The founder of WikiLeaks has warned that his supporters are primed to publish a ‘deluge’ of leaked government documents should his activities be curtailed by any country.

Julian Assange has distributed to fellow hackers an encrypted ‘poison pill’ of damaging secrets, thought to include details on BP and Guantanamo Bay.

He believes the file is his ‘insurance’ in case he is killed, arrested or the whistleblowing website is removed permanently from the internet.

Mr Assange – understood to be lying low in Britain – could be arrested by Scotland Yard officers as early as tomorrow.

A warrant for his arrest was issued last Thursday by Swedish prosecutors who want to quiz him over rape allegations.

The developments came as fresh revelations were published on the WikiLeaks website. They include:

• A leading Chinese politician coordinated the hacking of Google – which forced it to quit the Communist country – after finding unflattering articles about him on the website.
• UK firm Rolls-Royce lost out on a £200million contract to supply helicopter engines to Spain after the U.S. lobbied Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero in Madrid. The deal was eventually signed by American company GE.
• And European Union President Herman Van Rompuy told a U.S. ambassador that European troops were still in Afghanistan only ‘out of deference’ to America.

Mr Assange, a reclusive Australian, has infuriated and embarrassed the U.S. in recent months by releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

First, he published Army logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that suggested soldiers were complicit in murder and torture.

And last week he published the first of around 250,000 diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies, many containing sensitive information and embarrassing verdicts on leaders including David Cameron.

High-profile politicians in the U.S. including Sarah Palin, a narrow loser in the race to become the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, have suggested the computer programmer should be ‘executed’ for publishing leaked U.S. state secrets.

Mr Assange’s British lawyer, Mark Stephens, warned today that WikiLeaks was holding further secret material which he dubbed a ‘thermo-nuclear device’ to be released if the organisation needed to protect itself.

He said many of the papers being retained contained ‘material of equal importance to news-gathering’ as those already published.

He said: ‘They [WikiLeaks] have been subject to cyber-attacks and censorship around the world and they need to protect themselves.

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December 7, 2010

The Best of Ian Drury

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