‘Insurance.aes256’, Julian Assange’s contingency plan
An enormous 1.39 GB computer file dubbed “Insurance.aes256” contains explosive revelations which WikiLeaks has promised to release to the public should charges be pressed against its founder Julian Assange.
Even as crowds gathered outside a British court on Tuesday for the first hearing of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a document circulating on the Internet appeared to be attracting ever more attention. A huge computer file known as “insurance.aes256”, available on Internet torrent sites since July, has seemingly offered the WikiLeaks founder a new lifeline. The so-called “life-insurance” file contains yet more political and diplomatic secrets which some say will prevent powerful opponents of the whistle-blowing website from threatening its founder.
If any harm befalls either the organisation or its extremely media-exposed representative Assange, WikiLeaks has promised to release the document’s decryption key to the public. During a recent interview to the American news channel Democracy Now!, Assange himself stressed the importance of the document. “It might be worth ensuring that important parts of history do not disappear,” he said.
“Insurance.aes256” weighs in at a hefty 1.39 GB. “This is huge if it contains only text. So there is a chance that the document also contains images and other multimedia elements,” said Laurent Heslaut, director of security technology within the American anti-virus software firm Symantec.