Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks announced that the non-profit organisation would release documents related to Google in addition to the upcoming Presidential elections in the United States of America. He further detailed that the company will release the material on a weekly basis for next ten weeks at a particular time adding that “we don’t do it a 3 AM” as reported by The Verge.
Julian is currently living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after seeking asylum in 2012. He is wanted in Sweden for questioning in an allegation of rape, but he fears that he will be extradited to the United States because of his post as the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 in Iceland and its formation the organisation has published hundreds of thousands of documents relating to secret information, classified material and news leaks from anonymous sources all across the work.
The documents leaked by the company have mostly been associated with political parties and larger corporations which function in a complex nexus concealing actions and agendas from the public while twisting the law. This announcement comes after a considerable amount of hype and change of plans in last one week. Earlier Assange planned on addressing today’s release from the balcony of Ecuadorian Embassy, but theorganisation cancelled his appearance ruling “security concerns,” as reported by CBS news.
He has termed this release as “October surprise” and addressed the announcement with a video while speaking on the 10th anniversary of the organisation. Instead of providing details about the release, Assange referred to an extract titled “Google Is Not What It Seems” from his book “When Google Met Wikileaks.” In the book, he details that the company is working as a megacorporation adding that ” “Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad, But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of U.S. power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation,”as reported by recode.
This stance is different and more aggressive from the earlier position that Assange maintained towards Google as detailed in his book. He viewed Google as a stateless political organisation using its power to influence international events covertly in his book. As reported by Venture Beat, Assange’s view of the company evolved when Google Chairman Eric Schmidt came to England to visit Assange in 2011 with Lisa Shields, US State Department official and Schmidt’s partner and former employee of State Department and director of Google’s think-tank department “Google Ideas,” Jared Choen. Google Ideas has since morphed into Jigsaw, an incubator dedicated to understanding global challenges
Assange details that he became suspicious of Google’s partnership with US government and intimate ties to the foregin policy of the government after carefully scrutinising Cohen’s actions. This became serious when it was reported that Google took almost three years to notify WikiLeaks staffers that the company had provided their metadata, email data, search records and other contents to the authorities. Wikileaks blasted the company for not standing up and informing its staffers in a letter sent to Eric Schmidt seeking clarification as reported by Android Headlines.
In the past, the organisation has not released documents directly alleging Google’s involvement in anything. Assange did not make any allegationstowards the company for being connected in any way to issues like war crimes and other things like human rights violation. The organisation did release emails and diplomatic cables linking Google employees to attempts by State Department official to move Afganistan phone companies inside USA military bases and meetings with Iranian leaders.
Recently the organisation released approximately 19,000 emails for seven top officials in the Democratic National Convention as part of thewidely reported DNC server hack. Assange alleged that the documents to be released in coming ten weeks would be related to Google, Presidential Campaign, Oil, arms trading, war and mass surveillance. This comes right after reports emerged detailing Yahoo setting up a tool to scan emails and user data to be sent to FBI and US authorities.
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