Edward Snowden and Abdullah Gül - Influencing the world!

Amidst the doom, gloom and despondency that seems to fill a large part of the news media's daily output, it is  occasionally reassuring to see some glimmer of hope for a positive future. I was delighted to see that Time magazine has included Edward Snowden among its 'Pioneers' in its latest list of the World's 100 Most Influential People. Also on the list is Abdullah Gül, President of Turkey - though sad to say, not Julian Assange, whom the world seems to have forgotten about. I assume he is still holed out in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Time magazine and Rafael Correa - brothers-in-arms in the fight for freedom!?

Edward Snowden

By Daniel Domscheit-Berg

The renegade in exile

Edward Snowden’s story is one of choices. He is said to be a computer genius, but he has chosen to do what is right rather than what will enrich him, and he has chosen to do what is right rather than what is lawful. Showing a sense of great responsibility, he has exposed a global system of surveillance whose sheer dimensions are unfathomable.

This system threatens the very foundation of individual freedom throughout the world. And it threatens the basis upon which our democracies are built. Cynically, it does so by undermining and exploiting the very tools of communication and sharing that are meant to enable, engage and enrich us.

Snowden has given us a window of opportunity in which to make an informed, self-determined choice about this system. Our responsibility is to make sure it will not be the last choice we make. We must not waste time—for his sake, for ours and for the sake of our children. Our future is at stake.

(Domscheit-Berg, a German technology activist, is a former spokesman for WikiLeaks)

Reporters Without Perspective – Upcoming elections in Turkey

YASTAYIZ!  screamed the front page headline in 5cm font in this morning’s newspaper – ‘We are in mourning!’ 14 year-old Berkin Elvan was admitted to hospital on 15 June last year after being struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired by police trying to disperse demonstrators. Yesterday, a month past his 15^th birthday,  he passed away after spending 267 days in a coma. According to the family, young Berkin had been on his way to the bakery to buy bread when he became an innocent victim of excessive police violence sanctioned by Turkey’s AK Party government to silence protest against their undemocratic regime. ‘It is not God who has taken my son away. It is [Prime Minister Recep] Tayyip Erdoğan,’ said the mother, Gülsüm Elvan.

‘Turkey is weeping,’ said Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of Turkey’s main parliamentary opposition party, CHP. ‘Will the Prime Minister call the family to offer his condolences? You can be sure he will not.’ In fact, Mr Kılıçdaroğlu did not use the Turkish word for ‘Prime Minister’ (Başbakan). In a play on words, he used instead the word ‘Başçalan’, which we might translate as ‘Thief-in-Chief’, in a clear reference to corruption accusations being levelled at PM Erdoğan.

Page 5 featured a lengthy piece by a popular female columnist, from which I quote (the translation is mine):

‘What if your child was shot in the head while going to buy bread? What if a gas canister went in behind his ear and he had to pull it out by himself? And he lost a huge amount of blood? He began to vomit? If his last words were “Don’t tell my father – he’ll be so sad!” Moreover if that day was Fathers’ Day? What would you do?

‘Yesterday we woke to very sad news. Berkin had left us after we had been praying for 267 days that he would awake from his coma. And police were spraying pepper gas and firing gas cylinders at the young people who had gathered outside the hospital to farewell their friend. For God’s sake, is this possible? What are you trying to do? To put more children into a coma? How many more children will you put in a coma? Enough is enough!’

Lawyers representing the family issued a statement saying, ‘[Berkin’s] young body resisted for 267 days against the damage caused by the gas canister fired by the police, the same way our people resisted against fascism.’ The newspaper also published 19 tweets by celebrities from Turkey’s sports and entertainment world expressing their profound sorrow at Berkin’s death.

Bakery in Turkey

Political demonstration in Turkey

Well, I am sad too. It’s a tragic thing when a young life is cut short – more so when that death occurs in sudden and violent circumstances. Most of us cannot imagine the trauma experienced by a mother and father as they watch their young teenage son waste away in a coma for nine months before dying in front of their eyes. It may well be true that Berkin was, as they say, on his way to the bakery – and it is unfortunate that his way lay through the middle of a political demonstration the like of which had been ongoing in the country for more than a fortnight.

What saddens me as much as the Elvan family’s tragedy however, is the way the young lad’s death is being used to score political points in the lead-up to local body elections on 30 March. Street demonstrations in Turkey are rarely peaceful. The people in our New Zealand Embassy in Ankara send out memos from time to time to ex-pat Kiwis living here. Among their warnings they include advice to avoid such gatherings, or even places where police may be congregating such as police stations and checkpoints. The reason is not merely the risk of suffering from police violence. Turkish police have, in the recent past, been targeted by terrorist groups including suicide bombers. It is by no means unusual for Turkish men (and women for all I know) to carry concealed weapons – guns and knives. Don’t mess with an American cop, an Australian cop or a Turkish cop. They tend to be a lot more pro-active than your old-time London bobby or friendly New Zealand constable, and for good reasons. Mob violence can escalate rapidly. If you’re in the crowd and all you get is a squirt from a water cannon, you may think yourself lucky.

The columnist knows this. She also must be aware that Turkey is a very diverse society where some live in communities not far removed from tribalism; where ancient codes of honour still have a stronger hold than the law of the land; honour killings, and revenge killings are not uncommon - and blood feuds may pass down through generations. When she employed those emotive sentences quoted above, and posed the rhetorical question ‘What would you do?’ was she so naïve as to be unaware of the actions her words might provoke? When she says, ‘What are you trying to do? To put more children into a coma? How many more children will you put in a coma?’ Who is the ‘you’ she is addressing? Does anyone doubt that she is more or less directly accusing the Prime Minister of responsibility for the death of young Berkin?

The lady is, of course, entitled to her political opinions, and even if I disapprove of what she says, I will defend to the death her right to say it. Well, maybe not to the death, but you get my drift. What I find especially interesting, and what is, in fact, my main purpose in putting finger to keyboard today, is that all the above words are quoted, not from some fringe anarchist broadsheet handed out by young intellectuals on a city street at the risk of imprisonment and torture, but directly from a mainstream Turkish daily newspaper. You may find it interesting too, even surprising, given that you have perhaps seen reports in news media recently referring to an analysis by ‘Reporters Without Borders’ which ranked Turkey 154^th out of 179 countries according to its ‘World Press Freedom Index’. Turkey, say the borderless reporters, ‘is currently the world’s biggest prison for journalists, especially those who express views critical of the authorities on the Kurdish issue’.

No doubt these people are well-meaning souls who believe they have a role to play in building a better world. And I feel a certain patriotic pride when I see my own country New Zealand in 8^th position, 24 places higher than the United States and 29 ahead of France. On the other hand, when I see the Maldives, Fiji and Kyrgyzstan ranked 50 places higher than Turkey I have some questions in my mind. Continuing down the list and finding that Turkey ranks below Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Brunei and Burma, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, even Thailand and Iraq, I have to say I find the RWB’s list beyond ridiculous. At least they place Turkey marginally ahead of Saudi Arabia (163), Iran (174), Syria (176) and North Korea (178) – small consolation.

That same newspaper is free to publish a large advertisement for the CHP opposition party in which their leader says, ‘This mentality which has been working to polarize the country for 11 years can no longer govern Turkey.’ I cannot exercise a vote in elections in this country, and I have certainly no involvement in party politics – but in the interests of fair play, I have to tell you that it is the present government which has opened up discussion on ways to solves the Kurdish problem in Turkey; which has allowed Kurdish people to use their language freely, give their children Kurdish names and broadcast programmes in Kurdish on their own television channels.

Dilek and I are currently moving ourselves into rental accommodation while our apartment building is demolished and rebuilt as part of the ongoing urban renewal taking place in Istanbul. Last week we had an electrician install light fittings, and got chatting while he and his apprentice worked. It turned out that the guys were from Mardin, a city down in the south east of Turkey close to the Syrian border and not so far from Iraq. They happily admitted to being Arab, and that their native language was Arabic – they had learned Turkish after starting school. It crossed my mind that, not too long ago, such non-Turkish national pride would have been frowned upon in this country, perhaps even punishable.

If Turkey was not obviously polarised when I first arrived in the 1990s, it was because deviation from the principle of ‘Turkishness’ was actively discouraged. Take the lid off a boiling pot and steam will erupt – but it will soon settle down. Keep a sealed lid in place and you risk an explosion. Despite what some sources may tell you, there seem to me to be healthy debates taking place in at least some media in Turkey these days. Even traditional opposition parties have moderated their stance on women wearing headscarves and other formerly taboo subjects. If they would only spend more time explaining what steps they would actually take to improve people’s lives in Turkey, the majority of voters would be a good deal happier going into that election on the 30^th.

Threat to Democracy in Turkey

Much ink is spilled and breath expended within Turkey and beyond its shores on the ‘increasing polarisation’ of the population. Generally this phenomenon is attributed to the machinations of ‘the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP)’ government. Most recently I read of a workshop planned for May 2014 in the enlightened Aegean coastal city of Izmir, entitled ‘Encounters with Europe in an Era of Democratic Stagnation in Turkey’.

The convenors, from Bilgi University in Istanbul, speak, in their abstract for the workshop, of an ‘authoritarian regime’, ‘legal and de facto restrictions [on] the freedom of press’, ‘use of disproportionate force by the police’, ‘anger and resentment against the government’s policies’, and ‘the EU . . . stressing its concerns.’

CHP's new mayoral candidate
Sevinç Özdemir

Well, all these things may be true, and if so, those Bilgi University academics are to be admired and congratulated for their courage in organizing such a workshop and allowing their names to be published. However, for all the talk of ‘authoritarian regimes’ Turkey remains a multi-party parliamentary democracy holding free elections every four years. What really puzzles me is the apparent inability of the opposite pole of this ‘polarised society’ to get their act together and support a political party capable of mounting a serious challenge to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) people.

It has longed seemed to me, and at last I hear other voices singing the same refrain, that the greatest threat to democracy in Turkey is not the paternalistic certainty of AK Party Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, but the lack of a parliamentary opposition with the nous to come up with some credible alternative policies or programmes that will encourage people to vote for them in sufficient numbers. It is not enough merely to say NO to everything the government of the day proposes, and engage in personal attacks on its leader (or his wife).

Unfortunately, on the contrary, the other two main parties (MHP – Nationalist People’s Party, and CHP – Republican People’s Party) represented in Turkey’s parliament seem completely devoid of any positive ideas to offer the electorate. What is worse, after saying NO and NO again to the government’s ‘Islamist-rooted’ proposals, they then do a complete about-face and adopt the policy they had just finished slamming the AK Party for. Possibly this is tacit recognition of the fact that Turkey’s population is ninety-nine percent Muslim – but at the same time it shows a rather sad ignorance of very real problems within the country that could be addressed by a serious opposition ‘people’s’ party. Three that spring to mind are:

• The education system. Pretty much everyone agrees that education in Turkey is unsatisfactory at every level, and the government, after ten years in office, has so far failed to show that it has any idea how to fix it.
• Conditions of employment and rights in the workplace. According to government statistics, Turkey has a workforce of twenty-five million, of whom a mere 3.9 million belong to any kind of trade union. As a result, collective bargaining is almost non-existent and workplace conditions are very much in favour of employers.
• Many work places display on the wall somewhere a framed certificate proudly announcing that here workers are paid asgari ücret – the basic minimum wage – currently amounting to 773 TL net per month (about $US 384), not much to support a family on, even in Turkey.

Instead of formulating policies to rectify these problems, and in so doing winning themselves a good deal of popular support, recent news items tell me that:

• The Republican People’s party, supposedly the heirs of Atatürk’s secular legacy, have nominated a head-scarved lady by the name of Sevinç Özdemir as a mayoral candidate in the forth-coming local body elections.
• Not to be outdone in the race for the Islamic vote, a Nationalist People’s Party member of parliament Yusuf Halaçoğlu has introduced a bill proposing that the 1,500 year-old Byzantine cathedral church of St Sophia, established as a museum by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1935, should be converted back into a mosque, as it was after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

What can you say? Will the true secular democrats in Turkey please stand up?

International Comparisons - Democracy in the United Kingdom

There’s a lot of talk about freedom of the press these days, and the Turkish government comes in for a good deal of criticism for allegedly censoring news media and bullying reporters. Maybe they do – but if so, they’re not alone. Here’s a report about the home of democracy itself:

Guardian Editor Claims UK Authorities Destroyed Newspaper’s Hard Drives

Maybe not - but the UK government
as usual is poodling along

On August 18 David Miranda, the Brazilian partner of American journalist Glen Greenwald, was stopped and held at Heathrow for nine hours, the legal maximum under the country’s anti-terrorism law, before being released without charge. Though not a journalist, Miranda was on his way back to the home he shares with Greenwald, in Brazil, from Germany where he had been doing work for his partner. Greenwald is the Guardian journalist who broke the story of secret state surveillance programs in the US based on information leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. Miranda has stated that he had been in Berlin meeting with American filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has been working with Greenwald on Snowden’s files.

According to Miranda, all of his electronic equipment had been confiscated by British police. “I stayed in a room, there were six different agents, entering and leaving, who spoke with me,” he told the Associated press in Rio de Janeiro after returning from Heathrow. “They asked questions about my whole life, about everything. They took my computer, video game, cell phone, memory thumb drives, everything.”

The incident prompted a critical response from the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger – and brought out a new revelation. In an article posted on August 19, Rusbridger described how the British government had recently attempted to persuade him to destroy the documents leaked by Snowden. When Rusbridger resisted, he was threatened with legal action before officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) were sent to the Guardian’s London offices to destroy computers containing the documents themselves. Read more:

Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography - Review

‘Indian [Native American] history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that Americans are God’s chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this – not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again.’

That quote comes from a book I picked up on our recent visit to the USA, ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’, by James W Loewen who, the back cover tells me, is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont. My copy is the updated 2007 edition of a book that was first published in 1995 and claims to have won the American Book Award and the Oliver C Cox Anti-racism Award of the American Sociological Association.

The words can be found in the last paragraph of the 4^th chapter, which is as far as I have got so far. The chapter is entitled ‘Red Eyes’, and discusses what Loewen refers to as ‘the most lied-about subset of our population,’ Native Americans. The learned professor’s thesis is that textbooks used in US high school history courses have presented, and mostly continue to present, an idealised programme of White American-centred myth-making and patriotic indoctrination that bores and frustrates students, and bears little relation to the reality of their nation’s past.

Earlier chapters deal with the process of hero-making, the true importance of Christopher Columbus, and the truth about Thanksgiving. In discussing that sacred event on the all-American calendar, Professor Loewen points out that the traditional ingredients of a Thanksgiving meal, pumpkins, turkey, corn and squash, were all indigenous to the Americas, and that the pilgrims, in reality, were indebted to their Indian neighbours more than to their God for survival in the new colony. He further informs us that celebration of the famous feast dates only from 1863 when President Lincoln, looking for ways to stir up patriotic fervour, declared the date a national holiday.

Well, as you will expect from my title, I am not here to review the Professor’s book. Loewen is discussing history, though he does include the warning that the present cannot be properly understood without a realistic appraisal of past events. My aim was to set the scene for a discussion of contemporary events that demonstrate the same processes at work: tailoring the story to suit a desired end result, overlooking inconvenient facts, and creating scapegoats and villains to justify a particular course of action.

When it comes to studying history, the problem is not so much that the true stories are not available – rather that they are generally only available to researchers and serious students. The rest of us are lulled into soporific acquiescence by the barrage of ‘facts’ served up by the weighty textbooks we lugged around at school. When it comes to contemporary issues, we are at the mercy of the mainstream news media, for the most part controlled by business and political interests whose purpose is rarely to present an unbiased account.

I am greatly indebted to my experiences in Turkey for opening my eyes to how much my own worldview had been shaped by those factors. One of my earliest such experiences was attending a celebration where Turks were commemorating 18 March 1915 as their day of victory in the First World War theatre we know as the Gallipoli Campaign - in defiance of New Zealanders and Australians who know our boys didn't even get there till 25 April! Of course if you search you can find details of the Royal Navy's earlier disastrous attempt to force a passage through the Dardanelle Straits - but that didn't feature in any accounts I heard or read in my school years.

I guess life was easier in those days for government, military and status quo propagandists when the general public's sources of information were fewer in number, narrower in scope and more easily controlled. I learnt, many years after the event, and from a very unofficial source, that the British military had been testing its atomic weapons in the trackless wastes of Australia's central desert - and I was shocked. Surprisingly, many people still don't know about the Brits' nuclear testing programme, although I guess it's no longer classified information.

Another historical fact I learnt recently is that the United States had five military bases in Turkey during the Cold War, with nuclear weapons, missiles and artillery aimed at targets in the Soviet Union. The thing is, I can't help feeling that the Australian public, and maybe the public in Britain and in other NATO countries too, for all I know, would have liked access to that information at the time, in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s when it was extremely relevant to events on the international stage, and they might have exercised their parliamentary vote according to whether a political party supported or opposed the business. American citizens also might have been less starry-eyed and gung-ho about President JF Kennedy's threat to start World War III if the Russians didn't pull their missiles out of Cuba.

It's a fantasy, I know, but what if British and United States voters had had been able to eavesdrop on conversations between George Dubya Bush and Tony (the Poodle) Blah prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq? What if the Queen (bless her heart) had heard Tony promising Cherie that he'd convert to Roman Catholicism just as soon as he stopped being Prime Minister?

Sadly, in those pre-Wikileaks days, they weren't, and Her Majesty didn't. Then, almost overnight, thanks to a white-haired computer geek from Townsville, Australia, the world changed - and I suspect, hope, pray, it will never be the same again. Wikileaks was the website that brought us memorable video footage from a US Apache helicopter gunship where we heard the crew chattering excitedly like 13 year-old war-gaming kids, heard the tak-tak-tak of the cannon as the gunner got the ok to ‘Light ‘em up!’, saw the mostly unarmed civilians, including two Reuters Agency photographers, dying in a hail of 30 mm shells, saw the small van with its occupants, including two children, trying to pick up the wounded, and  suffering the same fate. War photography too will never be the same.

It was Wikileaks again that allowed us to overhear US diplomats expressing their refreshingly undiplomatic feelings about world leaders most of us have serious doubts about: Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah pressing the U.S. to ‘cut off the head of the snake’ by taking action against Iran's nuclear program. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi described as ‘feckless’ and ‘vain.’ German Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed as ‘risk averse and rarely creative.’

Of course, I understand that President Obama and his Secretaries of State past and present, Hilary Clinton and John Kerry are seriously p---d off with Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. I can totally understand how they would be happy to lock him up in some federal penitentiary until they felt he was suitably penitent - which might be a while. On the other hand, I know there are some Americans, and even a few Australians, in spite of the reluctance of their government to stand up for the guy, who believe he did the world a favour by making that stuff available, and are secretly hoping the Ecuadoreans will find a way to spirit Assange out of their embassy, past those London bobbies, and off to the sanctuary of Quito where he can keep giving us insights into events and information our leaders would prefer us not to know.

So I want to tell you a little about the book I read before starting on the one dealing with the lies I learnt at school. It's called ‘Julian Assange, the Unauthorised Autobiography’, and it may be even more important than the one about Steve Jobs.

One detail that needs explaining early on (and the publisher, Canongate Books does so) is how an autobiography can be unauthorised. Apparently Assange signed a contract and worked with a chosen writer, but later tried to pull out of the deal. By that time, according to Canongate, money had already changed hands (and been used by Assange to pay legal bills) and 38 publishing houses were committed to releasing the book. So here we have it – unauthorised but apparently straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

The book begins with Assange in a cell in Wandsworth Prison in London, comparing himself to Oscar Wilde, who, at about the same age, but in an earlier century, had spent time there after being convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – Victorian-speak for male homosexuality. Assange’s sexuality seems to be more mainstream, but it’s not until the penultimate chapter that we get his side of the business with the Swedish lasses. At first he is more concerned with giving details of his court appearances and time in prison, despite not having been charged with any crime - and explaining why he believes it’s not actually about the ladies.

From Wandsworth Gaol we flashback to Australia, mostly northern Queensland, where Assange was born into a hippy alternative lifestyle in an idyllic tropical paradise tinged with reality by the difficulties of being raised by a 19 year-old politically active solo mum. I’ll skip the details, but those were interesting times – and young Julian seems to have grown up in an environment of healthy anti-establishment scepticism.

The 1980s decade brought the personal computer into middle class homes, and for Assange, the world-changing technology came in the shape of a Commodore 64, produced by a now defunct company that, for a time there, actually outsold IBM PC compatibles, Apple machines and Atari. The C64 became his ‘consciousness’. Assange and his computer geek peers ‘always knew that the world was more modern than [the old guard] realised. Cairo was waiting. Tunisia was waiting. We were all waiting for the day when our technology would allow an increasing universality of freedom. In the future, power would not come from the barrel of a gun but from communications, and people would know themselves not by the imprimatur of a small and powerful coterie, but by the way they could disappear into a social network with huge political potential.’

Assange tells of his hacking exploits, under the code-name Mendax, starting in the late 1980s, as he rose to the challenge of ‘getting past a barrier that has been erected to keep you out’. One of his better efforts, apparently, was hacking his way into the computer system of the Pentagon’s 8^th Command Group. He compares his circle of like-minded freedom fighters to the 17^th century Levellers in England – a political movement which, according to Wikipedia, 'emphasised popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law, and religious tolerance’, expressing their ideas in a manifesto they called ‘Agreement of the People’. Perhaps, in a premonition of what was to come, Assange writes that ‘Governments were much more scared [of the power of the internet] than they were of people demonstrating in the street or throwing petrol bombs over barricades.’ In a chapter headed ‘Cypherpunks’, he speaks of a movement ‘engaged in establishing a system for the information age . . . that would allow individuals rather than merely corporations, to protect their privacy.’

What this movement produced in 2006 was Wikileaks, ‘the most secure platform for whistle-blowers the world had ever known.’ The essential principles were: so-called human rights are only rights if they are enforceable; ordinary citizens are often in possession of information the rest of us should know for true democracy to operate; if they want to share it they should be able to do so in privacy and anonymity; once they decide to share the information, it needs to be published by the mainstream media.

The 70-page Appendix to Assange’s autobiography contains details of the most noteworthy leaks made available via the Wikileaks website, many of which were picked up by major news media, to the benefit of their circulation, no doubt, and to the extreme embarrassment of many governments: the Standard Operating Procedure Manual for Guantanamo detention centre, for example, and information provided by a former employee of Julius Baer Bank (HQ in Zurich) detailing how the bank assisted wealthy clients to move taxable funds to tax-havens in the Cayman Islands.

The book is a fascinating read, essential for anyone wishing to access an alternative view to that presented by those ‘outed’ governments and their lapdog news media. As Assange notes, the Information Age has rendered obsolete, or at least highly debatable, many legal concepts laid down in simpler times, not least of which is the question of who ‘owns’ information. Of course, as those 17^th century Levellers discovered to their cost, the establishment elite in any society will fight tooth and nail to preserve their power and privileges. Sad to say, Assange may have been unduly optimistic about the democratic freedoms new communications technology would bring to Egypt. Possibly we will never know the extent to which the governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia influenced the military coup in Cairo. As for Wikileaks, we watch in stunned disbelief as the debate is switched from shocking revelations about events actually taking place behind the scenes on the world stage, to the romantic escapades of an Australian citizen and two sexually liberated Scandinavian women - with the active connivance of news media that were previously so keen to publish the leaked material.

Back in England in the 1640s, leaders of the Levellers were tried and hanged, or hunted down and shot by Oliver Cromwell’s men– thereby collapsing one of history’s early movements advocating popular democratic freedoms. We are currently waiting to hear how many lifetimes Private Bradley Manning will spend in prison; and Russian President Putin has seriously upset the US Government by granting asylum to Edward Snowden, who would otherwise very likely share Manning’s fate. How long Julian Assange can hang out in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London remains to be seen. The important thing for supporters of true democracy is not to lose sight of the real issue.

‘It is not Wikileaks the United States government is afraid of, and it is not Julian Assange that they are afraid of. What does it matter what I know? What does it matter what Wikileaks knows? It matters not at all. What matters is what you know. This is all about you.’

Julian Assange The Unauthorised Autobiography (Canongate Books, 2011) 339 pages