Friday, June 22, 2012

Julian Assange: patsy or fool?

On June 20, 2012, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa acknowledged that his country is considering giving political asylum to Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, who got temporary refuge at Ecuador’s embassy in London. Mr. Correa said that he will consult the UK, Sweden, and the US before deciding on Mr. Assange’s asylum request. In parallel, British authorities have announced that Mr. Assange will be detained as soon as he leaves the Ecuadorian diplomatic compound. Why Ecuador? The choice is more baffling that it looks at first, to the extent that one can’t help but ask: Assange: Patsy or Fool?

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The few appearances of Assange that I have seen did not give me the impression that he is a fool, despite his openly cursing in front of a TV camera (“Tabloid S******” he said to the BBC). Are we seeing the build-up of a super-agent? Is Assange building up an indestructible reputation, so that he will be able to make a giant strike for the sake of the CIA and its Reign of Terror? Is WikiLeaks a giant smear campaign by the American government against the rest of the world? There are worrying signs that there is more to come. News reporting attacks and counter-attacks over the internet have become common, the affair of the Flame and Stuxnet worms being the most remarkable one. Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at the 2008 Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet. Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act,” and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions. Lessig is the founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. He is founding board member of Creative Commons and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. These are not the ravings of some paranoid cyber geek. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. The real reason Julian Assange sought asylum...
  2. War on Whistleblowers: 'Manning & Assange just the test case'
  3. What's the big deal with WikiLeaks?
  4. The dullness of the WikiLeaks “revelations.”
  5. Anonymous: cyber super-heroes or master manipulators?
  6. 'Underwear bomber' was working for the CIA!!!
  7. FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US...

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