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Wikileaks

If I remember correctly, having read about this case last year, the 2 Swedish women in question both had consensual sex with him using condoms.

Woman 1 was unaware of woman 2 & during the time with woman 2, after they'd done it with a condom, they afterwards had sex without a condom, possibly in a 'sleepy early morning' scenario which is where the accusation of rape arises. As I recall she was half asleep & didn't realise he wasn't wearing one.

Neither of the women wanted to press charges. Woman 1 I think was entirely consensual so no offense whatsoever. It was a female Swedish prosecutor who decided to press charges.

So whilst his behaviour can certainly be deplored & 'typical male putting it about', if these details are correct I don't think it can be called rape.

Why the Swedish prosecutor wouldn't come here to interview him I don't know but it's ended up costing us millions in police guards. There's no doubt the US would like to get hold of him if they could & no guarantee the Swedish wouldn't deport him if he went there. Under these circumstances I can well understand his reluctance to go.
 
hunck said:
If I remember correctly, having read about this case last year, the 2 Swedish women in question both had consensual sex with him using condoms.

Woman 1 was unaware of woman 2 & during the time with woman 2, after they'd done it with a condom, they afterwards had sex without a condom, possibly in a 'sleepy early morning' scenario which is where the accusation of rape arises. As I recall she was half asleep & didn't realise he wasn't wearing one.

Neither of the women wanted to press charges. Woman 1 I think was entirely consensual so no offense whatsoever. It was a female Swedish prosecutor who decided to press charges.

So whilst his behaviour can certainly be deplored & 'typical male putting it about', if these details are correct I don't think it can be called rape.

Why the Swedish prosecutor wouldn't come here to interview him I don't know but it's ended up costing us millions in police guards. There's no doubt the US would like to get hold of him if they could & no guarantee the Swedish wouldn't deport him if he went there. Under these circumstances I can well understand his reluctance to go.
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I agree that Assange has a bad attitude towards women.
 
One of the women had bragged on a social media about having met Assange, then later went to the police and said he had raped her.
 
I don't think he can be classed as a rapist (at least, by this country's definition).
What he is guilty of, however, is being a jerk who treats women badly and has poor bedroom etiquette. He's not a gentleman, apparently.
The interesting (and scary) thing to me has been the rapid re-definition of rape to something that depends on a woman changing her mind.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I don't think he can be classed as a rapist (at least, by this country's definition).
What he is guilty of, however, is being a jerk who treats women badly and has poor bedroom etiquette. He's not a gentleman, apparently.
The interesting (and scary) thing to me has been the rapid re-definition of rape to something that depends on a woman changing her mind.
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Agreed, how the heck can a man counter that kinda argument, its absurd
 
Mythopoeika said:
The interesting (and scary) thing to me has been the rapid re-definition of rape to something that depends on a woman changing her mind.
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:eek:

But probably not something for me to worry about now. All my relationships are well in the past, and some of my partners may have already died. (At least one has, and she was 5 years younger than me.) As for the rest, do they even remember my name now? I find names of ex's mostly tend to fade with time...
 
Mythopoeika said:
I don't think he can be classed as a rapist (at least, by this country's definition).
What he is guilty of, however, is being a jerk who treats women badly and has poor bedroom etiquette. He's not a gentleman, apparently.
The interesting (and scary) thing to me has been the rapid re-definition of rape to something that depends on a woman changing her mind.
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As I posted some time ago on this thread, what Assange is accused of would certainly be classified as rape under English law.

Whether a case of this nature would be *pursued* here is another matter.

I don't have a great deal of time for Assange, who seems an unpleasant narcissist and his current plight is entirely of his own making. I don't agree that special arrangements should have been made to interview him - there are lots of practical implications (under which law does such an interview take place? What if the interviewer decided there was a case to answer but Assange still refused to move out of the embassy?) but I do agree that Sweden should have provided a guarantee that he would not be extradited to the US.
 
Quake42 said:
As I posted some time ago on this thread, what Assange is accused of would certainly be classified as rape under English law.

Whether a case of this nature would be *pursued* here is another matter.

I don't have a great deal of time for Assange, who seems an unpleasant narcissist and his current plight is entirely of his own making. I don't agree that special arrangements should have been made to interview him - there are lots of practical implications (under which law does such an interview take place? What if the interviewer decided there was a case to answer but Assange still refused to move out of the embassy?) but I do agree that Sweden should have provided a guarantee that he would not be extradited to the US.
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Any idea where this is? I've looked back several years but couldn't find it.
 
hunck said:
Any idea where this is? I've looked back several years but couldn't find it.
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I posted a quote from Assange's own barrister on page 16 and there's further discussion on page 21. Sorry, can't seem to link to individual posts from a tablet.

In essence the allegation is that he held the complainant down with one hand and forced her legs open with the other before penetrating her.

No question that such an act on an unwilling participant would constitute rape under English law.

Now, whether the complainant's account is credible is another matter, but the mantra from JA's supporters that what he's accused of would not be a crime in the UK is simply incorrect.
 
Fair enough. It's not worth arguing the toss since whatever happened happened & only the 2 people involved know.

What I can't understand is why the Swedish authorities decided to pursue it after at first deciding not to. Since the woman involved didn't want to press charges & presumably is not going to give evidence, there would appear to be no case to answer.
 
Quake42 said:
Now, whether the complainant's account is credible is another matter, but the mantra from JA's supporters that what he's accused of would not be a crime in the UK is simply incorrect.
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Let's be quite clear: I am not a supporter of Assange. I just think he should get a fair trial.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Let's be quite clear: I am not a supporter of Assange. I just think he should get a fair trial.
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Oh, I agree entirely. But it's quite wrong to say that all he is accused of is:

poor bedroom etiquette
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or

'typical male putting it about'
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What he is accused of would constitute rape in this country and indeed in most others.

I have no opinion as to his guilt or otherwise, but it annoys me that the UK has got stuck in the middle of the whole thing.
 
Quake42 said:
I have no opinion as to his guilt or otherwise, but it annoys me that the UK has got stuck in the middle of the whole thing.
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I'm with you there. The whole thing has been a shambles. The British government could have said no to extradition right from the off in the absence of a case against him bearing in mind no victim pressing charges. Would have saved us several million in policing & administration.

Whether you like him or not is irrelevant. No witness providing evidence equals no case as far as I can see. Ulterior motives are immediately suspected.
 
hunck said:
I'm with you there. The whole thing has been a shambles. The British government could have said no to extradition right from the off in the absence of a case against him bearing in mind no victim pressing charges. Would have saved us several million in policing & administration.
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It wasn't an extradition though. It was done under the European Arrest Warrant which doesn't provide the same safeguards. It couldn't be refused and the highest court in the land has confirmed this. Yet another issue with the EU.
 
Quake42 said:
It wasn't an extradition though. It was done under the European Arrest Warrant which doesn't provide the same safeguards. It couldn't be refused and the highest court in the land has confirmed this. Yet another issue with the EU.
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Far be it from me to argue with the highest court in the land but according to Wiki, "An EAW can only be issued for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution (not merely an investigation), or enforcing a custodial sentence."

Since there was no criminal prosecution owing to lack of witness, it would seem to be merely an investigation & could presumably have been refused on these grounds if the will arose...

I can well understand the authorities wanting shot of him but it's all very fishy.
 
Could fit here, as it is in the follow-up of Wikileaks Snowden's revelations about cyber-attacks. The Western press usually parrots the US stance that China is behind computer attacks, but there we have the Chinese viewpoint. To be taken with a pinch of salt, but no more no less than the US one :
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/nation...r-at-US-as-hacking-attacks-soar/shdaily.shtml
China points finger at US as hacking attacks soar
Source: Agencies | March 29, 2014, Saturday |
HACKING attacks on Chinese computers last year increased by more than 60 percent from 2012, the country’s top Internet security agency said yesterday.

Attacks originating from the United States made up a significant proportion of the total, the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center said.

Beijing and Washington have been squaring off for months over the issue of cyber attacks, each accusing the other of hacking into sensitive government websites.

China has long singled out the US as the top source of intrusion on its computers.

The country’s Internet faces “many security threats,” which creates a “challenge” for China’s overall security, according to the coordination center.

“There are frequent occurrences of state-level organized Internet hacking attacks, and some of our country’s important Internet information systems have been penetrated,” it said in a statement on its website.

Last year 15,000 host computers were taken control of by Trojan horse malware, while 61,000 websites were hijacked as a result of backdoor breaches from overseas, up 62 percent on the previous year, the statement said.

Almost 11 million host computers were hacked by overseas-based servers, mostly from the US, South Korea and Hong Kong, it said.

Servers based in the United States accounted for a third of the total, it said.

Last week, The New York Times and German magazine Der Spiegel said that the US government spied on major Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies Co.

On Thursday, China’s defense ministry said it would beef up its Internet security in response to the report, but also accused Washington of hypocrisy.

The White House has said the US does not spy to gain commercial advantage.
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A follow-up on the effects of mass surveillance on internet discussions, how it has a dissuasive impact, and why the "I have nothing to hide" attitude, in addition to being a bit dumb, is really noxious :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ilences-minority-opinions-according-to-study/
Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

By Karen Turner March 28

A new study shows that knowledge of government surveillance causes people to self-censor their dissenting opinions online. The research offers a sobering look at the oft-touted "democratizing" effect of social media and Internet access that bolsters minority opinion.

The study, published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, studied the effects of subtle reminders of mass surveillance on its subjects. The majority of participants reacted by suppressing opinions that they perceived to be in the minority. This research illustrates the silencing effect of participants’ dissenting opinions in the wake of widespread knowledge of government surveillance, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The “spiral of silence” is a well-researched phenomenon in which people suppress unpopular opinions to fit in and avoid social isolation. It has been looked at in the context of social media and the echo-chamber effect, in which we tailor our opinions to fit the online activity of our Facebook and Twitter friends. But this study adds a new layer by explicitly examining how government surveillance affects self-censorship.

Participants in the study were first surveyed about their political beliefs, personality traits and online activity, to create a psychological profile for each person. A random sample group was then subtly reminded of government surveillance, followed by everyone in the study being shown a neutral, fictional headline stating that U.S. airstrikes had targeted the Islamic State in Iraq. Subjects were then asked a series of questions about their attitudes toward the hypothetical news event, such as how they think most Americans would feel about it and whether they would publicly voice their opinion on the topic. The majority of those primed with surveillance information were less likely to speak out about their more nonconformist ideas, including those assessed as less likely to self-censor based on their psychological profile.

Elizabeth Stoycheff, lead researcher of the study and assistant professor at Wayne State University, is disturbed by her findings.

“So many people I've talked with say they don't care about online surveillance because they don't break any laws and don't have anything to hide. And I find these rationales deeply troubling,” she said.

She said that participants who shared the “nothing to hide” belief, those who tended to support mass surveillance as necessary for national security, were the most likely to silence their minority opinions.

“The fact that the 'nothing to hide' individuals experience a significant chilling effect speaks to how online privacy is much bigger than the mere lawfulness of one's actions. It's about a fundamental human right to have control over one's self-presentation and image, in private, and now, in search histories and metadata,” she said.

Stoycheff is also concerned about the quietly oppressive behavior of self-censorship.

“It concerns me that surveillance seems to be enabling a culture of self-censorship because it further disenfranchises minority groups. And it is difficult to protect and extend the rights of these vulnerable populations when their voices aren't part of the discussion. Democracy thrives on a diversity of ideas, and self-censorship starves it,” she said. “Shifting this discussion so Americans understand that civil liberties are just as fundamental to the country's long-term well-being as thwarting very rare terrorist attacks is a necessary move.”

Stoycheff has written about the capacity of online sharing tools to inspire democratic change. But the results of this study have caused her views to change. "The adoption of surveillance techniques, by both the government and private sectors, undermines the Internet's ability to serve as a neutral platform for honest and open deliberation. It begins to strip away the Internet's ability to serve as a venue for all voices, instead catering only to the most dominant," she said. She received no outside funding for the research or publication of this study, she said.
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Internet giants are not neutral :
https://www.rt.com/usa/345749-assange-us-google-clinton/
Google involved with Clinton campaign, controls information flow – Assange
Published time: 7 Jun, 2016 16:55Edited time: 7 Jun, 2016 21:00

American tech giant Google is closely cooperating with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to promote the candidate, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a televised address to an international media forum.
“Google is directly engaged with Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” the WikiLeaks founder claimed, as quoted by the Sputnik news agency. He added that the company used the State Department as part of “a quid pro quo.”

The journalist behind the world’s most well-known whistleblower website appeared via videoconference at a session of ‘End of the Monopoly: The Open Information Age’, part of the ‘New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream international media’ forum organized at the Rossiya Segodnya International Multimedia Press Center in Moscow.

Assange is far from the only one to notice the link between Google and the Clinton campaign. Behavioral Psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein has pioneered research on how search engines affect elections and much more. He told Lee Camp, host of RT America’s ‘Redacted Tonight’, that “when one candidate is higher in search rankings ‒ that is, looks better than another candidate in search rankings ‒ that shifts a lot of votes to that candidate. And it’s not a tiny number. It’s a very, very big number of votes.”

Humans are trained to believe that the higher ranking links are “better” and “truer,” Epstein explained.

Last year, billionaire Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt created a little-known start-up company called The Groundwork, “the sole purpose of which is to put Hillary Clinton in office,” he said. “It’s a very secretive organization, super high-tech stuff, and [it’s] very likely they’re using these techniques that we’ve been studying in our research to make sure that votes are shifted to Hillary Clinton in November."

Assange believes that unlike Donald Trump, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is predictable and will constitute a problem for freedom of speech in the US if elected.

“Of course she when she is in power… She is a problem for freedom of speech,” the whistleblower said. "We know what she is going to do. And she made the chart for the destruction of Libya, she was involved in the process of taking the Libyan armory and sending it to Syria."

“Google is heavily integrated with Washington power, at personal level and at business level… Google, which has increasing control over the distribution channels,… is intensely allying itself with the US exceptionalism,” Assange said, speaking in a video link from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

“It [Google] shows the will to use that at different levels. It will inevitably influence its audience,” Assange said, recalling the occasion when Google leased its front page to “promote [US State Secretary] John Kerry's call for bombing on Syria in 2013,” along with conspiring with “Al Jazeera to encourage Syrian defectors.”

“Google is an intensely Washington, DC-aligned company,” the famous whistleblower said.

Washington and Google likewise feel threatened by China and view the country as a rival, with Schmidt viewing China as “his enemy,” the WikiLeaks founder said.

“I see a Google exit from China… It seems much more to do with Google's feeling that it is part of ‘family America’ and that it is opposed to the Chinese,” said Assange.

‘80 percent of NSA budget privatized’
Another shocking claim from Assange is that 80 percent of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) budget has been privatized as part of the merger between power and big business.

“There is a merger between the corporate organizations and state… 80 percent of the National Security Agency budget is privatized,” Assange said, stressing that the NSA “is the core of the US deep state… There has been a smoothing out between the government and the corporations,” the whistleblower said.
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WikiLeaks Is About to Ruin Hillary Clinton’s Chances of Becoming President
Tom Cahill | June 13, 2016

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his next leak will virtually guarantee an indictment of Hillary Clinton.

In a recent interview with ITV, Assange said the whistleblowing website will soon be leaking documents that will provide “enough evidence” for the Department of Justice to indict the presumptive Democratic nominee. WikiLeaks has already published 30,322 emails from Clinton’s private email server, spanning from June 30, 2010 to August 12, 2014. While Assange didn’t specify what exactly was in the emails, he did tell ITV that WikiLeaks had “accumulated a lot of material about Hillary Clinton, which could proceed to an indictment.”

Assange hinted that the emails slated for publication contain additional information about the Clinton Foundation. He also reminded ITV’s Robert Peston that previously released emails contained one damning piece of communication from Clinton, instructing a staffer to remove the classification settings from an official State Department communication and send it through a “nonsecure” channel. Assange then pointed out that the Obama administration has previously prosecuted numerous whistleblowers for violating the government’s procedures for handling classified documents. ...

http://linkis.com/usuncut.com/politics/gZvW6
 
So Assange supports Trump? Thanks for nothing, Jules.
 
ramonmercado said:
Saved this just in case?
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Possibly - but there's quite a lot of Hillary dirt out there already, some of it pretty damaging (private, insecure email server, allegedly dodgy deals by Clinton Foundation, large payments from Saudi). If it's not just Assange mouthing off and Wikileaks genuinely has something much bigger we could be in for very interesting times indeed.
 
My guess would be that dear old Julian hasn't noticed his name in the papers for a few weeks, so decided to stick his oar into the election. I doubt there's much left to be revealed on Hilary.
 
ramonmercado said:
Amazing that whats out there already hasn't had more of an effect on her support levels.
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If she was up against anyone but Trump now, and had been up against anyone but Bernie (I like the guy, but he was never going to be a serious proposition) earlier, then I think it would have had more of an impact.
As it is, unless Assange really does have a trick or two up his sleeve, she'll be the next President.
 
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