On Saturday, August 30, more than 6000 people took to the streets of Berlin, Germany to protest against intelligence agencies' mass surveillance. A broad alliance of more than 80 organizations, including many Internet activists, journalists, human rights organizations, lawyers and even judges had called for this demonstration under the slogan “Freedom not Fear." Whistle-blowing websites, such as WikiLeaks and whistleblowers, such as Edward Snowden, who revealed the horrifying...
World famous whistle-blower, Julian Assange, marked the second anniversary of his political asylum inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London yesterday, June 19. Assange has been trapped inside the building for two years, since entering it after being ordered extradited to Sweden from the UK to answer questions regarding allegations of sexual misconduct. Speaking to the Real News Network earlier this week, Assange’s lawyer, Michael Ratner reminded the public what the saga was all...
According to a new article co-written by Glenn Greenwald published this morning by The Intercept, Britain’s top spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, secretly monitored visitors to a WikiLeaks site by collecting their IP addresses in real time as well as the search terms used to reach the site. One document from 2010 shows that the National Security Agency added WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a, quote, "manhunting" target list, together with...
Glenn Ashton - Edward Snowden, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning and Julian Assange have all attained legendary status amongst citizens’ rights advocates. They have exposed the extent that modern government has, under the aegis of security and intelligence gathering, encroached into all of our lives. This blanket surveillance of the citizenry, on a previously unimaginable scale, is the current manifestation of Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother. Yet few have heard of Jeremy Hammond, sentenced to 10 years for...
WikiLeaks has published the secret text to part of the biggest U.S. trade deal in history, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). For the past several years, the United States and 12 Pacific Rim nations have been negotiating behind closed doors on the sweeping agreement. A 95-page draft of a TPP chapter released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday details agreements relating to patents, copyright, trademarks and industrial design, showing their wide-reaching implications for Internet services, civil...
WikiLeaks' attorney Michael Ratner responds to Tuesday’s (30 July) verdict in the Bradley Manning trial. Manning was found guilty of 20 charges in total, including espionage, but he was acquitted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge. "For him facing 136 years in jail for telling the American people what our government should have been telling us — about torture centers in Iraq, 20,000 extra civilians killed in Iraq — I find outrageous," Ratner says....