Julian Assange appeared, as we told you before, by Skype at SXSW over the weekend. Set against a green-screened Wikileaks logo, wearing a scarf straight from the Doctor Who wardrobe department and an actually respectable showing of facial hair, he gave his usual kind of speech. That's to say, one grounded in a lot of…

Operational security, ladies and gentlemen. We have secrets, and we need to keep them! We also need to log them all. Now... where do I register this unredacted treatise on how to interrogate an Arab?

Political asylum is a weird idea: One country gets to tell another country: We think your criminal is actually a hero and he can come live here, so buzz off. Pretty annoying if you're the country trying to get the criminal, and the U.S. is really pissed that some countries and human rights groups are helping out NSA…

In the aftermath of the revelations about the NSA's secret spying programs, there is plenty of anger to go around. American citizens are pissed that they were spied on. European governments are pissed that they were spied on. Nobody, it seems, is happy with being spied on. So why is spying such an accepted institution?

Some people say that Edward Snowden is a hero because the secret NSA spying program that he exposed was ripe for abuse. Other people say Edward Snowden is a villain, because the program seemed to be well-run and lawful. Both of these positions are grounded in fantasy. Nobody knows whether the government's power was…

The CIA's secret Saudia Arabia drone base was finally revealed this week (again, after having been revealed in 2011 a couple times) to much controversy. Now Wired's Danger Room blog appears to have located this base, which was used in the 2011 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born radical Muslim cleric in Yemen.

What is a secret drone base that's not actually a secret? The Washington Post and the New York Times revealed today that they were among a number of news organizations that participated in a blackout regarding the location of a "secret" CIA drone base in Saudia Arabia at the behest of the Obama Administration. But it…

We would all like to know as much as we can about the Obama Administration's top-secret program of assassinating U.S. citizens with drones, so we can figure out how best not to get assassinated. But don't look to the pages of U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post, which cooperated with the Administration to…

We've called him a "seed-spilling sex creep," a "pale nerd king," and "a real-life The Matrix extra," so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a…

When the New York Times published a detailed story by chief Washington correspondent David Sanger today confirming the U.S. as the co-author of the Stuxnet virus and outlining Barack Obama's role in directing a highly classified digital monkeywrenching program against Iranian nuclear facilities, many observers noted…

After retiring from evil, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went about writing his memoir, Known and Unknown. As part of that effort, he asked the Obama Administration to declassify a bunch of secret documents from his tenure so he could write about them and publish them on his voluminous online library. Obama…

Not to be outdone by the National Archives, which is releasing a redacted version of the Pentagon Papers 40 years after they were actually published, the National Security Agency today declassified a book on cryptology that was published in 1809, during the presidency of James Madison. If it had been leaked before the…

After 40 years of painstaking labor, Pentagon researchers have finally combed through the 7,000-page Top Secret Pentagon Papers to ensure that none of the information contained therein—almost all of which has been public for as long as Marco Rubio has been alive—will harm the national security if released. Guess what?…

If you're a lawyer for one of the 170 or so remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay, you're probably happy that Wikileaks has finally dropped the classified case files for each defendant showing just how spurious, thin, and ludicrous much of the evidence against them is. That sort of information could come in handy for…

In a bid to show its transparency bona fides, the CIA has released six previously secret documents from World War I, thirty years before the Agency was created. They concern invisible ink. Which, until today, was a national secret.

Bill Keller, the editor of America's greatest newspaper, continues to systematically dismantle his professional reputation by writing an unnecessary, vainglorious, and ill-advised column in the New York Times Magazine, in which he demonstrates, week by depressing week, that he's not as great as you would have…

The notorious tea party-backing, climate change-denying Koch brothers are hosting their semiannual secret meeting of 200 rich and powerful people this year in Palm Springs. There they will plot global domination and compare yachts. And no tweeting allowed!

It's clear that the federal government's absurd war on Wikileaks broke free of the bonds of reason weeks ago, but this State Department memo issued today serves as a nice reminder: Staffers can't read Wikileaks cables on their "personal time."

Doddering cottonhead Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has already stated that he doesn't know what "Wikileaks" is. Today, he adds: can't we just go back to the days when Richard Cohen could caress the testicles of the powerful, in peace?