WikiLeaks Insurance Policy

WikiLeaks has been in the news a lot as of late for the leak of some  77,000 secret U.S. military documents about Afghanistan that the site posted in July. Yesterday the US Defense Department demanded that WikiLeaks hand over all documents belonging to the Pentagon and issued a strong warning saying "The only acceptable course is for Wikileaks to take steps immediately to return all versions of all of these documents to the U.S. government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records," and that "If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, then we will figure out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing," department spokesman Geoff Morrell said. "These documents belong to the United States government. They don't belong to WikiLeaks. They don't belong to anyone else."

In an interesting twist however a 1.4 gigabyte encrypted file called "insurance" was posted to the site and WikiLeaks Editor-in-chief Julian Assange told the independent U.S. news network Democracy Now! that “I think it's better that we don't comment on that,” according to the network's transcript of the interview. “But, you know, one could imagine in a similar situation that it might be worth ensuring that important parts of history do not disappear.”

I wouldn't want to be in Mr Assange's shoes right now, he's in a real life cat and mouse game and he's staring directly into the jaws of the biggest cat he's ever seen. Good luck!

Sources: The Globe and Mail, CNN

China denies accusations

In a move that should come as no shock to anyone, the Chinese government is denying accusations that it was involved in a cyber attack on the Pentagon. A Chinese Foreign Ministry official is quoted in this BBC report as saying "Some people are making wild accusations against China ... These are totally groundless and also reflect a Cold War mentality," Interestingly, President Bush and China's Hu Jintao are preparing to meet at the Apec summit in Sydney, Australia. I wonder what the agenda will be?

Unclassified Pentagon email system hacked

The pentagon was forced to take down a portion of it's e-mail system yesterday as it was apparently penetrated by an unknown hacker. The Pentagon says that it fends off hundreds of threats on a daily basis and that this intrusion was on a portion of the system that does not have classified status. 1500 e-mail accounts were affected though. BBC News Story.