Posts Tagged ‘sweden’

Julian Assange Arrested – Eyes shift to Watch Sweden

Published by calhoun on December 7th, 2010 - in News, Politics

Julian AssangeThe founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange has officially been arrested in the United Kingdom under an European Arrest Warrant issued by the Swedish authorities over sexual crimes. Assange has of course denied the allegations. The real question is how will the case play out, being now a high profile defendant, people are going to watch carefully how Sweden plays this out.

The slightest suspicion that this case has really been brought around by the United States would seriously damage the Swedish Government’s international reputation.

According to Reuters he turned himself in – possibly on the advice of his legal team which would show confidence in their ability to secure a not guilty verdict in the allegations made against him. Now that he has formally been arrested he will be brought in front of magistrates to have an extradition hearing date set. It is a requirement that this occurs within 21 days of his arrest. The outcome of said hearing will determine weather or not he is extradited to Sweden for them to conduct their trial against him.

His Swedish Lawyer has stated he will fight the extradition so if he is ordered to be extradited at the hearing it is likely an appeal will be made in Britain to the court of appeal so it is likely to tie up the case in the justice system for months before getting anywhere. The Swedish lawyer has indicated he believes that foreign influence[which is of course widely believed to be the United States] have an unjustified influence over the Swedish government in this case. If this is the case there is a good chance that the judge here may rule that extradition might breach his Human Rights and consequently deny the extradition to Sweden on these grounds.

References
Reuters

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Arrest Warrent issued for Wikileaks Founder

Published by calhoun on August 21st, 2010 - in News

Wikileaks FounderLate last night Swedish prosecution service issued an arrest warrant for the founder of the wikileaks website that recently came under criticism from the United States for publishing content about the Afghan war.

Julian Assange is wanted on suspician of rape and molestation by the authorities and they are encouraging him to come in for questioning over the suspicions.

He not surprisingly has denied the allegations and has attempted to push the interest away by claiming that these are related to the aforementioned released documents. The claims are forgeries setup to ‘get him’. He also indicated that they have been warned of ‘dirty tricks’ by the US particularly in the case of one conservative Senator who declared: “Wikileaks must be taken offline by any means necessary”. So there is at least a possibility that US Senators have conspired to arrange for this public relations incident.

He had been in Sweden to obtain a license which would offer him and the website the legal protection of Swedish law as a publishing website.This will come as a blow to the US campaign to bring down the website. Likewise if the allegations have been a result of US intelligence operations, this will have a negative impact on their attempts to take down the website; once again the website has received high publicity and has plans to reveal another 15K documents.

References
The Gaurdian
Aljazeera

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United States looking for internet censorship

Published by calhoun on August 7th, 2010 - in Internet, Technology

I recently criticized the UK Government over the IE6 browser not being upgraded and general security breaches of astronomical scales. Now it is the turn of the United States to be criticized, again.

“Wikileaks.org should be shut down by any means necessary.”

US Government Conservative Representative

Of course, I am not surprised that a conservative wants to shut down the Internet site by any means necessary lets face it the US Conservatives are trigger happy maniacs ready to shoot anything that doesn’t agree with them. Lets face it, some of the documents released on that site about the Afghanistan war have apparently left many Americans thinking the war was a mistake. US policy is to hide up the facts rather than simply admit they were wrong and try to leave the war as quickly as possible.

However, its time for them to wake up and smell the modern world. The Internet is here, and it is not the domain of the United States Government no matter how much they want to control it.

“The military is telling the troops they cannot even view what is publicly available, even though the WikiLeaks documents are on hundreds of websites.”

There are other nations that insist on censorship such as Afghanistan and China. It seems that the United States is keeping in good company with its friends such as them.

The Demand

The US Department of Defense has demanded that Wikileaks remove, delete and return all documents that they have classified. This being the property of the United States Government. Given that the main server that is being used is hosted in Sweden, Not USA they are likely to face a tough time of bringing it down lawfully.

I completely understand that the information may indeed be classified and should not have been leaked in the first place but that is the lesson that Governments need to learn. The weakest link in the government is the Government. Remove the Government and there wont be any more leaks of Government documents! Beef up security, stop using ancient software, ensure your staff are trained and vetted.

References
ZDNetUK
CNet
Washington Times

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