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What I discovered from today’s experience (1st day for me, out of The Matrix…) is that Sydney-siders love Anonymous – even the passers-by, who wanted to be photographed with… but had to carry the sign… to relieve my shaking arms…

Overall, it felt like the first time I went diving: totally new world. Men talked to me as if I were a MAN! (the moustache?) and young people adressed me as if I were of their age group (amazing to see one’s own prejudicial appearance disappear).

Everyone was incredibly OPEN when they told me about their situations, and respect was in the air. I discovered that Anonymous was seen as a lone and wise citizen, a protector of the little guy, as Americans call it.

I intend to go back, not so anonymous, and lend a hand.

It goes without saying that we don’t have it nearly so bad here in Sydney as our brothers/sisters in the US, but let’s not forget that the roof over our head here is the most expensive in the world! I work close to 7 days a week – 13 hour days sometimes – “casually”, for various schools, and I STILL can’t afford my own place. MY STUDENTS however don’t share houses; they share ROOMS (4-to-a ), and some of them are suffering from malnutrition.

We, to varying degrees, are the 99% !

Click on image to view the only video trace we can find. Unfortunately a published audio recording has also disappeared.

The Sydney Opera House, venue for the 2011 ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’, had announced but three days before, with a 27-hour window of opportunity, for its 5000 attendees to submit their questions by email, since they couldn’t be taken live due to the satellite connection. Hadn’t anyone there heard of an audio mixer? I was lucky enough to catch the notification in time, but many didn’t.

It came as good news that the presentation would be split in half: Julian’s talk; then a generous 30 minutes for questions. What became quickly evident however and also made me scratch my head, was that the satellite transmission was running on a 7 second delay, with ABC host Fran Kelly trying to explain that: “Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, is a very long way away… “.

It began thus:
[Audience cheers when Assange's name is mentioned; 'Woohoo!" when he appears onscreen]

Fran Kelly: “So over to you……………………..”
[Audience laughter at the extraordinarily long (satellite) delay]

Assange: It is heartening to me to hear that kind of response in Australia. The Australian public and its support of our work is really something that keeps us going. The reaction in Washington and London is really very different, and that’s something I’d like to explore a little bit; about how different nationalities and different States have viewed our work and reacted to it.

“310 days ago I was in Wandsworth Prison in Windsor, in London. I was placed into the basement, into the separation unit; kept away from all other prisoners, confined to myself 24 hours a day, and during that time I had a moment to reflect…”

“We had a whole lot of government task forces in Australia set up against us – publicly declared – involving the AFP, ASIS ASIO, the Department of Defence and the Attorney General; looking in to whether there was any way to stop what we were doing; whether we had committed criminal offences in Australia… and that swift reaction by the Australian Government was only stopped, ONLY stopped by the Australian population and by our friends in the Australian media.”

“Left to its own devices, the Australian Government / the Australian Labour Cabinet would have done everything in its power to see me and other people working with me shipped off to the United States.”

Assange shows us “some 270 pages released…” about Wikileaks staff by the Australian Government to the US State Department before Cablegate. He says they were obtained via FOI request, but the pages are about 75% blacked out.

Julian Assange holds blacked out FOI document from Australian Govt. at Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney 2011

Rolls of laughter from the audience and quite a bit of chatter… “This is your Government”.

Assange goes on to say that 1% of the American population has signed a secrecy agreement; a total of 3 million people who are not allowed to talk about what they are doing. It sounds familiar to Australians. Some of our government workers are not allowed to talk to each other, starting with people in other departments, about internal affairs. At one of our largest media organisations, you can’t connect to the internet from inside the building – to stop that kind of caper from happening – and they send a supervisor to tell the journalists what to write. That was the experience of this reporter when she was hired to train staff there.

I find it sad to contemplate this bottle-neck of blur, where people are not supposed to think for themselves or communicate their opinions to others; this absurd “don’t ask, don’t tell” framework that fosters confusion and disinformation by default, unintentionally. What’s also sad is that the recording of this “dangerous” event has disappeared from public view. A source close to Wikileaks later stated that Assange’s contract to speak at the Sydney Opera House had barred him from ‘appearing’ anywhere else in Australia for months prior to the event. Only on the night would he be able to battle misinformation and perhaps ‘shine a light’…

Assange tells us that America is run by a “Shadow Government” that involves both corporate sponsorship and collaboration. He cites Paypal, Mastercard and Bank of America’s extra-judicial blockage of Wikileaks revenue, to the tune of about $AU 30 million, but when asked, he passes on complaining about media-orchestrated calls for his assassination.

The nexus of power of the Shadow Government, Assange asserts, exists above government and brazenly so at times, outside of the rule of law. In the US, one can’t run for election without access to such sponsorship. He explains further, how this Shadow Government extends its existence and imposes its will across many other countries – and right into our pockets in the form of a credit card. “Yikes”, from someone nearby breaks the silence in the house.

Assange’s speech concludes on a note of optimism: the whistle blowing will continue even if Wikileaks doesn’t. The capacity crowd is stirring now at the prospect of their questions being selected. ABC’s Fran Kelly is onstage to read them out, but she starts with her own rather long-winded one, which essentially portrays Wikileaks as tragically dead meat.

Julian gets a laugh with his response, describing Wikileaks as “A rather big boat with a lot of torpedo holes in it” which is still… “drifting along”. Later he jovially slips in the word “Titanic” to describe governments, challenging the notion of “too big to fail”.

Fran Kelly went on to the selected questions, asking Assange up front about facing the “charges” in Sweden. It was an embarrassing mistake which Julian corrected, informing her that there were no charges. He also had to remind Kelly that the un-redacted State Department Cables had been released, and were viewable by everyone on Cryptome.org or downloadable as a torrent on the Pirate Bay before Wikileaks re-published them.

The Opera House’s selection of questions was not much appreciated. They were too generalist for that audience and made them groan and heckle at times. They ranged from valid to misinformed, antagonistic, redundant – there were two questions about harming informants – and irrelevant, with “too much time wasted” on the latter, like the Irishman said. “Why don’t you accept extradition to the US and stare out your accusers?” was met with multiple outbursts from the audience of: “That’s a stupid question”…

Julian’s forthright and clarifying responses were warmly applauded, as was his announcement that Wikileaks still don’t have “blood on their hands”. But what seemed to please most was the moment when Kelly tried stop his “CUT TO THE CHASE”.

At one point Assange went on a roll of “live leaks”, citing important but dubious redactions from cables when they had appeared in mainstream media. Not only names but facts were removed, and he demonstrated by comparison… If I had been the host, I would have let him continue, because that’s what we wanted to hear, but Kelly did her utmost to shut Assange down. However… because of the very long satellite delay he couldn’t hear her, so he insouciantly continued and she became visibly flustered. It was good theatre! Even after he must have heard her, Assange kept going and the excitement of the audience was rising to fever pitch. The host had lost control of the narrative. Utterly the best moment of the evening to see Assange conquer the 7-second delay.

Where memories are made

We hope you take advantage of this opportunity to have your voice heard by a wide audience, and take heed of our few guidelines to avoid litigation. Peace and Truth

Domscheit-Berg is best served cold but it looks like Juju wants to roast him..

Live to Federation Square, Melbourne

Speakers for "Wikileaks and Freedom of Speech" Event, Federation Square Melbourne, Feb 4th 2011

Speakers:
Julian Assange – via videolink
Jennifer Robinson – Assange’s UK lawyer
Adam Bandt – Federal MP for Melbourne
Chris Mitchell – Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance
Peter Gordon – Melbourne solicitor
Lizzie O’Shea – Melbourne public interest solicitor

This event was held in association with Liberty Victoria, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Law Institute Victoria, Victoria Trades Hall Council, Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and Future leaders.

thejuicemedia's Channel on YouTube

Their latest: “RAP NEWS 6 – Wikileaks’ Cablegate: the truth is out there” is approaching 1000000 views since it was posted on December 17th. One might wonder if the Berlusconi offer to buy their show is not such a “Hillaryous” idea… but their reply is clear: “Sorry, Silvio, we have scruples, it’s not for sale”.

Making a surprise appearance and rapping himself in “RAP NEWS 5: News World Order – the war on journalism” is Julian Assange (described by one viewer as ”sexy as fuck”).  The mutual respect continues, with “Rap News 6…” being embedded on the Wikileaks web site.

No wonder the large number of views… but we’ve also seen a remarkable rise in production values since Ep. 1, and much richer musical arrangements emerge. Some say Eminem meets Jon Stewart, but I’m sure I caught a flicker of Zappa. Farrant’s performance too improves as he slips more assertively into his characters (at times with chilling verisimilitude). The well-constructed (rhyming) discourse and rib-grinding humour rounds it off to create something that is truly worth watching.

Amidst scores of rave reviews, Ozsoapbox expresses its admiration for the team’s “strengths of linking current events, heavy-hitting intelligent lyrics and entertaining visuals together in a single broadcast of pure win.” Hell yeah!

These guys are deadly funny, talented and potently articulate. With Indigenous affairs high on their agenda, they are developing a very interesting slant on the notion of colonisation. Be sure not to miss the extensive “About Me” and wish the boys all the bandwidth they deserve.

http://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia

A first-hand report on the making of “Collateral Murder” by The New Yorker’s reporter Raffi Khatchadourian, with a wide-ranging backgrounder on Assange and Wikileaks.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz19n1GUouS

This beautiful Wikileaks designer garment features a US Critical Foreign Dependencies motif and “nothing up my sleeve” transparency. Become an instant citizen-journalist and wear it with pride on World Press Freedom Day… For every shirt you buy, we offer one absolutely free for your own personal “BRING-A-FRIEND” campaign.

Patrick Lichty, Assistant Professor of Media Theory at Columbia College, Chicago

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With the bleeding of information from the material to the infomatic rhizome through Wikileaks (i.e. the US diplomatic cable leaks), the Infostate has created an asymmetrical insurgency against conventional power. Negri’s conception of cognitive capital as locus of power asymmetrically challenges that of material capital. This is analogous to previous mention of events as told in the movie, The Matrix, where the artificial (informatic) being overrides/supercedes embodied conventional power.

As Deleuze, then Agamben assert that power is the separation of the subject from potentiality, and as such mitigates dissent, the nation-state is trying to exert power by separating the means of support and the figurehead from Wikileaks, but distributed, asymmetrical cyberwarfare by the net.community has already disrupted banks, credit, and networked sites. It has even awakened the amorphous hacker subculture of “Anonymous” which was last known for its mass protests against the Church of Scientology to rise against the opponents of Wikileaks. The Net, as child of the military (conventional power) has begun to turn on its masters, with expected reflexive responses.

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