by Guest Blogger | Jan 27, 2013:

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney discusses his new documentary, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” with Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!  The film examines the key players involved in the whistleblowing website’s release of hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, features prominently, as does Bradley Manning, the army private accused of leaking the documents to WikiLeaks. The documentary is currently showing at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

WATCH:

Julian Assange. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Last week, the hacktivist collective Anonymous dumped WikiLeaks. Anonymous accuses WikiLeaks’ beleagured  founder Julian Assange of turning the whistle-blowing website into a one man “Julian Assange show”.

Below is the full text of Anonymous’ statement explaining the divorce:

Hacktivist collective, Anonymous, has severed ties with long-time ally WikiLeaks. Anonymous announced the divorce via a tweet, and said the Julian Assange-controlled whistle-blowing website had become a one man “Julian Assange show”.

The tweet:

“The end of an era. We unfollowed @Wikileaks and withdraw our support. It was an awesome idea ruined by Egos. Good Bye.”

The timing of the divorce is interesting. The U.S. military recently declared both Assange and WikiLeaks enemies of the United States, according to this National Times report. That’s the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency.

Assange is currently holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden where he faces sexual assault allegations.

RELATED:

• U.S. pressuring Bradley Manning to implicate Julian Assange (VIDEO)
• Wikileaks: Stratfor spied on grassroots activists in Canada and US

The Mouse That Roared is a documentary-in-the-making film by Judith Ehrlich, the award-winning director of “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers”, which earned a Peabody, and was nominated for an Academy award for best documentary. The film centers around Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir’s efforts fights to make Iceland the free speech capital of the digital world. Jónsdóttir is also an activist, poet, Buddhist and single mom.

They would want him to testify or roll over against Julian. And it’s not me making that up. The lawyer for Bradley Manning, David Coombs, has said openly in court that they are going after Manning with so much toughness, with wanting a 40-year sentence or whatever he said in court, because they want him to testify against Julian Assange. A remarkable story here in some way is that Bradley Manning—whether he knows something or not I have no idea, or [whether] there’s even something to know—has so far not buckled to incredible torture in prison and a potential of a life sentence from a U.S. court. And so that’s remarkable.

Video available on YouTube

RELATED:

• Julian Assange Rejects Police Order To Surrender (VIDEO)
• Wikileaks: Stratfor spied on grassroots activists in Canada and US

At a press conference held today, 5 July 2012, at the Frontline Club in London, WikiLeaks spokesperson Sarah Harrison announced that over the coming months, WikiLeaks will release a database of over two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture.

At this time Syria is undergoing a violent internal conflict that has killed between 6,000 and 15,000 people in the last 18 months. The Syria Files shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy, but they also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another

Media partners for this release include Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), Associated Press (US), L’Espresso (Italy), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain), among others.

[source: wikileaks.org]

On Friday, the London Metropolitan Police Service served the WikiLeaks founder with an order to leave the Ecuadorean embassy and surrender to a central London police station. In the video below, a supporter of Assange reads his defiant statement. Assange “is wanted for questioning by the Swedish authorities, but fears he would be extradited from Sweden to the US in connection with WikiLeaks’ publication of leaked US diplomatic cables.”

WikiLeaks (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

by Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive, Feb. 27, 2012:

Today WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails showing the inner workings of Statfor, a Texas-based “global intelligence” used by large corporations to monitor groups fighting for a just cause. The emails, acquired by Anonymous, reveal a web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods. They betray the criminality and paranoia of corporations.

Julian Assange will be hosting a series of in-depth conversations with key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world. The theme: the world tomorrow.

Upheavals and revolutions in the Middle East have commenced an era of political change that is still unfolding. In the West, the deterioration of the rule of law has demonstrated the bankruptcy of once leading political institutions and ideologies. The internet has never been so strong, or so much under attack.

At this pivotal moment there is an awareness of the need to radically rethink the world around us.