Here’s the latest news and updates on civil liberties and digital freedom issues from FDL’s Kevin Gosztola.

It is difficult to know why the CDPP has decided now to officially go after David Hicks’ royalties. One wonders if it had anything to do with the warm reception and ovation he received when he spoke to “a packed audience of 1000 people at the Sydney Writers’ Festival” last May. At the same event, Hicks “also warned that Julian Assange could face a similar abandonment by the Australian government, if the US government get their hands on him.”

The new Wikileaks document release on Guantanamo consists of intelligence assessments of Guantanamo detainees whose factual basis is hopelessly compromised, not least by “facts” produced under torture. Former detainee David Hicks’s supporters are fighting back with a press release detailing the many government lies and errors.

As part of a new investigative story, Truthout has published two documents written by the former psychologist for SERE, and later CIA contract interrogator for the Bush torture program, Bruce Jessen. Jessen’s notes describe an “exploitation” survival course that was “reverse-engineered” to provide a blueprint for the interrogation and detention policies of the Bush administration, which emphasized not just the ways to coercively interrogate an individual for intelligence purposes, but to “exploit” the detainee for a number of uses, including production of false confessions, recruitment of prisoners as U.S. spies, putting on show trials, and medical experimentation.

Jason Leopold has posted an incredible interview with David Hicks, formerly Detainee 002 at Guantanamo. In April 2007, Hicks, an Australian, was released from Guantanamo and sent back to serve nine months in jail in Australia, having been forced to plead guilty to “providing material support to terrorism.” This is his first interview, and Truthout has posted it along with an article by Leopold with more background on Hicks, which includes interviews with some of the guards who watched him.