EAST SUSSEX, England — Julian Assange accused US lawmakers of calling for his “assassination” in a TV interview aired tonight — as separate revelations emerged that the WikiLeaks founder disguised himself as an old woman in order to evade American intelligence officers.
In the interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Assange called the condemnation of WikiLeaks by US politicians “completely outrageous,” adding that it was “the worst form of censorship we’ve seen since the 1950s, since the McCarthy era.”
“The statements by the Vice President [Joe] Biden saying that I was a high tech terrorist … Sarah Palin calling [for] me to be treated like the Taliban, to be hunted down. These are calls for my assassination or for the assassination of my staff,” Assange said.
Assange gained international notoriety in November 2010 when his WikiLeaks website began publishing over 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables.
Investigators have tried — and reportedly thus far failed — to establish a link between Assange and US Army soldier Bradley Manning, a disillusioned private now under arrest, who is accused of illegally downloading tens of thousands of government documents and passing them to an authorized person.
That person has been widely reported to be Assange, something the 39-year-old Australian has repeatedly denied.
“We’ve actually played inside the rules,” Assange told CBS. “We didn’t go out to get the material. We operated just like any US publisher operated. There’s a special set of rules for soldiers, for members of the State Department for disclosing sets of classified information. Prosecuting a publisher … that is just not done.”
When asked about reports that WikiLeaks was in possession of a 5GB hard drive belonging to a Bank of America executive, Assange declined to comment.
In November 2010, Bank of America’s stock dropped by more than three percent on speculation that WikiLeaks would soon release internal documents.
Assange conducted the interview from a private home in East Sussex, about 45 miles (72km) south of London, where he must reside under bail conditions during an ongoing attempt to extradite him to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault charges — accusations he denies.
Despite the onslaught of criticism directed at WikiLeaks and himself, Assange continued to defend the website’s release of thousands of leaked documents — including secret diplomatic cables and papers on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He denied he was motivated by anti-Americanism or other political agendas, describing his group as “free press activists.”
Assange also said there was no way to stop WikiLeaks, adding that the US government did not have the technology to take the site down or to prevent further leaks.
“We have a system whereby we distribute encrypted backups of things we have yet to publish,” he said.
“There are backups distributed amongst many, many people, 100,000 people, and all we need to do is give them an encrypted key and they will be able to continue on. If a number of people were imprisoned or assassinated we would feel we could not go on and other people would have to take over our work and we would release those keys.”
Meanwhile, extracts from a new biography revealed that Assange disguised himself as an old woman in order to evade US intelligence officers who he believed were following him, AFP reported.
Further passages from “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy,” written by Guardian newspaper journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, also showed that the hacker did not know his biological father until the age of 27.
Assange, who was in England at the time of the cross-dressing, became convinced that CIA agents were following him, despite “no obvious signs of pursuit,” the book claimed.
“You can’t imagine how ridiculous it was,” WikiLeaks’ James Ball told the authors. “He stayed dressed up as an old woman for more than two hours.”