But tbh I'm surprised that Assange is still alive tho. Someone that's stirring up waters that much is bound to have a fatal "accident".
I am not surprised. It is not that easy to kill someone who is holed up inside the diplomatic mission of a foreign nation. And diplomatic staff tend to be fiercely patriotic, which makes them less vulnerable to bribes and kickbacks. The "intrusion" which happened a few days back was a desperate attempt by Hitlery to assassinate Assange. But even that proved to be a futile exercise.
What is very telling about the safety of the U.K. In general is that with their overall cctv coverage they were (voluntary) unable to catch this assailant.
But killing him does not stop the leaks. These guys not uncommonly set up a series of releases to occur UNLESS then provide notice not to release them. This can be done a number of ways and is rather old technique.
I guessed that the volume of material coming in to Wikileaks has gone up dramatically of late. Assange mentioned this the other day and complained that the team was swamped.
In addition to the now dated 'insurance.aes256' file and it's follow-on which everyone has, a lot of other packages will probably float up into the ether should Assange depart from the living.
If I were Assange, I would make a series of base packages customized with unique auxiliary information. The idea would be to create a post-Assange world where the original Wikileaks continues to chug along while a variety of newly born leak sites with few connections to the parent sprout up. Those which find a foot-hold and tread carefully in an increasingly dangerous environment will continue on. Many will fall of course, and that is the point of sowing many seeds.
It's not possible to stop information flow on the internet. Sure, sites can be "shut down." But look at what that means. Simply removing the link in the database by ICANN between the website name, and the actual website IP address.
The IP address remains, of course. Then anyone publishing a list, searchable by Google, in the following format -
banned website name = xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa
and it would follow that Google would provide the link that ICANN no longer could.
It was interesting, the technique used by that strange creature "silk road," of jumping around on the tor network.
Many other techniques exist. I suspect that the increased use of cloud storage in the future will eliminate "portals" of the sort that ICANN represents. There's also of course, blockchain technology.
Of course, this means it's of strategic importance for governments to penetrate and control operations such as Google.