Julian Assange on 60 Minutes

Julian Assange, left, talks to Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes.” Photo credit: CBS News

In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired Sunday night, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange likened the values of his whistle-blowing website to those of the Founding Fathers of the U.S. and said the backlash by the American government is out of embarrassment.“Our founding values are those of the U.S. revolution,” Assange told interviewer Steve Kroft. “They are those of people like [Thomas] Jefferson and [James] Madison.

The white-haired secret-spiller also maintained the website has played within the rules, saying his organization is comparable to any other publisher and should be protected under the First Amendment.

“We operated just like any U.S. publisher operates … and there has been no precedent that I’m aware of, in the past 50 years, of prosecuting a publisher for espionage,” Assange said. “It is just not done.”

He called the disparity a “flagrant disregard for U.S. traditions.”

Assange also shared a story from his childhood, back when his mother worked as a political activist who helped scientists gather information about nuclear tests conducted by the British in the Australian outback.

The two were out late one night when authorities stopped them. According to Assange, one official said, “Look, lady, you’re out at 2 a.m. in the morning with this child. It could be suggested you’re an unfit mother. I suggest you stay out of politics.”

“Which she did, for the next 10 years,” said Assange, “in order to make sure nothing happened to me. That’s a very early abuse of power and of secrecy that I saw in my life.”

Kroft spent two days interviewing Assange at his Britain home, where he fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning in two sexual assault cases.

To watch the interview in its entirety, click here.

Julian Assange’s creepy love letters

This Gawker post on Julian Assange’s “creepy,” “lovesick” and “stalkery” emails is almost a month old, but its awesomeness is timeless.

From Gawker:

Julian Assange, the founder of the world’s most notorious secret-sharing operation, has some embarrassing documents in his own past. We’ve obtained a series of emails detailing his stalkery courtship of a teenager in his pre-Wikileaks days.

Elizabeth (not her real name) met Assange one night in April 2004, about two years before Assange started his now-infamous whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. She was 19 at the time; Assange was 33 and a student at the University of Melbourne studying physics and mathematics. Elizabeth spotted Assange at a bar near Melbourne and approached the older man with the long white hair because he seemed different than other guys she’d met.

“I started talking to him and he just seemed kind of quiet and nerdy,” she told us in a phone interview. “I didn’t think he was sexy or anything. Just strangely alluring for a 19-year-old girl.” Assange flirted with her, showing off by explaining complex equations and joking about her mathematical ignorance.

They chatted until the bar closed, and Assange walked Elizabeth back to the small town where she lived with her parents. Walking down a small country road, Assange kissed Elizabeth. She wasn’t particularly thrilled by this development, but it didn’t put her off too much either. “It was like, fine, whatever,” Elizabeth said. “He wasn’t creepy about it, and he didn’t try anything weird.”

Before parting ways, Assange gave her a card with his name, email address, and an image of a lighthouse—possibly an early symbol of his quest for radical transparency. Elizabeth gave Assange her email address in return, and he took the train back to Melbourne.

Soon after, Elizabeth received this email inviting her on a date.

Below are two of my favourites. Go to Gawker to read them all.

WikiLeaks calls for Sarah Palin’s arrest

Considering WikiLeaks, politics and the Arizona shooting are all topics I am interested in, you’d think I would find a combination of the three interesting. Instead, the result is a sad and pathetic smash-up, an inappropriate attempt by WikiLeaks to draw attention to the organization by exploiting a high-profile tragedy.

The whistle-blowing website’s official Twitter account released a statement Monday night calling for authorities to “treat incitement seriously or expect more Gabrielle Gifford (sic) killing sprees.” (I find the mere reference to Giffords in this title appalling and shameful.) The call comes after a media shit-storm surrounding Palin’s “crosshairs graphic” that has arguably (and sadly) generated as much, if not more, attention than the shooting itself.

An exerpt from the press release:

Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, leading the investigation into the Gifford shooting, said that “vitriolic rhetoric” intended to “inflame the public on a daily basis … has [an] impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.” Dupnik also observed that officials and media personalities engaging in violent rhetoric “have to consider that they have some responsibility when incidents like this occur and may occur in the future.”

WikiLeaks staff and contributors have also been the target of unprecedented violent rhetoric by US prominent media personalities, including Sarah Palin, who urged the US administration to “Hunt down the WikiLeaks chief like the Taliban”. Prominent US politician Mike Huckabee called for the execution of WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on his Fox News program last November, and Fox News commentator Bob Beckel, referring to Assange, publicly called for people to “illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” US radio personality Rush Limbaugh has called for pressure to “Give [Fox News President Roger] Ailes the order and [then] there is no Assange, I’ll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it.”, while the Washington Times columnist Jeffery T. Kuhner titled his column “Assassinate Assange” captioned with a picture Julian Assange overlayed with a gun site, blood spatters, and “WANTED DEAD or ALIVE” with the alive crossed out.

Before I proceed, a few things I think:

• WikiLeaks is an important site that has made a definitive impact on the way we gather news and disseminate information and its impact and influence will continue to have an effect into the forseeable future. (The release of sensitive information, however, DOES need regulation.)
• Julian Assange should not be killed or harshly prosecuted for a crime an average Joe wouldn’t receive the same punishment for.
• Sarah Palin’s graphic is wholly inappropriate, especially for someone who has talked of one day running for president of the U.S.
• Palin’s graphic didn’t CAUSE gunman Jared Lee Loughner to do what he did in Tucson, Arizona on Saturday. There is no proof of this.
• It is absolutely appalling for WikiLeaks — an organization I thought would have been a little better equipped to deal with mass media by now — to piggy-back off the tragedy and call attention to itself.

Here is the WikiLeaks press release in its entirety. To me, it reads like this:

“We offer our condolences to the victims of the Tucson shooting. It was probably caused by violent rhetoric. We at WikiLeaks have also been victims of that. In fact, Sarah Palin wants WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange killed. Mike Huckabee, Rush Limbaugh and all these other people want Assange killed too. WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks, Wikileaks. Arrest all these people. Long live WikiLeaks.”

They then link to a website succinctly titled People OK with Murdering Assange.

This is not the time for this. I like you a lot, WikiLeaks. But you lost on this one.

B.C. link traced to WikiLeaks avengers: Smoking Gun website

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is pictured through the heavily tinted windows of a police vehicle as he arrived at Westminster magistrates court in London, on December 14, 2010. Assange blasted Visa, MasterCard and PayPal for blocking donations to his website, in a defiant statement from behind bars ahead of the court appearance. Photograph by: Carl Court, AFP/Getty Images

Despite getting assigned this story on New Year’s Eve, it made the nerd in me explode into a cloud of multi-coloured confetti.

From my story in Saturday’s Vancouver Sun:

BY ANDREA WOO, VANCOUVER SUN

A global network accused of Internet attacks against perceived WikiLeaks opponents has a link to B.C.

One of the eight Internet Protocol (IP) addresses — the unique identifiers assigned to computers — hosting a website used to dispense instructions on how to electronically attack perceived opponents has been traced back to Frantech Solutions, based in Greater Victoria, according to five pages of an FBI affidavit obtained by The Smoking Gun website (thesmokinggun.com.

Following WikiLeaks’ highly publicized release of diplomatic cables in late November, U.S. companies including PayPal, Visa and MasterCard decided to suspend the whistle-blowing website’s accounts, citing the continuing investigation against the organization.

In response, groups of WikiLeaks avengers — collectively working under the name “Anonymous” — organized Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the companies.

DDoS attacks typically involve overwhelming a company’s server with external requests, thereby rendering it unable to respond to legitimate requests.

The attackers, who described themselves as “average Internet citizens,” organized and recruited via several Twitter accounts — such as @operation_anon, @anon_operation and @op_payback — until several of those accounts were suspended as well.

Participants recruited on Twitter were directed to a server at irc.anonops.net, hosted by the eight IP addresses, then instructed to download software designed as a network stress-testing application to take part in the DDoS attacks.

According to the affidavit, members from the RCMP and Saanich police department spoke with Frantech Solutions representative Francisco Dias, who confirmed the company ran a virtual server assigned the IP address in question, but said the server itself was housed at Hurricane Electric in Fremont, Calif.

Continue reading here.

Christmas with Julian Assange

My two favourite shots from Newsweek‘s exclusive 10-shot gallery:

If this is Santa Claus, governments around the world don't want him coming down their chimneys.

Ever the showman, a rubber-booted Assange finds the most dramatic way around a chicken enclosure at Ellingham Hall.

Likes: Long walks on the beach, global political disruption

DEC. 13 UPDATE: Forbes, who spoke with OkCupid CEO Sam Yagan, says it’s real.

My friend and colleague Katy Anderson blasted this piece of greatness out on teh interwebs tonight: Julian Assange’s supposed OkCupid dating profile. No one yet has been able to confirm that it is in fact his, but no one’s proved it’s fake, either.

So what do we learn from Mr. Assange’s (alleged) single’s ad?

From New York Magazine:

He is straight. Well, we could have guessed this much, already.

He is 87% slutty. Okay, we could have guessed that too. People never change. Anyway, he confirms it in his “self-summary:” “Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I am not the droid you’re looking for. Passionate and often pig headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair.” And in the “Test” section, he came back “87% dominating, 87% slut.” But also “Strong Democrat.” On the “I’m Really Good At” section, he wrote “A gentleman never tells.” So he’s also kind of cheesy and gross.

He likes tough, dangerous girls. “I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil,” he wrote. “Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!”

Despite the fangirls, he gets lonely: “Although I am pretty intellectually and physically pugnacious I am very protective of women and children,” he wrote. And while he said, “I have asian teengirl stalkers,” he ceded: “I could adapt to anything except the loss of female company and carbon.” (And carbon. Ha.)

Yeah… I’m sure the the “Asian teengirls” are all over that.

A commenter at Reddit also noticed this about his pseudonym choice:

The most interesting thing is the choice of user name. When I saw it I jumped up and grabbed a book off the bookshelf. Harry Harrison is a scifi writer that was popular in the ’70s and ’80s for his Stainless Steel Rat character. The SSR was an intergalactic criminal mastermind with a conscious who was too smart to get caught. It’s been decades since I’ve read any of this stuff, but I may have to wave my current ban on fiction to reacquaint myself with the stories. I can instantly see why Assange would choose such a moniker.

“…We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment…”

Interesting. Although I’m still caught up on his “test” results, which reveal that he is not only 87 per cent slut, but also 87 per cent sexually dominant. BLECH. Moving on: Assange’s (supposed) dating profile pics:

WikiLeaks: A round-up of good reads

Linked below are a few of the more interesting/insightful takes on the WikiLeaks saga I’ve read recently, in addition to the great Time magazine cover story in the previous post. A solid debate is brewing: Does the dumping of such sensitive information jeopardize the lives and safety of confidential sources around the world? Does it restore healthy criticism of an overly-secretive, deceptive government?  Two quotes I love: 1.) “Secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy … but it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents.” – The Economist, and 2.) ”The hallmark of a truly effective internal security system would be the maximum possible disclosure, recognizing that secrecy can best be preserved only when credibility is truly maintained.” – Justice Potter Stewart, 1971 — posted on the WikiLeaks website.

LAST UPDATED: DEC. 5, 3:15 PM

Will either add to this entry in the coming days or create new posts as I come across more.

“Like it or not, WikiLeaks is a media entity” – Gigaom (via @katyanderson)

“WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection.”

“Truth is not enough” – Joho the Blog (via @gmarkham)

“I don’t think Wikileaks’ actions can be justified simply by saying, ‘But the site is just saying the truth!’ It’s far more complex than that. What effect will this exposure have? How might it have been a more effective exposure? What do we gain and what to we lose. With this round of Wikileaks, we both gain and lose, imo.”

“Blogging the WikiLeaks” – The Nation blogger Greg Mitchell’s daily live-blogs on the leaks, complete with thoughts, opinions, links

“1:15 Editor  of Guardian:  Wash Times published column calling for Assange assassination yesterday (as I covered here) — after paper asked HIM for WIki files earlier in week.”

“Why I love WikiLeaks”  - Slate

“The idea of WikiLeaks is scarier than anything the organization has leaked or anything Assange has done because it restores our distrust in the institutions that control our lives.”

“WikiLeaks just made the world more repressive” – The Globe and Mail

“The damage done to Washington is nothing compared to the pain that is about to be inflicted on the confidential sources in Russia, China and Sudan.”

“WikiLeaks faces more heat in wake of cablegate” – The Tech Herald

“In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange covers Time magazine

(I love this cover.)

The Army says it was a crime. When Private First Class Bradley Manning downloaded tens of thousands of diplomatic cables to a CD-RW disc at an Army outpost in Iraq from November 2009 to April 2010, he broke 18 U.S. Code Section 1030(a)(1) — which criminalizes unauthorized computer downloads. But this was no ordinary crime. When Manning allegedly passed those electronic records on to self-described freedom-of-information activist Julian Assange and his revolutionary website, WikiLeaks, he did something much more far-reaching: he caused governments to ask what is really a secret and to assess how their behavior should change in an age when supposedly private communications can be whizzed around the world at the stroke of a key.

Read the rest of the story, by Massimo Calabresi, here.

Also posted on Time‘s website is the audio of managing editor Richard Stengel’s interview with Assange  via Skype on Nov. 30, 2010, with accompanying transcript. Check that here.