Extortion Attempt of Julian Assange Reveals Total Invasion of Privacy By Ecuadorian Officials at Embassy
Total Surveillance
Spanish Police are investigating an alleged extortion attempt of Julian Assange and Wikileaks by individuals who reportedly are in possession of video footage, photographs and other material from within the Ecuadorian embassy. The current editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson stated that, in conversations with the potential extortionists, the group demanded 3 million Euros in exchange for the material or the items would be made public.
Incredibly, a handwritten "note about Assange’s defense strategy written by one of his lawyers" was also said to be part of the material in possession by the group operating in Spain.
It was clear that the video footage of Assange came from security cameras inside of the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange was granted political asylum by the government of Ecuador in 2012. Since the election of Lenin Moreno as president of Ecuador in 2018, conditions for Assange inside the embassy have quickly transformed into something of a de facto prison steadily worsening with each day.
“Ever since [Ecuador president] Lenín Moreno came to power, Julian Assange has been living in a Truman Show situation,” said Hrafnsson, alluding to the 1998 sci-fi movie starring Jim Carrey.
Total Invasion of Privacy
The Verge
Considering that Julian Assange has been the target of multiple smear campaigns over the years the latest extortion attempt does not come as a surprise. Yet, what is so incredibly insidious about this latest attack on Assange is that the source of it all comes from the very people that are suppose to be safeguarding his human rights and his life - the Ecuadorian government and the staff of the London embassy.
It has been well documented that new draconian conditions of the asylum have been imposed on Assange retroactively that prevent the publisher from accessing the internet, communications of any nature have also been severely limited as well as visitations from friends and family, not to mention speaking on political matters has been prohibited.
In addition, any staff members who were considered to be friendly and/or sympathetic to Assange were effectively removed from the embassy on Moreno's orders.
At the press conference Hrafnsson made clear that although extortion is a very serious matter there were greater concerns:
This material gathering and spying on Julian Assange by the Lenin Moreno government and the officials that work on his behalf in the embassy against an individual that was granted a diplomatic asylum and full protection by the Ecuadorian government. That is, in my opinion, not only illegal but extremely unethical. And we all know from reports this is all the work for one purpose; to service the US government interest who would want to indict and imprison a publisher for the crime of publishing truthful material.
Joining Hrafnsson at the press conference, human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson declared that the latest betrayals are:
A severe breach of lawyer-client attorney privilege and fundamentally undermines our ability to properly defend and provide a defense for Julian Assange.
Wikileaks Press Conference - April 10th 2019
On April 25th, two UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture and Privacy are scheduled to visit the Ecuadorian embassy to examine the treatment of Julian Assange.
#ProtectJulian
This latest escalation of tensions at the embassy comes on the heels of a news that the Ecuadorian government was preparing to expel Assange since last week. News of the pending expulsion was relayed to Wikileaks and made it possible for Assange's supporters to rally to his defense.
An emergency online and real-world campaign. code named #ProtectJulian, sprang into action across the globe over the weekend made up of authors, luminaries, activists, journalists, comedians, leakers, and everyday supporters forcing the Ecuadorian government to cancel their planned eviction.
Members and supporters of the #Unity4J movement have participated in ongoing and inspiring online vigils in support of Assange for almost a year.
For the latest of actions and vigils please visit:
http://unity4j.com/
and
http://unity4j.com/discord
Please @v4vapid, sound the alarm. This is an emergency!
https://steemit.com/wikileaks/@lighteye/breaking-news-evicted-and-arrested
Noooo!
WTF
Thanks for alerting me... Damn this is so sad.
Thanks for continuing to bring attention to this. I find it's way too easy to get sort of mentally buried in the day-to-day stuff and forget about what is going on out there in this screwed up world. I think probably that happens to a lot of people. Something totally absurd will happen and folks get all worked up about it but after a little time goes by, the comfortable apathy creeps back in and washes over everything again.
Apathy finds a way to wash over all of us, indeed. It truly is impossible to keep up with everything going on our crazy planet, I think what helps inform me is when mass media just completely ignores stories and/or launches smear campaigns.It gives us clues as to what they want us to focus on and what they prefer dissolves into obscurity. I honestly believe that they want to completely erase this man down the memory hole. It's been in progress for years already if we pay attention.
Doesn't give much credibility to the Ecuadorian government does it. Well, at least it seems he hasn't been waterboarded, murdered and disappeared - which is likely to happen if he ends up in the hands of the US. Although, the official story might be something like "Assange confesses: commits suicide in cell"
All too likely, I'm afraid. I'd love to see an ocean of people protesting in the streets and carry him away - like he's crowd surfing right out of the embassy. I think that@kerrywolf is correct though we're inundated and even when a spark is lit apathy floods back over us and we get whisked away by its current.
Governments are made up of sacks of shit like us who, after getting to taste a little power, see checks and balances fundamentally as nothing but an impediment. In a world where everything happens increasingly in the digital realm, as many types of transactions as possible should take place on distributed ledgers. That would increasingly obviate the need for counteracting bad actors after the fact thus increasingly removing the need for the criminal justice system. Physical violence will always remain the ultimate trump card, but that resource, too, could be controlled using smart contracts executed on distributed computer networks given sufficiently advanced robotics and AI. The key is to remove the animal element from coercive power.
IMHO, the key is to restore power to individuals from the centralized institutions that have parasitized all of us to gain their oppressive power. DLTs are only part of that endeavor, and alone will simply be coopted by the financial institutions that presently exert control.
Means of production in every industry are being decentralized today at the bleeding edge of technological advance, from agriculture to manufacturing. By adopting individually the decentralized mechanisms that make the most sense in our personal situation, we decrease the parasitism of our wealth and power that creates oppressive tyranny.
We wouldn't even know that JA had been arrested without that decentralizing of the media by citizen journalists, for example. We may not presently have the power to secure his liberty, or even his life, today, but we never will be able to protect any - or all - of us unless we take back our power from the tyrants feeding off our production by adopting nascent technological advance across all industries burgeoning today.
It is the concatenation of decentralization that most creates a robust mechanism to resist tyranny. Any single person, like JA, or mechanism, like DLTs, is able to be oppressed and controlled via the centralized institutions that parasitize us all. That centralization is the very weakness that prevents control of the breadth of decentralization. Institutions centralize our wealth and power via parasitization, and project that power in mechanisms focused by the corrupt individual agents of those institutions. That utterly prevents broad spectrum responses to decentralization across all fields of human endeavor.
We are all animals. It is not to our benefit to further decrease our power, but rather to restore it to us from whom it has been parasitized by inhuman institutions controlled by individual agents. We do that by making what we need ourselves as our situation indicates, by being journalists ourselves, and by making our own means of transacting amongst one another that is resistant to parasitism - DLTs.
Nature is messy, redundant, and robust exactly because of the decentralization of the web of life. Centralized institutions are neat, efficient, and fragile because they are able to specialize and focus on one particular vector for wealth/power. To best defeat tyrants wielding institutional parasitic power against us, we must adopt the redundancy and powerful decentralization natural ecosystems reveal as the secret of their robust ability to thrive under all conditions.
I define abuse and injustice as the problem.
Times before centralized institutions were violent, chaotic and rife with abuse and injustice. Abuse and injustice, plenty of it, can take place at the micro level, too, as in between individuals, within small groups or between small groups. It does not require any degree of centralization.
The out-group vs. in-group distinction is built into our psyche. We are capable of dehumanizing those whom we consider not members of our in-group, committing unspeakable acts of cruelty against them and killing them without compunction given sufficient "justification". Harming our competition and tormenting those beneath our station are par for the course within our in-groups. In a state of nature, our lives are nasty, brutish and short. This has been going on since the dawn of our species, long before there were any centralized power structures.
What centralized states did was stop endemic warfare between tribes by instituting a justice system. But that solution was and remains very inadequate because the problem only played out at a higher level of organization. And thanks to centralization, we have state-level actors capable of developing weapons of mass destruction powerful enough to kill everyone. In fact, that has almost happened at least once.
You're right in that DLT alone is insufficient against corrupt centralized power structures. It's a part of a large array of tools. What I see being done by those in control of centralized power structures is act out the dark side of their human natures with little to stop them. Power is seductive because we're hardwired to seek it. Power is extremely useful at enhancing our success at propagating our genes. But dismantling centralized power structures solves only part of the problem.
No part of this comment isn't true enough. We are indeed hardwired to form hierarchies, and all the social niceties you mention are part of that system. To skip to the end, I also agree that dismantling centralized power structures by implementing decentralized mechanisms will not solve all our problems.
Good. Without problems to solve, we'll become vapid, insipid wastes of oxygen. Without struggle neither of us would be able to speak at all - we had to struggle to learn how to do so. I don't expect decentralization to solve all human problems. I just want the free and sovereign people of the world to have both the authority and the responsibility to do that themselves. Darwin can take care of the aftermath.
Given that government possessing the mechanisms of prosecuting crime is committing the crime, the only means of imposing sanctions on the government agents responsible is mobs with pitchforks and torches. The Moreno government isn't going to prosecute itself.
Government in a nutshell. When you concentrate wealth and power via government, it is incredibly naive to fail to predict the most venal and corrupt criminals will seek to control government. IMHO, this is the very purpose of government: to better provide a vector for corruption, graft, and parasitism on public pockets.
It is obvious across all industries that a race is underway. Either the panoptic police state will manage to more effectively enslave all civilians via sophisticated psychological manipulation combined with ever more violent thugs, or nascent technological advances decentralizing the means of production in every field will continue to erode tyrannical power and increase the liberty and prosperity of ourselves and our posterity.
Because technology is driven by physics, and always increases the power of individuals versus institutions, my bet is on freedom. Decentralization is literally freedom, and it is obvious that increased decentralization is the cutting edge of technological advance in all fields. People are only so stupid, and can only be kept in profitable psychological corrals for so long when the grass over the fence continues to grow ever more verdant.
The real world always eventually dispels hallucinatory fantasy, if only in death. To prevail over the impending panoptic police state all that we have to do is adopt the most advanced technology available and increase our personal prosperity as much as possible. Showing others how preferable that transcendence of legacy industrial paradigms is multiplies the benefits to each of us by every individual adoption of emerging decentralized mechanisms. The viral spread of 3D printing, CRISPR, aquaponics, open source hardware, mesh networks, and so on also multiplies the beneficial effects of adoption via concatenation of the vectors. Each additional adopter doesn't just add one more bit of freedom, but multiplies the freedom of each of us, and each additional mechanism doesn't only add one more bit of prosperity, but multiplies them all. The rate of transference of power and wealth is not additive, nor even multiplicative, but exponential.
Decentralization is literally freedom (I know I'm repeating myself, but this fact is simply utterly critical to grasp). JA is as free as every civilian today, and there may be no more poignant proof that centralization of wealth and power is actual tyranny. Since the governments of the world wield almost all power to surveil, project military power, and prosecute crime, civilians are practically abject slaves. The world has already passed peak centralization today, and the faster and more profitably we adopt nascent technological means of production the quicker JA - and all of us - can get free of the oppressive crimes against humanity tyrants seek to commit to aggrandize themselves.
In the meantime, I am glad to see that not only are civilians aware of the harm tyranny causes, and specifically how JA is being subjected to it but also proved that decentralization of information decreases the power of criminal institutions, but fighting against it to protect him. Let's continue to oppose the police state oppression online, via public policy mechanisms, and in the streets with pitchforks and torches, as necessary.
Thanks!
The embassy appears to believe "protection" includes harsh surveillance, control, and even abuse.
Kind of like most governments.
Fuck them and their forced fake safety!
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