Stallman: Only Victims Of Tyranny Should Use Facebook

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WikiLeaks shows governmental ‘dirty tricks’

Stallman is a supporter of WikiLeaks – unsurprisingly – and says of Julian Assange, who was arrested on rape charges: “Even if all the nasty things being said about Assange were true, I would still consider him a hero.”

“Everyone is flawed, so if we demand a person be flawless before we admire and support their heroic acts, we will never admire and support anyone,” he said.

He is sure that the US government is torturing Bradley Manning, the US intelligence operative who allegedly handed material to WikiLeaks, in order to find a way to get at Assange.

“When you look at how the government is treating Bradley Manning, this appears to be torture intended to break him,” said Stallman, launching into an explanation that “the purpose of torture is getting confessions, regardless of whether they are true or false.”

The US wants a confession from Manning, that implicates Assange and would open the way for his extradition, said Stallman: “They can probably convict [Manning] without a confession,” he said. “But they hope they can get him to confess to something that would implicate Julian Assange.”

Some fear that, once extradited to Sweden, Assange may then be extradited  to the US, but Stallman thinks the plan may be that while he fights extradition to Sweden he will stay in the UK, which has an extradition treaty with the US – under which Gary McKinnon is due to be taken to America. “That treaty makes me fear for Assange,” said Stallman.

Asked what lessons can be learnt from WikiLeaks, Stallman said: “Governments will use dirty tricks to censor the Internet.” By dirty tricks, he meant “getting hosting services to delete their sites and getting PayPal and credit card companies to refuse to transfer money to them.”

The fact that the US government did this when there was no legal judgement against WikiLeaks? “That is what makes it a dirty tricks campaign,” said Stallman.

Other unjust activity by governments includes  the US customs closing websites without a trial, a power which Stallman believes is currently illegal, but which the US government is apparently moving to authorise.

Governments have a tendency to label organisations as terrorists, again without a trial, and make them illegal. “In general governments are more dangerous than non-state sponsored terrorists, and they do more harm,” said Stallman, calculating that many times more Britons have died in the government-backed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than have been killed by terrorist action in Britain or abroad.

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