WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested Dec. 7 on charges of rape and sexual molestation stemming from incidents with two women in August.
WikiLeaks' chief spokesman and founder Julian Assange was denied bail
after being arrested today by U.K.
police for rape and other charges.
Assange, 39, stands accused of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of
sexual molestation and one count of rape stemming from incidents involving two
women in Sweden
this past August. Swedish authorities initially dropped the charges, but in
November, Swedish Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny requested Assange
be arrested.
Assange was taken into custody by the Metropolitan Police's Extradition Unit
at 9:30 a.m. GMT.
In an appearance in City of Westminster
Magistrates Court, according to authorities, he
told the court he would not consent to extradition, according to reports.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, told the Associated
Press that Assange's arrest is an attack on freedom of the press.
"This will not
change
our operation," Hrafnsson was quoted as saying.
As the main face of WikiLeaks, Assange has been at the center of
controversy surrounding the site. Last month, WikiLeaks began releasing a cache
of U.S.
diplomatic cables, opening up a new salvo of attacks-
both
cyber-security and public relations-wise-against the site.
But it's not just WikiLeaks' foes that have been busy;
defenders of
the site have been active as well. After PayPal announced it was blocking
the site's donation account, attackers knocked the PayPal blog offline for more
than 8 hours Dec. 4. A second attack hit the main PayPal site Dec. 6.
Also targeted was PostFinance.ch, which closed Assange's account after
claiming he had lied about his residency. An analysis of the attack by Netcraft
is
available here, and the site remains down as of 11:45 a.m. EST.
The attacks are reportedly the work of 'Anonymous,' a loose affiliation of
people tied to numerous hacktivist incidents. The group published a
seven-point platform pledging continued
attacks and urging supporters to "spread the current leaked cables as much
as possible."
WikiLeaks itself has been subject to denial-of-service attacks, with one coming
shortly before it began publishing the diplomatic cables Nov. 28. A second
attack occurred days later. Amazon also decided to stop hosting WikiLeaks on
its servers, forcing the site to look elsewhere. EveryDNS.net backed away from
the site Dec. 3, disabling services for WikiLeaks' secondary hosted domains as
well as the WikiLeaks.ch domain.
In order to stay alive, the WikiLeaks Website and its CableGate Webpage are
being mirrored on 748 sites.
Meanwhile, U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, who is accused of
leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, remains in U.S.
military custody.
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