An uncensored version of the entire US State Department's cable database obtained by WikiLeaks last year has been circulating on the internet, prompting fears that lives have been put at risk.
Access to an unencrypted 1.73-gigabyte file containing more than 251,000 uncensored diplomatic cables has been made possible thanks to the distribution of a password that unlocks a secret cache.
A distributed denial of attack on WikiLeaks main site subsided this morning after slowing traffic to a crawl starting late Tuesday evening, apparently in response to an unexpected rush-publication of more than 134,000 secret U.S. State Department cables that had not previously been released.
For the second time in a year, WikiLeaks has lost control of its full, unredacted cache of a quarter-million US State Department cables—and this time the leaked files are apparently online.
The uncensored cables are contained in a 1.73GB password-protected file named cables.csv, which is reportedly circulating somewhere on the Internet, according to Steffen Kraft, editor of the German paper Der Freitag. Kraft announced last week that his paper had found the file and easily obtained the password to unlock it.
A former WikiLeaks spokesman under fire for recently destroying thousands of unpublished documents submitted to the secret-spilling site last year says WikiLeaks is publicly exaggerating the contents of the deleted files, in an increasingly ugly dispute playing out over Twitter and in the press.
WikiLeaks does not record or retain source identifying information, however the claimed destruction of documents entrusted to WikiLeaks between January 2010 and August 2010 demands the revelation of inside information so sources can make their own risk assessments.
WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange will head to London's High Court on Tuesday to try to reverse an extradition order that would send him to Sweden for questioning about sexual assault allegations.
In February, a district judge ruled that Sweden's extradition request was valid despite arguments from Assange's legal team that, if charged, he would face an unfair trial since press and the public are excluded from portions of sexual assault trials.
After having opened up a gateway for DataCell for processing payments to WikiLeaks, the payments processing company Valitor (VISA Iceland) has decided to close down the gateway and terminate the contract with DataCell.
Whistle-blowing outfit WikiLeaks and DataCell, which handles credit card payment processing on its behalf, have announced they intend to sue Visa and Mastercard after the credit card merchants blocked donations to WikiLeaks last year.
Both Mastercard and Visa stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks after a campaign to hound the organisation out of existence began in the US, following the disclosure of mountains of information the war-hungry imperialist would have preferred to keep quiet.
Despite countless WikiLeaks copycats popping up since the secret-spilling site first dumped its cache of State Department cables last year, the new generation of leaking sites has produced few WikiLeaks-sized scoops. So instead of waiting for insider whistleblowers, the hacker movement Anonymous hopes that a few outside intruders might start the leaks flowing.
MasterCard's website is currently inaccessible following what appears to be a WikiLeaks-inspired internet attack against it.
In what appears to be the latest salvo by hactivists, the mastercard.com website is thought to be suffering from a denial-of-service attack - where an internet site is bombarded with a large amount of traffic making it impossible for genuine visitors to access it.
