Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web

As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.
State's Secrets Day 7
Articles in this series will examine American diplomatic cables as a window on relations with the rest of the world in an age of war and terrorism.
Other Articles in the Series » . Related Documents Chinese Government Singles Out Google
Chinese Press Controls Discussed
Chinese Warning about Google Earth
Cyber-Attacks and Other Security Threats
China's Ties to the World of Computer Hackers
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. The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”
That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.
Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and military data than generally known, including on the computers of United States diplomats involved in climate change talks with China.
One cable, dated early this year, quoted a Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Mr. Li himself directed an attack on Google’s servers in the United States, though that claim has been called into question. In an interview with The New York Times, the person cited in the cable said that Mr. Li personally oversaw a campaign against Google’s operations in China but the person did not know who directed the hacking attack.
The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was placed on Google to comply with local censorship laws, as well as Google’s willingness to comply — up to a point. That coercion began building years before the company finally decided to pull its search engine out of China last spring in the wake of the successful hacking attack on its home servers, which yielded Chinese dissidents’ e-mail accounts as well as Google’s proprietary source code.
The demands on Google went well beyond removing material on subjects like the Dalai Lama or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese officials also put pressure on the United States government to censor the Google Earth satellite imaging service by lowering the resolution of images of Chinese government facilities, warning that Washington could be held responsible if terrorists used that information to attack government or military facilities, the cables show. An American diplomat replied that Google was a private company and that he would report the request to Washington but that he had no sense about how the government would act.
Yet despite the hints of paranoia that appear in some cables, there are also clear signs that Chinese leaders do not consider the Internet an unstoppable force for openness and democracy, as some Americans believe.
In fact, this spring, around the time of the Google pullout, China’s State Council Information Office delivered a triumphant report to the leadership on its work to regulate traffic online, according to a crucial Chinese contact cited by the State Department in a cable in early 2010, when contacted directly by The Times.
The message delivered by the office, the person said, was that “in the past, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled.”
“But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable,” the person said.
That confidence may also reflect what the cables show are repeated and often successful hacking attacks from China on the United States government, private enterprises and Western allies that began by 2002, several years before such intrusions were widely reported in the United States.
At least one previously unreported attack in 2008, code-named Byzantine Candor by American investigators, yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from an American government agency, a Nov. 3, 2008, cable revealed for the first time.
Precisely how these hacking attacks are coordinated is not clear. Many appear to rely on Chinese freelancers and an irregular army of “patriotic hackers” who operate with the support of civilian or military authorities, but not directly under their day-to-day control, the cables and interviews suggest.
But the cables also appear to contain some suppositions by Chinese and Americans passed along by diplomats. For example, the cable dated earlier this year referring to the hacking attack on Google said: “A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.”

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Interpol issues wanted notice for Julian Assange

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is tonight facing growing legal problems around the world, with the US announcing that it was investigating whether he had violated its espionage laws.
Assange's details were also added to Interpol's worldwide wanted list. Dated 30 November, the entry reads: "sex crimes" and says the warrant has been issued by the international public prosecution office in Gothenburg, Sweden. "If you have any information contact your national or local police." It reads: "Wanted: Assange, Julian Paul," and gives his birthplace as Townsville, Australia.
Friends said earlier that Assange was in a buoyant mood, however, despite the palpable fury emanating from Washington over the decision by WikiLeaks to start publishing more than a quarter of a million mainly classified US cables. He was said to be at a secret location somewhere outside London, along with fellow hackers and WikiLeaks enthusiasts.
In contrast to previous WikiLeaks releases, Assange has, on this occasion, kept a relatively low profile. His attempt to give an interview to Sky News via Skype was thwarted today by a faulty internet connection.
But he was able to give an interview to Time magazine in which he called for Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, to resign. "She should resign, if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the US has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that," he said.
Assange's reluctance to emerge in public is understandable. It comes amid a rapid narrowing of his options. Several countries are currently either taking – or actively considering – aggressive legal moves against him. This lengthening list includes Sweden, Australia and now the US – but so far as can be made out, not Britain.
The US attorney general, Eric Holder, announced yesterday that the justice department and Pentagon are conducting "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into the latest Assange-facilitated leak under Washington's Espionage Act.
It was not immediately clear whether Holder was referring to Bradley Manning, the dissident US private suspected of being the original source of the leak, or Assange. The inquiry by US federal authorities is made tricky by Assange's citizenship – he is Australian – and the antediluvian nature of the law's pre-internet-era 1917 statutes.
According to the Washington Post, no charges against anyone from WikiLeaks are imminent. But asked how the US could prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, Holder struck an ominous note. "Let me be clear. This is not sabre-rattling," he said, vowing to swiftly "close the gaps" in current US legislation.
But Assange's most pressing headache is Sweden. Swedish prosecutors have issued an international and European arrest warrant (EAW) for him in connection with rape allegations, and the warrant has been upheld by a Swedish appeal court.
Assange strongly denies any wrongdoing but admits having unprotected but consensual encounters with two women during a visit to Sweden in August.
Mark Stephens, his London-based lawyer, has described the allegations as "false and without basis", adding that they amount to persecution as part of a cynical smear campaign.
Nonetheless, the Swedes appear determined to force Assange back to Sweden for questioning. Stockholm's director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny, said last month: "So far, we have not been able to meet with him to accomplish the interrogation."
Assange contests this too. But if he declines to return to Sweden voluntarily, and the UK decides to enforce Sweden's arrest warrant, things may get tricky. Some friends believe Assange's best strategy is not to go to ground but to get on a plane to Sweden and face down his accusers.
Stephens, moreover, says that the Swedish attempts to extradite Assange have no legal force. So far he has not been charged, Stephens says – an essential precondition for a valid European arrest warrant.
Under the EAW scheme, which allows for fast-tracked extradition between EU member states, a warrant must indicate a formal charge in order to be validated, and must be served on the person accused.
"Julian Assange has never been charged by Swedish prosecutors. He is formally wanted as a witness," Stephens told the Guardian today.
"All we have is an English translation of what's being reported in the media. The Swedish authorities have not met their obligations under domestic and European law to communicate the nature of the allegations against him in a language that he understands, and the evidence against him."
Assange's legal team are challenging the warrant in Sweden's supreme court. They are optimistic: a previous appeal was partially successful in limiting the grounds on which the warrant was issued.
Today a spokesman for Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency, which is responsible for validating extradition requests, would not confirm or deny receipt of a European arrest warrant for Assange's extradition.
Assange has previously suggested he might find sanctuary in Switzerland. More promising perhaps is Ecuador, whose leftist government unexpectedly offered him asylum on Monday.
"We are ready to give him residence in Ecuador, with no problems and no conditions," Ecuador's foreign minister, Kintto Lucas, said.
At the very least, Ecuador could offer Assange a new passport. He might need one. Yesterday Australia's attorney general, Robert McClelland, said Australian police were also investigating whether any Australian laws had been broken by the latest WikiLeaks release.
In reality, Assange's predicament may not be as hopeless as it seems. The US would be hard pressed to make charges against him stick, experts suggest.
"There have been so few cases under the Espionage Act, you can put them on one hand," said David Banisar, senior legal counsel for the campaigning group Article 19 and an expert on free speech in the US. "There is the practical problem that most of the information published by WikiLeaks wasn't secret. Then there is the debate about whether the documents were properly classified – there are detailed rules in the US about what can and cannot be classified."

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Cameron's spokesman refuses to condemn King comments

The prime minister's official spokesman today refused to condemn the comments made by Mervyn King to the US ambassador Louis Susman when asked repeatedly to confirm that David Cameron still had confidence in the Bank of England governor.
Referring to the fact that King's position is independent of government, the spokesman said: "The issue of confidence simply doesn't arise. The governor of the Bank of England makes lots of statements, as you would expect. The issue of confidence simply doesn't arise."
When asked whether the prime minister thought King was doing a good job, the prime minister's official spokesman, said: "Yeah."
The head of the Bank of England privately criticised David Cameron and George Osborne for their lack of experience, the lack of depth in their inner circle and their tendency to think about issues only in terms of their electoral impact, according to leaked US embassy cables revealed by the Guardian today.
King told Susman he had held private meetings with the two Conservative politicians before the election to urge them to draw up a detailed plan to reduce the deficit.
He said the pair operated too much within a narrow circle and "had a tendency to think about issues only in terms of politics, and how they might affect Tory electability".
The prime minister's spokesman's response came as Tristram Hunt, a Labour member of the political and constitutional reform select committee, claimed issues had now arisen about King's role in the coalition formation negotiations in May. The political and constitutional reform select committee is conducting an inquiry into the conduct of the coalition's formation, including the role of the civil service.
Hunt said: "There now seems to be mounting evidence that King was generating an atmosphere of crisis around the issue of the deficit boxing politicians in so there was no choice but to support his view."
Graham Allen, the chairman of the select committee, is taking soundings on whether to ask King to explain his role to the committee in writing.
Meanwhile Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, assured Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, that the WikiLeaks disclosures being released in the UK by the Guardian would not damage Anglo-American relations.
Clegg met Clinton at the OSCE summit at Astana, Kazakhstan. He said: "I made clear to Secretary Clinton that recent WikiLeaks disclosures would not affect our uniquely strong relationship. UK-US co-operation will continue with the same depth and closeness as before."

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WikiLeaks reveals that Mervyn King is just a humble patriot of austere convictions

So Mervyn King wasn't trying to get himself a peerage by supporting Tory austerity policies, after all. Those wary colleagues on the monetary policy committee about whose concerns I wrote last week may have misjudged the boss.
No. The deep, sharp cuts were his policies, pressed upon David Cameron and George Osborne because the governor of the Bank of England had concluded they were callow youths – presumably still are – and needed his fatherly assistance to save the economy. Not "Blue Mervyn" at all, but a humble patriot of austere convictions.
So suggests today's dollop of WikiLeaks, the point in the narrative at which we turn to domestic affairs: how the coalition was formed and who thought what about whom. The Wiki-pattern persists: we sort of knew a lot of this. But even an old curmudgeon like me must concede I read it all with interest – King's case especially so.
He is an academic by background, widely thought to be less adept than his canny, chain-smoking predecessor, Eddie George, a Bank of England man to his fingertips.
"Eddie would have spotted the looming liquidity crisis much quicker," folk say, as folk usually do.
King's team and the Brown-created FSA missed it – too busy worrying about solvency to fret about a liquidity crash – at Northern Rock and elsewhere. Even after the crisis broke, King was still banging on about "moral hazard" – ie that shareholders and bosses should not be protected from their own errors by taxpayers – when the whole financial edifice was ablaze and needed government rescue.
It's very annoying, but the alternatives were worse: look at the collapse of Lehman. At least London imposed restructuring on its dodgier banks rather than blithely underwriting their losses as Dublin did – to its continuing cost.
What today's papers are reporting is that King – who takes comfort in being right all the time – decided that Cameron and Osborne were "weak, insular and lacking in depth" as the Times's Guardian catch-up story puts it – and over-reliant on a small circle of advisers. This is what he is said to have told the US ambassador.
It's what old farts tend to say about younger farts. I've said it myself about all sorts of people, including George and Dave, now I come to think about it. But the young farts usually have a point and, being younger, learn faster.
For all his cocky weaknesses – noted here by me – I'd still bet on Master George to clean out Governor King in a poker game, if not this year, then next year. That's how life goes.
So King, a deficit hawk, decided this spring – as the Greek sovereign debt crisis unfolded – that Alistair Darling's provisional plans to cut £40bn or so from public spending if Labour won (Darling says he didn't expect his party to win) were not enough. More must be done and soon to get sterling and gilts – the UK Treasury's bond market to fund borrowing – out of the firing line.
As Patrick Wintour sets out in today's Guardian exclusive – he used David Laws's memoir too – King and the Treasury's permanent secretary, Nick Macpherson, were also influential in persuading Nick Clegg and his team, even the Keynesian Vince Cable, of the need to act fast after the coalition was formed on 11 May.
It was Laws who made the first cuts statement to MPs. I remember thinking "they'll get him for this" – and so "they" did, within a week, for expenses irregularities. When you put your head above the parapet be prepared for attempts to chop it off.
Laws and Clegg were always on the "Orange Book" (free market) side of Lib Dem policymaking. Cable was persuaded by the Greek crisis, though King insists he'd said nothing in private that he'd not said in public.
He might have added – but tactfully doesn't – that Cameron and Osborne had opposed the recapitalisation of tottering UK banks (Brown and Darling's key world-leading decision in the crisis) until after they had been briefed privately by King. Thereafter they miraculously changed their minds and publicly demanded it.
What is a little troubling here is that unelected public officials may have been calling the deflationary shots since 11 May. If you remember Dave and George backed Labour's now-unrealistic spending plans, promising to "share the proceeds of growth" until quite late – November 2008 – and later toned down their "austerity Britain" message when it proved unpopular with voters.
Bank governors can be expected to be small-c conservative. So can senior Treasury officials such as Macpherson, who are also paid to adjust to changing political weather. But we elect politicians to call the shots and take both credit and blame. And we know that, for all his faults, Brown imposed himself on the Treasury.
No wonder that officialdom likes the coalition. It restores its influence over policy and allows it to play both parties off against each other. I have heard it said that whenever Clegg or Cable gets cross, the Treasury says: "We told Danny Alexander." Flooding ministerial boxes with too much information is another old trick of Sir Humphreys down the ages.
Two final points here: Be sure to read the Guardian's account today of Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks leaker, who now faces trial and a fearsome prison sentence in the US. It's a sad story of what comes across as a naïve, well-meaning young man.
In today's Times (paywall), Danny Finkelstein, always a provocative writer, likens the leak to Martin Luther's historic posting of his critique of the corrupt medieval papacy on the door of Wittenberg church on 31 October 1517.
Driven by the invention of the printing press 70 years earlier (unless we count China) – it is one of the great moments in the history of the world and unleashed the Protestant intellectual revolution which created our societies.
You can't stop the internet, says Danny, any more than the Ottoman empire could stop the printing press (though it tried). It's about the shift of information and power away from existing elites – popes and priests, US diplomats and Saudi princes – to a wider community, usually for the general good.
I'm sympathetic to the broad proposition – suppressing the printing press helped ruin the mighty Ottomans just as disdain of the west humbled mighty China in the 19th century – but I'm not sure that the analogy holds here. Where, for instance, do the likes of Rupert Murdoch fit into this wholesome picture, Danny? Might they not be outriders for a new and suppressing information elite?
So, as with the role of Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks in this drama, I'm still thinking that one over. Julian Assange as Luther, eh? He was very pro-state, Luther, come to think of it. Some blame him for Hitler. As those dodgy Renaissance popes might have said. "See. I told you in would end in tears and WikiLeaks."

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WikiLeaks fights to stay online after US company withdraws domain name

The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against WikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.
The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.
Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with them.
On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch.
Julian Assange this morning said the development is an example of the "privatisation of state censorship" in the US and is a "serious problem."
"These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States," he warned.
The California-based internet hosting provider that dropped WikiLeaks at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday), Everydns, says it did so to prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense cyber attacks targeted at WikiLeaks.
The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name – wikileaks.ch, with the Swiss suffix. However, the new address still only points to an IP address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.
The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.
Late yesterday evening Tableau Software, a company which published data visualisations, pulled one of its images picturing the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables at the request of Senator Lieberman. Writing on the company's blog, Elissa Fink said: "Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organisations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website."
Mark Stephens, the London-based lawyer acting on behalf of Assange, wrote on Twitter after the shutdown: "Pressure appears to have been applied to close the WikiLeaks domain name."
Andre Rickardsson, an expert on computer security at Sweden's Bitsec Consulting, told Reuters: "I don't believe for a second that this has been done by everydns themselves. I think they've been under pressure," he said, apparently referring to US authorities.
A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain – wikileaks.dd19.de – also appeared on Friday morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.
In a statement on its website, the free everydns.net service said that the "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks by unknown hackers – who are trying to knock WikiLeaks off the net – meant that the leaks site was interfering with the service being provided to other users. That in turn meant that WikiLeaks had broken everydns.net's terms of service, and it cut the site off at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday).
DNS services translate a website name, such as guardian.co.uk, into machine-readable "IP quads" – in that case 77.91.249.30, so that http://77.91.249.30 will show the Guardian site. If the DNS fails, the site is only reachable via IP address – but WikiLeaks has not yet provided one via Twitter or other means.
Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".
WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."
The move comes after several days of WikiLeaks coming under a determined DDOS attack, apparently from hackers friendly to the point of view of the US government, which has disparaged the site's leaking of thousands of US diplomatic cables.
US companies have also come under intense political pressure to remove any connection to, or support for, WikiLeaks. Amazon ended its hosting of the cables on its EC2 cloud computer service earlier this week, but last night insisted in a blogpost that its decision was not due to pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, who has called for the removal of the data – and who has influenced at least one other US company to withdraw support for WikiLeaks data.
In a blogpost late on Thursday, Amazon said reports that government inquiries prompted it to remove the data were "inaccurate".
Amazon said:
"[Amazon Web Services] does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity". It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."
It noted that:
"When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn't rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won't injure others, it's a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere."
But as commentators have pointed out, that stance is contradicted by the fact that Amazon has previously hosted the "war logs" from WikiLeaks which contained data about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service. WikiLeaks itself said on Twitter that the ending of DNS services was allegedly due to "claimed mass attacks" and called for further donations to "keep us strong".

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Today's media stories from the papers

Today's headlines

The Guardian

WikiLeaks US embassy cables coverage. P1, 4-11
Sweden issues fresh arrest warrant for WiliLeaks founder. P7
News Corp has submitted a potential remedy to Brussels to help win clearance for its BSkyB takeover. P19
Google is beefing up its anti-piracy measures. P21
Lifetime award for actor Sheila Hancock. P25
Police have been called in to news channel France 24 to investigate spying allegations. P35
The owners of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror contemplated merging their regional newspaper businesses. P45
Simon Jenkins: In this World Cup sewer, we reptiles of British journalism hold our heads high. P49

The Independent

WikiLeaks coverage. P1, 4-7
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is expected to be arrested in the coming days. P6
Radio 3 is clearing its schedule for 12 days of Mozart in January. P20
News Corp offers EC concessions for Sky bid. P46

Daily Telegraph

BBC Radio 3 to broadcast nothing but Mozart for 12 days. P3
Commons speaker John Bercow likened to a character from TV show Family Guy. P13
News Corp offers to address Sky bid issues. Business, P4

The Times

WikiLeaks coverage. P22-23

Financial Times

Repubicans set to clash with big business over new FCC regulations. P8
WikiLeaks coverage. P9, 13
News Corp offers to address Sky bid issues. P18

Wall Street Journal Europe

WikiLeaks coverage. P11

Daily Mail

WikiLeaks coverage. P20-21
WikiLeaks supremo Julian Assange could be arrested in Britain today. P21

Daily Express

Scotland Yard is poised to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. P5
WikiLeaks coverage. P33

The Sun

X Factor coverage. P11, TVbiz P1
Puppets from 80s TV show Spitting Image for sale. P23
I'm a Celebrity… coverage. TVbiz, p2-3

Daily Mirror

X Factor coverage. P9
Photographs of Strictly Come Dancing stars as children. P23
I'm a Celebrity… coverage. P24-25

Daily Star

Strictly Come Dancing coverage. P3
X Factor coverage. P8-9
Katie Price under fire for "sick" HIV tweet. P11
I'm a Celebrity… coverage. P16-17

And finally ...

The Daily Express, never one to undersell a weather story, has been remarkably restrained so far this week in the face of some, you know … genuinely foul weather. But today the paper finally crashes the party - and how. "Now food is running out," screams the Express's splash headline. Don't worry, the newsagents are yet to run out of copies of the Daily Express. DAILY EXPRESS, P1

Also on MediaGuardian.co.uk today

News Corp offers remedy to secure BSkyB bid
Company sources say media giant offered to be bound by restrictions on future operations – but did not include selloffs

Mark Lamarr to leave Radio 2
One of the generation of presenters that revitalised the station is to depart after 12 years

BBC confirms Jana Bennett's Worldwide move
BBC Vision director to lead global rollout of global iPlayer in new role at corporation's commercial arm

BBC plans subscription-only US iPlayer on iPad
paidContent:UK: Corporation to launch long-awaited global version of its catchup service on a subscription-only basis, and initially only on iPad

Lifetime award for Carry On and EastEnders actor Sheila Hancock
Women in Film and Television honours 77-year-old for her 'outstanding and lasting' contribution to her trade

Julian Assange: Sweden issues fresh arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder
WikiLeaks founder subject to new arrest warrant issued following request by Britain's Serious and Organised Crime Agency

Cameron was 'pimping himself out' for World Cup bid, says Miliband aide
Twitter update from Labour leader's spokeswoman accuses prime minister of 'hypocrisy' for going on three-day Zurich trip

State-owned France 24 is in turmoil over boardroom 'spying' claims
Christine Ockrent denies any involvement in hacking as police investigate allegations of computer spying

Google ramps up anti-piracy measures
Internet giant to remove illegal content from search 'within 24 hours' and promote legitimate download sites

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Altered the way we see the world in just a week

hortly before 6.30pm on Sunday night, the first cracks appeared in the dam. The largest ever leak of US government classified documents streamed out online, revealing never publicly seen details about Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan and Russia.
Throughout the week the stream became a torrent of information about how US diplomats and foreign governments see the world. According to these classified cables, Saudi Arabia wanted Washington to bomb Iran, the UK harbours "deep concerns about the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons", and Russia is considered a "virtual mafia state" with its president, Vladimir Putin, accused of amassing "illicit proceeds" from his time in office.
But perhaps most embarrassing for Hillary Clinton who, as US secretary of state, is ultimately responsible for the content of most of the cables released so far, was a cable that revealed Washington is running a spying campaign targeted at the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the rest of the UN leadership, as well as the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.
Clinton has spent much of the week trying to justify the operation – which was looking for top UN officials' passwords and credit card numbers , even DNA samples – to the press and in person to the UN secretary general.
As startling as the exposés were – the Saudi king urging America "to cut off the head of the snake", to launch a military attack on Iran's nuclear programme – it was as much the sense of a curtain lifting to reveal the world leaders not as wizards but as all too human, and that the private positions of those in power were often diametrically opposed to what they said in public, that made the cables so gripping – and perhaps so dangerous.
Clinton's immediate reaction was to strongly condemn the leak and say that "every country, including the US, must be able to have honest, private dialogue with other countries … When someone breaches that trust, we are the worse off for it."
Former presidential candidate, the Republican Mike Huckabee called for the execution of Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old US army intelligence analyst who is in custody at a military base in Virginia, facing trial for downloading the files while on duty in Iraq.
Fellow Republican Sarah Palin called Julian Assange, the fugitive founder of the WikiLeaks website, "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" because she said previous leaks had included the identities of "more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban".
Yesterday Assange described Manning as "an unparalleled hero".
Several leaders who fared badly from the revelations were unconvinced the leaks were genuine. It was revealed that Russia was using mafia members to carry out operations like arms trafficking and that bribery functions as a parallel tax system for the personal enrichment of the police, officials and the KGB's successor, the FSB. Even before the revelations, Vladimir Putin said: "Some experts believe that somebody is deceiving WikiLeaks, that its reputation is being undermined in order for it to be used for political purposes. Such an opinion is being expressed here."
A day later, it emerged that US diplomats had reported suspicions that the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, could be "profiting personally and handsomely" from secret deals with Putin.
President Ahmadinejad of Iran also denied that the Gulf Arab states are antagonistic towards his regime and said: "We don't think this information was leaked. We think it was organised to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals."
Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan was so rattled that he even threatened to sue over allegations of corruption.
Rampant corruption in Afghanistan was revealed, including an incident last year when the then vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash.
In the UK, there were calls for Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, to resign after it emerged he had been briefing the US ambassador to London, Louis Susman, about the "lack of experience" of David Cameron and George Osborne, and that they "had a tendency to think about issues only in terms of politics and how they might affect Tory electorability [sic]".
At least one major revelation gave some hopes for a more peaceful future, not least the suggestion that China is ready to accept Korean unification and is distancing itself from North Korea, which it describes as behaving like a "spoiled child".
Dispatches on North Korea showed that South Korea's vice-foreign minister was told by two senior Chinese officials that they believed Korea should be reunified under Seoul's control and that this view was gaining ground in Beijing.
Throughout the week, the US authorities increased the pressure on WikiLeaks. On Tuesday they announced an investigation into whether it had breached espionage laws, and on Wednesday they successfully pressured Amazon to stop hosting the site.
Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, called on "any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them".
Yesterday, the WikiLeaks website went offline for the third time this week.

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WikiLeaks site's Swiss host dismisses pressure to take it offline

WikiLeaks received a boost tonight when Switzerland rejected growing international calls to force the site off the internet.

The whistleblowers site, which has been publishing leaked US embassy cables, was forced to switch domain names to WikiLeaks.ch yesterday after the US host of its main website, WikiLeaks.org, pulled the plug following mounting political pressure.

The site's new Swiss host, Switch, today said there was "no reason" why it should be forced offline, despite demands from France and the US. Switch is a non-profit registrar set up by the Swiss government for all 1.5 million Swiss .ch domain names.

The reassurances come just hours after eBay-owned PayPal, the primary donation channel to WikiLeaks, terminated its links with the site, citing "illegal activity". France yesterday added to US calls for all companies and organisations to terminate their relationship with WikiLeaks following the release of 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables.

The Swiss Pirate Party, which registered the WikiLeaks.ch domain name earlier this year on behalf of the site, said Switch had reassured the party that it would not block the site.

An email sent by Denis Simonet, president of the Swiss Pirate Party, to international members of the liberal political group said: "Some minutes ago I got good news: Switch, the registrar for .ch domains, told us that there is no reason to block wikileaks.ch."

Laurence Kaye, leader of the UK-based Pirate Party, tonight told the Guardian: "International Pirate Parties now have an integral role in allowing access to WikiLeaks. I wish some of our other politicians had the same guts.

"We support the WikiLeaks project as access to information is the prerequisite for an informed and engaged democracy."

WikiLeaks has been fighting to stay online since releasing a cache of sensitive diplomatic cables to the Guardian and four other international media organisations. Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, dropped the site from its servers on Thursday after being contacted by staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the US Senate's homeland security committee.

Everydns.net, the site's US hosting provider, yesterday forced the site offline for the third time in under a week. A series of "distributed denial of attacks" by unknown online activists still bring the site intermittently to its knees.

WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, described the decision as "privatisation of state censorship" in the US. Everydns.net said the attacks – which have been going on all week – threatened "the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".

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WikiLeaks shows how UK courts contempt

The latest WikiLeaks exposures (3 December) demonstrate how, with an embarrassing 19th-century mindset, our politicians continue to strut on the world stage as bold leaders of "a world power" – to disastrous effect. We read how the Americans treated Gordon Brown's international initiatives "with indifference bordering on contempt"; how secret diplomatic cables "expose a devastating contempt for the British failure" in Afghanistan. We learn how the British were criticised by Dan McNeill, commander of Nato forces in 2007-08, "for a failure to deal firmly with the drug trade" and because "they had made a mess of things in Helmand". Surely it's time to give up our aircraft carriers, our wanton and reckless wars, our nuclear arsenals, and earn real respect by becoming, at last, responsible members of the world community.

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WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates

7.42am:The WikiLeaks website is down again, after its domain name system, EveryDNS.net, pulled the plug on it.
But the Guardian is up and running and packed with more revelations from the leaked cables. Today the main focus is Afghanistan.
The dispatches expose a devastating contempt for the British failure to impose security and connect with ordinary Afghans, our lead story says.
The Ministry of Defence has been swift to rebut the cables. A spokesman said:

UK forces did an excellent job in Sangin, an area which has always been and continues to be uniquely challenging, delivering progress by increasing security and taking the fight to the insurgency.
That work is now being continued by the US Marines as part of a hugely increased Isaf presence across the whole of Helmand Province.
Both Afghan leaders, including the Governor of Sangin, and the US Marines have publicly recognised and paid tribute to the sacrifice and achievements of the UK forces in that area.
Criticism of UK troops in the cables has prompted a furious reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the online chatroom popular with British troops. "It's utterly ridiculous how little they appreciate the effort our troops have made," wrote Bloodloss, while Oddjob, who says he has a son currently serving in Afghanistan, tells the Afgans where to go.
Here's a round up of the other stories from the leaked cables today:
• CIA drew up UN spying wishlist for diplomats
• Afghan vice-president 'landed in Dubai with $52m in cash'
• Afghan MPs and religious scholars 'on Iran payroll'
• Germany accuses US over 'missing' Afghan funds
• Cables portray Hamid Karzai as corrupt and erratic
• Americans believed Gordon Brown was an 'abysmal' prime minister
• Gordon Brown's potential successors, as viewed by Washington
• Gordon Brown's global moves dismissed by US
• UK overruled on Lebanon spy flights from Cyprus
• U2 spy flights targetting Hizbullah fuels tensions
• Berlusconi 'profited from secret deals' with Putin
• Silvio Berlusconi's health hit by party lifestyle
• Cables vindicate Litvinenko murder claim, says widow
• Chávez and Uribe 'almost came to blows' at summit
• US has lost faith in Mexico's ability to win drugs war
You can follow all of yesterday's disclosures and reaction on Thursday's live blog. And for the full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.
7.56am: Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service, writes our technology editor Charles Arthur.
WikiLeaks lawyers Mark Stephens wants answers on whether anyone leaned on EveryDNS.net to pull the domain name. He just tweeted this:
Pressure appears to have been applied to close the Wikileaks domain name. Anyone else know anything?less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Mark Stephens
MarksLarks

8.07am: The rest of British press wasn't interested in the corruption allegations about Russia exposed in the cables. But that was before Russia won the right to host the World Cup.
The Independent neatly links to the two stories on its front page. The front of the sun says: "Fifa Bungs Russia the World Cup.". Inside the headline is "And the 2018 World Cup is awarded to... mafia state". The story quickly gets into the details of the WikiLeak revelations.
Hours before it landed the greatest show on earth yesterday, secret US documents published by rogue website WikiLeaks had spelled out shocking corruption allegations.
The largest country in the world was depicted as run by organised criminals and headed by a government that pockets almost £200billion a year in bribes.
In one document, a Spanish prosecutor who spent ten years examining corruption levels concluded: "The government of Russia's strategy is to use organised crime groups to do whatever it cannot acceptably do as a government."
8.44am: Colonel Stuart Tootal, former commander of 3 Para, the first battle group to be sent into Helmand, has been doing the rounds of broadcast interviews today to defend the British Army's record in Afghanistan.
On BBC Breakfast he said the US held British forces "in the highest regard" and said the army had ensured "strong security" in Afghanistan for US troops. He added:
Some of the individual criticisms I think are very unfair. We have now got the resources in place. I don't think (the army) made a mess of things but we got some of our approach wrong in not having enough resources.
A lot of this comment is historic and some of it is unfair.
And speaking on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he described the cables as "disappointing".
But it's important to remember these are the individual views of some people."
It's been challenging - the resources, the initial approach was wrong. Now we've got 30,000 Nato troops, British and American, who are all doing a fantastic job and we mustn't lose sight of this.
And quite frankly, the leaks don't help anyone, particularly not the poor bloody infantryman on the ground slogging his guts out, whether he's a Brit or an American, to try and improve the lot of the Afghan people.
9.03am: The WikiLeaks cables can still be seen at this proxy address, tweets Andrew Spooner.
A tweet from WikiLeaks suggests the new address is being hosted in Switzerland. Or is it just speaking metaphorically?
WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland http://wikileaks.ch/less than a minute ago via webWikiLeaks
wikileaks

9.15am: Pravada goes into Cold War mode. In an opinion piece David Hoffman, its legal editor launches a scathing attack on the United States, contrasting the US double standards over WikiLeaks and the outing of the CIA operative Valerie Plame.
The article doesn't mention the corruption allegations against Russia.
It is the American people who should be outraged that its government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
9.29am: The New York Times WikiLeaks coverage today focuses on corruption in Afghanistan.
From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier.
Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan's new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, "appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist."
But the paper's veteran foreign affairs commentator Roger Cohen has serious qualms.
The cables are intriguing, offering plenty of voyeuristic titillation but no gasp of discovery. They provide texture but break little new ground. Yet their publication has done significant damage to the courageous work of America's diplomats and may endanger lives. That's a tradeoff that I find troubling and unpersuasive.
10.14am:Here's the latest on what's happening with the WikiLeaks website, from Josh Halliday on our Media and Technology desk.
The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name with the Swiss suffix, .ch. However, the new address still only points to a DNS address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.
A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain also appeared this morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.
10.26am: There was a fascinating exchange yesterday between journalists and the US State department spokesman PJ Crowley. The State department has published a full transcript. Here's a key extract, in which Crowley reveals that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote to the US ambassador in London last weekend offering to talk:
QUESTION: P.J., on that subject of WikiLeaks, Amazon, as we know, did have them on their server for a time and then stopped doing that. And there's a human rights group that says that Amazon was directed by the U.S. Government to stop that relationship. Do you know anything –
MR. CROWLEY: All I can say is I'm not aware of any contacts between the Department of State and Amazon.
QUESTION: Or the U.S. Government or just State?
MR. CROWLEY: I'm not in a position on this particular issue to talk about the entire government. I'm just not aware of any contacts directly.
QUESTION: From your perspective, what is WikiLeaks? How do you define them, if it is not a media organization, then?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, as the Secretary said earlier this week, it is – one might infer it has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We're focused on WikiLeaks's behavior, and I have had personally conversations with media outlets that are reporting on this, and we have had the opportunity to express our specific concerns about intelligence sources and methods and other interests that could put real lives at risk.
Mr. Assange, in a letter to our Ambassador in the United Kingdom over the weekend, after documents had been released to news organizations, made what we thought was a halfhearted gesture to have some sort of conversation, but that was after he released the documents and after he knew that they were going to emerge publicly. So I think there's been a very different approach. And Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.
10.46am: Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has called for a boycott of Amazon, over its withdrawal of support for WikiLeaks.
In an open letter to Amazon, he writes:
I'm disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China's control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.
For the last several years, I've been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That's over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.
I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better.
Amazon denies that it was put under pressure by the US government.
10.57am: The Guardian's latest WikiLeaks story exposes more duplicity from the Foreign Office, this time over the plight of thousands of islanders expelled from Deigo Garcia to make way for a US military base.
Rob Evans and Richard Norton-Taylor report:

More than 2,000 islanders – described privately by the Foreign Office as "Man Fridays" – were evicted from the British colony of Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 1970s. The Foreign Office, backed by the US, has fought a long legal battle to prevent them returning home.
The islanders' quest to go back will be decided by a ruling, expected shortly, from the European court of human rights.
New leaked documents show the Foreign Office has privately admitted its latest plan to declare the islands the world's largest marine protection zone will end any chance of them being repatriated.
The admission is at odds with public claims by Foreign Office ministers that the proposed park would have no effect on the islanders' right of return.
Here's relevant cable.
11.12am: Julian Assange will be live on the Guardian's site from 1pm today to answer readers' questions. That's if he can get access to the internet. A big if at the moment.
11.22am: The WikiLeaks affair has claimed its first victim, according to the EU Observer. It reports that Germany's vice-chancellor Guido Westerwelle today sacked his chief of staff for spying for the Americans.
Westerwelle's chief of staff, Helmut Metzner, admitted that he gave regular information to the US embassy in Berlin, and has been "relieved from his duties," a spokesman for the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) said in a statement.
11.31am: Another technical update on the WikiLeaks site, from Josh Halliday.
The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.
11.40am: Der Spiegel has more on the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle's chief of staff who admitted to passing secrets information to the Americans.
A worker at the party's headquarters who was chief of staff to the FDP chairman, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, came forward and admitted to being the source, an FDP party spokesperson said.
Frankfturter Allgemeine names him as Helmut Metzner and says he has been relieved of his duties rather sacked. Does that mean he's been suspended?
Der Spiegel adds:
Helmut M. became chief of staff to the chairman of the party in Berlin after Westerwelle became Germany's foreign minister in a coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats in 2009. During the coalition talks, Helmut M. had participated as a notetaker, FDP officials stated.
In a cable sent back to Washington that has been published online by WikiLeaks and cited by Spiegel, US Ambassador Philip Murphy described the worker as a "young, up-and-coming party loyalist." The cable states that during his meetings at the US Embassy in Berlin, he brought along internal papers from the coalition talks, including participant lists from working groups, schedules and handwritten notes. According to Spiegel information, they include, for example, information about an internal dispute over disarmament that took shape during the coalition negotiations.
11.57am: This is useful: a full summary of today's WikiLeaks disclosures by my colleague Haroon Siddique. Down the right hand side of the article are links to previous day's disclosures.
12.04pm: The Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the man described as Robin to Vladimir Putin's Batman in one cable, has spoken out against US diplomats.
Speaking at a briefing with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the southern Russian resort of Krasnaya Polyana, he said the cables showed the "cynicism" of US diplomacy.
According to RIA Novosti he said:
We are not paranoid and we do not link Russian-American relations with any leaks, although the leaks are revealing. They show a full measure of cynicism of those evaluations and judgments that often prevail in the foreign policy of various states, in this case I am referring to the United States.
12.31pm: There's been some more interesting reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the site popular with squaddies, to the criticism of the British campaign in Afghanistan.
annoy_mous writes:

The comments about the British were justified. We didn't send enough troops out there because the British government, and British taxpayer, wouldn't pay for them. There weren't enough troops in Sangin to dominate the ground, so regular patrols weren't possible. The army hierarchy wouldn't / didn't acknowledge this and for several years carried on with the same tactics despite there obvious flaws.
Karzai and the Americans were right, US marines were needed to provide the extra manpower. I've read nothing to suggest that the lads themselves were anything other than professional. And hopefully now we are consolidating a position in central Helmand, we will be more effective.
Blokeonabike writes:
The military "top brass" have, on several occasions and occasionally very publicly, noted that we do not have enough manpower/helicopters/light armoured vehicles etc. However, they, like the soldiers below them, are obliged to follow legal orders. The fact that they are given those orders by politicians with no military understanding does not make them any less legally binding. Given insufficient funding/equipment and political back-up, the British Forces at all levels have done the best they could be expected to do with the hand they have been dealt.
12.43pm: Lebanon's al-Akhbar newspaper has an Arab world exclusive by getting its hands on a sizeable selection of Wikileaked state department cables from across the region, writes Ian Black, our Middle East editor.
How it got the material — much of it not yet released by anyone else — is a closely-guarded secret.
Al-Masry al-Youm, a respected Egyptian daily, also intended to run the cables - triggering nervousness in Cairo - but apparently came under pressure not to do so.
Interestingly, there is very little new in the Beirut documents about the 2005 murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, as expectations mount that a UN tribunal will shortly indict members of Hizbullah for the assassination.
Other key events are conspicuously absent.
Elias al-Murr, the defence minister, has come under attack for comments he reportedly made to US diplomats, and was forced to issue a statement that a Wikileaks cable was "incomplete and inaccurate."
It quoted him as telling the US ambassador that Hizbullah was "terrified of Israel."
Al-Akhbar accused him and other pro-western Lebanese politicians of acting like "informers." The paper also said the leaked documents proved the extent of the "politicization" of the UN's investigation into the Hariri assassination.
The Guardian's revelations about US spy flights over Lebanon are also big news in Beirut, not least because of the assumption that any intelligence about Hizbullah would automatically be passed to Israel.
12.58pm: The online chat with Julian Assange is about to start. He has signed in. There have been hundreds of questions and comments so it's going to be tricky to spot his answers.
My boss, Janine Gibson, posted this in the comments section:
Sorry to have to run this in the not-very-practical, scroll through the comments way. Obviously Julian Assange is only able to log on to the site as a commenter at present, and this is the most reliable way to host this Q&A. It is, I know, far from ideal. As far as we know he will still be able to join us at 1pm. But we will pull out his responses afterwards and publish in a more user-friendly form.
2.19pm: Sorry about the lack of activity for the last hour or so. The site fell over under the weight of interest in the Julian Assange Q&A. His answers so far (about Bradley Manning, death threats, UFOs) are here.
2.32pm: Assange is about to be arrested, according to the BBC.
Assange's lawyer said this afternoon that neither the British nor the Swedish authorities had sought to speak to his client, according to PA.
Mark Stephens said: "The police have given us an undertaking that they will contact us if they want to get in touch with Julian. At this point in time nobody has."
2.38pm: Over on the online chat, Assange says that Tom Flanagan, the former adviser to the Canadian premier Stephen Harper, should be charged with incitement to murder.
Flanagan told Canadian TV that Assange should be assassinated, a comment he later said he regretted (11.39am).
"Flanagan and the others seriously making these statements should be charged with incitement to commit murder," Assange told the Guardian.
2.47pm: More interesting online answers from Assange: "I have become the lightening rod. I get undue attacks on every aspect of my life, but then I also get undue credit as some kind of balancing force."
2.50pm: The French government has called for Wikileaks to be banned from French servers, writes Angelique Chrisafis.
Ministers complained that the site has been partly hosted since Thursday by OVH, a server based near Lille in northern France.
The industry minister Eric Besson wrote to the French body governing internet use saying it was "unacceptable" for Wikileaks to be hosted by French servers and there would be consequences for any French operators involved with keeping Wikileaks online.
Besson wrote: "France cannot host internet sites that violate the confidentiality of diplomatic relations and put in danger people who are protected by diplomatic secrecy." He added France could not host sites which had been deemed "criminal" and rejected by other states because they broke the law.
Contacted by the French press, OVH, based in Roubaix, declined to comment.
3.09pm: Assange ended his online chat with the defiant answer.
The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the US and other countries to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically. Further, the Cable Gate archives is in the hands of multiple news organisations. History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you.
Meanwhile, AFP reports that Sweden has issued a new warrant for the rest of Assange, according to Sky News.
3.19pm: My partner in WikiLeaks live blogging, Richard Adams, has drawn up a list of seven key things we have learned among all the disclosures.
3.34pm: One of the staunchest defenders of WikiLeaks over the last week has been Salon's Glenn Greewald. Here he is on Bloggingheads TV, attacking the media's scorn for Assange and its subservience to power.

Greenwald also went up against Steven Aftergood on Democracy Now today.
3.41pm: Here's an update from Paris on that attempt by the French government to ban WikiLeaks being hosted by French servers. Angelique Chrisafis writes:
The server OVH, which the government claimed was partly hosting Wikileaks site from northern France, has hit back.
It will consult a judge on whether it is legal to host the whistleblowing site in France. The server said "it's not up to politicians or OVH to demand or decide the site's closure".
3.53pm: My colleague, Sam Jones, picks out Assange's comments about Bradley Manning as the top line in his story about the online chat.
Here's how it starts:

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, today hailed the young US soldier accused of leaking the diplomatic cables as "an unparalleled hero" and suggested that his organisation deliberately placed its servers in certain jurisdictions, such as Amazon in the US, to test their commitment to freedom of speech.
In a live Q&A on guardian.co.uk, the Australian journalist highlighted the role alleged to have been played in the leaks by Bradley Manning.
"For the past four years one of our goals has been to lionise the source who take the real risks in nearly every journalistic disclosure and without whose efforts, journalists would be nothing," said Assange. "If indeed it is the case, as alleged by the Pentagon, that the young soldier — Bradley Manning — is behind some of our recent disclosures, then he is without doubt an unparalleled hero."
That's it from me. Richard Adams is poised for the night shift. Thanks for all your comments, sorry about the technical problems at lunchtime.
4.09pm: Good morning from Washington, where the knives appear to be out for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Here's this entirely sane and rational demand that Assange be assassinated by the US government, by someone named Jeffrey T Kuhner in today's Washington Times, a ferociously right-wing newspaper owned by the Moonies.
"It is too late for tough talk," says Kuhner, described as "president of the Edmund Burke Institute," who proceeds to do just that:
At this point, we are beyond indictments and courts. The damage has been done; people have died - and will die because of the actions of this puerile, self-absorbed narcissist. News reports say the WikiLeaks founder is hiding out in England. If that's true, we should treat Mr. Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets: Kill him.
Earlier in the piece, Kuhner says:
Mr Assange is ... an active, willful enabler of Islamic terrorism. He is as much a threat as Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri. In short, Mr Assange is not a journalist or publisher; rather, he is an enemy combatant - and should be treated as such.
4.34pm: A staunch defence of Assange and WikiLeaks – perhaps the best to appear in the US media – is this piece in the Atlantic by David Samuels, well worth reading in full. In particular Samuels points out the shameful attacks on Assagne from American journalists:
But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that "the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities – formerly known as journalism – by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion."
Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." The dean of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of Assange which used terms like "nearly delusional grandeur" to describe Wikileaks' founder. The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation."
Samuels concludes powerfully:
American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images 5.02pm: Human Rights First has sent a strongly worded letter to Amazon's Jeff Bezos, asking his company to "make clear the decision-making process that led Amazon to drop Wikileaks from its servers and to share with the public which parts of the United States government contacted Amazon to request that it do so."
Elisa Massimino, the chief executive of Human Rights First, went on to say in the letter:
With the holiday gift giving season approaching, undoubtedly the last thing Amazon wants to see is customers concerned by talk of boycotts, possible legal issues, and political uproar. However, like information technology companies the world over facing government requests to censor or restrict online activity, your company's actions affect the rights of millions of individuals today and will help determine whether the Internet of tomorrow lives up to its promise to provide people with greater freedom to express themselves and organize or, instead, becomes simply another forum where governments exercise unjust control over the rights of their citizens.
5.15pm: Unfunny Economist cartoon.
5.23pm: One of the spiciest news items that first emerged from the US embassy cables was this New York Times article that Iran had obtained 19 long-range missiles from North Korea. Some doubts soon emerged about the veracity of the information in the cables – well reported by Justin Elliott at Salon – and today the New York Times has had a second go at the subject:
[A] review of a dozen other State Department cables made available by WikiLeaks and interviews with American government officials offer a murkier picture of Iran's missile capabilities. Despite the tone of the February cable, it shows there are disagreements among officials about the missiles, and scant evidence that they are close to being deployed.
This highlights an interesting point: the cables are only as good as the information that US diplomats themselves have at the time they were written, and can offer an incomplete picture.
5.33pm: Cif America's Sadhbh Walshe listens to America's right-wing shock jocks so you don't have to. Here's Laura Ingraham – who likes what's she hearing from the WikiLeaks cables:
We now know Hillary Clinton is my kind of gal, because she wants to spy on people at the United Nations. That's the best thing I've heard about Hillary all day, all year, all decade. Good for her: we should be spying on these people, that's what I say. But it's not good that it's come out.
4.49pm: The Columbia Journalism Review has the transcript of an interview with Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Centre, and he has this insight into Amazon's craven decision to boot WikiLeaks off its servers:
The interesting thing about it is, the actual cables, the actual data in question, wasn't being distributed on Amazon servers. That's being hosted on a peer-to-peer network, so what Amazon was distributing was basically the index page: 'here's what we have, here's the link to the torrent files.' So the truth is, you'd have a hard time getting an injunction saying that Amazon was contributing to espionage or to the dissemination of stolen goods, because in fact, all they were really doing was hosting the HTML page that said, here's how to go get this on bit torrent.
So why did Amazon do it? Zuckerman speculates:
I think Amazon probably did a mental calculation and said, 'if we don't do this, we're going to end up the subject of a boycott on Fox News, and that's coming right before the Christmas season, we can't afford that.' I have no way of justifying that statement; that's a speculation. But I understand why they might be concerned about this.
6.10pm: An must-read piece from Hal Roberts – also at Harvard's Burkman Centre – arguing that Amazon's stated reasons for dropping WikiLeaks was even worse than if it had bowed to political pressure – and he's got a very good point:
The core of [Amazon's] argument is that WikiLeaks was hosting content that it did not own and that it was putting human rights workers at risk.... If this is really how they made their decision, this is a worse process than merely succumbing to the political pressure of the US government. At least Lieberman is an elected official and therefore to some degree beholden to his constituents. Amazon is instead arguing dismissively that it made the decision based on its own interpretation of its terms of service. Without getting into the merits of either side, the questions of whether Wikileaks has the rights to the content and especially of what level of risk of harm merits censorship are very, very difficult and should clearly be decided by some sort of deliberative jurisprudence rather than arbitrarily and dismissively decided by a private actor.
This need for careful, structured, and public deliberation on these questions is obviously balanced by Amazon's right to decide what to do with its own property. But as a society, we have reached a place where the only way to protect some sorts of speech on the Internet is through one of only a couple dozen core Internet organizations. Totally ceding decisions about control of politically sensitive speech to that handful of actors, without any legal process or oversight, is a bad idea (worse even than ceding decision to grandstanding politicians). The problem is that an even worse option is to cede these decisions about what content gets to stay up to the owners of the botnets capable of executing large DDOS attacks.
6.32pm: If you've only just joined us, earlier today Julian Assange held a live Q&A with Guardian readers via the internet. In it he answers a question that I've heard many times from readers and journalists:
Can you explain the censorship of identities as XXXXX's in the revealed cables? Some critical identities are left as is, whereas some are XXXXX'd. Some cables are partially revealed. Who can make such critical decisons, but the US gov't? As far as we know your request for such help was rejected by the State department. Also is there an order in the release of cable or are they randomly selected?
Julian Assange replied:
The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it. The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working.
The full Q&A transcript is here.
6.49pm: The BBC has toned down its earlier claim (see 2.32pm – all times here are GMT, five hours ahead of ET) that Julian Assange is about to be arrested. Its latest news item merely says "[A] Scotland Yard spokesman said that, as of 1600 GMT on Friday, no arrest had been made."
7pm: Ryan Gallagher at OpenDemocracy puts the WikiLeaks controversy into the context of British politics:
So far Cameron's strategy on Cablegate has been one of avoidance and denial. "We are not going to get drawn into the detail of the documents," said his spokesman. The Prime Minister was instead in Zurich yesterday alongside David Beckham and Prince William, making a failed bid to host the World Cup in 2018. But he cannot evade the encroaching reality of this exposé for much longer.
7.24pm: MSNBC currently discussing Julian Assange's Q&A with the Guardian via its Stockholm correspondent, standing outside and shivering.
Fox News also covers the online Q&A, quoting Assange's comment to Guardian readers "That depends on you."
7.47pm: The US embassy cables might be circulating around the world but the US government is telling federal employees that the cables are still classified and that they cannot be viewed on their computers.
Al Kamen of the Washington Post has an email from the Commerce department's Commerce Computer Incident Response Team, telling staff that the "information is NOT authorized for downloading, viewing, printing, processing, copying or transmitting" on your government "computers, laptops, blackberries or other communications devices":
"Accessing the WikiLeaks documents will lead to sanitization of your PC to remove any potentially classified information from the system and result in possible data loss," the e-mail warns.
Kamen also reports that the Department of Education is blocking access to the WikiLeaks website from its network.
President Obama in Afghanistan today. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters 8pm: The US news networks are reporting that Obama's trip to Afghanistan today and plans to talk to Karzai have been frustrated.
Earlier today the line was that Obama had planned to meet with Karzai but that the weather made it impossible for the US party to get to Kabul by helicopter and a teleconference was arranged instead. Now the word is that the planned video conference was also canceled – raising questions about why even that couldn't happen. Reuters reports from Bagram Air Base:
Obama spoke to Karzai by phone from Bagram Air Base outside the capital after a planned helicopter visit was scrapped. US officials said they had hoped to set up a secure videophone line but weather and technical difficulties prevented that.
8.17pm: Following the item at 7.47pm below – on how US government employees are barred from looking at WikiLeaks's site – comes chilling news that students are being warned not to go near the US embassy cables if they want a career working for the federal government.
This creepy discovery comes from a blogger at the Arabist.net website, Issandr El Amrani, who posts an email from the Office of Careers Service at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). "Hi students," the email begins:
We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.
The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.
8.30pm: Hal Roberts's excellent commentary on Amazon's dangerous decision to boot WikiLeaks off its servers is now also online at Cif America.
8.56pm: US magazine Mother Jones dives into the US embassy cables and finds that the US seriously considered taking action against Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger brother of Hamid Karzai, to "signal a change in US policy on corruption" – but nothing came of it:
Despite widespread allegations about his involvement in Afghanistan's drug trade and other illicit activities, the US government has never taken steps to prosecute Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger half-brother of the Afghan President – though a leaked diplomatic cable suggests American officials may have come very close.
9.13pm: Unfunny McSweeney's piece Fragments From Wikileaks! The Musical.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton: sorry. Photograph: Mazen Mahdi/EPA 9.22pm: Here we go, the latest from the Guardian's WikiLeaks cable coverage rolls off the runway: Clinton begins effort to limit damage with apology to UK
"I personally want to convey to the government and the people of the United Kingdom both my deep respect and admiration for the extraordinary efforts and our regret if anything that was said by anyone suggested the contrary," the US secretary of state said.
She added that it was essential for any government that its ministers, officials and advisers were able to speak frankly and in confidence with one another. "I think everyone knows that if we cannot speak openly and candidly with each other, we can't understand each other and we can't make policy that will benefit each other," she said.
The article also goes into detail about the impact on US-Afghan relations following recent cables showing US ambassador Karl Eikenberry calling Hamid Karzai "a weak individual":
In Kabul, there appeared to be widespread agreement on the streets with Eikenberry's assessment of Karzai as a weak leader.
Abdul Wahid, a Kabul shopkeeper, said: "I agree that he can't make decisions and he doesn't have a good administration to help him. The people around him don't want this government to succeed. Karzai himself is a good man but the people around him are a mafia."
Ahmad Behzad, a politician, said: "Karzai is seriously weak and that has given the terrorists the opportunity to destabilise the country. He is not governing in the best interests of the country. Eikenberry is right."
9.35pm: And our WikiLeaked country of the day is – Yemen
• Yemen offered US 'open door' to attack al-Qaida on its soil
The president of Yemen secretly offered US forces unrestricted access to his territory to conduct unilateral strikes against al-Qaida terrorist targets, the leaked US embassy cables reveal.
In a move that risked outraging local and Arab opinion, Ali Abdullah Saleh told Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, John Brennan, in September 2009: "I have given you an open door on terrorism. so I am not responsible," according to a secret dispatch back to Washington.
• Yemeni president 'bizarre and petulant'
Yemen's long-serving president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, emerges from the US embassy cables as a perplexing partner in the "war on terror" who flits from disdain for the Americans to congeniality while all the time wrestling to keep a lid on the simmering tensions in a country that he warns is on the brink of becoming "worse than Somalia".
The 64-year-old, who has ruled Yemen for half his life, is variously labelled as "petulant" and "bizarre" in his negotiations with US security officials who met him in Yemen on several occasions in 2009 as concern grew about al-Qaida's resurgence in the country.
9.48pm: The US diplomatic efforts on climate change negotiations is the subject of a new tranche of cables released this evening:
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
10.12pm: WikiLeaks and FIFA's World Cup decisions – how to weld those two unrelated stories together into one seamless whole? Frank Foer of the New Republic – or "TNR" as the kids today call it – pulls it off:
They both highlight the paradoxes of American power. Yes, the world still badly needs us. In the State Department cables, foreign leaders are constantly whispering their agreement with American policy – on subjects from Iran sanctions to Pakistani nukes – and, for the most part, seem happy to have us playing an outsized role in the world. The same is true for the world of soccer, where the relatively well-heeled American consumer remains the biggest prize for the game's marketers. But neither the foreign heads of state nor the rulers of FIFA cared to publicly express their longing for American leadership. We have power without prestige, and allies who are reticent to closely identify with us.
10.37pm: El Pais has a very long, detailed and fascinating account of the US's strenuous efforts to force Spain to fight internet piracy. The 120 cables show the US pushing hard for revised intellectual property laws, using various tactics to push Spanish politicians into taking action, with help from US trade bodies such as the Motion Picture Association of America.
Although El Pais's coverage is in Spanish, the published embassy cables are in English and you can read them here.
11pm: The White House's Office of Management and Budget has told government departments to warn their employees against accessing the leaked US embassy cables from either their home or work computers, according to a memo sent out by the office tonight.
AFP obtained a copy of the memo:
"Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents (whether in print, on a blog or on websites) do not alter the documents' classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents," the OMB said.
"To the contrary, classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate US government authority."
The memo does not bar federal employees from visiting WikiLeaks, just from accessing the classified embassy cables.
11.17pm: The Library of Congress posted a statement on its blog, explaining that it was forced to block access to Wikipedia through its network:
The Library decided to block Wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents' classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.
11.30pm: Time to wrap it up for this evening, with this timely tweet today from Republican congressman Ron Paul, darling of American libertarians:
Re: Wikileaks - In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.

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WikiLeaks can leave you lost in a moral maze

Be clear, right from the start. Any editor presented with a quarter of a million US State Department documents on a WikiLeaks plate has a duty to sift, check – and publish. Newspapers exist to get news into print, not shilly-shally around as pompous (and, alas, often American) champions of the public's right not to know too much. And if, thus far, the most unexpected story of the lot is Washington's inability to keep its diplomatic traffic secret, that's a public service, too.
But clarity, of course, strays into moral mazes as it goes along. The multimedia boss of the Daily Mirror talks about phone hacking in his blog and wonders whether handling hundreds of thousands of stolen memos is really any different. Other bloggers join the chorus. You wait, perhaps, for the Information Commissioner to decide that what Mervyn King told the American ambassador about Messrs Cameron and Osborne (or what Prince Andrew told a noisy dinner party somewhere in the middle of Asia) is information he thinks should be shielded from view.
To which the simple answer is that rules only take you so far. There is a clear public interest in printing most of what's being published by WikiLeaks and its partner papers – though not always in portraying it as high-level decision-making, as opposed to low-level ambassadorial gossip. Diplomats cultivate journalists who tell them things, just as journalists do the other way around. Grosvenor Square's damning verdict on a "rudderless" Gordon Brown might have been a Polly Toynbee column for the Guardian – and probably was.
But is all this different in kind (and in law) from private eyes paid for by the News of the World listening to phone messages on princely mobiles? The detective who did the bugging, and the reporter who paid him, went to prison. Are Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, currently facing arrest in Sweden over alleged sex offences, and Bradley Manning, the US army private charged with dishing the dirt, in a somehow purer situation?
I'd hate to argue it in court. I'd hate to maintain that Sarkozy's temperament or Berlusconi's raddled lifestyle comes with public interest umbilically attached – or that what the US embassy in Moscow says about Russia's "mafia state" could never get the libel eagles circling.
I'd balk, too, at defining the difference between a general trawl through private phone records in search of a story and a matching trawl through 250,000 classified documents in search of something newsworthy.
At which point – casting aside assorted bits of legislation, editing codes and sheaves of moral guidance – a more basic test applies. Do you, printing the WikiLeaks bumper bundle, feel queasy or certain you're trying to do the right thing? How would you feel if you didn't print them? And, equally, would you feel chastened, angry, maybe ashamed, if your telephone hacking exploits were laid out to the full by Private Eye?
Feeling matters hugely in journalism. Feeling is often what unites reporters in red-top land with their loftier brothers up the reading scale. And feeling, here, is another word for instinct. Instinct is what drives the best instant decisions – and puts too much pettifogging purity to shame.

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British police seek Julian Assange over rape claims

British police are continuing to look for the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, over rape allegations made against him in Sweden.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency, which is handling the case, confirmed yesterday it had flagged up an Interpol "red notice" to all UK police forces that the whereabouts of Assange were being sought.
Police sources said Assange would be arrested if they discovered his precise location. The 39-year-old is believed to be in the UK.
A Soca source said: "If there is intelligence or information to say he is in a said location, then that will be acted upon. With a red notice issue it means he's on the radar, on police force systems. Law enforcement Plc is looking for him."
A source close to Assange told the Guardian that his lawyer had been assured by police that he would be approached first if there was any attempt to detain the WikiLeaks founder.
Although the red notice does not amount to an arrest warrant, an Interpol spokesman said that often they were interpreted as a "valid request for provisional arrest" especially if the two countries, such as Sweden and the UK, have extradition treaties.
A Soca source described it as an "initial locate and trace" request by Interpol for Assange, with the red notice asking people to contact police if they have any information about his whereabouts.
Assange, who is from Australia and is thought to have been in London recently, moves regularly from country to country and is known to have spent periods in Britain and Sweden. The source added that police had not received any information relating to the whereabouts of Assange or any indication that he might currently be in the UK.
The red notice concerning Assange was sent from Interpol on 20 November to all its 188 member countries after being contacted by the Swedish authorities who want to interview him over sex offence allegations.
Assange is wanted by Swedish prosecutors on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. He denies the allegations.
Initially details of the notice were marked "restricted" and only came to light yesterday after Sweden said its request could be publicised.
Today, Assange's lawyer issued a vigorous condemnation of the Interpol move. Comparing the Swedish prosecutor to Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, Stalin's notorious security chief, Mark Stephens said "neither Mr Assange nor his lawyers have been provided any further information beyond that reported in the press."
He continued: "This appears to be a persecution and a prosecution. It is highly irregular and unusual for the Swedish authorities to issue a red notice in the teeth of the undisputed fact that Mr Assange has agreed to meet voluntarily to answer the prosecutor's questions. Mr Assange has repeatedly sought meetings with the prosecutrix – both in Sweden and subsequently – in order to answer her questions and clear his name. It is relevant that Mr Assange sought permission from the prosecutrix to leave Sweden and she gave him her permission. Since leaving Sweden Mr Assange has continued to seek meetings with the prosecutrix, but his requests have either been ignored or met with a refusal."
He added: "At this point in time, we have no evidence pointing to a link between these allegations from August and the issue of the Interpol alert just two days after the WikiLeaks first release of US diplomatic cables. However, it is highly unusual for a red notice warrant to be issued in relation to the allegations reported as having been made, since Swedish law does not require custodial orders in relation to the allegation – indeed to our knowledge this is a unique action by the Swedish prosecuting authorities in applying for a red notice on the basis of these allegations.
"We are also investigating whether the prosecutor's application to have Mr Assange held incommunicado without access to lawyers, visitors or other prisoners – again a unique request – is in any way linked to this matter and the recent, rather bellicose US statements of an intention to prosecute Mr Assange."
If Assange is arrested in the UK, police will notify Swedish authorities immediately before he faces proceedings to extradite him to Sweden at City of Westminster magistrates' court in central London.
"Once he has been located, the Swedish authorities would be contacted and then they would send an arrest warrant and that gets processed by us, to make sure it ticks all the boxes within the legislation, and then it gets actioned," said the Soca source.
He said the process could be delayed if Assange chose to appeal against attempts to extradite him.
An Interpol spokesman said: "In cases where arrests are made based on a red notice, these are made by national police officials in Interpol member countries."
The WikiLeaks founder is facing growing legal problems around the world after US Republicans revealed yesterday they were pushing for his criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.

Scotland Yard refused to divulge any discussions that may have taken place concerning Assange.
A Metropolitan police spokesman said: "We don't discuss purported communications regarding extradition cases unless someone is being called before the City of Westminster magistrates court, where we deal with our cases."
Meanwhile, Assange's mother, Christine, who runs a puppet theatre in Queensland, Australia, said she was worried about her son's wellbeing.
"He is my son and I love him, and obviously I don't want him hunted down and jailed. I'm reacting as any mother would. I'm distressed," she told Australian radio. "

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US embassy cables culprit should be executed

The Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has called for whoever leaked the 250,000 US diplomatic cables to be executed.
Huckabee, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination at the last election but is one of the favourites for 2012, joined a growing number of people demanding the severest punishment possible for those behind the leak, which has prompted a global diplomatic crisis.
His fellow potential Republican nominee Sarah Palin had already called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be "hunted down", and an adviser to the Canadian prime minister has echoed her comments.
Huckabee said: "Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty."
He added, according to Politico: "They've put American lives at risk. They put relationships that will take decades to rebuild at risk. They knew full well that they were handling sensitive documents they were entrusted.
"And anyone who had access to that level of information was not only a person who understood what their rules were, but they also signed, under oath, a commitment that they would not violate. They did … Any lives they endangered, they're personally responsible for and the blood is on their hands."
Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the diplomatic cables, is currently being held at a military base. He has been charged with transferring classified data and delivering national defence information to an unauthorised source. He faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison.
The 23-year-old was arrested after boasting in instant messages and emails to a high-profile former hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he had passed the material to WikiLeaks along with a highly classified video of US forces killing unarmed civilians in Baghdad.
Kathleen McFarland, who served in the Pentagon under the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, concurred with Huckabee. "It's time to up the charges," said McFarland, now a Fox News national security analyst. "Let's charge him and try him for treason. If he is found guilty, he should be executed."
It is not just the Americans who are demanding blood. Tom Flanagan, a senior adviser to the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, issued what has been described as a fatwa against Assange, on the Canadian TV station CBC.
"I think Assange should be assassinated, actually," he said. "I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." Flanagan chuckled as he made the comment but did not retract it when questioned, adding: "I wouldn't feel unhappy if Assange does disappear."
Revelations directly relating to Canada have been few and far between so far, although there was some embarrassment for Harper in the leak of a US embassy note from one of the French president's key foreign advisers. It explained that Harper was invited to last year's D-day commemorations in Normandy only because his government was in trouble.
Assange is facing growing legal problems around the world.
The US has announced it is investigating whether he has violated its espionage laws, and his details have been added to Interpol's worldwide wanted list, based on an arrest warrant issued by Swedish prosecutors in connection with rape allegations.
On Monday, Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook: "He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?"

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