world food situation

bacterium in soil enhances learning decreases anxiety

Video - mycobacterium vaccae light installation.

Sage | Turning off the TV and computer and spending some time outdoors may not only be good for your health, it may also make you smarter, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego by associate professor of biology at The Sage Colleges, Dorothy Matthews. Matthews conducted the research, entitled Effect of Mycobacterium vaccae on Learning, with her colleague, associate professor of psychology and biology, Susan Jenks.

Matthews became intrigued by mycobacterium vaccae, a bacterium commonly found in soil, several years ago after a study indicated that mice injected with a heat-killed version of the bacterium resulted in increased levels of serotonin and reduced levels of anxiety. Serotonin levels, which elevate mood and reduce anxiety, are associated with learning and Matthews was intrigued by the possibility that the bacterium could have an effect on learning in mice and that's exactly what the researchers found.

Mice exposed to the bacteria by nibbling on enticing tidbits of peanut butter snacks laced with the live bacterium were able to negotiate through a maze twice as fast as those in the control group and exhibited a reduction in anxiety behaviors as well.

The mice exhibited a profound increase in learning, according to the study. Even weeks after the mice stopped snacking on the live bacterium, they were still able to impress the researches with their newly learned skills. Three weeks later, the effect seemed to taper off, although since mice live on average for about 2 years, the effects were still impressive. Fist tap Dale.

the shadow biosphere

Video - Felisa Simon Wolf discusses her work at Mono Lake.

WaPo | the discovery opens the door to that possibility and to the related existence of a theorized "shadow biosphere" on Earth - life evolved from a different common ancestor from all we've known so far.

"Our findings are a reminder that life-as-we-know-it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, 33, the biochemist who led the effort.

Prompted by debate about the possible existence of a shadow biosphere, Wolfe-Simon set out specifically to see whether microbes that lived in California's briny, arsenic-filled Mono Lake naturally used arsenic instead of phosphorus for basic cellular functions, or were able to replace the phosphorus with arsenic.

She took mud from the lake into the lab and began growing bacteria in Petri dishes. She fed them sugars and vitamins but replaced phosphate salt with arsenic until the surviving bacteria could grow without needing the phosphates at all.

Her research found that some of the bacteria had arsenic embedded into their DNA, RNA and other basic underpinnings.

"If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected - that breaks the unity of biochemistry - what else can life do that we haven't seen yet?" said Wolfe-Simon, a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow and member of the National Astrobiology Institute team at Arizona State University.

"This is different from anything we've seen before," said Mary Voytek, senior scientist for NASA's program in astrobiology, the arm of the agency involved specifically in the search for life beyond Earth and for how life began here.

"These bugs haven't just replaced one useful element with another; they have the arsenic in the basic building blocks of their makeup," she said. "We don't know if the arsenic replaced phosphorus or if it was there from the very beginning - in which case it would strongly suggest the existence of a shadow biosphere."

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center at Arizona State and a prolific writer, is a co-author on the new Science paper. He had been thinking about the idea of a shadow biosphere for a decade and had written a paper on it in 2005. Two years later University of Colorado at Boulder philosopher and astrobiologist Carol Cleland also published on the subject. Both asked why nobody was looking for life with different origins on Earth, and Cleland coined the phrase "shadow biosphere."

At a Beyond Center conference four years ago, Wolfe-Simon, then in her late 20s, proposed a way to search for a possible shadow biosphere, and it involved Mono Lake and its arsenic.

"We were kicking vague ideas around, but she had a very specific proposal and then went out and executed it," Davies said. "It defies logic to think she found the only example of this kind of unusual life. Quite clearly, this is the tip of a huge iceberg."

Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal "Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership

Video - Democracy Now interviews Noam Chomsky about Wikileaks.


Video - Democracy Now interviews Noam Chomsky about Wikileaks.


Video - Democracy Now interviews Noam Chomsky about Wikileaks.

Democracy Now | In a national broadcast exclusive interview, we speak with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky about the release of more than 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks. In 1971, Chomsky helped government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg release the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret internal U.S. account of the Vietnam War. Commenting on the revelations that several Arab leaders are urging the United States to attack Iran, Chomsky says the latest polls show "Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent... This may not be reported in the newspapers, ... but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and the U.S. governments and to the ambassadors... What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership."

scotland yard set to arrest assange today

DailyMail | WikiLeaks supremo Julian Assange could be arrested in Britain today over sex allegations.

Scotland Yard detectives were last night preparing to detain the 39-year-old over claims of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.

An extradition warrant is expected to be passed to the Metropolitan Police today or early next week.

They have apparently known for over a month where Australian-born Mr Assange, who is in hiding in south-east England, is staying.

He supplied the force with his contact details upon arrival in Britain in October, said his London-based lawyer.

It today emerged that Mr Assange only escaped arrest yesterday because the Swedish authorities filled out an Interpol arrest warrant incorrectly.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: ‘If an international arrest warrant is legitimately issued and is passed to us and if we know where that person is then of course we would arrest them.’

has the u.s. already indicted him?

ChristianScienceMonitor | Sweden has issued an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and according to one newspaper report, he is hiding out in Britain. But is he already under indictment in the United States on charges related to his online release of a vast trove of secret US documents?

It’s certainly possible. US officials publicly will only say that they are investigating the matter and that no legal options have been ruled out. But an indictment in such an important federal matter would be handed down by a grand jury, and grand jury proceedings are secret, notes Stephen Vladeck, an expert in national security law at American University. There may be an empaneled grand jury considering the Assange case right now.

“We wouldn’t know what they’re doing until the whole thing is concluded,” he says.

WIKILEAKS 101: Five questions about who did what and when

A judge could order an indictment of Assange sealed until such time as the US is able to apprehend him, or until he is in custody in a nation from which he is likely to be extradited. The purpose of such secrecy would be to keep the WikiLeaks chief from going even further underground.

At least one prominent US legal analyst thinks this is just the sort of thing that is going on.

“I would not be at all surprised if there was a sealed arrest warrant currently in existence against [Assange],” said CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin on Wednesday. “That question is whether the American authorities can find him and bring him back to the United States for trial.”

In recent days US military officials have been talking about the WikiLeaks matter as if more is going on, legally speaking, than may meet the eye. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said that the military has enlisted FBI agents in its investigation of the matter, which could mean that someone who is not a uniformed US military person is about to be charged, or has been.

frescos in BoA headquarters lobby

capitalism, biogenetics, disavowel, and the end times...,

Video - Riz Khan interviews Slavoj Zizek.

Is the world ignoring the signs of the so-called "end times"? Renowned philosopher and critic, Slavoj Zizek, explains what he thinks is causing the downhill slide, and points to the faltering economy, global warming and deteriorating ethnic relations as evidence.

the secret life of julian assange

Video - Elric

CNN | In a 2007 blog post on IQ.org, he wrote:

"The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."

IQ.org is believed to be a blog created by Assange and is registered under the name "JA" by the same U.S. domain company as WikiLeaks. Its Australian postal address is also the same as a submissions address for WikiLeaks.

Among myriad topics addressed in the blog, Assange discusses mathematics versus philosophy, the death of author Kurt Vonnegut, censorship in Iran and the corporation as a nation state.

Driven by the conviction of an activist and the curiosity of a journalist, Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He slept little and sometimes forgot to eat. He hired staff and enlisted the help of volunteers.

Always, he protected his sources, never discussing where information came from.

"People should understand that WikiLeaks has proven to be arguably the most trustworthy new source that exists, because we publish primary source material and analysis based on that primary source material," Assange told CNN. "Other organizations, with some exceptions, simply are not trustworthy."

The Web site skyrocketed to notoriety in July when it published 90,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan. It was considered the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history.

WikiLeaks followed in October with classified documents about the Iraq war. And then this week, it began posting 250,000 cables revealing a trove of secret diplomatic information.

Some praised WikiLeaks as a beacon of free speech. But others, including outraged Pentagon and White House officials, consider it irresponsible and want WikiLeaks silenced for what they call irreparable damage to global security.

Assange, the elusive public face of WikiLeaks, catapulted to celebrity status.

The image of the lean, lanky, leather jacket-clad figure with the pale skin and mop of white hair was splashed on television screens and websites. Everyone wanted to know how the editor in chief of WikiLeaks had pulled it off.

Time magazine has nominated him for its Person of the Year, calling him a "new kind of whistle-blower ... for the digital age."

a revolution has begun and it will be digitised

Video - Veteran of 1000 Psychic Wars

Guardian | The web is changing the way in which people relate to power, and politics will have no choice but to adapt too. Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.

Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn't sharing information that had put the nation's security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous "lost opportunities" to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.

But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.

Individually, we have all already experienced the massive changes resulting from digitisation. Events or information that we once considered ephemeral and private are now aggregated, permanent, public. If these cables seem large, think about the 500 million users of Facebook or the millions of records kept by Google. Governments hold our personal data in huge databases. It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.

But when data breaches happen to the public, politicians don't care much. Our privacy is expendable. It is no surprise that the reaction to these leaks is different. What has changed the dynamic of power in a revolutionary way isn't just the scale of the databases being kept, but that individuals can upload a copy and present it to the world. In paper form, these cables equate, on the Guardian's estimate, to some 213,969 pages of A4 paper, which would stack about 25m high – not something that one could have easily slipped past security in the paper age.

To some this marks a crisis, to others an opportunity. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography – replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency.

wikileaks is holding u.s. global power to account

Video - Blue Oyster Cult Black Blade

Guardian | The WikiLeaks avalanche has exposed floundering imperial rule to scrutiny – and its reliance on dictatorship and deceit.

Official America's reaction to the largest leak of confidential government files in history is tipping over towards derangement. What the White House initially denounced as a life-threatening "criminal" act and Hillary Clinton branded an "attack on the international community" has been taken a menacing stage further by the newly emboldened Republican right.

WikiLeaks' release of 250,000 United States embassy cables – shared with the Guardian and other international newspapers – was an act of terrorism, Senator Peter King declared. Sarah Palin called for its founder Julian Assange to be hunted down as an "anti-American operative with blood on his hands", while former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has demanded that whoever leaked the files should be executed for treason.

Not much truck with freedom of information, then, in the land of the free. In reality, most of the leaked material is fairly low-level diplomatic gossip, which naturally reflects the US government's view of the world, and crucially doesn't include reports with the highest security classification.

When it comes to actual criminality and blood, nothing quite matches WikiLeaks' earlier revelations about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with their chilling records of US collusion with industrial-scale torture and death squads, and killings of Afghan civilians by rampaging Nato troops.

Nor, of course, is what US diplomats write necessarily true. But beyond the dispatches on Prince Andrew's crass follies and Colonel Gaddafi's "weirdness", the leaks do paint a revealing picture of an overstretched imperial system at work, as its emissaries struggle to keep satraps in line and enemies at bay.

assange in uk and police know his whereabouts

Video - Public Enemy movie trailer.

Reuters | Wikileaks website founder Julian Assange is in Britain and police know his whereabouts but have refrained so far from acting on an international warrant for his arrest, a British newspaper said on Thursday.

The 39-year-old Australian, who founded the whistle-blowing website that has disclosed a trove of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, supplied British police with contact details upon his arrival in October, The Independent said.

The newspaper cited police sources who said they knew where Assange was staying and had his telephone number. It added that it was believed he was in southeast England.

The international police agency Interpol this week issued a "red notice" to assist in the arrest of Assange, who is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of sexual crimes, but Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (Soca) so far has refused to authorize this, the paper said.

Citing unnamed sources, the Independent said Soca needed clarifications about the European Arrest Warrant issued by Swedish prosecutors but it described the delay as technical.

The Metropolitan Police and Soca declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

BoA in the wikileaks crosshairs

DailyKos | From Monday: "WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets."

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org ... The data dump will lay bare the finance firm's secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

And from Tuesday: "Bank Of America WikiLeaks' Next Target?"

[A]n eagle-eyed reader has sent me a link to a quote from a Computer World interview with Assange from October of 2009, which, if true, may contain a clue to that bank's identity:

"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on five gigabytes from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."

Here's another view on all of this, from the Lede Blog over at the NY Times, roughly 18 hours ago: "Latest Updates on Leak of U.S. Cables, Day 3."

And, last of all, if you have ANY doubts that this Wikileaks' story is not about Bank of America, HERE'S some help connecting the dots, from Zero Hedge, on Monday.

And, here's more on the second act of this horror show...

ecuador offers then withdraws residency to assange

Reuters | An Ecuadorean government official has invited the founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblower website to live and lecture in the country, days after the site caused an international uproar by releasing additional sensitive U.S. documents.

Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas told local media that Ecuador was attempting to get in touch with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange to invite him to the country, praising his work as an investigator.

Ecuador is part of a leftist bloc of governments in South America, including Venezuela and Bolivia, that have been highly critical of U.S. policy in the region.

"We are inviting him to give conferences and, if he wants, we have offered him Ecuadorean residency," Lucas said in an interview published on Tuesday in local newspaper Hoy.

Asked if the offer of residency was a formal invitation from the government, Lucas said, "sure."

International Business Times | Ecuador's President Rafael Correa stated that he did not approve any offer of residency made to the Wikileaks founder following the latest leaks. Earlier on Monday, Kintto Lucas, the Deputy Foreign Minister welcomed Assange to live and lecture in the country unconditionally. Sweden had already turned down his application for residency and Australia is launched an investigation if the whistle-blower website broke any local laws.

interpol issues red notice for the arrest of julian assange

Wired | The international police organization Interpol has issued a Red Notice for the arrest of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, in connection with a sex crime investigation in Sweden.

A Red Notice is kind of international wanted poster seeking the provisional arrest of a fugitive, with an eye towards extradition to the nation that issued the underlying arrest warrant. Interpol transmits the notices to its 188 member countries, including Britain, where Assange is believed to be located. Interpol has no authority to compel a subject’s arrest. It issued 5,020 Red Notice last year for a variety of crimes.

A terse extract of Assange’s notice appeared on Interpol’s website Tuesday, without a photograph, reporting that the 39-year-old Australian is wanted for “sex crimes” by the International Public Prosecution Office in Gothenburg, Sweden.

A Swedish judge on Nov. 18 ordered Assange “detained in absentia” to answer questions in a rape, coercion and molestation investigation in Stockholm. A court approved an international arrest warrant for the ex-hacker two days later, at which point Sweden reportedly applied to Interpol for the Red Notice. Assange’s lawyer appealed the detention order to the Svea Court of Appeal, but lost. Assange filed a new appeal Tuesday to the Swedish Supreme Court.

wikileaks moves to amazon cloud to evade ddos attack

TechnologyReview | As of this moment, according to Wikileaks itself, the site is under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack "now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second." These kinds of attacks are typically carried out by a widely distributed "botnet" of zombie computers under the control of a single or a group of hackers. They are par for the course on the web, and have been used in everything from extortion efforts against businesses to cyberattacks on neighboring countries.

What's interesting about this attack is that Wikileaks' webmasters have switched from their usual host, Swedish company PRQ, which has at times also hosted the media pirating site The Pirate Bay, to Amazon's cloud services.

According to network analyst Andree Tonk, who posted his observations on the mailing list of the esteemed North American Network Operators' Group, Wikileaks moved to Amazon hosting, in particular Amazon's EU cluster in Dublin, some time Sunday, when the first denial of service attack was launched against the site.

Without this fall-back in place, it appears that the first distributed denial of service attack against Wikileaks would have succeeded. PRQ was forced to "nullroute the IP" of Wikileaks in response to this first attack - making it completely inaccessible to the outside world.

Amazon's servers, by contrast, seem to be having no trouble at all mopping up the extra traffic - as of this writing, and for the overwhelming majority of the time since the first attack, Wikileaks.org has been up and available, according to Netcraft.

One way to thwart a distributed denial of service attack is simply to over-provision the server and bandwidth resources allotted to a particular IP address (i.e. website), and Amazon's cloud services are in a way a perfect solution for any webmaster wishing to deal with a DoS attack in this way

As DDoS attacks go, 10 gigabits a second is big, but by no means at the upper end of the scale of such attacks. A 2008 study would put an attack of this scale somewhere in the middle of the pack, with the largest ever attack as of two years ago topping out at 40 gigabits / second.

Whatever happens to Wikileaks.org - whether it's shut down by law enforcement or by hackers and governments who wish its current "cablegate" trove to remain out of the public eye, it appears that the site's creators have already released an encrypted archive of the entirety of the cablegate documents or perhaps all of Wikileaks.

Calling the compressed, encrypted but freely available 1.3 gigabyte file "history insurance," Wikileaks has made the archive available as a torrent on The Pirate Bay.

wikileaks true value (smear and denial - part 2)

medialens | The UK and US media smears described in Part 1 should be kept in mind when considering the gravity and importance of the latest WikiLeaks. In addition to thousands of previously unreported civilian killings, the leaks revealed more than 1,300 claims of torture by Iraqi police and military between 2005 and 2009. More than 180,000 people were detained at some point between 2004 and 2009, or one in 50 Iraqi males.

But these are only the incidents the US military knew about, or chose to know about, or chose to report; and the documents are an unknown sample of all documentation held by the US government. There are, for example, no reports from the “shock and awe” year of 2003, and none from the tens of thousands of after-attack Pentagon bombing assessments. The leaks also report no civilian deaths in major US atrocities, including the offensive that devastated Fallujah in 2004.

The leaks corroborate previous allegations that US forces turned over prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the Iraqi interior ministry's commandos, infamous for their torture and extra judicial killings. This was not merely ‘turning a blind eye’ to torture, as investigative journalist Gareth Porter notes: “The implication was that the Shi'a commandos would be able to extract more information from the detainees than would be allowed by U.S. rules.”

US forces, then, were complicit in the torture. Indeed, under international law, as the occupying power, the coalition is accountable for all of these crimes.

US troops are actually commanded to not investigate the tortures by an order called Frago 242. Issued in June 2004, this instructs coalition troops not to investigate any abuse of detainees unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi forces on Iraqis, "only an initial report will be made... No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".
The leaks reveal that the US military was also aware that the Iraqi government had murdered detainees.

Civilian Deaths - The “Standard Accepted Figure”
The leaks reveal, not just a staggering level of violence and criminality in occupied Iraq, but also the determination of the Iraqi government and US forces to hide civilian casualties.

This is hardly surprising and fits with evidence that the US and UK governments have worked hard to smear credible scientific analysis of the likely death toll. A recent study by Professor Brian Rappert of the University of Exeter reported of the UK government: “deliberations were geared in a particular direction – towards finding grounds for rejecting the [2004] Lancet study [estimating almost 100,000 Iraqi deaths from the war] without any evidence of countervailing efforts by government officials to produce or endorse alternative other studies or data”.

Nevertheless, with a near-uniform intellectual sleight of hand, journalists have managed to turn evidence that civilian casualties are likely much higher (as much as ten times higher) than most media have been reporting into evidence that casualties are perhaps 15 per cent higher. As one seasoned journalist told us privately, “WikiLeaks has been Guardianised” - their true significance has been disarmed, defanged and contained by the media.

wikileaks "attack" is now a "crime"

AP | Striking back, the Obama administration branded the WikiLeaks release of more than a quarter-million sensitive files an attack on the United States Monday and raised the prospect of criminal prosecutions in connection with the exposure. The Pentagon detailed new security safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets.

The young Army Pfc. suspected of stealing the diplomatic memos, many of them classified, and feeding them to WikiLeaks may have defeated Pentagon security systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer memory stick.

The soldier, Bradley Manning has not been charged in the latest release of internal U.S. government documents. But officials said he is the prime suspect partly because of his own description of how he pulled off a staggering heist of classified and restricted material.

"No one suspected a thing," Manning told a confidant afterward, according to a log of his computer chat published by Wired.com. "I didn't even have to hide anything."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted Monday that WikiLeaks acted illegally in posting the material. She said the administration was taking "aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information."

Attorney General Eric Holder said the government was mounting a criminal investigation, and the Pentagon was tightening access to information, including restricting the use of computer storage devices such as CDs and flash drives.

"This is not saber-rattling," Holder said. Anyone found to have broken American law "will be held responsible."

Holder said the latest disclosure, involving classified and sensitive State Department documents, jeopardized the security of the nation, its diplomats, intelligence assets and relationships with foreign governments.

next target, bankster ganksters...,

Forbes | In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business.

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

(For the full transcript of Forbes’ interview with Assange click here.)

When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”

This is Assange: a moral ideologue, a champion of openness, a control freak. He pauses to think—a process that occasionally puts our conversation on hold for awkwardly long interludes. The slim 39-year-old Wiki­Leaks founder wears a navy suit over his 6-foot-2 frame, and his once shaggy white hair, recently dyed brown, has been cropped to a sandy patchwork of blonde and tan. He says he colors it when he’s “being tracked.”

“These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them,” he says, then pauses again.

“Megaleaks?” I suggest, trying to move things along.

“Yes, that’s good—megaleaks.” His voice is a hoarse, Aussie-tinged baritone. As a teenage hacker in Melbourne its pitch helped him impersonate IT staff to trick companies’ employees into revealing their passwords over the phone, and today it’s deeper still after a recent bout of flu. “These megaleaks . . . they’re an important phenomenon. And they’re only going to increase.”

bon apetit!