WikiLeaks

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier accused of providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents, has pleaded guilty to some of the lesser charges against him and has begun reading a statement explaining his actions in military court today.

The 25-year-old soldier entered guilty pleas to 10 of 22 charges that he is facing, acknowledging that he was the source of the files that WikiLeaks divulged, according to the Los Angeles Times and other press accounts. The lesser charges carry a maximum upper limit of 20 years in prison.

But Manning has pleaded not guilty to the … Read more

Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks founder, is planning to run for a senate seat in Australia, reports out of that country say.

Assange's application to enroll in the election for a Victoria Senate seat was filed with the Australian Electoral Commission in Melbourne yesterday, The Age is reporting. His father, John Shipton, was among the people who filed the application on his behalf.

Assange, a native-born Australian, is currently living in political asylum at the Ecuador embassy in London, which has provided him a sanctuary from the Swedish and U.S. governments. Swedish officials have sought Assange to question … Read more

It can't be easy to create a movie in which the hero is seen by some as the villain.

Yet that is the difficult task for the production team behind "The Fifth Estate," a movie whose filming has already begun.

This DreamWorks opus traces the rises, falls, and drips of pathos surrounding Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks enterprise.

The Associated Press reveals that Assange will be played by Benedict Cumberbatch, one of the many who have impersonated Sherlock Holmes on film.

Cumberbatch is quite posh, so he should quite easily be able to express that touch of … Read more

WikiLeaks said late yesterday that recently deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz assisted the organization, was in contact with Julian Assange, and may have been one of the organization's sources.

Reached in Iceland on Saturday evening, California time, WikiLeaks representative Kristinn Hrafnsson confirmed to CNET that the tweets were authentic but declined to elaborate.

In the tweets, the organization said it was revealing the information "due to the investigation into the Secret Service involvement" with Swartz.

Here are screenshots of the tweets:

The phrasing of the last tweet ("strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove") may … Read more

In its ongoing pursuit to strike back at hackers, U.K. courts have convicted a member of Anonymous for conspiracy.

A London jury found Christopher Weatherhead, a 22-year-old self described "hacktivist," guilty of carrying out a campaign of Distributed Denial of Service attacks against major credit card companies that refused to process online donations to WikiLeaks, according to the U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service. The conviction came after guilty pleas of three of Weatherhead's co-conspirators.

"Christopher Weatherhead is a cyber criminal who waged a sophisticated and orchestrated campaign of online attacks on the computer systems … Read more

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of sharing documents with WikiLeaks that were eventually released on the Internet, is now one step closer to handling some of the claims brought against him.

Military judge Col. Denise Lind today accepted the language used to describe seven charges to which Manning could plead guilty. The charges include Manning willfully sending videos, war logs, and other classified materials to WikiLeaks.

The Associated Press was first to report on the ruling.

To be clear, Col. Lind's ruling does not imply that Manning willl offer a guilty plea. Instead, the ruling approves … Read more

And the saga continues...Anonymous and Wikileaks got into a public tit-for-tat over Twitter yesterday about a donation overlay page that Wikileaks posted on its Global Intelligence Files. Anonymous called the donation page a paywall -- since it cannot be closed unless a donation is made or the Javascript is disabled -- and demanded it be taken down.

The page was taken down for a couple of hours in the evening and it looked like Anonymous had won the battle. But then, Wikileaks put it back up. And this time it's not only on the site's Global Intelligence … Read more

An opinion piece that appears to be by former New York Times editor Bill Keller on what appears to be the New York Times Web site is a fake.

The editorial urges Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to take a "stand against the use of financial embargos to prohibit supporters from contributing or subscribing to media organizations protected by the First Amendment and free speech laws." The fake op-ed was drafted as a follow up to a February 2012 op-ed by Keller titled "Wikileaks, A Postscript."

The URL for the fake column was a giveaway to … Read more

Following a concerted effort to starve Wikileaks of cash by cutting off its sources of funding, the controversial publisher of government and corporate secrets has found a way to once again accept donations via credit cards.

WikiLeaks yesterday announced that it has launched "a new payment gateway" that relies upon the French credit card system Carte Bleue. That system, which works globally with the Visa/MasterCard system that's currently blockading WikiLeaks, is "contractually barred from directly cutting off merchants," according to the organization. A French not-for-profit has taken advantage of that loophole and helped WikiLeaks … Read more