WikiLeaks' Julian Assange bail granted by British court

It was initially reported that Swedish authorities made the appeal against Assange’s bail, but according to new information, it was Britain’s official Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that tried to block Assange’s release, and Swedish prosecutors denied involvement with the decision, the Guardian reported.

Karin Rosander, director of communications for Sweden's prosecutor's office, told the Guardian: "The decision was made by the British prosecutor. I got it confirmed by the CPS this morning that the decision to appeal the granting of bail was entirely a matter for the CPS. The Swedish prosecutors are not entitled to make decisions within Britain. It is entirely up to the British authorities to handle it."

As a result, she said, Sweden will not be submitting any new evidence or arguments to the high court hearing tomorrow morning. "The Swedish authorities are not involved in these proceedings. We have not got a view at all on bail."

The confusion about who appealed Assange's bail led to an attack on the website of the Swedish prosecutors (Aklagare.se) through distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks launched by Anonymous, a loose-knit collection of computer hackers, the Guardian reported.

An unofficial media spokesman for anonymous, Gregg Housh, told the Monitor last week that such DDoS attacks are an effective way of fighting on behalf of WikiLeaks and Assange.

"The only reason these DDoS’s actually work so well is because the press comes running every time they do it and ask for tons of articles," Mr. Housh said in the sit-down interview. "If they’re not doing the DDoS’s, they’ll get an article a month maybe about them if they're lucky on the back page of some blog. When they DDoS something like Visa, then I end up on the front page of The New York Times and on CNN that day."

The Monitor reported on Tuesday that a portion of Assange’s bail was paid by filmmaker Michael Moore, who in a statement also vowed “the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names, and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving."

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