Julian Assange

Assange is the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, which publishes submissions of secret information, news leaks and classified media from anonymous news sources and whistleblowers.
Assange was a hacker as a teenager, then a computer programmer before becoming known for his work with WikiLeaks and making public appearances around the world speaking about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.
Since 19 June 2012, he has been inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has since been granted diplomatic asylum. The British government intends to extradite Assange to Sweden under that arrest warrant once he leaves the embassy, which Assange says he fears may result in his subsequent extradition to the United States to face charges over the diplomatic cables case.
Assange launched an Australian political party called The WikiLeaks Party to campaign for a Senate seat in Victoria in the Australian federal election in September 2013 but was unsuccessful.

Glenn L Carle

Carle is an ex-CIA Agent and author of The Interrogator. He served twenty-three years in the Central Intelligence Agency, working in a number of overseas posts on four continents and in Washington, DC.
Carle has worked on issues of terrorism, politics, security, and economics. His last position was as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, on the National Intelligence Council, where his office was responsible for strategic analysis of terrorism, international organized crime, and narcotics issues. When instructed to use torture after the 9/11terrorist attacks in New York, he faced a moral dilemma, which led him to leave the CIA and write The Interrogator, which covered his concerns about the USA loosing the moral foundations on which its democracy was based.

Julian Burnside AO QC

Burnside is an Australian barrister and commercial lawyer and an advocate for human rights and fair treatment of refugees. He has also provided legal advice and representation for Julian Assange. He has represented a number clients in some high profile cases in Australia. He has often acted for the underdog including Ok Tedi natives against BHP, Alan Bond in fraud trials, for Rose Porteous in numerous actions against Gina Rinehart, and for the Maritime Union of Australia in the 1998 waterfront dispute against Patrick Stevedores.
He was the Senior Counsel assisting the Australian Broadcasting Authority in the “Cash for Comment” inquiry and was senior counsel for Liberty Victoria in the Tampa refugee litigation case.

Dr Mark Andrejevic

Andrejevic is a media scholar who writes about surveillance, new media, and popular culture. In broad terms, he is interested in the ways in which forms of surveillance and monitoring enabled by the development of new media technologies impact the realms of economics, politics, and culture. His first book, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2003), explores the way in which this popular programming genre equates participation with willing submission to comprehensive monitoring. His second book, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (2007), considers the role of surveillance in the era of networked digital technology and explores the consequences for politics, popular culture, and commerce.

Dr Sebastian Kaempf

Kaempf is Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland (Australia). He received his PhD (‘Wresting under Conditions of Asymmetry: Contemporary US Warfare and the Trade-off between Casualty-Aversion and Civilian Protection’) at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University (UK) in 2007. He was a Research Associate of the US Studies Centre at The University of Sydney (2011) and a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (2004/05). He holds a BSc and MSc (Econ) in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 2012, he won awards for teaching excellence from the University of Queensland and the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

Antony Loewenstein

Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney-based independent freelance journalist, author, documentarian, photographer and blogger. He has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Guardian, Juan Cole, Mondoweiss, Washington Post, New Statesman, Huffington Post. Antony contributed a major chapter to 2004′s Australian best-seller, Not Happy, John! on the Middle East.

His best-selling book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, My Israel Question, was released by Melbourne University Publishing in 2006. A new, updated edition was released in 2007 (and reprinted again in 2008). The book was short-listed for the 2007 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. Another fully updated, third edition was published in 2009. It was released in all e-book formats in 2011. An updated and translated edition was published in Arabic in 2012 and soon in Indonesia.

Dr Lincoln Dahlberg

Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
Dr Lincoln Dahlberg teaches and researches in the areas of media politics, public sphere theory, and digital democracy. He has published extensively in these areas, including co-editing Radical Democracy and the Internet (Palgrave, 2007) and Discourse Theory and Critical Media Politics (Palgrave, 2011). He is currently working on two projects: first, an interrogation of discourses of digital democracy, particularly deploying critical political economy; and second, a radicalization of the Habermasian public sphere conception, particularly by way of post-Marxist discourse theory.