Wikileaks Founder's autobiography

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to write an autobiography, which should net him around $1.3 million.

In an interview with the Sunday Times (subscription required), Assange revealed that the book will be published in the UK as well as the U.S. He would receive $800,000 from U.S. publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House, and £325,000 ($502,000) from UK publisher Canongate Books Ltd.
A spokesman for Random House confirmed the deal, but not the amount. “We are very excited to be publishing this book. The work that Assange has been doing at WikiLeaks has tremendous importance around the world,” he said.

Assange’s motives for writing an autobiography are quite clear: he needs the money. “I don’t want to write this book, but I have to. I have already spent £200,000 for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat,” Assange told the Sunday Times.

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Wikileaks supporters mull change in tactics

Web attacks carried out in support of Wikileaks are being wound down as activists consider changing tactics.

Attacks against Amazon were called off late on 9 December and re-directed towards net payments firm Paypal.

Analysis suggests the earlier attacks were made more effective by the involvement of hi-tech criminals.

At the same time one wing of the activist group suggested ditching the attacks and doing more to publicise what is in the leaked cables.
The attacks have been carried out using a tool, called LOIC, that allows people to bombard a site of their choosing with data or let the target be chosen by those running the Anonymous campaign.
The tool launches what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack which tries to knock a website offline by bombarding it with so much data that it cannot respond.

The LOIC tool has been downloaded more than 46,000 times but, said Anonymous activists in a tweet, this did not translate into enough people using it to knock the retail giant off the web.

Instead, the attack was re-directed towards Paypal and its computer systems which, according to a status page, has intermittently suffered "performance issues" ever since.

There have also been calls for attacks on official Dutch websites following the arrest of a 16-year-old boy suspected of involvement in the online campaign.

But early on 10 December Moneybookers was chosen as the next target and its site was occasionally unreachable from about 1100 GMT.

The chances of success could be boosted by a new version of LOIC written in web programming language Javascript that allows anyone with a browser, including on a mobile phone, to launch attacks.

However, defences against the attacks were being drawn up as security firms scrutinise the code behind LOIC to work out how attacks happen. Some suggest that well-written firewall rules would be able to filter out most of the harmful traffic.
information is also starting to emerge about the other resources that supporters of Anonymous have been able to bring to bear. Research by security firm Panda suggests that some of the earlier attacks on payment firms were aided by hi-tech criminals.
Luis Corrons, technical director of Panda Labs, said during its investigation of Anonymous' attacks its analysts got talking to some of the activists via Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

One of those activists said he had a botnet of 30,000 machines under his control that he was planning to use on behalf of Wikileaks.

"The guy said he had this botnet which was nothing special and was not specifically designed to do these attacks but could be used to do them," said Mr Corrons.

A botnet is a network of hijacked home computers that have been compromised by their owners visiting a booby-trapped webpage that installs code to hand over control to a hi-tech criminal.

Mr Corrons said a botnet with 30,000 machines in it was "about average size". Most of the spam sent around the net is funnelled through machines that are in botnets.

It was becoming clear, he said, that some attacks were aided by the 30,000 machines under the cyber criminals control.

"We know for sure the botnet was used in at least one attack on Paypal," he said.

Panda itself has come under attack with its blog knocked offline for hours by an attack very similar to those Anonymous has been carrying out. Mr Corrons said that, so far, it did not why it was being attacked or who was attacking it.
There are also suggestions that the Anonymous group might be about to drop the web attacks in favour of another tactic.

A message posted on the 4chan image board, out of which Anonymous has grown, suggests dropping LOIC in favour of publicising information in the diplomatic cables that Wikileaks is releasing.

Searching for the less-well publicised cables and spreading the information they contain around the web could be more effective than simply knocking out sites deemed to be enemies of Wikileaks, it said.

The message also suggests using misleading tags on posts and YouTube videos to trick people into reading or viewing the information.

"They don't fear the LOIC, they fear exposure," read the message.

It is not yet clear if the call to change tactics has been taken up by the Anonymous group at large.

In related news, Wikileaks looks set to have a rival as former staffers of the whistle-blowing website prepare to launch. Set up by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Open Leaks is expected to launch in mid_December and will host and post information leaked to it.

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New Wikileaks US Plan to Defend Baltics from Russia

The US and Nato have drawn up plans to defend Nato's Baltic members against Russia, latest US diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks show.

The cables, published in the Guardian, reveal plans to expand an existing strategy to defend Poland to include Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Wikileaks is releasing hundreds of diplomatic cables, angering the US.

Meanwhile, a warrant for the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has reached UK authorities.

Mr Assange, who is believed to be in hiding somewhere in England, is preparing to talk to British police, his lawyer said.

Mr Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden in connection with rape allegations which he denies.
The latest leaked documents show that in January this year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently signed a confidential cable saying allies in Nato had agreed to expand the contingency plan to defend Poland, to include the Baltic states.

The nine Nato divisions involved would be American, British, German and Polish, the Guardian says, citing information leaked to Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

The cables say the military plans should not be discussed publicly as it might lead to an unnecessary increase in Nato-Russia tensions.

Russian news agency Interfax quoted a source in the Russian foreign ministry as saying Moscow was "perplexed" by the leaked plans.
Peter Biles says the documents should be seen against the background of Washington's efforts to "reset" its relations with Russia and improve co-operation.

One secret cable from the US mission to Nato in Brussels revealed that US Admiral James Stavridis, the alliance's top commander in Europe, had proposed in January expanding Nato's contingency plans for defending Poland - known as Eagle Guardian - to include Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

The cable adds: "The expansion was formally submitted to Allies for decision under a silence procedure."
Another cable, signed by Mrs Clinton, instructs US embassies how to deal with the new Nato plan for the Baltic states, and stresses that the project must be kept secret.

"We see the expansion of Eagle Guardian as a step toward the possible expansion of Nato's other existing country-specific contingency plans into regional plans," it says.

Analysts say other cables show a degree of frustration between Warsaw and Washington over plans to deploy Patriot air defence missiles to Poland.

This had been the key price for a Polish decision to back the Bush administration's wider missile defence plans.
But rather than getting operational systems with their full crews, the Poles received only launchers minus their missiles and a token number of US troops.

One senior Polish official is quoted in a cable from February 2009 as telling the Americans that his country expected to get operational missiles and not what he called "potted plants".
Sources have told the BBC that the European Arrest Warrant for Mr Assange arrived on Monday afternoon.

Mr Assange's UK lawyer, Mark Stephens, told the BBC: "We are in the process of making arrangements to meet with the police by consent in order to facilitate the taking of the question and answer that is needed."

Sweden first issued an arrest warrant for Mr Assange on 18 November but it was invalidated by a procedural error. A new warrant was issued on 2 December.

The Swiss post office's bank, PostFinance, has frozen Mr Assange's accounts.

PostFinance, in a statement on its website, said Mr Assange had "provided false information regarding his place of residence" during the account opening process.

"Assange entered Geneva as his domicile. Upon inspection, this information was found to be incorrect.

"Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance. For this reason, PostFinance is entitled to close his account."

Wikileaks says it and Mr Assange have lost 100,000 euros in assets in a week.

In one of its most controversial leaks so far, Wikileaks released on Monday a US State Department cable from February 2009 asking its officials around the world to update a list of key sites, the loss of which "could critically impact" the US.

The list includes undersea cables, key communications, ports, mineral resources and firms of strategic importance in countries all over the world.

Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind described Wikileaks' actions as "verging on the criminal".

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