Assange and Wikileaks - Dec. 8, 2010

STD Fears Sparked Assange Case blog post by Michael S. Rozeff

WikiLeaks No Threat to Free Society by Steve Greenhut

The Wikileaks sex files

Still Not Convinced on Amazon Boycott by Bob Murphy

Don't Shoot Messenger for Revealing Uncomfortable Truths by Julian Assange

Australia blames U.S. for leaks, Assange in U.K. Jail - Reuters - "Suspected attacks by hackers sympathetic to Assange and against censorship brought down the websites of the prosecution Swedish authority and of Borgstrom's law office."

MasterCard site partially frozen by hackers in WikiLeaks 'revenge' - The Guardian - Operation: Payback' hacks into MasterCard site over payment network's decision to cease taking donations to WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange is denied bail - USA Today - "Visa said it would 'suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks' website pending investigation into the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules.' MasterCard said it would suspend payments 'until the situation is resolved.' PayPal, a popular online payment service, has already cut its links to the website, and Swiss authorities closed Assange's new Swiss bank account on Monday, freezing tens of thousands of euros, according to his lawyers.

"WikiLeaks is still soliciting donations through bank transfers to affiliates in Iceland and Germany, as well as by mail to an address in Australia, Assange's birthplace."

Why WikiLeaks Is Winning Its Info War By MASSIMO CALABRESI, Time -  "First, the U.S. government pushed WikiLeaks off the servers of Amazon, its U.S. host — thanks in part to an effort by the office of Senator Joe Lieberman, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee. After the rogue site was pushed off a smaller, backup host in the U.S., it moved first to a Swiss domain, then to a simple numeric one. WikiLeaks has complained, and some news outlets have reported, about apparent hacker attacks against the website. The effect of all that pressure, however, was very much like cutting the head off the mythical Hydra. By Tuesday evening, WikiLeaks listed 507 Web addresses that it said were hosting the site worldwide."

TIME's Julian Assange Interview - Richard Stengel - "JA: This organization [Wikileaks] in its four years of publishing history — we don't need to speculate, it has a history — has never caused an individual, as far as we can determine or as far anyone else can determine, to come to any sort of physical harm or to be wrongly imprisoned and so on. That is a record compared to the organizations that we are trying to expose who have literally been involved in the deaths of hundreds or thousands or, potentially over the course of many years, millions."

Truth in Chains by Chris Floyd - "It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents -- available on WikiLeaks."