What do you think of when you think of Guy Fawkes? Maybe you think of a mask, the Gunpowder Plot, ‘V for Vendetta’ or maybe you think of the group, Anonymous. Anonymous is a group of hacktivists who come together on the internet to share important information that the public may not see otherwise.

The group has made huge headlines exposing the Church of Scientology, supporting anti-corruption movements, and has provided a platform for Iranian citizens to criticize their government. One large group that benefits from Anonymous and anonymous information, is WikiLeaks. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is currently facing an American “witch hunt” against him in which the New York Post says, “It’s trying to punish him for leaking American military and diplomatic secrets on his controversial site.”

The question is, how far should one be punished for revealing pertinent, valuable, information? The point of the Anonymous group is to have a safe place to reveal information that one may not be able to release with their name attached to it. Sometimes that is the only way the most important facts can be known.

Anonymous Analytics describes themselves this way:

“We provide the public with investigative reports exposing corrupt companies. Our team includes analysts, forensic accountants, statisticians, computer experts, and lawyers from various jurisdictions and backgrounds. All information presented in our reports is acquired through legal channels, fact-checked, and vetted thoroughly before release. This is both for the protection of our associates as well as groups/individuals who rely on our work.”

The founder, Assange, has currently been told by Swedish officials that he needs to be extradited from the UK where he has been on house arrest for alleged sex crimes. In a speech he made outside of his balcony, he asked that Bradley Manning (a contributor to WikiLeaks who is facing trial soon) be left alone. Manning, a Unites States Army soldier, was arrested in 2010 in Iraq for suspicion of giving classified information to WikiLeaks. He could be incarcerated for “aiding the enemy.” Manning could be seen as an object of treason, or someone who believes in telling the whole truth.

It always seems to be a debate, especially in the field of journalism, if anonymity is “okay” or not. Anonymity can lead to false information, but can also expose information that can change the lives of many people. Anonymous is a group who is challenging power through anonymity. There is a moral issue with this. The public has a right to know this information, but they also have a right to know where the information is coming from and if it is reliable or not.

However, Anonymous seems to be focusing on helping the people, and keeping them aware of what is going on around them. They have dozens of youtube videos, where they expose information and say, “We are Anonymous, we are Legion, we do not forgive,we do not forget, expect us,” as almost a threat to people who are causing harm. In one video, they even tell the U.S. Senate to expect them.

It really says something when a group of people put forth much time and energy into helping the people by researching and exposing groups who are causing harm, and who are not being paid a single cent for it. However, it also means something when they won’t attach their names to it, and are willing to destroy many group’s reputations and people’s lives at the same time.

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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was accused of sexual abuse during his visit to Stockholm earlier this year. He spent a few months under home arrest; however, the Swedish government insisted that Assange’s case needs a substantial investigation and demanded his immediate extradition to Sweden.

On August 26, 2012, the 41-year-old Assange was given a political asylum by Ecuador and is currently staying in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Britain cannot take any legal actions against the former hacker-activist because the inrush in the consulate of the South American country and the arrest of Julian Assange will be regarded as violation of the international laws. Although the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called the British intention to storm the five-storey building of the embassy a “monumental diplomatic mistake”, the UK government declared that it will not allow Julian Assange to flee the country.

According to Correa, Julian Assange “never refused to face justice in Sweden.” However, the founder of WikiLeaks and the leader of the South American country fear that there is a political reason behind the extradition of  Assange.

“I think there is a hidden plan to send Assange to a third country. What other conclusion could you reach?” declared Correa.

The US is said to be the secret force that pulls the wires of Assange’s case. In 2010, Assange’s non-profit organization WikiLeaks began the release of more than 250,000 classified cables, sent by embassies and consulates from all over the world to the U.S. State Department in the period from 1966 to 2010. Immediately after the documents were published, government organizations in the USA, China, Australia, UAE and Switzerland, as well as some financial institutions such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard, blocked their WikiLeak’s accounts. However, the protectors of Assange referred to him as defender of freedom of information and speech.

The release of the classified cables opened a wide wound between Ecuador and the States. As a result, the former US ambassador in Ecuador, Heather Hodges, was extradited from the South American country on accounts of accusing President Correa of “ignoring police corruption.” The US government struck back, and the Ecuadorian ambassador was also forced to resign his position.

Meanwhile, Washington denied the rumors that the US is involved in any political machinations against the Australian freedom seeker. However, a lot of questions about Assange’s case remain unanswered.

Who is Baltazar Garzon and why exactly does he represent Julian Assange in the court?

Baltazar Garzon is a former Spanist judge, famous for his uncompromising and aggressive attitude in the court, especially on cases concerning international human rights. He is responsible for the arrest of the former President of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, in 1998 on account of torturing and causing the death of Spanish citizens in both Chile and Argentina. It was the first case in which a head of state was detained, although no serious measures were taken.

Recently, Garzon was accused of cooperating with the Falange, the Spanish political followers of the Fascist movement in Italy. That’s why some analytists assume that Assange’s case is mainly on a political basis.

Concerning the situation of the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, Garzon declared that Ecuador should address the International Court of Justice in the Hague to force the British government to allow Assange to leave the South American country.

What are Correa’s real intentions?

The Ecuadorean President is renowned for his tempestuous and rigid foreign and domestic politics. His decision to help Julian Assange was both condemned and appreciated by the international public.

“Correa has managed to antagonize the UK, Sweden, and the US at the same time. Once again he has stomped his way to central stage,” the John Hopkins University professor Riordan Roeff said in an interview.

However, specialists are inclined to believe that behind the plans of Correa to save the founder of WikiLeaks from his extradition to Sweden and and then probably to the US, stands a political rather than a humane reason.

Recently, it has been revealed that Correa and Assange “met” personally via Skype in May 2012, when the founder of WikiLeaks was still serving his home arrest. Right then, Correa wanted Assange to understand that for him he is not an international criminal, but an “emblem of ultimate freedom of expression.”

Andrés Mejía Acosta, an Ecuadorian political scientist, proposed another hypothesis about Correa’s reason to give a political asylum to Assange. In an interview, he revealed “the gesture to Assange may be a way for Correa to cleanse his reputation as a persecutor of the press.”

Years ago, an Ecuadorian newspaper called Correa a “dictator” and accused him of violation of human rights. The author of the article, Emilio Palacio, was arrested and the newspaper forced to pay a fine measuring $40,000,000 in charge of “criminal libel” against an authority.

Earlier this year, Palacio, who has been living in Miami since he was set free, was officially excused by the Ecuadorean President. That’s why many specialists assume that Correa is now trying to represent himself in a more favorable light.

On the other hand, the storm between Ecuador and the US will not subside soon. Whether Assange is the weapon of their mutual revenge – nobody is able to comment at this stage.

Indeed, the majority of the analysts asume that Correan’s decision to offer Assange a helping hand is his next step for broadening his leadership position on the international political firmament.

Will Assange receive the support of the rest of the South American world, and what will be the fate of the WikiLeak’s founder?

On August 19, 2012, Assange gave his first public speech from one of the balconies of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, after the South American country granted him political asylum. Watched by hundreds of police officers, he thanked Rafael Correa for the rendered assistance and addressed the White House with the request to “renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.”

Washington assured Assange that his fate is in the hands of Britain, Sweden and Ecuador.

Although in his speech Assange cogently declared that the countries from Central and South America support him, Brazil and Columbia issued that they did not agree with Correa’s decision to give a political asylum to the 41-year-old Assange.

The foreign ministers of South America’s 12 nation union gathered in Guayaquil, Ecuador last Sunday to discuss the case and to convince the White House to take a stance on the issue. However, no one can make an exact prognosis about what will be the next step in the case of Julian Assange and what’s more controversial - who will make it.

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Anonymous has attacked several British Government websites in support of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. In the attack titled #OpFreeAssange, Anonymous took down both the site of the Ministry of Justice as well as the site of the Department for Work and Pensions with the message ‘Tango Down http://www.dwp.gov.uk/  & http://www.justice.gov.uk #Assange’ posted by the #AnonymousIRC account.

Assange was granted Asylum by the Ecuadorian government earlier last week, following over two months of waiting within the Ecuadorian embassy after he broke his bail conditions and stayed there overnight. As a result, Assange has been unable to leave the embassy for fear of being arrested.

However, the British government warned that it could still enter the embassy despite the diplomatic immunity he has and arrest Assange. While the British Government have yet to follow through on this threat fully and arrest Assange, they have not seen fit to withdraw it either. The police did enter the embassy two days ago and although they did not arrest Assange, this act could have been the Government showing they will enter and arrest him should they choose to.

Addressing the public keeping watch outside the embassy Assange, said in a speech on Tuesday “Inside this embassy after dark I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape, but I knew there would be witnesses and that’s because of you.”

While it is not clear whether Anonymous’ members appear to be carrying out their attacks just for fun or as a way of causing disruption, they do have loosely agreed goals that they attempt to achieve. The main factor prompting Anonymous to launch an attack is any attempt from government’s to curtail people’s freedom of speech or rights especially concerning censorship of the internet.

This can be seen in their defence of several pirating websites, as well as their involvement in the Occupy movement. Therefore it is easy to see just why they have leapt to the defence of Assange. After all, Assange’s website is devoted to bringing news to the public, and like Anonymous, has received condemnation for its methods of obtaining data.

The attack, which also apparently targeted the Prime Ministers No 10 and home office websites, was done using Anonymous’ standard method of DDOSing. DDOSing stands for distributed denial of server, and involves a multitude of computers bombarding a website with requests for information. If successful, the server will be unable to handle the huge amount of information received by the various attackers, and as a result is forced to shut down and stop processing information for the site being attacked.

This type of attack is illegal in both the U.S. and U.K., with laws in place to prevent them from taking place. These laws seem to have done little to prevent people from taking part in the attacks, which have become vastly more popular in recent years.

They are so effective that governments may have started using them. Demonoid, one of the world’s largest torrent websites, was DDOSed and hacked three weeks ago, just days before the Ukranian government raided Demonoid’s servers. This attack was either a huge coincidence or a carefully constructed plan by the Ukranian authorities, turning the attackers’ main weapon against them.

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Julian Assange’s worst nightmare has finally come true. According to the London Police Station, Julian Assange has received a letter to report to London’s Belgravia police station this coming Friday at 11:30 p.m. Sam Jones, a reporter for ‘The Guardian,’ reported, “Assange has been seeking political asylum (where an individual seeks refuge in another country after not feeling safe in their own country, and if the country in which they are seeking refuge, approves of them being there) inside Ecuador’s embassy in London since last week” as he tries to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning about alleged sex offenses.”

For extradition cases, being court ordered via letter to attend a court hearing is considered the first step of the extraditing process. Assange is facing court orders to be extradited back to Sweden after he was found of accusations of raping a woman and molesting another while attending a lecture in Stockholm back in August of 2010.

Assange, the Wikileaks website founder, “published a mass of leaked diplomatic cables that embarrassed governments and international businesses, denies all allegations, saying the sex was consensual and the allegations against him are politically motivated,” according to The Guardian.

As of recently, a letter has been signed by leading political figures in the United States including that of Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky and Danny Glover. In addition to the letter that was sent to the embassy in Ecuador, a petition of over 4,000 American signatures arrived there as well, in hopes of Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa approving Assange’s political asylum to stay in Ecuador.

According to Reporter Sam Jones, “The letter, which has been posted online, states that its signatories believe Assange has good reason to fear extradition from the UK to Sweden, “as there is a strong likelihood that once in Sweden, he would be imprisoned, and then likely extradited to the United States.”

If Assange is extradited to the United States, and is found guilty of his allegations, he will face the death penalty, according to the Espionage Act.

One of the individuals who signed the petition also wrote a letter to President Correa stating, “Because this is a clear case of an attack on press freedom and on the public’s right to know important truths about US foreign policy, and because the threat to his health and wellbeing is serious, we urge you to grant Mr Assange political asylum.”

Thus far, Assange has not received any charges from the country of Sweden.

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Moscow, Russia – Two Arab Spring revolutionaries, Nabeel Rajab and Alaa Abd al-Fattah explain why the reform movements stalled in Bahrain and have destabilized in Egypt on the May 8th episode of “The World Tomorrow” on RT.

Nabeel Rajab is the leading human rights activist from Bahrain and the founder of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights; right prior to the air of his interview to Julian Assange he was arrested by the Bahraini government forces and will now stand trial for inciting the acts of protests.

Alaa Abd al-Fattah is the Egyptian writer and political activist who was a prominent figure in the Egyptian revolution. The two guests discuss the impetus behind the uprisings in the Middle East, what has been achieved and the prospects for democracy and reform in these countries.

“I speak to two leading revolutionaries: one from Bahrain, where the revolution failed; one from Egypt, where the revolution is now in turmoil. What makes a revolution? And where is the Arab Spring going to go?” – commented Assange on the upcoming episode.

In the interview given prior to his arrest Rajab commented on the struggle of the protest movement inBahrain on the show: “This is freedom. This is democracy that we are fighting for. It has a cost and we have to pay this cost, and the cost might be very expensive – as we have paid high cost in Bahrain. And, we are willing to pay that for the changes that we are fighting for.”

The fourth episode of Julian Assange’s program will air globally on Tuesday, May 8th at 15:30 Moscowtime /11:30 GMT/7:30 EDT across all RT channels in English, Arabic and Spanish, and will be rebroadcast every two hours thereafter.

The progress of the Arab Spring movements across different countries is a topic that Julian Assange has explored continuously starting with the very first episode of “The World Tomorrow.” Interview with the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah caused a global media firestorm and trended on Twitter throughout the day. The most recent episode featured an extended discussion with Moncef Marzouki, the interim President of Tunisia, on democratic reforms in the cradle of the Arab Spring.

“The World Tomorrow” is RT’s weekly interview program created and hosted by the WikiLeaks founder. Promotional materials, an exclusive interview with Assange and the full-length video of the aired episodes are available at http://assange.rt.com.

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Today, April 17 at 11:30 GMT RT will premiere “The World Tomorrow,” an exclusive and highly anticipated project by Julian Assange.

“The World Tomorrow” will premiere simultaneously across four channels – RT in English, Arabic and Spanish and on RT America. The broadcast will begin at 15:30 Moscow time and 7:30 EDT (New York), and will repeat every two hours. Promotional materials, including an exclusive interview with Assange, are available at assange.rt.com.

“RT is rallying a global audience of open minded people who question what they see in mainstream media and we are proud to premiere Julian Assange’s new project. We provided Julian a platform to reach the world and gave him total editorial freedom. He is absolutely the right person to bring alternative opinions to our viewers around the globe,” said RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.

Assange commented on choosing RT as a platform for the program’s debut: “When we look at international networks there’s really only two that are worth speaking about, and that’s RT and Al Jazeera,” he noted. “When we were looking at what international broadcaster…we wished to partner with, we looked to see what was the penetration into the United States. RT had greater penetration into the United States.”

Ten episodes of this interview program have been scheduled, at 26 minutes each. The show is being taped in London, where Assange remains under house arrest without official charges. Assange, who is the creator and host of “The World Tomorrow,” will interview interesting and significant individuals – those who in his opinion will form the agenda of tomorrow.

In the US RT is available to more than 85 million viewers across the country via major cables: Time Warner Cable (channel 135) in New York, Comcast Cable (channel 81) in Washington D.C., Comcast Cable (channel 103) in Chicago, Time Warner Cable (channel 236) in Los Angeles, Comcast Cable (channel 263) in Philadelphia. For more information on where to watch RT go to rt.com/where-to-watch/.

RT, around-the-clock international news channel broadcasting from its studios in Moscow and Washington, D.C. in English, Arabic and Spanish, reaches 530 million viewers, or 25% of all cable subscribers, in more than 100 countries worldwide. In the UK, RT is more widely watched than Bloomberg TV, according to a survey by Kantar Media. RT became the first news channel to pass 700 million views on YouTube. In 2010 RT became the first Russian channel to be nominated for the prestigious Emmy International award in the “News” category. RT streams online at the network’s website RT.com.

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When Wikileaks released a total of 477.000 secret US records of military incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American government went into a panicked frenzy – how did this happen? Among the sensitive material was the highly controversial recorded killing of 12 people – including two journalist – by US helicopter force in Baghdad, 2007. The video went around the world and became a major political embarrassment to the American forces in the region.

On May 26, 2010, US Pte First Class Bradley Manning was arrested and later charged on July 5 under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UDMJ) for stealing classified data and leaking it to Wikileaks between November 2009 and May 2010. Manning was exposed after a chat exchange between him and former hacker Adrian Lamo where he confessed to parts of his actions and expressed his distress over the “mess” he had created. Upon his arrest, he was held at a military jail in Kuwait but in July 2010, the 23-year-old Private was moved to the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia and classified as a ‘maximum custody detainee’.

The documents believed to be leaked by Manning continued to be published after his arrest but Wikileaks denied any direct contact with the detained Private. Regardless, the US government launched an intensive investigation into its founder, Julian Assange. According to the New York Times in December 2010, federal prosecutors were seeking to build a case on the notion that the Wikileaks leader had encouraged and ‘coached’ Pte Manning to extract the classified documents. According to Lamo, Manning had claimed to be a high-profile source for Wikileaks but following his arrest, the organisation stated that they had no way of verifying if Manning was in fact the source of the military documents. Assange told msnbc TV in December 2010 that the allegations of a Wikileaks/Manning conspiracy was “absolute nonsense” and by the new year, several online sources seemed to agree that links between the army private and Assange were questionable.

This changed nothing for Manning – by March, 2011, the US Army had filed another 22 counts against him in relation with the leakage of more than 720.000 secret diplomatic and military documents, according to the BBC. The Iraq War Logs is considered the greatest data leak in US military history and from a legal point of view, Manning’s fate is sealed.

However, there are still humanitarian concerns. In June 2010, the Bradley Manning Support Network was founded to promote justice in the process and their foundation has been highly critical of the conditions of his detention. According to reports dating back to 2010, Private Manning had been subjected to harassment and ritual humiliation while being held at Quantico. Accounts of his mistreatment, delivered through his lawyer, gave rise to strong criticism – both public and political.

“The military and Administration has been shocked by the support Bradley Manning has garnered globally – specifically at the gates of Quantico, Virginia. Last month, 500 supporters rallied near the Marine brig where PFC Manning has been held since August 2010. It wasn’t a secret that we were preparing to rally one to two thousand for an upcoming DC-area pre-trial hearing,” explains Jeff Paterson, the Project Director at Courage to Resist and member of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

On April 12, Juan Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, told the press that he had been blocked from an unmonitored meeting with Manning as part of his investigation into the rumoured torture. US officials were not going to let Mr Mendez speak to Manning without officials present but the UN investigator said that a monitored conversation would be counter to his mandate, according the the BBC.

On April 19, the US administration transferred Manning to Kansas – a move viewed as the result of the criticism of his mistreatment. Dennis Kucinich, a congressman from Ohio, commented on the decision that, “Any move of PFC Manning does not change the underlying fact, which has not been disputed by the Department of Defense, that he has been held under conditions which may in fact constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ in violation of the 8th amendment.”

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