TIME Magazine Person of the Year 2010?

 

REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud

The man behind WikiLeaks has won the most votes in this year’s Person of the Year poll.

Readers voted a total of 1,249,425 times, and the favorite was clear. Julian Assange raked in 382,020 votes, giving him an easy first place. He was 148,383 votes over the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey.

(See the top 10 everything of 2010.)

But Assange wasn’t the winner in all aspects — Lady Gaga trounced him on Facebook, receiving 65,417 “likes” on Facebook to Assange’s 45,643. See the top 10 readers’ choices below, and view the full poll here.

1. Julian Assange
2. Recep Tayyip Erdogan
3. Lady Gaga
4. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
5. Glenn Beck
6. Barack Obama
7. Steve Jobs
8. The Chilean Miners
9. The Unemployed American
10. Mark Zuckerberg

(See TIME’s exclusive interview with Julian Assange.)

Will Assange be named Person of the Year? The editors of TIME will unveil their choice on the TODAY show, Wednesday morning on NBC.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/13/julian-assange-readers-choice-for-times-person-of-the-year-2010/#ixzz187lWMoX0

Wikileaks “The Peoples” TSA

 

There was a time when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s voluntary surrender to the British authorities might have put an end to the crisis created by the Internet provocateur’s dissemination of tens of thousands of state secrets. But in the upside-down world of transnational crowdsourcing unleashed by WikiLeaks, in which thousands of activists around the globe can be rallied to defend and extend its work, Assange’s arrest is a win, not a loss, for his organization.

The asymmetrical info war initiated by the WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables is all about spectacle — the more Assange is set up by world powers, the more powerful his own movement becomes. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks,” wrote John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment advocacy group, in a message to his followers. “You are the troops.” WikiLeaks admiringly forwarded the post to 300,000 of its own followers. As the U.S. and other governments attempted to close down WikiLeaks over the past week, those “troops” have fought back. And so far, it doesn’t look like much of a contest. (Read TIME’s interview with Julian Assange.)

First, the U.S. government pushed WikiLeaks off the servers of Amazon, its U.S. host — thanks in part to an effort by the office of Senator Joe Lieberman, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee. After the rogue site was pushed off a smaller, backup host in the U.S., it moved first to a Swiss domain, then to a simple numeric one. WikiLeaks has complained, and some news outlets have reported, about apparent hacker attacks against the website. The effect of all that pressure, however, was very much like cutting the head off the mythical Hydra. By Tuesday evening, WikiLeaks listed 507 Web addresses that it said were hosting the site worldwide.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2035817,00.html#ixzz17aGwioUM

Wikileaks-The Leak That Can’t Be Shut

“There are hundreds of mirrors of WikiLeaks now,” he said. “It’s a test for Internet censorship. Can governments take something off the Net? I think not. There are copies of the website everywhere.”

GENEVA – WikiLeaks’ elusive founder, his options dwindling, has turned to Switzerland’s credit, postal and Internet infrastructure to keep his online trove of U.S. State Department cables afloat.

Supporters say Julian Assange is considering seeking asylum in Switzerland. He told a Spanish newspaper that he faced “hundreds of death threats,” including some targeting his lawyers and children, aside from the pressure he is getting from prosecutors in the U.S. and other countries.

After a number of web companies dropped WikiLeaks, much of the site’s traffic was coming through the wikileaks.ch Web address Sunday. The address is controlled by the Swiss Pirate Party, a group that formed two years ago to campaign for freedom of information. The site’s main server in France went offline but it remained reachable through a Swedish server.

The site showed Assange had begun seeking donations to an account under his name through the Swiss postal system in Bern, the Swiss capital, while also using a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and other accounts in Iceland and Germany. He lost a major source of revenue when the online payment service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account over the weekend.

Assange has been widely praised and criticized. Supporters view him as a savior of the media and free speech; critics vilify him for brazenly unleashing diplomatic secrets, as well as for earlier leaks involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called Assange “a high-tech terrorist.” He told NBC’s “Meet the Press” he hopes Assange will be prosecuted for the “enormous damage” the disclosures have done to the country and to its relationship with its allies.

via Yahoo

Ron Paul: What we need is more WikiLeaks

Popular Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul is no stranger to breaking with his party, but in a recent television appearance the libertarian-leaning Rep. went even further than any member of Congress in defending whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

Speaking to Fox Business host Judge Napolitano on Thursday about recent revelations at the Federal Reserve, Paul’s typical candor showed through.

“What we need is more WikiLeaks about the Federal Reserve,” he said. “Can you imagine what it’d be like if we had every conversation in the last 10 years with our Federal Reserve people, the Federal Reserve chairman, with all the central bankers of the world and every agreement or quid-pro-quo they have? It would be massive. People would be so outraged.”

Paul, a longtime critic of the US Federal Reserve, is the incoming chairman of a House subcommittee on monetary policy. His most recent book, titled “End the Fed,” takes aim at central banks the world over, blaming fiat money systems and fractional reserve banking for the world’s increasingly volatile economies.

“In a free society we’re supposed to know the truth,” Paul insisted. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.

via Rawstory

Wikileaks: The World Will Be A Better Place

LONDON -WikiLeaks struggled to stay online Friday as corporations and governments moved to cut its access to the Internet, a potentially crippling blow for an organization dedicated to releasing secret information via the web.

Legal pressure increased on the site’s founder, Julian Assange, after Swedish authorities cleared an obstacle to his arrest by adding information to a European arrest warrant in response to procedural questions from British officials, who had put his possible arrest on hold for more than a day.

Assange’s lawyer said that he is in the U.K. but she hadn’t received a warrant by Friday afternoon.

Assange said that his arrest would do nothing to halt the flow of American diplomatic cables being released by his group and newspapers in several countries. Hundreds have been published in redacted form this week and Assange said that all of the cables had already been distributed in a heavily encrypted form to tens of thousands of people.

If something happened to him, he suggested, then the password needed to unencrypt the data would be released and all the secrets would go out at once.

“History will win,” Assange said in a web chat with readers of The Guardian newspaper, one of the media organizations helping to coordinate the documents’ publication. “The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you.”

via AOL

Where in the World Is Julian Assange?

(Nov. 30) — Seemingly everyone wants a piece of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this week, with Interpol, Sweden, the United States, Australia, Sarah Palin, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill O’Reilly joining the posse.

Palin says he should be hunted down “like al-Qaida.” O’Reilly calls him a “sleazebag.” Government officials want him tried for espionage, and Interpol is after him for alleged sex crimes. Others want him banned from the Internet.

Good luck with all of that. The 39-year-old recluse and self-described misfit — whose latest secret-documents dump comprises more than 250,000 diplomatic memos — has been on the lam for months.

Amid an escalating series of controversies, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been laying low recently and was last known to be in London.

So where is he? This month he’s apparently been in London, where he gave an interview to Forbes magazine, posted online this week after the chat was recorded at an undisclosed London apartment. The Australian native has cut and dyed his hair again to avoid detection, and promised that his site’s rage-inspiring and ongoing upload of U.S. State Department documents was only the beginning — of his latest controversy.

via AOL