Wikileaks

Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, is weighing whether to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's request for political asylum. The Australian-born Assange, who is fighting extradition to Sweden to face sexual-assault allegations, is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Whatever the fiery populist president decides, this is a bizarre story because Correa has shown little tolerance for freedom of expression in Ecuador. He's engaged in a war of words with the media, conjuring up archaic libel laws to go after newspaper owners and a columnist he disagreed with.

WASHINGTON - Two Republican senators called for a formal investigation Tuesday to determine whether President Obama's administration has leaked classified information for the sake of political gain. Outraged by two recent articles published by the New York Times, which exposed the extent of U.S. involvement in cyberattacks made against Iran and the White House's secret 'Kill List,' John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) took to the Senate floor to admonish the administration, and accuse it of widespread disregard for national security.

WikiLeaks and the Pirate Bay suffered denial-of-service attacks this week that brought both websites down. WikiLeaks suffered the more intense attack. The whistle-blower site tweeted Wednesday that it had been getting attacked for the last three days. The site was down for some time, and the organization actually had to put up a mirror site for its users. It was back and seemed to be operating normally by Thursday. No person or organization has been identified as the culprit behind the attack.

A coalition of well-known journalists, activists and civil libertarians have sued President Obama, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. , Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and other members of the U.S. government  to push them to remove or rewrite this year's defense appropriations bill, saying it chills speech by threatening constitutionally protected activities such as news reporting, protest and political organizing in defense of controversial causes...

On the first day of court martial proceedings against an intelligence analyst accused of the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history, lawyers for U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning said the government was unnecessarily drawing out the prosecution in violation of Manning's right to a speedy trial. Manning has been held in pre-trial confinement for 635 days. The arraignment in a military court at Ft. Meade , Md., lasted 50 minutes and focused on legal housekeeping matters, such as setting a date for trial and requests by the defense for more documents from the prosecution.

The Army intelligence analyst accused of being responsible for one of the largest public dumps of classified information in U.S. history chatted online with the founder of WikiLeaks while he was uploading files to the WikiLeaks website, military prosecutors said Thursday. During closing arguments in the pretrial hearing of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, prosecutors flashed excerpts of chat logs to the courtroom that they alleged showed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange coaching Manning on how to decode computer passwords to access secret Army computers under someone else's name.

  Two witnesses for Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst accused of passing a trove of national security secrets to WikiLeaks, testified Wednesday that analysts listened to music CDs, watched videos and played games on their classified computers in Iraq. Army Capt. Barclay Keay, who spent several weeks in charge of the intelligence unit where Manning worked, said he was surprised to see compact discs and other media items inside the supposedly secure facility at Forward Operating Base Hammer, near Baghdad, where the analysts handled highly classified materials.

A prosecution witness told a military judge Tuesday that an emotionally distraught Army Pfc. Bradley Manning confessed to him in encrypted Internet chats to pilfering a vast trove of U.S. military and diplomatic secrets and passing them to the WikiLeaks website. The witness, Adrian Lamo, said he was so alarmed by his online conversations with Bradass87, Manning's Internet handle, over five days in May 2010 that he felt compelled to alert law enforcement, prompting Manning's arrest several days later.

Personal computer drives, compact discs and media cards containing classified information were found during searches of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning's bunk in Iraq and the home of his aunt in Maryland, Army investigators testified on the second day of the soldier's pretrial hearing. Investigators also found chat logs on Manning's personal laptop in Iraq that showed the Army analyst had bragged to a former hacker that he had leaked to the WikiLeaks website hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, ground reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay detainees' files, and videos of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.