wikileaks

NEW YORK CITY--A Wikileaks editor, deciding not to risk a confrontation with federal agents, skipped a high-profile speaking engagement at a hacker conference here on Saturday.

Instead, Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the Tor Project, who's involved in the Wikileaks Web site, took over the 1 p.m. ET keynote slot on behalf of co-founder Julian Assange.

Appelbaum used the opportunity to exhort a largely sympathetic audience to support Wikileaks by volunteering or by donating money, to address recent criticisms of the document-publishing Web site, and to boast that Wikileaks remains uncensorable. "You can try to take … Read more

NEW YORK CITY--Federal agents appeared at a hacker conference Friday morning looking for Julian Assange, the controversial figure who has become the public face of Wikileaks, an organizer said.

Eric Corley, publisher of 2600 Magazine and organizer of The Next HOPE conference in midtown Manhattan, said five Homeland Security agents appeared at the conference a day before Wikileaks Editor in Chief Assange was scheduled to speak.

The conference program lists Assange--who has been at the center of a maelstrom of positive and negative publicity relating to the arrest of a U.S. serviceman and videos the serviceman may have provided … Read more

The E.U. may force Apple to allow Flash on the iPad as well as competitive devices to use iTunes. Like that'll happen. Also: Mario smacks iDrones, and Prince says the Web is over. So, see ya.

The U.S. military has filed criminal charges against an Army intelligence analyst who has been accused of sending sensitive files to Wikileaks, including a controversial video showing troops firing on Reuters journalists.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, was charged Monday with sending the video to a person not authorized to receive it and with obtaining "more than 150,000 diplomatic cables" from the State Department. The charges were made public Tuesday.

Adrian Lamo, a hacker who pleaded guilty in 2004 to breaking into The New York Times' computer network, told CNET last month that Manning had contacted him … Read more

An Army analyst jailed for allegedly leaking a video of a controversial Iraq air strike also allegedly leaked classified information about a U.S. investigation into cyberattacks on Google that originated in China, the hacker who turned in the analyst told CNET on Saturday.

U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning had confided to well-known hacker Adrian Lamo in e-mails and instant messages that he was the one who provided the 2007 video of a military helicopter gunning down journalists and civilians in Iraq, as well as other information, to whistleblower Web site Wikileaks, Lamo has said.

Along with leaking … Read more

AOL says it's hiring hundreds of journalists, which they seem to do all the time, and then they're never heard from again ... hmm. In other news today, Pulse seems to have a pulse again, while the New York Times is on life support and doesn't even know it, and we're putting together a little hit list of doomed Twitter-related apps. Oh, and if you pirated the "Hurt Locker" movie, we totally know your IP address.

A well-known hacker says he tipped authorities off to a man who confided in him about leaking a video of a U.S. military helicopter gunning down journalists and civilians in Iraq in 2007. Other information allegedly being leaked could compromise U.S. foreign policy and lead to deaths, the hacker said.

"I turned him in to protect lives and to protect information that's essential for the U.S. to be able to effectively carry out foreign policy abroad," Adrian Lamo, once busted for breaking into computer networks of high-profile companies, told CNET in a phone interview … Read more

A gritty video released by Wikileaks on Monday shows U.S. troops in Iraq destroying a vehicle that was preparing to rush a wounded Reuters journalist to the hospital.

The secret black-and-white video, recorded by at least one Apache helicopter that was shooting at a group of about a dozen people, appears to show the death of a Reuters photographer and his assistant, who were unarmed.

The U.S. Army had rejected Reuters' earlier requests, including ones made under the Freedom of Information Act, to disclose the July 2007 video. Government sources told both Reuters and the Associated Press on … Read more

A leaked U.S. Army intelligence report, classified as secret, says the Wikileaks Web site poses a significant "operational security and information security" threat to military operations.

Classified U.S. military information appearing on Wikileaks could "influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors," says the report, prepared in 2008 by the Army Counterintelligence Center and apparently disclosed in its entirety on Monday.

The embarrassing twist: It was Wikileaks that published the 32-page document, but not before editor Julian Assange prepended a critique saying some details in the Army … Read more