Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been on the run from the US authorities after being linked to a serious US national security breach, has come out of hiding in Belgium.
The Telegraph reports that trouble started for Assange after a US intelligence analyst bragged about sending 260,000 confidential state department cables about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the online whistleblower website. Washington tried to stop the classified information being posted online by arresting the analyst, Bradley Manning. Amid reports that he was the target of a US military manhunt, Mr Assange went to ground for one month.
We need support and protection. We have that. More is always helpful. But we believe that the situation is stable and under control. There’s no need to be worried. There’s a need always to be on the alert.
Wikileaks appeared on the internet three years ago. It was created by an online network of journalists, computer experts and dissidents from all over the world, as a repository for highly sensitive, or secret information, often published straight from the secret files. The website’s content is held by as many as twenty servers around the world and the site uses some of the world’s most sophisticated anti-hacking technology as well as software that makes the original sources of the leaks untraceable.
The website caused more than usual controversy in April this year when it released classified video footage of an American helicopter gunship firing on Iraqis in a Baghdad street in 2007. The de-encrypted video, which WikiLeaks released on its own sites, as well as on YouTube, caused an international uproar.
Assange believes that WikiLeaks is for the “greater good.” And because WikiLeaks is not based in a particular country — and Assange’s team work from several different locations — no legal precedent exists to shut the site down.
Rumours abound that the secretive whistle-blowing website is gearing up to publish “devastating new material” on an incident involving U.S. forces in Afghanistan. What should we be expecting? asks the New York Times.