[Reader-list] British Police arrests Julian Assange

[Jeebesh]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/world/europe/08assange.html?_r=1&emc=na

LONDON — In the latest twist in the drama swirling around theWikiLeaks  
anti-secrecy group, British police officials said on Tuesday they had  
arrested Julian Assange, its beleaguered founder, on a warrant issued  
in Sweden in connection with alleged sex offenses.

Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, was arrested by officers from  
Scotland Yard’s extradition unit when he went to a central London  
police station by prior agreement with the authorities, the police  
said. A court hearing was expected later.

In a statement, the police said: “Officers from the Metropolitan  
Police extradition unit have this morning arrested Julian Assange on  
behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape.”

Mr. Assange denies the charges of sexual misconduct said to have been  
committed while he was in Sweden in August. It was not immediately  
clear if Mr. Assange would resist extradition to Sweden for  
questioning by prosecutors there.

While it had been widely anticipated, the arrest opened an array of  
new questions about Mr. Assange’s future, even as the Justice  
Department in Washington said it was conducting what Attorney General  
Eric H. Holder Jr. called “a very serious, active, ongoing  
investigation that is criminal in nature” into the WikiLeaks matter.

Over the past 10 days, WikiLeaks has been publishing documents from a  
trove of over 250,000 cables between the State Department in  
Washington and American diplomats abroad. Mr. Assange has threatened  
to release many more diplomatic cables if legal action is taken  
against him or his organization.

“Over 100,000 people” were given the entire archive of 251,287 cables  
in encrypted form, Mr. Assange said on Friday in a question-and-answer  
session on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian.

“If something happens to us, the key parts will be released  
automatically,” Mr. Assange said

Mr. Assange’s threat of further disclosures poses a problem for the  
Obama administration as it explores ways to prosecute Mr. Assange or  
the group in relation to the archive of diplomatic cables it obtained,  
reportedly from a low-ranking Army intelligence analyst.

The British police statement said Mr. Assange was “accused by the  
Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of  
sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been  
committed in August 2010.”

The arrest was made under a European arrest warrant “by appointment at  
a London police station at 09:30 today,” the statement said.

The charges involve sexual encounters that two women say began as  
consensual but became nonconsensual after Mr. Assange was no longer  
using a condom. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing and suggested  
that the charges were trumped up in retaliation for his WikiLeaks  
work, though there is no public evidence to suggest a connection.

His arrest came challenges mounted to his operations, as computer  
server companies, Amazon.com and PayPal.com, have cut off commercial  
cooperation with WikiLeaks.

On Monday, a Swiss bank froze an account held by Mr. Assange that had  
been used to collect donations for WikiLeaks. Marc Andrey, a spokesman  
for the bank, PostFinance, an arm of the Swiss postal service, said  
the account was closed because Mr. Assange “gave us false information  
when he opened the account,” asserting inaccurately that he lived in  
Switzerland.

In the United States on Monday, moreover, “I authorized just last week  
a number of things to be done so that we can hopefully get to the  
bottom of this and hold people accountable,” he said at a news  
conference, declining to elaborate.

His threat is not idle, because as of Monday night the group had  
released fewer than 1,000 of the quarter-million State Department  
cables it had obtained, reportedly from a low-ranking Army  
intelligence analyst.

So far, the group has moved cautiously. The whole archive was made  
available to five news organizations, including The New York Times.  
But WikiLeaks has posted only a few dozen cables on its own in  
addition to matching those made public by the news publications.  
According to the State Department’s count, 1,325 cables, or fewer than  
1 percent of the total, have been made public by all parties to date.

There appears to be no way for American authorities to retrieve all  
copies of the cables archive. And legal experts say there are serious  
obstacles to any prosecution of Mr. Assange or his group.

But the disclosure of the confidential communications between the  
State Department and 270 American embassies and consulates has  
infuriated administration officials and prompted calls from Congress  
to pursue charges.

Mr. Holder repeated assertions by several Obama administration  
officials about the damage done by the cable disclosures, which began  
late last month.

“The national security of the United States has been put at risk; the  
lives of people who work for the American people have been put at  
risk; the American people themselves have been put at risk by these  
actions that are, I believe, arrogant, misguided and ultimately not  
helpful in any way,” Mr. Holder said.

Justice Department prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to  
indict Mr. Assange since July, when WikiLeaks made public documents on  
the war in Afghanistan. But while it is clearly illegal for a  
government official with a security clearance to give a classified  
document to WikiLeaks, it is far from clear that it is illegal for the  
organization to make it public.

The Justice Department has considered trying to indict Mr. Assange  
under the Espionage Act, which has never been successfully used to  
prosecute a third-party recipient of a leak. Some lawmakers have  
suggested accusing WikiLeaks of receiving stolen government property,  
but experts said Monday that would also pose difficulties.

Perhaps in a warning shot of sorts, WikiLeaks on Monday released a  
cable from early last year listing sites around the world — from  
hydroelectric dams in Canada to vaccine factories in Denmark — that  
are considered crucial to American national security.

Nearly all the facilities listed in the document, including undersea  
cables, oil pipelines and power plants, could be identified by  
Internet searches. But the disclosure prompted headlines in Europe and  
a new denunciation from the State Department, which said in a  
statement that “releasing such information amounts to giving a  
targeting list to groups likeAl Qaeda.”

Asked later about the cable, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton  
said the continuing disclosures posed “real concerns, and even  
potential damage to our friends and partners around the world.”

“I won’t comment on any specific alleged cable, but I will underscore  
that this theft of U.S. government information and its publication  
without regard to the consequences is deeply distressing,” she said.

In recent months, WikiLeaks gave the entire collection of cables to  
four European publications — Der Spiegel in Germany, El País in Spain,  
Le Monde in France and The Guardian. The Guardian shared the cable  
collection with The New York Times.

Since Nov. 28, each publication has been publishing a series of  
articles about revelations in the cables, accompanied online by the  
texts of some of the documents. The publications have removed the  
names of some confidential sources of American diplomats, and  
WikiLeaks has generally posted the cables with the same redactions.

But with the initial series of articles and cable postings nearing an  
end, the fate of the roughly 250,000 cables that have not been placed  
online is uncertain. The five publications have announced no plans to  
make public all the documents. WikiLeaks’s intentions remain unclear.