Russia 101202 Basic Political Developments

Julian Assange says WikiLeaks wants to expose China and Russia as much as US

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/02/julian-assange-wikileaks-china-russia

In interview, Assange denies US focus and says WikiLeaks can be force for opening up closed countries like China and Russia

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 December 2010 00.01 GM

Jo Adetunji

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted to expose China's and Russia's secrets as much as those of the US, and believes Hillary Clinton should resign if she ordered diplomats to engage in espionage.

"[Clinton] should resign if it could be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage of UN activities, in violation of the international covenants to which the US signed up," he said in an interview with Time magazine, published yesterday following the leak of secret US diplomatic cables that have caused huge embarrassment for the country.

Assange gave the interview via Skype from an undisclosed location after a warrant was issued by Interpol following rape allegations in Sweden, which his lawyer said amounted to persecution and a smear campaign.

While Assange has been accused by former members of the WikiLeaks project of obsessively focusing on the US, he said countries with less transparency, such as China and Russia, had the most potential to be reformed by whistleblowers.

"We believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential," he said. Assange said that while parts of the Chinese government and security services "appear terrified of free speech" he believed it was "an optimistic sign because it means speech can still cause reform."

He added: "Journalism and writing is capable of achieving change which is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it."

Assange argued that countries like China could be easier to reform than countries like the US and the UK, which "have been so heavily fiscalised through contractual obligations that political change doesn't seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn't result in change."

While secrecy was important, Assange said, in keeping the identity of sources hidden, secrecy "shouldn't be used to cover up abuses."

He said that revealing abuses could lead to positive changes in countries and organisations. "They have one of two choices … to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavours, and proud to display them to the public" or "to lock down internally and to balkanise, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient."

Turning back to the US, Assange said he believed American society was "becoming more closed" and its "relative degree of openness … probably peaked in about 1978, and has been on the way down, unfortunately, since."

Speaking about accusations that he had singled out the US as a force for harm in the world, Assange said the view lacked "the necessary subtlety".

"I don't think the US is, by world standards, an exception; rather it is a very interesting case both for its abuses and for some of its founding principles."

Assange said the media interest in the WikiLeaks cables had been tremendous.

"The media scrutiny and the reaction are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it," he said, with "a tremendous rearrangement of viewings about many different countries".

Assange also gave a glimpse into why WikiLeaks had chosen to partner with traditional media organisations to release the files, rather than, as might have been expected, amateur bloggers. In 2006, "we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on," he said.

But "when people write political commentary on blogs or other social media, it is my experience that it is not, with some exceptions, their goal to expose the truth.

"Rather, it is their goal to position themselves amongst their peers on whatever the issue of the day is. The most effective, the most economical way to do that, is simply to take the story that's going around, [which] has already created a marketable audience for itself, and say whether they're in favour of that interpretation or not."

Now, he said, the analytical work was "done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human rights activists. It is not done by the broader community." Social networks acted as amplifiers, he added – and, as WikiLeaks gained more publicity, an important supplier of source material.

2 December 2010 Last updated at 01:07 GMT

Wikileaks: Russia branded 'mafia state' in recent cable

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11893886
Kristinn Hrafnsson says people have a right to know what officials working on their behalf are doing.

A senior Spanish prosecutor told the US Embassy in Madrid that Russia, Belarus and Chechnya had become virtual "mafia states", new disclosures of classified material by Wikileaks show.

A cable also questions whether Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is implicated in the Russian mafia.

Another reveals that a powerful Ukrainian businessman told US officials he had ties to Russian organised crime.

The documents are among hundreds being released by the whistle-blower website.

On Wednesday the US online shopping giant Amazon reportedly blocked Wikileaks from its servers - a move welcomed by US officials.

Mafia links?

Access to Wikileaks' homepage was sporadic on Wednesday. The website had been using Amazon servers since its Swedish-based servers came under cyber-attack twice earlier this week.

The cables, published by the Guardian newspaper, show that in January 2010, Spanish prosecutor Jose "Pepe" Grinda Gonzales claimed that in Russia, Belarus and Chechnya "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the Government and OC (organised crime) groups".

Judge Grinda led a long investigation into Russian organised crime in Spain, leading to more than 60 arrests.

A cable from the US Embassy in Madrid talks about the "unanswered question" of the extent to which Mr Putin is implicated in the mafia and whether he controls its actions.

Judge Grinda reportedly said that former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko thought Russian intelligence controlled organised crime in Russia. Mr Grinda reportedly stated that he believed this thesis was accurate.

In the cable, the judge is reported as saying he has information that certain political parties in Russia operate "hand in hand" with organised crime.

The leaked cables also show that Washington believed Mr Putin was likely to have known about the operation to murder Mr Litvinenko in London in 2006. The Kremlin has denied any involvement.

Wikileaks also released another cable, from the US Embassy in Kiev dated December 2008, which reveals that a Ukrainian businessman with links to the Russia state-run conglomerate Gazprom told the US ambassador he had ties to Russian organised crime.

He said he had needed the approval of a gangster called Semyon Mogilevich to get into business.

Mogilevich is believed by European and US law enforcement agencies to be the "boss of bosses" of most Russian Mafia syndicates in the world.

BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall says that neither Moscow nor Washington will be happy at being exposed by the latest Wikileaks revelations.

She says the contents of the secret cables will place new strains on their relationship.

In other developments, Interpol has issued a notice asking for information on the whereabouts of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Interpol said the Australian was wanted for questioning in Sweden over an alleged sex offence, which he has denied.

On Wednesday the US appointed an anti-terrorism expert to lead efforts to tackle damage caused by the documents' release.

Russell Travers will try to find out how thousands of secret files were taken from government internet files. The White House said he had also been tasked with tightening security inside the US government's computer network.

Wikileaks has so far posted only 505 of the 251,287 messages it says it has obtained. However, all of the messages have been made available to five publications, including the New York Times and the Guardian.

The US has condemned the disclosures as an attack on the world community.