16 Mar 11 | Uncategorized
Speaking publicly for the first time in four months, Julian Assange addressed the Cambridge Union on Tuesday. Members waited for hours in a queue around the building; many did not make it inside and watched it on screens elsewhere in the Union.
For legal reasons, the boundaries of Assange’s talk were clearly defined before he began. He would talk only of the leaked cables and not sexual assault allegations.
He barely acknowledged the rapturous applause and seemed drained by his experiences. He began by drawing on Orwell:
“He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.”
This was the first of a number of lofty allusions which peppered Assange’s rhetoric. He referred to the radical publishers stifled by the licensing system of the 1640s; and Soviet attempts to alter encyclopaedia entries. He described his theme as “the privatisation of censorship”.
His speech focused on political events surrounding the publication of Wikileaks cables. He quoted figures revealed in the Iraq War logs and the Tunisian cables about Ben Ali. Assange praised the online resurrection of Al Akbhar, an Arabic newspaper which had published several Wikileaks cables. It was subjected to Denial of Service attacks and banned by the Tunisian government. Assange described a period where visitors to the newspaper’s website were redirected to a Saudi “sex site”. The publication returned to the internet earlier in the day.
He claimed Wikileaks prevented Joe Biden from maintaining that Mubarak was not a dictator and was critical of America’s relations with the Middle East. He was disparaging about Hillary Clinton’s comments on the role of the internet. Whilst he acknowledged that Twitter and Facebook had played a part in the uprisings, he said that Al Jazeera had been far more influential.
The Egyptian revolutionaries’ handbook explicitly and repeatedly warned against using Facebook and Twitter, he said, following a brutal lesson when previous revolution attempts used these media. He claimed that officials used Facebook to “round up all the principal participants” who “were then beaten, interrogated and incarcerated”. He used this to support his opinion that the internet is “the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.”
Answering questions following the speech, he said he recognised the importance of the rule of law, but said that there were certain situations where he believed citizens must break the law. The most contentious question concerned the detention of Private Bradley Manning. The Cambridge Union’s president intervened as this did not fall within the strict remit of the talk, but Assange answered anyway.
He explained that Wikileaks operated a technological system whereby sources were unknown, as “the best way to keep a secret is not to have it in the first place”. He expressed his sadness at Manning’s plight and accepted that Wikileaks would have some responsibility if he actually had been a source. He claimed that Manning was arrested following revelations to Wired magazine.
03 Mar 11 | Uncategorized
This article was originally published in the Guardian
I’ve always wanted a walk-on part in a Hollywood movie, but I don’t suppose Steven Spielberg will indulge me. The mogul has bought the film rights to two recent books critical of Julian Assange, both of which provide racy accounts of the difficult relationship between the WikiLeaks founder, his comrades and the newspapers he worked with. Now my role as an alleged “Jewish” conspirator against him may, if I’m lucky, go celluloid.
All this would be entertaining, but for anyone who cares about free expression and freedom of information, the catfight between WikiLeaks and the organisations that were longstanding supporters is a shame. At the risk of sounding pious, it’s time to refocus on the big issues.
When Index on Censorship began nearly 40 years ago, the issues were perhaps more black and white than those posed by instant information and the internet, and the competing needs of free expression, confidentiality, privacy and security Assange has raised. Index strongly supported the publication of the leaked US embassy cables. With the odd exception, we saw no evidence that they posed a clear and present danger to sources; we saw them as strongly in the public interest. The days when governments or corporations believed they had a right to secrecy, to protect their narrow interests or save them embarrassment, are gone.
Index’s association with Assange goes back some time. In 2008 WikiLeaks won the new media prize at our annual awards. We were pleased to host him in a debate in London last September, but his combative demeanour that evening was a surprise. Throughout the past few months we have been at the heart of the tussle. Two of Index’s trustees are Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens and his agent, Caroline Michel. Whenever asked, particularly in the US, about reconciling Stephens’s two roles, I have pointed out that Index is a broad church, and that Stephens has been a longstanding battler for free speech.
It has often felt like treading on egg shells. We were asked in December to channel Assange’s defence fund through our bank account. Our chairman, the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, and I thought it inappropriate for a charity to become involved in the personal allegations against Assange. So we declined.
When urged at the start of January by Assange’s publisher to help him write his memoirs I said I was ready to assist, but only if I had strong editorial input and that no subject was off-limits. This, I was told, was not acceptable. Roughly at the same time our organisation started asking questions about Israel Shamir, a man accused of Holocaust denial and of being a close associate of Belarus’s autocratic leader Alexander Lukashenko. Index is one of the founders of the Belarus Committee. Despite repeated but polite requests to WikiLeaks, our team was stonewalled, so we went public with our concerns.
Assange’s reported conspiracy remarks to Private Eye magazine about me and senior figures in the Guardian do not help his cause. With so many genuine adversaries, why seek more? His approach has reinforced a view that whistleblowing is the preserve of irresponsible eccentrics — playing into the hands of malign forces in the US seeking to prosecute him for “terrorism” or under the espionage act.
Thanks in large part to WikiLeaks, no matter how hard the authorities try, it will be impossible in future to prevent conscientious whistleblowers from passing on material that seeks to cast a light on the actions of the powerful — information that might otherwise remain secret. Due to the published documents, people around the world — notably in the Middle East and north Africa — have a better sense of what others thought of their autocratic leaders. All this is the positive legacy. The rest is soap opera or, dare I say it, Tinseltown.
24 Feb 11 | News and features
Lawyers for Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, are to appeal his extradition to Sweden to face a sexual assault investigation.
Judge Howard Riddle ruled today that the European Arrest Warrant issued by a Swedish prosecutor was valid, and that Assange should return to Sweden to face questioning.
(more…)
27 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
Human Rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC was this week awarded the New York Bar Association’s annual award for distinction in law and international affairs. In his acceptance speech he proposed new legal principles for whistleblowers:
The First Amendment to the US Constitution is based on Madison’s principle that government information should be the people’s information too. I currently have a client, in Mr Julian Assange, who takes Madison’s principle to what some politicians and diplomats see as extremes. WikiLeaks has certainly made people around the world better informed about what their rulers do not tell them, but to tell the US Embassy instead. This is not the place to discuss my controversial client, other than to express the hope that he remains alive to give me instructions. Joe Biden and Mick Huckabee want him treated like a terrorist, Rush Limbaugh yearns for him “to die from lead poisoning from a bullet in the brain”, while Sarah Palin, as ever shooting from the lip, says “he should be hunted down like Bin Laden” (I suppose that would give him nine more years of freedom).
These shrill, exaggerated voices calling for the messenger to be killed come unhappily from the land of the First Amendment. WikiLeaks, whatever its failings, has at least enlightened the people of many countries around the world, from Tunisia to Indonesia, who now realise what their governments have been up to and how truly corrupt those governments are. It might be thought that the most astonishing secret revealed by WikiLeaks is that US diplomacy is both principled and pragmatic and that most foreign leaders place upon the United States the heavy burden of world leadership, most urgently in dealing with Iran and the prospect of a nuclear bomb in the hands of mullahs without mercy.
It can only diminish US leadership and dim the beacon of the First Amendment, to raise that old blunderbuss the Espionage Act of 1917, death penalty and all, and aim it beyond the jurisdiction at a publisher who is the citizen of a friendly country. Nor can it be helpful to America’s reputation for respecting due process to amend it retrospectively, as Senator Lieberman has suggested. What the WikiLeaks phenomenon calls for, surely, is a cool-headed appraisal not only of US government classification policy — these cables were apparently accessibly to over 2 million public servants, including 22 year olds — but to developing international media law principles for dealing with worldwide publishers of national security information.
A sensible rule might contain these principles:
1. Citizens everywhere have a democratic right to know what a government does in their name;
2. Governments and their public servants bear sole responsibility for protecting properly classified information;
3. Outsiders who receive or communicate confidential government information should not be prosecuted unless they have obtained it by fraud or bribery or duress;
4. National security exceptions should be precisely defined, should protect the identity of sources who are at risk of reprisals but should not stop whistleblowers from revealing human rights violations – the public has, at the very least, a right to know when a war fought in its name is killing innocent civilians through illegal targeting decisions.
I do not advance these principles as definitive but as the basis for a debate that the US Justice Department should be prepared to engage in with publishers – the New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian and Mr Assange included. It might end in an agreement that could be the basis for injunctive action in national courts, but not for criminal prosecution of publishers. That, surely, is wholly antipathetic to the spirit of the First Amendment.
