After failed senate bid, Assange supporters in Anonymous assault fringe parties

INTERNET — Julian Assange’s highly publicized bid for the Australian senate has failed after his controversial Libertarian-allied Wikileaks party received just over half a percent of votes. Other fringe parties which received even less votes, such as the Motoring Enthusiast Party, gained seats due to a quirk in the Australian electoral system which allows losing parties to pass their votes on to a second choice. No parties passed votes on to Assange.

Members of Anonymous are convinced that the Australian election was “rigged,” and have launched several high-profile attacks on what they call a “Conspiracy of fringe Australian political parties to deny Freedom for Assange.” An election to the Australian senate would have secured privileges which could have allowed Assange to leave his “confinement” at the Ecuadorean embassy without facing prosecution for minor sex crimes in Sweden.

Anonymous members defaced the Sex Party’s web site, replacing images of candidates and rallies with pornography depicting so-called “Bukkake” sex parties in which one woman is treated as a semen receptacle for hundreds of men. Anonymous also launched a Denial of Service attack on the Motoring Enthusiast Party, mobilizing thousands of enraged teens to overwhelm the site using the freedom software tool known as “Low Orbit Ion Cannon.”

Aaron Brown, who repeatedly denied acting as spokesperson for Anonymous before speaking to the press, told reporters, “If we can just keep the public eye on this injustice for another day or two, whatever the cost, it’ll bring the social change and freedom we’re all hoping for. Just another hour of exposure and it may have untold repercussions for freedom a hundred years from now. But if we don’t do something, soon it will be too late to do anything at all!”

When pushed on the ethics of attacking the free speech of political opponents, Brown told reporters, “Anonymous is often defined by its defense of free speech, and that’s why we don’t support attacks on the media, but since the Internet is a kind of media, we can’t really do anything but attack media.”