HOMOSAPIENS.KI BULLETIN BOARD

The News Stand and Online Magazine Rack



Current and Forecast Weather for Manhattan
For other cities in North America (and trip planner), type location in top line at this link.

- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman | TV Channel ^

BBC World Service Live ^

MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann ^

- America's #1 Populist Jim Hightower On Air ^

- Mark Fiore Animated Political Cartoons ^

- Documentary - Bilderberg and the Obama Deception ^

Jewish TV Channel ^

---

Top Story-Lines

Julian Assange, the man behind Wikileaks ^
They seek him here, they seek him there, but the founder of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks is as elusive as a modern-day pimpernel.

Julian Assange dreamt that one day the internet would streamline the leaking of state secrets. Last week his whistleblowers’ website posted its most explosive leak yet: a secret video shot by an American attack helicopter of Iraqi civilians and a Reuters photographer being mown down, apparently in cold blood.

The release of the military footage and recordings of US air crew mocking the dead has deeply embarrassed the Pentagon, outraged Iraqi journalists and enhanced the aura of mystery surrounding Assange, a figure so elusive that he even refuses to confirm his age: “I prefer to keep the bastards guessing.”

- The Strange Upbringing of Wikileaks Founder Jullian Assange ^

Australian hacker Julian Assange, Wikileaks' silver-coiffed leader, increasingly appears to be the main character in a Web 2.0 Mad Max sequel. His past includes a carefree childhood, escaping a cult and motorcycling around Vietnam.

Wikileaks.org is the whistle-blowing website that's responsible for dozens of high-profile leaks, including this year's Iraq attack helicopter video. Much of the information contained in the long profile of Assange in this week's New Yorker is not new: Assange and his haphazard crew are overly paranoid; Assange is a passionate crusader who sees Wikileaks as the vanguard in a new movement for radical transparency; Assange is sort of a weirdo hobo, who travels the world with a duffel bag full of socks.

But New Yorker reporter Raffi Khatchadourian delves deep into Assange's past and we learn about the abbreviated childhood that shaped his obsessions. Assange for a time lived on the tiny Magnetic Island off the coast of Australia. He was homeschooled, grew up riding horses and making rafts, and when he was eight his mom hooked up with a musician. Things got weird:

- A Reporter at Large | No Secrets ^
Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency.
The New Yorker - by Raffi Khatchadourian - June 7. 2010

The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

- Video | * * *** Julian Assange - Oslo Freedom Forum 2010 (Part 1 of 2) ^

Assange speech on the War Between Transparency vs Secreted and Destroyed Historical Facts | The Struuggle Between Open Honesty and Nefarious'Criminal' Activity. (nefarious - adjective - (typically of an action or activity) wicked or criminal : the nefarious activities of the organized-crime syndicates - including those in government. )

- Video: WikiLeaks’ Media Insurgency - Baghdad Massacre ^
Posted by The New Yorker _ May 31, 2010

This week in the magazine, Raffi Khatchadourian writes about WikiLeaks. Here Khatchadourian discusses a classified U.S. military video that shows the killing of two Reuters employees in Baghdad, posted by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder.”

---

Sound off at Carrumpah-Lobo, the Homosapiens.ki Blog
- Check in

---

About Homosapiens.ki

This website incorporates clips from mainstream and alternative media and, less frequently, blogs, and even obviously biased and counter-point-of-view sources. The clips are taken directly from the websites noted in each source link. Quotation marks are used where they appear in the cited source.

Homosapiens.ki has been developed on the XOOPS website production program.

Subscribe to a brief email notification as each edition of this site is posted. See top, left of any page io subscribe.

The editorial offices of Homosapiens.ki are located in New York City and Nelson BC Canada. Website hosting and technical services are provided from Sydney, Australia. The domain name registration ( .ki ) is a service of the Republic of Kiribati ( South Pacific ) domain registrar. Special thanks are due to all those who have assisted in bringing this site to life on the internet.

You may email the editor at
orchill@earthlink.net

In accordancee with TITLE 17 U.S.C. Sectopm 107, this material is distributed free to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes, Homosapiens.ki has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this content nor is Homosapiens.ki endorsed or sponsored by any originator.

Links are provided for access to source articles and for verification of authenticity. However, as originating Items are sometimes updated by their host sites, a version posted here may not match the version our readers view when clicking the source link on this site.

Privacy - we will not sell or otherwise or provide your name, address or any other personal information to any entity or person whatsoever at any point in time.

---