Assange: It is fascinating to see the tentacles of the corrupt American elite. In some ways, seeing the reaction is as important as the material we have released. PayPal and Amazon froze our accounts for political reasons. With PayPal, 70,000 euros were frozen. With our defense fund, that was 31,000 euros.
Viana: What do they allege?
Assange: They say that we were conducting ?illegal activities,? and that clearly is untrue. More, they are echoing the accusations of (US Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton about publishing embarrassing US government documents. However, the head of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security bragged to the press about how he had called Amazon and demanded they shut us down.
Viana: What is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself from the freezing of its donations?
Assange: We have lost 100,000 euros this week alone as a result of the freezing of our assets. We have accounts in other banks - in Iceland and Germany, for example, that the public can still use. We have a website. We also accept credit card donations.
Viana: What more is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself?
Assange: We are counting on a diversity of support from good people. We have more than 350 websites in the world that are reproducing our content. We value that more than anything.
--from an exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by Natalia Viana at Narco News.
And be sure to read Al Giordano's long take on the WikiLeaks furor. He argues that the mass docu dump resulted in a ball of confusion obscuring the value and importance of the more vital, telling cables.
Sure, WikiLeaks has increased the reach of its own brand name. Was that the primary goal? Again, I don't know. But it has also hastened the day by which other, newer ventures, will replace it in the work of making secret documents public, because, fair or not, it is not at all clear that WikiLeaks itself can withstand the intense scrutiny, reaction and repression now upon it. We?re sympathetic to WikiLeaks. We oppose those attacking it. We will defend it from spurious prosecution (our attorneys, who essentially wrote the law that protects WikiLeaks, are also on standby). We hope it can withstand the firestorm. But we?re reality-based and have seen radical celebrity stories turn quickly to flashes in the pan before. This game ain?t tiddlywinks. There are real consequences at play. And it's tough for metal to go through fire if it wasn't forged in fire, first.
What will remain, though, and it?s a wonderful thing, is that the whole world now knows that anyone can make unseen documents shoot ?round the world in the course of a day. A thousand whistleblowers, in every land, are pondering the new landscape, with itchy trigger fingers on the send button. And Washington, methinks, protests too much, because the next waves will surely include leaks of documents from other countries, too, probably including from many of its adversaries. And then their Secretaries of State will be likewise screaming bloody murder and issuing stern threats to the media that expose them. The tactic of exposing hidden information is not wed to any ideology or ?ism.? It is merely a tool that can be made to work for all sides in any conflict. Don?t be surprised if the next big data dump comes from leaked documents from Iran, or North Korea, Russia or any number of State powers at odds with the United States. This pox will soon be upon all houses of State and upon private corporations, too. (I?ve long said: The next Daniel Ellsberg will have to come from inside the New York Times rather than leaking to it.) And that, too, is as it should be: Information is Life! It finds a way!
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/12/something-wiki-this-way-comes.html
King Abdullah Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Omar al-Bashir Gloria Arroyo Joe Biden
No comments:
Post a Comment