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Julian Assange tried to contact Hillary Clinton and the White House when he realized that unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables given to WikiLeaks were about to be dumped on the internet, his lawyer told his London extradition hearing on Tuesday. Assange is being sought by the United States on 18 counts of hacking U.S. government computers and an espionage offense, having allegedly conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. soldier known as Bradley Manning, to leak hundreds of thousands of secret documents by WikiLeaks almost a decade ago. On Monday, the lawyer representing the United States told the hearing that Assange,...

The developer behind the game-changing, WikiLeaks inspired submission system “SecureDrop,” has allegedly committed suicide. “Second developer of WikiLeaks inspired submission system “SecureDrop”, security expert James Dolan, aged 36, has tragically died. He is said to have committed suicide. The first, Aaron Swartz, is said to have taken his own life at age 26, after being persecuted by US prosecutors,” tweeted WikiLeaks’ official Twitter account.

Special counsel Robert Mueller focused a portion of his final report on WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange making false statements about slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and the theft of emails from Democratic officials. Rich was killed in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016, in what police have described as a botched robbery. But Rich's death quickly became the subject of conspiracy theories claiming he was killed in a politically motivated hit job for leaking stolen emails to WikiLeaks. The redacted Mueller report, released Thursday, said WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, "made several public statements apparently...

Adrian Lamo, the computer hacker who reported Chelsea Manning to authorities for sharing classified documents with WikiLeaks, was found dead in an apartment in Wichita, Kansas, last week, according to local reports. Lamo, whose cause of death has yet to be reported but has been deemed unsuspicious by police, was 37, the Wichita Eagle reported. “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and [acquaintances] that he is dead,” his father, Mario Lamo, posted on Facebook on Friday. “A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son.” Lamo...

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles. Aaron Swartz, 24, of Cambridge, was accused of stealing the documents from JSTOR, a popular research subscription service that offers digitized copies of more than 1,000 academic journals and documents, some dating back to the 17th century. In an indictment released Tuesday, prosecutors say Swartz stole 4.8 million articles between September 2010 and January after breaking into a computer wiring closet on MIT's campus. Swartz, then a student at the...

Anonymous, a band of online vigilante activists, has turned its ire on the U.S. Department of Justice, threatening to release secret, internal documents the group hacked in memory of Aaron Swartz, the Internet prodigy who committed suicide before his federal trial. “With Aaron’s death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration. The time has come to give this system a taste of its own medicine,” read part of the message and video posted on the U.S. Sentencing Commission website, which the activist...

(CNN) -- Adrian Lamo, the former computer hacker who tipped off federal authorities to WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning, says two men in the Boston area have told Lamo in phone conversations that they assisted Manning. Lamo said both men attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he refused to identify them because, he said, at least one of them has threatened him. One of these men allegedly told Lamo they gave encryption software to Manning and taught the Army private how to use it, Lamo said. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, is being held in solitary confinement at a Virginia...

Adrian Lamo, the former recreational hacker who reported Chelsea Manning to authorities, says he’s glad the WikiLeaks source will get a second chance. Lamo elicited a confession from Manning and gave it to military investigators in 2010, resulting in a 35-year prison sentence for the leaker who embarrassed the U.S. government by disclosing a massive number of military and diplomatic documents. The informant says “it was not my most honorable moment,” though he says he made peace with the effects of his decision, even before President Barack Obama on Tuesday granted clemency to Manning, who will be released in May...

HAGERSTOWN, Md. — A key figure in the government's investigation of thousands of leaked secret war records says the suspected culprit had help. Adrian Lamo is the computer hacker who turned in Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning. Lamo says someone told him that he helped Manning set up encryption software that Manning allegedly used to send classified information to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Lamo isn't naming the apparent accomplice. But he says the man is among a group of people in the Boston area who work with Wikileaks.