In the latest twist in the drama swirling around the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group, British police officials said on Tuesday they had arrested Julian Assange, its beleaguered founder, on a warrant issued in Sweden in connection with alleged sex offenses.
Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, was arrested by officers from Scotland Yard’s extradition unit when he went to a central London police station by prior agreement with the authorities, the police said. A court hearing was expected later.
In a statement, the police said: “Officers from the Metropolitan Police extradition unit have this morning arrested Julian Assange on behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape.”
Hmmmm.
Are they *really* calling “sex without a condom” . . . “rape”?
???!!!?
I wanna know what he has on Roswell, the UFOs, and the little grey space aliens.
Sarah, If it allows them to get their hands on him, u betcha.
If there is a case to answer on Rape or a sexual offence, it is right to extradite Assange. However, the issue of consent with an option to withdraw consent, or consent subject to particular conditions, breach of which will negate the consent is a strange one. This may of course be in accordance with Swedish criminal law, which is I imagine based on the Napoleonic codes as amended and may be different from English criminal law. I imagine Assange’s lawyers will be looking at all this closely. If however the Swedish action is being taken with a view to future extradition to the US, well that is a very different matter.
However we are seeing some strange things going on relating to Wikileaks:
– Amazon withdrawing hosting for Wikileaks’ website;
– Paypal not passing on payments;
– Visa not passing on payments;
– A Swiss Bank suspending a bank account;
And on the other hand we are seeing:
– Denial of Service attacks on Paypal by groups of internet geeks;
– alternative websites carrying Wikileaks information across the world;
– What appear to be special branch or security service personnell parked outside the home of the London lawyer for Assange, the perfectly respectable and proper Mark Stevens; and
– threats from internet geeks to carry out cyber attacks in support of Wikileaks.
The termperature seems to be rising, but somewhere in the mists of all this I have not heard any one explain the legal basis of the above actions – are they based in law, international treaties, or court injunctions? I wonder if in the heat of the moment all parties are leaving the rule of law behind. The trouble with that is if one party plays fast and loose with the law, others may be encouraged to do the same – then where are we as things just leave common sense and legality behind and deteriorate.
I do not support what Wikileaks or Assange have done, but we are on a slippery slope when ends justify means. The rule of law is important and one should be careful to observe it carefully. We know, we had exactly the same dilemmas in Northern Ireland, and when we played fast and loose with the law, it invariably was something we came to regret, not least because we lost the moral highground.
I have been doing some googling around.
The Daily Mail, critical of Assange, sent a reporter to Sweden who came back with this story on the allegations. The story from the Mail is just bizarre.
Moreover on the technical side, it looks as if Distributed Denial of Service attacks have been made by a number of parties. The Wikileaks site was subject to the early attacks; and those supporting the clampdown on Wikileaks have also had presumably retaliatory DDoS attacks on their sites [bombardment of the sites by multiple sources, usually hijacked third party computers]: PostFinance Bank in Switzerland, PayPal, and the website of the Swedish prosecution authority.
We seem to be seeing probably the Western world’s first cyber-war. It all seems to be getting very nasty indeed.
#5 has touched the truth, and a bloody wound it is going to be. This is only the first of the cyber wars, peculiar because they can be carried out on a battlefield which has no location, no rules of any sort, and the antagonists can easily be nameless and nearly countless. This is not an idle war game however, because the consequences can be enormous and quite without regard to truth or evidence. I suppose the worst is this, that one man may bring down a government out of mere malice (as is the case here.) This will get much worse very fast because it puts so much power in the hands of a single person of ill will. Armageddon will be this: One man, out of malice or curiosity will discover how to use the battlefield as a means of destroying whole networks of computers, a real virus in a virtual atomic bomb. Larry
[blockquote]
In fact, the current prosecutor, Marianne Ny, who re-opened the case against Assange, has been active in the proposed reforms of Swedish rape laws that would, if passed, involve an investigation of whether an imbalance in power between two people could void one person’s insistence that the sex was consensual.[/blockquote]
Monica Lewinsky was raped!!
[blockquote] Despite what has happened, the woman who organized the event and had Assange stay at her apartment told Aftonbladet that she never intended that Assange be charged with rape.
“It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent, and I do not feel threatened by him,” she told the newspaper in an interview that did not identify her by name. “The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who had attitude problems with women.”
[/blockquote]
You mean the attitude that he thought it was OK to sleep with women who he had just met who wanted to have sex with an international celebrity they had just met?? Because they were looking for a faithful committed long-term relationship of at least a week but he was really just looking for a cheap one night stand!!!