by Louise Healy for the BBC's Biodun Iginla

Updated Sun Dec 5, 2010 11:25am AEDT

Assange has embarrassed the US government and foreign leaders by leaking thousands of secret American diplomatic cables (Reuters: Valentin Flauraud)

• RELATED STORY: WikiLeaks back online, Assange close to arrest
• RELATED STORY: Fresh warrant issued for Assange's arrest

As authorities close in on Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks founder has blasted Australia's response to the scandal, saying the Federal Government has thrown away his rights in an attempt to pander to US interests.

The 39-year-old Australian has embarrassed the US government and foreign leaders by leaking thousands of secret American diplomatic cables.

And Swedish authorities have issued a fresh arrest warrant over sex crime allegations against Mr Assange, who is believed to be hiding in Britain.

Mr Assange broke his silence in an online Q&A session for the Guardian newspaper, in which he questioned the motives of the Australian Government.

"I am an Australian citizen and I miss my country a great deal," he wrote.

"However, during the last weeks the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, have made it clear that not only is my return impossible but that they are actively working to assist the United States government in its attacks on myself and our people."

Ms Gillard has been heavily critical of Mr Assange, labelling him "grossly irresponsible" and calling the leaks illegal.

Mr McClelland has asked the AFP to investigate whether Mr Assange has broken any laws in leaking the US diplomatic cables.

In response, the WikiLeaks head questioned the value of his citizenship, comparing his treatment to that of David Hicks.

"This brings into question what does it mean to be an Australian citizen - does that mean anything at all," he wrote.

"Or are we all to be treated like David Hicks at the first possible opportunity merely so that Australian politicians and diplomats can be invited to the best US embassy cocktail parties."

But Mr McClelland has stopped short of cancelling Mr Assange's passport, saying it would be counter-productive.

"There has been some discussion as to whether it would be counter-productive to remove the identification that would trigger the law enforcement processes," he said.

Mr Assange's London-based lawyer Mark Stephens said he was not aware whether authorities in Britain had yet received the latest international arrest warrant, which was issued in relation to allegations of rape and sexual molestation.

However, Mr Stephens confirmed that any potential arrest of his client would take place by arrangement.

He added: "The last warrant took 10 days to come through, we know that it was incompetently filled out, so another one was sent on Friday."

"So I expect another 10 days, unless of course they are going to treat Julian Assange differently than anyone else."

Mr Assange has denied the allegations and hinted they could be part of a "smear campaign" designed to distract attention from the leaks.

Funding cut

While authorities zone in on Mr Assange, WikiLeaks faces a fresh threat to its survival after the online payment service PayPal cut off the account used for donations to the whistle-blowing website.

WikiLeaks is already fighting to stay on the internet. It had to switch its domain to Switzerland because its original web address was shut down by a US provider, as it continues to release tens of thousands of classified US diplomatic cables.

The US-based PayPal, which is owned by auctions group eBay, announced overnight that it would stop taking donations for WikiLeaks thus blocking a key source of its income.

"PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal acceptable use policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity," it said in a statement.

WikiLeaks blamed "US government pressure" for the PayPal ban, in a message on its Twitter feed.

Meanwhile, some targets of the sometimes brutally frank US diplomats' assessments threw doubt on their credibility.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai said at least one of the incidents described in a cable which portrayed him as corrupt and weak could not have happened as described, while he dismissed others as an attempt by US officials to discredit him and his government.

In one cable, US diplomats said one of Mr Karzai's deputies had transported $SU52 million out of the country in suitcases, a claim Mr Karzai rejected.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said on Saturday she had contacted dozens of foreign leaders to smooth over any frictions and will continue to do so for "the next weeks".

"I haven't seen everybody in the world, and apparently there are 252,000 of these things out there in cyberspace somewhere," she said, noting that all of them had not yet been published.

"So I think I'll have some outreach to continue doing over the next weeks just to make sure that as things become public, if they raise concerns, I will be prepared to reach out and talk to my counterparts and heads of state and governments."

The release marked the third major publication of secret US files by WikiLeaks this year, after the site had published tens of thousands of US military files from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

WikiLeaks was forced to turn to Switzerland for a new domain name after its original wikileaks.org address was shut down by an American provider, while Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting it.

The Swiss domain - www.wikileaks.ch - was up and running again on Saturday after migrating to new servers, the group which owns the name said.

– 2 hours ago

LONDON

 — Its founder is a wanted man, its systems are under attack, it is condemned from the capitals of the world.

But although the future is uncertain for WikiLeaks, the website dedicated to releasing classified information has opened a Pandora's Box of secret-spilling that will be difficult to reverse.

WikiLeaks, which has triggered global governmental alarm by releasing reams of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, is facing attacks in cyberspace and in the legal sphere. The site is assailed by hackers and has been booted from its U.S. server. Frontman Julian Assange is in hiding and faces allegations of sexual misconduct.

"Whatever happens to the domain name and the actual organization, the idea unleashed by WikLeaks is going to continue," said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Ben Laurie, a data security expert who advised WikiLeaks before it launched in 2006, agreed.

"The concept is not going to die. It's really hard to keep things shut down if they want to stay up," he said. "Look at everything else people would like not to happen online — phishing, spam, porn. It's all still there."

Little is known about the day-to-day functioning of WikiLeaks. It has no headquarters, few if any paid staff — but a famous public face in Assange, a wiry 39-year-old Australian computer hacker with no permanent address.

He's on the cover of newspapers and magazines around the world, but he has not appeared in public for a month.

Assange, who is somewhere in Britain, is the subject of a European arrest warrant issued by authorities in Sweden, where he is accused of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.

If British police arrest him, he will likely be caught up in a lengthy legal fight against extradition and could be jailed, his ability to operate as the face of WikiLeaks curtailed even further.

Assange denies the Swedish charges, which his British lawyer, Mark Stephens, has said stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex." He said Assange was happy to speak to Swedish prosecutors and had provided his contact details to authorities there and in Britain.

Assange also has made powerful enemies in the United States, especially since WikiLeaks released thousands of secret logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan earlier this year. With the latest leaks, U.S. politicians have called for him to be prosecuted for espionage — or worse. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked on Facebook: "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?"

Assange acknowledged Friday that "I have become the lightning rod."

"In the end, someone must be responsible to the public and only a leadership that is willing to be publicly courageous can genuinely suggest that sources take risks for the greater good," he said during a question-and-answer session on The Guardian newspaper's website.

"I get undue attacks on every aspect of my life, but then I also get undue credit as some kind of balancing force."

It's not just governments and the law with whom Assange conflicts. He is a divisive figure who has been accused of overshadowing WikiLeaks' work and appears to have fallen out with several former colleagues.

They include WikiLeaks' former German spokesman Daniel Schmitt, who has written a soon-to-be-published book about his time at the website.

In September, German magazine Der Spiegel quoted Schmitt as saying that Assange "reacted to any criticism with the allegation that I was disobedient to him and disloyal to the project."

Yet those who have worked with Assange say his charisma and passion are evident.

"You kind of get the feeling that you are talking to a persona from the 'Matrix' movies," said Icelandic legislator Robert Marshall, who met Assange while preparing legislation that aims to turn the island nation into a haven of media freedom. "But his enthusiasm toward freedom of expression and the rights of journalists was very real to me."

Laurie recalled Assange as "fairly geeky, very smart, extremely interesting to talk to."

"I know a lot of geeks and I certainly know weirder people than him," Laurie said.

As WikiLeaks released the first few hundred of what it says are a quarter of a million secret diplomatic cables this week, pressure on the site grew.

Amazon.com Inc., which had provided WikiLeaks with use of its servers, evicted it on Wednesday saying the website had violated its terms of service. The site remains on the servers of its Swedish provider, Bahnhof AB.

The next day, WikiLeaks' American domain name system provider withdrew service to thewikileaks.org name after it came under concerted cyber-attack. Service provider everyDNS said the attacks threatened the rest of its network. WikiLeaks responded by moving to a Swiss domain name, wikileaks.ch. On Friday, the French government moved to ban WikiLeaks from servers in that country.

Chased from one country to the next, WikiLeaks also appears perennially cash-strapped, appealing on its website and Twitter for donations to "keep us strong."

Recently it seems to have taken steps to put itself on a firmer footing. Last month it set up a private limited company in Iceland as part of a move to restructure its global operations. The organization is also establishing legal entities in Sweden and France, spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said, as bases from which to carry out tasks such as opening bank accounts.

The Icelandic government recently passed a resolution in favor of a bill that aims to turn the tiny nation into a journalistic haven by granting high-level protection to investigative journalists and their sources. Backers hope the initiative, partly driven by Assange, will become law next year. Such a law could provide protection to a site like WikiLeaks.

Assange said in Friday's online chat that WikiLeaks had taken steps to make sure it was not silenced, sending the "Cablegate" material and other secret documents in encrypted form "to over 100,000 people."

"If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically," he said. "History will win."

Whatever happens to Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy cat may be out of the bag. Schmitt, the former WikiLeaks spokesman, has said he wants to set up a rival secret-spilling site, and others may follow.

"I think the basic concept has a future," said Steven Aftergood, who works on government secrecy policy for the Federation of American Scientists. "Anonymous disclosure of restricted records is easier than it has ever been. The virtues of transparency and government accountability are more widely recognized than they have ever been. Those two factors together provide a foundation for this kind of activity.

"Whether it will be Julian Assange's WikiLeaks or the new German spinoff or another initiative remains to be seen," he said.

Benton, director of the Nieman Lab, said that means governments will have to develop a response beyond condemnation and legal threats. He compared it to music file-sharing, which was greeted with hostility by a music industry that soon realized it had to develop ways to make money from downloads.

"They can't think, 'This is an opponent we need to defeat,'" he said. "They have to think about how they are going to deal with it."

Submissions

1. Material we accept

Wikileaks will accept restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. We do not accept rumor, opinion, other kinds of first hand accounts or material that is publicly available elsewhere. This is because our journalists write news stories based on the material, and then provide a link to the supporting documentation to prove our stories are true. It's not news if it has been publicly available elsewhere first, and we are a news organisation. However, from time to time, the editors may re-publish material that has been made public previously elsewhere if the information is in the public interest but did not have proper news analysis when first released.

If you are sending us something, we encourage you to include a brief description of why the documents is important and what the most significants parts are within the document. It will help our journalists to write up and released the story much faster.

2 Our anonymous electronic drop box

Wikileaks has an anonymous electronic drop box if you wish to provide original material to our journalists. Wikileaks accepts a range of material, but we do not solicit it. If you are going to send in material it should be done as securely as possible. That is why we have created our novel method of submission based on a suite of security technologies designed to provide anonymity. We have put a great deal of technical and design work into the drop box because we take the journalist-source relationship very seriously.

2.1 Its easy to submit

Our drop box is easy to use and provides military-grade encryption protection.

Submitting documents to our journalists is protected by law in better democracies. For other countries, the electronic drop box is there to offer help and protection. It is particularly designed to keep your identity hidden from everyone, including WikiLeaks. We never keep logs of who uses the drop box or where they are coming from.

There are several ways to send in material, but the most secure and anonymous is at the following link.

(currently closed for re-engineering security and useability improvements)

To add another layer of protection,you might also want to use the secure TOR network (http://suw74isz7qqzpmgu.onion/) Tor is a secure anonymous distributed network that provides maximum security.

2.2 Help with any questions about submitting

You can also chat to us online and we will answer any questions or solve any problems you might have with submitting (https://chat.wikileaks.org) (Currently temporarily closed with the electronic drop box for re-engineering.) Our chat is designed to be secure and anonymous. Visitors are protected by many layers of security. They can not see each other. There is a mechanism in place to stop logging and the server forbids potentially dangerous commands that could reveal other user's identity. Communication is secured with SSL encryption.

2.3 Protection for you

Wikileaks does not record any source-identifying information and there are a number of mechanisms in place to protect even the most sensitive submitted documents from being sourced. We do not keep any logs. We can not comply with requests for information on sources because we simply do not have the information to begin with. Similarly we can not see your real identity in any anonymised chat sessions with us. Our only knowledge of you as a source is if you provide a coded name to us. A lot of careful thought by world experts in security technologies has gone into the design of these systems to provide the maximum protection to you. Wikileaks has never revealed a source.

2.4 How it works

When WikiLeaks receives a document, our accredited journalists assess the submission. If it meets the criteria, our journalists then write or produce a news piece based on the document. This typically includes a description of the document, an analysis of why it is important, and an explanation of what it signifies to broader society. The news piece might also highlight the parts of the document that are most newsworthy. Our news stories are deliberately analytical regarding the wider significance of the document. We then link from the news piece to the original submission.

Submissions establish a journalist-source relationship. Online submissions are routed via countries which have strong shield laws to provide additional protection to sources and journalists.

Some documents submitted contain highly sensitive information. WikiLeaks has developed a harm minimisation proceedure to clean documents which might endanger innocent lives. In other instances, WikiLeaks may delay publishing some news stories and their supporting documents until the publication will not cause danger to such people. However in all cases, WikiLeaks will only redact the details that are absolutely necessary to this end. Everything else will be published to support the news story exactly as it appeared in the original document.

WikiLeaks has a overriding objective to publish and bring information into the public arena to encourage an informed society. It will stay doggedly true to this goal.

3. Directions for how to submit material

If you want to send us a message of your own, as opposed to a document, please see Contact.

3.1 Submissions via secure upload

Fast, easy and automatically encrypted with the best banking-grade encryption. We keep no records as to where you uploaded from, your time zone, browser or even as to when your submission was made (if you choose a non-zero publishing delay, we set the file time record to be the release date + a random time within that day).

If you are anonymously submitting a Microsoft word file (".doc") that you have edited at some stage, please try to send a PDF document (".pdf") instead, as Word documents may include your name or the name of your computer, see Word file redaction for further information. If you have no means to produce a PDF file your document will be converted by WikiLeaks staff.

The process your document will undergo is outlined for understanding submissions.

You can also use secure TOR network (secure, anonymous, distributed network for maximum security)

3.2 Submissions via our discreet postal network

Submissions to our postal network offer a strong form of anonymity and are good for bulk truth-telling.

Steps:

1. First place your leak onto a floppy disk, CD, DVD or a USB Flash Drive. If you are using a floppy disks, please create two as they are often unreliable. If you only have paper documents, we will scan them if they are of significant political or media interest (if you are unsure whether this may be the case, please contact us first). This will delay the process however.
2. Post your information to one of our trusted truth facilitators listed below. You may post to whatever country in the list that you feel most suitable given the nature of the material and your postal service. If your country's mail system is unreliable, you may wish to send multiple copies, use DHL, FedEX or another postal courier service.

WikiLeaks truth facilitators will then upload your submission using their fast internet connection. If you use a floppy disk, be sure to send two for increased reliability.

You can use whatever return address you like, but make doubly sure you have written the destination correctly as postal workers will not be able to return the envelope to you.

After receiving your postal submission our facilitators upload the data to WikiLeaks and then destroy the mailed package.

3.3 High risk postal submissions

If your leak is extremely high risk, you may wish to post away from your local post office at a location that has no witnesses or video monitoring.

Many CD and DVD writers will include the serial number of the DVD or CD writer onto the CD/DVDs they write. If the post is intercepted this information can in theory be used to track down the manufacturer and with their co-operation, the distributor, the sales agent and so on. Consider whether there are financial records connecting you to the CD/DVD writer sale if your adversary is capable of intercepting your letter to us and has the will to do this type of expensive investigation. Pay cash if you can for the CD/DVD writer.

Similarly, CD and DVD media themselves include a non-unique manufacturing "batch number" for each group of around 10,000 CD/DVDs made. Pay cash when buying the CD or DVD. Try to choose a store without video cameras at the register.

Although we are aware of no instances where the above has been successfully used to trace an individual, anti-piracy operations have used the information to trace piracy outfits who sell tens or hundreds of thousands of counterfeit CDs or DVDs.

If you post it to us, a good option is to encrypt the USB file/CD file and then contact us at a later date via live online chat with the encryptin passphrase. That way if the post is intercepted, the data can not be copied.

If you suspect you are under physical surveillance, discreetly give the letter to a trusted friend or relative to post. On some rare occasions, targets of substantial political surveillance have been followed to the post office and have had their posted mail seized covertly. In this rare case if you are not intending to encrypt the data and if the police or intelligence services in your country are equipped to perform DNA and/or fingerprint analysis you may wish to take the appropriate handling precautions.

3.4 Postal addresses of our trusted truth facilitators

You may post to any country in our network.

Pick one that best suits your circumstances. If the country you are residing in has a postal system that is unreliable or frequently censored, you may wish to send your material to multiple addresses concurrently. For unlisted postal addresses, please contact us.

In Australia:

To: "WL" or any name likely to evade postal censorship in your country.

BOX 4080
Australia Post Office - University of Melbourne Branch
Victoria 3052
Australia

Send to Friend Print