Julian Assange: a summary for dimwits

1. Julian Assange is wanted in Sweden for questioning in relation to allegations of sexual assault. He has not been charged. He has not been 'incarcerated' for aeons as Wikileaks keeps saying - most sex crime suspects are banged up on remand, not bailed to a massive mansion in the countryside before diving into the Ecuadorian Embassy.

2. Julian Assange is innocent unless charged and proven guilty. There's nothing progressive about celebrating a man's refusal to assist an inquiry by the police force of a country which is much, much more equitable and liberal than the UK.

3. The UK and US are definitely infuriated by Wikileaks' activities, and no doubt the US would love to spirit him away from Sweden to somewhere like Texas. This doesn't mean he should seek sanctuary in Ecuador - a largely admirable country though ironically lacking a free press - but that he should face the music in Sweden and our progressive comrades in that country should help resist any US extradition proceedings should that come to pass. I don't see anything wrong with asking the Swedes to guarantee Assange won't be extradited to the US. While we're on the subject, I'm rather confused by the British government's hostility to Assange - after all, when General Pinochet came to stay, hands dripping with the blood of thousands, it protected him from extradition to Spain, in one of the most shameful episodes of political history.

4. Confusing Assange with Wikileaks, and assuming that his sexual conduct must automatically be as stainless as his position on big power duplicity, is a distortion of progressive politics which leads to the dead-end of conspiracy theories.

5. The new element - Ecuador's diplomatic rights - is genuinely worrying. If the UK decides that it can violate international law by entering an Embassy in pursuit of Assange, then there are no more rules in this arena: why should the Chinese not retrieve dissidents sheltering in Western embassies, or the authorities of any other repressive country? It doesn't matter whether it's Assange or the most sainted individual: this aspect of the case is really worrying.

6. The whole affair has unmasked a lot of so-called leftists who think the alleged victims' rights are far less important than their hero's worries. If your politics depends on you downgrading sexual assault and vilifying women when it's politically convenient, you need to take a long hard look at yourself. Of course there's a long history of this kind of vicious masculinist Stalinism: Gerry Healy (Workers' Revolutionary Party, bankrolled by the Iraqi and Libyan reactionary regimes) was a serial rapist, violent thug and hypocrite, yet his cult's members rarely wavered from the argument that all criticism was CIA or KGB-inspired propaganda. Healy and his friend Ken Livingstone claimed it was all MI5-inspired. Sound familiar?

7. Socialists don't need heroes. We understand that individuals are flawed, weak and often contradictory. Instead, we believe in the Cloud: the collective wisdom of the intelligent human race. We know that ideas survive individual and generational failure, defeat and death. We believe that a massive never-ending argument, while not always efficient, will guide us towards humane, workable relations between us all. Hero-worship is a dead end, the fantasy of those determined to bring about the apocalypse/class-war/race war or whatever regardless of prevailing conditions.

8. Automatically adopting positions because you don't like those on the 'other' side is what Lenin called 'infantile leftism' (though it applies to the right as well). 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' is a vicious, destructive mantra. What kept billions of people poor and oppressed during the Cold War? The West's deliberate support for any regime - Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, Iraq etc etc - which promised to be anti-Communist. The same goes for the Soviet Union's puppet states - Ethiopia, Angola and Romania. This kind of mindless, obedient politics is the exact opposite of true, humanist communism. It's weird having to point this stuff out because it seems so obvious, but clearly not, given the continued tolerance of Kissinger, George Galloway and most of the Tory Party.

Assange is a diversion. Wikileaks is a noble enterprise, but he is - like us - weak and complicated. By all means resist American/UK efforts to demonise him, but understand that canonising him is simply the mirror of demonisation, and doing so plays their game.

Adieu, Assange

So, 5 judges have decided that Julian Assange can be deported to Sweden to be questioned (not charged) on suspicion of sexual assault. Two judges disagreed, and apparently Assange's lawyers are appealing on the grounds that the decision was made on the basis of arguments not aired in court.

From the Wikileaks press releases, tweets and followers, you'd think that Assange was being sent to a CIA black site for immediate torture and execution, rather than to one of the world's most civilised states for questioning. This is utterly disappointing: I've long been a supporter of Wikileaks' mission, but the organisation has become an unreflective propaganda machine for one particular individual: this morning they're tweeting the two judges' dissent without mentioning the majority judgement, and they spend a good deal of their time organising 'rallies for Assange', with no acknowledgement that the complainants' stories deserve investigation.

Things like this don't help:

Assange: 613 days Grand Jury, 533 days bank blockade, 530 days house arrest. Charges? None. 

Assange isn't Mandela or Dreyfus and Sweden isn't North Korea. He's been living in a massive mansion with all mod cons, whereas most people accused of sexual assaults get a shared cell in a rundown prison. I have no doubt that the US and its allies are all over Assange's life and records, but presenting him as a martyr to CIA-supported feminists is not progressive. A dignified stance would be to profess innocence and faith in the Swedish legal system, and have your day in court. Wikileaks should stick to its core purpose and resist becoming a vehicle for one man's messianic tendencies. I hope he's innocent - but turning every event into a grand conspiracy reduces the chances of Wikileaks being taken seriously when it uncovers (as it frequently does) real conspiracies.

Revealed: Corporate Attacks on Wikileaks

A security company proposed these attacks on Wikileaks to Bank of America. It's not clear whether or not BoA took them up on this offer, but somebody sure has. Either way, it's a fascinating insight into how covert netwar and PR operations work.

Om Bongo, Om Bongo, he steals it from the Congo

I'm so sorry, I couldn't resist that slightly dated and quite racist mass culture reference, but it's so apt.

You see, Wikileaks reveals that the President of Gabon, Omar Bongo, was astonishingly corrupt (not very surprising), that he stole money from the pooled funds of several countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo - a simple rule of thumb is that the more adjectives in a country's name, the less likely they are to be true: think UK, GDR, DPRK etc. - and gave some of it to Sarkozy's party in France (which stinks to high heaven already).

A senior official at the Bank of Central African States (Beac) told a US diplomat in Cameroon of Bongo's "brazen" defrauding of the bank which holds the pooled reserves of six central African countries, including Gabon, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Shortly after Bongo's death in 2009, the US embassy in Yaounde said the bank source told them: "Gabonese officials used the proceeds for their own enrichment and, at Bongo's direction, funnelled funds to French political parties, including in support of French President Nicolas Sarkozy."

Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange face off: in prison!

See it here in this ever-so-slightly satirical cartoon about the American plan to charge publishers of leaked material with espionage.

Meanwhile, have another of my favourite words: synfyfyriol. It sounds utterly beautiful, doesn't it? Especially if you know that in Welsh, 'f' is a v sound and the y is a slightly flattened vowel. It means 'absent-minded', 'pondering', 'musing' and so on. There's even a song about it, by the wonderful Fflaps (hello Alan) and available on the sublime Triskedekaphilia album (play it here).

Assange bailed

Julian Assange, co-founder of Wikileaks, has been freed on bail pending extradition proceedings on a Swedish charge of sexual assault, though the Swedes are lodging an immediate appeal, which seems pointless. Assange is probably the most recognisable person in Europe at the moment.

Some important points which seem to have gone unmentioned recently:
1. Innocent until proven guilty.
2. Sexual violence is a serious crime.
3. Sweden is a mature and independent democracy with a good reputation for an independent judiciary. Perhaps there is murky behaviour afoot, but let's not rush to judgement.
4. Julian Assange is not Wikileaks.
5. It is possible to be morally flawed in some regards and righteous in others. People are complicated.
6. If he's guilty of sexual assault, that doesn't mean his actions in regard to Wikileaks are somehow tainted. Likewise, if you're opposed to Wikileaks, Assange's other behaviour shouldn't alter your perspective.
7. I still haven't heard Hillary Clinton explain why publishers of leaked material are guilty of espionage, nor why the CIA wanted the DNA of United Nations officials. The rest we can argue about, but this is pretty clearly non-diplomatic behaviour.

DDOS, LOIC and other nerdy things in perspective

I'm absolutely loving the Anonymous collective's attacks on Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, PayPal and various other corporations who've decided that censorship is a matter of commercial wisdom.

The old definition of a state is a body which reserves to itself the right to use force against its citizens or other states/their citizens. To some extent, this still applies online: every major country, from the UK to China employs an army of hackers: China recently downloaded all global e-mails, Israel infected Iran's science computers, Russia attacked Lithuania and the Chinese have access to basically all of the US's critical infrastructure.

However, the danger of training masses of computer programmers is that hackers tend to be contrary libertarian weirdos. Some will do whatever they're paid to, but quite a lot of these bedroom warriors will develop skills and apply them if they think there's a challenge in it - like Gary McKinnon, autistic sysadmin. Put a hacker in front of a big bad corporation or government and they'll have a go.

So - and as you may know, I read a lot of 'hard' SF, where the notion of flowing around states and corporations rather than allowing them to dictate the shape and direction of the online world - each hacker is now in possession of the tools formerly reserved to the state. A Distributed Denial of Service (automated mass hits on a website to block access to legitimate users) using a tool like LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon - the name tells you all you need to know about these kids: they play a lot of computer games) is essentially a weapon available to a global, untraceable collective. Sure, my institution blocks DDOS software like LOIC, but most users are at home, limited only by bandwidth. Download LOIC here to get involved in Operation Payback.

A part of me worries that these guys are selfish libertarians with no regard for democracy, but an alternative reading is that they're anarchist-syndicalists of the kind portrayed in Ken MacLeod's Scottish Trotskyist-libertarian science fiction. Their principles are those of Jefferson which I quoted yesterday: freedom of information leads to free societies, and organisations which block, reserve or squat on information are the lumbering dinosaurs which need to be brought down.

There's a good deal of idealism and fantasy in the anarchist-egalitarian world of hacking and futurism, partly because these people are only now developing an ideological base, but I'm all for it. It has the potential to bring to life a non-capitalist, non-statist democracy of the kind envisioned by Lenin and Trotsky before the Russians became wedded to the state-communism model.

Where things are getting interesting is the overflow of DDOS-style activism into the offline world. What is the fluid, random, 'flash-mob' style closedowns of Vodafone, TopShop and other outlets organised by UK Uncut to protest against tax evasion if it isn't a distributed denial of Service? Loose, leaderless groups coalesce with minimal organisation for a specific event before melting away again. No structure for the cops to infiltrate, no long-term planning, no hierarchy: just a shared set of ideals and limited set of objectives.

It's not new of course: UK Uncut are drawing on the traditions of Captain Swing, the Luddites, the Rebecca Rioters and the Chartists - but faster.

Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose except your social lives!

Africa: a wholly-owned subsidiary of Shell and friends

Wow. Wikileaks has really come up with the goods this time. Shell essentially owns Nigeria. The US asks Uganda to 'let it know' if it's planning any war crimes ad infinitum.

Read it all here. It's pretty grim.

Oh the irony

The US is hosting next year's World Press Freedom Day! Meanwhile, the US wants Assange on espionage charges: despite the fact that he didn't leak the Wikileaks files, Bradley Manning probably did.


If Assange is a spy, then so is every newspaper editor who's every published leaked information, and every blogger who's repeated it. Assange may have committed a sexual assault, and if so, he deserves to face justice (though last night's Newsnight seemed to have decided that he is a rapist, rather than innocent until proved guilty), but he isn't a spy.


Update:
And so it comes to pass: weirdo egotist Senator Joe Lieberman has now called for the New York Times to be investigated for espionage (even though that craven publication sought Administration permission to publish). At this point, I'll draw on Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the United States:

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

There is not a truth existing which I fear... or would wish unknown to the whole world.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Corporate Ethics

Amazon, PayPal, Visa and Mastercard have all withdrawn services to Wikileaks on moral grounds (so Visa is deciding for me how I spend my money - time for a new card). Maybe that's true, in which case the detail below is even more disturbing because it reveals the basis of their morality, or maybe it's a big fat lie and they're doing what corporations always do when leaned on by powerful governments. Or perhaps Mastercard and Visa are merely paying the US Government in return for its lobbying of Russia - as revealed, inevitably, by Wikileaks.

Charles Arthur, the Guardian's technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are "white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God."

Just in from the department of You Couldn't Make It Up

There's little worse than a imperialist liberal hypocrite (speaking as a lefty):

 "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." 

So said Hillary Clinton in January, in a major speech on internet freedom. What does she say now that Wikileaks revealed that - amongst other things - American diplomats are asked to collect the DNA of United Nations officials?

"stealing... dangerous.. and not serving the public good."

"this disclosure on just an attack on America's foreign policy interests it is an attack on the international community." 

(Obviously, America's foreign policy interests and 'the international community' are the same thing).

she said the Wikileaks disclosure "tear at the fabric of "responsible government... every country including the USA must be able to have candid conversations... there is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people". 

Unless you're using B52 bombers.

Circuses. Hold the bread.

Wikileaks documents revealed that an aging, secretive, ruthless and unpopular dictator who refuses to relinquish power and who has handed his fiefdom over for exploitation by unprincipled corporate interests contemplated taking over Manchester United last year.

That's strange. I though Alex Ferguson was already in charge.

Boom, and indeed tish.

(Joking aside, the story is stunning and heartbreaking).

Hezbollah: better than BT?

There's been a lot of discussion over recent years of Britain's utter failure to invest in fibre-optic networks (there's another story today which demonstrates how completely, utterly useless the British plan is), mostly because industry doesn't want to pay for it. And so, the UK falls well behind other developed countries in the new media stakes.

More shockingly, Wikileaks reveals that the UK isn't even as advanced as premier league terrorists Hezbollah, who managed to instal their own fibre-optic network across Lebanon. I for one intend to move provider…

The value for Hizballah is the final step in creating a nation state. Hizballah now has an army and weapons; a television station; an education system; hospitals; social services; a financial system; and a telecommunications system.

Who says terrorism doesn't work? In this new world of privatisation, we should contract Hezbollah to put down their AK47s and pick up lucrative contracts. The UK has mothballed its navy, cut television and arts funding, smashed the education system, removed large chunks of health provision, rewarded the banks for losing all our money while increasing bonuses and is attacking net neutrality.

We're always being told Islamic terrorists are marooned in the 13th century, but it's very clear who's more advanced in this situation. I for one would welcome our bearded overlords. At least they believe in public services and government provision.

Fish or People?

American politicians have leaned on web hosts to boot Wikileaks off their servers: Amazon is the latest one to bow to their pressure, and Wikileaks' .org address has been cancelled too.

I've spent - at a rough estimate - £3000 on Amazon's sites in the last 2 years. No longer. I was uncomfortable enough with their anti-union stance. This is the last nudge I need to start shopping at independent stores. I've just cancelled my order for a new camera - that's £970 withdrawn from their business in one go.

Wikileaks is now back online with a new address: Wikileaks.ch

The shocking story today is one that cynics won't find shocking and most others won't care about: the long and boring tale of Diego Garcia. It's an archipelago of isolated islands in the Indian Ocean which the British stole at some point in its colonial history. When the Americans wanted a Cold War base there in the 60s, the British deported the 2000 natives to foreign countries where they didn't fit in and couldn't pursue their fishing livelihoods. Then the British spent decades claiming that there never had been any natives.

Eventually, a string of British and other courts decided that these unfortunates were natives and should be allowed to go home. The government has used a number of loopholes to prevent this, and came up with this cunning wheeze: to declare the whole area a 'marine conservation park' - i.e. no fishing, and therefore no hope of return.

While government ministers were telling Parliament that there was no such plot, Wikileaks has revealed that the Foreign Office was exchanging racist quips with the Americans and promising that these savages wouldn't be allowed to get in the way of imperial policy: Diego Garcia has become a central location in the Allies' kidnapping'n'torture network.

the Foreign Office has privately admitted its latest plan to declare the islands the world's largest marine protection zone will end any chance of them being repatriated.

Colin Roberts, the Foreign Office director of overseas territories, told the Americans Diego Garcia's value in "assuring the security of the US and UK" had been "much more than anyone foresaw" in the 1960s, when the plan to set up the base was hatched.

"We do not regret the removal of the population since removal was necessary for [Diego Garcia] to fulfil its strategic purpose," he added under a passage that the Americans headed "Je ne regrette rien". 

"Roberts stated that, according to [Her Majesty's government's] current thinking on a reserve, there would be 'no human footprints' or 'Man Fridays' on the BIOT uninhabited islands," according to the American account of the meeting. The language echoes that used in 1966 when Denis Greenhill – later the Foreign Office's most senior official – described the inhabitants as "a few Tarzans and Man Fridays".

The leaked documents also record that Roberts "asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago's former residents".

This private stance differs from the Foreign Office's public line in April when a series of MPs asked Chris Bryant, the then Foreign Office minister, if the marine park ruled out the islanders, known as Chagossians, ever returning home. 

Leading conservation groups have supported the marine park plan. Roberts is quoted as telling the Americans that Britain's "environmental lobby is far more powerful than the [islanders'] advocates". 

I know most of you won't care - what are the concerns of a small bunch of poor brown people? But for me, the ways in which you treat the weakest in society are the basis on which you should be judged. The Diego Garcians are all of us: governments would do the same to us if they thought they could get away with it.

My students' attitude towards the Wikileaks story has been depressing. Some think governments have the right to do whatever they want without citizens knowing or protesting. Others think that knowledge without the power to change anything is pointless knowledge. I must confess to feeling the same way. I'm shocked and saddened by the injustice meted out by successive British governments ('ethical foreign policy', anyone?) and my gloom is deepened by the awareness that knowing about this stuff makes absolutely no difference. Those islanders are going to die friendless, hungry, despised and on foreign soil and there's nothing you nor I can do to help.

Politicians just don't get it

Whether you agree with the Wikileaks story of the week or not, the politicians' responses are pathetic: desperately trying to cover their behinds with (false) claims that 'lives are at risk', or asserting the need for privacy while continuing to extend the surveillance state's intrusion into the lives of everybody on the planet.

There've also been some dumber, more vicious reactions. Sarah Palin tweeted about 'treason' (er, Wikileaks' main representative is Australian) and appears to see anti-Americanism as worthy of death:

"He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?"

(Yes, Osama Bin Laden can testify to the urgency of the US's pursuit of him). Mike Huckabee (senior Republican politician) called for the 'execution' of the leaker, while the Canadian Prime Minister's senior adviser said this:

"I think Assange should be assassinated, actually," he said. "I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." Flanagan chuckled as he made the comment but did not retract it when questioned, adding: "I wouldn't feel unhappy if Assange does disappear."

It's dumb and vicious, of course. But it also betrays their failure to understand the way new media work. If Julian Assange were assassinated, Wikileaks would continue. Distributed across servers, nations and continents, an army of technically and politically-savvy activists would replace him. They may not want his public profile, so they'd be harder to find, and they'd always be easy to replace. The true liberal/libertarian web doesn't have leaders in any profound sense. It has autonomous movements which make a virtue of disorganisation and dispersal: there are drawbacks to this, but it infuriates governments, who can only conceive of power as something wielded by centralised states against its own citizens, other governments and their citizens.

(The Canadian government is upset because it turned out that France's conservative president only invited Harper to a war commemoration because he's a rightwinger who is in electoral danger - nasty-minded, cynical meddling in electoral affairs).

Those wacky Taiwanese

Another brilliant animation, summarising the Wikileaks story with accuracy and considerable verve.

"All of this sounds exactly like France"

For some reason, the British government employs 'Prince' Andrew as a trade representative, presumably because he has no actual skills and they'd rather he was out of the country for long periods.

One of the fascinating Wikileaks documents is an account of a lunch held in Kyrgyzstan. We've had a lively debate about it in class: should an individual's privacy be disturbed? In this case, yes: Mr. Windsor is a government representative, and what he says is disturbing: repeatedly attacking Britain's (rather pathetic) anti-corruption investigators and the journalists who pursued British Aerospace's bribery until Tony Blair cancelled the investigation.

Having exhausted the topic of Kyrgyzstan, he turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the “idiocy” of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia.  

His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to “these (expletive) journalists, especially from the National Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere” and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business. The crowd practically clapped. He then capped this off with a zinger: castigating “our stupid (sic) British and American governments which plan at best for ten years whereas people in this part of the world plan for centuries.” There were calls of “hear, hear” in the private brunch hall. Unfortunately for the assembled British subjects, their cherished Prince was now late to the Prime Minister’s. He regretfully tore himself away from them and they from him. On the way out, one of them confided to the Ambassador: “What a wonderful representative for the British people! We could not be prouder of our royal family!”

Andrew's perspective is exactly that of a Tory golf-club bore: nothing should get in the way of corporations making a fast buck, journalists are liberal scum, corruption's just an occupational hazard. To top it off, his saloon-bar sense of humour is encapsulated by the repeated claim that every instance of corruption 'sounds exactly like France'.

How his guests roared with laughter.

Hail shining morn (except for the Yanks)

Well, it's damn cold, but the light of exposure is shining on the US diplomatic service: Wikileaks has published 250,000 documents exposing opinions, activities and gossip about the US's relations with other countries. Here's a Guardian video explaining why it's significant.

The US and its allies are, of course, condemning the release as loudly as possible. Unflattering things have been said about US allies, the UN has been spied on by the US (surprise surprise) and awkaward truths are emerging. On the other side, Wikileaks and their friends are proclaiming that we're living in a new world of information freedom and dispersed networks of wisdom.

Both sides are wrong and right. Diplomats need to express themselves frankly, and we shouldn't be surprised that the US's self-interest is more important to it than the interests of its friends. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. However, it's important to the publics of all these countries that we have some insight into the real world of international relations. We are at war, yet our political leaders never, ever, admit that they disagree sometimes, that they have concerns about our allies (I particularly hate it when they claim to be 'good friends' with people they've met once or twice), that they don't trust each other - we're kept in the dark an awful lot of the time, and needlessly in a lot of cases.

I don't buy the Wikileaks argument wholesale either. I don't think they have blood on their hands, as some Republicans are claiming (rather cheekily), but I don't think that many citizens will read those 250,000 documents. We still need a professional old media to use their powerful resources to analyse them, contextualise them and interpret them for us. I don't know what Julian Assange's motives are. Is he a weird libertarian out to smash states in principle, or is he a good socialist? Our governments are elected - who made Wikileaks the arbiter of the public sphere?

On balance, I'm pleased these documents are available, because I'm largely opposed to US and British foreign policy as it's currently practiced. Would I feel differently if I supported the government being exposed so publicly? I don't know. Maybe.

The ever-reliable Paul Mason has a Captain Renault take on it all. Shocked, shocked, I tell you!

Handing over the baton?

Today's one of those occasions on which the new media/old media divide is up for examination. I'm watching BBC News 24, which is leading on two stories which originated on the web, one of them weeks ago. The first is the Wikileaks release of 90,000 US military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan; the other is a story about a bear which got trapped in a car.

The Wikileaks story has been floating around for a long time. It's the kind of event an anonymous, locationless organisation can do: the BBC or another established, regulated media organisation would have avoided the legal ramifications, would have spent too long considering the national or security implications, and would probably have been penetrated by the security services in any case (there's a long history of news media aiding the secret services).

On the other hand, it's interesting that Julian Assange is now giving a press conference for the offline media, and three chosen newspapers have been given full and early access to the material- clearly the 'old' sources are still important, for informing the wider public, and because they have greater journalistic resources when it comes to investigating stories. Strikingly, however, Assange's conference displays his awareness of the limitations and responsibilities of classic journalism: research, fact-checking, skepticism. He's also engaged in some weeding of material which would, he says, cost lives or damage security, which is a major assumption of authority. His nomadic, independent approach gives him the freedom to subvert the cultural and legal boundaries which hamper established media, but it makes him immune to the checks and balances too (though Fox News behaves in exactly the same way, as its disgusting behaviour over the Shirley Sherrod story shows (rightwing blogger edits a black Department of Agriculture official's speech to make her look racist - she gets the sack by a cowardly employer but is reinstated when the true story emerges, Fox refuses to apologise or alter its position - as does the blogger: original, unqualified and uncorrected story here).

 Either way, we're into a new era when the power of major news organisations fail to uncover major scoops - they're sclerotic, timid and too dependent on their relationships with authority.

The bear-trapped-in-a-car story is the other side of the new/old media coin. Ten years ago, it's the kind of thing which would take up page 3 of a local newspaper. Now it's a light-hearted bit of fluff which fits in with 90% of what's on the internet. What's shameful is that it's now a story for the global news media: rolling news has very obviously led to dumbing down, simply to fill space. IT'S NOT NEWS, PEOPLE!

What's still unclear is the implication for Wikileaks and similar sites. No doubt the security services are chasing it through legal and illegal means - cyberwar resources will engage in DOS attacks and more, but it'll be like nailing down a jelly. I'm hugely positive about this. Wikileaks claim they're politically neutral, but a commitment to the free exchange of information is clearly a libertarian/anarchist position which will hopefully challenge authorities which act with impunity by keeping us in the dark.

I just need to get this off my chest

Barclays Bank, which is negotiating with the government for the taxpayer to insure their insanely risky investments, is a serial tax evader. Worse than that, it has an arm which specialises in shifting money around the world with the sole purpose of making money out of the taxpayer - about £1 billion pounds a year. The Guardian, despite having some dubious links to certain financial bodies, has been uncovering Barclays' web of deceitful trades, which the Inland Revenue haven't got the resources to follow.

This is what one financier said of Barclays' scheme, in the Financial Times:

I will say it was absolutely breathtaking, extraordinary. The depth of deceit, connivance and deliberate, artificial avoidance stunned me. The intricacy and artificiality of the scheme deeply was absolutely evident, as was the fact that the knew exactly what they were doing and why: to get money from one point in London to another without paying tax, via about 10 offshore companies. Simple, deliberate outcome, clearly stated, with the exact names of who was doing this, and no other purpose.

Until now I have been a supporter of the finance industry - I work with people there regularly and respect many of them, and greatly enjoy the Financial Times and other financial papers.

However this has shone a light on something for me, and made me certain that these people belong in jail, and companies like Barclays deserve to be bankrupt. They have robbed everyone of us,every single person who pays tax or who will ever pay tax in this country (and other countries!), through both the bailouts and schemes such as this.

Barclays' response is to ban publication of, and linking to, the leaked internal documents which revealed how they steal from us while begging for our help. So let's give a big hand to Wikileaks, which makes sure that leaked documents are never lost for good. You don't have to read them, just understand that this kind of activity is the Web's version of public service. The Guardian, like many companies which pay tax without trying to cheat, has a big office in London and responsibilities to employees and readers: it can't publish and be damned if the courts (yet again, acting solely for the powerful against the public interest) issue an injunction. Wikileaks, ironically, is like the dubious corporations who hide offshore (Walkers Crisps: a Swiss company now), and can post information out of reach of local courts.

These people are thieves. The Department of Work and Pensions is currently running an Orwellian campaign against benefit cheats who 'rob' the rest of us by falsely claiming the dole, or whatever. Fair enough - though living on £50 per week isn't exactly the same as having a Bond-villain style hideout. How about we conduct a similar campaign of persecution against these financiers? They steal far more than all the benefit cheats put together.

Some of their activities are illegal, and rely on the connivance of offshore states (Britain, ironically, encourages this behaviour onshore and offshore), and the poverty of the Inland Revenue - which sold its office to an offshore company which thus avoided tax. I can't express how angry this stuff makes me. I know all my friends think that I'm a boring old wanker for getting wound up by this, but it's important. These bankers and lawyers like their Chelsea mansions and airports and golf courses and private schools and all the other trimmings that makes life in Britain fantastic for the rich, but they're engaged in a concerted plot to make live worse for the rest of us: tax pays for roads and schools and infrastructure and child benefit and the NHS and pensions and clean air and universities and street lights and the police and the ambulance services and the firemen and the coastguard and so many things, so these bastards are stealing the high life and leaving us naive morons to pay for everything.

I have an enjoyable job and I'm paid fairly well (for now - half my contract expires in September), but I'll never be rich. There are, however, small ways in which I could get some tax back, quite legally. I don't do it. I believe that governments (even these gimps) are a good way to improve the lives of the citizens as a whole and it's our duty to contribute (which doesn't mean we shouldn't scream blue murder when it's wasted, as with Trident and ID cards). We have responsibilities to each other: my taxes pay for a binman's heart operation and his children's education and his taxes pay my salary. Everyone's a winner in the long term, which is why these tax-avoiding scum are thieving from us in exactly the same way as the benefit cheat: rich men have their bins emptied by the council the same as the rest of us. Their cleaners claim child benefit and their heart attack will be treated by an NHS nurse.

How's this for an idea? Ban non-domiciled or tax-avoiding executives from using public services. No bins emptied. Turned away from A+E. No road travel. No TV or radio. No calling the police, fire brigade or ambulance. No calling the council when the neighbours have a noisy party… we could wreck their lives until they're shamed into paying up.

Let's start with Lord Rothermere. He owns the Daily Mail, which hates governments but also hates foreigners and tax cheats. He lives in a massive, tasteless, reactionary, £50m mansion in Wiltshire which wasn't big enough so he's added another couple of wings to the building you see here.

Apparently, however, Donhead St. Andrew in Wiltshire is a foreign country. It must be because Private Eye (discussed here) has discovered that Rothermere is, for tax purposes, 'non-domiciled' and therefore doesn't pay UK tax on his £800m (inherited) fortune because his father lived in Paris. The Inland Revenue decided that this blatant theft wasn't worth investigating.

I must go for a little lie-down now.