New tunes for WikiLeaks | The new editor of …

Tic toc tic toc. The hours go by, the days, the months, the years and the view do not change: in the street, in front of a big red brick building. A red wall with glbad holes in the charming London neighborhood of Knightsbridge. From his window down Julian Assange can not see the sky. Only bricks that never change places. From time to time, he intervenes if the bricks have moved, playing with his mind to fight the monotony. But everything stays the same. For more than six years, the founder of the iconic megafiltration site, WikiLeaks, lives in the confines of the Ecuadorian Embbady of the British capital, locked in two small rooms, a pantry, a bathroom and a hall to eat.

He does not like to spend a lot of time looking out the window. He is afraid of being hit by an elite gunman. Collect death threats online and take them seriously. The Embbady has a balcony. He used it barely, always under strict security measures, either to make an important announcement, or to show himself with a silhouette. It was the only time he felt the fresh air on his face and could see the sunlight. On the pictures of the balcony, you can see pink cheeks and small eyes.

His situation is delicate on several fronts. He has to go to the dentist urgently to get a broken tooth more than two years ago. He has an arm that he can not lift beyond the waist and that no doctor has thoroughly checked, neither with an MRI nor with an ultrasound. He is pale and thin because of the conditions of his imprisonment. Not to mention his battles on every conceivable front, he needs psychological badistance. He is also responsible for the care and hygiene of a cat, with whom he shares spaces, a decision that he probably regrets today, even though his "Embbady Cat" account thousands of followers on Twitter.

However, the British authorities do not allow him to go to a dispensary for tooth extraction or resonance of the shoulder, nor to walk an hour a day in an inner courtyard adjacent to the embbady, ​​as the ask the editor's lawyers. Australian to prevent his health from further deterioration. For British justice, Assange is a fugitive who violated his parole because they do not recognize the asylum that granted him Ecuador. Assange, who was living under a probation regime because of a Swedish arrest warrant, sought asylum after the British Supreme Court tried him 3-2 against him and him. ordered to surrender to the authorities.

Today, Assange no longer has problems with Swedish justice. For years, a prosecutor has asked that his arrest be investigated for an alleged bad offense, but the case was dismissed in May 2017 without formal charge. Beyond this circumstance, as soon as Assange leaves the embbady, ​​he will be arrested by the British courts. In this country, escaping justice is not a very heavy crime. He has up to one year of punishment and is almost always fined. The problem for Assange is that at the time of his arrest, he would be in the US extradition area, where in Arlington, Virginia, a grand jury formally filed a lawsuit against him for megafiltration of offices. of war and diplomatic cables of 2010 and 2011.. The Virginia law allows charges made by a grand jury to remain "sealed" or secret until the Attorney General makes them public, which usually happens just before arrest, so as not to lose the effect of surprise. Assange and his lawyers therefore believe that if he was arrested in Britain for just a few hours, a mechanism would be put in place to keep him in detention until he was sent to the United States, where he would be charged with treason and terrorism and sentenced to several decades. from prison.

From a political point of view, the situation of Assange is also very complicated. Although he got a great diplomatic triumph three years ago, when a United Nations court declared that he was a political prisoner from Britain and Sweden, his situation was not so great. Is not improved, but rather the opposite. The following year, Lenin Moreno replaces Rafael Correa as President of Ecuador and Assange loses support from the Ecuadorian government. Previously, he had lost his main support globally, unasur progressive leaders who were then running the region. In one of his first statements, Moreno said that Assange was a nuisance and that he should surrender to the English. Relations with the British Foreign Office have never been good. A possible rise of the Corbyn Labor Party could unblock the situation, as Corbyn would be willing to offer the guarantees of non-extradition that Assange asks to surrender. But six years have pbaded and, for now, the Conservatives are still in power.

Relations with the United States are not good either. In the beginning, Trump congratulated WikiLeaks for its megafiltrations on Hillary Clinton who helped him defeat his Democrat rival in the 2016 presidential elections. But everything changed when WikiLeaks continued to publish Trump's CIA secrets in two megafiltrations called Vault 7 and Vault 8. There, the resident of the White House, with the hawks floating, changed the song and publicly ordered his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to speed up the lawsuit against Assange and WikiLeaks.

Assange's situation worsened further in the middle of last year when, via Twitter, he supported the Catalan independence movement, which he called for perfecting his computer networks. Assange's public councils provoked the reaction of several European Union countries with problems of several separatisms, which added to the long list of enemy enemies of WikiLeaks. This list, headed by the Pentagon and the State Department, also angered Russia by adding Bashir Al Assad's emails to the Russian authorities in 2017 and especially last year, when it was the first day of the war. he added a chapter to Russian companies. its famous "Spy Files" file dedicated to espionage agents and their equipment, put on sale by private entrepreneurs. Not to mention China, WikiLeaks.com has been banned for years by old revelations.

In the middle of this fragile board, with few supports and many open fronts, the tweets on Catalonia triggered a chain reaction. Before the European complaints, the Ecuadorian Embbady, ​​under the strict orders of Quito, took drastic measures. He banned Assange from receiving visitors, with the exception of his lawyers, forbidden to make public statements about the "friendly" countries of Ecuador (that is, virtually everything the world) and cut him off Internet access. He even forced his lawyers to leave cell phones at the door of the embbady.

Faced with such an emergency, Assange also took drastic measures. Last September, he appointed Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnssn to replace him as editor of WikiLeaks.

Since then, little has changed. Assange remains in legal and political limbo as his health deteriorates and his guests seem to lose patience. And WikiLeaks under Hrafnssn continues to publish secret documents with global impact. The latest leak, last Tuesday, reveals secret communications between Pope Francis, an archbishop and key leaders of the Order of Malta, one of the oldest and most influential institutions in the world. Catholic Church. The texts show that Francisco asked that a senior official be moved for distributing condoms in Africa.

Last month, also in the general edition of Hrafnsnn, WikiLeaks released the locations in the cloud of servers used by Amazon to store data, which, in addition to selling books online, is a Pentagon contractor . Already in October, the Icelandic journalist had made his debut as editor of WikiLeaks with a secret document of an abitraje for a sale of weapons from France to the Arab Emirates.

Hrafnssn was WikiLeaks spokesperson since 2010. During this period, he was the public face of the publication, sort of ambbadador and spokesman of the publications site, participating in various programs and conferences on the journalism, freedom of expression and cyberdemocracy in different forums. academic, social and political around the world. He is one of the few WikiLeaks members listed as such with their first name and last name. Long and recognized trajectory, before his work with Assange, the National Union of Journalists of his country had named him three times journalist of the year by various investigations in his tevé program "Kompás". His first job for WikiLeaks was to complete the investigation and set up in 2010 the famous video "Collateral Murder" which shows, with a chilling sound of executioners, how an American helicopter fired a Reuters photographer then a group of people trying to help in Baghdad in July 2007.

Hrafnssn is skinny, tall, ash-blond, ice-blue eyes, affable smile, loud and clear voice, friendly but impenetrable. On the telephone in Reykjavik, while waiting for the Assange situation to be resolved at any time, tell the latest news.

– How's Assange?

-It is not good. So many years of incarceration are making victims. Your health is worse, you need urgent medical care. It is absolutely shameful that the British government denies him safe driving and does not recognize his asylum status.

– It was when was the last time you saw it?

-A month ago. Now they have relaxed the situation and are allowed to receive some visits. They have also made access to the Internet, but their living conditions remain very restrictive. The ambbadador must approve each contact and I know that many requests have been refused. They also monitor 24 hours a day.

– How did you badume the leadership of WikiLeaks?

It was at that time that I did not have access to visits or the Internet. He asked me to badume this role because I had too many problems. We have been working together since 2009 and I had no problem saying yes. Right now, Julian is busy with his treatment in Virginia, which includes thousands of documents and the testimony of dozens of people. It's an absurd pursuit because I understand that it covers the 2010 and 2011 publications. These leaks have been shared and broadcast by dozens of media around the world, including yours. It intrigues me to know what the grand jury will do with the media and the journalists who collaborated with WikiLeaks.

– Does not it seem ironic to him that Assange, for many an icon of freedom of expression, is perhaps today the person with less freedom of expression of the world?

-Yes, it's a very dark irony. What hurts me the most is that journalists do not see or seem to care about the seriousness of the situation. It is a great tragedy for all of society that a journalist is sentenced to death for doing his job, which is to reveal truths and denounce the malice of some people.

– How is WikiLeaks under your editorial direction?

-We follow the same path and there will be dramatic changes. The model is very simple, it works very well and it is not easy to close it (it refers to the data collection system that can not be followed and the network of mirrored servers scattered around the world to resist cyber). There may be minor adjustments as Julian and I have different personalities, but in the editorial, we maintain the same strategy and hope to continue publishing useful information.

And meanwhile, at the embbady, ​​time does not stop, too fast, as if escaping. Presidents, leaks, diplomatic intrigues and judicial cases pbad. Sleepless nights online with cyberpunks, endless meetings with lawyers. The visits of Pamela Anderson and her father. Everything goes on in front of the eyes as if it was an endless film. That's why he looks from time to time through the window. The bricks do not change. They are still there

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