UK police arrest WikiLeaks backers for Web attacks

Newspaper fronts reporting on the documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks are seen in New York, November 29, 2010.


British police arrested five young men yesterday as they and US authorities conducted searches as part of a probe into Internet activists who carried out cyber attacks against groups they viewed as enemies of the WikiLeaks website.

“The arrests were related to recent ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attacks by an online group calling themselves Anonymous,” London police said in a statement.

In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that agents executed more than 40 search warrants as part of its investigation and that the attacks were facilitated by software the group made available for free on the Internet.






“The FBI is working closely with its international law enforcement partners and others to mitigate these threats,” the agency said in a statement, adding that there were other, unspecified investigative and enforcement actions in the Netherlands, Germany and France.

WikiLeaks, which was founded by Australian-born Julian Assange, has disclosed classified US diplomatic dispatches which included candid and embarrassing assessments of world leaders as well as classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition to the probe into the cyber attacks, US authorities have been investigating the leak of the documents themselves and their prime suspect has been a former US Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning.

Internet activists last month carried out a series of online assaults against institutions they viewed as enemies of WikiLeaks, temporarily bringing down the websites of credit-card giants Visa and MasterCard, Amazon.com and of the Swedish government.

Sweden wants Assange extradited from Britain so he can answer questions over sexual assault allegations.

Officers from a specialist London police unit dealing with online crime detained the five males, aged from 15 to 26, in raids at homes in central and southern England.

Dutch police last month arrested two teenagers suspected of involvement in the online campaign. They face trial later this year.

A DDoS attack consists of swamping the resources of a computer such as a server to make it unavailable to users.

The maximum penalty in Britain for offences of computer misuse is 10 years imprisonment and a fine of £5,000 (RM24,272).

In the United States, such a cyber attack carries a maximum punishment of 10 years in prison and significant fines.

WikiLeaks founder says enjoys making banks squirm

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds up CD’s containing data on offshore bank account holders, which he received from former Swiss private banker Rudolf Elmer at the Frontline club in London on January 17, 2011.


WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he enjoys making banks squirm thinking they might be the next targets of his website which has published US diplomatic and military secrets.

“I think it’s great. We have all these banks squirming, thinking maybe it’s them,” Assange told the CBS television programme “60 Minutes” in an interview.

CBS released a partial transcript yesterday ahead of Sunday’s broadcast of the full segment.

Bank of America Corp shares fell more than 3 per cent on November 30 on investor fears that the largest US bank by assets would be the subject of a document release.

Interviewer Steve Kroft asked Assange whether he had acquired a five-gigabyte hard drive belonging to one of the bank’s executives, as Assange had previously asserted.





“I won’t make any comment in relation to that upcoming publication,” said Assange, who is under a form of modified house arrest in England, awaiting an extradition hearing to Sweden for questioning over alleged sex offences that he denies.

Assange had told Forbes magazine that WikiLeaks planned a “megaleak” by releasing tens of thousands of internal documents from a major US bank in early 2011 that he expected would lead to investigations of the bank.

In an October 2009 interview, Assange told Computerworld that WikiLeaks had obtained five gigabytes of data from a Bank of America executive’s hard drive.

The Forbes interview came just after WikiLeaks released 250,000 US government diplomatic cables. Previously, WikiLeaks had made public nearly 500,000 classified US files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Major headlines were generated by some of the cables, which revealed that Saudi leaders had urged US military action against Iran and detailed contacts between US diplomats and political dissidents and opposition leaders in some countries.

Assange told “60 Minutes” he fully expected US retaliation but that the American government was incapable of taking his website down.

“The US does not have the technology to take the site down. ... Just the way our technology is constructed, the way the Internet is constructed,” Assange said.

“We’ve had attacks on particular domain names. Little pieces of infrastructure knocked out. But we now have some 2,000 fully independent in every way websites, where we’re publishing around the world. It is — I mean, it’s not possible to do.”

WikiLeaks says it is a nonprofit organisation funded by human rights campaigners, journalists and the general public. Launched in 2006, it promotes the leaking of information to fight government and corporate corruption.

Julian Assanger founder of Wikileaks alleged leads wild promiscuous lifestyle

The two women who say they were sexually assaulted by the WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange would never have complained to police if he had agreed to take an HIV test, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

WikiLeaks’s Swedish co-ordinator, who worked closely with Mr Assange for months, said in an exclusive interview that he repeatedly begged his boss to have the test, both to head off the possible police investigation and for Mr Assange’s own peace of mind, given his promiscuous sex life.

Allegations: Julian Assange is accused of rape by two women in Sweden

Celebrity support: Jemima Khan contributed to Mr Assange's £240,000 bail

‘The two women told me, that if he goes to the clinic for an HIV test, then we won’t go to the police,’ said Mr Assange’s colleague, who wishes to remain anonymous because he is a witness in the case brought by Swedish prosecutors, which led to Mr Assange spending nine days in Wandsworth Prison pending extradition.

‘I became the middleman in these negotiations,’ he added.

‘I felt that if Julian had agreed to have the HIV test, they would have dropped it. I told him, “Just do it, and anyway, it’s good for you, because you’re sleeping around”. A lot of women were extremely attracted to Julian, and after a few minutes, they offered themselves to him. From my perspective, they were like groupies with Mick Jagger, and he takes these opportunities.’


The WikiLeaks co-ordinator said he felt certain that the two women – who both allege that Mr Assange forced them to have intercourse during the same week in August without using a condom, against their express wishes – had nothing to do with any supposed American intelligence plot to discredit him, as he has frequently claimed.

‘The CIA is not behind this at all,’ he said. ‘Of course it is a golden opportunity for them. But from the beginning, it was personal.’

He said Mr Assange refused to take the test until it was too late, when all the Swedish clinics had closed for the weekend: ‘Julian said, “I don’t like it when people are blackmailing me, and they are blackmailing me by threatening to go to the police”.’

Mr Assange also told him that he had spoken to one of the alleged victims, known as ‘Ms W’, assuring him that ‘she is fine, she won’t go to the police’. The WikiLeaks co-ordinator knew from his own conversations with Ms W that she was not fine at all, but terrified she had been infected.

Mr Assange’s British lawyer, Mark Stephens, said his client had taken a test for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases at a later date, which showed he was not infected.

‘If it is true that all the women really wanted was for him to be tested, and that this would have stopped the case, then it is very disappointing that it has got so far,’ he said.

Today, The Mail on Sunday publishes unredacted details of the sexual-assault allegations against Mr Assange. They may well dismay his high-profile feminist supporters, such as the American writer Naomi Wolf, who has claimed he is a victim of the ‘international dating police’, and Jemima Khan, who offered to provide one of the sureties that led to his release last week on £240,000 bail.

Our investigation also reveals that:

* In the same week that Mr Assange had sex with Ms A and Ms W, he ended the relationship between a well-known American reporter and his girlfriend by blatantly attempting to seduce her during a dinner at a Stockholm restaurant. Having left the restaurant hand in hand with Mr Assange, the woman did not spend the night at the hotel where she had been sharing a bed with the American.

* Mr Assange has lied about aspects of his work. At a public meeting in London, he falsely claimed that the ‘Climategate’ emails from the University of East Anglia were first published by WikiLeaks. In fact, the emails were published by specialist climate websites in America and Canada – yet Mr Assange spent several minutes lamenting how he had found publishing them morally difficult because they boosted the arguments of global-warming sceptics.

* A senior journalist who worked closely with Mr Assange at the Guardian, and helped broker the deal that saw the paper become one of a handful of media organisations around the world with privileged, early access to successive WikiLeaks documents, has refused to continue dealing with him. It is understood that staff at other organisations, including Der Spiegel in Germany and Al Jazeera television, have also grown unhappy with his methods. One reporter said: ‘He can be extremely dictatorial. I’ve seen this first-hand.’

* Mr Assange has been accused of dishonesty by key colleagues, including Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German computer specialist who was his closest collaborator for three years until he left WikiLeaks in September.

Mr Domscheit-Berg plans to publish a book about WikiLeaks early next year.

An advance copy of the publicity blurb states: ‘Not only he, but also other close colleagues could no longer put up with Assange’s high-handedness, dishonesty and grave mistakes, and got out.’

Allegations: Ms Wand, left, and Ms A are accusing Mr Assange of forcing them to have sex without using condoms

Up against it: Mr Assange arrives at Beccles police station as stipulated in his bail conditions

WikiLeaks' Assange complains he's victim of leaks

It has come to this: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is complaining that someone leaked a Swedish police report on his alleged sexual offenses.

In an interview with the British newspaper The Times, Assange complained about reporting in the rival newspaper The Guardian, which is one of several publications that has been helping WikiLeaks edit its trove of secret U.S. diplomatic files in exchange for an early look at them.

The Guardian published details Saturday of the Swedish police report in which two women accuse Assange of rape, based on what it described as "unauthorized access" to prosecutors' files. Assange claimed the newspaper was "selectively publishing" parts of it, and questioned the timing of the leak, saying it was given to the paper a day before his bail hearing last week.





"The leak of the police report to The Guardian was clearly designed to undermine my bail application. It was timed to come up on the desk of the judge that morning," Assange was quoted as saying in Tuesday's paper. "Someone in authority clearly intended to keep Julian in prison, and shopped (the report) around to other newspapers as well."

Assange, who is contesting a Swedish extradition bid, was freed on bail last week under strict conditions including that he stay at the home of a supporter in southern England, wear an electronic tag, observe a curfew and post a bond of 200,000 pounds ($310,000). He faces his next court hearing Jan. 11.

Swedish officials want to question Assange about allegations stemming from separate encounters with two women in Sweden over the summer. The women have accused Assange of sexual crimes including rape, molestation and unlawful coercion. Assange denies the allegations, which his lawyers say stem from a dispute over "consensual but unprotected sex." He has not been charged.

The Times quoted Assange as saying there is "very suggestive evidence" that the two women were motivated by revenge, money and police pressure.

In an editorial, The Guardian defended its coverage, saying it "is unusual for a sex-offense case to be presented outside of the judicial process in such a manner, but then it is unheard of for a defendant, his legal team and supporters to so vehemently and publicly attack women at the heart of a rape case."

Swedish Director of Prosecution Marianne Ny said she did not know how The Guardian obtained its information.

"We don't know exactly what material the Guardian has received," Ny said in a statement.

"The Swedish protection of sources mean we don't have the right to investigate the source, and therefore we don't know how the Guardian got this information."

In a BBC interview aired Tuesday, Assange said he believed the women behind the allegations "found out that they were mutual lovers of mine and they had unprotected sex and they got into a tizzy about whether there was a possibility of sexually transmitted diseases."

The women's lawyer, Claes Borgstrom, has said they went through similar experiences with Assange and decided to go to the police together to seek advice on what to do. A policewoman who heard their accounts decided that Assange had probably committed a sex crime of some kind and passed the case to a prosecutor.

Borgstrom has criticized Assange for suggesting that the allegations are part of a smear campaign against him and WikiLeaks, which has begun to release what it says are more than a quarter-million leaked U.S. embassy cables, infuriating the United States and governments around the world. Borgstrom says the case has nothing to do with Assange's website or any wider conspiracy against it.

Asked by the Times whether he is promiscuous, Assange replied: "I am not promiscuous. I just really like women."

He said WikiLeaks had received "tremendous" public support, even when he was in jail.

"I was handed a card by one of my black prison guards. It said, 'I only have two heroes in the world: Dr. (Martin Luther) King, and you,'" he told the newspaper. "That is representative of 50 percent of people."

Assange didn't immediately return calls Tuesday seeking comment.

Sweden reopens WikiLeaks founder rape probe

Sweden’s Chief Prosecutor said on Wednesday she was reopening a preliminary investigation into rape charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (picture).

Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny said in a statement the decision to reopen the probe was taken after further review of the case. Prosecutors last month dropped a probe into alleged rape, but carried on investigating charges of molestation.

Assange denies any wrongdoing and said last month he had been warned by Australian intelligence of plans to discredit the whistle-blower website.

WikiLeaks last month published more than 70,000 secret military files on Afghanistan in what US officials have called one of the biggest security breaches in US military history. — Reuters

Swedish police to question WikiLeaks founder

Swedish police are to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over alleged molestation, Sweden’s chief prosecutor said yesterday, but a second case against him has been dropped, she said.

“The investigation is still going on. I find there is a suspicion of molestation,” Eva Finne told Reuters Television.

“I’m going to tell the investigator to contact the suspect’s lawyer and they decide when it’s possible to hold an interrogation,” she said.

Assange, an Australian behind the whistle-blowing website, had been accused by two women of sexual molestation in Sweden, where he has spent the past couple of weeks.

Finne said there were no grounds to continue an investigation into a case which initially led a duty prosecutor to issue an arrest warrant for Assange for suspected rape.

That warrant was dropped on Saturday.






Assange has said through Twitter he is innocent of the accusations.

Claes Borgstrom, a lawyer representing the two women, was critical of the chief prosecutor’s decision. “I’m a little bit disappointed,” he told Reuters by telephone.

WikiLeaks, which published secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan last month, said it plans to release a document from the Central Intelligence Agency yesterday.

Assange told Al Jazeera television on Sunday that he was warned by Australian intelligence of plans to discredit Wikileaks as it prepares to release more secret documents.

Finne dismissed any suggestion of a smear campaign.

“There is no indication whatsoever that supports a conspiracy theory,” she said.

The punishment for molestation in Sweden is usually a fine but can also be up to one year in prison, she said.