Legal fury at 'war on free speech' Karen Kissane .. December 11, 2010
One of the protesters at the Melbourne rally in support of Australian WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. Photo: Luis Enrique Asqui
A MELBOURNE lawyer and former boss of Prime Minister Julia Gillard has criticised her government for its handling of WikiLeaks and its Australian founder, Julian Assange.
Peter Gordon, whose legal firm made Ms Gillard the first female partner of Slater and Gordon, said her comment that Mr Assange had broken the law was baseless.
He said the fact that people such as Ms Gillard and Attorney-General Robert McClelland - both of whom he knew to be good lawyers and decent people - could be driven to behave in this way was a sobering reminder of ''the seductive and compulsive draw of power''.
Mr Gordon was speaking on Thursday night at a WikiLeaks forum attended by 250 lawyers and civil libertarians at the Law Institute of Victoria.
In today's Age opinion page, he writes: ''If the Wikileaks disclosures tell us anything, it is that no government, whatever its political colours, is going to hesitate for a nanosecond to conflate the notion of 'national security' with 'my own career security'.''
He calls for a challenge to the ''war on information … call it what it is - a growing and insidious attack on free speech''.
Mr Gordon's stance was backed by several top barristers, who said neither official secrets nor terror laws provided any offences under which Mr Assange could be charged in Australia.
Mr Assange also received support from more than 500 people who attended a rally outside the State Library in Melbourne. The rally was one of several held around the country, with backers calling for a ban on WikiLeaks censorship and for Mr Assange to be freed.
Julian Burnside, QC, said of the government: ''I think they are trying to defend the indefensible.''
He said the state had an obligation to protect citizens who got into trouble in a foreign country. ''They ignored that obligation and instead sided with the Americans. They even went so far as to threaten to cancel his passport. That's exactly the opposite of what any self-respecting country ought to do.''
Ms Gillard insists the actions of Mr Assange, an Australian citizen, are illegal. Attorney-General Robert McClelland has said Wikileaks' actions are likely to be illegal.
Yesterday Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor said it was entirely up to federal police to say whether Mr Assange had committed any crimes.
Several barristers agreed that it would be stretching credulity to try to mount a case based on terror laws, such as a claim that Mr Assange had recklessly helped al-Qaeda by publishing a list of the sites the US most feared would be terror targets.
Greg Barns, a barrister with experience of Australian terror trials, said: ''Even under the outrageous curtailing of freedom of speech that the anti-terror laws represent in this country, you couldn't even at a stretch maintain that there was an intention or even recklessness on the part of Mr Assange.''
Mr Barns and others pointed out that any charge laid against Mr Assange would also have to be laid against all the large media outlets that had republished his documents.
Even the United States had so far failed in its search for an offence, Mr Assange's Melbourne solicitor, Rob Stary, said. ''This issue has also been examined by the Congressional Research Service in the US, and they made the same observation. He's the second person in the chain; he receives material, but he doesn't take it himself.'' Therefore, no offence could be identified, he said.
Mr Stary said lawyers at the forum expressed ''enormous disquiet as to the role of government attempting to suppress this information'' and had criticised Ms Gillard and Mr McClelland for undermining the presumption of innocence.
Mr Burnside said: ''I think, standing back from it, what we have seen is what happens to a citizen who breaks the unwritten law about embarrassing the governments of powerful countries … If they want to avoid embarrassment, they shouldn't shut down freedom of information. They should stop acting embarrassingly.''
Assanged out, yet? Not me. As long as there new perspectives offered on the loudmouthed .. lol .. Australian (am sure "loudmouthed" was not meant as a derogatory comment there) and the forces ranged against Assange and his supporters .. so here are a couple more ..
Fey general who ignited a cyber war Hamish McDonald December 11, 2010
Kat Henderson makes her displeasure known as she joins supporters of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, at a rally in Brisbane. Photo: Michelle Smith
Julian Assange has a virtual presence and a global effect.
As China yesterday hardened its internet dragnet against support for the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo being awarded the Nobel peace prize in far-off Norway, an officially inspired cyber campaign was in full swing in the West against Julian Assange, the Australian leading figure of WikiLeaks fighting extradition to neighbouring Sweden.
Such were the immense ironies in WikiLeaks' second week of gradual disclosure of its third tranche of secret documents.
At the reported instigation of powerful Washington politicians - notably Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, but possibly also staff in Barack Obama's White House - American and foreign internet hosts began kicking WikiLeaks off their servers, and financial transaction services such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal froze accounts that were the window for public donations to WikiLeaks, its only financial resource.
In retaliation, a massive cyber counter-attack began on Wednesday against these institutions, with 3000 WikiLeaks sympathisers, including some in Australia, accepting a program called Low Orbit Ion Cannon that installs a ''bot'' capable of sending 20 million connect requests an hour. Within hours, the main credit card operations and the Swiss postal bank, which had blocked a WikiLeaks account, were knocked out, along with the websites of Lieberman and other politicians calling for Assange to be hunted down, among them Sarah Palin.
Meanwhile, nervous institutions such as Columbia University in New York were warning their students that an electronic record of having connected to WikiLeaks might harm chances of employment with the State Department and other government agencies. US military personnel were told WikiLeaks was off-limits. As the American dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky emailed this week to an Australian friend: ''I can't get any access to WikiLeaks in the land of the free.''
''The Chinese must be getting a real thrill out of this,'' said Scott Burchill, a Deakin University specialist in international relations whose earlier diplomatic career ended over his dissent with policy on East Timor. ''They will be sitting back and saying: 'We were always wondering when the cyber war would start, now it's begun among yourselves. We were going to do it.'''
There were perceived threats of a more sinister kind. With Palin calling for Assange to be hunted down like al-Qaeda, the former Republican House of Representatives leader Newt Gingrich saying he should be classed as an ''enemy combatant'' and an adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister saying he should be ''assassinated'', Assange's lawyer has earnestly asked Australia's Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, to warn them off.
Clinton Fernandes, an associate professor in international relations at the Australian Defence Force Academy, urges Assange to get back to Australia when he can. ''He's physically safest in this country, because any kind of lethal action that would be done by foreign services, especially those that are partners of us in ANZUS, would not be done in this country,'' Fernandes said.
''He's quite liable, if he stays away from Australia, to fall asleep in one jurisdiction and wake up in another, and all the passport and immigration documentation will be in order. But it wouldn't happen if he was here because he's an Australian citizen and Australia is a US partner and there are protocols in place to prevent that kind of snatch-and-grab operation.''
The ironies extended to Sweden, long viewed as a nation of liberalism, sexual permissiveness and political neutrality - and a reliable haven for refugees. Given its off-and-on investigation of Assange for alleged sexual offences against two women there, conspiracy theories are swirling around Gothenberg's chief prosecutor, Marianne Ny. As readers of Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell novels will know, Swedish prosecutors are at the interface of police and politics, and if political pressure is being exerted on criminal cases it is through them.
Yet so far there is little evidence to support the widespread supposition that the Swedish government is responding to American requests to take Assange out of circulation by any means, or that it is part of a right-wing drive to end Sweden's armed neutrality stance.
Ny and the volunteer lawyer for the complainants, Claes Borgstrom, a Social Democrat MP, seem more driven by their involvement in the development of Swedish law on sexual assault, which is already marked by much more nuanced definitions of what is coercion and consent than in most other countries.
The emerging case Ny is trying to build against Assange, that he overstepped the degree of consent by Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen by insisting on sex without a condom and by having sex with one while she was asleep, occurred in wider encounters that all seem to a degree to have been consensual. The two ''victims'' tweeted and blogged about their exciting liaisons with the ultra-cool Assange, then tried to pull them off the web as they decided to make complaints.
Ardin in particular seems a woman who can look after herself. She was previously in charge of investigating gender discrimination at the prestigious Uppsala University, and had been expelled from Cuba for supporting Las Damas de Blanco (Women in White), the wives of dissidents jailed in Castro's 2003 crackdown.
Ny revived the investigation after a junior prosecutor had decided the facts did not mount up to a case of sexual assault under current law. The British court weighing the Swedish extradition request may well decide that the alleged offence is not mirrored in British law and Assange should not be handed over.
The paradox, meanwhile, is that in Larsson's thrillers his asocial computer-hacking heroine Lisbeth Salander was fighting simultaneously against two enemies: official conspiracies and sexual violence towards women. The two were connected in Larsson's thinking, as probably with many of the information libertarians now grouping around WikiLeaks.
A bit like Salander, the white-haired Assange is a character who floats almost ethereally around the world like a virtual presence. Raised by his theatrical, new-age mother - for a while on Queensland's Magnetic Island, so named because Captain Cook found his compasses swinging widely as he sailed by - he spent part of his childhood in a quasi-Hindu cult in the Dandenongs, came of age in Melbourne squats and learnt his skills in early hacking efforts on the primitive internet in the 1980s, before formal study in maths and physics.
At 39 Assange owns no property, has no fixed home but a dissolved family, travels with few possessions beyond a backpack of hard drives and discs, and works with little need for food or sleep. ''He's basically without assets that can be seized, has no material needs, and no vulnerabilities,'' said Deakin's Burchill. ''He seems to have worked towards this over a long period of time. He seems to have prepared himself for the onslaught that we've seen in the last few days.''
But, as with the sexual urges that persuaded New Guinea highlanders that the first white men they saw were also human, Assange's relationships with women encountered in his nomadic life seem to be the chink in the armour, perhaps randomly found by a prosecutor working to an agenda that has nothing to do with global power balances, only those in bedrooms.
Again like Salander, the Assange defenders have the capacity to wage asymmetrical warfare in his defence, not just in cyber attacks.
This week's trickle of cables about Australia followed a declaration by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, that the WikiLeaks activity was ''illegal'' and McClelland's announced study of ways to prosecute Assange or cancel his passport. To some analysts, it looked a classic study in game theory, the predictive applied mathematics of how adversaries and competitors react, which Assange is known to have studied.
The search for legal action against Assange and WikiLeaks is, meanwhile, running into problems. Assange has moved far beyond his earlier hacking exploits, recounted under his cover name Splendide Mendax (Nobly Untruthful, a reference from the Roman poet Horace) in the 1997 book Underground, which earned him a conviction and fine in 1992, at the age of 21.
''They are not hackers by any means,'' said Fernandes, who teaches a master's course at the defence academy on the uses of intelligence. ''They have created a system whereby people who wish to blow the whistle can do so. But they have no actual ability to break into anything like that stuff. They're completely outgunned in that sense. Most of the people around the world who have PhDs in mathematics are working for the defence bureaucracies.
''The computing firepower that is deployed against them is immense. We're talking about supercomputers half the size of a football field that sit in a bath of liquid nitrogen because they get so heated so quickly. The algorithms that they have to deploy to defend themselves certainly can't compete with that.''
The US Attorney-General, Eric Holder, has been looking at the 1917 Espionage Act, but admits some problems fitting it to WikiLeaks. He is also studying whether WikiLeaks aided or directed the suspected leaker of the massive trove of secret material, the young army private Bradley Manning, which would enable a conspiracy charge.
Otherwise, WikiLeaks seems to have a valid protection under the US constitution's first amendment protecting freedom of expression. It has been careful to class itself as a media organisation operating on journalistic principles, meaning it is no more guilty of espionage or theft than newspapers that invite whistleblowers to make contact and supply the phone numbers and email addresses to do so.
Fernandes thinks WikiLeaks has been so far more successful in attracting this kind of inside material because it offers better technical protection, akin to bank-level software, has a good record of protecting sources, and puts documents out without ''spin'' or commentary - free of the ''five filters'' listed by Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, a favourite of the counterculture in which Assange moves. (The filters in their ''propaganda model'' were media ownership, advertising pressures, a symbiotic link to sources, outside pressure groups, and a pervasive anti-communist ideology.)
The counterculture seems set to provide a milieu in which cyber-activists such as Assange can operate, even if he himself is taken out one way or the other. The grim recession throwing millions out of work across Europe and America will provide many educated and alienated recruits to a self-conscious underground. As the cyber-attacks showed this week, many are prepared to turn from sympathy into activity. Even conventional, established libertarians such as the barrister Geoffrey Robertson and journalist John Pilger are rallying to Assange's defence and it is conceivable a legal counter-offensive could reach the US Supreme Court.
Whether WikiLeaks will develop from a loose, semi-underground network of about 400 activists sustained by small businessmen into a coherent political movement is doubtful. Already it is fracturing, as leftist movements tend to do, with a 25-year-old German setting up his own WikiLeaks.
Assange's writings over the years reveal eclectic, unsystematic reading with no particular guru or thinker predominating, and often read to Burchill like those of a scientist or mathematician applying his matrix to messy politics.
The WikiLeaks group can be defined as anarchists, if not the bomb-throwing 19th-century kind, he said. ''They're anarchists in believing the state is an inherent evil, and responsible for most of the crimes that are committed and most of the oppression that is meted out to people. They believe in freedom, they don't believe in intellectual property, being able to patent ideas - which they believe should be accessible to everyone. Unlike everyone else they have got the wherewithal to do a bit of damage.''
The targets are not particularly the United States, but any circles that they see as gaining and holding power by access to secret information. ''Assange dislikes people who get power simply by access to information, and he has the means to break down the barriers by his IT expertise,'' Burchill said.
Past disclosures have hit Kenya's political elite and Scientology. The next target Assange has foreshadowed is a big American bank, whose executives allegedly enriched themselves via government support during the global financial crisis.
Burchill is among many analysts marvelling that it is the third tranche, involving mostly diplomatic briefings, that has brought down so much government activity against WikiLeaks, rather than the first two, which revealed details of combat operations, civilian casualties and local contacts in Iraq and Afghanistan - and which had much more risk of harm to individuals if exposed than cables that merely embarrass politicians.
''It won't change the way international relations are conducted but it will change the way governments preserve their secrets, or attempt to,'' Burchill said. ''After 9/11 so many people shared this kind of information: it was only a matter of time before someone disclosed it. How you run a huge bureaucracy of that kind where information is the basic lifeblood of it and share it around without it falling into the hands of a maverick or someone with other motivations, is something they haven't worked out.''
It might have been the obvious place to look but it seems no one did, writes Mike Sweet.
The wood-panelled members' lounge of the Frontline Club is a warm and inviting space, perched above the icy streets of Paddington in west London. Two chesterfield sofas take centre stage in this convivial watering hole for journalists working in, and passing through, the British capital.
It is busier than usual, with camera crews from Danish, German, Italian and Swedish TV channels preparing in turn to interview the founding director, Vaughan Smith. Advertisement: Story continues below
Hours earlier, Smith had made public the fact that Julian Assange had been using the club as a base of operations. After Assange's arrest, the club was offered as a bail address for the co-founder of WikiLeaks.
"I got very worried about the manner in which certain things were happening, which suggested political pressure,'' says Smith. ''For example, the Swedish court case where the charges were dropped because of not enough evidence: he requests to leave Sweden, is allowed to leave, and the charges re-appear. Little things aren't right."
Reflecting on the trip he and Assange made voluntarily to Kentish Town police station the previous day (to hand over Assange), Smith says he was surprised to find a video crew inside. "The police decided to let in a camera crew. It's a bit odd, isn't it?"
Knowing intimately Assange's movements in the days before the arrest, Smith is perplexed about the refusal of the London court to grant bail - and what might have influenced that decision. "I'm not a legal expert but there seemed to be a good case for bail. I saw Assange make the decision to hand himself in. He was basically saying, 'Look, I said I was going to do it, so I must'. And he did. He wouldn't have done that if he was then going to run."
It's clear to see the practical appeal of the club to Assange and his team. Its cosy attic bedrooms, available to club members at very modest rates for central London, each come equipped with free Wi-Fi, widescreen televisions, power showers and a place for a laptop. When such creature comforts are combined with Frontline's campaigning idealism, it would be hard to find a more appropriate venue for WikiLeaks operations.
With a certain irony, Smith talks about Assange's need to keep his communications discreet while at the club. "He didn't advertise where he was." Smith believes the media ''sexed up'' the notion of Assange in hiding, to Assange's detriment.
"He was at the club for a large part of the time when people thought he was hiding out. Journalists were meeting him but still there were these stories.
''According to Mark Stephens, his legal counsel, the police knew where he was but they didn't call him in. He wasn't a fugitive but he was presented as one, and that didn't help his bail case.
"There's a very interesting relationship between the media and Julian Assange. With WikiLeaks, Assange has in effect put up a huge mirror. In it, journalists are looking at themselves and we're not all liking what we see. It's a time to think about our trade. We need to have a bit of courage."
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Mark Chew
The journalist Suelette Dreyfus collaborated with Julian Assange to create Underground, a 1997 book about hackers in Australia and around the globe. Here she reveals the inside story on Assange, the geek who founded WikiLeaks and became the scourge of world governments.
ONE of Julian Assange's favourite books is Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. It is a bleak novel loosely based on the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.
It tells the story of a Russian named Rubashov who was once a revered 1917 revolutionary, but who is cast out from his society. Suddenly he awakes in the middle of the night to find he is arrested and imprisoned. There are no charges, no due process and no justice. He can get no truth or explanation of what is going on. Eventually he is interrogated, and asked to sign a false confession admitting his guilt in a plot to assassinate the mysterious “No. 1”, the unknown and unnamed government leader.
He refuses.
From left: Julian Assange after being accused of hacking in 1995; a stressed Assange tells reporters last month that WikiLeaks staff were receiving death threats; Interpol's online wanted poster before Assange's arrest last week. Photo: Reuters/Getty Images
He is isolated in his cell, but finds a way of communicating with another prisoner by tapping on pipes. Ever so carefully, they begin secretly passing information and stories back and forth.
In the gloomy prison, an interrogation begins. First, an old friend of Rubashov's is brought in to start a soft persuasion. When that fails, because Rubashov refuses to admit to a crime he did not commit, his friend is arrested and executed for going too easy on the prisoner.
Then a coarse and violent interrogator takes over. He believes that torture is a good way to extract confessions from prisoners. He hates Rubashov because the prisoner is educated: being enlightened through learning is clearly a dangerous thing.
The activist on the cover of Time Magazine this month.
At the novel's end, Rubashov is summarily executed.
It's a case of life imitating art, with obvious parallels between Julian Assange's predicament and that of his favoured novel.
The world's most mysterious and famous publisher of verboten secrets is sitting in a jail cell in Britain awaiting extradition to a place with a very alien legal system, Sweden, to face questioning about criminal charges he does not understand. He has said publicly that he is at a loss to know how he could be accused of sexual offences against two women with whom he had sex when they have admitted it was consensual.
Assange has always been an avid reader of books. I know this because we worked together for almost three years to create Underground, a book published in Australia in 1997 and again in an electronic version in 2001. Underground is the true story of hackers in Australia and around the globe. Assange, the former hacker, contributed exceptional technical skills and analysis, and I brought years of experience as a journalist and writer. The book has become something of a classic among computer enthusiasts and has been translated into Czech, Chinese and Russian. Books were the basis of Assange's self-education. He attended school off and on during his childhood, but he was continually frustrated by teachers who were at a loss about what to do with him.
A geek friend of his once described Assange as having an IQ "in excess of 170". I suspect this could be true. I can only imagine how hard it must have been for a teacher in 1970s Australia to teach her class of normal children while also dealing with one small blond-haired boy who was off the charts.
So Assange largely gave up on school, finding it more efficient to educate himself by reading books. He learned to tune out if people didn't feed him information fast enough.
I've watched Assange do this many times. It's not meant to be rude, though it can make him seem aloof. It is, I suspect, a habit learned from these early years. It can give him the air of an absent-minded professor. He's not really absent; it's just that his brain is running several processors in parallel, like a high-powered desktop computer.
If some information is of more interest, more processing power will be diverted to that to optimise the running of the machine. Sometimes he thinks he has told you something when he hasn't. This is probably because his brain moves so much faster than his voice; by the time he opens his mouth to speak, his thoughts have zoomed a million light years down the next thought path.
The computer geek in him always gravitated towards optimisation of everything. Some people are born engineers and the desire to optimise is a good test of this.
Once, when Assange was packing boxes to move house, he complained at how long it took. Most people just throw things in boxes and tape them up. Not Assange. He approached putting his books in boxes as though he was solving a puzzle aimed at using all the space in the box most efficiently. If there was dead space in the box, the packing had not been optimal and was a failure. He would empty the box and restart the packing again.
This desire for optimisation might be dismissed as the quirky trait of a geek, but it is far more important. It is part of the larger puzzle of how WikiLeaks has come to exist today.
The need for optimisation and the deep desire for justice, reflected by his choice of books, came together with a few other convictions.
One of these can be found in another favourite piece of writing, this time by the World War II pilot and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The quote, used by Assange to sign many of his emails, was this: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the seas."
The quote suggests that if you can show people why something is important, they will work to achieve that goal far more effectively than if you just tell them to tick off items on a banal to-do list. Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year trying to drum that message into their executives in high-end training courses. Assange knew it instinctively.
The final piece in the puzzle was curiosity. Like all good journalists, Assange has it in abundance. It is part of his clay. He understood that most people are curious and he spoke to me about the immense power of information to change the world for the better.
WikiLeaks is the picture that emerges when you lay the last puzzle piece in place.
If you want to improve the lot of the poorest, most oppressed people in the world, you can go to a destitute, corrupt African country and work in a community-aid program. It is a noble and self-sacrificing choice. But it only saves one village. Therefore, although it works towards greater justice (in this case economic justice) it is not optimal. A computer geek would consider it sub-optimal. To be optimal, it must be on a much larger scale. Larger than one village, larger than one country, even than one continent. The only way to do that is to use information which can be replicated endlessly – and cheaply – to promote change for the better. But it must be good information, not trashy information or PR spin. It must be the kind of information that plucks at those little threads of curiosity we all have in one measure or another.
It must be the kind of information news media organisations would publish for their readers.
Not everyone wants change, however. Tin-pot dictators like to steal money from their countries.
Insert: MURDOCH AND OTHER BILLIONAIRE TAX EVADERS?? .. dictait's all a bit relative, isn't it? .. little guy tax evasion, goes on, butt ...
Average people may think they are happy in their ordinary lives: they don't want change. Yet imagine if there was a secret world these average people did not know about. What could be in that world? It could be a world of classified logs from the front line of a war. It could also be a world of secret diplomatic cables that tell the truth about what really happens behind the mahogany doors of power. The average people might actually want that information – if someone revealed it to them.
WikiLeaks has taught people to "long for the endless immensity of the seas". Who wants to go back to their cramped dog-box apartment now that they have tasted the salty air and seen the ocean's infinite horizon?
Yet Assange still sits in prison, waiting for answers and explanations, like Rubashov. It is more than likely the US will try to extradite him from Sweden if he is forced to leave Britain. Hints in the American media suggest that a secret grand jury investigation is under way or is even completed – without Assange even being in the country.
American politicians propose that Assange be assassinated. Forget a trial or jury. They are judge, jury and executioner, like the thuggish interrogator in Darkness at Noon.
The office of US senator Joseph Lieberman tried to gag WikiLeaks this week by making a phone call that forced Amazon to stop hosting the publisher. The New York Times has also released the diplomatic cables. Lieberman's office has called for an investigation but has not tried to order the paper to stop its presses. As if it could. There would be rioting in the streets of Manhattan.
In person, Assange is remarkably calm. He is sometimes dedicated to the cause of free speech in a pointed way that that affronts Americans, which is surprising, really, given their dedication to the right of free speech.
What matters is that WikiLeaks is changing the balance of power between average citizens and their governments like nothing else has this century. For the past decade the pendulum has swung towards government. WikiLeaks is pulling the pendulum back towards towards the citizens.
Suelette Dreyfus is a Melbourne-based technology journalist.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
