WikiLeaks' Assange jailed while court decides on extradition

London (CNN) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange handed himself over to police Tuesday, promptly appeared in court where he was denied bail, and left for jail in a police van.

A judge will now decide whether to extradite him to Sweden to face questioning over allegations he had sexual relations with two women without their consent. He has not been charged with a crime.

The judge at the City of Westminster Magistrate's Court ordered Assange jailed until December 14, despite several celebrities coming forward and offering to pay his surety, or bail. It was not immediately clear if the court would decide on that date whether to release him.

The judge repeatedly said the case is "not about WikiLeaks," but about serious sexual offenses that allegedly occurred on three occasions with two women.

Assange, who was in court with security guards on either side of him and his lawyer in front, initially proved reluctant to declare a home address.

At the start of the proceedings, Assange was asked for his address and at first gave a post office box. When told that wasn't sufficient, he wrote a location on a piece of paper and handed it to the judge; it was later revealed that Assange wrote "Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on the paper.

In making his decision to deny bail, the judge cited the fact that Assange gave no permanent address and has a nomadic lifestyle, and that he has access to significant funding that would make it easy for him to abscond.

Vaughn Smith of the Frontline Club, a journalists' organization that hosts many of WikiLeaks press events and gives WikiLeaks workspace in London, said that he had offered Assange an address for for bail. Smith said he was "suspicious of the personal charges" against Assange.

English socialite Jemima Khan had offered to pay bail of 20,000 pounds ($31,500), and journalist John Pilger also offered a sum of money.

The media was allowed inside the courtroom initially but was later ordered to leave.

Assange appeared in court after turning himself in at a London police station. He was arrested on a Swedish warrant.

He refused to agree to be extradited to Sweden, so the court now has roughly 21 days to decide whether to order his extradition, said Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association.

Ellis was surprised that Assange was denied bail, he said.

But Assange will now face an uphill battle to prevent being sent to Sweden -- showing that he cannot get a fair trial there.

"That is difficult" given Sweden's highly developed legal system, Ellis said.

The Swedish warrant is a European arrest warrant designed for easy transfer of suspects among European states, Ellis said.

If the court does decide to allow his extradition, Assange will be allowed to appeal that decision, too, elongating the legal process, he added.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has said he has long feared retribution for his website's disclosures and has called the rape allegations against him a smear campaign.

Sweden first issued the arrest warrant for Assange in November, saying he is suspected of one count of rape, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of unlawful coercion -- or illegal use of force -- allegedly committed in August.

The Australian High Commission in London said Tuesday it was providing consular assistance to Assange as it "would to any Australian under arrest."

A spokesman for WikiLeaks said Tuesday the legal proceedings in London had not affected the site, which facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information.

"WikiLeaks is operating as normal, and we plan to release documents on schedule," spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said.

WikiLeaks has been under intense pressure from the United States and its allies since it began posting the first of more than 250,000 U.S. State Department documents November 28.

Since then, the site has been hit with denial-of-service attacks, been kicked off servers in the United States and France, and found itself cut off from funds in the United States and Switzerland.

In response, the site has rallied supporters to mirror its content "in order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the internet." More than 500 sites had responded to the appeal by Monday evening, it said.

WikiLeaks has also posted a massive, closely encrypted file, identified as "insurance" -- a file Assange's lawyer has described as a "thermonuclear device." Assange has said the more than 100,000 people who have downloaded the file will receive the key to decoding it should anything happen to him or should the site be taken down.

"The insurance file will only be activated in the gravest of circumstances if WikiLeaks is no longer operational," Hrafnsson said.

On Monday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he has authorized "significant" actions related to a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, saying U.S. national security has been put at risk.

"We are doing everything that we can," Holder said, though he declined to answer questions about the possibility that the government could shut down WikiLeaks.

Holder also refused to say whether the actions involved search warrants or requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes wiretaps, or other means, describing them only as "significant."

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the leaked information is also a danger to British national security, calling the leaks "reprehensible" and "irresponsible."

"Governments have to be able to transmit confidential information, to share confidential information, of course, for them to be able to go about their job," Hague told CNN affiliate ITN. "We think it can be a danger to our national security."

Asked Tuesday in Afghanistan for his response to the arrest, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I haven't heard that, but it sounds like good news to me."

Monday, WikiLeaks published a secret U.S. diplomatic cable listing places the United States considers vital to its national security, prompting criticism from both the United States and Britain that the site is inviting terrorist attacks on American interests.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the disclosure "gives a group like al Qaeda a targeting list."

The sites are included in a lengthy cable the State Department sent in February 2009 to its posts around the world, asking American diplomats to identify installations overseas "whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States."

The diplomats identified dozens of places on every continent, including mines, manufacturing complexes, ports and research establishments. CNN is not publishing specific details from the list, which refers to pipelines and undersea telecommunications cables as well as the location of minerals or chemicals critical to U.S. industry.

CNN's Laura Perez Maestro and Atika Shubert contributed to this report.

WikiLeaks' Assange jailed while court decides on extradition - CNN.com

To me the guy is a case of good intentions badly implemented..

Surely the consequences of his actions should come as no surprise.

If some PFC can just walk out of a govt office with all those cables burned to a RW disc this is really a case of closing the barn door way to late.

I'm sure that all the info had already previous been stolen by Middle Eastern, Israeli, Chinese, and Russian agents - since they all of them have tons of agents in the US military and DoD.

Chinese have been caught over and over and over cyber and physically stealing our nuke data.

We (as a nation) don't get all that butt hurt when we catch even our friends (like Mossad) spying on us.

(CNN) -- Australia's foreign minister put the blame for the release of tens of thousands of pages of diplomatic cables and military information through WikiLeaks squarely on the United States Wednesday.

"I have been pretty consistent about where the core responsibility lies in this entire matter and that lies with the release of an unauthorized nature of this material by U.S. personnel," Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd told the Reuters news agency.

"My responsibility as the foreign minister is to ensure that this individual is treated no differently to any other Australian around the world who find themselves in legal difficulties," Rudd said.

"I take that responsibility very seriously because he has, in my view, complete entitlement of presumption of innocence before the law, and our job as the Australian government is to ensure that he has full access to normal consular and legal services that we would seek to provide to any Australian in these sorts of difficulties in any country around the world."



Julian Assange's legal tangle RELATED TOPICS
Julian Assange
Wikileaks.org
Australia
WikiLeaks has been under intense pressure from the United States and its allies since it began posting the first of more than 250,000 U.S. State Department documents November 28.

Since then, the site has been hit with denial-of-service attacks, been kicked off servers in the United States and France, and found itself cut off from funds in the United States and Switzerland.


Australia blames U.S. for documents getting to WikiLeaks - CNN.com

Who's to blame for damage from WikiLeaks?



Editor's note: Gen. Michael V. Hayden was appointed by President George W. Bush as CIA director in 2006 and served until February 2009. He also was director of the National Security Agency and held senior staff positions at the Pentagon and is now a principal with The Chertoff Group, a security consulting firm.

(CNN) -- As the dust begins to settle on "Wiki Dump III," some realities seem to be settling into the popular discourse and the public consciousness.

For example, it appears that American diplomats, like their military counterparts, are a dedicated and hard-working lot. Their reporting is well-written, incisive and occasionally even humorous.

What our government says to itself privately seems remarkably consistent with what it says to others (and to us) publicly.

If anything, the private conversations of diplomats and security professionals paint a world even more dangerous than the one we usually allow ourselves to describe publicly. And there seems to be more consistency with this American worldview on the part of our friends and allies than is generally admitted. Quite an exposé

Now what will this and the previous dumps cost us? With a certainty approaching 1.0, it will cost us sources. Some described in previous releases will be killed. Others, like those who described the inner workings of the formation of the German government, will simply refuse to talk to Americans.

What do you think about WikiLeaks? Sound off at CNN iReport

It will cost us cooperation with potential partners. How much purchase will any future American promise of confidentiality or discretion have for someone who might consider cooperating with us?

It will set back the kind of information sharing that has actually made us safer since 9/11.



Julian Assange arrested

August 2010: Assange accused of rape

WikiLeaks founder walks out of interview

Why the world needs WikiLeaks RELATED TOPICS
Julian Assange
Central Intelligence Agency
The New York Times Company
Michael Hayden
Barack Obama
SIPRNET, the Department of Defense network from which these documents were stolen, has a vast array of data available to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. We will now conclude that this is too much information and too many people, and we will once again be trading off potential physical safety for information security.

Most perversely, this dump will actually make the historical record less complete. Diplomatic cables of the type now being released illegally are routinely made public over the course of time. With their private thoughts now prematurely and thus harmfully on public display, diplomats and other reporters will pull their punches. The good stuff -- the trenchant observation or edgy judgment -- will be reserved for phone calls or face-to-face meetings and thus be denied to future historians.

Who bears responsibility for this? The prime culprits are clear.

There is, of course, the original leaker of the data. Then there is Julian Assange, whom I have described previously as "a dangerous combination of arrogance and incompetence." Listing global infrastructure sites that are critical and vulnerable is not transparency; it is perfidy.

But beyond these obvious criminals, there are others who, maliciously or not, have helped create the conditions for this.

I would include Amazon.com, which appeared to have been quite content to host the Wiki data on its servers until its cooperation was outed by a staffer to Sen. Joe Lieberman. The earlier decision to facilitate public access to American secrets and stolen property does not strike me as a particularly ambiguous situation or a close ethical call.

I would also include the Obama administration, at least partially and indirectly. Although the actual response to the leak has been criticized as a bit tepid and tardy, the White House clearly understands the damage being done.

But it was the Obama campaign that made a fetish of openness and transparency, and both the candidate and Harold Koh (then dean of the Yale Law School and now the top lawyer at the State Department) railed against the allegedly excessive secrecy of the Bush administration.

When President Obama decided to make public the details of a covert action of his predecessor -- the CIA interrogation program -- his spokesman defended the move as part of the president's standing commitment to transparency. Things may look different now, but actions and rhetoric have consequences.

And I would especially include the one U.S. news organization that has aggressively maneuvered to have early access to the Wiki dumps -- The New York Times. The Times could have said no to partnering with Assange. But the Times decided instead to attach what exists of its prestige to Assange's piratical enterprise, even though it had to obtain this latest WikiLeaks dump through a third party.

The newspaper highlighted the disclosures so that they got the widest possible global coverage and then attempted to legitimate the whole affair.

In a self-justifying letter to its readers, the Times admitted that these cables were "intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington" but that their revelation "served an important public interest."

Of course, the Times could argue that the documents were going to be posted on the web and that other media organizations (in Europe) had advance access and would be writing commentary on the disclosures. But on reflection, that sounds a bit like the journalistic equivalent of a teenager's lame justification to his parents that "everybody's doing it." The Times consciously decided to participate in, legitimize and facilitate the effort.

Like all things, this will pass. National attention will move on.

Those military and civilian professionals whose correspondence and reporting have been made public will continue to soldier on. But their task has been made more difficult.

And when bad things happen because their task is now harder, will those who claimed they were "serving an important public interest" by facilitating and justifying this release step up and shoulder responsibility?

I doubt it, but they will talk about the "failure" of those professionals whom they have just hobbled.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Michael V. Hayden.


Who's to blame for damage from WikiLeaks? - CNN.com

Hackers strike at MasterCard to support WikiLeaks



By RAPHAEL G. SATTER and JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Raphael G. Satter And Jill Lawless, Associated Press – 55 mins ago

LONDON – Hackers rushed to the defense of WikiLeaks on Wednesday, launching attacks on MasterCard, Visa, Swedish prosecutors, a Swiss bank and others who have acted against the site and its jailed founder Julian Assange.

Internet "hacktivists" operating under the label "Operation Payback" claimed responsibility in a Twitter message for causing severe technological problems at the website for MasterCard, which pulled the plug on its relationship with WikiLeaks a day ago.

MasterCard acknowledged "a service disruption" involving its Secure Code system for verifying online payments, but spokesman James Issokson said consumers could still use their credit cards for secure transactions. Later Wednesday, Visa's website was inaccessible.

The online attacks are part of a wave of support for WikiLeaks that is sweeping the Internet. Twitter was choked with messages of solidarity for the group, while the site's Facebook page hit 1 million fans.

Late Wednesday, Operation Payback itself appeared to run into problems, as many of its sites went down. It was unclear who was behind the counterattack.

MasterCard is the latest in a string of U.S.-based Internet companies — including Visa, Amazon.com, PayPal Inc. and EveryDNS — to cut ties to WikiLeaks in recent days amid intense U.S. government pressure. PayPal was not having problems Wednesday but the company said it faced "a dedicated denial-of-service attack" on Monday.

WikiLeaks' extensive releases of secret U.S. diplomatic cables have embarrassed U.S. allies, angered rivals, and reopened old wounds across the world. U.S. officials in Washington say other countries have curtailed their dealings with the U.S. government because of WikiLeaks' actions.

PayPal Vice President Osama Bedier said the company froze WikiLeaks' account after seeing a letter from the U.S. State Department to WikiLeaks saying that the group's activities "were deemed illegal in the United States."

Offline, WikiLeaks was under pressure on many fronts. Assange is in a British prison fighting extradition to Sweden over a sex crimes case. Recent moves by Swiss Postfinance, MasterCard, PayPal and others that cut the flow of donations to the group have impaired its ability to raise money.

Neither WikiLeaks nor Assange has been charged with any offense in the U.S., but the U.S. government is investigating whether Assange can be prosecuted for espionage or other offenses. Assange has not been charged with any offenses in Sweden either, but authorities there want to question him about the allegations of sex crimes.

Undeterred, WikiLeaks released more confidential U.S. cables Wednesday. The latest batch showed the British government feared a furious Libyan reaction if the convicted Lockerbie bomber wasn't set free and expressed relief when they learned he would be released in 2009 on compassionate grounds.

Another U.S. memo described German leader Angela Merkel as the "Teflon" chancellor, but she brushed it off as mere chatter at a party. American officials were also shown to be lobbying the Russian government to amend a financial bill they felt would disadvantage U.S. companies Visa and MasterCard.

The most surprising cable of the day came from a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia after a night on the town.

"The underground nightlife of Jiddah's elite youth is thriving and throbbing," the memo said. "The full range of worldly temptations and vices are available — alcohol, drugs, sex — but all behind closed doors."

The pro-WikiLeaks vengeance campaign on Wednesday appeared to be taking the form of denial-of-service attacks in which computers are harnessed — sometimes surreptitiously — to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.

Per Hellqvist, a security specialist with the firm Symantec, said a network of web activists called Anonymous — to which Operation Payback is affiliated — appeared to be behind many of the attacks. The group, which has previously focused on the Church of Scientology and the music industry, is knocking offline websites seen as hostile to WikiLeaks.

"While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons," the group said in a statement. "We want transparency and we counter censorship ... we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."

The website for Swedish lawyer Claes Borgstrom, who represents the two women at the center of Assange's sex crimes case, was unreachable Wednesday.

The Swiss postal system's financial arm, Postfinance, which shut down Assange's bank account on Monday, was also having trouble. Spokesman Alex Josty said the website buckled under a barrage of traffic Tuesday.

"Yesterday it was very, very difficult, then things improved overnight," he told the AP. "But it's still not entirely back to normal."

Ironically, the microblogging site Twitter — home of much WikiLeaks support — could become the next target. Operation Payback posted a statement claiming "Twitter you're next for censoring Wikileaks discussion."

Some WikiLeaks supporters accuse Twitter of preventing the term "WikiLeaks" from appearing as one of its popular "trending topics." Twitter denies censorship, saying the topics are determined by an algorithm.

Twitter's top trending topics are not the ones people are discussing the most overall, but those they are talking about more right now than they did previously, Twitter explained in an e-mail Wednesday. If tweets were ranked by volume alone, the weather or other mundane topics would dominate the trends.

WikiLeaks angered the U.S. government earlier this year when it posted a video showing U.S. troops on a helicopter gunning down two Reuters journalists in Iraq. Since then, the organization has leaked some 400,000 classified U.S. war files from Iraq and 76,000 from Afghanistan, which U.S. military officials say could put people's lives at risk. In the last few weeks, the group has begun leaking a massive trove of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

U.S. officials have directed their anger at Assange, but others have begun to ask whether Washington shares the blame for the diplomatic uproar.

"The core of all this lies with the failure of the government of the United States to properly protect its own diplomatic communications," Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday, criticizing the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. government employees had access to the cables.

Assange, meanwhile, faces a new extradition hearing in London next week where his lawyers plan to reapply for bail. The 39-year-old Australian denies two women's allegations in Sweden of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion, and is fighting his extradition to Sweden.

In a Twitter message Wednesday, WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson shrugged off the challenges.

"We will not be gagged, either by judicial action or corporate censorship ... WikiLeaks is still online," Hrafnsson said.

___

Malin Rising in Stockholm, Frank Jordans in Geneva, Jamey Keaten in Paris, Cassandra Vinograd in London, Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Brian Murphy in Dubai, Tia Goldenberg in Jerusalem, Michelle Chapman, Peter Svensson and Barbara Ortutay in New York and Anne Flaherty in Washington contributed to this report

Hackers strike at MasterCard to support WikiLeaks - Yahoo! News

Mastercard is a bunch of hypocrites - I've been involved with anti-spam Info-sec work, and Mastercard would NEVER take action against web sites that where selling illegal drugs (I don't generally have a problem with drug dealers, but I do take issue with drug dealers who spam...) even when you point out the site, the MC logo, and sales of controlled substances....

Pro-WikiLeaks hackers change target to PayPal

(CNN) -- Computer hackers supporting WikiLeaks shifted targets Thursday from Amazon to PayPal, they said, as Dutch authorities announced an arrest in connection with hacker attacks on the websites of MasterCard and Visa.

The Dutch High Tech Crimes unit arrested a 16-year-old in The Hague, Netherlands, with prosecutors saying he confessed to attacks on the websites.

"He is probably part of a larger group of hackers, who are under continued investigation," they said. The teen is due in court Friday in Rotterdam.

Separately, a group of hackers calling themselves Anonymous Operations said they would attack PayPal, not Amazon.com, about an hour after an attack on Amazon was due to start.

"We can not attack Amazon, currently. The previous schedule was to do so, but we don't have enough forces," they said on Twitter.

Anonymous Operations released a do-it-yourself hacking tool earlier Thursday so supporters could make their own computers part of the attack.



What is WikiLeaks? Here's how it works

Hacker 'activists' target MasterCard

WikiLeaks: What you need to know RELATED TOPICS
Wikileaks.org
Amazon.com Inc.
The Amazon.com attack was supposed to have started at about 11 a.m. ET.

So far, PayPal appears to be operating normally. The site has been attacked, which has slowed it down but has "not significantly impacted payments," PayPayl's Anuj Nayar told CNN.

Amazon.com has massive server capacity -- much more than that of Mastercard or Visa -- in order to handle the holiday e-commerce rush. Its server infrastructure ensures that a massive traffic spike can't take site down, whether it comes from a hacker-led attack or genuine shoppers.

Anonymous Operations released the hacking tool on Twitter and called for followers to translate it into other languages.

Hackers have been targeting websites of organizations they see as hostile to WikiLeaks and its Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange, who was arrested in London this week on allegations unconnected to the website's publication of secret documents.

Amazon used to host WikiLeaks' website in the United States, but shut it down last week, saying it had violated their terms of service by publishing material it did not own and which could cause harm.

PayPal stopped handling donations to WikiLeaks last week.

The United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights said Thursday that pressure on websites to cut off WikiLeaks could violate the site's right to freedom of expression.

"I'm concerned about reports of pressure exerted on private companies, including banks, credit card companies, to close down credit lines for donations to WikiLeaks as well as to stop hosting the website or its mirror sites," Navi Pillay said in Geneva, Switzerland

"They could be interpreted as an attempt to censor the publication of information," she said at a press conference. "If WikiLeaks has committed any recognizable illegal acts, then this should be handled through the legal system and not through pressure and intimidation including on third parties."

Anonymous Operations members told CNN Thursday their goal was "freedom of information. Any and all information."

They were originally focused on piracy, but shifted their attention to WikiLeaks because it was "obvious we had to help."

"While their methods may be controversial, they do demand transparency, which is something we definitely support," they said, adding that once they feel they have made their point about WikiLeaks, they will go back to fighting for "unlimited freedom of expression."

They spoke to CNN Correspondent Atika Shubert in an online chat after being contacted through Twitter.

WikiLeaks said Thursday it was not associated with Anonymous Operations and neither supported nor condemned their actions.

"This group is not affiliated with WikiLeaks. There has been no contact between any WikiLeaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. WikiLeaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous' actions," it said on its website.

"We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets," WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said.

The hackers have been attacking sites with a relatively simple tool called a low orbit ion cannon (LOIC).

Users who put it on their computer are allowing Anonymous Operations to use the machine to launch attacks on a chosen target, computer security expert Mikko Hypponen told CNN.

He hasn't seen any obvious code in the tool that would allow Anonymous Operations to use people's computers for other purposes, he said.

Because people cut and paste the code off a website, rather than downloading it, there's no way to tell how many people have put the tool on their computers.

One person who put the hacking tool on his computer told CNN it was the arrest of Assange that "sparked this global movement.

"If he was not arrested, I doubt that the movement would have grown to its current unstoppable size," said the computer user, who refused to give his name but said he was not a hacker.

The website of the lawyer representing the women who accuse Assange of sex attacks in Sweden went down on Thursday, said the office of the lawyer, Claes Borgstrom.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority's website was down earlier in the week. Anonymous Operations told CNN it had carried out that attack.

The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that government's website also went down for a few hours, but the government refused to comment, saying it did not discuss security matters.

And a website has been set up in the name of Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask -- but it automatically redirects users to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks founder Assange is being held in a London jail as the British courts decide whether to extradite him to Sweden to face questioning. He has not been charged with a crime.

CNN's Francesca Church, Nicola Hughes, David DeSola, Richard Allen Greene, Per Nyberg, Robyn Turner, Julianne Pepitone and Amir Ahmed contributed to this report.

Did you guys know how ridiculous swedish law is when rape is concerned?
Apparently a consenting sexual encounter between adults can be considered
rape if no condom was used. That's right. No violence or being forced is needed
to constitute a rape.
So it was a setup by these two chicks who flirted with Assange.
The evening started out with condoms but ended without.
So it was really nothing that happened, and it is just a setup to either frame
Assange on purpose or some twisted desire for attention by these two women.

I got this in an email, but I'll try to find a legit source and link it.