The Most Dangerous Man In the World by Andrew Fowler

Author:Andrew Fowler [Fowler, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

9

SEX MONEY POWER

In mid-August 2010, Julian Assange arrived at Stockholm Airport. He was on his way to a conference he’d been invited to, run by ‘The Brotherhood’, a leftist Christian faction of Sweden’s Social Democrat Party. As Assange made his way out of the spacious airport he might have paused to stop and check the credentials of the person he’d be dealing with at the conference. Assange has a brilliant mind, but he does get a touch of the Bazza McKenzies about him at times, and though he exudes an air of worldliness, he also has an extraordinary naiveté, trusting people he’d be best to steer away from.

If he had googled Anna Ardin he’d have come up with a blog entry written by her entitled: ‘Seven Steps to Legal Revenge on a Cheating Lover’. It was potentially far more damaging for Assange than his fears about a CIA hit squad.

Not that Ardin wasn’t suspect in that area too. Though she’d been called a leftist, she’d been connected with ‘US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups in Cuba’. By the time that information emerged, Sweden had issued a warrant for Assange’s arrest on allegations of rape and sexual molestation.

As Assange travelled in to Stockholm he had plenty to occupy his mind. The possibility that Iceland might not be the safe haven he originally hoped for WikiLeaks had begun to concern him. There were questions about how close the Icelandic government was to the United States and, on a personal level, his relationship with Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir had cooled considerably, and was even hostile at times. Sweden was in many ways a Scandinavian mirror image of Iceland. It had good infrastructure, excellent communications systems and, at the time, better laws to protect journalists.

These laws offered an unusual protection to sources. Based on Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act, whose origins trace back to 1766, journalists are legally forbidden to reveal a confidential source unless it involves a direct threat to national security or treason. While the laws covered newspapers and magazines, they didn’t automatically give protection to the electronic media and that included organisations like WikiLeaks. Assange would need to register WikiLeaks as a media organisation in Sweden, and to do that he needed to be a resident of the country.

In the meantime, WikiLeaks would have to make do with the kind offering from the Swedish Pirate Party—a legitimate political organisation in Sweden with a member in the European Parliament. It offered to donate servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks free of charge, until the WikiLeaks registration was approved. It would also provide technicians to make sure that the servers were maintained and kept in working order. What was almost as attractive to Assange was that the Pirate Party planned to set up an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to offer anonymous Internet connections. The organisation would offer anonymity by not storing a copy of its users’ Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, a unique identification number used to locate every computer, mobile phone or other device on the Internet at any given time.

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