Julian Assange: the man behind WikiLeaks(The  man who turned the world eyes:He is the super hero)

Last Updated: Tuesday, December 7, 2010 | 2:16 PM ET

CBC News

WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief Julian Assange takes his seat before a news conference in Geneva in November. He turned himself in to British police Tuesday to face Swedish sex-crime charges. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone/Associated Press)

WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief Julian Assange's exact whereabouts are often unknown, and he has acknowledged hopping between countries amid death threats against him and his family.

That's no longer the case. The 39-year-old Australian, the figurehead and self-described "lightning rod" behind the ongoing release of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department documents, is behind bars in Britain.

Assange turned himself in to police in London on Tuesday morning in response to European and international warrants for his arrest. He is wanted in Sweden to face four allegations of sexual offences, stemming from separate incidents with two women in mid-August.

News photographers swarm a prison van believed to be transporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after he was ordered to be held in jail at a court hearing Tuesday in London. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press)

The computer programmer and journalist was denied bail in an afternoon court session and will remain in jail until at least Dec. 14, for a follow-up hearing. Rejecting surety proposals for Assange from filmmaker Ken Loach, journalist John Pilger and two others — who offered to put up a total of £120,000 in bail money — the judge said there was too great a risk of flight.

Assange's organization is also increasingly cut off from sources of financing. MasterCard announced Monday night that it would no longer permit its credit cards to be used for donations to WikiLeaks; Visa followed suit Tuesday; and the Swiss bank PostFinance has shut an account Assange had there that held the equivalent of $41,700. Last week, the online payments company PayPal cut off WikiLeaks.

The latest developments highlight an aspect of Assange that's been debated ever since WikiLeaks jolted the world in July with its release of 75,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan invasion: that the internet activist is as controversial as the website is transparent.

Loved and reviled

Assange is extolled by human rights groups on the one hand and despised by governments and institutions around the world on the other — often for the same reason.

WikiLeaks, which he founded in 2006, is known for posting classified government documents supplied by whistle-blowers in their entirety. The most controversial ones so far have been the hundreds of thousands of secret reports on the wars in Iraq, released in October, and Afghanistan, which have gotten him attention from the CIA.

The spotlight veered back onto WikiLeaks and Assange in late November, when the website began posting classified diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies that news outlets seized on to publish details of frank and unflattering assessments of world leaders, as well as candid views of rogue nations and discussions about global crises.

Assange holds a news conference in London in October after the release of 400,000 U.S. military documents about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The files revealed 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths. (Lennart Preiss/Associated Press)

Revelations include that the U.S. ordered its spies to collect DNA, bank account info and other personal information on UN officials, in violation of international law; that attacks on militants in Yemen, which the government there avowed were its own counterinsurgency efforts, were the covert work of the United States; and that Arab leaders have implored the U.S. to confront Iran with military might.

To some, Assange is a hero for these and other disclosures. He won an Amnesty International Media Award last year, was named in Utne Reader this month as one of 25 visionaries changing the world and is being considered for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.

In a TedTalk last July, Assange provided some insight into his core values.

"Capable, generous men do not create victims. They nurture victims, and that's something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life," he said. "I am a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurturing, but there's another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crimes."

But despite his good intentions, he's still viewed by some as a dangerous troublemaker, one that the U.S. government and other countries, including his native Australia, are trying to prosecute. There are even some who would rather see him dead.

Former U.S. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has accused President Barack Obama of not doing enough to stop Assange and wrote in a Facebook posting, "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"

North of the border, Tom Flanagan, the prime minister's former chief of staff, told CBC News on Tuesday that he'd like to see Assange assassinated. In a panel interview on Power & Politics with Evan Solomon, he said Obama "should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." But on Wednesday, Flanagan said that he regretted his remarks.

A secretive man

Assange noted both these threats, as well as an American blogger's call for his 20-year-old son to be harmed, on Tuesday in an op-ed article about WikiLeaks in the newspaper the Australian.

"The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption," Assange writes.

'WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time ... not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed.'
                                                                                                                   —Julian Assange

"People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it."

Assange goes on to address critics alleging that his website has put people's lives risk.

"WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the U.S., with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone."

For someone who espouses openness and transparency, Assange is a private and secretive man. He doesn't appear to have a fixed address and has acknowledged the use of "four bases" in the past several years, including ones in Iceland, Kenya and Sweden. He is said to be constantly on the move, a way of life he's known since he was a child.

Born in July 1971 in Townsville on Australia's northeastern coast, Assange's parents ran a touring theatre company that travelled a lot. His mother later divorced and remarried a man who was part of a cult that Assange has joked about spending time running away from when he was young.

In his youth, Assange reportedly attended 37 schools and six universities. He studied physics and math at the University of Melbourne, but never completed a degree. In his twenties and early thirties, he was a computer programmer of free software in Melbourne before starting WikiLeaks.

Because of WikiLeaks, Assange said he has had to take security precautions. After the website published 400,000 documents on the war in Iraq in October, he brought bodyguards with him during a TV interview, Israel's Channel Two confirmed.

What is next?

Assange's legal woes could go several ways. He will fight Sweden's bid to extradite him from the United Kingdom, a court process that should take no more than three weeks. Then, if a British judge approves his transfer to Stockholm to face charges there, he will contest them. His lawyer Mark Stephens has previously said that the allegations were made after Assange had consensual sex with two women who turned on him after becoming aware of each other's relationships.

There is also a risk the United States could indict Assange and then seek his transfer, either from Britain or Sweden, with which it has extradition treaties. Several American commentators and politicians have urged charges against Assange under the U.S.'s Espionage Act or for possession of stolen government property. But the possibility is remote.

And though its figurehead and founder is behind bars, WikiLeaks says it will soldier on. The website has only released a small fraction, under 1,000, of the 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables it possesses. The world could be in for many more months of Assange and his brainchild in the headlines.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/12/01/profile-assange.html#ixzz17Uyx7Wjw

Latest Wikileak Faces Cyberattacks, Censorship and Interpol Arrest Warrant

Thursday, 02 December 2010 02:04

The latest leak being released by a whistleblower web site Wikileaks.org beats a record set by the previous leak of Iraq War Diaries. The new leak includes 251,287 United States embassy cables dating from 1966 up to February 2010 containing confidential communications between Washington DC and 274 embassies in other countries. Wikileaks says these cables "show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them". They also reveal "the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors". Almost immediately after making the first documents release on sunday Wikileaks.org web site came under a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, a type of cyberattack that overloads a web server with traffic in an attempt to make it crash. The attackers were not identified. A second and stronger DDOS attack came on tuesday which overloaded the site with 10 gigabits per second of traffic and made the site unavailable. Such a huge amount of traffic implies a larger effort. To evade further attacks Wikileaks turned to Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service for hosting, but that didn't last for long. The next day, wednesday, US Congress pressured Amazon into booting Wikileaks off their cloud which forced them to switch to hosting in Europe. "WikiLeaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world," US Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said, "No responsible company - whether American or foreign - should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials. I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other Web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information." Needless to say, governments, and US Government in particular, were never quite happy with what Wikileaks was doing as is evident from their rhetoric, which brands these leaks as illegal and as threatening to national security while simultaneously ignoring the crimes and corruption that the leaks actually expose. This puts governments in an essentially no-win position in which the only choices they have are to admit to their crimes and corruption, which are vast and many, or proceed with an unpopular task of repressing the flow of this information and shutting down Wikileaks. They appear to be pursuing the second option. While US Congress was pressuring Amazon to boot Wikileaks off their cloud servers Interpol was busy issuing an European arrest warrant, and an international Red Notice against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over rape allegations made earlier by the two women in Sweden, the circumstances of which are fairly controversial. As the OSNews editor Thom Holwerda explained this appears to be an ongoing smear campaign against Julian Assange. "First, the two Swedish women flip-flop on whether or not to press any charges", Holwerda said. "Then, the Swedish courts retract the case - Assange was even explicitly allowed to leave Sweden. Then, right after the latest Wikileaks reveal, the case is taken out of the freezer again, and Assange is put on Interpol's list for something you normally would not end up on this list for." The context of the case would seem to lend some credibility to this theory. Two cyberattacks, US Congress pushing Amazon to oust Wikileaks from its servers, and now an arrest warrant, all happening within just three days of the latest leak, are a good example of "strange coincidences". The saga of the latest wikileaks is undoubtedly to continue and the full extent of its repercussions are yet to be seen. As Thom Holwerda aptly put it, "The internet is changing the very distribution of power in the world, the same way the printing press did before it". This  is also evident in a previously talked about battle against internet censorship in the name of combating copyright infringement. The late stages of internet's disruption of power structures are here.

Secret US Embassy Cables

	Secret US Embassy Cables
	What are the US embassy cables?
	Wikileaks is releasing classified United States diplomatic cables sent to and from US embassies in countries throughout the world. These cables include orders sent out from the Department of State, embassy reporting about the local governments and details of US government activities in each country.
	How many are there and what period do they cover?
	Wikileaks will publish 251,287 cables, originating from 274 embassies and dating from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010. Of this total, 15, 652 of the cables are marked Secret, 101,748 Confidential and 133,887 Unclassified, although even the 'unclassified' documents contain sensitive information.
	What are your motives for releasing these documents?
	As US founding father James Madison famously said: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." This basic philosophy of the American revolution inspires all our work.
	The cables appear to be the single most significant historical archive every released and affects basic and heartfelt issues all over the world; geopolitics and democracy; human rights and the rule of law; national resources and global trade.
	US authorities have said the release may put people at risk. Is this true?
	Wikileaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have released documents pertaining to over 100 countries. There is no report, including from the US Government, of any of our releases ever having caused harm to any individual. For this release we are releasing the documents in a gradual manner, reviewing them with the assistance of our media partners.
	Did you contact the US Department of State ahead of the release?
	As part of the review process, we requested the US State Department, which has claimed to have conducted an extensive review of the material of its own over the last few months, to provide the titles of the cables which we should look at with extra care.
	The State Department refused to provide that information, or negotiate any other arrangement, suggesting that its desire to cover up at all costs eclipses its bona fide desire to minimise potential harm.
	The State Department gave its side of the correspondence to the New York Times and elsewhere at the same time.
	Are all the embassy cables being released at once?
	No. Instead of publishing the documents all at once, the organisation will be releasing the embassy files in stages.
	Why not release everything now?
	The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.
	We owe it to the people who entrusted us with the documents to ensure that there is time for them to be written about, commented on and discussed widely in public, something that is impossible if hundreds of thousands of documents are released at once. We will therefore be releasing the documents gradually over the coming weeks and months.
	Why did you choose established "old media" as your initial media partners for the release?
	Wikileaks makes to a promise to its sources: that will obtain the maximum possible impact for their release. Doing this requires journalists and researchers to spend extensive periods of time scrutinising the material.
	The established partners chosen were among the few with the resources necessary to spend many weeks ahead of publication making a start on their analysis.
	Even with this much effort, the five current media partners will only scratch the surface of this material. As a result, Wikileaks will continue seeking media partners to work on the embassy cables.
	How does Wikileaks intend to reach people in every country?
	Wikileaks is staging the release of the embassy cables in order to maximise the impact of their release and do justice to the source material. A later phase of this release will involve working with partners in a far wider selection of countries to ensure each country gets to see the real workings of its government's relations with the USA.
	How did WikiLeaks obtain the US embassy cables?
	Wikileaks protects its sources. We will not publicly comment on the source of any of our releases, how the information was obtained, or on the security measures used to protect sources identities. Our submission systems are secure and anonymized.
	Do you think this information will have a long-term impact?
	The US embassy cables cover serious issues for every country in the world with a US diplomatic prescence. The cables extensively cover the past five years, and reach back to 1966. As far as knowledge about what is truly going on in the world can influence our decisions, this material must result in political change and reform.
	What will the effect be on the Middle East?
	One newspaper has alleged the cables might destabalize the Middle East. These cables, by giving the players an unvarnished description of how they are seen, there will be a common ground on which to effectively negotiate peace and stability. We do not see this as a risk of destabilisation, but an opportunity for stabilisation and reform in the Middle East.

Top 500 keywords (A to Z) : Worlds most searched words in internet

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UFO Over China (06/10/2010) Marks 8th Time Since June

E-mail virus attacks NASA server

"World not died by nature only by the virus":

Washington, Sep 11 (IANS) An e-mail virus has attacked servers across the world, including those at NASA and Google, and possibly the US internal security department office.

The virus, called 'here you have' or 'VBMania', is a simple Trojan Horse that arrives in your inbox with the odd-but-suggestive subject line 'here you have', the Fox News said Saturday.

The body reads 'This is The Document I told you about, you can find it Here' or 'This is The Free Download Sex Movies, you can find it Here'.

The Internet Storm Center, a free analysis and warning service that tracks malicious internet activity, reported that the initial application that generated the vast cloud of spam clogging servers had been taken down, which should limit the spread of the virus Friday.

However, the centre warned: 'New variants may well follow.'

Leading virus monitors such as McAfee Labs and Symantec are currently investigating the threat, and have already updated their website to push security products that could protect users.

'Stop or remove the virus with Norton Internet Security 2011,' advised Symantec on its site Friday morning. The security companies describe 'here you have' as especially challenging to monitor, since the virus may already have replicated into several new forms.

In addition to a variety of major corporations, the virus appeared to take down internal servers at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Thursday. Sources said that some DHS agencies that run on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement server crashed and were mostly disabled throughout Thursday.

But US officials denied that issues with its servers were related to the virus, saying that 'DHS was not among the agencies that were affected'.

'It's a phishing attack -- when you click on the link in an e-mail it goes into the address book. It was clogging a bunch of e-mail and that's it,' officials said.

Life in one song (pudhupettai tamil movie- oru nalil vazhkai)

Perception

..something to think about...




Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.


4 minutes later:

The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes:

A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.


10 minutes:

A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.


45 minutes:

The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.


1 hour:

He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.




No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.


This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made.... How many other things are we missing?

"Valentines Day" Special Stories for Kids

Valentine's Day Stories for Kids

The Valentine Box Author : BOB Roger had planned to send a great many valentines to the girls and boys he knew. There were beautiful valentines in the toy shop window, red satin hearts in little heart-shaped boxes, painted post card valentines, and little card-board figures holding baskets of flowers. Roger had been saving his allowance for four weeks and he was quite sure that he had enough money to buy a valentine for the little girl next door, and one for the little girl across the street, and one for the boy on the next block, and one for the boy who lived upstairs. So, quite early the day before Saint Valentine's Day, Roger decided to go out and buy his valentines. Just as he was about to start, though, he heard a sound from the playroom. Peep, peep, peep. Oh, it was Roger's pet canary who was calling to him, "Wait a moment, little master! You have forgotten to feed me." Roger knew that he must not buy valentines if his pet bird was hungry. He found that it needed fresh water to drink, and the cage needed cleaning too. When he had done all this and filled the seed box, his mother called him. "I want two yards more of lace like this for the baby's dress, Roger. Will you please go down to the store and buy it for me?" "Oh, yes!" Roger said, for he thought that he should be able to go on down to the toy store and buy his valentines at the same time. But just as he was going out of the door his mother spoke again. "Come right home, Roger, just as quickly as you can. I want to finish the baby's dress so that she can wear it this afternoon when I take her over to Aunt Lucy's." Roger got the lace and hurried home with it, but he couldn't get the valentines then. He had to amuse the baby while his mother sewed on the lace. "I can go for the valentines this afternoon," Roger thought. But right after luncheon mother dressed the baby and started out for Aunt Lucy's house. "I may not be back until five o'clock, Roger," his mother said as she kissed him good-bye. "You won't leave dear grandmother alone a minute, will you?" "No, mother," Roger said, but he could have cried, for he knew now that he could not buy his valentines at all. Grandmother lost her spectacles several times, and dropped her knitting ball several more times, and wanted Roger to take her for a walk, so he was very busy all the afternoon. He was glad to be busy for he felt very badly indeed about having no valentines to send. All the children to whom he had planned to send valentines had sent valentines to him the year before. The children were his loved playmates and he knew that Saint Valentine's Day was the holiday for telling one's love. He did not let his dear grandmother know how sorry he was, though, and after a while it was five o'clock, and his mother came home. "Has Roger been a good boy?" she asked his grandmother. "As good as gold," grandmother said. "He has just warmed my heart all the afternoon." "Well, I thought he would," his mother said. "Oh, I almost forgot something, Roger. I have a surprise for you up in the attic." She went up to the attic and came back with a box in her hand. "I meant to give these to you this morning, Roger," she said. "I found them in an old trunk when I was cleaning the attic last week. They are just as good as new and much prettier than the ones in the shops now, I think. They are the valentines that I had when I was a little girl." Oh, such beautiful valentines as filled the valentine box! There were enough so that Roger could take one to every child in the neighborhood on the morning of Saint Valentine's Day. His mother had been right about these pretty, old-fashioned valentines. They were nicer than any in the toy shop. Roger spread them all out on the library table, and looked at them. Suddenly he found out something queer about the valentines; they made him feel as if he had been playing Saint Valentine all day. Some of the valentines had cunning little paper windows that pulled out and showed tiny gold birds inside. They made Roger think of his pet canary that he had fed that morning. Some of the valentines were bordered and trimmed with gilt, and silver, and white paper lace. It made Roger think of the lace he had bought for his mother. A great many of the valentines were in the shape of hearts, or there were hearts hung from them, or hearts on them that could be pulled out and would stand alone. They made Roger think of what his dear grandmother had said, "Roger has warmed my heart all the afternoon." "Hurrah for the valentine box!" Roger said as he began putting valentines in envelopes. He felt most unusually happy.