WikiLeaks Volunteer Hacked a Reporter, Assange Autobiography Reveals

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has revealed in an unauthorized autobiography published Thursday that an Icelandic member of his team hacked into a journalist’s computer system last year to retrieve a database of documents he had given to the reporter.
The revelation of the crime could potentially place the organization, or at least the former WikiLeaks member, in legal jeopardy. The information appears in a new autobiography written by a ghostwriter who interviewed Assange for the book earlier this year.
A British publisher released the book on Thursday, Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, in the midst of a rousing battle with Assange over its right to publish the book. The book is currently being sold online in the U.K., but it’s unclear when or if it will be sold in the U.S., since Assange’s U.S. publisher backed out of its deal to publish the title.
The hacking incident mentioned in the autobiography involves a U.K.-based American journalist named Heather Brooke, who received a copy of the now-infamous database containing more than 250,000 U.S. State Department cables that WikiLeaks published with media partners in the U.S. and Europe beginning last November.
Some time after the summer of 2010, Brooke obtained a copy of the database from a WikiLeaks member named Smári McCarthy — after Assange had agreed to give the Guardian newspaper and other media partners exclusive access to the documents. Assange apparently didn’t know about the internal leak from his staffer until Guardian editors brought it up with him in a heated confrontation over publication of the documents.
Smári McCarthy, a former WikiLeaks volunteer. Credit: Wrote/Flickr
“I investigated that matter,” Assange says in the book. “It turned out that our Icelandic colleague, Smári McCarthy, had indeed shared the material with the Independent journalist during an anxious moment. He had been asked to work on the cables for a short time to help format them, but, stressed at the workload, he had misguidedly shared them with her — to get some help with the burden of the work involved — under certain strict conditions. He then hacked into the computer remotely and wiped the cables, though it would never be clear whether she had copied them or not.”
Brooke, indeed, had already copied the documents off of the server where it was stored, so the WikiLeaks hack proved pointless. McCarthy, who left WikiLeaks last year around the time it began publishing the Afghan War logs, acknowledged to Threat Level that he deleted the file on Brooke’s server but says that she had given him permission to have remote access to her system, though not to delete the file.
“That was me overreacting to the situation that came up with regard to the way WikiLeaks people reacted to the knowledge that I had been giving her some access to the files,” McCarthy told Threat Level, adding that he later smoothed things over with Brooke about the unauthorized file deletion.
According to an account of the incident that Brooke put in her recent book, The Revolution Will Be Digitized, McCarthy, who is not identified by name in that book, told Brooke that he deleted the file because, “I’ve been put under a lot of very serious pressure and I’m afraid for my security.”
It’s not the first time that the issue of WikiLeaks hacking has come up in connection to journalists. Earlier this year, both the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers suggested that Assange or someone associated with WikiLeaks had hacked into the e-mail accounts of their reporters.
The Guardian revealed in a book it published about its collaboration with WikiLeaks that one of its reporters suspected Assange hacked into his e-mail account or sniffed his e-mail traffic after making coy remarks to the reporter about network security and referring to information the reporter had sent his colleagues in a private e-mail. Former Times Editor-in-Chief Bill Keller also hinted in a Times magazine piece that WikiLeaks hacked reporters, writing that “at a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.”
The Assange autobiography covers his childhood, early hacking career, WikiLeaks work and the legal difficulties he’s faced in connection with the publication of U.S. documents as well as sex-crimes allegations in Sweden.
While it contains few new revelations, the book does give Assange the chance to explain some of his criticized behavior and present his side of the story about things — such as claims from his media partners that he callously refused to redact the names of informants in U.S. documents before publishing them, saying that if the informants got killed due to the revelations, they deserved to die simply for being informants.
One of the few new tidbits is that WikiLeaks’ media partners weren’t the only ones to have copies of the State Department cable database. Assange says he made other copies “and stashed them first with contacts in Eastern Europe and Cambodia” and also “put them on an encrypted laptop and had it delivered to Daniel Ellsberg, the hero of the Pentagon Papers” since Ellsberg, an outspoken WikiLeaks supporter, could be trusted “to publish the whole lot during a crisis.”
Strangely, there’s little mention in the book of Bradley Manning, the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who was arrested for allegedly supplying WikiLeaks with the State Department cables and thousands of other documents. It also doesn’t address the falling-out Assange had with former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who staged a revolt with another member of WikiLeaks and formed a competing secret-spilling venture called OpenLeaks.
The absence of this information may in part be due to the fact that the book is unfinished. It’s based on a first draft of the manuscript from Assange’s ghostwriter and ends abruptly just at the point WikiLeaks and its media partners were about to begin publishing the cables.
Canongate Books, the publisher of the book, announced suddenly on Wednesday that it planned to publish the book Thursday after asserting that Assange had stopped cooperating with the project. Assange disputes this in a lengthy rebuttal, asserting that Canongate agreed to extend his deadline for a revised manuscript to later this year, then suddenly reneged on this and decided to publish the unfinished draft, which Assange didn’t factcheck.
Despite all of the drama around the book, Assange comes off fairly well in it, as one would expect in an autobiography, though he has a well-known tendency to see faults in everyone else that he can’t see in himself. There are also contradictions and factual issues, particularly in the chapter addressing the sex-crimes allegations in Sweden, where Assange claims he was warned twice against possible honey traps and was feeling very paranoid and suspicious in general, yet showed a remarkable lack of trepidation about bedding two strange women he’d just met.
He claims that just as he arrived in Sweden a contact “in a Western intelligence agency” revealed that the U.S. planned to use devious means to get him, such as planting drugs or child pornography on him or embroiling him in some immoral conduct. He says Frank Rieger, a member of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany, had written a press release to publicize the information quickly “as it did no good to put these things out after some damage had been done,” but that Assange, regretfully, failed to release it before the women publicly lodged their complaints against him. Rieger, however, tells Threat Level that he never prepared a release or anything else like this for Assange.
Journalists in general don’t fare well in the book, but Assange reserves the most withering comments for his former media partners at the Guardian and New York Times, who treated him badly after profiting from the valuable documents he gave them. Times former Editor-in-Chief Keller, whom Assange refers to as a “moral pygmy with a self-justifying streak the size of the San Andreas Fault,” is particularly called out for suggesting in an article that Assange uses “sex as both recreation and violation.”
“Ladies and gentleman, that last statement is actionable,” Assange says in the book. “It is a malicious libel, and one intended — bizarrely — to inflict maximum damage to a person then facing, as I was, allegations of sexual misconduct. He must have known as he wrote and published that line that it constituted the most heinous assault on my wellbeing, my legal standing and my reputation. But he did it anyway. I’ll never understand why and I won’t speculate.”
One new piece of information in the book involves one of Assange’s earliest collaborators, a mathematician named Daniel Mathews, whom he’d met at the University of Melbourne. Mathews wrote an analysis of the first document — from Somalia — that WikiLeaks published shortly after its launch in December 2006. The document was part of a mysterious cache of one million documents that, according to a 2010 New Yorker profile, WikiLeaks had obtained from someone who intercepted them while or after they passed through the Tor anonymizing network.
Mathews also worked on Guantanamo Bay manuals that WikiLeaks later published, but opted to distance himself from the organization after he became embroiled in a legal dispute that the Swiss-based Julius Baer Bank initiated to squelch internal bank documents that WikiLeaks had published.
Mathews, who was then teaching and working on his Ph.D. at Stanford University, told Threat Level that the bank served him with a summons because he was the only U.S.-based person they were able to associate with WikiLeaks. He had been a moderator on a WikiLeaks Facebook page. After this, Mathews decided to focus on his academic activities, though he remains friends with Assange.
Below are some highlights from the book.
Assange on being fair game for criticism:

From the start, of course, being a whistleblowing website, as they call us, certain people were keen to blow the whistle on us and that hasn’t changed. My response was, ‘Fair enough. We should eat our own dog food and see how it tastes.’ We were a group of committed, idealistic people who were trying to get something done. We could take what flak was on offer, but our basic position was strong and ethical, and I couldn’t see what rubbish could be thrown at us.

On the difficulties of finding collaborators in the early days and having to work alone:

Once or twice, quite comically (though not at the time), I turned out to be the only person at those online meetings. And of course the whole thing was right on the border of schizophrenia: I’d be there, tapping away, being the Chair and the Secretary and bringing the next thing on the agenda and calling the vote. Mad. But I felt I had to go on as if the whole thing were possible, and that way it would really happen.

On the “Collateral Murder” video:

It is a famous document of our times. But when I first saw the footage, it wasn’t at all clear what was going on; the images were jagged and the sequence lacked drama and impact, though what it depicted, eventually, was truly devastating.

On his disappointment in how the media reacted to it.

The storm that blew up about that title was depressing and surprising, even given what I knew about the attitude of much of the Western media to the official US government line. So puffed up are they with a sense of their own importance that, on seeing the video, the first debate they wanted to have was about our title, not about the contents.

On claims that he said that informants named in the cables shouldn’t be protected because they deserved to die.

Another erroneous report emerged at this time that had me saying we weren’t responsible for the welfare of informants and that ‘they deserved to die’. This is just nonsense: I said some people held that view, but that we would edit the documents to preserve their essential content and not throw harm in people’s way if we could avoid it. … In actual fact, we had been burning the midnight oil on redactions from early on.

On the sex-crimes allegations:

I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort but I am no rapist, and only a distorted version of sexual politics could attempt to turn me into one. They each had sex with me willingly and were happy to hang out with me afterwards. That is all.

OnStar Tracks Your Car Even When You Cancel Service

Navigation-and-emergency-services company OnStar is notifying its six million account holders that it will keep a complete accounting of the speed and location of OnStar-equipped vehicles, even for drivers who discontinue monthly service.
OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.
Adam Denison, a spokesman for the General Motors subsidiary, said OnStar does not currently sell customer data, but it reserves that right. He said both the new and old privacy policies allow OnStar to chronicle a vehicle’s every movement and its speed, though it’s not clear where that’s stated in the old policy.
“What’s changed [is that if] you want to cancel your OnStar service, we are going to maintain a two-way connection to your vehicle unless the customer says otherwise,” Denison said in a telephone interview.
The connection will continue, he said, to make it “easier to re-enroll” in the program, which charges plans from $19 to $29 monthly for help with navigation and emergencies. Canceling customers must opt out of the continued surveillance monitoring program, according to the privacy policy.
The privacy changes take effect in December, Denison said, adding that the policy reinforces the company’s right to sell anonymized data.
“We hear from organizations periodically requesting our information,” he said.
He said an example of how the data might be used would be for the Michigan Department of Transportation “to get a feel for traffic usage on a specific section of freeway.” The policy also allows the data to be used for marketing purposes by OnStar and vehicle manufacturers.
Collecting location and speed data via GPS might also create a treasure trove of data that could be used in criminal and civil cases. One could also imagine an eager police chief acquiring the data to issue speeding tickets en masse.
Jonathan Zdziarski, an Ohio forensics scientist, blogged about the new terms Tuesday. In a telephone interview, he said he was canceling his service and making sure he was being disconnected from OnStar’s network.
He said the new privacy policy goes too far.
“They added a bullet point allowing them to collect any data for any purpose,” he said.
Photo: OnStar Command Center in Detroit, Michigan. Associated Press/Gary Malerba
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
Follow @shoaib786_pk on Twitter.

FBI Arrests U.S. Suspect in LulzSec Sony Hack; Anonymous Also Targeted

A 23-year-old man was arrested in Arizona on Thursday in connection with the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment last May, according to news reports.
The suspect, Cody Andrew Kretsinger, is believed to be a member of the LulzSec group, an offshoot of the online griefer collective known as Anonymous. LulzSec called it quits in June after 50 days of high-profile breaches made public through a fascinating and oddly entertaining Twitter account.
A second unidentified man was arrested in San Francisco the same day in connection with Anonymous cyberattacks on web sites belonging to Santa Cruz County government offices, according to Fox News. Search warrants were also being executed against other Anonymous suspects in New Jersey, Minnesota, and Montana, an FBI source told the news agency.

The actions continue an ongoing law-enforcement crackdown against alleged members of the two groups. In July, federal agents arrested 14 suspected Anonymous members on charges of participating in denial-of-service attacks against online payment service provider PayPal.

Five additional suspects were arrested overseas — one in the United Kingdom and four in the Netherlands — for related crimes. The U.K. arrest was reportedly of “Tflow”, a former member of LulzSec, identified by police as a 16-year-old male.

The majority of the individuals were allegedly acting as part of Anonymous, which took credit for denial-of-service attacks last year against PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard after the payment service providers announced they would stop processing donations intended for the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks.

As for the latest arrest on Thursday, according to the indictment against Kretsinger (.pdf), on May 23 the Tempe, Arizona resident registered a virtual private network at hidemyass.com using the handle “recursion.” He and others allegedly used the masking service to conduct a SQL injection attack on Sony’s servers and steal data, before announcing the hack on the LulzSec web site and Twitter feed. Kretsinger then allegedly erased his hard drive in an effort to wipe out evidence of the hack.

He’s currently facing one count of conspiracy and one count of computer fraud.

Hackers breached several divisions of Sony this year, beginning in April with its PlayStation Network, where they stole data pertaining to more than 75 million customers. This was followed by another breach at Sony Online Entertainment, which compromised an additional 25 million customers, and still more breaches at Sony Pictures and Sony BMG. The initial intrusion forced Sony to take its PlayStation Network offline for 40 days. No one has taken responsibility for that hack.

In April the tech giant was hit with a class-action lawsuit by customers complaining, in part, that the company failed to adequately secure their data, failed to notify customers of the breach in a timely manner, and deprived customers of the use of the network for an extended period of time.

Sony estimated the breaches would cost it more than $170 million this year, including expenses for shoring up its network against future attacks.

An FBI spokesman said he had no immediate information to provide about the latest arrests.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Appeals Court OKs Challenge to Warrantless Electronic Spying

A legal challenge questioning the constitutionality of a federal law authorizing warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans inched a step closer Wednesday toward resolution.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the second time rejected the Obama administration’s contention that it should toss a lawsuit challenging the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. Among other things, the government said the plaintiffs — Global Fund for Women, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch, International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association, The Nation magazine, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union and others — don’t have standing to bring a constitutional challenge because they cannot demonstrate that they were subject to the eavesdropping or suffered hardships because of it.
The lawsuit, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, was lodged within hours of the FISA Amendments Act (.pdf) being signed into law by President George W. Bush in July 2008. The legislation is being challenged because it allows the National Security Agency to electronically eavesdrop on Americans without a probable-cause warrant if one of the parties to the communication resides outside the United States and is suspected of a link to terrorism.
“It is the glory of our system that even our elected leaders must defend the legality of their conduct when challenged,” (.pdf) Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for the divided court.
In a 6-6 vote, the New York-based appeals court let stand its March decision allowing the case to proceed. A majority vote of the court’s active judges is required to rehear cases.
After three years of litigation over whether the plaintiffs had standing, the merits of the case could soon be litigated in a New York federal court. That is, if the Supreme Court does not intervene or the administration does not play its trump card: an assertion of the powerful state secrets privilege that lets the executive branch effectively kill lawsuits by claiming they threaten to expose national security secrets.
The courts tend to defer to such claims. But in a rare exception in 2008, a San Francisco federal judge refused to throw out a wiretapping lawsuit against AT&T under the state secrets privilege. The AT&T lawsuit was later killed anyway, because the same FISA Amendments Act also granted the phone companies retroactive legal immunity for their alleged participation in warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ internet communications.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation claims the spying is ongoing and telecoms are siphoning all electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. An EFF lawsuit challenging the immunity is on appeal at the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The FISA Amendments Act — which passed with the support of then-senator Barack Obama — generally requires the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to rubber-stamp terror-related electronic surveillance requests. The government does not have to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process, in the rare instance of rejection by the secret FISA court. The FISA Act, first enacted in 1978 in the wake of disclosures about abuses of intelligence powers to spy on Americans, previously required targeted warrants for any spying directed at American citizens.
The plaintiffs in the 2nd Circuit case claim the legislation chills their speech, and violates their Fourth Amendment privacy rights. In a bid to win standing, they argued that they often work with overseas dissidents who might be targets of the National Security Agency program. So instead of speaking with those people on the phone or through e-mails, the groups asserted that they have had to make expensive overseas trips in a bid to maintain attorney-client confidentiality.
Photo: Agitproper/Flickr
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
Follow @shoaib786_pk on Twitter.

Federal Law Blocks Netflix, Facebook Integration — But Should It?

Facebook announced a slew of updates Thursday making it easier for millions of U.S. customers to effortlessly share their lives via a new timeline — except for details of the movies they’re renting.
For instance, Spotify customers may now consent to the automatic publication on Facebook of the songs they’re listening to. Netflix customers can do the same with the movies they watch — so long as they are in Canada or Latin America.
However, Netflix’s U.S. customers are left in the automatic sharing dark. That’s because federal law bars Netflix from offering the same type of effortless sharing in the United States.
The Video Privacy Protection Act is nearly a quarter century old. Congress adopted the measure in 1988 after failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history was published by the Washington City Paper during confirmation hearings. The act outlaws the disclosure of video rentals unless the consumer gives consent, on a rental-by-rental basis.
So now, Netflix and members of Congress are teaming up to update the law for the Facebook generation.
Whether there’s too much information being shared on social networking sites is not the issue. People seem increasingly obsessed with sharing every tidbit of their lives on electronic social networks like Facebook — from who is dating whom to what’s for breakfast.
The real issue is whether we should be alarmed by the proposed Netflix legislation (which some say was purchased with $200,000 in Netflix lobbying).
The privacy community is mixed, and Facebook has already been sued for posting Blockbuster rental information.
Here’s what the proposed H.R. 2471 does: It allows consumers to opt-in and grant ongoing consent to Netflix or other video services so video rental choices will automatically be shared via social networking tools such as Facebook’s new feeds. The Video Privacy Protection Act, as written, requires rental-by-rental consent.
“That’s a logical change,” said Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
“We would want to make sure it is implemented in a way that the consent is not buried on page 17 of the terms of service,” he said. “If users are given sufficient notice, and they have the right to revoke their consent at any time, they should be able to consent to sharing of their data.”
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said H.R. 2471 is not a good idea. He said Facebook users, if they choose, can already update their timelines manually with the movies that they are watching.
“There should be more privacy protections for users,” he said. “This is ultimately about control, about whether the user decides when to disclose what’s going on in their private life. Or do the companies get to decide?”
EPIC says on its website that the law “stands as one of the strongest protections of consumer privacy against a specific form of data collection.”
Jonathan Strickland at howstuffworks.com said Netflix chief Reed Hastings went too far when on Thursday he called the Video Privacy Protection Act “outdated.”
“While I’m sure Hastings simply meant that the law is out of date because of developments in the digital age, it felt like he was just shrugging off what has been a cornerstone of consumer privacy protection in this country. I find that sort of dismissal chilling,” Strickland wrote.
But should the Video Privacy Protection Act be altered to allow Netflix or other rental services to integrate with Facebook or other social networks automatically, without the need for a user to hit a share button? Clearly that would make Facebook users even bigger advertising pawns than they already are, and it could end up causing some embarrassing moments for those who forget the feature is turned on before they start watching a tear-jerker or a steamy foreign flick.
But regardless of that possibility, Congress should give the people what they want.
And while lawmakers are busy revising laws outdated by the march of the internet, they should reform the 1986 statute that says the government does not need a probable-cause warrant to seize your data stored in the cloud if it’s older than six months.
The Electronic Privacy Communications Act of 1986 allows that — based on the outdated theory that data left on a third-party server for a long period of time could be considered abandoned. Legislation to change that was introduced in May.
However, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the measure’s sponsor, has not granted his proposal a committee hearing. If he did, that’s a hearing we wouldn’t mind automatically sharing with our Facebook friends.
Photo: rachellynnae/Flickr
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
Follow @shoaib786_pk on Twitter.

Warrantless Mobile Phone Searches Now Still Illegal – In California

Cops in California would no longer be able to dig into your cellphone, iPad or laptop without a warrant if you are arrested, thanks to a new law that went into effect this week if California Gov Jerry Brown signs a passed bill into law by October 9.
The measure would override a California Supreme Court decision in January that let the police search through a mobile phone at will, just as they can search a suspect’s pockets after an arrest.
Correction: We did a quick blog post on this story relying on CNN’s story which was incorrect about the status of the bill.
New law bans warrantless cell phone searches – CNN.com.

WikiLeaks Founder Loses Control of His Memoir

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost control of more than just the U.S. State Department cables he possessed. He has also lost control of a memoir he had planned to publish.
Assange’s British publisher, Canongate Books, announced on Wednesday that it would release an unauthorized memoir about Assange on Thursday, despite his objections to the project and attempts to pull out of a previous agreement with the publisher.
The now-unauthorized authorized autobiography is said for the first time to address the events between Assange and two women in Sweden that led to sex-crimes allegations against him and a costly legal battle to fight his extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden.
Assange had signed much ballyhooed agreements last December with Canongate in Britain and with Alfred A. Knopf in the United States to tell his story. The deal was reportedly worth around $1.3 million, though Canongate spokeswoman Liz Sich has called that number “totally inaccurate,” while declining to provide an accurate number.
The book was intended to be part-memoir and part-manifesto, the latter focusing on the WikiLeaks operation and its fight for transparency. Assange predicted at the time that his book would become “one of the unifying documents of our generation.”
But after spending 50 hours meeting with a ghost writer at Ellingham Hall — the country estate in the UK where Assange is under house arrest while awaiting a ruling on his extradition case — Assange grew uncomfortable with the project. According to a statement on the publisher’s web site, the project proved to be “too personal” for the transparency guru, who suddenly decided in March after reviewing the first draft of the manuscript that “all memoir is prostitution.” Sources told The Independent that Assange felt the book was too heavy on personal details and too light on manifesto.
Although 38 other publishers around the world had already sub-contracted with Canongate to release the book, Assange formally moved to withdraw from the Canongate contract in June. But according to the publisher, he had by then already tied up the advance money he had received for the project and therefore could not pay it back. The Independent reports that the money may have been put into escrow to pay Assange’s legal bills for fighting the sex-crimes case.
Knopf said in a statement that it did cancel its separate contract with Assange, telling the Associated Press, “The author did not complete his work on the manuscript or deliver a book to us in accordance with our agreement. We will not be moving forward with our publication.”
But Canongate decided to go forward with its publication of the book, despite Assange’s objections. The publisher reportedly gave Assange opportunity to revise the book, but he failed to deliver any changes. The publisher also gave him a “twelve day window to seek an injunction” against the project, but that expired on Monday with no action on Assange’s part, according to The Independent.
Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, who was the ghostwriter on the book, delivered the draft to Canongate last March. But he subsequently asked for his name to be removed from the book.
Canongate is calling the book “the unauthorised first draft” of Assange’s story.
“It is passionate, provocative and opinionated – like its author,” Canongate said about the book in its statement. “It fulfils the promise of the original proposal and we are proud to publish it.”
The book, which the British newspaper The Independent plans to begin excerpting Thursday, contains a chapter devoted to the sex-crimes allegations in Sweden, in which Assange repeats the much-criticized claim that he had been warned by a source in an unnamed intelligence agency that the US government had planned to set him up. According to The Independent, Assange admits to sleeping with the two women – referred to as A and W in the book – but asserts that their allegations that some of their sexual encounters were not consensual are simply motivated by his failure to return their calls or are part of a conspiracy to get him.
“The international situation had me in its grip, and although I had spent time with these women, I wasn’t paying enough attention to them, or ringing them back, or able to step out of the zone that came down with all these threats and statements against me in America,” Assange states in the book, according to The Independent. “One of my mistakes was to expect them to understand this? I wasn’t a reliable boyfriend, or even a very courteous sleeping partner, and this began to figure. Unless, of course, the agenda had been rigged from the start.”
Assange’s previous claim that the CIA was behind the women’s allegations against him caused a rift between him and other members of WikiLeaks who criticized him for making allegations he couldn’t back and for getting WikiLeaks’s business and reputation entangled in his personal affairs.
Canongate Books has reportedly printed and distributed thousands of copies of the memoir under tight security, in order to prevent Assange from stopping its publication.
The book will go on sale in stores and online on Thursday.
Assange will receive royalties from the book he now claims he doesn’t want published, after the advance is paid back in sales, according to Canongate spokeswoman Sich.
It’s not the first time that Assange has lost control over the publication of material. Last month, he lost control of a WikiLeaks database containing more than 250,000 U.S. State Department cables after a German newspaper reported that supporters of the organization had inadvertently published a full copy of the database online. Although the file was password protected, the password had been revealed in a book that the Guardian newspaper had published about WikiLeaks, making it possible for anyone to grab the file and unlock the unredacted cables.
Photo: Julian Assange (center) speaks to the media, flanked by his lawyers Mark Stephens (left) and Jennifer Robinson after making a appearance at Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in London, Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011. Matt Dunham/AP

Kim Zetter is a senior reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, security and civil liberties.
Follow @KimZetter on Twitter.

CIA Says Global-Warming Intelligence Is ‘Classified’

Two years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency announced it was creating a center to analyze the geopolitical ramifications of “phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and heightened competition for natural resources.”
But whatever work the Center on Climate Change and National Security has done remains secret.
In response to National Security Archive scholar Jeffrey Richelson’s Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA said all of its work is “classified.”
“We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety,” (.pdf) Susan Viscuso, the agency’s information and privacy coordinator, wrote Richelson.
Richelson, in a Thursday telephone interview from Los Angeles, said the CIA has not released anything about its climate change research, other than its initial press release announcing the center’s founding.
“As far as I know, they have not released any of their products or anything else,” Richelson said. “There was a statement announcing its creation and that has been pretty much it.”
Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, blasted the CIA’s response to Richelson.
The CIA’s position, he said, means all “the center’s work is classified and there is not even a single study, or a single passage in a single study, that could be released without damage to national security. That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”
When the center was announced, the CIA said it would become “a powerful asset recognized throughout our government, and beyond, for its knowledge and insight.”
President Barack Obama also promised a transparent administration, which he might not be living up to. For instance, in 2009, the Obama administration played the national security card to hide details of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that is still being negotiated across the globe.
What’s more, consider the 33-page report the White House issued Friday, “The Obama Administration’s Commitment to Open Government.” (pdf)
Aftergood said the report “downplays or overlooks many of the administration’s principal achievements in reducing inappropriate secrecy. At the same time, it fails to acknowledge the major defects of the openness program to date. And so it presents a muddled picture of the state of open government, while providing a poor guide to future policy.”
In any case, the Center for Climate Change and National Security might not continue much longer “because of pressure for intelligence budget cuts and resistance from conservative lawmakers.”
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
Follow @shoaib786_pk on Twitter.

Gov. Brown: Sign Bill Outlawing Warrantless Smartphone Searches

ANALYSIS — There’s a bill sitting on the desk of California Governor Jerry Brown, which if signed would ban police from searching the mobile devices of people arrested for a crime.
Instead, police would need to get a warrant from a judge to search a person’s smartphone or tablet, the same as they would if they wanted to search someone’s house or home computer. The governor has until October 9 to sign or veto the bill, but his office is giving no indication which way he’s leaning.
However, there are rumors in the privacy community that Gov. Brown will veto the bill, known as SB 914, as a favor to law enforcement.
That would be a mistake.
Increasingly, the mobile devices we carry around are portals into our personal and professional lives, full of photos, our e-mails and banking information.
It’d be absurdly unconstitutional to give the police carte blanche to come search through your home and your home computer and your online accounts without a warrant if they arrested you at a protest or for any other reason. Just because we now carry a portal to that information around with us in our pockets does not mean that the rights of people to be secure in their papers and possessions should be left in the 20th century.
The bill includes an exception for emergencies — so in the extremely rare instance where a suspected kidnapper had been apprehended, an officer could search the device to look for clues pointing to the location of the abducted — without having to get a warrant.
If anything that exception is too large, given that it doesn’t require any annual reporting on how often such “exigent” circumstances are used to bypass the warrant requirement. In absence of such audits, officers are likely to abuse the “exigent” clause, just as FBI agents did with the Patriot Act when they broke the law to get the phone records of American citizens.
Despite the bill being weaker than we’d like, Governor Brown should take this opportunity to join with the legislature in overturning a January Supreme Court ruling that mistakenly decided that searching through the contents of the computing devices in our pocket was equivalent to searching through a suspect’s pockets.
Of course, law enforcement wants as much power and as little paperwork as possible, and it is a powerful lobby in California that Brown wants on his side (L.A.’s District Attorney’s office spent more than $144,000 on lobbying in just the first six months of 2011.)
But in this case, Governor Brown should put the rights of the people first and respect that California has long been on the forefront of privacy laws that protect citizens.
Or to put it more simply, just because we live in a wireless world, that doesn’t mean we should live in a warrantless world.

Net Neutrality Rules Published, Lawsuits Soon to Follow

The FCC has finally officially published long-delayed rules prohibiting cable, DSL and wireless internet companies from blocking websites and requiring them to disclose how they slow down or throttle their networks.
The so-called Net Neutrality rules (.pdf), passed along party lines in late December last year in a 3-2 vote, were published in the Federal Register Friday and will go into effect on November 20.
The basic outlines of the rules, which differentiate between fixed broadband (e.g. cable, fiber and DSL) and mobile broadband (the connection to smartphones and mobile hotspot devices):

The Commission adopts three basic protections that are grounded in broadly accepted Internet norms, as well as our own prior decisions.
First, transparency: fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and commercial terms of their broadband services.
Second, no blocking: fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.
Third, no unreasonable discrimination: fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

One of the more contentious debates, left unresolved to either side’s liking, is whether wireless companies should be forced to play by the same fairness rules as cable and DSL internet providers do. Online activists argue that in absence of such rules, wireless carriers will throttle innovative services — while the carriers maintain that their networks are more congested and that competition will prevent any unfair behavior on their part.
Verizon and MetroPCS filed suit in January to block the rules, but the suits were dismissed as being too early. Now that the rules have been officially published in the publication of the government’s business, telecoms are free to challenge the rules — which they almost certainly will do.
The Obama FCC, making good on Obama’s campaign promises, set out to strengthen rules established by the Bush FCC that guaranteed Americans the right to use the devices and online services of their choice online. But those “rules” were set up as the FCC chose to deregulate cable and DSL internet service providers — and were thrown out in court when the FCC tried to order Comcast to not block peer-to-peer file sharing.
The court found that by choosing to deregulate ISPs, the FCC lost the right to regulate ISPs.
The FCC then faced the choice of re-regulating ISPs by putting them back in the same regulatory bucket as phone service, which gives the FCC clear authority to require ISPs not to block services like Skype and to require them to let users connect to any website they like — the same as phone companies must let users call any number they like.
But that avenue turned out to be politically poisonous, with Republicans clamoring nonsensically that amounted to regulation of Internet content.
So instead the FCC says it found new authority to regulate ISPs that it has deregulated, though it’s not clear that the new authorities, which look cobbled together with Legos and Lincoln Logs, will hold up under scrutiny, especially if the telecoms get their way and have the suits heard by the same federal court that demolished the old rules.
In that case, the fights, lobbying and political posturing will start all over again.

Canongate: We were right to publish Julian Assange's book

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Publishing Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Auto­biography has been one of the most unusual, fascinating, frustrating but exciting journeys that Canongate has ever been on. By the time this piece appears, a lot of ink and airtime will have been given over to the drama behind the book's publication and our decision to go ahead without Julian's approval.
The fact is he was given five and a half months to read the manuscript and during this time he contributed not one written word by way of response. It became increasingly clear that he was never going to approve the book, despite signing a contract to write such a book and happily taking a significant amount of Canongate's money.
This was never going to be a quiet affair but what I still hope, above all, is that people actually read the book. For the book is remarkable. Whatever your opinion of Julian Assange, and he polarises people like few contemporary figures, this memoir offers unique insights into who he is, how he thinks and how WikiLeaks came into being.
It is also superbly paced and riveting. The moment we finished reading the first draft (we being me, Nick Davies, Canongate's publishing director, and Julian's editor in New York), we all felt that we had the makings of a phenomenal and highly commercial book on our hands. Everything seemed to be going to plan. We talked ambitiously of a June publication date as the three of us and the ghost enjoyed a high-spirited dinner together. We were going to make publishing history.
Then the problems began. I'm not going to dwell on the gory details of why the project began to lose its way, but it certainly was not for lack of effort on our part. And it is hard to overestimate the amount of pressure the subject of the book was under. However, there comes a point when you sometimes have to accept that the best-laid plans are fundamentally flawed. This was one of those instances.
Publishing books is not meant to be easy and it is inherently risky. And some authors are more tricky than others. But we have never been afraid to publish what we think is important, even if that involves upping the ante and doing things differently. And with Julian's book it seems entirely appropriate that the publishing of it should break all the rules.

Zimbabwe politician sues paper over WikiLeaks revelations

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Zimbabwe's former information minister, Jonathan Moyo, has sued the Daily News and its publisher for an article about him based on a WikiLeaks disclosure.

Moyo's lawsuit concerns a 6 September report, Moyo's plans to oust Mugabe, which cited a 2007 US diplomatic cable in which Moyo voiced support for sanctions against President Robert Mugabe, the leader of his own party, Zanu PF.

A follow-up article the next day, Moyo advised US on Zanu-PF sanctions list, reported that Moyo had suggested which senior members of the party should be targeted by sanctions.

Moyo, a Zanu PF politburo member who claims to be one of Mugabe's foremost defenders, has named Daily News editor Stanley Gama and reporter Thelma Chikwanha in his writ. He is demanding $100,000 in damages.

But the Paris-based press watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, has condemned Moyo's action. It says:

"The Daily News just reported, and commented on, reliable information that is now accessible to everyone through WikiLeaks.

Its reporters did a serious piece of investigative journalism based on information that is clearly embarrassing but is now out in the open.

Annoyed by the publication of his confidential comments, Moyo is singling out a local newspaper he has never liked. His accusations are grave and without foundation."

A Daily News spokesman said the Harare-based newspaper stood by its articles.

Last May, shortly after the Daily News resumed publishing after a seven-year ban, Moyo sued the newspaper for $60,000 for reprinting former articles about his expulsion from Zanu-PF in 2005. He rejoined later.

Source: Reporters without Borders

Julian Assange publishers to release autobiography without his consent

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange became 'increasingly troubled by the thought of publishing an autobiography', according to Canongate. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
Julian Assange's publishers will publish on Thursday the "unauthorised first draft" of his autobiography without his consent, months after the WikiLeaks founder withdrew from a million-pound contract for his memoirs.
In a dramatic move, Canongate has defied Assange's wishes and secretly printed thousands of copies of Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, with the book being shipped amid strict security to booksellers in preparation for imminent release. The enormous security operation was put in place by the publishers, according to a source, to stop the author blocking publication.
Assange signed a high-profile deal, reportedly worth a total of £930,000, with the Edinburgh-based publisher and the US firm Alfred A Knopf in December. The manuscript was subsequently sold in more than 35 countries. Assange said at the time that he believed the book would become "one of the unifying documents of our generation".
But after seeing a first draft in March, the WikiLeaks founder told his publishers that he no longer intended to write the book, believing it could give ammunition to US prosecutors seeking his extradition over possible espionage charges relating to the WikiLeaks cable release.
He formally withdrew from his contract on 7 June and since then the Australian and his publisher have been locked in a bitter dispute over the contract and his £500,000 advance, which he has not returned. Assange, requiring funds for his legal fight against extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault, had placed the advance in escrow, meaning that his former legal team have first claim on any assets.
The Independent, which is to serialise the book, starting on Thursday, said Andrew O'Hagan, Assange's ghostwriter, had asked for his name to be removed from the book. The paper said that Canongate, faced with a financial crisis, gave Assange two months to work on the manuscript and, finally, a 12-day window to seek an injunction, which expired on Monday. Assange has not sought to block the book.
Assange did not respond to requests for comment, but according to a source close to him, he was aware the publisher had plans to release the draft manuscript, and would have liked to have enjoined it, "but the manner in which this has happened has reduced his options to do so. The book is not in a form that Julian ever expected or believed should be published, and certainly he's concerned that it isn't something that he has properly read through and checked." Neither O'Hagan, nor Assange's current or former lawyers were available for comment.
Canongate said: "Despite sitting for more than 50 hours of taped interviews and spending many late nights at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk (where he was – and still is – living under house arrest) discussing his life and the work of WikiLeaks with the writer he had enlisted to help him, Julian became increasingly troubled by the thought of publishing an autobiography. After reading the first draft of the book that was delivered to the publishers at the end of March, he declared: 'All memoir is prostitution.' On 7 June 2011, Julian told Canongate he wanted to cancel his contract.
"However, he had already signed his advance over to his lawyers to settle his legal bills and has not repaid the advance owed since. So the contract still stands and Canongate has decided to honour it and publish the autobiography."
In a preface to the book, Canongate explains its reasons for defying Assange's wishes. ""We disagree with Julian's assessment of the book. We believe it explains both the man and his work, underlining his commitment to the truth. Julian always claimed the book was well written; we agree, and this also encouraged us to make the book available to readers." The volume, Canongate said, "fulfils … the promise of the original book proposal and is, like its author, passionate, provocative and opinionated.".
Given sufficient sales, the publisher confirmed Assange would receive royalties once the advance had been covered.
The Independent says Assange writes in the book about Swedish allegations that he had been warned by a source in an unnamed intelligence agency that the US government was planning to set him up.
Speaking of the two women who accused him of assault, he says: "The international situation had me in its grip, and although I had spent time with these women, I wasn't paying enough attention to them, or ringing them back, or able to step out of the zone that came down with all these threats and statements against me in America. One of my mistakes was to expect them to understand this? I wasn't a reliable boyfriend, or even a very courteous sleeping partner, and this began to figure. Unless, of course, the agenda had been rigged from the start."
In the book extracts published on Wednesday, Assange gives his first account of the sexual encounters with the two women in Stockholm which led to the current demands from Swedish authorities for his extradition to answer sexual assault allegations.
The memoirs say Assange describes one of the women, without naming her, as "a little neurotic". He says that he failed to phone the second women after their night together, which "turned out to be the most expensive call I didn't make".
He insists: "I did not rape these women, and cannot imagine anything that happened between us that would make them think so, except malice after the fact, a joint plan to entrap me, or a terrible misunderstanding that was stoked up between them. I maybe a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I am no rapist."
The book says Assange admits one of the women's claims: that they wanted him to take an STD test, which he failed to do. But the book is silent on the main allegation: that he had sex without a condom against his partner's will.
In the extracts, he also talks of the thrill of computer hacking, and how accessing top-secret websites quickly became addictive: "The thrill was exorbitant. It was like the first time you beat an adult at chess."
He writes of himself and other hackers finding their "ways into the workings of vast corporations" and the excitement of the experience as being "mindblowing."
The book will not be published in the US. "We cancelled our contract for Julian Assange's memoir," Knopf told the New York Observer. "The author did not complete … the manuscript or deliver a book to us in accordance with our agreement. We will not be moving forward with our publication."

How WikiLeaks is changing journalism

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How has WikiLeaks changed the journalistic environment? Charlie Beckett of POLIS, the LSE's journalism think-tank, is about to answer those questions at the world editors' forum in Vienna next month and in a forthcoming book.

In advance of his appearance at the forum, he has given an interview to an unnamed WAN-IFRA questioner in which he contends that we shouldn't see WikiLeaks as an "aberration" but as part of the changing landscape of modern journalism.

He makes all sorts of good points about the changing nature of journalism in a lengthy Q&A. Couple of highlights:

"What has changed has not been the journalists so much as what's happening around them...

Traditional journalists have to observe the law of the land, they have libel problems, they have codes of ethics, etc. and so they had to be more careful...

WikiLeaks was seen as a place which was, in a sense, braver or, some would say, foolhardy. Journalists, in a way, can't compete with that...

The big question that WikiLeaks poses for traditional journalism is: have you done your job properly? Have you been tough enough on authority? WikiLeaks is a challenge to say; is your journalism really holding power to account?"

Asked whether news organisations should create their own mechanism for the leaking of documents, Beckett replies:

"I think that's what they should do anyway. News organisations should be places that people can come to because they want to reveal things. This is as old as journalism itself...

I think the trouble has been that with a lot of journalism the public doesn't see the journalists as on their side...

Traditional journalism has to invent a new model for itself, it just has to do what it's supposed to do properly."

Source: Editors' weblog

Why we journalists need confidential police sources

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One question we journalists tend to be asked most often by those people we call "ordinary members of the public" is simple enough. Where, they ask, do stories come from?

But, as you all know, it's difficult to give a straightforward answer because there are so many routes.

If we choose to talk about "contacts" or "sources", then explaining who they are and how we obtain them often proves tricky too.

We know that from our earliest moments in journalism we learn that cultivating sources is our key task. Sources are our lifeblood. No sources, no stories.

We can all witness events, such as riots, and describe what is before our eyes. We can turn up at courts and council meetings and parliamentary debates and record what is said and also interpret why it was said.

Getting genuine news stories, the ones that lie hidden, whether on purpose or by accident, is altogether different.

Obtaining documentary evidence can be crucial (as WikiLeaks illustrated), but most genuine news stories emerge because journalists have forged relationships with other human beings.

Cub reporters learn the importance of getting close to people who, by the nature of their occupation, have information that would otherwise remain secret.

They include police, fire officers, hospital secretaries, undertakers, coroners' officers, court officials, council bureaucrats and, of course, a variety of PRs.

At the beginning of my career, this wasn't viewed as a controversial matter and, in the main, it isn't so today, though the rise of the public relations "industry" has had a markedly negative effect.

PRs churn out "information", but it is - by its nature - anodyne. Public relations is very different from public interest.

The easy flow of public interest information from source to reporter has become more complicated when PRs act as gatekeepers to knowledge.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the way journalists interact with police officers.

When I started out as a reporter every day began with a visit to Barking police station for a chat with the duty sergeant.

He (and it was always a male in those days) would consult the OB, the occurrence book, and read out noteworthy incidents. Some sergeants gave the information grudgingly, some turned the book around so that I could read it.

That's how I learned about misbehaviour in the community – burglaries, pub assaults, accidents, domestic disputes, overnight arrests. Some I followed up with visits while some warranted a mere paragraph. Some, such as the domestics, were unreportable.

It was only natural that I should also meet and get to know other officers, particularly the younger constables who were closer to my age. We drank together. I often attended their parties. I went to the cinema a couple of times with one sergeant and once babysat for another.

My police "contacts", as I came to call them, appeared to know where to draw the line between what I should and should not be told. Similarly, I learned what could be reported and what could not.

There was no trade in information. No money changed hands, and I recall that they paid for drinks more often than I did since they earned more than me.

These were commonsensical relationships built on trust and a measure of friendship. Thinking back, I guess they might well have inhibited my being critical of the force, though that problem didn't arise at the time.

The central point of this reminiscence - prompted by the current nervousness of certain authorities (and, possibly, the public) to contacts between journalists and police officers - to is to emphasise the mundane nature of this old way of doing the news business.

Informal contacts between a journalist and a police officer need not be in the least contentious.

With the introduction of PRs, a move that police forces appeared to imagine would enhance the flow of information, the situation has certainly changed.

All too often, the official release of information is formal, narrowly defined and delayed.

Many police forces also withhold information by citing, often inaccurately, the Data Protection Act, which protects people's privacy. As a result, most police officers have tended to be more circumspect in their dealings with reporters.

Even so, the dialogues between the two have never been totally terminated. Now, though, some meetings have become covert, assuming a sinister aspect that was never previously the case.

Both sides know that senior officers and their public relations squads disapprove of unofficial leaks. Yet, the clamp on information, allied to the British penchant for official secrecy – a disease more rampant here than in many other countries – encourages reporters to seek out pliant police officers.

In general, they are not offered financial inducements, nor do they seek them. Both sides know this would be illegal.

Most leaks occur because of a mutuality of interest, a genuine belief by representatives on each side that the public does have a right to know about hidden facts.

I have no idea what motivated the person who leaked the information that led The Guardian to publish its story about the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone.

But is anyone prepared to say that it was wrong for that leak to have occurred? Consider the consequences following the story's publication...

It led to the closure of the News of the World, the resignation of senior News International executives, the downfall of the Met commissioner and one of his lieutenants, a slew of arrests, the acute embarrassment of prime minister David Cameron, the humbling of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a judicial inquiry into press regulation and a continuing investigation by MPs into media ethics.

So the story's emergence, courtesy of a confidential source, was of inestimable public value with ramifications that are yet to run their course.

The Guardian reporter and the police leaker were performing a public duty. Public interest disclosure is our raison d'être. Upholding the law is the police's reason to exist.

The exposure of the Dowler episode was an example of the paper doing its job properly because the police had failed to do theirs.

Remember the wise words of Lord Northcliffe: "News is what somebody, somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising." The police did suppress news.

NB: Some of this material appears in my London Evening Standard column today.

Julian Assange's memoir should not have been published

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography on sale in London. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/AFP/Getty Images
The truth is out – or at least the "unauthorised autobiography". Opening with a dramatic scene in the back of a police van with "press photographers … scrabbling around the windows like crabs in a bucket", and ending in a Norfolk house that "was soon to become … [a] prison for the foreseeable future", the promised account of the "global struggle to force a new relationship between the people and their governments" hits bookshops today, after a cloak-and-dagger operation to prevent its subject from halting its publication.
But whose book is it? The subject, Julian Assange, disowns it, claiming in a statement on the Wikileaks website that his publisher, Canongate, is "profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft" which was never intended for publication, but was handed over "for viewing purposes only". According to the Independent, which has begun serialising the book today, ghostwriter Andrew O'Hagan became "increasingly uncomfortable about the furore", and appears only as an unnamed writer in the publisher's note describing the "more than 50 hours of taped interviews" on which the book is based. Perhaps the real author of the book is head of Canongate Jamie Byng, who splashed out on the Assange autobiography at the end of last year, presumably hoping that the man of the moment would deliver the kind of landslide publishing victory his house pulled off with Barack Obama.
But now, Canongate finds itself accused by Assange himself of "screwing people over to make a buck": he claims that the published version was in fact a draft, a "work in progress" and that he had promised to provide a new version of the book by the end of this year. According to Canongate the contract "still stands", since Assange had "already signed his advance over to his lawyers to settle his legal bills" before informing them he wanted to cancel the deal. They have "decided to honour it – and to publish" – but it's difficult to see where honour comes into this decision.
Canongate publishing director Nick Davies denies Assange's advance was the reported £500,000, but tells the Bookseller that the Independent was "left with no other option". Maybe you have sympathy with a small publisher straining under a "financial imperative", but isn't it just wrong to publish something against an author's wishes, even if that author is a little hard to work with? This autumn might have looked pretty bleak fior Canongate, without a book that has already shot to

WikiLeaks cables reveal Australian 'middle power diplomacy' on green issues

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  Rudd told the US ambassador he was not 'starry-eyed towards China' and that his government would not give the US 'any grief' over reducing its carbon emissions. Photograph: Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images
Senior Australian officials privately criticised China for its "lack of ambition" in cutting emissions, floated the idea of importing its nuclear reactors and desperately attempted to dampen tension with Japan over the controversial issue of whaling, secret diplomatic cables have revealed.
In an intriguing insight into the stated aim of Australian "middle power diplomacy" by the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, the tranche of cables show a country pulled in different directions by the US, China and Japan on environmental issues.
The cables from the US embassy in Canberra, released by WikiLeaks, show that Rudd was keen to stress his pro-American credentials, given his background as a Mandarin-speaking former Beijing diplomat.
At a December 2007 meeting, Rudd told the US ambassador he was not "starry-eyed towards China" and that his government would not give the US "any grief" over reducing its carbon emissions.
This was followed by another cable sent a month later, in which the US embassy noted Rudd's efforts to act as an "intermediary" between China and the west on climate change, adding that the prime minister wasn't a "panda hugger".
However, the cable also highlights areas of division, citing Rudd's immediate signing of the Kyoto protocol, unlike the US, after taking power. The prime minister, the cable states, will take a more "independent" stance on US-Australia relations, pulling back from predecessor John Howard's "unquestioning cheer squad" approach.
Australia has also had a complicated relationship with China when it comes to environmental matters, the leaked cables suggest.
A March 2005 cable describes talks between Chinese officials and John Carlson, director general of the Australian Safeguards and Nonproliferation Office.
Carlson said there was an "agreement for co-operation" for uranium sales to China, with Australia sending 80% of its annual 10,000 tonne export cargo to the country. China said it needed the uranium to boost its production of nuclear power from 2% of overall energy production to 4% by 2020.
However, Carlsson pointed out that the Chinese officials were a "bit coy" when asked whether they were using enriched uranium to make missiles.
Carlsson ruminated that Howard-era Australia "might some day" import nuclear reactors from China, although the cable stresses that this would require the "Australian Labor party, Greens and the general Australian public drop their opposition to nuclear energy in the meantime."
This revelation may cause disquiet in Australia, which has consistently vocalised bipartisan opposition to nuclear power, despite having the largest deposits of uranium in the world.
By January 2010, with Rudd in power, Australia's relationship with China appeared to be on rockier ground.
In the wake of the disastrous Copenhagen climate change talks, Martin Parkinson, secretary of Australia's Department of Climate Change, "expressed concern to Chinese diplomats over the lack of ambition" in China's stated goal of a 40-45% reduction in carbon intensity by 2020.
Parkinson said that Rudd had a "concrete action plan" to address the deficiencies of the Danish summit, but that "China would only do what it saw in its own interest, so demonstrating that early action would be in China's own best interest is critical."
Parkinson warned that Chinese failure to include its carbon pledge in the Copenhagen accord would "seriously jeopardise" Australia's own emissions trading scheme (ETS).
Ultimately, China did commit to the goal, but the ETS didn't materialise anyway.
The failure to pass the legislation was a significant factor in the downfall of Rudd, who was replaced as prime minister by his deputy, Julia Gillard, in June last year. He has since returned to the government front benches as foreign minister.
It is perhaps surprising that Australia attacked China for a lack of ambition over emissions targets when it has itself committed to a mere 5% cut on 2000 levels by 2020. Doubts have been raised that even this modest goal will be achieved.
Caught between the competing interests of traditional ally, the US, and regional superpower, China, Australia has also managed to clash with its second largest trading partner – Japan.
A leaked cable from May 2008 shows the frantic attempts made by the then foreign minister Stephen Smith to smooth the relationship with Tokyo over Japan's whaling activities in the Southern Ocean.
Whaling is highly controversial in Australia, although Japan maintains its activities are legal due to the "scientific" nature of the hunts.
Smith, anxious over the potential damage to trade agreements, backed down from a previous threat to refer Japan's continued whaling to the International Court of Justice, according to the cable.
A separate October 2008 cable highlights the Australian government's concern over the issue, with the cabinet divided over whether legal action was preferable or even likely to succeed.
The repeated harassment of Japanese whaling boats by the conservationist Sea Shepherd vessel saw the Australian government take a "low key" approach to " prevent a diplomatic escalation to match that taking place at sea", a cable from February 2009 reveals.
However, a harder line was adopted by Australia following the sinking of the Ady Gil, a speedboat used by Sea Shepherd.
The Ady Gil was sliced in half after a collision with a Japanese whaling vessel in January 2010, with both sides blaming each other for the incident.
A US diplomatic cable correctly predicted that Japan would "come away clean" from the resulting inquiry, although Japanese officials told the US embassy that they considered legal action over whaling "inevitable" after Rudd demanded an end to the practice.
Japan subsequently suspended its Antarctic whaling activities, although Australia is still pushing for a permanent end to the hunts.
The leaked cables also shine a light on a domestic environmental controversy that is currently dogging the beleaguered Labor government.
Two companies involved in the construction of a contentious A$35bn liquefied natural gas hub in an untouched area of Western Australia claim that the government gave them no option but to use the site.
A December 2009 cable reveals complaints by Chevron and BHP that "unprecedented interference" by government officials meant that they had to go along with project leader Woodside and develop on the Kimberley coastline.
Environmental groups claim the LNG plant will ruin an area that contains one of the world's longest trails of dinosaur footprints, as well as pollute the Kimberley coast, endangering rare communities of humpback whales, snubnosed dolphins and sea turtles.
Last week, federal resources minister Tony Burke announced that he will add 20m hectares of the Kimberley to the national heritage list, with the caveat that development such as the LNG plant will be allowed to continue, a position that has enraged conservationists.

Why we are publishing Julian Assange's (unauthorised) autobiography | Nick Davies

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  Julian Assange – the Unauthorised Autobiography 'is a compelling portrait of one of the most mercurial figures alive today'. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
It wasn't supposed to happen like this.
Late last year Canongate, the publishing house I work for, signed Julian Assange's autobiography to huge media attention. Julian had just been released from Wandsworth prison and wanted to find a publisher for his book. And why not? Everyone else was at it. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the disillusioned former WikiLeaks spokesperson, was busy spinning his memoir. The Guardian and the New York Times were eager to put their respective versions of events across. Here was Julian's chance to raise some much-needed money for WikiLeaks and to set his critics straight. And Canongate Books seemed like the perfect fit: a small, independent publishing house that has always been happy to take a risk and admired what Julian and WikiLeaks had achieved.
The first three months couldn't have gone much better. Canongate's managing director, Jamie Byng, and I travelled up to Norfolk to see Julian in early January. Our first priority was to find a ghostwriter to work on the project. Julian was very clear about what he wanted: "I have all the facts. Find me a novelist who can turn those facts into stories."
We struck it lucky with the writer we found: an award-winning novelist who was equally comfortable writing serious, hard-hitting reportage. He was a strong character too. Somebody who could put his hand up and tell Julian when he was talking shit or veering off subject. It was a brilliant combination and the two men worked late into the night, most nights, drinking whisky in the icy-cold drawing room at Ellingham Hall through January, February and March.
At the same time, Canongate – on Julian's behalf – struck rights deals with 38 of the best publishing houses around the world. This really would be a global book launch, which seemed fitting for the founder of WikiLeaks and his international fanbase. What could possibly go wrong?
Julian's ghostwriter delivered a brilliant first draft of the book, bang on schedule, at the end of March. We read it and loved it. Julian didn't. He didn't love it. We're not even sure how much he actually read. It was an extraordinary reaction to a manuscript he should have been grateful for and immensely proud of.
What followed was a series of broken promises. We set Julian free to work on the manuscript himself. He had six weeks to edit and rewrite. On the day he was supposed to return it to us, we heard that he'd lost all of his work. It was buried in one of his many laptops and he couldn't find it (dogs and homework came to mind). Then he told us he wanted to cancel his contract. But he couldn't repay his advance. He had already signed it over to his lawyers to cover his escalating legal bills.
There have been countless other twists and turns to this extraordinary story. But the reason we've decided to publish the book – against Julian's will, but with clear forewarning – is this: with no prospect of ever seeing Julian's advance repaid to us, and with little chance of convincing Julian to engage with that first draft, we had only one sensible option – to publish the draft that we felt was so strong and which conformed so closely to the original brief.
There is a financial imperative, of course. We hope that in publishing the book we will recover some of our losses. But we are also immensely proud of the book itself. It is a compelling portrait of one of the most mercurial figures alive today.
As for that much commented-upon subtitle, The Unauthorised Autobiography, it is definitely a publishing first. And given we're talking about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks there is, of course, a sweet irony to it too.
• Nick Davies, not to be confused with the Guardian reporter Nick Davies, is publishing director at Canongate

Julian Assange autobiography reaction – Thursday 22 September 2011

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  Julian Assange: The WikiLeaks founder's 'unauthorised autobiography' has been released by publishers Canongate. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images9.40am: Good morning. Julian Assange's publishers, Canongate, have this morning released his "unauthorised autobiography" despite an attempt by the Wikileaks founder to withdraw from his million-pound book deal.
The book – based on an early 70,000-word draft of the manuscript written by Assange with the novelist Andrew O'Hagan and shown to the publishers in March – was released amid heavy secrecy to stop the author from seeking an injunction to block publication, the Guardian reported yesterday.
In a statement to the Associated Press last night, Assange accused the publisher of "profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft".
"The events surrounding its unauthorised publication by Canongate are not about freedom of information, they are about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity screwing people over to make a buck," he said.
But the Australian also gave a rare insight into his strained financial situation, which may be helped by publication, since Canongate has confirmed it will pay him royalties if sales are sufficient to first cover his £500,000 advance.
"My legal costs are mounting due to politically motivated legal attacks and a financial blockade jeopardises Wikileaks' continued operations," he said.
We'll be sharing selected highlights and reaction here.
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10.24am: The first thing to say about the book is that it is very obviously a fragment.
The narrative ends before the US Embassy cables release in November last year and Assange's arrest and subsequent bailing under curfew to Ellingham Hall, though the foreword has a short account of his time in Wandsworth prison, which he describes as "a kind of deviant's Barbarella".
The story focuses instead on Assange's childhood and early adulthood in Australia, the origins of Wikileaks through the "Collateral Murder" video release, and the early days of the organisation's relationships with media partners including the Guardian, of which more later.
Almost a third of its 339 pages is made up of an appendix of the cable releases and an afterword, and there is no index.
10.48am: Attention is likely to focus on the passages in which Assange addresses the accusations of rape and sexual assault made by two Swedish women, for which his extradition is being sought (he is currently awaiting the judgement of his appeal against extradition).
In a chapter entitled "Blood", Assange writes that he had gone to Sweden initially hoping it could be a haven, given its laws protecting sources. On arriving he says he was told by an unspecified "Western intelligence agency" contact that the US government were talking about "dealing with [him] illegally", which he understood to mean planting drugs or child pornography on him.
The first woman who would later accuse him, called Ms A in the book (and in court documents), was an activist in whose apartment Assange was staying while she was away. She returned early and suggested that they share her only bed, Assange writes; he adds that he had no reason "to believe that this was naught [sic] but a friendly suggestion."
Given the "stressful" situation, he says he was "glad of the attention of these smiling and affectionate women" though it may be "ungallant" to say so. He says he found the woman "a bit neurotic".
He met the second woman, Ms W, at a press conference, noting: "I remember she was wearing a nice pink sweater." He met up with her later and went back to her house. "My behaviour sounds cold, and no doubt was, which is a failing of mine, but not a crime. I'd spent long enough at A___'s and could see that it would be a bad idea to stay longer. Remember I was feeling especially paranoid."
On leaving her house, he says, he promised to call her from the train, but didn't. "It has already turned out to be the most expensive call I didn't make."
"The international situation had me in its grip," he writes, and so he "wasn't paying enough attention" to the women. "One of my mistakes was to expect them to understand this... I wasn't a very reliable boyfriend, or even a very courteous sleeping partner, and this began to figure. Unless, of course, the agenda had been rigged from the start."
Elsewhere, Assange writes of flirting with another woman — with whom he was dining along with her boyfriend — on the same short trip, but being warned by a friend of possible honeytraps. "I remember he went into detail about how Mossad had captured [Mordechai] Vanunu."
The repetition of hints about possibly nefarious motives from his accusers is notable, given that Assange has elsewhere conceded that it is "not probable" that there was a honeytrap plot against him.
11.29am: More from the Wikileaks statement, released overnight, in which Assange gives his account of what appears to have been an extremely acrimonious dispute with his publishers over the book. Canongate's statement is here.
Assange says he was advised by his lawyers that he would have grounds to block publication, but when he sought legal advice from "numerous solicitors", they were unwilling to take his case because he would need to show he was in a position to pay Canongate damages if he lost. "I am not in a position to give such an undertaking. Canongate are aware of this."
In fact, Assange says, he had a verbal agreement with Jamie Byng, Canongate's publisher, "to deliver the agreed 100,000 to 150,000 word manuscript by the end of the year." He says he was given assurances by Byng in a later phonecall "that Canongate would never, contrary to rumours... publish the book without the consent."
"Contrary to what The Independent reports, I did not pull the plug on the deal, nor was I unwilling to compromise. Rather, I proposed on 7 June 2011 to cancel the contract as it stood in order to write up a fresh contract with a new deadline." He writes that he received an email from his agent saying that both Canongate and US publisher Knopf "insisted on cancelling the existing contract".
"My agent was negotiating a new timetable and we had agreed to draw up a fresh contract for the book I wanted to publish in my name. The last conversation with Jamie Byng on 16 June was friendly, positive and forward-looking. Since then, as Canongate secretly prepared the manuscript for publication, it has found excuses not to interact with me, presumably in order to avoid discovery."
The statement also criticises Assange's former legal team from law firm Finers Stephens Innocent, led by solicitor Mark Stephens.
Assange says that the advance from Canongate was paid to his former law firm Finers Stephens Innocent "wholly without my consent" and is currently being held by them following a dispute over fees.
"The outcome of this dispute is pending, but a favourable finding would release the entire advance, which has not been touched, back to Canongate and Knopf."
We have asked FSI for their response.
1.28pm: As might be expected, the memoir is very critical of Wikileaks' dealings with some of his media partners, particularly the Guardian and New York Times, during their first collaborations on document caches relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. "Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore," Assange opens a chapter entitled "All the editors' men", "they use it to fend off the dark whiff of themselves."
Nonetheless, he writes of those journalists with whom he has disagreed, "I bear them no deep resentment, but only mourn, as they must, the failing light of their principles."
First, perhaps unexpectedly, some praise of this newspaper. "Everyone who likes a cause likes the Guardian, and I am not different finding the paper to be a beacon sometimes... After the events of 9/11, The Guardian was the only truthful newspaper available in America." Its virtues, he writes, "won't diminish as a result of their infamous venality over me".
(Readers may be interested to learn that a number of Guardian journalists, notably those who have worked most closely with Assange, Nick Davies and David Leigh, receive no mention by name in the book, being referred to, instead, as "a special investigations reporter" and "another reporter... a news guy" respectively.)
But the author is also highly critical of his former media partners, writing of his regret in not realising, soon after forging his relationship with the Guardian and New York Times, "that these people were not gentlemen". It was a full-time job "to keep them honest", he says. He himself was "not always nice. But I thought these were men of action and principle, not weaklings with a crush." He says there was a "very personal" element to his falling out with the unnamed investigations reporter, whom he describes as "behaving erratically and needily, like a besotted person".
His major criticism of the Guardian itself is that, during the period of publication of the Afghanistan and Iraq cables last summer, the paper became more preoccupied with its exclusivity than the material itself. Criticism from this newspaper of Assange as obstructive was part of its characteristic "bitching and hissyness", he writes.
(The Guardian's account of this period, which differs in a number of key points from Assange's, is here.)
The New York Times's editor Bill Keller is personally criticised very harshly in prolonged passages, with Assange describing a request from the paper that others published a sensitive story on Afghanistan first as "a piece of strategic cowardice". "The cock crowed three times, and Bill Kller shamelessly denied us". Later he calls him "a moral pygmy with a self-justifying streak the size of the San Andreas fault". He refers to Keller's account of their collaboration, writing: "By that point I was a bag-lady and a smelly old nutcase, according to him, while he was Bill Keller, the weakest and most self-protecting man ever to edit the New York Times." There's plenty more, but Assange is clearly extremely angry over Keller's account of their dealings, which he calls "sordid" and says contains "malicious" libels of him.
1.29pm: Later, Assange writes of his dealings with this newspaper over the US embassy cables release, after the freelance journalist and campaigner Heather Brooke, whom he also criticises but doesn't name, had obtained a copy of the US embassy cable stash independently, which the Guardian argued increased the urgency to publish.
He describes a now-infamous meeting in the Guardian offices, at which Assange's lawyers and journalists from Der Spiegel were also present. Assange says he demanded to know if the New York Times had been given a copy of the cables, while the Guardian journalists "warbled" about the fact that other copies of the cables were circulating. Demanding to know if he could trust those present, he writes: "It now looked like all their eyes were rolling round the room... who wouldn't lose their temper with such lily-livered gits hiding in their glass offices."
He describes the Guardian as "the most ill-named paper in the world", suggesting that it "had been prepared to fuck us all along" by working with the New York Times on the cablegate release. The Guardian's position is that the original deal to involve the NYT in publication had always included the embassy cables.
He also accuses "my old friend, the special investigations reporter, to write a dirty little attack on me". This appears to refer to this article, which the Guardian published as the first detailed account of the sexual assault allegations against Assange.
2.09pm: Quite a lot of he-said, she-said, it turns out. Canongate have in turn responded to Assange's response to the publication, saying they "stand by" their account of their dealings with him, while his account is "distorted". The full statement is as follows:

"Canongate stands by the press release it issued on 21 September regarding its publication of Julian Assange : The Unauthorised Autobiography. Julian Assange's statement made later that day offers a distorted version of events. We believe in the book and maintain we were right to publish it."

3.15pm: "The work I have done at Wikileaks," Assange writes, "bears the ghostly imprint of my younger years", and some of the most revealing passages in the book deal with his early life in Australia, a peripatetic childhood spent constantly on the move.
Part of that time he and his mother were hiding from an abusive man. "Moving in those years... had a degree of hysteria attached and that, in a sense, took all the simplicity away and replaced it with fear." Wherever they moved, however, "I had a desk for my computer and a box for my floppy discs. It was heaven."
He started hacking, excited by the possibilities presented by his Commodore 64 and, particularly, modem. "The thrill was exorbitant." He and his fellow hackers "were anarchists, I suppose, by temperament if not by political conviction. We had started off having fun and ended up wanting to change the world."
He does admit, at one point, that he has an undisclosed number of children in addition to his son Daniel, born when he was still a teenager, whose mothers are "people I cared about". But "this is a book about my life as a journalist and as a fighter for freedoms: my children are not part of that story and I won't say much more about them." Disclosure is not the same as gossip, he says.
One incident Assange does share was during one Christmas break, when he and Daniel who liked to explore abandoned buildings together, "gathered Barbie dolls and toy dragons and blew them up with some home-made explosives and liquid nitrogen."
4.14pm: At one point, writing about the beginnings of Wikileaks, Assange offers a rather neat definition that might also hint to his Aussie roots. "Our philosophy was, from the beginning, fundamentally anti-bastard, and, coarse as that seems, it's also got a certain honesty."
He describes working obsessively on the early days of the site. He would call online meetings for volunteers but:

"Once or twice, quite comically ... I turned out to be the only person at those online meetings. And of course the whole thing was right on the edge of schizophrenia: I'd be there, tapping away, being the Chair and the Secretary and bringing the next thing on the agenda and calling the vote. Mad. But I felt I had to go on as if the whole thing were possible, and that way it would really happen."

In another illuminating passage, Assange says he was mystified by author Michaela Wrong's "eruption" when Wikileaks published on its website a pirated PDF of her book about Kenyan corruption, called It's Our Turn to Eat, because he considered it an important document. (Wong has said that she supports Wikileaks in principle but when she wrote to Assange to protest that her copyright had been infringed, she was told "This book may have been your baby, but it is now Kenya's son.")
"I found the whole thing baffling," Assange writes, "but another early lesson in the complications of political commitment."
4.43pm: We're going to wrap up this blog for the day, but first some thoughts on the book from my colleague Nick Davies, whom Assange refers to throughout as the Guardian's "special investigations reporter" rather than by name (see 1.28pm).
Assange may be surprised to find an ally in Davies in his protests over the book. Davies writes:

I think the publishers, Canongate, have behaved very badly. I can't think of any other publisher who has put out an autobiography that has been disowned both by its subject and by its author...
It just stops in the middle of nowhere... Canongate have padded it out to make it look like a full-length book by publishing lots of US cables which are already widely available for free on the Internet.
But worse than that, the section that might be interesting is just riddled with inaccuracy. Anybody who was involved in these events last year will just gasp at the scale of it. Some of the inaccuracy is laugh-out-loud stuff...
The US publisher, Knopf, had hired fact-checkers who had been in touch with lots of people... but Knopf cancelled the book and so their fact-checking never happened. Canongate never even tried. They hired good lawyers who cut out all the really libellous stuff and then they've pushed it out, on the assumption that gullible readers will fork out for it even if it isn't remotely reliable.
I fear Julian is right when he says Canongate are guilty of profiteering.

Thanks for reading and commenting.