@ Date Confusion
The investigation was started August 20, when the allegations were made.
Then it was cancelled on August 21 because most of the larger claims were felt to be baseless and only the lighter claims held water. At least, as felt by the Swedish police.
30 August, he was questioned by the Stockholm police.
Then a super higher up stepped in and reinstated heavier sexual assault allegations on September 1st. The director reclassified the investigation as a rape investigation. There was no actual change in evidence and no new result from the investigation to prompt that change.
He left Sweden on 27 September 2010.
So, presumably he left because he thought he was going to get politically persecuted. You can agree/disagree with that.
@ Dismissal of rape allegations
Look, when not even feminists in Sweden are giving a shit, I'm not going to do so.
@ Founding
As this isn't OTC, going off-topic doesn't really matter.
The Chinese dissidents are counted as starting Wikileaks because the organisation is about leaks, not about fancy speeches. Those guys risked life and limb to get out information on the Chinese regime, I'm going to count them as the founders and I count the other people as helping them. I'm going to give credit where credit is due.
Even your article lists them first. "Quite a few", as in, more words were necessary to describe each and every non-Chinese person whereas the Chinese personnel was a one-shot "Chinese dissidents"?
edited 20th Aug '12 1:54:08 PM by breadloaf
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Bread:
The article pretty much states the Chinese dissidents are not the sole creators of it and it was launched with the help of an unknown number of persons from other parts of the world like North America, Europe, South Africa and Australia. I wouldn't be surprised if the people who were involved in the initial launching, funding, and volunteering to start wiki leaks was much more diverse.
I want you pay attention to this part.
The dissidents are listed with the various back grounds such as journalist, mathematicians, start up techies and then it goes on to list where everyone is from. The first half of the quote is backgrounds for the inviduals the second half is where everyone is from. The dissidents are not the sole or even chief originators, this was clearly a multinational effort of people who all shared a variety of concerns about government and its handling of information. They came together under one banner to found,start, and run Wikileaks.
I am still calling bs on the fear of being sent to the U.S. He was in the hands of the authorities a couple times and he wasn't shipped to the U.S. The government of Sweden knew full well the Americans wanted him and could have clapped him in cuffs and sent him back when tey had him around still.
Personally I think either his paranoia has gotten the better of him and he made a mistake.
Also even if Assange gets snatched up Wikileaks will not cease to be or cease to function. In fact it would be beneficial for him to get snatched up. Granted his life would officially suck from that point on but it would pretty much immediately validate the majority of his claims and would certainly cause the world as whole to take wikileaks much more seriously. Then the massive backlash against anyone involved would ensue. The impact of such an event would be amplified if he fully cooperated with authorities and went in voluntarily.
I believe the fear of backlash is very likely why Ecuador still has an Embassy in Britain and it hasn't be dissolved and stormed to get Assange.In fact I think both the U.S. and Sweden know this and would rather let him continue to make an ass of himself. As long as his conspiracy does not materialize he loses credibility for making such claims. The smart thing to do would be to do nothing and let him go to Sweden talk to the authorities and then go through normal legal proceedings.
It would be far more damaging to snatch him then to leave him.
Who watches the watchmen?
The best option for the USA is to smear his name and always hover the option of snatching him so he always lives in fear. His life still sucks and people will call him a rapist and his entire life will be clouded by an ever growing number of criminal allegations.
The difference between the West and dictatorships like China is that our governments are much better at PR campaigns.
And the sentence you point out seems to indicate that they received Western funding from technology start-up guys, but the main people were "Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians". The group came to include more and more non-Asian dissidents over time, very quickly, since 2006 and generally operated in that manner (of collecting information from a growing network of dissidents). I'm not sure what the big deal is here to admit that Chinese dissidents were the primary component of Wikileaks at its birth. It just feels like a pointless exercise to shift credit away from the hidden individuals of the organisation and toward the visible faces.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
It would indeed be far more effective to let him face the charges in Sweden and never snatch him to make the claims of conspiracy seem crazy to emberass him. In fact that might actually be one of the most harmful things they could do to his reputation. The results of the investigation, charges, and subsequent trial would impacted noticably. Even if declared innocent it will still have people wondering. If he is guilty even on some lesser charge he looks like creep and a fugitive.
The group was multinational from the begining. The sentence makes it very clearthat it was not anyone group but a series of people who got together to found it from multiple nations and multiple back grounds. The dissidents are a background not a point of origin.
Addtional fact checking shows no evidence of the Chinese dissidents being the originators. It does show the mutli-national and multi-background effort. The staff and volunteers included everyone from the listed backgrounds and then some including the dissidents.
Plus I showed you an article saying the Chinese Dissidents wanted their own wiki leaks like site. why on earth would they want one when they supposedly founded wiki leaks? Not a Chinese dissident only start up.
At best the claim that it was started by Chinese dissidents is very questionable and likely originated from erronious info being passed on and not fact checked before hitting publishing.
edited 24th Aug '12 9:03:47 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Basically, to me, it goes like this. The "international" effort at the beginning was a method for which to give the group a face and the opportunity to raise funds. Chinese dissidents can't go around saying "Hey, I'm leaking secret information from communist China, want to support me?". He'd be dead the next day. But Assange? He can go out to USA raise funds, awareness and so on. So what is the disproportionate attention going to be spent on? Not the anonymous people actually doing the hard work that needs to be done.
I mean, we can sit here, read a zillion biographies, descriptions and multi-page articles on every single westerner involved in the wikileaks organisation, or suspected to be involved in it, yet you won't find anything more than one sentence about the guys actually doing anything. But, you are basing the amount of words being written about the westerners as "proof" that they make up this "large international effort". They do not. I'm not trying to say they did nothing, or that they were not useful to the organisation but it's like if you pretended the PR guy at a major corporation was the mover/shaker of the technology it produced. Obviously it'd be the faceless anonymous people working hard behind the glass walls that are actually doing things and not the marketing heads.
The point of having Assange as the face is for him to take the fall. For him to be charged with sexual assault. For his name to be run through the dirt. For his life and anything bad he ever did from kindergarten and on to be magnified 10000x fold. And the people actually hard at work? They get to continue on in anonymity. You don't know their size, their names, their extent or their reach and really that's the point.
So then slowly in the background the dissident groups can network, share information and grow. After the first years of its existence, they've really branched out and rather than just focusing on Chinese information, they've went through the Mid-east, Africa, North Africa and only now have they begun leaking secret from the West. Now is the first time where they were even noticed in the west and also why they were immediately demonised. I mean just look at the media talk about it, "These guys are just out to hurt the USA!". Right. That's why they were leaking information on China since 2006.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Any new news on the situation with the embassy?
All of the information points to it being international. You have folks from South Africa , parts of the middle east, people from Europe, the U.S., all over Asia and Canada, and other regions. China is not the only nation where leaking can get you killed or disappeared.
Where did I specify westerners? That is your words not mine. You can can continue to errounsiously insist it was for Chinese dissidents but we have the information from the people who founded it from the ground up. You have offered nothing of substance to support the notion it was a Chinese group who founded it for it use by the Chinese or that it was intended for the Chinese dissidents to use. Not only have I pointed out there is readily available info that it was founded by a much broader group but that the Chinese are seeking to emulate wikileaks in a spin off for their specific use.
Assange is more then just a face unless you haven't been paying attention but is one of the founders.
Wikileaks was not created soley for the Chinese dissident or with the Chinese dissidents alone in mind. It was created for leakers and whistle blowers in general. This is the stated goal of the site from day one. We don't need biographies or special research we have the info right from the horses mouth so to speak.
The first posted Major leak was from Somalia just to bring home the international nature of the group.
Wiki leaks started out working just like a common wiki. User editable website. It shifted models to provide better protection to it's sources. We don't see any serious Asia related leaks until sometime around 2008 and it is about Tibetan dissidents not the Chinese dissidents.
To quote wikileaks itself from their own page they put together. Courtsey of the Way Backmachine. earliest snap shot is October 2007
You know not long after Wikileaks was started up.
Our public Advisory Board, which is still in formation, includes courageous journalists, representatives from refugee communities, ethics and anti-corruption campaigners, including a former national head of Transparency International, human rights campaigners, lawyers and cryptographers.
There are currently over 1,200 registered volunteers, but we need more people involved at an organizational level
No where does it say wikileaks is a Chinese lead Chinese formed enterprise. It is from the ground up an international effort. Even their vast array of leaks both minor to the high impact are international in nature from the very begining.
The Chinese have been poking holes in the great fire wall for some time before there was even a wikileaks and are far from the only group to be leaking info in that time frame to the press and the outside world.
Unless you got something to back up your claim that it was formed by Chinese dissidents for use by Chinese dissidents you haven't got a leg to stand on with your claim.
edited 25th Aug '12 8:10:00 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
There is healthy paranoia and then there is letting your paranoia get the better of you.
Who watches the watchmen?