Hasta La Gadget!

Wikileaks has stirred up its share of trouble in its day, but it might be up to something more. The site’s been posting links to a trio of encrypted files pretty insistently on Facebook, and one of them is a whopping 349GB. What’s in there?

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DreamWorks has been working on its WikiLeaks film, The Fifth Estate, for a while now—and this trailer reveals that Benedict Cumberbatch plays a hugely convincing Julian Assange.

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Even if he anticipated the risks involved in turning whisteblower, Edward Snowden can’t have imagined the rushed, convoluted journey he’d have to take to avoid the full wrath of the US government. First to Hong Kong; most recently to Moscow, and perhaps soon to Ecuador (via Cuba and Venezuela) where he has apparently made a request for asylum. Strongly worded demands for his capture have followed every step of the way, with the White House National Security Council expressing “disappointment” that Hong Kong allowed Snowden to flee and now urging Russia (which has no formal extradition treaty with America) to “expel Mr. Snowden back to the US to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged.” In an effort to help the fugitive navigate the maze of diplomatic fault lines, WikiLeaks has stepped up to say that its own legal advisors are “escorting” Snowden towards his final destination, likely making use of the knowledge they gained while protecting Julian Assange, and that it sees US efforts to arrest him as an “assault against the people.”

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Source: WikiLeaks, CBS News, @RicardoPatinoEC (Twitter)

This week a chat between Google’s own Eric Schmidt and the head of the organization known as WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been revealed in full. This conversation has been typed out in transcript form and revealed to the public by none other than WikiLeaks itself, releasing this document just ahead of the publication of the book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future. This is significant due to the book’s co-author, Jared Cohen, also apparently being present at the meeting with Assange.

The transcript at hand – which you can access [here] – is said to be a complete write-up of a five-hour chat between Schmidt, Assange, Cohen, and Lisa Shields. Cohen is otherwise known as a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton. Lisa Shields hails from the Council on Foreign Relations.

At the time of the recording from which the transcript was transcribed, Assange was under house arrest in the UK. The meeting took place in a single day, the 23rd of June, 2011, and according to WikiLeaks, it was Schmidt and Cohen that requested the meeting “to discuss ideas for” their book.

“To be used in a book by Eric Schmidt, due to be published by Knopf in October 2012. I have been given a guarantee that I will see the transcript and will be able to adjust it for accuracy and clarity.” – Assange

One of the first subjects that has turned up as telling – and will almost certainly appear in the forthcoming book – is Schmidt and Assange’s words exchanged on a government’s ability to turn off the internet. Using mobile phones, they note, things have changed drastically.

ES: When we were sort of chatting initially we talked about my idea that powering, mobile phones being powered, is sort of changing society. A rough summary of your answer for everybody else is that people are very much the same and something big has to change their behaviour, and this might be one of them, and you said, you were very interested in someone building phone to phone encryption.

Can you talk a little bit about, roughly, the architecture where you would have a broad open network and you have person to person encryption. What does that mean technically, how would it work, why is it important. That kind of stuff. I mean, I think people don’t understand any of this area in my view.

JA: When we were dealing with Egypt we saw the Mubarak government cut off the internet and we saw only one – there was one ISP that quite few of us were involved in trying to keep its connections open, it had maybe 6% of the market. Eventually they cut.. eventually the Mubarak government also cut off the mobile phone system. And why is it that that can be done?

People with mobile phones have a device that can communicate in a radio spectrum. In a city there is a high density… there is always, if you like, a path between one person and another person. That is there is always a continuous path of mobile phones, each one can in theory hear the radio of the other.

This conversation continues for over 25000 words – you’ll want to take a deep dive as we continue investigating throughout the day (and through the future, too). If you’re feeling really intrepid, you may want to download the page just incase it’s taken down or redacted in any way in the near future as well.

For this particular situation we’d love for you, the reader, to engage with us in taking a look at this WikiLeaks document. In our Facebook Chat today we’ll be discussing this document in-depth. Please feel free to join in!

Eric Schmidt WikiLeaks meeting turns up details on internet shut-down is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Many people have commented on the Aaron Swartz case that came to a close when the 26-year-old Internet activist committed suicide earlier this month, but now WikiLeaks has chimed in with a series of very interesting tweets. Over the weekend, the WikiLeaks Twitter account posted four tweets that detail the website’s relationship with Swartz. Through these tweets, we find out that not only did Swartz assist the website, but he also may have been a source.

We say “may have been” because apparently even WikiLeaks isn’t sure. The final tweet in the series reads “We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that Aaron Swartz was a WikiLeaks source,” suggesting that the website can’t prove if he was or wasn’t either way. The Verge points to WikiLeaks’ policy on anonymous sources to show how the website splits information on users up so even it would have a hard time identifying them. Provided WikiLeaks actually does that, then the tweet about not being able to prove Swartz was a source could be nothing but the truth, instead of WikiLeaks simply trying to cover itself.

One tweet also claims that Swartz was in contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2010 and 2011. Given WikiLeaks’ policy of not revealing its sources, it’s easy to see why these tweets are so significant. On the other hand, it’s also difficult to know why WikiLeaks has chosen to out this information now, when it never has done anything like this in the past. After all, WikiLeaks has a history of standing up to investigators and those who would like to know information like this.

CNET got in touch with WikiLeaks representative Kristinn Hrafnsson, who confirmed that the tweets were the real deal, but didn’t say anything else. Hrafnsson did say, however, that he would answer questions at a later time, so let’s hope he sticks to that and sheds some light on these tweets. Stay tuned, because with WikiLeaks entering the conversation, things just got pretty interesting.

Aaron Swartz named as possible WikiLeaks source is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.