Click these images to sign petitions from CodePink and Defending Rights & Dissent, calling on the Biden administration to free whistleblower Daniel Hale.
Courage is excited to announce whistleblower Daniel Hale as its newest beneficiary. Hale is a former Air Force and NSA intelligence analyst who is serving nearly a four-year prison sentence for passing classified U.S. military documents to reporters at The Intercept. In 2015, The Intercept published The Drone Papers, giving the public an unvarnished window into the incredibly secretive U.S. remote assassination program, including how it selects targets to kill and how the government “masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets.”
As we approach one year of Daniel Hale’s incarceration, his support team invites you to a night of reflection and solidarity on Tuesday, May 10, at 7:30pm EST: “We miss him so much and community helps us and him keep his fighting spirit – forever in pursuit of justice – alive.” Register here.
Courage has recently announced Hale as its newest beneficiary. We’ll continue to report on his prison conditions and other ways you can support him.
The much-anticipated auction of NFT collection ‘Censored’, a collaboration between political prisoner Julian Assange and renowned artist Pak will launch today, the same day set by the UK Supreme Court for Julian Assange to file his application to appeal against US extradition.
The collection consists of two parts: an auction of a single artwork ‘Clock’ (1 of 1) and a separate pay-what-you-like Open Edition.
The proceeds from the auctioned single artwork Clock will raise funds for Julian Assange’s legal battle.
Both the auction for Clock and the sale of the Open Edition start today at 14:00 London, 09:00 New York, 17:00 Moscow, 19:30 New Delhi, 22:00 Hong Kong, 01:00 (8th February) Sydney.
The auction for Clock and the sale of the Open Edition will run for 48 hours.
The Open Edition artwork generates a customized NFT based on the message entered by each collector.
Proceeds from the Open Edition will go to organizations chosen by Julian Assange and Pak that fight censorship, champion press freedom, or defend fundamental rights.
One of the bidders on Clock, AssangeDAO, has raised more than $40 million worth of ethereum (ETH) and counting to deploy at the auction.
The Collaboration: ‘Censored’
‘Censored‘ is a digital art collection exploring the concept of freedom, and is a collaboration between Julian Assange and record-breaking NFT artist Pak. It was unveiled over the weekend.
‘Censored’ is a two-part collection.
The first part of the collaboration is a one of a kind generative interactive blockchain artwork titled Clock. AssangeDAO, one of the bidders, has raised over $40 million and counting to deploy at the auction.
Censored consists of two generative interactive blockchain artworks.
Pak tweeted: “Clock (1/1) [Auction] A muted timer. It currently counts Julian Assange’s days in prison.”
Clock changes daily as it displays the number of days that Julian Assange has been imprisoned. All proceeds from Clock will go to support Julian Assange’s defense.
Pak has described the artwork as “dynamic and generative”. “Dynamic” means that the digital art piece changes over time. “Generative” means that the artwork is generated directly from the artist’s instructions on the blockchain. ‘Clock’ is expected to attract major collectors and NFT-world cooperative funds known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
The second part of the collection is an interactive Open Edition, which will also run for 48 hours. All proceeds from the Open Edition will go to organizations chosen by Julian Assange and Pak to fight censorship, champion press freedom, or defend fundamental rights.
The Open Edition artworks are generated by anyone who wants to participate and can be acquired “at any price you desire, even free.” Pak’s record-breaking collection ‘Merge’ set the record for open editions with 30,000 collectors and grossing US $91.8 million.
Both Clock and the Open Edition artworks are interlinked and transform in response to Julian Assange’s imprisonment or liberation.
The collaboration between Julian Assange and Pak was kept under wraps for months. On January 5th, Pak’s Twitter account @muratpak tweeted “nine hundred ninety nine”, signifying the number of days that Julian Assange had spent in prison. The following day, @muratpak tweeted “define freedom”, followed by “freedom as a medium” and linked to a WikiLeaks tweet.
Battle of the DAOs
The auction for the single edition is expected to bring about a major bidding war between DAOs.
One of the DAOs planning to bid on the NFT has already broken records. AssangeDAO (@AssangeDAO) launched at 22:32 GMT on 3 February. By Sunday night, it had surpassed the previous most successful NFT-buying DAO, ConstitutionDAO, which was formed to buy a rare copy of the US Constitution. To date, AssangeDAO has raised over $40 million and counting from over 7000 contributors. Contributions range from many small transactions of under US $10 to US $2 million at current Ethereum exchange rates. The median contribution is approximately US $600 (0.2 ETH). The DAO is still open for contributions and each contributor gets a share of the NFTs purchased by the DAO.
AssangeDAO’s mission statement is to “raise funds to help with his legal fees and campaigns to increase public awareness on the systemic failure of our justice systems” and “to inspire a powerful solidarity network and fight for the freedom of Julian Assange”.
US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “The Assange NFT is doing real numbers. Very much looks like a protest vote against the White House’s abuse of the Espionage Act.”
AssangeDAO was loosely modeled on FreeRossDAO, which raised over US $12 million to bid on the Ross Ulbricht NFT collection. More details about AssangeDAO can be found at the following links:
DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are organizations whose “articles of incorporation” run on the blockchain. They have proven to be extraordinarily effective fundraising vehicles, especially in short time frames. A DAO is a collective of people who organize online to pool their resources, skills, and time to achieve the stated goals of the DAO. The structure and objectives are determined by its members. The management of a DAO is then automated on the blockchain, allowing people from around the world to come together for a common purpose without having to trust each other.
The Creators
Renowned digital artist Pak is one of the highest grossing artists alive, known for pushing conceptual and stylistic boundaries. Pak became a household name in the traditional art world after Sotheby’s auctioned his collection ‘The “Fungible’ in April 2021, selling for US $16.8 million. In December 2021, Pak again made headlines as his collection ‘The Merge’ set a new record for an artwork sold publicly by a living artist at US $91.8 million, surpassing Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit”.
Australian award-winning author and publisher Julian Assange is the world’s most famous living political prisoner and freedom of speech campaigner. The US government is seeking his extradition to put him on trial for publishing documents evidencing war crimes against civilians by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as torture in Guantanamo Bay. Julian Assange faces a 175-year prison sentence if the US government gets its way. Press freedom organizations warn that the legal precedent will cripple free speech protections worldwide. WikiLeaks specializes in publishing censored documents of diplomatic, political, ethical, or historical significance. WikiLeaks is credited for sparking democratic revolutions, exposing corruption, war crimes, big pharma, the banks, and environmental disasters, and of bringing evidence of torture, ill-treatment and extrajudicial killings onto the public record. Julian Assange, who has been nominated for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, has been imprisoned in London’s notorious Belmarsh prison for over one thousand days.
How will it work?
Both the auction of Clock and the sale of the Open Edition will take place on censored.art.
NFTs are typically auctioned over a period of 24 to 48 hours. NFTs are traded using blockchain technology and are usually sold on the Ethereum network. The currency is ETH.
The code for the NFTs will be contained within the Ethereum blockchain itself. This means that the computer code that generates the artwork exists on the blockchain and can therefore not be manipulated, corrupted, removed, or censored. This ensures data permanence and avoids the problems associated with some so-called ‘JPEG’ NFTs that rely on links to external servers.
‘Censored’ is a digital art collection created by NFT artist Pak in collaboration with imprisoned WikiLeaks-founder Julian Assange.
The art collection titled ‘Censored’ will be unveiled shortly in time for the auction on February 7th. ‘Censored’ is shrouded in mystery and is set to make NFT history.
Pak has dropped some hints with tweets about censorship and freedom. On January 5th, Pak’s Twitter account @muratpak tweeted “nine hundred ninety nine”, signifying the number of days that Julian Assange had spent in prison. The following day, @muratpak tweeted “define freedom”, followed by “freedom as a medium” and linked to a WikiLeaks tweet.
Renowned digital artist Pak is one of the highest grossing artists alive, known for pushing conceptual and stylistic boundaries. Pak became a household name in the traditional art world after Sotheby’s auctioned his collection ‘The “Fungible’ in April 2021, selling for US $16.8 million. In December 2021, Pak again made headlines as his collection ‘The Merge’ set a new record for an artwork sold publicly by a living artist at US $91.8 million, surpassing Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit”.
Australian award-winning author and publisher Julian Assange is the world’s most famous living political prisoner and freedom of speech campaigner. The US government is seeking his extradition to put him on trial for publishing documents evidencing war crimes against civilians by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as torture in Guantanamo Bay. Julian Assange faces a 175-year prison sentence if the US government gets its way. Press freedom organizations warn that the legal precedent will cripple free speech protections worldwide. WikiLeaks specializes in publishing censored documents of diplomatic, political, ethical, or historical significance. WikiLeaks is credited for sparking democratic revolutions, exposing corruption, war crimes, big pharma, the banks, and environmental disasters, and of bringing evidence of torture, ill-treatment and extrajudicial killings onto the public record. Julian Assange, who has been nominated for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, has been imprisoned in London’s notorious Belmarsh prison for over one thousand days.
‘Censored’ is a two-part NFT collection:
The first part is a one of a kind (“1/1 edition”) NFT, which Pak describes as “dynamic and generative”. “Dynamic” means that the digital art piece changes over time. “Generative” means that the artwork is generated from the artist’s instructions on the blockchain. The single edition NFT is expected to attract major collectors and NFT-world cooperative funds known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
The second part of the collection is an “open edition,” which in addition to being “dynamic” will also be participative. The open edition is designed to be more accessible and therefore draw a broader pool of collectors. As a reference point, Pak’s record-breaking collection ‘Merge’ set the record for open editions with 30,000 collectors and grossing US $91.8 million.
The auction for the Single Edition commences on Monday February 7th, 2022 at 09:00 New York, 14:00 London, 17:00 Moscow, 19:30 New Delhi, 22:00 Hong Kong, 01:00 (on 8th) Sydney.
How will it work?
NFTs are typically auctioned over a period of 24 to 48 hours. NFTs are traded using blockchain technology and are usually sold on the Ethereum network. The currency is ETH.
The code for the NFTs will be contained within the Ethereum blockchain itself. This means that the computer code that generates the artwork exists on the blockchain and can therefore not be manipulated, corrupted, removed, or censored. This ensures data permanence and avoids the problems associated with some NFTs that rely on links to external servers.
The auction location will be announced via the Twitter accounts of the artist (@muratpak), Julian Assange’s brother (@gabrielshipton) and his partner (@stellamoris1).
Proceeds of the NFT will go to benefit Julian Assange’s defense fund as he fights against a US extradition request.
Battle of the DAOs
The auction for the single edition is expected to bring about a major bidding war between DAOs.
DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, have proven to be extraordinarily effective fundraising vehicles, especially in short time frames. A DAO is a collective of people who organize online to pool their resources, skills, and time to achieve the stated goals of the DAO. The structure and objectives are determined by its members. The management of a DAO is then automated on the blockchain, allowing people from around the world to come together for a common purpose without having to trust each other.
AssangeDAO launched today to bid on the single edition ‘Censored’ NFT. By 17:15 GMT on February 4th, the contributions to the AssangeDAO had surpassed over US $7 million (over 2,450 ETH). AssangeDAO’s mission statement aims “to inspire a powerful solidarity network and fight for the freedom of Julian Assange” and to “raise funds to help with his legal fees and campaigns to increase public awareness on the systemic failure of our justice systems”.
Join the Twitter Spaces event with the NFT artist Pak (@muratpak), Julian Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton (@gabrielshipton), and Julian Assange’s partner Stella Moris (@stellamoris1) and others at 22:00 GMT on February 5th, which is:
Whistleblower Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison today, for disclosing government documents on the U.S. military’s drone program to a journalist. The sentence—three years and nine months—includes his time served during court proceedings and will be followed by three years of supervised release.
Before he was sentenced, Hale read a powerful and intensely emotional speech to the court, condemning the horrors of war, particularly the post-9/11 U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and drew attention to Iraqi and Afghan victims of the U.S. drone assassination program. He said he opposes war for the same reasons he opposes the death penalty, saying it’s wrong to kill and especially wrong to kill the defenseless. The U.S. often posthumously labels those it kills as “combatants,” and Hale said that sometimes up to 90% of victims in a given airstrike are unidentifiable.
Hale recounted the day he plead guilty to one count under the Espionage Act. He biked to the Capitol that day, to the Department of Justice, and to the war memorials on the National Monument. He noticed there was no monument to mark the end of the Iraq War, and he said the most powerful memorial is for the Vietnam War, consisting of a long black marble slab engraved with the names of dead American soldiers. “If the memorial included the names of the Vietnamese dead,” he said, “it would be four miles long.”
Hale said that he is a descendant of Nathan Hale, who spied on British troops for the United States in the Revolutionary War, and who was executed following his own espionage conviction more than two hundred years ago. Daniel Hale echoed the famous sentiment of his ancestor in his speech: “My only regret is that I have but one life to give to my country, whether here or in prison.”
Hale talked about the “moral injury” war inflicts on soldiers. He said a fellow member of the Air Force once said to him about drone strikes, “You ever step on an ant? That’s what we’re doing.” He talked about how this weighed on him, how it “tore [him] up inside” to the point of “nearly giving up.” Hale said,
“I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life. For that I was compensated and given a medal. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretended that things weren’t happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of taking human lives.”
Judge Liam O’Grady took note of Hale’s widespread support, mentioning that several dozen people, including former members of the military, journalists, and others have written letters to the judge calling for leniency and considering Hale a hero. Judge O’Grady himself said that Hale deserves credit for the time he spent after his Air Force service in informing the public about U.S. warfare, but said that he could’ve done so without disclosing documents to the reporter. O’Grady noted this case raises the issue of the intersection of the First Amendment with national security interests, and said that he needed to deliver a substantial sentence to act as a deterrent against those whom Hale might inspire.
O’Grady sentenced Hale to 45 months in prison, to be served in northern Virginia.
Following the proceedings, a press conference was held outside the courtroom. CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou applauded Hale for acting on his morals, and said there could be “no sentence that will deter someone who knows in their soul that a crime is being committed. There will always be people with a conscience.”
Chip Gibbons, with Defending Rights and Dissent, condemned the double standard applied to media leaks: “If Daniel Hale had leaked documents that supported” U.S. military action “rather than exposed it, he wouldn’t be in prison today.”
Jesselyn Radack, herself a former whistleblower and a member of Hale’s legal team, said “Daniel rejects the notion that he is a hero or a victim.” What he wants the public to know and talk about, she said, are the victims of the wars he tried to expose. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who has been through an Espionage Act prosecution, lauded Hale’s personal sacrifice, knowing what he could face but doing the right thing anyway.
As the official remarks concluded, the crowd chanted a call for President Biden to pardon Daniel Hale.
The sentencing hearing for whistleblower and former Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel Hale is scheduled for July 27th at 9am in Alexandria, VA. In 2014, Hale disclosed documents to The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, exposing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s secret drone assassination program. Sign up to attend the hearing and learn more about the case here.
Hale was charged with five counts under the Espionage Act, each of which carry a 10-year prison sentence. He argued that the Act, which doesn’t allow defendants a “public interest defense” in which they can explain their motives, violated his First Amendment rights, an argument the court rejected. Facing an all-but-guaranteed conviction and a half a century in prison, Hale pleaded guilty to one count under the Act.
Attorney Jesselyn Radack says that the government is seeking 7-9 years in prison for Hale, which would be at least 2 years longer than the sentence given to NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, currently the longest prison term for a whistleblower in federal court.
New York Magazine has published a profile of Hale today, recounting what lead him into the Air Force and exploring the motives for his disclosure which the court has refused to hear.
There was a graphic of the “kill chain,” the bureaucratic process through which Obama approved a strike: little yellow arrows pointing on a diagonal all the way up the page, landing at POTUS. There was further evidence that when military-age males were murdered in a strike, they were classified as militants, an accounting trick that lowers civilian-death counts, and there was an account of a five-month period in Afghanistan in which U.S. forces hit 19 people who were targets of strikes and 136 who were not the targets. There were admissions that the intelligence on which strikes were based was often bad and that strikes made it difficult to get good information because the people who might have provided that information had just been killed by the strike. There was the report detailing the secret rules the government uses to place people on the terrorist watch list. “Each thing that I would discover would lead to something else,” Daniel said, “something more.” Together, these documents form a picture of a country vacuuming up massive amounts of information and struggling to transform that information into knowledge. One gets the sense that the Obaman air of “certainty” and “precision” around drones is possible only if one has considerable distance from the process.
Learn more about Hale’s case, how to write to him, and how to show your support at StandWithDanielHale.org.
Daniel Hale, formerly with the U.S. Air Force and then with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, blew the whistle on the United States’ drone assassination program, providing documentary evidence that the U.S. was killing civilians in Afghanistan whom it posthumously claimed were combatants.
Charged with five counts under the Espionage Act and facing 50 years in prison, Hale pled guilty to one count under the Act with the hopes of a much lower sentence. The United States has requested 7-9 years in prison for Hale, which would be the longest-ever sentence for a federal whistleblower by far.
Unable to explain his motives in the trial phase, because the Espionage Act precludes any discussion of motivation, conflating whistleblowers with spies for foreign adversaries, Hale has written a letter to the judge for the sentencing phase of his proceedings. His honest, heartfelt letter, worth reading in full, concludes:
Your Honor, the truest truism that I’ve come to understand about the nature of war is that war is trauma. I believe that any person either called upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma. In that way, no soldier blessed to have returned home from war does so uninjured.
The crux of PTSD is that it is a moral conundrum that afflicts invisible wounds on the psyche of a person made to burden the weight of experience after surviving a traumatic event. How PTSD manifests depends on the circumstances of the event. So how is the drone operator to process this? The victorious rifleman, unquestioningly remorseful, at least keeps his honor intact by having faced off against his enemy on the battlefield. The determined fighter pilot has the luxury of not having to witness the gruesome aftermath. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated?
My conscience, once held at bay, came roaring back to life. At first, I tried to ignore it. Wishing instead that someone, better placed than I, should come along to take this cup from me. But this, too, was folly. Left to decide whether to act, I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience. The answer came to me, that to stop the cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person.
So I contacted an investigative reporter with whom I had had an established prior relationship and told him that I had something the American people needed to know.
On 12 November 2019 and 26 November 2019 WikiLeaks published batches of tens of thousands of documents it obtained from Mr. Jóhannes Stefánsson, a whistleblower within SAMHERJI, a multinational fishing company based in Iceland. They expose corrupt schemes by the company in Namibia to gain access to rich fishing grounds off the African country’s shores.
Mr. Stefánsson is the former Managing Director of SAMHERJI´s operations in Namibia. He has decided to come forward as a whistleblower and testify about the activities of the company. He is also cooperating with anti-corruption authorities and police in Namibia, who have been investigating the case for more than a year.
The documents are dated from 2010 to 2016, the period during which the company gained its foothold in Namibia. SAMHERJI has now become the biggest single recipient of fishing quotas in the country. The documents (which include agreements, e-mails, internal reports, spreadsheets, presentations and photos) expose how the company spent millions of dollars in pay-offs to senior Namibian officials and politicians in order to ensure growing and continued access to the country’s resources.
It also exposes that lofty promises by SAMHERJI, to build infrastructure in the country and create jobs, were never fulfilled. On the contrary, the company used its international corporate structure to transfer proceeds from the operations straight out of the country. This was done through intermediaries it controls in Cyprus and in the tax-haven of Mauritius.
Today’s released files also demonstrate how these same tools were used to transfer funds to a secret account, set up by SAMHERJI in Dubai, for the sole purpose of transferring kick-backs to the corrupt entities in Namibia.
WikiLeaks releases documents pertaining to the Fishrot case that have come to light as a result of investigation into bribes, money laundering and tax evasion. These investigations have been launched by several institutions across Norway, Iceland and Namibia as a result of WikiLeaks’ Fishrot publication earlier this month.
The first document details internal exchanges between staff at DNB, Norway’s largest bank, from April 2018 to 2019, discussing how to respond to AML flagging (anti-money laundering) from Bank of New York Mellon. Specifically it relates to payments from the international fishing company Samherji to JPC Ship Management (Cyprus), a crew management company supplying services to Samherji.
The second document outlines how DNB (the Norwegian bank) carried out a detailed assessment in 2017 of JPC Ship Management in accordance with KYC principles (Know Your Customer) and did not seem to find anything wrong, despite being classified as a high-risk customer. Another company associated with Samherji financial transactions, Cape Cod FS (Marshall Islands), however was evaluated using the very same principles and its accounts were closed as the bank could not determine who the owner was.
The third document shows how DNB finally decided to terminate its accounts with JPC Ship Management only after receiving AML flagging from Bank of New York Mellon:
“Conclusion: The client is not in need of Norwegian account or within LCI strategy. The client does not have AML Policy and there is considerable risk related to transactions to Russia and Ukraine. The necessary resources to manage the sanction risk will be too high and the client has already disrespected instruction regarding resend once. Our recommendation is offboarding the client. “
Fishrot Files – Part 3 will be released soon with the addition to the searchable database.
On 12 November 2019 and 26 November 2019 WikiLeaks published batches of tens of thousands of documents it obtained from Mr. Jóhannes Stefánsson, a whistleblower within SAMHERJI, a multinational fishing company based in Iceland. They expose corrupt schemes by the company in Namibia to gain access to rich fishing grounds off the African country’s shores.