Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Has Passport Confiscated

Taco Cowboy writes "The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week. While Assange has made himself particularly unpopular with the US military by publishing video of attacks on civilians in Iraq, he's been something of a thorn in the side for the Australian government too. Last year, Wikileaks published a list of websites which were to be banned under the government's proposed Internet filter. While the aim of the filter is to block extreme pornography and the like, the blacklist included a number of more prosaic sites such as those of a travel company and a dentist.

Comments

Move along. Nothing to see here

[kentrel]

He has a criminal record. His passport was old. They cancelled it. He got it back.

The dentist site was censored with a reason

[mangu]

Wouldn't you censor a dentist that has a sign like this?

Re:For a Whole Fifteen Minutes

[sopssa]

Did everyone suddenly skip over the line where it says it will be cancelled?

While it was returned 15 minutes later, Assange said he was told it would be cancelled.

Wikileaks != Wikipedia

[tverbeek]

Why is this tagged "Wikipedia"? Wikileaks is a completely separate site and organization. Do you think that "protons" are "protozoa" are the same thing just because they start with he same four letters?

Re:I'm becoming...

[shish]

Relatedly, does anyone know /how/ it costs $600,000 to run the site? Since it's been offline and collecting donations for as long as I've known it, I'm not sure what it does, but the name implies "a wiki where people can upload leaked stuff", for which I would imagine $2000 in hardware and $2000/year in bandwidth would be generous...