If you strike Julian Assange down, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine--so he says

The UN's special rapporteur on torture says the Wikileaks founder is not fit to stand trial.

Mr. Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in 2012. He faces a British charge of skipping bail and is wanted in the United States on charges of releasing secret documents.

He took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over an alleged sexual assault. The Met Police said he was arrested for failing to surrender to the court.

Julian Assange, who had been living at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, was arrested Thursday morning after the country’s president rescinded the WikiLeaks founder’s asylum status. Assange’s eviction has caused an uproar across the globe. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson and Edward Snowden both said the arrest marks a “dark day” for press freedom.

Using cryptography and virtual drop boxes, Julian Assange's WikiLeaks created a revolutionary new model for media to lure massive digitized leaks from whistleblowers, exposing everything from US military secrets to wealthy tax-dodgers' illicit offshore accounts. Assange's arrest in London Thursday on a US extradition request to face charges of computer crimes could spell the end of 13-year-old WikiLeaks.

Why Julian Assange deserves First Amendment protection. Last fall, a court filing in the Eastern District of Virginia inadvertently suggested that the Justice Department had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other outlets reported soon after that Assange had likely been secretly indicted for conspiring with his sources to publish classified government material and hacked documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee, among other things.

In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feminists and bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam Hussein plucked straight from his spider hole. The only camera crew to record this pivotal event belonged to Ruptly, a Berlin-based streaming-online-video service, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of RT...

If the Swedish charges against Assange are revived he could face a second extradition request, on top of the existing request from the US. Then it will be up to the UK to decide which to prioritise.

WikiLeaks’ publishing of the so-called 'Vault 7' trove of the CIA is what propelled the United States government to feel like it needed to take action against the organization. By William M. Arkin.

The arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement.

A Swedish software engineer with close ties to Julian Assange was arrested while trying to leave Ecuador as authorities investigate the WikiLeaks founder’s alleged efforts to fight his eviction from the country’s embassy in London by blackmailing the country’s president. Ola Bini was arrested Thursday at Quito’s airport as he prepared to board a flight to Japan, a senior Ecuadorian official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The British, Australian, Ecuadorian and US Governments have made an ad about Julian Assange’s arrest and it’s surprisingly honest and informative!

The embassy of Ecuador in London has lost two — not one — of its most high-profile guests in recent times. One is Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who was arrested on charges of skipping bail in a UK court after seven years of asylum within the embassy. The other is Assange’s cat, better known as Embassy Cat, a social media phenomenon often seen wearing a tie in pictures posted by Assange.

Hackers protesting the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continued their reign of chaos on Thursday — crashing the website of British Prime Minister Theresa May. The hackers took down the website for the UK Police on Wednesday. Earlier in the week they had targeted the websites for the nation’s Supreme Court, National Crime Agency and 1,633 other UK websites hosted on the same server.

Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? By Caitlin Johnstone. [Censored by Medium, rehosted]

Former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning said Sunday she again plans to refuse to testify before a grand jury about her leak of classified documents to WikiLeaks -- even if it means returning to jail. Manning, who served seven years in prison over her transfer of secret diplomatic and military documents, recently spent another two months in lock-up for contempt of court after refusing to answer the grand jury's questions.

The government of Ecuador has taken one more step in its offensive against cyberactivist Julian Assange. The Ecuadorian attorney general has greenlighted an operation to search one of the rooms that the WikiLeaks founder used during his prolonged stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and agreed to turn over to US authorities any documents, cellphones, digital files, computers, memory drives, CDs and any other devices that may turn up during the search, according to an official notice that EL PAÍS has seen.

The U.S. Department of Justice today indicted Wikileaks' Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, the first time a publisher has been charged for revealing classified information.

Yesterday, I wrote about the new, superseding indictment of Julian Assange and noted how the theories behind it were absolutely insane and a blatant attack on the 1st Amendment. The Obama administration went after leakers using the Espionage Act...

A statement was released from Chelsea Manning’s lawyers on the 17 new indictments to charge Assange with if he is extradited. Once again, Manning shows integrity and heroism in her statement. An article at Sparrow Media states the following:

Wikileaks has set up a new website, Free Snowden, to collect money to defend National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The site allows for donations by credit card, PayPal, bank transfer, WePay payment, and virtual currencies Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Sarah Harrison, the British journalist and WikiLeaks staffer who has been working with Edward Snowden since his arrival in Moscow, has left Russia and joined the growing band of net activists stranded in Berlin.

The year's most controversial secret treaty just became very, very public. WikiLeaks has posted a full copy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership proposals from this August, revealing many provisions that have only been seen by a small group of lobbyists and heads of state. Nothing in the text has been definitively agreed to, but it offers a rare look into the state of a treaty that could lock in a broad range of rules about information access, patents, and consumer hardware.

WikiLeaks has released the draft text of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, a multilateral free-trade treaty currently being negotiated in secret by 12 Pacific Rim nations.

Plea comes amid off-the-record remarks that the US is unlikely to pursue charges against WikiLeaks founder over leak of state secrets

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting US news organisations and journalists, United States officials say.

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

In March of 2010, WikiLeaks was just weeks away from bursting onto the world stage with the first of its major leaks from intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning: the “Collateral Murder” video showing a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and wounded children. Julian Assange, in Iceland, was in contact with Manning in online chats, getting more leaks and keeping his source updated on WikiLeaks’ progress.

WikiLeaks founder and journalist, Julian Assange, has marked the third year spent in detention in UK under constant threat of extradition to Sweden. On December 7, 2010 Assange was taken into custody after voluntarily attending a British police station. He spent 10 days behind bars, before being released on bail with a residence requirement at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England.

After Manning’s initial leaks were published, WikiLeaks' profile took the world stage. The site was subsisting on online donations from citizens around the world who were becoming increasingly interested in the idea that states should have nothing to hide.

Mediastan, WikiLeaks Film (Part 1 of 3)

Today, 15 January 2014, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Environment Chapter and the corresponding Chairs' Report. The TPP transnational legal regime would cover 12 countries initially and encompass 40 per cent of global GDP and one-third of world trade...

Swedish MPs are calling on the prosecutors in the Julian Assange sexual assault case to travel to London and question the WikiLeaks founder at the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has been taking refuge since June 2012.

The UK has spent over $8 million on monitoring the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Julian Assange has been holed up for 20 months. His stay is having a knock-on effect on British taxpayers, reportedly costing them over $16,000 a day.