Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi, convicted last week of a hate crime for spying on his gay roommate’s date, regrets his “dumb kid” actions, but told ABC News today that he takes “comfort” in the belief that his webcam peeking is not the reason Tyler Clementi jumped to his death.
Ravi, 20, of Plainsboro, N.J., spoke about the case just days after a New Jersey jury convicted him of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, witness tampering and hindering arrest for using a webcam to peek at Clementi’s date in their college dorm room on Sept. 19, 2010 and encouraging others to spy during a second date, on Sept. 21, 2010.
Ravi was not charged in connection with Clementi’s death.
“Even though I wasn’t the one who caused him to jump off the bridge, I did do things wrong and I was stupid about a lot of stuff,” Ravi said in an exclusive broadcast interview with “20/20″ co-anchor Chris Cuomo.
Ravi, who was 18 at the time, was initially rattled by Clementi’s death, which the press depicted as the result of cyber bullying.
He asked himself, “Is this because of me?” Ravi told Cuomo.
But Ravi said that what he learned about his freshman roommate during the course of legal proceedings — including information that hasn’t been made public — convinced him that the 18-year-old took his life for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with Ravi and his webcam.
“The more and more I found out, it would be kind of obnoxious of me to think that I could have this profound effect on him,” Ravi said.
At another point he added, “After all this time and reading his conversations and how and what he was doing before, I really don’t think he cared at all.
I feel like I was an insignificant part to his life. That’s giving me comfort now.”
Ravi also pointed out that Clementi left behind a note, and that its contents have never been made public.
“The fact that we weren’t allowed to read it, that they said it didn’t have anything to do with this, that gave me comfort also because I figured if it has nothing to do with me…it must have been something else that was going on,” he said.
“He didn’t even care about this… He had bigger problems in his life,” he said.
Ravi, alerted by his dorm resident adviser that Clementi was aware of his spying and wanted a room change, sent Clementi a text and an email apologizing. That text was sent about the same time that Clementi jumped off the bridge.
“What is frustrating was I never knew if he got my text or the e-mail that I sent.
It was very frustrating to think I didn’t get a chance to say anything to him. To this day, I just say you know what, I’ll just think he read it and he got it and I’m going to accept that as that’s what happened. …At least he had to hear what I had to say.” Ravi is scheduled to be sentenced May 21 and could face five to 10 years in prison.
As an Indian citizen who is in the U.S. on a green card, Ravi could also face deportation.
Despite the hate crime conviction, Ravi maintains his innocence. He said he never hated Clementi and is not homophobic. That’s why, he said, he turned down prosecutors when they offered a plea deal that included no jail time in exchange for admitting to charges of intimidation against Clementi.
“I had to go up there in front of a judge under oath and say I intimidated Tyler because of sexual orientation — (to say that) I did this because I had this hate for gay people,” he said. “I don’t hate gay people.”
It is believed Clementi learned about his roommate’s spying over Ravi’s Twitter account, on which Ravi posted messages about the incidents.
The first time, Ravi said, he and a friend watched Clementi and his date kissing for just few seconds from another dorm room before quickly shutting it down.
The second time, Ravi said, he planned to let a friend watch the webcam feed, and through a Twitter post he also let other friends know about his plans. But he later decided against it and turned the camera away from Clementi’s bed, he told Cuomo.
During Ravi’s trial, the prosecutor rejected Ravi’s claim to have turned off his computer and turning the webcam away, arguing that it was Clementi who shut it off.
Ravi told Cuomo that his actions were never intended to hurt or shame Clementi and that the Twitter posts were just a way to keep in touch with his own friends and let them know what was going on in his life.
“Looking back, I was very self-absorbed with the whole thing. It was never, ‘What if Tyler finds out, how’s he going to feel about it?’” he said. “…I was 18, I was stupid, I wouldn’t think about my actions beyond a minute into a future. I was a dumb kid not thinking about it.”
Despite media depictions of Clementi and his suicide, Ravi said he believes the teen wasn’t fragile.
“Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he’s automatically fragile and can’t deal with anything,” he said.
While Ravi believes he should face some punishment, that punishment shouldn’t include jail, he said.
“So much worse happens,” he said. “Kids actually get bullied and actually go through stuff much worse than this. I understand why people feel the need to punish me.
Bad stuff happens and they need to set an example, but it’s unfortunate this has to be the case where this happens.”
Ravi said he feels he’s been taken advantage of.
“The people that are fighting for gay rights, they have a just cause. I think this kind of detracts from their cause,” he said. “This is something people can point to and say, ‘You guys are going overboard.’ I think it’s bad for them.”
A series of alarming Twitter posts about President Obama appeared on Fox News’ Twitter account for political news early Monday morning, and the Web site for the cable television network said it was a victim of hacking.
The Twitter account, @foxnewspolitics, one of many operated by Fox News, claimed that the president died while campaigning in Iowa, but gave no source for the news. On Monday morning, FoxNews.com first posted a brief statement saying that the reports were incorrect, and that it regretted “any distress the false Tweets may have created.”
The six messages were removed online around noon on Monday, about 10 hours after they were first posted, but not before attracting a flurry of attention overnight and in the morning.
Because of the seriousness of the content, containing graphic, though fictional, descriptions of the president’s death, senior Secret Service officials had gathered Monday morning to discuss them, said a law enforcement official who declined to be identified because of an investigation into the matter.
A spokesman for the Secret Service, George Ogilvie, said, “We are investigating the matter and will be conducting appropriate follow-up.” The White House declined to comment.
In a statement Monday afternoon, Twitter indicated that its own servers were not broken into; instead, the e-mail account associated with the specific Twitter feed was compromised, and from there the hacker or hackers were able to gain access.
Twitter referred other questions about the incident to Fox News; a spokeswoman there did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The FoxNews.com political news Twitter account, which has some 36,000 followers, had been dormant since Friday, but at about 2 a.m. Monday, a message was posted there that eerily presaged the posts that would follow about the president: “just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th.” The next post said that the president “has just passed. The President is dead. A sad 4th of July indeed.”
The next one said he had been “shot twice in the lower pelvic area and in the neck; shooter unknown,” and offered the disturbing detail that he “bled out.” The next post said that the president was shot at Ross’s restaurant in Iowa.
The last Tweet stated: “We wish @joebiden the best of luck as our new President of the United States. In such a time of madness, there’s light at the end of tunnel.”
President Obama had been spending the weekend with his family at Camp David, and returned to the White House on Sunday, according to the official schedule.
FoxNews.com posted a short statement early on Monday morning explaining what had happened: “Hackers sent out several malicious and false Tweets claiming that President Obama had been assassinated. Those reports are incorrect, of course, and the president is spending the July 4 holiday with his family. The hacking is being investigated, and FoxNews.com regrets any distress the false Tweets may have created.”
Twitter accounts are hacked from time to time, but Monday’s incident attracted national attention because a presidential assassination was referenced and because a major news organization was affected. Increasingly, news organizations like Fox News have embraced Twitter as a venue for promotion and interaction with readers.
The false Twitter posts about Mr. Obama seemed even more provocative because Fox News is widely perceived to be a voice of opposition to the Obama administration. On Monday, thousands of people on Twitter poked fun at the incident and at Fox News by pretending to guess Fox’s Twitter passwords.
A spokeswoman for Twitter, Carolyn Penner, would not address why the posts to the Fox News political Twitter account stayed up so long, nor would she address reports about who was responsible. “We don’t comment on specific accounts, for privacy reasons,” she said.
A group calling itself the Script Kiddies claimed responsibility for hacking the Fox News Twitter account, according to Adam Peck, the former editor of Think, an online student magazine operated at Stony Brook University, who said he had conversed via instant messaging early Monday morning with a member of the group.
The Script Kiddies, Mr. Peck said, had posted to its own Twitter account that it had hacked Fox News’ political Twitter account and wanted to speak to The Huffington Post, supplying an address at the instant-messaging service AIM. Mr. Peck, 23, said he figured he would try the address as well.
The first conversation took place around 12:38 a.m., Mr. Peck said, before the inflammatory posts to Twitter appeared. “We did ask them what their purpose was,” Mr. Peck said. “They said that they did align themselves with Anonymous and the antisec movement,” he added, meaning “anti-security movement,” or hacking efforts designed to uncover information corporations or governments are trying to hide.
In the instant message, the person claiming to be a representative of the Script Kiddies said to Mr. Peck that there “will always be a group of people that need to stand up for everyone else and attempt to keep the governments in balance with its people.” The person claimed to be a former member of the better-known hacker group Anonymous.
According to the instant-message record, which Mr. Peck provided to The New York Times, the person with whom he communicated at Script Kiddies said that Fox News “was selected because we figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting.”
Mr. Peck said he reached back to the Script Kiddies when the first Tweets about the president were published, asking if the group had hacked the Twitter feed.
Mr. Peck said he received a mercurial message in response: “I cannot confirm that at this time. Stay tuned.”
Adding to the confusion, the Twitter account for the Script Kiddies at some point seemed to disappear, Mr. Peck said. He started “frantically searching elsewhere to find corroboration of this story.” But after 10 minutes of not finding it anywhere online, he said he figured it was the work of this group.
Several news reports referenced Think’s interview, but for a time on Monday, the link to the interview was disabled. Mr. Peck, who will be graduating in December with a degree in journalism, said he suspected the shutdown was due to overuse. “We’re not used to having all that much traffic,” he said.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted bail Tuesday after a hearing at Westminster Magistrate's Court in London.
The 39-year-old Australian handed himself over to London police last week to answer a European arrest warrant over alleged sex crimes in Sweden.
Assange is facing accusations of rape, sexual molestation and illegal use of force in separate incidents in August in Stockholm. He could be sentenced to two years in prison if convicted. His lawyers deny the allegations and have vowed to fight any attempts at extradition.
The magistrate agreed to grant bail Tuesday after Assange's team of attorneys reported that Vaughan Smith, a former British army officer who founded London's Frontline Club, had offered his mansion in Suffolk to Assange.
Smith will keep Assange "if not under house arrest, at least under mansion arrest," said defense attorney Geoffrey Robinson. At that, Assange, dressed in a white shirt and a blue jacket and sitting in a glassed-in corner of the court with three security guards, smiled wryly.
The magistrate set bail at 200,000 pounds (about $315,000) plus two sureties of 20,000 pounds each (about $31,500). Assange's passport must remain with police, and he will be monitored by a location tag.
Assange must be at Smith's mansion, about two hours outside of London, for at least four hours overnight and four hours during the day. He will be required to report to police daily between 6 and 8 p.m. The next court hearing was scheduled for January 11.
After the conditions were set, Assange stood and said, "I understand," with a neutral expression.
Outside the court, about 100 people demonstrated in support of Assange, holding signs saying "Julian Assange is a political prisoner" and "Why are you shooting the messenger? This is not 1984."
During the hearing, Assange's team of attorneys argued that since he is only wanted for questioning and has not been formally charged, he is presumed innocent. The magistrate agreed.
But, said Gemma Lindfield, the attorney representing the Swedish prosecution, "The court has already found that Mr. Assange is a flight risk. Nothing has changed in this regard."
She said if the alleged offenses had occurred in Britain, "it undoubtedly would have been a charge of rape in this jurisdiction."
Those in attendance at the hearing included Fatima Bhutto, niece of the late Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto and current Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, and prominent left-wing journalist John Pilger.
The judge denied Assange's first request for bail at a hearing on December 7 on the grounds that there was a risk he would fail to surrender.
WikiLeaks' release of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic and military documents is also under criminal review in the United States.
Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he had authorized "significant" actions related to a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks' publication of the materials but has declined to elaborate.
An attorney for the WikiLeaks founder, citing Swedish authorities, has said a secret grand jury is meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, to consider charges related to the release of the documents.
WikiLeaks inflamed U.S. authorities last month by publishing the first of a large group of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables.
Only a small fraction of the 250,000 U.S. State Department documents have been released and more are being published daily.
U.S. authorities and other Western leaders say the documents' publication threatens lives and national security.
WikiLeaks and its supporters say that the public has a right to know what is going on behind diplomatic doors.
Assange has been in custody since handing himself over to police last week.
On Tuesday, Australian broadcaster and CNN affiliate, Seven News, said it had received his first correspondence since being imprisoned.
The network said Assange's mother, Christine, who is in London after traveling from Australia to be near her son, handed it a note in response to her question as to whether it had been worth it.
The statement from her son said: "My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have expressed. This circumstance shall not shake them. If anything this process has increased my determination that they are true and correct."
Christine Assange told Seven News she supported her son and appealed for others to do the same. "As a mother, I'm asking the world to stand up for my brave son," she said.
On his last appearance in court, several celebrities joined protesters with offers to post bail.
In an email entitled "Hands Off WikiLeaks," human rights activist Peter Tatchell urged readers to join him outside the court to defend the website and its founder.
"The WikiLeaks revelations regarding secret U.S. diplomatic cables have exposed the two-faced, dirty diplomacy of the U.S. government and its support for unsavoury regimes and human rights abusers," Tatchell wrote.
He added: "Although the charges against Assange look like a fix to silence and discredit him, there may be truth in them. It is impossible to be sure either way. However, what is beyond question is that some top people in the U.S. are out for revenge. They want to destroy Assange and WikiLeaks."
Since Julian Assange was first accused of sex crimes against two Swedish women in August, his defenders have asserted his innocence and dismissed the allegations as malicious, or trumped up, or part of a politically driven conspiracy.
To his powerful critics, however, the rape charges have become elided with what they consider his other crimes, including accusations of espionage, for which a number of US political figures have already called for his execution.
But if the WikiLeaks controversy has seemed ferocious in its intensity to date, the fact that Assange is tonight in custody as an accused rapist means that the political, technological and moral culture wars that have been skirmishing for months around the website have reached a new pitch of vitriol, in which conspiracy theories, slander and misogyny have become every bit as central to the debate as high-minded principles of justice or freedom of information.
Certainly there are some, not only in the Australian's legal team, who argue that a rape accusation based on the details of the allegations in the public domain – some of them placed there by the women themselves – would be highly unlikely to come to court in this country. Others counter, however, that even those who support Assange or the principle of free speech must let the law decide on serious criminal accusations.
Two women who say they are victims of serious sex crimes find themselves key players in a very ugly reputational slanging match. Named in court only as Miss A and Miss W, their identities have nonetheless been circulating widely online since very soon after the attacks. And with Assange's arrest, parts of the internet have declared open season on the two women, vowing to enlist an army of tech-savvy research assistants skilled in squirrelling out information that others might wish to keep hidden — described with ill-disguised glee today by one blogger as "the First World Infowar".
Rarely can there have been a rape case where the personal details of the alleged victims have been so eagerly sought out by so many. "Is [Miss A] a lesbian?" asks one blog, accompanying its text with photographs of Miss A alongside another woman. "If [she] is gay, and she sleeps with Assange, that's a contradiction. So, I'm inviting the blogosphere to look for the evidence. Be a WikiSleuth! There must be a lot of people who know about [Miss A] and her behavior. Speak up!"
Partisan bloggers have obliged, digging up and publishing previously deleted tweets sent by one of the women while at a party with Assange, details of texts sent by the other, Miss W, following her sexual encounter with Assange, blog entries by Miss A in which she talks about her political outlook and opinions, even a document written by the same alleged victim entitled "7 steps to legal revenge", in which she writes: "Go to it and keep your goal in sight. Make sure your victim suffers just as you did."
These are now part of a distasteful and unsettling story, many details of which, thanks to a Swedish police leak and an interview given by Miss A to a Swedish paper, are in the public domain.
The story appears to proceed as follows: Miss A, having invited Assange to speak to a leftwing campaign group in the town of Enkoping, suggested he stay in her flat, although the two had not met. Both agree that they slept together on the night before the event, during which the condom split.
The following day, the woman attended and helped facilitate the event, at which Miss W was also present. According to her police interview, Miss W accompanied the Australian and some male guests to lunch at which he flirted with her; afterwards the pair went to the cinema, where she told police she had performed oral sex on him. They slept together that night, using a condom, and again the following morning, when both parties appear to agree that a condom was not used, after which Assange left.
What happened next will be the subject of any legal process, but according to her testimony Miss W, for some reason, got in touch with Miss A (they did not previously know each other); some days later the two went to a Stockholm police station where they said they were "seeking advice" on making a complaint against Assange. Miss A is understood to have told police that he had ripped the condom on purpose, while Miss W said the unprotected sex act had been without her consent. They were reportedly advised by the police officer that these allegations amounted to rape against Miss W and sexual molestation against Miss A.
The accusations leaked to the press two days later, shortly after which Miss A gave an interview to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. She said: "The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who had attitude problems with women."
A Swedish court may yet be called upon to adjudicate on the facts of the case in due course; that has not stopped an unedifying and arguably unprecedented assault on the reputations of the two women. Described as "a seasoned feminist warrior" in the Daily Mail – not a publication that regards that term as a compliment – details of Miss A's CV, from her feminist campaigning at university, where she was the campus equalities officer, to her role in the Swedish political party that in August invited Assange to speak, are widely available. Another website that reasserts the voice of men in the mainstream media calls her a "psychotic feminist".
What has most engaged the conspiracy theorists and Assange's more excitable defenders, however, are a few key incidents in Miss A career, in particular that she is said to have worked in the Swedish embassy in the US, and wrote her university thesis in 2007 on a vision of Cuba after the death of Castro.
This has led to widespread allegations that the woman is a CIA agent, planted as a honeytrap to bring down Assange. One blogger notes: "[Assange] just happens to meet a Swedish woman who just happens to have been publishing her work in a well-funded anti-Castro group that just happens to have links with a group led by a man at least one journalist describes as an agent of the CIA: the violent secret arm of America's foreign policy.
"Cuba … just happens to be the global symbol of successful defiance of American foreign policy … [while Assange] just happens to be the man America's political class – the people who run America's foreign policy – have been trying to silence."
Video footage of the other woman attending the event addressed by Assange is also available, meanwhile; her details and the name of her partner, an American artist, are also circulating.
Assange's defenders will argue that he, too, has been the subject of a vigorous online and media assault, that has intensified with the rape arrest. The NBC journalist Matt Lauer greeted news of Assange's arrest by declaring "the international manhunt for Julian Assange is over", although no warrant was issued until Monday night, after which the Australian, whose whereabouts were not unknown, immediately presented himself at a police station.
With Assange due to reappear in court on 14 December, his immediate future is clear, even if what will happen after that date, to the man and his website, is anyone's guess. The lives of his two accusers, however, whether he is guilty or not, are likely to be depressingly predictable. "Spread the word," reads another site, "Julian Assange's lying rape accusers are [Miss A and Miss W]. These women need to be exposed for what they have done. I'm adding some more pictures that my readers have found. Here's one …," says one website.
What did U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder mean when he said Monday that "there are other statutes, other tools that we have at our disposal," beyond the laws against espionage, that could be used to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange?
For one thing, government officials say, the Justice Department is considering whether a federal law dealing with theft of government property would apply. Part of that statute makes it a crime to receive or keep property that's known to have been stolen. The law applies to anyone who receives it with intent to "convert to his own use or gain."
While that would seem to be a possible fit to the WikiLeaks case, the law has apparently never been used to prosecute anyone for receiving classified information.
It was used in 1984 to prosecute a US naval intelligence analyst, Samuel Morison, who gave top secret photographs of a Soviet aircraft carrier to a British publication, Jane's Defense Weekly. Only Morison was prosecuted, not the publication. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
And in 2001, a former analyst for the Drug Enforcement Administration, Jonathan Randal, was prosecuted under that same law for giving unclassified information to a London newspaper. Once again, the newspaper was not charged. Randal pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in prison.
Another federal law makes it a crime to retain classified information that was obtained by improperly accessing it on government computers. The law applies only to the person who actually gets it from a computer and does not directly criminalize retaining classified information that was obtained by someone else. But some legal experts think it could be used to charge someone who's an accessory after the fact.
That brings us back to the espionage laws, which the government clearly is considering.
One of the espionage statutes makes it a crime to receive national defense information if one knows it was obtained illegally and has reason to believe that it could be used "to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation."
Some legal experts believe Assange may have tried to inoculate himself against this law when he asked in late November if the U.S. wanted any names blacked out of the most recent document dump.
But on Nov. 27, the State Department sent him a letter advising him that publishing further documents would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals — from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security."
Publication would also, the letter said, place military operations at risk and jeopardize U.S. relations with other countries. The letter was clearly intended to defeat any subsequent argument by Assange that he had no idea the material could be used to injure the U.S.
It's worth noting that the letter, signed by Harold Koh, the State Department's legal adviser, also said that the diplomatic cables WikiLeaks was about to release were obtained illegally and that "as long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing." That incidates that some government lawyers have concluded that WikiLeaks is violating the espionage laws merely by retaining the cables.
The government faces a considerable obstacle with the espionage laws: They've never before been used to charge a recipient who publishes classified information.
But a senior Justice Department official says the government may be preparing to argue that it's not going after newspapers that actually publish the information in the traditional sense. It would instead claim that WikiLeaks is functioning as a kind of storehouse, gathering and maintaining the material in clear violation of the law.
And there's another obstacle. Before federal prosecutors could put Julian Assange on trial, they'd have to get him here. The U.S. has extradition treaties with several European countries, including Sweden. But some do not apply to crimes considered political. Assange's lawyers could argue that any U.S. prosecution was politically motivated. In any event, the extradition process can take months to work through the courts overseas.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defended his secrets-spilling website in an editorial published in an Australian newspaper Wednesday, a day after he was arrested in London in a sex-crimes investigation.
In the editorial, published by The Australian, Assange writes that there is a great need for WikiLeaks and denies that the site's publication of classified information has endangered lives.
"WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed," Assange wrote. "But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone."
Also Wednesday, WikiLeaks tweeted a statement on Assange's arrest in Britain on Tuesday.
"Today, Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange was refused bail by a UK court ... However, this will not stifle Wikileaks," spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said in a statement. "The release of the US Embassy Cables — the biggest leak in history — will still continue. This evening, the latest batch of cables were released, and our media partners released their next batch of stories."
The statement also made note of efforts to cut off the flow of money to WikiLeaks.
"We will not be gagged, either by judicial action or corporate censorship. Today Visa joined Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon, EveryDNS and others in cutting off their links," Hrafnsson said. "Wikileaks is still online. The full site is duplicated in more than 500 locations. Every day, the cables are loaded more than 50 million times."
In his editorial, Assange wrote that democracies require strong media to keep governments honest and that WikiLeaks helps fulfill that role. "WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption."
The 39-year-old Australian surrendered to British officials Tuesday to answer a warrant issued for his arrest by Sweden. He is wanted for questioning after two women accused him of having sex with them without a condom and without their consent.
Assange's lawyers say the accusations stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex" and say the women only made the claims after finding out about each other's relationships with Assange.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters in Brisbane Wednesday that Australia would support Assange as it would any Australian arrested abroad.
"Any Australian citizen is entitled to the presumption of innocence — and that includes Mr. Assange," Rudd said.
During his court appearance, Assange said he would fight extradition to Sweden and he provided the court with an Australian address. Britain's Sky News reported that Assange was receiving consular assistance from officials at the Australian High Commission.
The next court hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday, and Assange will remain in custody until then because he was deemed to be a flight risk.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was sent to jail Tuesday while a London court decides whether to order his extradition to Sweden.
The judge at the City of Westminster Magistrate's Court refused to grant Assange bail, despite several celebrities coming forward and offering to pay his surety.
Assange, who was in court with security guards on either side of him and his lawyer in front, must now stay in custody until December 14. It was not immediately clear if the court would decide on that date whether to release him.
In making his decision, the judge cited the fact that Assange gave no permanent address and has a nomadic lifestyle, and that he has access to significant funding that would make it easy for him to abscond.
English socialite Jemima Khan had offered to pay surety of 20,000 pounds ($31,500) and journalist John Pilger also offered a sum of money.
At the start of the proceedings, Assange was asked for his address and at first gave a post office box. When told that wasn't sufficient, he wrote a location on a piece of paper and handed it to the judge; it was later revealed that Assange wrote "Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on the paper.
The judge repeatedly said the case is "not about WikiLeaks," but about serious sexual offenses that allegedly occurred on three occasions with two women.
The media was allowed inside the courtroom initially but was later ordered to leave.
Assange appeared in court after turning himself in at a London police station. He was arrested on a Swedish warrant, though he has not been charged with any crime.
He refused to agree to be extradited to Sweden, so the court now has roughly 21 days to decide whether to order his extradition, said Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association.
Even though the Swedish warrant is a European arrest warrant designed for easy transfer of suspects among European states, Assange may still fight it, Ellis said. If the court does decide to allow his extradition, Assange will be allowed to appeal that decision, too, elongating the legal process, he added.
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has said he has long feared retribution for his website's disclosures and has called the rape allegations against him a smear campaign.
Sweden first issued the arrest warrant for Assange in November, saying he is suspected of one count of rape, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of unlawful coercion -- or illegal use of force -- allegedly committed in August.
The Australian High Commission in London said Tuesday it was providing consular assistance to Assange as it "would to any Australian under arrest."
Last week, at the request of Sweden's Stockholm Criminal Court, Interpol issued a "red notice" placing Assange on a list of wanted suspects.
A spokesman for WikiLeaks said Tuesday the legal proceedings in London had not affected the site, which facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information.
"WikiLeaks is operating as normal, and we plan to release documents on schedule," spokesman Kristinn Hrafnson said.
WikiLeaks has been under intense pressure from the United States and its allies since it began posting the first of more than 250,000 U.S. State Department documents November 28.
Since then, the site has been hit with denial-of-service attacks, been kicked off servers in the United States and France, and found itself cut off from funds in the United States and Switzerland.
In response, the site has rallied supporters to mirror its content "in order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the internet." More than 500 sites had responded to the appeal by Monday evening, it said.
WikiLeaks has also posted a massive, closely encrypted file, identified as "insurance" -- a file Assange's lawyer has described as a "thermonuclear device." Assange has said the more than 100,000 people who have downloaded the file will receive the key to decoding it should anything happen to him or should the site be taken down.
"The insurance file will only be activated in the gravest of circumstances if WikiLeaks is no longer operational," Hrafnson said.
Ira Winkler, a former National Security Agency analyst, said the file is nearly impossible to decode without the key.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he has authorized "significant" actions related to a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, saying U.S. national security has been put at risk.
"We are doing everything that we can," Holder said Monday, though he declined to answer questions about the possibility that the government could shut down WikiLeaks.
Holder also refused to say whether the actions involved search warrants or requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes wiretaps or other means, describing them only as "significant." British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the leaked information is also a danger to British national security, calling the leaks "reprehensible" and "irresponsible."
"Governments have to be able to transmit confidential information, to share confidential information, of course, for them to be able to go about their job," Hague told CNN affiliate ITN. "We think it can be a danger to our national security."
Asked Tuesday in Afghanistan for his response to the arrest, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I haven't heard that, but it sounds like good news to me."
Monday, WikiLeaks published a secret U.S. diplomatic cable listing places the United States considers vital to its national security, prompting criticism from both the United States and Britain that the site is inviting terrorist attacks on American interests.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the disclosure "gives a group like al Qaeda a targeting list."
The sites are included in a lengthy cable the State Department sent in February 2009 to its posts around the world, asking American diplomats to identify installations overseas "whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States."
The diplomats identified dozens of places on every continent, including mines, manufacturing complexes, ports and research establishments. CNN is not publishing specific details from the list, which refers to pipelines and undersea telecommunications cables as well as the location of minerals or chemicals critical to U.S. industry.
Other leaked documents reveal confidential information relayed by U.S. embassies around the world that shed light on the United States and other countries.
A cable prepared for the visit of U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke to Saudi Arabia earlier this year says terrorist funding emanating from the kingdom remains a "serious concern."
A series of cables from last year show Chinese officials were increasingly anxious about their citizens obtaining uncensored online content through Google. One Politburo member said he believed the search engine was a "tool" of the U.S. government.
U.S. diplomatic cables from Mexico say their war against drug cartels is frustrated by a risk-averse army and interagency rivalries. It does, however, highlight outstanding successes against cartel bosses.
Swedish prosecutors issued the arrest order for the 39-year-old Australian who is wanted on suspicion of committing sexual crimes, which he denies.
Assange was arrested at 9:30 a.m. local time (4:30 a.m. ET) Tuesday and was due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day, London's Metropolitan Police said.
Assange has been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began publishing hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables online last month.
The organization's room to maneuver has been narrowing by the day. It has been battered by Web attacks, cut off by Internet service providers and is the subject of a criminal investigation in the United States, where officials say the release jeopardized national security and diplomatic efforts around the world.
Assange's British lawyer, Mark Stephens, had earlier arranged to deliver him to U.K. police for questioning in the sex-crimes investigation.
The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper reported that Assange arrived at court with both of his lawyers, Stephens and Jennifer Robinson, and was expected to release a video statement later Tuesday.
The Guardian reported that WikiLeaks had no plans to issue an encrypted version of its documents that could be published instantly, as it had threatened to do if its staff were arrested.
Assange is wanted on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in Sweden, and the case could lead to his extradition.
Amid Assange's personal legal troubles, his website continued to reveal state secrets.
According to the latest diplomatic cables — reported by the Guardian — NATO has drawn up secret plans to defend the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Poland against any Russian threat.
Nine NATO divisions were identified for combat operations in the event of Russian aggression and countries were grouped together in a new regional defense scheme codenamed Eagle Guardian, the cables said.
Such revelations have prompted the U.S. to consider prosecuting Assange, but the rape allegation presents a more immediate issue.
Interpol placed Assange on its most-wanted list on Nov. 30 after Sweden issued an arrest warrant. Last week, Sweden's highest court upheld the detention order.
Assange has denied the accusations, which Stephens has said stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex." The lawyer has said the Swedish investigation has turned into a "political stunt."
'Keen to clear his name'
Another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, said the WikiLeaks founder had voluntarily offered to cooperate with Swedish prosecutors because he "is very keen to clear his name," but his offers have been refused.
She said it was "disproportionate" to seek an arrest warrant rather than a formal summons for his interrogation.
"Mr. Assange still has not seen the full allegations against him or the potential charges he faces in a language which he understands, which is English, and this is in clear breach of his human rights under the European Convention of Human Rights," Robinson said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The pressure on WikiLeaks mounted from other quarters Monday: Swiss authorities closed Assange's bank account, depriving him of a key fundraising tool.
And WikiLeaks struggled to stay online in the face of more hacker attacks and resistance from world governments, receiving help from computer-savvy advocates who have set up hundreds of "mirrors" — or carbon-copy websites — around the world.
In one of its most sensitive disclosures yet, WikiLeaks released on Sunday a secret 2009 diplomatic cable listing sites around the world that the U.S. considers critical to its security .
The locations include undersea communications lines, mines, food suppliers, manufacturers of weapons components, and vaccine factories.
'Dangerous'
Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan called WikiLeaks' disclosure "dangerous" and said it gives valuable information to the nation's enemies.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday the Obama administration was considering using laws in addition to the U.S. Espionage Act to possibly prosecute the release of government information by WikiLeaks.
Assange has said he and colleagues are taking steps to protect themselves after death threats.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told a news conference Tuesday that it is "grossly irresponsible" for WikiLeaks to publish items like critical infrastructure lists.
But she backed away from her comment made last week that posting classified U.S. government documents on the WikiLeaks website was an "illegal" act.
After being pressed by reporters to distinguish between leaking the documents and posting them, Gillard said their publication would not have been possible "if there had not been an illegal act undertaken" in the United States.
She said police were still investigating whether Assange had broken any Australian laws.
WikiLeaks has been under intense international scrutiny over its disclosure of a mountain of classified U.S. cables that have embarrassed Washington and other governments.
U.S. officials have been putting pressure on WikiLeaks and those who help it, and is investigating whether Assange can be prosecuted under espionage law.
In what Assange described as a last-ditch deterrent, WikiLeaks has warned that it has distributed a heavily encrypted version of some of its most important documents and that the information could be instantly made public if the staff were arrested.
For days, WikiLeaks has been forced by governments, hackers and companies to move from one website to another.
WikiLeaks is now relying on a Swedish host. But WikiLeaks' Swedish servers were crippled after coming under suspected attack again Monday, the latest in a series of such assaults.
It was not clear who was organizing the attacks. WikiLeaks has blamed previous ones on intelligence forces in the U.S. and elsewhere.
'Born with the Internet'
WikiLeaks' huge online following of tech-savvy young people has pitched in, setting up more than 500 mirrors.
"There is a whole new generation, digital natives, born with the Internet, that understands the freedom of communication," said Pascal Gloor, vice president of the Swiss Pirate Party, whose Swiss Web address, wikileaks.ch, has been serving as a mainstay for WikiLeaks traffic.
"It's not a left-right thing anymore. It's a generational thing between the politicians who don't understand that it's too late for them to regulate the Internet and the young who use technology every day," he added.
Meanwhile, the Swiss postal system's financial arm, Postfinance, shut down a bank account set up by Assange to receive donations after the agency determined that he provided false information regarding his place of residence in opening the account. Assange had listed his lawyer's address in Geneva.
"He will get his money back," Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty said. "We just close the account."
Assange's lawyers said the account contained about $41,000. Over the weekend, the online payment service PayPal cut off WikiLeaks and, according to Assange's lawyers, froze $80,000 of the organization's money.
The group is left with only a few options for raising money now — through a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and accounts in Iceland and Germany.
NATO combat plan
According to the latest leaked cables, NATO took a secret decision to draft contingency plans for the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania earlier this year at the urging of the United States and Germany.
The move ended years of division within the alliance over how to view Russia, the Guardian said.
In parallel talks with Warsaw, the newspaper added, Washington offered to beef up Polish security against Russia by deploying special naval forces to the Baltic ports of Gdansk and Gdynia, putting F-16 fighter aircraft in Poland and rotating C-130 Hercules transport planes into Poland from U.S. bases in Germany.
NATO leaders were understood to have quietly endorsed the new strategy to defend vulnerable parts of eastern Europe at a summit in Lisbon last month, the Guardian said.
In Lisbon, NATO and Russia agreed to cooperate on missile defense and other security issues, and hailed a new start in relations strained since Russia's military intervention in Georgia in 2008. U.S. President Barack Obama has a policy of "resetting" relations with Moscow.
But the WikiLeaks cables point to the underlying tension in the relationship between the former Cold War adversaries.
The plan entailed grouping the Baltic states with Poland in a new regional defense scheme, codenamed Eagle Guardian, the paper said.
Poland, the Baltic states and others were rattled by Russia's brief war against Georgia and have been irked by large-scale Russian army exercises in Belarus and by Moscow's new military doctrine that sees NATO expansion as a threat.
The Guardian said nine NATO divisions — U.S., British, German and Polish — had been identified for combat operations in the event of aggression against Poland or the Baltic states.
North Polish and German ports had been listed to receive naval assault forces and British and U.S. warships, the paper said.
The first NATO exercises under the plan were to take place in the Baltic next year, it quoted informed sources as saying.
Germany and other Western European countries had previously opposed drawing up plans to defend the Baltic states, anxious to avoid upsetting Russia.
Earlier this year, the United States started rotating U.S. army Patriot missiles into Poland.
But the secret cables exposed the Patriots' value as purely symbolic. The Patriot battery was for training purposes, and was neither operational nor armed with missiles, said the Guardian.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defended his secrets-spilling website in an editorial published in an Australian newspaper Wednesday, a day after he was arrested in London in a sex-crimes investigation.
In the editorial, published by The Australian, Assange writes that there is a great need for WikiLeaks and denies that the site's publication of classified information has endangered lives.
"WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed," Assange wrote. "But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone."
Also Wednesday, WikiLeaks tweeted a statement on Assange's arrest in Britain on Tuesday.
"Today, Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange was refused bail by a UK court ... However, this will not stifle Wikileaks," spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said in a statement. "The release of the US Embassy Cables — the biggest leak in history — will still continue. This evening, the latest batch of cables were released, and our media partners released their next batch of stories."
The statement also made note of efforts to cut off the flow of money to WikiLeaks.
"We will not be gagged, either by judicial action or corporate censorship. Today Visa joined Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon, EveryDNS and others in cutting off their links," Hrafnsson said. "Wikileaks is still online. The full site is duplicated in more than 500 locations. Every day, the cables are loaded more than 50 million times."
In his editorial, Assange wrote that democracies require strong media to keep governments honest and that WikiLeaks helps fulfill that role. "WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption."
The 39-year-old Australian surrendered to British officials Tuesday to answer a warrant issued for his arrest by Sweden. He is wanted for questioning after two women accused him of having sex with them without a condom and without their consent.
Assange's lawyers say the accusations stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex" and say the women only made the claims after finding out about each other's relationships with Assange.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters in Brisbane Wednesday that Australia would support Assange as it would any Australian arrested abroad.
"Any Australian citizen is entitled to the presumption of innocence — and that includes Mr. Assange," Rudd said.
During his court appearance, Assange said he would fight extradition to Sweden and he provided the court with an Australian address. Britain's Sky News reported that Assange was receiving consular assistance from officials at the Australian High Commission.
The next court hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday, and Assange will remain in custody until then because he was deemed to be a flight risk.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was sent to jail Tuesday while a London court decides whether to order his extradition to Sweden.
The judge at the City of Westminster Magistrate's Court refused to grant Assange bail, despite several celebrities coming forward and offering to pay his surety.
Assange, who was in court with security guards on either side of him and his lawyer in front, must now stay in custody until December 14. It was not immediately clear if the court would decide on that date whether to release him.
In making his decision, the judge cited the fact that Assange gave no permanent address and has a nomadic lifestyle, and that he has access to significant funding that would make it easy for him to abscond.
English socialite Jemima Khan had offered to pay surety of 20,000 pounds ($31,500) and journalist John Pilger also offered a sum of money.
At the start of the proceedings, Assange was asked for his address and at first gave a post office box. When told that wasn't sufficient, he wrote a location on a piece of paper and handed it to the judge; it was later revealed that Assange wrote "Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on the paper.
The judge repeatedly said the case is "not about WikiLeaks," but about serious sexual offenses that allegedly occurred on three occasions with two women.
The media was allowed inside the courtroom initially but was later ordered to leave.
Assange appeared in court after turning himself in at a London police station. He was arrested on a Swedish warrant, though he has not been charged with any crime.
He refused to agree to be extradited to Sweden, so the court now has roughly 21 days to decide whether to order his extradition, said Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association.
Even though the Swedish warrant is a European arrest warrant designed for easy transfer of suspects among European states, Assange may still fight it, Ellis said. If the court does decide to allow his extradition, Assange will be allowed to appeal that decision, too, elongating the legal process, he added.
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has said he has long feared retribution for his website's disclosures and has called the rape allegations against him a smear campaign.
Sweden first issued the arrest warrant for Assange in November, saying he is suspected of one count of rape, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of unlawful coercion -- or illegal use of force -- allegedly committed in August.
The Australian High Commission in London said Tuesday it was providing consular assistance to Assange as it "would to any Australian under arrest."
Last week, at the request of Sweden's Stockholm Criminal Court, Interpol issued a "red notice" placing Assange on a list of wanted suspects.
A spokesman for WikiLeaks said Tuesday the legal proceedings in London had not affected the site, which facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information.
"WikiLeaks is operating as normal, and we plan to release documents on schedule," spokesman Kristinn Hrafnson said.
WikiLeaks has been under intense pressure from the United States and its allies since it began posting the first of more than 250,000 U.S. State Department documents November 28.
Since then, the site has been hit with denial-of-service attacks, been kicked off servers in the United States and France, and found itself cut off from funds in the United States and Switzerland.
In response, the site has rallied supporters to mirror its content "in order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the internet." More than 500 sites had responded to the appeal by Monday evening, it said.
WikiLeaks has also posted a massive, closely encrypted file, identified as "insurance" -- a file Assange's lawyer has described as a "thermonuclear device." Assange has said the more than 100,000 people who have downloaded the file will receive the key to decoding it should anything happen to him or should the site be taken down.
"The insurance file will only be activated in the gravest of circumstances if WikiLeaks is no longer operational," Hrafnson said.
Ira Winkler, a former National Security Agency analyst, said the file is nearly impossible to decode without the key.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he has authorized "significant" actions related to a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, saying U.S. national security has been put at risk.
"We are doing everything that we can," Holder said Monday, though he declined to answer questions about the possibility that the government could shut down WikiLeaks.
Holder also refused to say whether the actions involved search warrants or requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes wiretaps or other means, describing them only as "significant." British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the leaked information is also a danger to British national security, calling the leaks "reprehensible" and "irresponsible."
"Governments have to be able to transmit confidential information, to share confidential information, of course, for them to be able to go about their job," Hague told CNN affiliate ITN. "We think it can be a danger to our national security."
Asked Tuesday in Afghanistan for his response to the arrest, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I haven't heard that, but it sounds like good news to me."
Monday, WikiLeaks published a secret U.S. diplomatic cable listing places the United States considers vital to its national security, prompting criticism from both the United States and Britain that the site is inviting terrorist attacks on American interests.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the disclosure "gives a group like al Qaeda a targeting list."
The sites are included in a lengthy cable the State Department sent in February 2009 to its posts around the world, asking American diplomats to identify installations overseas "whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States."
The diplomats identified dozens of places on every continent, including mines, manufacturing complexes, ports and research establishments. CNN is not publishing specific details from the list, which refers to pipelines and undersea telecommunications cables as well as the location of minerals or chemicals critical to U.S. industry.
Other leaked documents reveal confidential information relayed by U.S. embassies around the world that shed light on the United States and other countries.
A cable prepared for the visit of U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke to Saudi Arabia earlier this year says terrorist funding emanating from the kingdom remains a "serious concern."
A series of cables from last year show Chinese officials were increasingly anxious about their citizens obtaining uncensored online content through Google. One Politburo member said he believed the search engine was a "tool" of the U.S. government.
U.S. diplomatic cables from Mexico say their war against drug cartels is frustrated by a risk-averse army and interagency rivalries. It does, however, highlight outstanding successes against cartel bosses.
Swedish prosecutors issued the arrest order for the 39-year-old Australian who is wanted on suspicion of committing sexual crimes, which he denies.
Assange was arrested at 9:30 a.m. local time (4:30 a.m. ET) Tuesday and was due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day, London's Metropolitan Police said.
Assange has been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began publishing hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables online last month.
The organization's room to maneuver has been narrowing by the day. It has been battered by Web attacks, cut off by Internet service providers and is the subject of a criminal investigation in the United States, where officials say the release jeopardized national security and diplomatic efforts around the world.
Assange's British lawyer, Mark Stephens, had earlier arranged to deliver him to U.K. police for questioning in the sex-crimes investigation.
The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper reported that Assange arrived at court with both of his lawyers, Stephens and Jennifer Robinson, and was expected to release a video statement later Tuesday.
The Guardian reported that WikiLeaks had no plans to issue an encrypted version of its documents that could be published instantly, as it had threatened to do if its staff were arrested.
Assange is wanted on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in Sweden, and the case could lead to his extradition.
Amid Assange's personal legal troubles, his website continued to reveal state secrets.
According to the latest diplomatic cables — reported by the Guardian — NATO has drawn up secret plans to defend the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Poland against any Russian threat.
Nine NATO divisions were identified for combat operations in the event of Russian aggression and countries were grouped together in a new regional defense scheme codenamed Eagle Guardian, the cables said.
Such revelations have prompted the U.S. to consider prosecuting Assange, but the rape allegation presents a more immediate issue.
Interpol placed Assange on its most-wanted list on Nov. 30 after Sweden issued an arrest warrant. Last week, Sweden's highest court upheld the detention order.
Assange has denied the accusations, which Stephens has said stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex." The lawyer has said the Swedish investigation has turned into a "political stunt."
'Keen to clear his name'
Another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, said the WikiLeaks founder had voluntarily offered to cooperate with Swedish prosecutors because he "is very keen to clear his name," but his offers have been refused.
She said it was "disproportionate" to seek an arrest warrant rather than a formal summons for his interrogation.
"Mr. Assange still has not seen the full allegations against him or the potential charges he faces in a language which he understands, which is English, and this is in clear breach of his human rights under the European Convention of Human Rights," Robinson said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The pressure on WikiLeaks mounted from other quarters Monday: Swiss authorities closed Assange's bank account, depriving him of a key fundraising tool.
And WikiLeaks struggled to stay online in the face of more hacker attacks and resistance from world governments, receiving help from computer-savvy advocates who have set up hundreds of "mirrors" — or carbon-copy websites — around the world.
In one of its most sensitive disclosures yet, WikiLeaks released on Sunday a secret 2009 diplomatic cable listing sites around the world that the U.S. considers critical to its security .
The locations include undersea communications lines, mines, food suppliers, manufacturers of weapons components, and vaccine factories.
'Dangerous'
Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan called WikiLeaks' disclosure "dangerous" and said it gives valuable information to the nation's enemies.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday the Obama administration was considering using laws in addition to the U.S. Espionage Act to possibly prosecute the release of government information by WikiLeaks.
Assange has said he and colleagues are taking steps to protect themselves after death threats.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told a news conference Tuesday that it is "grossly irresponsible" for WikiLeaks to publish items like critical infrastructure lists.
But she backed away from her comment made last week that posting classified U.S. government documents on the WikiLeaks website was an "illegal" act.
After being pressed by reporters to distinguish between leaking the documents and posting them, Gillard said their publication would not have been possible "if there had not been an illegal act undertaken" in the United States.
She said police were still investigating whether Assange had broken any Australian laws.
WikiLeaks has been under intense international scrutiny over its disclosure of a mountain of classified U.S. cables that have embarrassed Washington and other governments.
U.S. officials have been putting pressure on WikiLeaks and those who help it, and is investigating whether Assange can be prosecuted under espionage law.
In what Assange described as a last-ditch deterrent, WikiLeaks has warned that it has distributed a heavily encrypted version of some of its most important documents and that the information could be instantly made public if the staff were arrested.
For days, WikiLeaks has been forced by governments, hackers and companies to move from one website to another.
WikiLeaks is now relying on a Swedish host. But WikiLeaks' Swedish servers were crippled after coming under suspected attack again Monday, the latest in a series of such assaults.
It was not clear who was organizing the attacks. WikiLeaks has blamed previous ones on intelligence forces in the U.S. and elsewhere.
'Born with the Internet'
WikiLeaks' huge online following of tech-savvy young people has pitched in, setting up more than 500 mirrors.
"There is a whole new generation, digital natives, born with the Internet, that understands the freedom of communication," said Pascal Gloor, vice president of the Swiss Pirate Party, whose Swiss Web address, wikileaks.ch, has been serving as a mainstay for WikiLeaks traffic.
"It's not a left-right thing anymore. It's a generational thing between the politicians who don't understand that it's too late for them to regulate the Internet and the young who use technology every day," he added.
Meanwhile, the Swiss postal system's financial arm, Postfinance, shut down a bank account set up by Assange to receive donations after the agency determined that he provided false information regarding his place of residence in opening the account. Assange had listed his lawyer's address in Geneva.
"He will get his money back," Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty said. "We just close the account."
Assange's lawyers said the account contained about $41,000. Over the weekend, the online payment service PayPal cut off WikiLeaks and, according to Assange's lawyers, froze $80,000 of the organization's money.
The group is left with only a few options for raising money now — through a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and accounts in Iceland and Germany.
NATO combat plan
According to the latest leaked cables, NATO took a secret decision to draft contingency plans for the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania earlier this year at the urging of the United States and Germany.
The move ended years of division within the alliance over how to view Russia, the Guardian said.
In parallel talks with Warsaw, the newspaper added, Washington offered to beef up Polish security against Russia by deploying special naval forces to the Baltic ports of Gdansk and Gdynia, putting F-16 fighter aircraft in Poland and rotating C-130 Hercules transport planes into Poland from U.S. bases in Germany.
NATO leaders were understood to have quietly endorsed the new strategy to defend vulnerable parts of eastern Europe at a summit in Lisbon last month, the Guardian said.
In Lisbon, NATO and Russia agreed to cooperate on missile defense and other security issues, and hailed a new start in relations strained since Russia's military intervention in Georgia in 2008. U.S. President Barack Obama has a policy of "resetting" relations with Moscow.
But the WikiLeaks cables point to the underlying tension in the relationship between the former Cold War adversaries.
The plan entailed grouping the Baltic states with Poland in a new regional defense scheme, codenamed Eagle Guardian, the paper said.
Poland, the Baltic states and others were rattled by Russia's brief war against Georgia and have been irked by large-scale Russian army exercises in Belarus and by Moscow's new military doctrine that sees NATO expansion as a threat.
The Guardian said nine NATO divisions — U.S., British, German and Polish — had been identified for combat operations in the event of aggression against Poland or the Baltic states.
North Polish and German ports had been listed to receive naval assault forces and British and U.S. warships, the paper said.
The first NATO exercises under the plan were to take place in the Baltic next year, it quoted informed sources as saying.
Germany and other Western European countries had previously opposed drawing up plans to defend the Baltic states, anxious to avoid upsetting Russia.
Earlier this year, the United States started rotating U.S. army Patriot missiles into Poland.
But the secret cables exposed the Patriots' value as purely symbolic. The Patriot battery was for training purposes, and was neither operational nor armed with missiles, said the Guardian.
Welcome to the BLACK POLITICAL BUZZ Blog. (Established 2008)
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