Julian Assange: the fugitive

[freshwest]

2. This reads like lives of the rich and famous. I googled this from the article:

...Domscheit-Berg stated he would destroy WikiLeaks data when leaving WikiLeaks.[17] He wanted to be sure that duplicates would be confirmed deleted by a notary with an affidavit.[18]

In leaving, WikiLeaks state that Domscheit-Berg representing OpenLeaks, held the organisation to ransom over the unpublished documents and internal organisation communications[19] with mediations by a member of the hacker collective Chaos Computer Club between OpenLeaks and WikiLeaks.

Domscheit-Berg apparently told weekly Der Freitag that "I took no documents from WikiLeaks with me", leading to suspension of mediations.[16] Domscheit-Berg was eventually kicked out of Chaos Computer Club due to his conduct during the mediation and for requesting the Chaos Computer Club to test OpenLeaks' security.[16] This decision was revoked in February 2012 by the general assembly of the Chaos Computer Club.

WikiLeaks and other sources later confirmed the destruction of over 3500 unpublished whistleblower communications with some communications containing hundreds of documents.[18][16][20][21]

Including: US Government's No Fly List[22], 5 GB of Bank of America leaks[23], insider information from 20 right-wing organizations[22][24] and proof of torture and government abuse of a Latin America country...[25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Domscheit-Berg

I never forgot this. Who remembers these stories?

What Does WikiLeaks Have on Bank of America?
Thursday 13 January 2011
by: Mary Bottari - t r u t h o u t

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a U.S. megabank executive. In 2009, he told Computer World that the bank was Bank of America (BofA). In 2010, he told Forbes that the information was significant enough to "take down a bank or two," but that he needed time to lay out the information in a more user-friendly format.

http://archive.truthout.org/what-does-wikileaks-have-bank-america66889

Some of WikiLeaks' Bank of America data destroyed

...The destruction of the documents could provide a small amount of relief to Bank of America investors. The bank's stock dropped 3 percent in November amid fears the bank could be the target of WikiLeaks' next document release. In recent weeks investors have pummeled Bank of America's stock on fears it may need to raise outside capital to absorb losses...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/22/us-bankofamerica-wikileaks-idUSTRE77L55P20110822

I wish they had not destroyed the data which might have brought down right wing groups, that they had released proof of abuse in 'a Latin American country' noted on the Wikipedia page. Here is something I read years ago about this:

If you rule by code you will fall by code: the philosophy of Wikileaks

...The world of diplomacy, the world of the rulers, is certainly no sacred realm. The content of the leaked cables - as has been pointed out - is not all that surprising. But Marshall McLuhan strikes again here too: the message is the medium. The momentous nature of Wikileaks comes in its form, not its content: the digitalisation of our representations of the world around us is a new global DNA. And that digitalisation brings to the foreground – partly by contrast – another, complementary aspect of humanity: what I call crealism, the desire to become self-created, to establish a space of liberty outside the automata by seizing democratic control of of the protocols that rule us. Another word for this is empowerment.

The old, elitist, analog world of double-speak and counter-bluff, the worlds of diplomacy and political institutions, cannot hope to survive the two-pronged attack from digitalisation and empowerment. The message sent by Wikileaks to governments is this: “you are using the digital to organise the world and to control the people; but that means that the people will also have access to your mechanisms of control, the code and the data; the people will be able to hack you – to uncover and subvert your hegemonic uses.” The only way governments could stop this democratising force would be to imprison the coders – a temptation some seem to be tempted by.

Whosoever rules by code will fall by code. Those who expect to control the masses through biometric identification systems and other electronic controls, must expect that the digital will be turned back against them. And this as long as hackers have access to a free Web and a free press. The freedom needed is not just technical – it requires constructive crticism. Remember the lesson from Orwell: technocratic digitalism alone, without crealism - collective empowerment - will not deliver more democracy … but only the best of all possible worlds.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/print/57240

Is this theory working at all?