Julian Assange: “The number one enemy is ego”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange rails against Facebook, says it’s a spy tool for US government

NY Daily News May 2nd 2011

BY Nina Mandell
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Maybe he’s a MySpace guy.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook “the most appalling spying machine ever invented” in an interview with Russia Today, pointing to the popular social networking site as one of the top tools for the U.S. to spy on its citizens.

“Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence,” he said. “Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all these major U.S. organizations have built-in infaces for US intelligence.

“Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook they are doing free work for the United States intelligence agencies,” he added.

The rest of the story

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Media Black Out: Ray McGovern Assaulted for Silent Protest at Hillary Clinton Speech

Hmm, does this look like a non news item? Well, it is for the main stream media. Take a look at this google search for…. Ray McGovern dragged out of Hillary Clinton “Freedom Speech”

Here’s an excellent post on this from BradBlog

By Brad Friedman on 2/17/2011 2:03pm
Ray McGovern, Former Sr. CIA Analyst, ‘Bruised, Bloodied’ While Dragged From Room During Hillary Clinton Speech on ‘Freedom of Expression’
We’ve interviewed former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, on the air and off, many times over the years. We’ve come to consider him not just a source, but a friend and a national hero for his tirelessly non-partisan fight for truth and justice.

The man who once briefed Presidents directly, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, had long ago earned our great respect — from his courageousness in famously confronting then-SecDef Don Rumsfeld in 2006 about lying about Saddam and WMD (watch the classic confrontation on video here) to his calling out CNN on air for their abysmal failures in accurately reporting on WikiLeaks (video here) last December to his arrest weeks later at the White House with other vets and national heroes for “refusal to obey a lawful order” while protesting against the Obama Administration’s wars around the world — all while overcoming some enormous personal health issues at the same time.

More on this from the BradBlog

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Cyber Wars the movie

The corporate government is not satisfied with having the ability, enabled by Homeland Security, to snoop anywhere they seem fit, but now find the need to control the innertubes. or even shut it down .

Who is Mike McConnell?

Exerpt from godlikeproductions.com:

“On Jan. 5, 2007, Pres. George W. Bush announced the nomination of retired Vice Admiral John Michael “Mike” McConnell to be director of national intelligence. McConnell was approached by Cheney himself about accepting the position, according to Newsweek.”

Mike McConnell is now Senior VP for Booz Allen Hamilton, leading the National Security business and part of the Leadership Team. Needless to mention he has connections with the CIA, corporate government, and defence industries.

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Government Seizes All of Glenn Beck’s Precious Gold

Government Seizes All of Glenn Beck’s Precious Gold

WONKETTE

by Riley Waggaman

9:07 am December 9, 2010

An activist California judge legislating from the bench has frozen the assets of Superior Gold Group, one of many NASCAR gold coin dealers who advertise The Solution to Weimar Hyper Inflation on Glenn Beck’s satanic teevee program. According to lawyers, Superior Gold Group “took payments from customers and never provided the gold ordered, charged prices much higher than fair market value and misled customers into buying expensive specialty coins.” Whoops. And now the authorities have seized all of Superior Gold’s delicious gold. FDR really is snatching up all the gold! (Oh, fuck!) [LAT/Mother Jones]

The House passed the DREAM Act yesterday. Nobody expects this bill to make it through the Senate, though. And in other “what are we gonna do with all those brownz?” news: Arizona is arguing about immigration with the Supreme Court. [WaPo]

Visa.com got cyber-sexed by Internet heroes/nerds Anonymous. The Great Infowar continues. [NYT]

IMPORTANT MAIL-ORDER GOLD NEWS: Read this thing. [TwitPic]

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Julian Assange Arrested!

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrested.

Wikileaks Arrest: Julian Assange In Custody, Court Battle Underway

Huff Post- First Posted: 12- 7-10 10:21 AM   |   Updated: 12- 7-10 10:35 AM

LONDON (AP) — A British judge has denied bail for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told a London court he intends to fight his extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations.

Judge Howard Riddle told Assange that he had “substantial grounds” to believe the 39-year-old Australian wouldn’t turn up for subsequent proceedings. He then put Assange into U.K. custody ahead of an extradition hearing.

Assange faces allegations of sex crimes in Sweden. He denies the accusations.

See the latest details below:

live blog

Oldest Newest

11:24 AM ET Interview, Part Five

 

HP: Which leak has generated the most reader interest?

AR: If you mean which individual cable: the first day attracted the biggest traffic – though I think there is a huge number of people monitoring events today over the fate of Assange himself. The UN spying story generated a lot of reader interest. Of the individual countries I think Russia attracted the biggest traffic.Breaking news: a colleague reports: “The inside piece on how the US manipulated climate accord has been the biggest single story. Then the North Korea-China story, followed by Prince Andrew. Russia was pretty big as a package rather than for individual stories catching fire.”

So that’s scientific, as Julian Assange would say, as opposed to speculation.

11:21 AM ET Live Interview, Part Four

 

HP: What has the popular reaction been in the U.K. to the decision to publish the cables?

AR: There have been one or two snap pieces of polling which didn’t show a strong feeling one way or the other. Some papers have been critical of individual cables released by Assange. Generally, the UK press has been avidly reporting the cables.

MORE HERE

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WikiLeaks’ Amazon Servers Go Offline (LIVE UPDATES)

WikiLeaks’ Amazon Servers Go Offline (LIVE UPDATES)

Huff Post- First Posted: 12- 1-10 04:06 PM   |   Updated: 12- 1-10 04:06 PM

Amazon pulled the plug on hosting WikiLeaks today amidst increasing political pressure.

The Associated Press reports:

Amazon.com Inc. forced WikiLeaks to stop using the U.S. company’s computers to distribute embarrassing State Department communications and other documents, WikiLeaks said Wednesday.The ouster came after congressional staff had questioned Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks, said Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut.

WikiLeaks confirmed it hours after The Associated Press reported that Amazon’s servers had stopped hosting WikiLeaks’ site. The site was unavailable for several hours before it moved back to its previous Swedish host, Bahnhof.

WikiLeaks tweeted in response: “WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free–fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe,” and later, “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”

Keep up with the latest WikiLeaks news in our continuously-updated live blog below.

live blog

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6:34 PM ET Alexander Litvinenko’s Murder And Putin

The Guardian is focusing on Putin’s possible knowledge of plans to kill former KGB agent and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. The paper reports:

Daniel Fried, the assistant secretary of state, questioned whether “rogue elements” in Russia’s security services could have carried out the hit without Putin’s direct approval.A scenario where the Kremlin was unaware of the Litvinenko plot was far-fetched “given Putin’s attention to detail”, Fried said. The Russians were behaving with “increasing self-confidence to the point of arrogance”, he told the French, arguing for a tougher stance towards Moscow.

Litvinenko was killed in November of 2006 from an overdose of polonium-210 in England. His death and the subsequent British attempts at extraditing the man they suspected was responsible resulted in strained U.K.-Russian relations.

5:20 PM ET WikiLeaks: Russia ‘Highly Centralized, Occasionally Brutal’

In the latest round of cables, WikiLeaks looks at Russia and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s high profile president and former prime minister. Although there have been overtures towards warmer relations between Russia and the U.S., the cables show that the U.S. has a cynical view of the former Soviet Union and its leaders. According to the New York Times:

The cables portray Mr. Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build.Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr. Putin’s Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.

Relations between the two nations have been under some strain recently. This week, Russian Prime Minister Medvedev warned of a possible upcoming arms race if Russia and the West cannot come to an agreement on a missile defense shield. Today, Putin bluntly stated that U.S. failure to ratify a new nuclear agreement known as the START treaty would be “dumb.”

3:34 PM ET Full Julian Assange Interview

You can find the full transcript and audio from Time‘s interview with Julian Assange here.

3:17 PM ET WikiLeaks: Amazon ‘Ousted’ Servers

From the WikiLeaks Twitter account:

WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free–fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe.

2:13 PM ET WikiLeaks Down? CableGate Site OFFLINE After Days Of Attacks

The CableGate website is allegedly down, possibly due to losing its host, Amazon.com. The AP reports:

The main website and a sub-site devoted to the diplomatic documents were unavailable from the U.S. and Europe on Wednesday, as Amazon servers refused to acknowledge requests for data.

UPDATE: From the AP:

The WikiLeaks website has left its U.S. Web host, Amazon.com, and moved back to a Swedish provider.

1:39 PM ET More Details On Victim Of ‘Mistaken’ CIA Kidnapping

Additional information on Khaled El-Masri, who was the mistaken victim of “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA, has come out in the cables. A German citizen of Lebanese descent, El-Masri has repeatedly attempted to confront the CIA about his ordeal. Says Boing Boing:

When the CIA realized he was innocent, he was flown to Albania and dumped on a back road without so much as an apology.El-Masri’s futile efforts at receiving justice in the U.S. are well-known, but the cables published this week by Wikileaks include revelations the U.S. also warned German authorities not to allow a local investigation into his kidnapping and abuse.

MORE HERE 

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WikiLeaks U.S. Embassy Cables: New Documents Released

WikiLeaks U.S. Embassy Cables: New Documents Released

AP/The Huffington Post First Posted: 11-28-10 01:36 PM   |   Updated: 11-28-10 03:19 PM

This article is being updated.

WASHINGTON — The New York Times and The Guardian have published a selection of the 250,000 classified State Department documents provided to them by the online website WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks website appeared to be inaccessible, and WikiLeaks said in its Twitter feed that it was experiencing a denial of service attack. WikiLeaks also provided the documents to Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde, and Germany’s Der Spiegel.

According to The New York Times, the cables reveal how foreign leaders, including Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, urged the U.S. to confront Iran over its nuclear program.

“The cables also contain a fresh American intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program,” The Times reports. “They reveal for the first time that the United States believes that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could let it strike at Western European capitals and Moscow and help it develop more formidable long-range ballistic missiles.”

Haaretz reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to pressure the U.S. into military action against Iran by exaggerating its nuclear capabilities:

Meanwhile, another cable shows that a 2009 claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran was months away from achieving military nuclear capability was dismissed by the Americans as a ploy.According to German weekly Der Spiegel, which also received advance information from WIkiLeaks, a State Department official says in a classified cable that Netanyahu informed the United States of Iran’s nuclear advancement in November 2009, but that the prime minister’s estimate was likely unfounded and intended to pressure Washington into action against the Islamic Republic.

Perhaps more embarrassing to U.S. officials is the revelation, according to The Guardian that U.S. diplomats spied on UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.

MORE HERE

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Roberts: US Treasury Running on Fumes

down to the last trillion in red ink

By Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE.com, July 26, 2010

The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.”

What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at risk.

Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks.  This means that there is a spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.

And rightly so.  The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.

Continues >>

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How Lady Gaga Helped Leak 150,000 Classified State Department Cables

How Lady Gaga Helped Leak 150,000 Classified State Department Cables

TPM MUCKRAKER

July 9, 2010, 2:22PM

More details are emerging about the case of Wikileaker Pvt. Bradley Manning and they are… Gagalicious. Manning’s plan to download and leak thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks hinged on lip-syncing to “Telephone”.

Manning allegedly leaked the Iraq Apache helicopter video, and it’s believed he also downloaded over 150,000 diplomatic cables from the military’s SPIR-Net and shared them with Wikileaks. How did he do it without arousing suspicion? According to the New York Times:

He was able to avoid detection not because he kept a poker face, they said, but apparently because he hummed and lip-synched to Lady Gaga songs to make it appear that he was using the classified computer’s CD player to listen to music.

Adrian Lamo, a well-known former hacker, had traded electronic messages in which Private Manning described his unhappiness with the Army – and, Mr. Lamo said, his activities downloading classified data.
Mr. Lamo said Private Manning described how he had used compact discs capable of storing data, but tucked inside recognizable music CD cases, “to bring the data out of the secure room.”

“He indicated he disguised one as a Lady Gaga CD,” Mr. Lamo said Thursday in a telephone interview. “He said he lip-synched to blend in.”

(Ha, “poker face.”)

And that’s how one of the great leaks of our times was perpetrated via Lady Gaga karaoke. Manning’s method of deception certainly does not do anything to contradict speculation that he’s not straight.

The original version of the story appears here.

Gawker dishes the nation’s most current and cutting gossip across media, entertainment, technology, and business. Founded in 2002 and namechecked frequently in mainstream publications, the site is essential reading for those who want big media hypocrisy debunked and faux-sincerity exposed, all with a healthy dose of snark.

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