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Wikileaks
Wikileaks is one of the biggest and most important stories in the world, challenging governments and journalists alike. I’ve been writing extensively about the group since 2006, featured an exclusive interview in 2008 with founder Julian Assange and examined the myriad of issues around the website. Assange himself asked me in the early days whether I wanted to be on the group’s board to vet incoming leaks and determine their veracity before publishing. I agreed but unfortunately this never eventuated.
Investigative journalism in the era of Wikileaks
Last year, in September, I appeared at Australia’s first… conference (Back to the Source) for investigative journalists in Sydney alongside ABC TV’s… Andrew Fowler, freelance journalist… Philip Dorling and The Australian Financial Review’s… Brian Toohey. We had all in different ways reported on Wikileaks, mostly sympathetically, and the discussion revolved about what the organisation had done to journalism. The…
Ignore the Western white noise, Wikileaks matters in Latin America
Stories and news that barely rate a mention in the Western corporate media. This is why Wikileaks remains vital for democratic transparency, away from bitter Western hacks who see their role as protecting turf and power. The Nation explains: On June 19, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange slipped into the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, seeking sanctuary…
Wikileaks documents know more about Afghan war than US military
Almost funny. This is what a floundering empire looks like (via Wired): Insurgencies are amongst the hardest conflicts to predict. Insurgents can be loosely organized, split into factions, and strike from out of nowhere. But now researchers have demonstrated that with enough data, you might actually predict where insurgent violence will strike next. The results,…
Wikileaks wins important legal fight against Visa cowardice
Here’s a just released Wikileaks statement: In a case against Valitor, formerly VISA Iceland, ReykjavÃk District Court just ruled the company had violated contract laws by blocking credit card donations to Wikileaks. After WikiLeaks’ publications revealing U.S. war crimes and statecraft in 2010, U.S. financial institutions, including VISA, MasterCard, Bank of America, erected a banking…
Wikileaks reveals; US PR firm tells Assad regime how to improve image
Via Foreign Policy: The lobbying firm that brought you a… Vogue… story featuring the Syrian first lady was still trying to help the Syrian… regime improve its image abroad two months after the notoriously ill-timed article was published and then scrubbed, as the country descended into violence, according to a document revealed by Wikileaks. The international firm Brown…
Private eyes are watching all of us
The idea that repression only happens “over there” is a myth that needs to be constantly challenged (my recent PEN lecture tackled this). Take this (via Pro Publica): Cellphone companies hold onto your location information for years and routinely provide it to police and, in anonymized form, to outside companies. As they note in their…
Assange interviews Anwar Ibrahim
Another week and another interesting episode of The World Tomorrow (past ones here). This week the Malaysian Opposition Leader:
Wikileaks releases the Syria Files
Yet more confirmation that Wikileaks remains an essential news organisation. Today they did this: Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities…