Update:
Swedish authorities have cancelled an arrest warrant issued for Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing site that recently became famous for publishing tens of thousands of secret US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.
Mr Assange has risen to prominence in recent weeks as the public face of Wikileaks.
To his fans, Julian Assange is a valiant campaigner for truth. To his critics, though, he is a publicity-seeker who has endangered lives by putting a mass of sensitive information into the public domain.
Mr Assange is described by those who have worked with him as intense, driven and highly intelligent.
He can go long stretches without eating, and focus on work with very little sleep, according to Raffi Khatchadourian, a reporter for the New Yorker magazine who spent several weeks travelling with him."He creates this atmosphere around him where the people who are close to him want to care for him to help keep him going.
"I would say that probably has something to do with his charisma," Ms Khatchadourian said. ...
The Swedish arrest warrant was issued as Wikileaks reportedly prepared to release thousands more documents from its cache of files on the Afghan war
Statements from the website spoke of the expectations of a "dirty tricks" campaign against Wikileaks, and expressed unconditional support for Julian Assange.
Just as quickly as they were brought, though, the charges were dropped, heightening the mystery of Julian Assange even further.
via BBC
Earlier story:
Swedish authorities say they have issued an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, on accusations of rape and molestation.
The warrant was issued late on Friday, said Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden's prosecutors' office. ...
Wikileaks, criticised for leaking Afghan war documents, quoted him saying the charges were "without basis".The message, which appeared on Twitter and was attributed directly to Mr Assange, said the appearance of the allegations "at this moment is deeply disturbing".
In a series of other messages posted on the Wikileaks Twitter feed, the whistle-blowing website said: "No-one here has been contacted by Swedish police", and that it had been warned to expect "dirty tricks".
More documents due
Last month, Wikileaks published more than 75,000 secret US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.
US authorities criticised the leak, saying it could put the lives of coalition soldiers and Afghans, especially informers, at risk.
Mr Assange has said that Wikileaks is intending to release a further 15,000 documents in the coming weeks.
Ms Rosander said there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation.
She gave no details of the accusations. She said that as far as she knew they related to alleged incidents that took place in Sweden. ...
via BBC News - Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accused of rape.
Comments over at ATS:
... the people at wikileaks were expecting some form of retaliation to get at him - just shows how low they can sink.
... "That was expected, wasn't it? Either rape or child pornography is the usual tactic taken to discredit someone. So it begins...."
... Give me a break. It's just another way to create a negative association with Julian Assange in the public's mind, even if the case is completely false and gets dropped in a few days. I hope Sweden has good libel laws.... Well well, looks like we might be getting that encryption key for the insurance file after all.
See the previous post "wikileaks-encryption-use-offers-legal-challenge" about the insurance file.
"I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape," the chief prosecutor said, but declined to go into any more details. ...
Al Jazeera's Paul Brennan, in London, said: "The two alleged victims in this are in their twenties.
"One is supposed to have happened last weekend in Stockholm and another last Tuesday in Sweden but in a separate town."
Assange was in Sweden last week partly to apply for a publishing certificate to maintain the advantages it receives from the country's whistle-blowing protection laws. Wikileaks also has many of its servers in Sweden. - aljaz
More on that 1.4 GB encrypted "insurance" document. If you download it, and they give out the password, I think you could open it with 7-Zip on a Windows computer, among other programs. I don't think AES-256 has been or can be cracked. There isn't even hope of cracking the weaker AES-128, according to this site. If 7 billion people each with 10 laptops capable of testing 1 billion key combinations per second divided the work, it would still take 77,000,000,00,000,000,000,000,000 years. Of course, quantum computers might do some damage... According to one comment on stackoverflow.com, "If quantum computers are developed, the effective keylength of symmetric ciphers will be halved. So a 256-bit AES key will give the same security as a 128-bit AES key does today."
In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks’ recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.”The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, is 1.4 GB and is encrypted with AES256. The file’s size dwarfs the size of all the other files on the page combined. The file has also been posted on a torrent download site as well.
WikiLeaks, on Sunday, posted several files containing the 77,000 Afghan war documents in a single “dump” file and in several other files containing versions of the documents in various searchable formats.
Cryptome, a separate secret-spilling site, has speculated that the file may have been posted as insurance in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization’s founder, Julian Assange. In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it.
It’s not known what the file contains but it could include the balance of data that U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning claimed to have leaked to Assange before he was arrested in May.
In chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning disclosed that he had provided Assange with a different war log cache than the one that WikiLeaks already published. This one was said to contain 500,000 events from the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009. WikiLeaks has never commented on whether it received that cache. - link
Thought: Isn't the existence of Wikileaks an argument against certain conspiracy theories? If 9/11 was an inside job by Dick Cheney, for example, wouldn't there be some leaked evidence by now? Like video of a missile hitting the Pentagon instead of a jet? Where does Julian stand on the 9/11 conspiracy theories:
"Conspiracy theorists have begun developing their own ideas about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange after he said in a recent interview that he is “annoyed” at “false” conspiracy theories surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud,” Assange told The Belfast Telegraph in an interview published July 19."
Interesting, isn't it? Some of the 9/11 conspiracy sites accuse him of running a honeypot operation and/or of being himself secretly a member of some super secret US government organization. Assange as a double agent? That is the strangest idea I've heard lately. Right up there in my book with the idea that Gary McKinnon is a double agent. File it in the freaky "what if?" file.
No comments:
Post a Comment