September 21. Central Criminal Court, London: Today is an era of repetition and expansion. Computer scientist Christian Grothoff of the Bern Higher School of Specialists provided the applicable chronology of what led to the publication of un redacted cables from the State Department of This turned out to be a small example of what would happen: the alleged agreement negotiated through Richard Grenell, then U. S. ambassador to Germany, with the Ecuadorian government for the arrest and expulsion of Julian Assange from the Embassy in London in April 2019.
Grothoff and chronology
With 3 of the 18 rates opposed to Assange based on the factor of releasing un redacted cables, Grothoff’s testimony served to recap the importance of synchronization. When the organization published the files, others had. The horse, having shot out, would return. While WikiLeaks had taken steps to encrypt the applicable record with the documents, things got worse with his exchange with David Leigh of The Guardian in the summer of 2010. Uploaded to a compromise website, it had a secure password and decryption. Assange had committed the only component of that secret word on paper.
November 2010. WikiLeaks arrived and its media partners have begun publishing redacted cables. “Embassy cables will be published in stages over the next year,” WikiLeaks promised. “The subject of these cables is so important and the geographical distribution is so broad that doing so in one other way would not do justice to this curtain. “
The organization’s online page has become the target of distributed server denial attacks. Assange spread the word among fans: respond to knowledge of the site on other servers; In February 2011, Leigh and his Guardian colleague Luke Harding published their painting story with Assange and WikiLeaks. It was a hasty and, in the end, careless effort. A bankruptcy title. Der Freitag pulled out the smell in August, offering some breadcruedness to the entrepreneur, adding the feeling that the registration password was easy to locate. Der Spiegel, one of the media partners, showed the bill. Nigel Parry, self-proclaimed as “the first user off the circuit and in the wild to have unzipped Cablegate cables,” simply sealed the deal.
Assange and Sarah Harrison, also from WikiLeaks, mingle. The US State Department has not been able to do so. But it’s not the first time You have been warned that un redacted files are in a position to make their way into cyberspace. for WikiLeaks was made: the file was published on its website. As Grothoff told the court, “[The password] had to be obtained on the Internet in a way that would be virtually more unlikely to stop. “
Writing about what happened next, political commentator and former civil rights lawyer Glenn Greenwald said WikiLeaks’ security measures were poor and inadequate, but “one point will have to be clear: there was nothing intentional about publishing WikiLeaks cables in an unworded form. In the end, they had no choice. Releasing the cables in their entirety was the maximum moderate and “safe” course of action, “so that not only the intelligence agencies of the world but all maintain them, so that the steps can be taken to protect the resources and that the data involved is also available. . »
When asked through the indictment, Grothoff rejected advice that the publishing organization had shared the entire file with the 50 media partners interested in Cablegate. “At the very express technical point where you say WikiLeaks published those cables, you are and you didn’t. do your homework well to find out who posted the wires first. “WikiLeaks may not be considered the “main un redacted cable editor”.
Grothoff also faced questions about his bias from Joel Smith QC. Didn’t you add your appeal to a 2017 letter to US President Donald Trump urging him not to rate Assange or other WikiLeaks members? “The professor did not add his appeal, but he thought Assange was a” sympathetic character “in denouncing” war crimes. ” by posting “.
Fairbanks, transactions and evictions
Assange’s defense team then prepared the dynamite: through Trump activist and supporter Cassandra Fairbanks, dated June 7, 2020, describing communications with Republican donor Arthur Schwartz. club with a Twitter direct messaging organization that included “several other people who worked for or were close to President Trump in some other way. “Grenell and Schwartz were also members.
On October 30, 2018, Fairbanks shared an interview with Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, at the forum “in the hope that someone will see her and feel motivated to help. “The plea was not well won through Schwartz, who called Fairbanks to rebuke her for such a strident plea. Stop, he insisted, because a pardon is not happening to take place. What followed instead were the main points of what was in reserve for Assange: fees were imminent because of his connection to Chelsea Manning, not other publications (the correspondence of the Democratic National Committee; the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office’s Shelter 7 publication). He also told me they’d pass after Chelsea Manning. I was also told, I think, that it wouldn’t be before Christmas. predictions came a few months later. “
Fairbanks also revealed its goal of, however, resolving the Assange political asylum factor. Schwartz “also told me that the U. S. passing government would go to the embassy to look for Assange. “He was worried about a sovereign country and kidnapping a political refugee would be an act of war, and he said, “not if they let us do it. “Unless Fairbanks knew at the time, in October 2018, Grenell “made an agreement for Assange’s arrest with the Ecuadorian passing government.
The exchange disappointed Fairbanks. Hydraulic paints have begun. Schwartz softened his phone when he heard Fairbanks sobs, but barely reassured the WikiLeaks editor: Assange would “probably” only serve the rest of his life in prison.
From that moment on, the computer virus began to spin. She followed a stopover in Assange on January 7, 2019 and Fairbanks sought her out to perceive what she knew. Assange became involved in surveillance. ” I know he’s afraid to be heard or spied on and he had a little radio to control the conversation. She and Assange have taken ” steps to talk to each other “to make sure they are not in view or heard of surveillance cameras or microphones, creating a white noise background and writing notes. Fairbanks had also stopped in Manning, talking about fears “that they might withdraw him. “
In less than two months, the hospitality of the Embassy had grown cold. Fairbanks recalls being shocked by the remedy she and Assange won during this visit. It was an encounter that he was writing about, noticing an environment that was gradually deteriorating. They forced him to spend an hour in a meeting room without blood; Assange won a serious prior remedy, “subjected to a full frame scan with a steel detector before” he was allowed into the room. Su continues: “I described it at the time as ‘eerily similar to the visits I made to inmates in federal penitentiaries in the United States. ‘ I think at the time ‘it seemed like our government was getting what it was looking for from Ecuador, as a former State Department official told Buzzfeed in January. “ As far as we are concerned, he is in prison. I noted that “ in an interview with El País in July, President Moreno said that his ‘ideal solution’ was that Assange could simply ‘benefit’ from being ‘extradited’ if the UK promised that the United States I would. do not kill him.
Taking a radio to the meeting room to thwart audio surveillance was a source of dismay. “Only 8 minutes of our planned two-hour stopover were despite everything that could be done due to the clash with embassy security staff. if we wanted to talk, we had to do it in the convention hall and there were only two minutes left.
Fairbanks recalls the dispute in its March 2019 article: how Assange had told embassy staff how “unworthy” it was to be subjected to the frame scanner; why staff are “afraid” of their meeting with Fairbanks. “Is it a prison?” asked. ” That’s not it,” the answer. “You know that’s not the case. “
On March 29, 2019, Fairbanks contacted Schwartz and urged him over rumors of imminent expulsion from the embassy. Schwartz called to tell him that he knew Fairbanks had not been so cautious in revealing what he had told him. Reliable recipient The clear explanation. For Schwartz to know, conversations at the embassy had to be recorded and broadcast. “It was clear,” Fairbanks said, “that the United States had been involved,” the State Department added, and that Schwartz had been named some of that information. “
The bucket was thrown. On April 11, 2019, Assange was deported. On April 15, ABC News published an article describing how the operation of this action began in March 2018, “when Ecuadorians made their first request to the UK: a letter asking for written assurances that the UK would not extradite Assange to a country where it could face the death penalty. “It’s been six months. The United States approached through the offices of Ecuador’s ambassador to Germany, Manuel Mejoa Dalmau, who called for “an” “personal” emergency meeting in Berlin with U. S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, regarded as one of the presidents. Donald Trump’s closest envoys to Europe. ». During a meeting, Dalmau, according to a “high American official”anonymous,” asked if the United States would dedicate himself not to killing Assange. “Grenell filed the petition with the US Department of Justice. “Nice stay” According to a senior U. S. official, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein agreed. “A verbal devotion followed.
Fairbanks properly tweeted abc’s story. Ambassador Grenell has worked out. The head of Fairbanks won a message: delete the tweet. Fairbanks refused, but eventually relented. Grenell also had another suggestion: return to Fairbanks. In this miasma of panic, Schwartz called. ” Frantic,” Fairbanks recalls. “He declaimed and pointed out that he could go to jail and that I tweet classified information. She reported” that in coordinating Assange’s departure from the embassy, Ambassador Grenell had done so by direct order”of the president. “She believed in the veracity of Schwartz’s comment, given her close ties to Trump and Grenell.
Schwartz had also suffered a bloodthust. Several messages to Fairbanks after the ABC report focused on “how everyone interested in WikiLeaks deserved the death penalty. “This is troubling for Fairbanks, as only one verbal and un written agreement had been reached to protect Assange from the death penalty. “Schwartz’s reaction to this sent me a shrug and continued his diatribe about how Assange deserved to die. “
Fairbanks also blamed Schwartz for a vast network of influence, being a normal guest to the White House, a “repairman” of Donald Trump, Jr. , a radiantly significant figure in Trump’s cosmos and added “Richard Grenell, Sheldon Adelson and others. “The mention is revealing: his company Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest casino operator, allegedly provided canopy to security consultancy UC Global for surveillance operations that opposed Assange for his tenure at the embassy, which were sanctioned through the Central Intelligence Agency.
UC Global CEO David Morales was charged through a Spanish High Court in October 2019 for fees for violating Assange’s privacy, violation of attorney-client privilege, cash laundering and corruption. an elaborate and illegal U. S. surveillance operation in which the security company reportedly spied on Assange, his legal team, his American friends, American hounds, and an American congressman, who was reportedly sent to the Ecuadorian embassy through President Donald Trump, including Ecuadorian diplomats who UC Global was hired to protect were attacked on the spy network.
Joel Smith QC, representative of the prosecution, did not settle for Fairbanks’ statements: “The fact that Ms. Fairbanks learned from Arthur Schwartz was not to her knowledge. Tactics deployed in the past would be repeated: partial witness for recognizing yours for WikiLeaks. For the defense, Edward Fitzgerald QC made it clear: “We say that what Schwartz said [in Fairbanks] is an intelligent indication of the government at the highest level. “
The defense technique deserves to remain a patient and constant reminder to the court: that the case opposed to Assange is stale with politics, dragging Trump’s leadership to the scene.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark, a Commonwealth member at Selwyn College, Cambridge, teaches at RMIT University in Melbourne.
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Share: WhatsAppFacebookTwitterTelegramRedditEmail This article is based on the 25th Chandrashekar Memorial Conference on September 20, 2020. La original conference was given in Hindi and the occasion was organized through Punashcha, the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and Koshish. Friends, comrades accumulated here; I am very honored to have been invited to speak this year’s Chandrashekhar Memorial Conference, but I cannot [Read more . . . ]