Police in Sweden say they’re dropping the sexual assault charges against Julian Assange, not because he didn’t do it—a question of fact that will never be answered—but because he successfully holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London long enough that the statute of limitations has expired.
Julian Assange appeared, as we told you before, by Skype at SXSW over the weekend. Set against a green-screened Wikileaks logo, wearing a scarf straight from the Doctor Who wardrobe department and an actually respectable showing of facial hair, he gave his usual kind of speech. That's to say, one grounded in a lot of really honorable principles about disclosure and democracy and openness and how constant surveillance undermines all of those things.
"I believe that you are a decent person, who would not naturally wish to harm good people in dire situations," is probably the weirdest compliment person-shaped-internet-meme Benedict Cumberbatch has received in his career. But Julian Assange is not your normal tween Cumerbatch fan on Tumblr. Assange is not happy about the upcoming Dreamworks blockbuster The Fifth Estate, which features Cumberbatch as him, and he's written a very long letter to express his dissatisfaction.
A photograph of Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning wearing makeup and a blonde wig was released yesterday by the army as part of documentation related to Manning's trial. It's the first such photo of Manning, who is transgender.
Here's the trailer for The Fifth Estate, the Wikileaks movie (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange). "Some call him a visionary... some call him a traitor... some call him an irritating prat."
Where's Edward Snowden? As I write this, only a handful of people know exactly the location of the world famous NSA whistleblower, after he apparently ditched his flight from Moscow to Cuba last night. One of those people is Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Snowden is "safe and healthy" and his "spirits are high," Assange told reporters begging for any scrap of information on a conference call this morning. It is this secret knowledge that has paradoxically thrust Assange's anti-secrecy outlet back into the media spotlight after a long period of decline. Now there's hints of another massive leak. Wikileaks is back, God help us all.
If there's one downside to Edward Snowden's NSA leaks it's that they have offered a new platform for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's stateless self-aggrandizement. Although Wikileaks had nothing to do with Snowden's leaks, the washed-up whistleblowers are now forcing themselves onto the story like a government probe on a trans-Atlantic fiberoptic cable.
How much would you pay for an interview with Julian Assange, Wikileaks' founder and current undisputed world record-holder for Most Consecutive Days Spent In London's Ecuadorian Embassy? $58 seems fair. But Assange asked filmmaker Alex Gibney for $1 million to be interviewed for his new Wikileaks documentary We Steal Secrets, according to Gibney.
The anti-government secrecy site Wikileaks is embracing a peculiar new role: Excitedly publishing already-available declassified government information. The site's embattled honcho, Julian Assange, announced the release this morning of its much-anticipated "Project K," which turned out to be the "Kissinger Cables"—1.7 million diplomatic communiques covering the period from 1973 to 1976.
Yesterday, 25-year-old former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning admitted he gave all those documents to Wikileaks and attempted to explain why he did it. In the Wikileaks debate Manning is typically cast as either a a heroic whistleblower or a seditious traitor, or as a confused kid acting out in an emotional tantrum. What's remarkable about Manning's own account is how it fits none of those characterizations. We see Bradley Manning the curious analyst become Bradley Manning the world's most famous leaker through a very personal relationship with Wikileaks that is inseparable from his own motives and psychological situation.
Here is the first picture of Benedict Cumberbatch from the BBC's Sherlock Holmes as Julian Assange in the upcoming Wikileaks movie The Fifth Estate. That sound you heard was Tumblr's servers exploding, given that a significant portion of all Tumblr blogs are dedicated to either Benedict Cumberbatch gifs or Julian Assange fan fiction.
We've called him a "seed-spilling sex creep," a "pale nerd king," and "a real-life The Matrix extra," so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a phone interview on the condition that we speak only about the book. I agreed, which was a lie.
