acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM News

Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks

Julian Assange

Jenny Morgan

This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication. Not really, I confessed. The Times doesn’t have encrypted phone lines, or a Cone of Silence.

Well then, he said, he would try to speak circumspectly. In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications.

WikiLeaks’s leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered The Guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables.

From The New York Times
View Full Article


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account