WikiLeaks founder Assange refused bail by UK court

(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has angered U.S. authorities by publishing secret diplomatic cables, was remanded in custody by a British court on Tuesday over allegations of sex crimes in Sweden.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, had earlier handed himself in to British police after Sweden had issued a European Arrest Warrant for him. Assange, who denies the allegations, will remain behind bars until a fresh hearing on December 14.

He has spent some time in Sweden and was accused this year of sexual misconduct by two female Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. A Swedish prosecutor wants to question him about the accusation.

WikiLeaks, which has provoked fury in Washington with its publications, vowed it would continue making public details of the 250,000 secret U.S. documents it had obtained.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates welcomed news of the arrest. "I hadn't heard that but it sounds like good news to me," Gates told reporters during a trip to Afghanistan.

At a court hearing in London, Senior District Judge Howard Riddle said: "There are substantial grounds to believe he could abscond if granted bail."

He said the allegations were serious, and that Assange had comparatively weak community ties in Britain.

His British lawyer Mark Stephens told reporters a renewed bail application would be made, and that his client was "fine."

"We are entitled to appeal to a higher court, to the High Court, and we are also entitled to go again in the magistrates court at another date," he told reporters.

He said many people believed the prosecution was politically motivated, and that he would be "released and vindicated."

But a Swedish prosecutor was cited in newspaper Aftonbladet as saying the case was not a personal matter and was not connected with his WikiLeaks work.

CELEBRITIES OFFER TO STAND SURETY

Assange, dressed in a navy suit and wearing an open-neck white shirt, initially gave his address in court as a PO Box in Australia. Pressed for a more precise address, he gave a street in Victoria, Australia.

Australian journalist John Pilger, British film director Ken Loach and Jemima Khan, former wife ofPakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan, all offered to put up sureties to persuade the court Assange would not abscond.

Pilger, who offered 20,000 pounds ($31,600), told the court: "These charges against him in Sweden are absurd and were judged absurd by a senior Swedish prosecutor.

"It would be a travesty for Mr Assange to go within that kind of Swedish system."

Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline journalists' club in London, said Assange had worked out of the club for the past several months. Smith said he had offered him use of the club address for his bail request.

"I am suspicious of the personal charges that have been made against Mr Assange and hope that this will be properly resolved by the courts. Certainly no credible charges have been brought regarding the leaking of the information itself," Smith said in a statement.

The U.S. government and others across the world have argued the publication of cables is irresponsible and could put their national security at risk.

The WikiLeaks website was shut down after apparent political pressure on service providers, but WikiLeaks said there were now 750 global mirror sites meaning the data so far released remained publicly available. More cables would be released later on Tuesday, it said.

Lawyer Gemma Lindfield, representing the Swedish judicial authorities, said the extradition case contained allegations of four sexual assaults by Assange against two women in Stockholm in August 2010. One charge over Miss A is that Assange "sexually molested her" by ignoring her request for him to use a condom when having sex with her.

Another charge relates to "Miss W," who alleged Assange had sex with her without a condom while she was sleeping on August 7.

Swedish prosecutors opened, then dropped, then re-opened an investigation into the allegations. The crime he is suspected of is the least severe of three categories of rape, carrying a maximum of four years in jail.

Assange's Swedish lawyer has said his client would fight any extradition and believed foreign powers were influencing Sweden.

Swiss PostFinance, the banking arm of state-owned Swiss Post, has closed an account used for WikiLeaks donations and online payment service PayPal has also suspended WikiLeaks' account. Visa Europe said on Tuesday it had suspended payments to the WikiLeaks website.

(Additional reporting by Mia Shanley in Stockholm and Sudip Kar-Guptaand Angus MacSwan in London; Editing by Maria Golovnina)

What's Behind WikiLeaks? Too Much Writing

The latest WikiLeaks dump has reinvigorated all the arguments about how the digital age has made the dissemination of oodles of pages of information easier than it has ever been. Less noticed is that it has made the creation of those pages easier, too. Plain fact is, there's more to leak than there used to be. Why? Because officials now write too much. Why? Because they can.
It wasn't always like that. Long ago - well, actually, not that long ago, in the early 1980s - I was a government official in a policy analysis unit in the British Cabinet Office. My job involved writing draft minutes, memos, reports, all of which would be reworked numerous times before they left the building to go to other government offices. (I mean, left on paper, you understand; in envelopes, if you can remember what they looked like.) And when I say my job involved "writing" I mean just that; writing, in long-hand, on government-issue pads of paper. (See "WikiLeaks' Russian Cables: Bad for the Reset, Good for Putin?")
Sadly, my handwriting, then as now, was execrable (even worse then, for some reason, than it is today) which meant that my wonderful secretary couldn't understand a word of it. So I decided that to make her life easier, I would revert to the practice I had followed as an academic: to type, very roughly, what I wanted to say, fill up the page with scribbled corrections, and then hand it to her for a fair copy - or, if it was really long, send it to the "typing pool," wherever that was, from where it would return in a couple of days. Then my draft would be sent, again, on paper, up the editing chain.
But this wheeze, of course, meant that I needed a typewriter. Nobody in my unit had a typewriter. Nobody, so far as I could make out, had ever asked for one. (To be fair, and to let you know that we were bang up to date, some colleagues did use dictation machines. I could never get the hang of them: "Dear Jennings, comma, new sentence, capital letter, I have yours of the 15th.... Oh s--t, double space before the new sentence, sorry....") So I had to petition the administration department for permission to have a typing machine.
A stern-looking lady came up from the bowels of the Office to my top-floor garret, overlooking London's St. James' Park. Why, exactly, did I need a typewriter? I explained the problem. She looked very dubious, but in the end relented. And a few days later, an old-fashioned, upright, manual typewriter - not one of those fancy IBM Selectrics that were all the rage at the time - was delivered, and I could hunt and peck to my heart's content.
But of course, even that technological breakthrough was pretty modest. Anything I wrote of any substance would be edited ("redrafted") by my superiors, who would subject my prose to the most thorough copy-editing it has ever had - getting to the point, cutting out the Latinate, shortening the sentences, making sure the proposed "handling" of an issue was clear. Writing something down, in other words, was not a matter to be taken lightly; it was not the start of a process, it was, rather, the end of one - something that came after a series of conversations, debates and on occasion furious arguments, all conducted in person, sometimes in formal meetings, sometimes when two or three of us were gathered together over tea. (Get the latest tech news at Techland.com.)
The sheer difficulty of committing something to paper, I like to think, meant that the arguments we made were more thought-through than those that are now dashed off electronically and whizzed around the world. To be clear, the system our office used was not leak-proof; nothing is. The Pentagon Papers were produced in the old style, and that didn't stop them leaving the Department of Defense. But the traditional methods must have meant that there was a limit to the amount of stuff available to be leaked. There was, if you like, a quantity theory of government secrecy at work.
We knew that things would change. Right at the end of my time in the Cabinet Office, there was a buzz of excitement among the secretaries. A "Word Processor" - just one of them - arrived. It was about the size of a bus, and it made such a shuddering racket that the whole thing had to be sheathed in a perspex hood. The secretaries gazed at it rapturously. It was all downhill from there.

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