Occupy Wall Street coverage
In a Rolling Stone exclusive, Hastings reports that Homeland Security tracked the Occupy Wall Street movement:
An internal DHS report entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street,” dated October of last year, opens with the observation that “mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas.”
The report is one of 5 million documents leaked by WikiLeaks and examined by the magazine.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
Gibney releases documentary about the creation of Assange’s controversial website.
I thought it was an incredible David and Goliath story in the age of the internet… I initially thought it was a story about a fascinating new technology, this idea of the leaking machine. So that’s what originally motivated me. My reasons for doing the film changed as I learned more about the story.
Sex change treatments begin
Under Pentagon approval, Manning, is to begin treatment for gender dysphoria while serving her sentence in military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Manning has asked for hormone treatments since announcing she wanted to live as a woman.
Assange: Google worked with State Department
Assange writes in When Google Met Wikileaks that he met Schmidt while under house arrest in in mid-May 2011 in Norfolk. Schmidt had requested the meeting. He says Schmidt and Cohen, the head of Google Ideas and a former State Department official (government bio here), were writing a book and wanted an interview. Schmidt, his (then) partner Shields, Cohen, and book editor Malcomson, who would later join the State Department as a speechwriter, turned up at their mid-June appointment:
At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts U.S. foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser.
They talk about geopolitics and Schmidt refuses a request to leak to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks later attempts to contact the State Department to give a heads-up on the early publication of the group’s book. They are eventually contacted by Shields. Assange:
It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, D.C., including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel.
Spider-Man traits leaked
A 2011 legal licensing agreement between Sony Pictures and Marvel leaked by WikiLeaks includes a list of ‘mandatory’ traits for Peter Parker and Spider-Man. According to the agreement, Spider-Man must have the following characteristics:
Male; does not torture; does not kill in defense of self or others; does not use foul language beyond PG-13; does not smoke tobacco; does not sell/distribute illegal drugs; does not abuse alcohol; does not have sex before the age of 16; does not have sex with anyone below the age of 16; and is not a homosexual (unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual).
Police removed from Ecuadorian embassy
After 40 months, UK police call off their 24-hour surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy. The cost of the operation is over $17 million. Police:
[It is] no longer proportionate to commit officers to a permanent presence…The MPS will not discuss what form its continuing operation will take or the resourcing implications surrounding it. Whilst no tactics guarantee success in the event of Julian Assange leaving the embassy, the MPS will deploy a number of overt and covert tactics to arrest him.
WikiLeaks spokesperson:
My interpretation is that it has not been lifted. They are calling off the uniformed presence but escalating the covert operation and will arrest him if he steps out off the embassy.