Within moments of Julian Assange entering a UK courtroom on 11 April 2019, what has been obvious for almost a decade was confirmed: the US government has always intended to extradite and prosecute this publisher for publishing.
On 25 November 2018 former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard appeared on the BBC global news channel's 100 Women series. On the show's website, Gillard was described as having 'used her experience to help advance women and girls around the world through the promotion of education and leadership'. Obviously the women she'd 'helped' didn't include the refugees she attempted to dump on Malaysia, or those refugee women and children imprisoned in the internment camps Gillard…
November 2012 was yet another decisive month for digital revelations. The new CIA Director David Petraeus, a self-professed ‘scholar-monk’ and Obama’s Iraq hero, was caught out in an adultery scandal with—surprise!—his ‘embedded’ biographer Paula Broadwell. Alex Hern was right onto it in The New Statesman with the raunchy header ‘Two Generals, Agent Shirtless and 30,000 […]
The underlying story in all this is not the content but the form—the form of the vehicle that brings the revelations in this mass (apparently) uninterpreted form, and the claims that are being made of it, writes Alison Caddick
Perhaps it was inevitable in a culture of media and celebrity that the focus upon WikiLeaks would be replaced by a near obsession with its creator. Julian Assange has become a one-man Zeitgeist, a constellation of the issues and anxieties that govern contemporary life. The salacious mix of alleged sex crimes, international conspiracies, questions of extradition and the coercive power of the United States has elevated him to either revolutionary hero or new Bin Laden,…
Have data become a strategic commodity for twenty-first century governments?Facebook is newsworthy. Hardly a week passes without the company occupying some section of the newspaper, be it 'Society', 'Economy' or 'Politics'. Admiration for its skyrocketing market share, suspicion about its legendary CEO or indignation about its ultra-volatile privacy settings keep it in the headlines but alter surprisingly little of its astounding, ongoing success. More than 800 million people, according to the latest figures, have endorsed…
I would like to begin by thanking Boris Frankel for his extended reply to my article 'Killer Drones, Dieback and Democracy', and hence the opportunity to clarify several points he contests. This extends a Markov chain of chattering white middle-aged middle-class metropolitan males still further: Bolt, Manne, Assange, Frankel, myself ... That said, my focus on the near-identical rhetoric of free speech shared by the first three of these personages was intended to distinguish them…
