Long Live Assange!

from Cnn today:

Since WikiLeaks is in the business of publishing information that governments and multinational corporations want kept secret, the site employs some technical tricks that aim to keep it from crashing or being hacked.
The site keeps servers on multiple continents, and its sensitive information passes through countries -- such as Sweden, Iceland and Belgium -- that have offered WikiLeaks a degree of legal protection.
"We use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails -- pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium to enact those legal protections," the site's controversial editor, Julian Assange, said in an onstage interview at the TED Global conference on July 20.
The fact that WikiLeaks' servers and volunteers are all over the globe makes it, in effect, the "world's first stateless news organization," writes Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University.
Rosen says this is key to the site's ability to protect itself.
"WikiLeaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another," he writes. "This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system."
Assange reportedly has spent his life developing the tech skills needed to set up such a system.
"As a teenager in Melbourne, Australia, he belonged to a hacker collective called the International Subversives," writes the magazine Mother Jones.
He eventually pleaded guilty to multiple counts "of breaking into Australian government and commercial websites to test their security gaps, but was released on bond for good behavior."