s justice ministry said it welcomed Ecuador’s acceptance of its offer of negotiations, but the Guardian understands the ministry rejected a proposal by Quito to meet this week because officials were on holiday, and because it would take more than a few days to prepare the negotiations.

Assange is wanted for questioning over allegations of sex crimes in Stockholm in August 2010, but has resisted extradition to Sweden citing fears that he could be transferred to the US to face espionage charges. He has repeatedly requested that he be questioned in London. He has not been charged with any offence.

Sweden’s prosecutor has faced pressure to interview Assange in London to make progress in the case, which has been deadlocked since Assange sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in June 2012. In March she dropped her objections, citing the impending expiry of the statute of limitations on most of the allegations as a reason for renewed urgency.

In April, Assange consented to the prosecutor’s conditions for an interview. But as this month’s deadline under the statute of limitations drew closer, progress towards a London interview was slow. Sweden formally requested permission from Ecuador to enter the embassy only two months later, and an agreed date of 17 June to begin the questioning had to be cancelled at the last minute amid mutual accusations of blame for the delay.

The statute of limitations on allegations of unlawful coercion and one count of sexual molestation, made against Assange by two Swedish women, expires on Thursday, and on one count of sexual molestation next Tuesday.

Sweden made the offer last Thursday to negotiate with Ecuador, and Ecuador accepted it on Monday, Riddselius said. “I do not know when the discussions will begin. Undertaking a general agreement takes time and is normally a longer procedure.”

Ecuador had insisted on negotiating a specific agreement with Sweden over the conditions for questioning Assange in the embassy, which would be contrary to the Swedish constitution, Riddselius said last week.

She said Quito had also demanded that Sweden confer upon Assange the same status of political refugee bestowed on him by Ecuador, which had created a fresh obstacle to agreement. This appeared to prompt a statement by the Ecuadorian embassy on Monday: “At no point has the Republic of Ecuador asked the Kingdom of Sweden to grant Mr Assange asylum”.

Riddselius said on Tuesday that Sweden had not altered its understanding of Ecuador’s requests.

Ecuador had noted a “positive change on the Swedish side” during the last few weeks, according to a senior official at the country’s foreign ministry. Quito had therefore been surprised and disappointed by the rebuff it received from Sweden last week, according to people familiar with the situation.

“After the initial official correspondence from Sweden seemed to discard any possibility of maintaining an official dialogue on the matter, Sweden’s current inclination towards negotiating an agreement is perceived with optimism from our side, along with the hope that we can find a well overdue resolution to the Assange case,” the foreign ministry official said.

“It’s unfortunate that those authorities haven’t responded favorably to our requests to meet during the nearly three years of Julian Assange’s asylum”.

An outstanding allegation against Assange of “rape, less serious crime” remains current under Swedish law until August 2020.
Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Wikileaks Offering $50,000 Bounty for Kunduz Bombing Footage

Transparency activist group Wikileaks is offering a $50,000 reward for any footage of the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders facility in Kunduz or cockpit audio from the plane.

“The AC-130 records its attacks with high resolution gun cameras,” says the post on Wikileaks, the website founded by Julian Assange that publishes news leaks and classified information. “According to military procedure, this footage should have been retained along with the cockpit audio. A post-massacre inquiry report referred to as an ‘AR 15-6’ should have also been commissioned. We are raising a U.S. $50,000 bounty to obtain the footage, the cockpit audio, the inquiry report and other relevant materials.”

Read More: Obama Apologizes for Air Strike That Hit Doctors Without Borders Hospital

On Oct. 3, a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was bombed, killing 22 staff and patients. U.S. officials have admitted the bombing was a mistake and apologized; leader from Doctors Without Borders have called for a United Nations investigation into the attack.

Read Next: Doctors Without Borders Releases Post-Bombing Footage and Calls for Investigation


Bron: time.com

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Wikileaks release of TPP deal text confirms 'freedom of expression' fears

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Wikileaks has released what it claims is the full intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the controversial agreement between 12 countries that was signed off on Monday.

TPP was negotiated in secret and details have yet to be published. But critics including Democrat presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, unions and privacy activists have lined up to attack what they have seen of it. Wikileaks’ latest disclosures are unlikely to reassure them.

One chapter appears to give the signatory countries (referred to as “parties”) greater power to stop embarrassing information going public. The treaty would give signatories the ability to curtail legal proceedings if the theft of information is “detrimental to a party’s economic interests, international relations, or national defense or national security” – in other words, presumably, if a trial would cause the information to spread.

A drafter’s note says that every participating country’s individual laws about whistleblowing would still apply.

“The text of the TPP’s intellectual property chapter confirms advocates warnings that this deal poses a grave threat to global freedom of expression and basic access to things like medicine and information,” said Evan Greer, campaign director of internet activist group Fight for the Future. “But the sad part is that no one should be surprised by this. It should have been obvious to anyone observing the process, where appointed government bureaucrats and monopolistic companies were given more access to the text than elected officials and journalists, that this would be the result.”

Among the provisions in the chapter (which may or may not be the most recent version) are rules that say that each country in the agreement has the authority to compel anyone accused of violating intellectual property law to provide “relevant information [...] that the infringer or alleged infringer possesses or controls” as provided for in that country’s own laws.

The rules also state that every country has the authority to immediately give the name and address of anyone importing detained goods to whoever owns the intellectual property.

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Britse politie stopt bewaking Assange bij ambassade

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De Britse politie patrouileert niet meer rond de klok bij de ambassade van Ecuador om Julian Assange direct op te kunnen pakken als hij een voet buiten de deur zet. De politie verklaarde maandag dat de kosten 'niet meer proportioneel' zijn. Ze zullen wel hun best blijven doen om de oprichter van WikiLeaks te arresteren, laat de politie in een verklaring weten.

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Five years confined: New Foia documents shed light on the Julian Assange case

The role of the Crown Prosecution Service lawyers in advising the Swedish prosecutors, their comments on the extradition case as not being handled as just another extradition request, the questioning in the embassy that never took place. Files obtained by l'Espresso under the Freedom of Information Act provide a five-year account of the Swedish case against the WikiLeaks founder
19 ottobre 2015
The Scotland Yard agents encircling the embassy and guarding Julian Assange night and day have been removed. But the police siege which is estimated to have cost 12 million pounds over the last three years is far from over, as the Metropolitan police admits in its press release: Scotland Yard «will make every effort to arrest him», deploying «a number of overt and covert tactics».


He has been confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge since June 19th, 2012. Next December 7th will mark five years since the founder of WikiLeaks lost his freedom, ending up first under house arrest and then confined in the embassy in a roughly 20 square-meter room. «Despite the efforts of many people», wrote Scotland Yard last week, «there is no imminent prospect of a diplomatic or legal resolution to this issue». A clear admission that the judiciary case against Julian Assange has become a legal and diplomatic quagmire.


L'Espresso has filed two comprehensive Freedom of Information Act (Foia) requests in Sweden and Britain to access the Assange file and reconstruct the case. We have requested documents from the Swedish Prosecution Authority in Stockholm – which has been conducting a criminal investigation for the last five years on Assange, still in its preliminary phase - and from the "Crown Prosecution Service" in London, the principal prosecuting authority for England and Wales, which has provided support to the Swedish Prosecution Authority on the Assange case. While the British have rejected all of our Foia requests, the Swedish released 226 pages of documents to l'Espresso.

Whether these pages represent a major portion of the Assange file or only a small set of documents is hard to say. To our request on the exact number of pages held by the Swedish Prosecution Authority, the Swedish replied that it was impossible to say, as many documents only exist as individual electronic documents, requiring too many resources to count all the pages. Instead the Crown Prosecution Service replied that the task was not possible for the opposite reason: the information is voluminous and mostly held in paper format, hence ascertaining the exact number of pages would be too time-consuming and expensive.

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The files obtained under Foia reveal that from the very beginning, the "Crown Prosecution Service" in London advised the Swedish prosecutors against the investigative strategy that could have led to a quick closure of the preliminary investigation: questioning Assange in London – as he has requested on many occasions - rather than extraditing him to Stockholm, as the Swedish prosecutors have always tried to do.

Bron: m.espresso.repubblica.it

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WikiLeaks releases documents from CIA director's personal email account | Media | The Guardian

Publication follows the hacking of John Brennan’s email account on Monday, allegedly by high school students who call themselves Crackas With Attitude

WikiLeaks has released documents it said had been collected from CIA director John Brennan’s personal AOL account, the first in what the group said would be a series of publications.

The personal email account of the US’s top spy was compromised by hackers who claimed to be high school students. Those hackers had threatened on Twitter to release the same documents.

The embarrassing leaks include a questionnaire for the official’s security clearance marked: “Review copy – Do not retain.”

Other documents included an early version of the Limitations on Interrogations Techniques Act of 2008, a bill defining the limits of interrogation methods. Also released was a letter from Missouri Republican senator Christopher Bond, then a member of the Senate select committee on intelligence.

All the documents in the WikiLeaks cache are from 2008 and before. Brennan assumed office in 2013.

The hack is an embarrassment not just for Brennan and for the CIA, but also for AOL and parent company Verizon. The sensitivity of the material in the account notwithstanding, the hackers have said that they were able to obtain a Verizon employee ID number and, with that, the last four digits of Brennan’s credit card on file, which was all that was needed to reset the email password for the US’s top intelligence official.

The leak arrived one day before former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was scheduled to testify about her own personal email accounts before a congressional panel established to investigate the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, but has grown increasingly focused on the vulnerability of government information on her communications.

The people behind the breach, who call themselves CWA (Crackas With Attitude), said they had breached Brennan’s account and followed up with screenshots containing social security numbers, cellphone numbers and email addresses. The cell numbers and email addresses appeared to be genuine.

Authorities told CNN that Brennan’s account did not contain any classified information.

Multiple Twitter accounts associated with CWA have been deleted or suspended. Another account, used by a member calling him or herself PHPhax, is still live, but has not been active for 13 hours after a near-constant stream of information, teasers about the kind of data in the account and jokes about how the account’s user would soon be “v&” (“vanned”) – taken away in a van. His last tweet was: “What are those flashing lights.”

One hacker, who first spoke to the New York Post, claimed to be “American high school student who is not Muslim and was motivated by opposition to US foreign policy and support for Palestine”. The Twitter timeline for PHPhax includes many references to the UK. It’s not clear which members of CWA are using any of the accounts at a given time.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

twitter:

BellaMagnani twitterde op vrijdag 01-01-2016 om 19:20:44 FOI email shows #Assange prosecutor trying to mislead press over negotiations with #Ecuador https://t.co/Lcpu5X3dHm https://t.co/6P7VOcZKCm reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 1 januari 2016 23:46 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Moet de topic titel inmiddels niet tonen dat Wikileaks een front is van de Russische geheime dienst en een propaganda kanaal van het Putin regime? (FSB/SVR)?

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Op zaterdag 2 januari 2016 12:19 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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http://20committee.com/2015/08/31/wikileaks-is-a-front-for-russian-intelligence/

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Wikileaks gebruikt 90% bronnen van RT/Sputnik, komen altijd met pro-Russische verhaaltjes aan zetten. Hebben nog nooit iets schadelijks over Rusland gepubliceerd. Assange wilde FSB beveiliging, vertelde Snowden dat hij alleen in Rusland veilig was. Rusland verliest een jet boven Turkije en plots begint Wikileaks anti-Turkse propaganda te verspreiden.

En frontman Assange heeft een talkshow op Russia Today. Ze zijn niet meer zo subtiel de laatste tijd.