Ecuador denied a report on Tuesday that it had granted amnesty to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the country's foreign minister said only he and President Rafael Correa could make the decision.
Assange has been taking refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for the past eight weeks to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning on sex crime allegations.
Wikileaks‘ website is up again after over a week of denial of service attacks, though as of this writing I’m still seeing errors on the site. On its Twitter account Wikileaks credited CloudFlare, a company that provides a web security service, for helping the organization get its site back online.
As the nine-day DDoS hammering of WikiLeaks continues, hacking group AntiLeaks, has said that attacks will continue and widen, but have nothing to do with the Trapwire monitoring system the whistle-blowing site has been documenting.
In an email conversation with The Register, someone claiming to be the head of the AntiLeaks hacking group – aka DietPepsi – said the attacks were in protest over the role of Julian Assange, who is currently the guest of the Ecuadorian embassy while waiting for his plea for political asylum to be decided.
Controversial whistleblower site WikiLeaks was taken down last week following a week-long and massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The attacks coincided with WikiLeaks' release of new information on the Trapwire surveillance system discussed by Stratfor, the US-based global intelligence firm that hacker collective Anonymous infiltrated late last year to steal roughly five million emails.
In a summary judgment, a federal judge ruled on Monday that the United States government can continue to classify and redact 23 embassy cables that have already been released in their entirety by WikiLeaks.
After almost two years of fighting an unlawful banking blockade by US financial giants VISA and MasterCard, WikiLeaks has announced it is back open for donations using the French credit card system, Carte Bleue.
The Wau Holland Transparency Reports for WikiLeaks' finances, released today, illustrate that the blockade resulted in WikiLeaks' income falling to just 21% of its operating costs. WikiLeaks has been forced to run on its cash reserves which have diminished from EUR 800,000 at the end of December 2010, to less than EUR 100,000 at the end of June 2012.
The world has known for 18 months that a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia has been exploring the potential to indict anyone associated with the secret-spilling group WikiLeaks. But as with all things WikiLeaks-related, the truth gets more interesting when documents start to emerge.
Hacktivist group Anonymous is claiming responsibility for an attack on the computer systems of the Syrian government and its evil overlord Bashar Assad thanks to which over two million emails ended up in the hands of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
As of last Thursday, the site began drip-feeding sections of the ‘Syria Files’ to its selected media partners, and given there are a total of 2.4m emails from 680 separate domains going all the way back to August 2006, it could take some time.
As the US and Europe leveled increasingly severe sanctions on Syria, Western tech companies were still working eagerly with the Assad regime and Syrian government-owned entities. This is according to e-mails obtained by Wikileaks, dating from 2006 up until March of 2012. The e-mails are now being published in waves by Wikileaks, both through its own website and through a collection of news organizations.
Police will arrest Julian Assange even if he is granted asylum with one legal expert claiming his only way out of the country is becoming Ecuador's representative to the UN.
The WikiLeaks founder has spent the past two nights holed up in the South American country’s London embassy, in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning over alleged sex crimes. He will discover later today if Ecuador plans to grant him asylum.
