You Don’t Have to Like Julian Assange to Defend Him

LONDON—You do not have to spend a long time in a room with Julian Assange to realize that he will be difficult. It takes a little longer, though, to realize just how difficult dealing with him can be. This was the lesson I learned in 2010, working first with Assange, and then for him at WikiLeaks, as we published tranche after tranche of bombshell material, leaked by Chelsea Manning.

Julian Assange Got What He Deserved

In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feministsand bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam Hussein plucked straight from his spider hole. The only camera crew to record this pivotal event belonged to Ruptly, a Berlin-based streaming-online-video service, whoch is a wholly owned subsidiary of RT, the Russian government’s English-language news channel and the former distributor of Julian Assange’s short-lived chat show.

EUs satsning för att stärka upphovsrättsägares skydd i digitala plattformar är vällovlig. Men utifrån direktivstextens nuvarande lydelse ser IVAs avdelning för Informationsteknik ett antal konsekvenser av betydelse för svenska grundläggande principer för yttrandefrihet.

Digitaliseringen av information har underlättat allt från kommunikation till spridning av kunskap. Den har därmed på många sätt bidragit till att människor fått det bättre. Samtidigt innebär möjligheten att kopiera information att många informationsproducenter – till exempel fotografer – fått se sina verk mångfaldigade utan rimlig ersättning.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN’S plan to break up tech giants Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple has given concentrated corporate power its most prominent political platform since the 1912 presidential election — and we’re still nearly a year away from the first round of primary voting. This tracks with the rising awareness of the corrosiveness of monopoly power generally and those tech giants specifically.

Whether such policy boldness means anything in a brand-obsessed political landscape will be determined when ballots are cast. But it is undeniably driving a policy discussion that the next Democratic presidential nominee, no matter who it is, will likely take up. In that context, the debate over Warren’s plan is critical, as it prefigures the trajectory of each and every challenge to corporate dominance.

Dirty lies: how the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

John German had not been looking to make a splash when he commissioned an examination of pollution from diesel cars back in 2013. The exam compared what came out of their exhaust pipes, during the lab tests that were required by law, with emissions on the road under real driving conditions. German and his colleagues at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in the US just wanted to tie up the last loose ends in a big report, and thought the research would give them something positive to say about diesel.

They might even be able to offer tips to Europe from the US’s experience in getting the dirty fuel to run a little cleaner.

Inside the Video Surveillance Program IBM Built for Philippine Strongman Rodrigo Duterte

JAYPEE LAROSA WAS standing in front of an internet cafe in Davao City, a metropolitan hub on the Philippine island of Mindanao, when three men in dark jackets pulled up on a motorcycle and opened fire. That summer evening, Larosa, 20, was killed. After the shooting, according to witnesses, one of the men reportedly removed Larosa’s baseball cap and said, “Son of a bitch. This is not the one.” Then they drove off.

Larosa’s murder, on July 17, 2008, was one of hundreds of extrajudicial killings carried out in Davao City, now a city of 1.6 million, while Rodrigo Duterte, now president of the Philippines, was mayor there. Years before launching his notorious, bloody “drug war” across the country, Duterte presided over similar tactics at the local level. During his tenure as mayor, according to a 2009 investigation by Human Rights Watch, death squads assassinated street children, drug dealers, and petty criminals; in some cases, researchers found evidence of the complicity or direct involvement of government officials and police.