wikileaks

I was in Germany for Chaos Congress 2009, a hacker conference, and after attending a series of talks I was headed back to my hotel when I spotted Julian Assange. This predated my working as a project manager at DARPA as a hacker-in-residence, if you will. It was also before Wikileaks released the video “Collateral Murder” and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, the Swedish rape allegations, and Julian ending up a virtual prisoner, holed up in Ecuador’s diplomatic mission in London.

After 10 days and 93 bids, an historic server used to host Wikileaks’ treasure trove of secret documents has sold on eBay — to a 17-year-old who used his dad’s email account without permission.

Swedish ISP Bahnhof, which had hosted Wikileaks for about eight months starting back in 2010, decided to sell the server last week, hoping to raise money for two charities: Reporters Without Borders and the 5th of July Foundation, a digital rights group.

Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday for leaking "hundreds of thousands" of confidential documents to anti-secrecy website Wikileaks.

In 2010 Manning handed over videos exposing the murder of two Iraqi journalists by a US Army helicopter crew and the abuse of detainees by Iraqi officers under the control of American forces, as well as more than 700,000 files of classified US State Department cables.

A young Icelandic boy's journey as an informant all began with a cryptic e-mail sent to the United States Embassy in Reykjavík from Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson (Sigurður Ingi Þórðarsson), then an 18-year-old.

Thordarson had been involved with WikiLeaks during the previous 18 months, moving ever-closer to the inner circle of the group—Julian Assange eventually promoted him to running the group’s IRC channel, and he was put in charge of dealing with newcomers, media, and other volunteers.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney doesn't shy away from controversy. In fact, he may gravitate towards it. His previous works cover the fall of Enron (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the Elliot Spitzer saga (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer), and torture during the war in Afghanistan (Taxi to the Dark Side).

All movies have heroes and villains and Alex Gibney's documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, felt like vintage silver screen. Two-thirds of the way through, the film established clear roles. Our protagonist is Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and underdog hacker hero. His evil nemesis is actually information-silencing bureaucracy but the US government largely plays this role (voiced often by Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and CIA). It's a classic conflict: a battle waged over censorship and the public's right to know.

A senior judge from Sweden’s supreme court, Justice Stefan Lindskog, has told an Australian audience that Julian Assange’s argument he cannot stand trial in Sweden without being extradited to the USA is not as black and white as the wikileaker would have us believe.

Lindskog yesterday told an audience at the University of Adelaide that unless Assange is charged with a crime that directly correlates to a law on the books of both Sweden and the USA, the Scandinavian nation won’t be able to hand him over.

WikiMartyr in waiting Julian Assange has emitted another screed in which he shares his belief that democracy is being dangerously undermined by government monitoring of the internet, and that Facebook and Google are helping those efforts.

Chatting with RT, Assange has outlined his belief that nations now conduct surveillance on a massive scale, because “it is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon.”

Bradley Manning, the US Army Private First Class accused of leaking classified documents from his post in Iraq to WikiLeaks, has made a formal offer of responsibility in his pre-trial hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland.

To be clear, Manning has not pled guilty or not guilty in the case, where he has been accused of espionage, computer fraud, and “aiding the enemy," among other charges. But this marks the first time Manning has offered to accept formal responsibility for leaking government documents to WikiLeaks. If found guilty in the case, Manning could face the death penalty.

According to a member of the hacking collective, there are plans to set up a similar service to Wikileaks by the end of the year.

A Wikileaks competitor is in the works, and due to be launched on December 21 this year, according to The Hacker News. A representative of the loose hacktivist group -- who said he was representing the collective as a whole -- spoke about the project in an emailed interview with the Voice of Russia.