NY Times: "WikiLeaks’ Founder, in a Gilded British Cage"

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is fighting extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual misconduct, outside Ellingham Hall in December 2010.

David Carr (NY Times):

The man in the rubber boots and a thick coat to protect against the evening chill walked purposefully about a farm here, scattering pheasants as he went. He could have been an English gentleman out for a bit of hunting, except he carried no gun.

In his current circumstance, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is more hunted than hunter, fighting extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual misconduct while struggling to maintain the influence of WikiLeaks even as he remains here at Ellingham Hall, the country manor house of Vaughan Smith, a former soldier and journalist who runs a restaurant and club for journalists in London.

Mr. Assange and a few WikiLeaks staff members who are staying at the farm joined some friends of Mr. Smith on Saturday for an outdoor lunch. I took the train up from London to get a first-hand look at Mr. Assange’s gilded, remote sanctuary. MORE...

Micah Sifry: "WikiLeaks, Assange, and Why There's No Turning Back"(Exclusive Excerpt)

Micah Sifry:

NOTE to readers: Adapted from my new book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, which ORBooks is publishing this month in the United States and is available on their website. It is also being published in Great Britain by the Yale University Press UK. Sifry is the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and editor of its blog, techPresident.com.

Back in the fall of 2009, getting hold of Julian Assange wasn't easy. The Australian founder of WikiLeaks seemed to be constantly on the move, and his email habits were unpredictable. My colleague Andrew Rasiej and I had invited him to speak at the inaugural European gathering of our Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) conference in Barcelona that November. "Micah, great!" he wrote in late October, accepting the invitation. "Currently in Laos. Denmark 18th Nov-ish. Iceland not long after. Can you send me all necessary details?"

I wrote back right away, but a series of follow-up emails to his Sunshinepress.org account failed to get a response. The conference was just a few weeks away and we weren't sure if one of our keynote speakers was really coming. In desperation, I went online to the WikiLeaks.org website and clicked on "live chat." Within moments another screen opened, and I was given an anonymous user account name. I typed hello, and someone responded, telling me his name was "Daniel." I started to explain who I was, and Daniel suggested opening a private one-on-one chat to continue the conversation. No, Julian wasn't available right now, he told me, but he promised to relay my messages to him.

He did, because two weeks later, Assange and his trusted colleague Daniel (who then went by the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, but has since broken with WikiLeaks to launch OpenLeaks, and is now known by his real name, Daniel Domscheit-Berg) were with us at the hypermodern Torre Agbar building in Barcelona, where some 350 people from all over Europe had come to PdF to talk about how technology was changing politics. The speakers included the top online organizers of the Barack Obama presidential campaign of 2008; senior tech advisers to the English, French, Spanish, German, and Norwegian governments; leaders from companies like Google, Facebook, and Meetup; and a polyglot mix of political bloggers, social media consultants, e-democracy innovators, human rights activists, and transparency advocates. But everyone seemed slightly awed by Assange and Domscheit-Berg, who were already known then among the digerati for what they had achieved with WikiLeaks.

On stage in Barcelona for the final plenary at the forum, Assange didn't talk much about how the Internet and new communications technologies made WikiLeaks' work possible. Instead, he called on Western journalists and transparency activists to do more to keep governments and business honest.
"A friend of mine in the United States, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, uses a phrase that I've become fond of," he said, leaning into the microphone for emphasis. "'Courage is contagious,' that is, when someone engages in a courageous act and shows other people that that act wasn't an act of martyrdom, rather that it was an intelligently designed act, it encourages other people to follow him." MORE...

H/t to Ari Melber.

SNL on Assange, WikiLeaks and Facebook (video)

SNL (NBC), video (02:12).

Glenn Greenwald on "The Nixonian henchmen of today: at the NYT"

Glenn Greenwald:

Yesterday, Assange walked out of an interview with CNN, which he thought had been arranged to discuss the significance of the Iraq War revelations, because the CNN "reporter" seemed interested in asking only about petty, vapid rumors about Assange himself, not the substance of the leaks. The Nation's Greg Mitchell summarized that interview this way: "Assange to CNN: 'Do you want to talk about deaths of 104,000 people or my personal life?'" CNN's answer could not have been clearer: the latter, definitely.

But the low point of this smear campaign was led by The New York Times' John Burns, who authored a sleazy hit piece on Assange -- filled with every tawdry, scurrilous tabloid rumor about him -- that was (and still is) prominently featured in the NYT, competing for attention with the stories about the leaked documents themselves, and often receiving more attention. Here's the current iteration of the front page of the NYT website, with the Assange story receiving top billing:

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WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange: "Transparent Government Tends to Produce Just Government" (with audio/video)

Democracy Now! with audio/video:

We spend the hour with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, talking about the biggest leak in U.S. history: the release of more than 91,000 classified military records on the war in Afghanistan. As the Pentagon announces it is launching a criminal probe into who leaked the documents, Assange asks what about investigating the "war crimes" revealed in the leaked military records? He also talks about the media, why he isn’t coming to the U.S. anytime soon and what gives him hope. "What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change," Assange says. "They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way."