WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Arrested in London

The British police arrested WikiLeaks founder and owner Julian Assange on an arrest warrant from Sweden, where Assange is accused of sexual crimes.

“Julian Assange (…) was arrested on a European arrest warrant by appointment at a London police station at 9:30 [a.m.] on 7th December. He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010,” the Metropolitan Police Service said in a statement.

Assange was recently placed on Interpol’s wanted list. The warrant for his arrest stems from accusations of sexual assault by two women Assange had met in Sweden during a business trip to the country. The charges of rape were initially dropped, but the case was reopened and an appeals court has upheld the original accusations.

Assange surrendered to the police himself, stating earlier that he had agreed to meet with the UK police in regards to the outstanding warrant and rape accusations in Sweden. He is due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court later.

Assange’s arrest is just one in a long line of troubles for WikiLeaks and its founder. The site itself has been the victim of DDoS attacks ever since it started releasing secret embassy cables, and several U.S.-based web companies, including Amazon, PayPal, and its DNS service provider, EveryDNS.net, have denied WikiLeaks service. The site is now functioning mostly as series of mirrors, set up by sympathizers around the globe, but it’s still releasing new secret cables on a daily basis.

Wikileaks' struggle to stay online

For rolling news outlets Wikileaks has been a dream come true with thousands of US embassy cables dribbling out titbits of sensitive information and providing new headlines on a daily and even hourly basis.

But for the US government, the revelations are less welcome.

The site has become its bete noire and after making its displeasure clear, US firms that have dealings with it have been quick to turn their backs.

The troubles began for Wikileaks when Amazon which hosted its servers in the US, withdrew services saying the site was breaking its terms and conditions.

They continued when EveryDNS, the domain name firm which allowed the Wikileaks.org address to be translated into an IP address, withdrew services.

Without it, the .org site was effectively shut down.

EveryDNS said that it had terminated services because web attacks aimed at Wikileaks "threatened the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure which enabled access to almost 500,000 other websites".

But despite losing many links in its supply chain, Wikileaks remains defiantly online.

What is WikiLeaks? Read these short paragraphs and you'll be fully up to date with this Worldwide leaks!

WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. The organisation has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States,Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director.

WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award. In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news". Russia extended its support to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange by issuing a statement which suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in the aftermath of the United States diplomatic cables leak.

In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.

WikiLeaks was originally launched as a user-editable wiki site, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model, and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. The site is available on multiple servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.