Julian Assange is back in the news again this week due to the latest episode of his appeals against extradition.
One thing that is crystal clear about the case is that for Vladimir Putin, the persecution of Julian Assange is the gift that keeps on giving.
For starters, Edward Snowden had originally decided to seek refuge in Hong Kong. He came to realize that Hong Kong could extradite him back to the US and so he fled to Russia. This may lead to copycat defections by future whistleblowers, reminiscent of the cold war. Is there any bigger fan of the cold war than Vladimir Putin?
Then there was the small matter of Alexei Navalny dying in a Russian prison last week. It is just coincidence that this mysterious death happened shortly before the latest court decision on Julian Assange. If Assange were to die in the days ahead due to his health, it will be just that little bit harder to criticize Putin over the death of Navalny. It is just coincidence that authorities in Australia, worried about Assange's ill health, are pretending to be on his side. The symbolic vote in the Australian parliament was just that, symbolic and nothing more. If Assange were to die in the days and weeks ahead, the Australian politicians can point to the symbolic vote they just took and say their hands are clean.
Therefore, it is very sad to see that both the Australian Government and the Russian president are simultaneously making opportunistic acts of backside-covering that pivot around the health and wellbeing of Julian Assange.
It is now six years that my family and I have been subject to harassment from rogue elements of Debian and FSFE. These misfits are motivated by nothing other than censorship. People who want to read the blogs that Debian is censoring can follow the Debian.News planet site and the related Debian.News RSS feed.
There are many more threads related to this. Over 80,000 messages on debian-private, the gossip network. Less than a quarter has been disclosed so far.
Subject: Are we owned? How deep are we owned? Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 06:54:35 +0200 From: Jaime Robles <jaime@robles.es> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org Hello all, I have read this[1] and I really think we should do something. If we are owned (I really think so) we may failing to fulfil the Social Contract and not doing our best. It is not easy to fight back and even to detect all the "intrusions" we may be suffering but we may not be doing our best to provide the best software we can. The questions are: - What can we do? - Create a list of potentially attractive packages and create an international team to check the diffs? - Force "enemies" to work together in security packages? - Simply forget and continue doing as today? We need at least to think about this. To all the "intruders" that will be reading this... It is not personal, I feel we need to do this. It is not only you, your enemies are also around us ;-) [1] http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/julian-assange-debian-is-owned-by-the-nsa/