wikileaks

No parts of whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks are now on the Australian blacklist of banned Web sites, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

In March 2009 the ACMA revealed that a number of pages on WikiLeaks were put on the blacklist of banned Web sites because the pages linked to Web sites on Denmark's blacklist.

However, the ACMA today revealed that WikiLeaks was no longer on its blacklist of Web sites.

"Currently, the ACMA list of prohibited URLs that is notified to accredited filter providers does not contain any URLs within the WikiLeaks Web site," … Read more

The incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says WikiLeaks should be officially designated as a terrorist organization.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the panel's presumptive next head, asked the Obama administration today to "determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization," putting the group in the same company as al-Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway.

"WikiLeaks appears to meet the legal criteria" of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, King wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reviewed … Read more

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered clandestine surveillance of United Nations leadership, including obtaining "security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys, and types of VPN versions used" and biometric information, according to a secret directive made public today by WikiLeaks.org.

The July 2009 directive issued under Clinton's name, which also asks for details about "information systems, networks, and technologies used by top officials and their support staffs," sheds rare light on the shadowy world of government espionage.

That classified dispatch is part of a massive document dump, about 250,000 diplomatic cables, that began appearing … Read more

The Swedish government said today it would issue an international arrest warrant for WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on rape charges.

A Stockholm district court ruled that Assange will be "detained in his absence" on charges of rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion. The decision came at a hearing where Sweden's director of prosecution, Marianne Ny presented evidence related to the allegations.

"I requested his arrest so we could carry out an interrogation with Assange," Ny told the Agence France-Presse news agency. "That is the reason."

The rape allegations--which Assange strenuously denies and says … Read more

WikiLeaks launched in 2006 with the stated goal of being an open repository for documents that governments were trying to keep buried. It has become, though, more of a simple repository of U.S. military secrets. The site became notorious in 2007, when it released graphic U.S. military video of a helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians. It's released two other big caches of U.S. military docs recently, on Afghanistan and Iraq. And, despite its name, it's done so not in the wiki way--open and transparent--but selectively, giving media organizations advance news.

The site's main founder, Julian Assange, gets nearly as much press as the site itself. He has been described as "on the run" by The New York Times in an unflattering story that ran alongside a major feature detailing new findings from documents WikiLeaks released. To say Assange has an uneasy relationship with the mainstream media is an understatement.

Today we're talking about WikiLeaks and another site similar in some ways to it, Cryptome, focusing on their effect on journalism and government.

We have two guests. First up, Declan McCullagh, political reporter for CNET News. Later in our show, we're joined by John Young, the man who registered WikiLeaks.org, and the founder of Cryptome, one of the Web's first repositories of leaked documents and top-secret information.

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When WikiLeaks launched with little fanfare in early 2007, its founders touted it as a unique collaboration that would rely on the same anyone-can-edit software and sense of community that made Wikipedia such a success.

Instead of having a small group of experts examine documents, WikiLeaks promised, the forthcoming Web site would allow "the entire global community" to "interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public." News coverage at the time quoted spokesman Julian Assange emphasizing the lack of hierarchy, saying WikiLeaks is "an international collaboration, primarily of mathematicians."

That was then. In … Read more

Forget China or Al Qaeda. In a twist that would have been inconceivable even a few months ago, the WikiLeaks.org Web site is being proposed as the first public target for a U.S. government cyberattack.

After the shadowy, document-leaking organization distributed nearly 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq war on Friday, Washington officialdom responded with a torrent of denunciations alleging violations of national security and endangering U.S. military operations.

In a rare point of congruence, The Washington Post and The Washington Times both criticized the release, with the smaller paper arguing that WikiLeaks' offshore Web site … Read more

A Republican senator has proposed rewriting the Espionage Act to target WikiLeaks.

Sen. John Ensign of Nevada yesterday announced a bill that would make it illegal to identify informants working with the U.S. military, which WikiLeaks did earlier this year when releasing files from the war in Afghanistan.

In last week's Iraq war files release, WikiLeaks removed names, but the U.S. Defense Department said yesterday that information in the leaked documents could still identify dozens of people.

"My legislation will extend the legal protections for government informants, such as the Iraqis named in this latest document … Read more

WikiLeaks defied a series of increasingly stern warnings from the U.S. military and other government officials today by releasing a massive trove of secret documents from the Iraq war.

Portions of the U.S. military reports, totaling nearly 400,000 classified documents, began appearing on the Internet this afternoon, including on the Web sites of some news organizations that had been handed the documents in advance.

The U.K. Guardian reported that the Iraq war logs show an Apache crew killed insurgents who had tried to surrender. Al Jazeera's analysis found a Pentagon directive told troops to ignore … Read more