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AS JULIAN ASSANGE awaits a judge’s extradition verdict, it could be WikiLeaks’ very future that’s at stake.
Its finances under pressure and some of its biggest revelations already public, WikiLeaks may not have the strength to survive if Britain’s High Court judge decides Wednesday in favour of a Swedish request to extradite Assange to face questioning over rape allegations, some experts argue.
Tim Maurer, who has studied the group and its membership, said he wasn’t sure whether its remaining staff had the tech savvy to run the site if its founder is absent.
“I don’t think that WikiLeaks will exist without Assange,” said Maurer, a research associate at the Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Extradition
Legal analysts were predicting a ruling in favour of extradition.
“Very, very few people defeat a European Arrest Warrant,” said Julian Knowles, an extradition lawyer at London’s Matrix Chambers who has been following the case. “The courts in England generally lean in favour of extradition.”
Assange may have the right to challenge an unfavourable verdict in Britain’s Supreme Court. But Knowles said that if he were denied leave to appeal, it could be only days before he were sent to Scandinavia to face allegations of sex crimes.
That result could be devastating for WikiLeaks.
For much of the past year Assange has been running the website from a supporter’s country manor in eastern England, where the terms of his bail have confined him to virtual house arrest.
The 40-year-old Australian says he has 20 staff members, but it’s unclear who might take over were he jailed. A few years ago two of his closest aides, Joseph Farrell and Sarah Harrison, were working as journalistic interns. WikiLeaks’ spokesman, Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson, is rarely reachable.
Even if Assange eventually wins his battle to the stay in the UK, his fight will be far from over.
A US grand jury is still weighing whether to indict him on espionage charges, WikiLeaks is straining under the weight of an American financial embargo which he says has starved it of nearly all its revenue, and some media organisations that previously worked closely with the website have since turned their backs to the online secret-spiller.
Perhaps most important is the question of whether Assange can still produce explosive leaks with his suspected chief source, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, in detention.
Purported chat logs between Manning and the man who turned him in, Adrian Lamo, list the State Department cables, the Iraq war logs, and a sheaf of Guantanamo documents among the highlights of the material handed to WikiLeaks.
Except for an Afghanistan air strike video — which has allegedly been destroyed — all the material has since been published.
WikiLeaks’ only other publicly announced disclosure since then, the purported hand-over of CDs packed with tax evasion secrets by Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer, turned into a big dud when Elmer’s lawyers later claimed that the discs were blank.
Troubled partnerships
Even if the spectacular revelations return — and Assange insists he’s still sitting on hundreds of secrets — WikiLeaks may have trouble finding an outlet to publish them.
The WikiLeaks chief said last week that he’d struck deals with some 90 media and human rights groups. But he has long had a prickly relationship with the mainstream press, which he variously describes as corrupt, complicit with powerful governments, or — in a recent speech to demonstrators in London — “war criminals.”
Many journalists return Assange’s disdain.
“I don’t think we’d ever work with him again,” said Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger, whose newspaper played a key role in last year’s WikiLeaks disclosures.
Assange’s conflicts with the Guardian (and The New York Times) are long-running, but reservations about WikiLeaks extend beyond the English-language press.
Concerns became especially acute after WikiLeaks published 250,000 diplomatic cables to the Web in their raw, uncensored form — a move many feared would lead to the persecution of sensitive diplomatic sources.
The circumstances of the release are disputed, but Javier Moreno, the director of Spain’s El Pais newspaper, said it had breached his paper’s agreement with the online secret-spiller.
“It is now too complicated to work with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,” Moreno told The Associated Press in September.
Other problems are looming. WikiLeaks is starved for cash, something Assange says is the result of the decision by MasterCard Inc., Visa, and other financial companies to block donations to his site late last year. Assange warned last week that his site could shut as soon as January if funding didn’t pick up. Lawyers for his payment processor have lodged a complaint in Brussels.
Back in the United States, the grand jury investigation into Assange’s activities continues, with government lawyers trawling through the Internet records of WikiLeaks’ volunteers and supporters looking for evidence of criminal activity under US laws.
Governments have also become more wary of the threat of WikiLeaks-style releases.
In early October, the White House announced a series of measures to guard US government computer networks and classified material against leaks — including the creation of a special committee to coordinate information sharing and to ensure confidentiality.
But Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, said that the spirit of WikiLeaks would live on whatever happened to the group — or to Assange.
“The technology that made WikiLeaks possible is not going away,” he said.
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Well that’s what happens when you run a public health system on the brink of collapse for 9 years. Soon as there’s unforeseen extra load placed on it, you’re in trouble.
@Unconvertible Rebel: Get a grip. Government doing a fantastic job, look across the water both ways.
@Unconvertible Rebel: Bit of a difference between an extra load and a global pandemic. Health services all over the world are struggling to deal with this issue
@Unconvertible Rebel: Ah stop, I agree our public health service was under performing but nobody could have imagine a health emergency of these proportions.
@Unconvertible Rebel: no country in the world has been able to cope with it
@Unconvertible Rebel: a ridiculous comment. You can’t run a health service for a pandemic that might happen every hundred years. It’s not feasible and definitely not necessary.
@Unconvertible Rebel: oh ,just go away please -I am sick and tired of the same old BS being trotted out here every day – If you have nothing positive to say just keep quiet .
@Unconvertible Rebel: There’s no hospital system in the world that would have the capicity we’ll need in the coming weeks. By the way, our health system has been unslder resourced for much longer than 9 years, not sure where you’re getting that time frame from!
@Unconvertible Rebel: my sentiments exactly, as much as they appear to be doing all they can, there has been fundamental problems that have gone unsolved in the HSE for years which has then caused this enormous pressure on the service. I wonder statistically speaking if you contract serious complications with covid-19 in which areas of the country are you most likely to die, such as it is with heart attacks etc due to lack of services and resources? Morbid but true.
@Unconvertible Rebel: Look if you’re going to use this epidemic to score political points the *least* you could do is actually expand on the topic in some kind of meaningful or useful way.
For example, as a country we are in the Top 10 worldwide in terms of spending per capita on health. As such we don’t have a spending (ie political) issue, we have a management (ie civil-service) issue. So the reality is it doesn’t really matter who gets elected in terms of our health service since our civil service is entrenched in their position like it’s the Somme and the year is 1916.
And if you ask a politician what they think they can do about this they will just stare at you as if you just asked them to fly. So not only does the actual problem get almost no recognition, it’s further compounded by the fact that our health service is treated like a political football come election time. Unless we solve these structural blockers actual reform is borderline impossible. You might as well be trying to learn how to fly.
@Breda Kelly: Ablab alamas Canadian eh?
@Tony Lyons: much like the Who and its Chinese masters you seem to overlook Taiwan
@Unconvertible Rebel: Sit down in a dark room you fool.
@Breda Kelly: me ass doing a great job
@Unconvertible Rebel: clown
@Breda Kelly: another North-South polist among us. Shameful.
@Breda Kelly: I’m don’t seem to be buying into this government doing a great job.. the government are simple taking orders from the health professionals. And why is Leo Varadkar posing for photos. Seems every opportunity is a photo shoot for them..
@Unconvertible Rebel: Sinn Fein troll. You are doing more damage to the party with your rubbish on herd than their elected members singing IRA songs drunk in bars.
@Paul O’Sullivan: oh look, another brand new faceless twitter account calling anyone who isnt singing leos praises SF trolls.
the spin unit is back
@Breda Kelly: per percentage of population, the UK are faring both better and worse than us in Ireland, so it’s a fairly uninformed argument that they are faring much worse than us. Better In UK: 0.0449% as of population who are infected as to Ireland’s 0.0714%. However, deaths in UK 0.00354% compared to Ireland’s 0.00176%. Median age in Ireland is 36.5years while in the UK it is 40years, so you should statistically see more deaths there than here as a % of population. What I’d love to compare are the number of beds and ICU beds, ventilators and testing kits
@John O Brien: the sign of a good leader is listening to the experts. Look at the 2 countries either side of us!
@Irene Mc Hugh: Irene it would be very boring here if people cannot say what they want. Be more open minded to a variety of comments & opinions. Adds variety.
If u can’t take it deactivate your account.
@Declan Edward: you haven’t taken into account that we had tested I’ve twice as many per head on the positive numbers
@johnny onion eye: didn’t take it into account! We’re pretty much on the same playing field so. I did expect UKs numbers to be much worse considering that 83% live in urban areas compared to Ireland’s 63%.
@Breda Kelly: delays in carrying out testing and test results government claim shortage of supply yes other countries dont have same problems.
Yes doing amazing job alright
@Unconvertible Rebel: shut up with your pander you can see the whole world is suffering. Please stop with wrongful propaganda. God bless
@Maria: Dustin would look good in comparison to those two as apes
@Declan Edward: I’m sorry Declan but you can’t draw meaningful comparisons with the U.K. in terms of the numbers of infected. They aren’t testing serious numbers of people. Proportionately, Ireland is testing far more people. The U.K. stats are internationally accepted as unreliable. Moreover, where deaths occur outside of the hospital environment due to Covid they are not included in the U.K. figures at the moment as I understand it.
@John O Brien: Another person who thinks, conveniently, that the Govt are taking orders from civil servants. The legal of ignorance amongst a cohort of certain Journal commentators about how democratic Government works is illuminating. The Govt takes advice from civil and public servants. Advice. All key decisions are taken by Government and nobody else. They are them accountable for those decisions. The Govt don’t follow “orders” from the unelected. They are not SF for goodness sake.
Harris telling us the HSE is under pressure! Yes Simon we’ve been telling you that for years now!
@Colette Kearns: I remember visiting hospitals be in the 1970s when religious orders were in charge. Everything was spotless. You could smell the antiseptic in the air. There wasn’t any huge waiting lists. A first world health service at time when we were economically poor. It seems like our liberal “progression” has regressed our health system to that of a 3rd world nation. Bring back the nuns!
@Colette Kearns: thanks Colette for your intelligent input to the unforeseen problem Ireland and the whole world are experiencing at this moment in time. When this is all over run for the elections and you can show us all the expert you are while running the health service in this country.
@John Devaney: Yeah, I used to live it when they beat the snot out of us when they ran the schools. But sure at least they were spotless schools
@Colette Kearns: maybe you should run the health service so?. We can all complain. Unfortunately the HSE isn’t a quick fix. Increase in funding has been allocated in the last few budgets, but it is once of those areas that every country find it hard to run effectively.
@John Devaney: no. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. My grandmothers used to say that you only go into hospital to die. Nuns or no nuns, we didn’t have a wonderful health system. There was a very recent modern push to reform it, by which I mean shake off the abusive practices that other countries had successfully reformed from 1964 onwards. You were far too young to realise how many women were literally crippled by an outdated system; nor how many men died before their time. Oh, and the clean smell of antiseptic was applied by enslaved pregnant women, conned into believing they deserved to work for a pittance, while their children were being starved in orphanages. Stop sniffing the air and support the health service staff working in this century.
@John Devaney: in the 1970s DOBwas bearly out of short pants
@John Devaney: Was that when you were out pulling women? Looking back is great, the good times ehhh…. except medicine has moved on quite a bit, costs a fortune and we can treat way more illnesses…..
@Steve O’Reilly: BS very few developed countries in Europe have a similar shambles of a health service as ours.
@John Devaney: that’s a common misconception. Hospitals nowadays are just as clean. Its the superbugs you can’t see due to decades of over prescribing which are the problem in controlling infections.
@John Devaney: leave them where they are. That was the time where u would be two weeks in hospital if u were having your appendix out.
@Colette Kearns: Very true. Its what happens when you initiative something to Death. The money can spread over far far too much and not enough Butter. Scale back protect the core services.
Will you all stop bashing Unconvertible Rebel..and look at the photo…Leo will want to practice what he preaches…He is NOT 2 metres away
@brian reid: I see that. It might be the camera angle, it’s hard to judge with foreshortening. They certainly don’t look as if they’re 2 metres apart. We can’t tell but let’s assume for the sake of thinking it through that they have both been tested recently and aren’t carriers, because they have essential roles.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: Silly statement..( they have been tested )does not stop them from catching it in the future…this virus does not distinguish what job you do..
@brian reid: no fear he wont go near her.
@Paul O’Sullivan: maybe she would just to let him see what he is missing
This has publicity stunt wrote all over it. How in the midst of the worse pandemic we have seen in our lifetime is he going round smiling in these pictures like its something to be proud of. I really dont understand this man at the best of times in the riddles and smoke screens but these pics are like a bloody advert!
@Christine Hanway: reminds me a bit of when he saw what way the wind was blowing & jumped on the Repeal bandwagon. Everything is calculated PR opportunity with him
@Christine Hanway: did he not advise us to NOT make any non essential journeys? Did he not advise us to stay at home where possible? Was this really an essential journey, did both himself and Harris really have to be there? Another photo opportunity and a chance for them to tell us how wonderful they are.
His ego is out of control!!!
Very hygienic, park your ar#e on the treatment couch. The hired help will deal with it.
Government doing a good job. We are lucky we are not in the UK or the US. EU overlords doing sod all for anyone.
have your say