talisman "Imagine that, sleeping with a colleague AND
publishing "annoying stuff". Unheard of"

not really, it was obviously lost on you .. people in high public profile who do what he did, end up as he has, that's not a surprise. He is obviously smart but lacks wisdom.

what was he thinking? He wasn't .. it's rhetorical .. (that means, it requires no answer)

Like others, I'm amazed at the people attacking the alleged victims here, a bit like they attacked Roman Polanski's child rape victim, what was it Whoopie Goldberg said, oh yes, "it wasn't rape rape", so because Roman is famous, it's OK. Because Assange is doing what the left, for the time being, applauds, it's OK.

How about all those who want a free and open world where all government records are in the open, publish their tax file numbers, and bank account details, their medical records, and all dealings yo and your families and businesses have with the government, please scan in all you tax returns .. that would be such a cool show of support. Perhaps you could all post your details to wikileaks, and be a big band of brothers .. I'll have a look later and see how many of you subscribe to such openness.

Well it looks like the story about the 'scandal' of Assange is occupying media interest, diffusing the issue of freedom of information and rights of access.

rpg - the open display of pesonal information has already been touched on. The display of your medical information, financial data is noone's business. The work of governments and those who work on behalf of government is the business of the people who 'fund' those activities. Taxypayers have a different right to access information than a person who just has an idle curiousity about someone else's personal affairs.

If any of us were to come in contact with information that clearly reveals corruption - ultimately who and what are we protecting if we choose to conceal it. Even if documents are basically inocuous, there is no harm with greater awareness of the machinations of government. It is also an opportunity to involve people more directly with their governments and in some areas of decision making.

Wikileaks is a depository for information, to accuse it of espionage activity (unlike any other jouranistic endeavour) is indicative of where we have come and why organisations like Wikileaks should be encouraged not demonised. The media who are writing stories based on the information supplied to Wikileaks are not being accused of espionage.

Are we better for having access to information that forms policy and other decisions governments make on our behalf. Based on reactions on OLO and talking to people in RL, many people are all for this 'people power' peaceful revolution.

The beauty of transparency is that it makes corruption much more difficult and I think this will work towards a better society than the continuing reliance on game-play and secrecy. For example, I would want to know more about the people we choose to trade with and exposing all the underhand deals, bribery and corruption will do more to level the playing field and ensure trickle-down effect to ordinary people more than the status quo.

To use a couple of worn cliche's - lets let it all hang out and put everything on the table.

Very well said, pelican. I don't think
that I could have responded to rpg's facile
comparison of Wikileaks with personal privacy
of individuals any better than you have.

Unlike individuals, information about governments
and corporations should be generally transparently
available, unless there are very good reasons for
secrecy. None of the information that I've so far
seen from Wikileaks should be secret.

Organisational secrecy facilitates illegal and
unethical behaviour. Individual privacy protects
us from it.

Fascinating stuff, Geoff of Perth, in your post of Thursday, 9 December 2010 at 4:46:08 PM.

You say, inter alia, in relation to claims as to Assange having been involved in sexual misconduct:

"... The tweets don't match her story given
to the police on 20 August. So she simply
deletes them. But it's not as easy to remove
things from the Internet. Google takes snapshots
of how web pages look - so called caches-doing
this has revealed the above, the plot thickens!"

It is an assumption that it was one of the complainants who deleted tweets. Whilst that may have been so, and would have been correspondingly unusual had it been done that way in such circumstances, it is also in my experience possible that Twitter can be subject to what appears to be a form of censorship by unidentified third parties, in which tweets seemingly go missing.

I hold a jaundiced enough view of Twitter to believe that it is capable of being used, and manipulated, as a world-wide 'intelligence' gathering tool quite independently of any actions of its ostensible proprietorship. It could have been that genuinely posted tweets could have provided information helpful to the orchestration of a sexual compromise scenario or claim as to molestation, but that those same tweets remaining on display could also subsequently undermine the credibility of such claim, as Geoff of Perth has already observed.

The author states:

"British media now report that the charges
include forcing one woman’s legs apart to
have sex with her, and taking advantage of
the other’s sleeping state to have sex
without her consent."

I wonder, should it be substantiated that one of the claims is that one of the women was molested whilst asleep, was she the one who's tweets have been, by whomever, taken down?

ProScience observes:

"I, for one, have simply said [Assange] is entitled to
due process and considered innocent until proven
guilty. That is what any person who lives in a
civilised country should be entitled to."

Not in the UK, these days!

TBC

Continued

There is every motivation for the UK government to want Assange removed to Sweden.

Should it be that the UK government was in the near future to receive a request from the US government for the extradition of Assange, an Australian citizen, especially if in connection with alleged terrorism (as is presently being noised about in some quarters within the USA with respect to Assange's activities), under the provisions of the UK Extradition Act 2003, it would seem that the UK government, without charge or hearing would simply comply with any US request.

The potential for diplomatic embarrassment of the UK with respect to Australia should it export on request an Australian citizen to the US is obvious.

That, after all, is exactly how the UK government treats its own citizens these days. Brian Howes, a UK citizen, was arrested and held in custody for over 200 days simply because the US authorities considered him a supplier of pre-cursor chemicals to meth labs in the US. The dealing in these chemicals was completely legal in the UK where Howes lived and operated his business. While released from custody following a hunger strike, he is still under house arrest in Scotland several years on whilst continuing to fight his extradition. http://wp.me/paXuz-6v

Meantime the Scottish government covers itself with glory releasing one of the Lockerbie bombers, whilst at the same time doing seemingly nothing on the part of one of its own citizens, other than perhaps isolating him from the generally better quality legal representation obtainable in English, as opposed to Scottish, courts.

I suspect the UK government is starting to get a scent of the opprobrium in which it is increasingly coming to be held by the public for its evident betrayal of basic principles of justice like the presumption of innocence, and the prohibition of detention without charge.

The risk of all this opprobrium boiling over should a high profile case such as Assange's put the spotlight upon extradition may be more than the present UK government can bear to contemplate.

Betrayal chickens coming home to roost?

My medication has been mucking my eyesight up for days and addling my brain, but as far as I can tell, there's some Chinese guy who has released hundreds of confidential emails sent between China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and al Qa'ida (?) and they have arrested him on some minor trumped-up charge of "forcing one woman’s legs apart to
have sex with her, and taking advantage of the other’s sleeping state to have sex without her consent." [As if that sort of thing constituted 'rape' !]

And in England, some other guy has demanded that the government observe the law, and allow freedom of speech and assembly, and he has been given eleven years' gaol.

And according to one authority, "Israel intelligence sources are feeding Assange [the Chinese guy?] perhaps without his knowledge of the real source" of his information. So Wikipedia is just another gigantic Jewish plot ? Thanks, Arjay.

I'm trying to untangle all of that, I just have to see my doctor first, he'll tell me to have cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie-down, in order to put it all into perspective. Good advice.

Joe