Monday, August 2, 2010

Wikileaks editor interrogated by US border police


By Stephen Foley in Las Vegas
The Independent

"A senior volunteer for Wikileaks in the US has been detained, questioned and had his phones seized when he returned to the country from Europe, as the FBI steps up its investigation into the leak of thousands of Afghanistan war secrets to the whistleblower website.

Jacob Appelbaum, who has stood in for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange since he was advised not to travel to the US, spent three hours at a New York airport while customs officers photocopied receipts and searched his laptop, and he was again approached and questioned by FBI officers at a computer hackers conference in Las Vegas on Saturday.

Two officers approached Mr Appelbaum after he had given a talk on how to subvert Chinese government internet surveillance at the annual DefCon conference. He declined to talk to them.....

At DefCon, Mr Appelbaum refused to confirm or comment on his detention but defended Wikileaks' commitment to exposing information that governments around the world want suppressed. "All governments are on a continuum of tyranny," he said. "In the US, a cop with a gun can commit the most heinous crime and be given the benefit of the doubt. In the US, we don't have censorship but we do have collaborating news organisations.""

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