Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell did not say what
efforts the Defense Department might be able to take to compel Wikileaks to
comply.
He told a Pentagon news conference that, at this point, the
Pentagon is asking Wikileaks "to do the right thing."
Wikileaks posted nearly 77,000 classified military and other
documents, mostly raw intelligence reports from Afghanistan, on its website
July 25.
On Thursday, WikiLeaks posted a huge encrypted file named
"Insurance" to its website, sparking speculation that those behind
the organization may be prepared to release more classified information if
authorities interfere with them.
Bloggers have noted that it's 20 times larger than the batch
of 77,000 secret US military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped
onto the Web last month.
Contributors to tech sites such as CNet have speculated that
the file could be a way of threatening to disclose more information if
WikiLeaks' staffers were detained or if the site was attacked, although the
organization itself has kept mum.
"As a matter of policy, we do not discuss security
procedures," WikiLeaks said Thursday in an e-mail response to questions
about the 1.4 gigabyte file.
Editor-in-chief Julian Assange was a bit more expansive — if
equally cryptic — in his response to the same line of questioning in a
television interview with independent US news network Democracy Now! "I think it's better that
we don't comment on that," Assange said, according to the network's
transcript of the interview. "But, you know, one could imagine in a
similar situation that it might be worth ensuring that important parts of
history do not disappear."
Assange, a former computer hacker, has
expressed concern over his safety in the past, complaining of surveillance and
telling interviewers that he's been warned away from visiting the United
States.
Since the publication of the Afghanistan files, at least one
activist associated with the site has been questioned by US authorities.
Programmer Jacob Appelbaum, who filled in for Assange at a conference last
month, was reportedly detained and questioned about the site by officials after
arriving in the US on a flight from the Netherlands.
US officials have had harsh words for Assange, with Adm. Michael
Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying he and his colleagues had
disclosed potentially life-threatening information and might already have blood
on their hands.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has refused to rule out
the possibility that Assange could be a target into the military's
investigation into the leak.
