Advocates of press freedoms had urged the new administration to instead drop a Trump-era effort to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder.
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Tag Archives: WikiLeaks
Biden Justice Dept. Asks British Court to Approve Extradition of Julian Assange
Advocates of press freedoms had urged the new administration to instead drop a Trump-era effort to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder.
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With Trump Presidency Winding Down, Push for Assange Pardon Ramps Up
Supporters of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have enlisted a lobbyist with connections to the president and filed a clemency petition with the White House.
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Julian Assange Is Denied Bail by U.K. Judge
The decision came two days after the judge blocked the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder to the United States, citing risks of suicide.
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UK judge denies US request to extradite WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange
A UK district court judge has refused to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US.
In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this morning, Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition on grounds that Assange is a suicide risk and extradition to the US prison system would be oppressive, given the likely impact on his fragile mental health.
The US, which has been seeking to bring Assange to the country to put him on trial for conspiracy to hack as well as a number of charges under the controversial Espionage Act, has said it will appeal.
The case has been seen as a pivotal test of press freedoms and freedom of expression vs state power.
In the judgement Baraitser dismissed a number of other defence arguments against Assange’s extradition but concurred with clinical testimony that he is a suicide risk and that he possesses the intellect to circumvent measures that could be taken to prevent him taking his own life.
“I am satisfied that the risk that Mr. Assange will commit suicide is a substantial one,” she writes in the 132-page judgement, discussing the testimony of a number of psychiatrists during last year’s extradition hearing.
“I accept that oppression as a bar to extradition requires a high threshold. I also accept that there is a strong public interest in giving effect to treaty obligations and that this is an important factor to have in mind. However, I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the “single minded determination” of his autism spectrum disorder.
“I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” she added.
The judgement orders Assange’s immediate release although at the time of writing the WikiLeaks founder remains in custody — pending a bail hearing.
The US has 14 days to lodge an appeal.
Assange, who (self) incarcerated in the Embassy of Ecuador in London between 2012 and 2019 to avoid a warrant against him, was arrested last year after Ecuador withdrew his diplomatic asylum.
He was found guilty in a UK court of breaching bail conditions and sentenced to 50 weeks.
The US immediately said it would seek his extradition on its separate roster of charges — which relate to how the WikiLeaks founder obtained and published classified information leaked to it by former army intelligence analyst and whistleblower, Chelsea Manning.
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Julian Assange Faces Ruling on Extradition to U.S.
A British judge plans to rule on Monday whether the WikiLeaks founder should be sent to the U.S. to face charges of violating the Espionage Act and hacking government computers.
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Laura Poitras: Journalism Is Not a Crime
The Justice Department is setting a dangerous precedent that threatens reporters — and the truth.
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Fox News Reaches Settlement With Parents of Seth Rich
A lawsuit they filed in 2018 over the network’s coverage of the murder of Mr. Rich, who had been a Democratic aide, comes to an end.
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Their First Try Backfired, but Giuliani and Allies Keep Aiming at Biden
The former New York mayor’s dirt-digging effort on Hunter Biden in 2019 ended with President Trump’s impeachment. Now he is back with new associates. So far it is not going exactly as planned.
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Imagining the Trump Presidency That Wasn’t
A politically incorrect administration might have succeeded where this one failed.
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At Assange’s Extradition Hearing, Troubled Tech Takes Center Stage
The WikiLeaks founder’s high-profile case was delayed for months by the coronavirus. Now it is being hobbled by faulty livestreams and other technical issues.
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Julian Assange Appears in London Court for U.S. Extradition Hearing
The case against the WikiLeaks founder, who is accused of obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents, was delayed in February because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.
“Cooperation” or “collusion” or whatever. It was a plot against American democracy.
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Trump Phone Calls Add to Lingering Questions About Russian Interference
A Senate committee went further than the Mueller report on key points about Russia’s election sabotage operations and the Trump campaign.
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Trump’s Clemency Came After Displays of Loyalty by Stone
The extraordinary decision to commute the prison sentence of an embattled adviser demonstrates how the president has managed to bend America’s legal machinery to his advantage.
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Multiple “CIA failures” led to theft of agency’s top-secret hacking tools
Enlarge / CIA headquarters. (credit: Library of Congress)
In early 2017, WikiLeaks began publishing details of top-secret CIA hacking tools that researchers soon confirmed were part of a large tranche of confidential documents stolen from one of the agency’s isolated, high-security networks. The leak—comprising as much as 34 terabytes of information and representing the CIA’s biggest data loss in history—was the result of “woefully lax” practices, according to portions of a report that were published on Tuesday.
Vault 7, as WikiLeaks named its leak series, exposed a trove of the CIA’s most closely guarded secrets. They included a simple command line that agency officers used to hack network switches from Cisco and attacks that compromised Macs, in one case using a tool called Sonic Screwdriver, which exploited vulnerabilities in the extensible firmware interface that Apple used to boot devices. The data allowed researchers from security firm Symantec to definitively tie the CIA to a hacking group they had been tracking since 2011.
Proliferation over security
Agency officials soon convened the WikiLeaks Task Force to investigate the practices that led to the massive data loss. Seven months after first Vault 7 dispatch, the task force issued a report that assessed the extent and the cause of the damage. Chief among the findings was a culture within the CIA hacking arm known as the CCI—short for the Center for Cyber Intelligence—that prioritized the proliferation of its cyber capabilities over keeping them secure and containing the damage if they were to fall into the wrong hands.
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C.I.A. Failed to Defend Against Theft of Secrets by Insider, Report Says
Better security could have protected hacking tools that were stolen in a large breach and handed over to WikiLeaks, a task force found.
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Chelsea Manning is out of jail after almost a year
Enlarge / Manning in 2019, when she was briefly free between two grand jury terms. (credit: ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images)
Virginia federal judge Anthony Trenga ordered the release of Chelsea Manning on Thursday after almost a year of confinement. The judge was holding Manning in contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury about matters related to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. But now that the grand jury has wrapped up its work, there’s no longer a legal basis to hold Manning.
In 2010, Manning was an army private with access to some of the US military’s classified networks. Concerned about the conduct of America’s wars in the Middle East, Manning leaked a vast trove of classified military documents to Wikileaks, hoping to spark a national debate.
But the US government quickly identified Manning and tried her before a military court. In 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. But just before leaving office in 2017, President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, allowing her to go free years early.
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