the end game
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is slowly dying in a UK prison, as the US maintains its fight to have him die in theirs – but there is hope.
1 August 2021
wikileaks
julian assange could walk free if we seize the moment
For the first time in more than a decade there’s cause for hope.
27 March 2021
repressing the truth
First published in ‘A Secret Australia,’ December 2020 Every act of repression offers a choice between retreat or defiance, fear or anger. In the comfortable West for as long as I’ve been alive, that word – repression – was crafted as something distant. Repression was something unleashed in Eastern Europe, or Tiananmen Square, or the back blocks of Nairobi. It was something that advanced and civilised democratic nations stood against, buttressed by the human rights instruments they had drafted after the defeat of fascism in the 1940s. Like most fairytales, this origin story has taken grains of truth and
9 December 2020
cypherpunks and surveillance power
Let’s go looking for the best examples of how people are building something better, something that delivers on the internet’s original promise. Let’s signal boost the good stuff for a change.
1 April 2019
remember wikileaks
Despite this remarkable publishing record, almost nobody in the mainstream press writes about the disclosures themselves. Instead, commentary is drawn almost exclusively to the character and conduct of founder and editor Julian Assange.
19 December 2018
the wikileaks test
Way back in the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach formalised a scheme for diagnosing schizophrenia that involved showing abstract patterns of ink blots to patients, and drawing conclusions about their mental state from how they interpreted the images. Where one subject sees a butterfly in the enigmatic splatters, maybe you see a pair of wolves poledancing, or whatever, it’s on you. First published at Crikey The WikiLeaks organisation has operated as a kind of political Rorschach test since at least 2010, when they exploded into mass consciousness with the Collateral Murder footage of journalists and bystanders being executed by
25 July 2018
slow fuse
“We don’t discuss intelligence matters,” Australia’s bewildered Prime Minister told the media again this morning, making him the only person left on earth not discussing intelligence matters. Finally, seven months after the fuse was lit, the scandal of the US National Security Agency surveillance state has finally detonated in Australia.
19 November 2013
with friends like these…
By now, anyone following the extraordinary twists in the WikiLeaks story will have heard the Government, from the Prime Minister on down, insisting that they have provided full consular assistance for Julian Assange, and don’t know anything about US plans to prosecute him. These statements tend to be delivered in a tone of wounded innocence, as though the Government can’t believe that people don’t appreciate the strenuous efforts they’re making to support this Australian citizen. It is a peculiar form of consular assistance that is being delivered here. It extends to the Prime Minister pre-emptively judging the work of
21 June 2012
An Australian Abroad
No-one was celebrating when it became apparent that the dense hour of argument and counter argument in the vaulted courtroom number 4 in London had resulted in a further stay of extradition for WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange.
10 December 2011