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Julian Assange To Write For Swedish Tabloid
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has signed on as a columnist for Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Why such a move? Maybe there's something more to be found in Swedish law when you are employed by a newspaper." Here's an account in English, including a translation of the interview that forms part of the linked Aftenbladet article.
Of course! Securing employment as a Swedish tabloid columnist: That was his plan all along!
It's so obvious, now...
You can't take the sky from me...
Is he looking for support from the laws that protect journalists?
What I found more interesting was the stuff buried down in Chapter 7 where it's noted that
That would seem to suggest that if Swedish defence is undermined by WikiLeaks then there are grounds for prosecution. As far as I know Sweden doesn't have forces in Iraq but they do have people in Afghanistan.
Aftonbladet used to be a serious newspaper, but these days they're definitely a tabloid in every sense of the world, although not yet as far down the morass as the U.S. ones.
The major tabloids in the Nordic countries are to the "serious newspapers" what the New York Post is to the New York Times: less detailed articles, more "infotainment", a tendency to pounce on any small news item about crime or the private lives of politicians and declare it the collapse of society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet
Tabloid has different connotations in Europe. Tabloid is more of a printing size than a rating of journalistic value. It looks like the publication he'll be writing for is on par with the New York Post or one of the many English tabloids like The Sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid
moox. for a new generation.
The newspaper has some serious journalism, but also entertainment non-news of various B or C-rate celebrities and such. Their specialty in all cases seems to be how to phrase the headlines as misleadingly as possible (and pause videos in the most compromising and misleading frames possible for use as pictures) to attract people to read the articles which are usually much less interesting than the headlines would have one think. They also enjoy making up new double words (like 'nude shock', 'sex attack' or 'death cheese'.) All in all, their reputation is probably not as good as Dagens Nyheter or Svenska Dagbladet, but it could
It's much more insidious than that.
He's already been compromised. CIA operatives intercepted him in his hotel room, doped him up with rohypnol and scopolamine, and hypnotized him into destroying the credibility of himself and Wikileaks.
Now Wikileaks will fade into obscurity forever...st least until they unearth the whereabouts of batboy.
To support the Iranian people in 2008, I ran a Toir relay. I eventually ran one to help with WikiLeaks. I used my neighbors Internet connection over WiFi (which I helped pay for). - he didn't care. But, ICE ended up raiding his house looking for kiddy porn. Of course, they didn't find any and I have since learned that this is a hazard with running these relays. Though, the warrant mysteriously disappeared and there is no record of the raid, so this makes me think that the FBI/ICE is raiding Tor Relay operators under the guise of anti-child porn, imaging their drives and then dropping the case.
So, how do you fight back against something like this? I have created an autoinstalling version of Tor that is automatically set to operate in Relay mode (/w uPNP enabled). I just place this autoinstaller in a dozen locations on the web and change the payload url of an existing worm out with this. Imagine how overwhelmed the thugs in ICE would be if 10,000 Tor Relays popped up overnight.
You sound angry, but your anger is directed at the wrong people.
Instead of asking for the extradition of Assange, you should be asking for the court martial for the officers (high and low) who are in charge of IT security of the US army.
You should be asking for hefty refunds from the companies (undoubtedly laced with a lot of former brass) that were paid money to supply the hardware and software for the said information processing. Maybe they should cover part of the costs for helping your informants.
Those "heroes" are the people who are responsible for the data leakage and for the danger to everyone who is assisting them in Afghanistan.
You can't *start* a thread by Godwinning it! That's what Hitler would have done!
F0 07 C7 C8
I'm sure the CIA is also much more interested in the people who provide the content for Wikileaks. Unfortunately, that's harder to find and publish.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
We could dub this tactic Blitzkrieging a thread. =)
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Bullshit. The only person he put at risk are the warmongers running this country. If I invest in a company I have a right to know the financial details of the company, but yet when I'm forced to "invest" in a war suddenly they can obscure all the details?
A democracy becomes nothing more than a mob if information is not released, if the government wouldn't release it, I applaud Julian Assange for having the balls to post it so the world can make a rational decision on whether it is worth it to continue the war.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I think that's a more interesting question.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Democracy can only work if people have access to -all- the information available to make an informed decision. Tainted information be it from media bias or government secrecy undermines it. How do you know what the Taliban does? We are fed propaganda every day. No, I'm not saying that the Taliban are nice people, that we should support them (though we did) or that the conventional view is wrong, but think about where you get your information from and you will find that you really could have been fed pure lies. Without information, how do you make that decision?
It is important to end imperialistic wars because it -always- bites us in the ass later on. These ever so evil Taliban fighters? Oh wait we supported them against the "evil" USSR. Saddam Hussein? Oh wait we helped him too...
If you think the US supports human rights you are sadly mistaken, imperialistic wars like the wars in the middle east and Vietnam have -always- ended up in a net loss for human rights and a net loss for the world.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But carry on. Keep obsessing and feeding the vain egotistical schmuck. Keep giving him the power to dictate and jerk you around like a dog on a leash. Put him on a pedestal as an authority and praise his name like he's some new messiah. When you find out you've been wasting your time and people get hurt you might learn.
Yes, because we all know that imperialistic wars historically have always been great, right? Oh wait... they haven't. Explain to me how by using facts and reason I'm being led like a dog on the leash.
FACT The US helped arm and fund Islamic radicals in the 80s.
FACT The US is wasting tons upon tons of money in these imperialistic wars
FACT The US has killed many civilians in this imperialistic war
Explain to me how using facts and reason is making me be a sheep? Lets see here the argument in favour of the war and the "troops" goes as follows:
We were attacked by Islamic terrorists on 9/11 THEREFORE we must invade 2 countries, kill lots of civilians, cause mass chaos and waste money and if you don't support this you are "Un-American" because terrorists are bad.
Now granted, 30 years ago the argument was:
The Communists have an atomic bomb!!! THEREFORE we must invade countless countries, support various Islamic organizations and right wing dictators and waste money if you don't support this you are "Un-American" because COMMUNISM IS EVIL JUST PURE EVIL
These documents only echo history, imperialistic wars waste taxpayer money, kill innocents, support murders and decline standards of living.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
...Only because we were lied to and were impulsive. If people thought we would still be actively fighting a war in Afghanistan in 2010, I can guarantee you that it wouldn't have much support. If people actually remembered their history and realized that we keep funding the people who we fight a generation later, and this was widely proclaimed through the media, there wouldn't be much support. But alas, the American people was essentially told that the fighting would be over in a few weeks and the mainstream media was too sensationalized to actually look at history so "we" got stuck with the war.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Do you actually comprehend what sort of people the Taliban are, and what they do to people who, for example, teach their daughters to read?
They are certainly no worse than serial killers in America. When was the last time police justified killing innocent American's in order to reach a serial killer by saying "Do you actually comprehend what sort of person he is. What he does to people? Sure I got a bunch of innocent children killed... but you don't understand... he was really bad."
You've never heard the police say that because it goes against everything we stand for. It ridiculous on its face. Yet if those innocent people aren't American's its somehow different? Who's moral compass is broken?
Oh wait... we're at "war" with them, right. And that makes it right how?
Are we at war with them because they are bad people who treat there daughters poorly and violate what we feel are their essential human rights? Of course not, we were even happy to SUPPORT them and PROVIDE THEM WEAPONS AND MONEY when they were serving our political interests... they weren't "nicer" back then, and they haven't really changed at all.
There is plenty of brutality in the world... Darfur springs to mind. Are we doing much about the genocide there? Hmm... nope. Genocide is bad too, right? I'd say it's even worse than medieval thinking about the education of women and outdated policies on beard length. Only a complete idiot would seriously argue that we are in afghanistan because the taliban are 'bad people'. The world is full of bad people. Yet we are in afghanistan while we write 'stern letters' to groups who are much worse.
If we were in Afghanistan to make it a better place, you might have leg to stand on. But we're not, and we're not going to make the world safer as a whole by invading other countries. Even if you WIN more innocent people have died due to the invasion than you would ever have saved by invading.
So far 15,000 to 30,000 *innocent civilians* have died in Afghanistan as a result of the war we are waging in Afghanistan. According to multiple sources we are actually killing more civilians than the Taliban are.
Good thing we are there making things better. Although I'm not sure exactly how killing innocent people more effectively than the 'bad people' makes us the 'good people'. Maybe we should stop.
I'll absolutely bet he flies coach. But that's not the story, is it? The story is that we're supposed to want to kill the messenger for showing what lots of us would prefer stays hidden in the shadows.
We're not supposed to know about all the greasy things our government does in the name of "national security" and we're supposed to like it that way. Any challenge to this tacit agreement between citizen and government is met with extreme prejudice, because what kind of society would we be if we actually had to account for our collective actions?
I don't think the fact that Assange is still alive should give us any indication of his personal security. There are lots of ways to neutralize a threat to the power structure. We have lots of examples of how actual assassination is no longer necessary to remove a threat. Have you noticed how much news space has been taken up demonstrating that Assange may in fact may not be a perfect human being? I don't think those stories are materializing out of nowhere. Very few news stories do any more. So the main focus becomes Assange and his human foibles instead of the massive fuck-up in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
I hope dozens of wikileaks copycats spring up around the world. This responsibility should not be in the hands of any one person. I think this is a more worthy use for the Internet than just more commerce. In a decade, things like wikileaks won't be possible, especially without a world-wide movement toward net neutrality. Some people prefer not knowing about war crimes, and I guess I can understand that, unless you happen to be one of the victims.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We saw the video. It showed very clearly how the US deals with unarmed civilians. Only a total fool would deny it.
The truth, it hurts doesn't it?
gosh, go undercover with the US army. You mean emigrate to the US, enlist, be assigned to afghanistan, film? Oh you mean go with some US troops who know they got a reporter with them and capture them on video behaving as if there was a reporter present?
Just how big a fool are you?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Bit silly to say Afghanistan isn't a threat when it has been unable to stop its citizens from starting wars.
Here's a list of the 9/11 hijackers. Not a single one of them is an Afghan citizen. No Iraqis on the list, either. The vast majority were from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As of today, nearly 9 years after 9/11, we still do not have an extradition treaty with either nation. Even if we had discovered evidence to charge someone with, we could not extradite them to face charges for their crimes.
Their specialty in all cases seems to be how to phrase the headlines as misleadingly as possible (and pause videos in the most compromising and misleading frames possible for use as pictures) to attract people to read the articles which are usually much less interesting than the headlines would have one think...
So, baically like Slashdot?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Am I the only one who looks around these days and wonders where the hell we went wrong? Look around you folks, because we the geeks are the last remaining american product this side of hollywood. The guy in the white house is too cool to solve pretty much anything, and the last guy was about the dumbest, most self-interested shill in history. At least this Assange guy is trying to preserve some semblance of the truth, so people of the future can learn from it (not that knowing the truth has really helped much before). I think the guy deserves protection, and good for him if he back-doors his way into it. He is serving the public whether they like it or not, which is ballsy and will probably end badly, but hey more power to him.
I find it fascinating that we are losing Afghanistan to the most primitive people on earth, and at the same time ONE GUY is able to stymie the entire Intelligence community by telling the truth about it. So with these facts before us, what exactly is worth 700$Billion per year that we spend on defense? Oh and lest we forget, even with google maps we haven't found Bin Laden's cave either. I think we as a country are wasting our time, and letting our best resource (young people) learn lessons in war and imperialism that we should have learned from Vietnam years ago. 10 years... my god.
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
Talk about canards. Using fancy sounding words cannot change history.
Say what you will about the merits of the Iraq expedition, it was at least in the consideration stage in the Clinton administration and would have happened with or without 9/11.
According to some people, Iraq presented no threat to the US. Doesn't sound like preparations for invasion to me. Maybe you're confusing that policy with the policy presented by Project for a New American Century. They begged Clinton to invade Iraq, but he ignored them. Probably because, as this guy Dick Cheney once said, the US could quickly find itself in a quagmire if it invaded.
9/11 was not presented as one of the major factors in the decision by anyone worthy of attention.
SHENANIGANS.
Not only did Cheney and Bush repeatedly make the connection, they had to specifically recant their opinion years later. They made the accusation so many times, and through so many propaganda arms, that by the time the war came around, 70% of Americans believed there was a link.
I'm sure in the bizarro fantasy land where the (R) means infallible, you'll just pretend that none of that happened. Which is alright, if you're not interested in reality.
Now, go home and get your shine box.
And what exactly did he tell us about what [...] "war crimes" are you talking about? Care to cite any examples?
And yet, I haven't seen anything that justifies [...] quite clearly putting lives of our Afghan allies and our own soldiers a risk.
(Pardon the elisions, I wanted to contrast those two statements. I don't think I've altered your intended meaning.)
Do you see the contradiction? You have accepted without evidence the claims that the leak "quite clearly" puts soldiers at risk, but you won't accept claims that the reports detail unlawful civilian killings, instead demanding proof.
Shouldn't you extend the same skepticism to the government's claims?
That said, I think Wikileaks screwed up the release by dumping it all at once. Since the US Gov was primed for it (after the arrest of PFC Manning) they were ready to counter-attack by making the issue about the leak itself, not the contents of the leak.
It would have been better doled out in smaller event-specific lumps. (Such as the Polish mortar attack on a village. Or the US Marine panic killing of civilians.) And better to have first privately, then publicly, approached other governments (UK, other NATO, Afghan, etc) to request help with hiding names of Afghani informants. They'd probably refuse, but you'd have media reports of the attempts before anything was released.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Let's not focus on the wrong question. Which is the greater risk to lives, both those in our services and those of innocent civilians, and to the health and standing of our republic: that posed by information released in these files or that posed by the state of the war being mis-represented to the body politic?
If some informants die or similar because wikileaks didn't scrub the data well enough, that is a tragedy. However, the magnitude of that loss is much less than that implicit in hiding the poor execution of an ongoing war effort.
Which is the more applicable truism in this case, "Loose ips sink ships." or "Democracy dies behind closed doors."? Comparing the lack of sudden tactical reversals and the upsurge in authoritarian posturing since this development, it seems to me that the latter is more apropos.