Wikileaks founder jailed in England

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is behind bars in London, facing extradition to Sweden where he is charged with rape and sexual molestation in two separate cases.

Assange, who turned himself in to Scotland Yard early Tuesday, denies the sexual charges.

A spokesman for WikiLeaks, Kristin Hrafnsson, told a news organization that Assange's arrest is an attack on media freedom and that it won't prevent Wikileaks from putting more state secrets on the web.

This will not change our operation, Hrafnsson said.

Wikileaks, perhaps to empahsize Hrafnsson's statement, today released a dozen new diplomatic cables, including details of a NATO defense plan for Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

On Nov. 28, Wikileaks began publishing 251,287 U.S. embassy cables. The content has embarrassed and enraged officials from several nations. The U.S. is considering charging Wikileaks and Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, with violating the U.S. Espionage Act.

The U.S. has been actively pursuing ways of shutting Wikileaks down, while Sweden has been looking into ways of bringing Assange back to that country to answer the sexual charges against him.

On Dec. 3, U.S. servers killed Wikileaks' domain name, shutting down the website around the world. Amazon had already ousted Wikileaks from its server, while Visa and Mastercard have suspended payment acceptance on Wikileaks' sites, curtailing the organization's ability to receive donations.

Online money-transfer site PayPal has also blocked transactions of the organization.

PayPal permanently restricted the account used by Wikileaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, a statement on the online money transfer site said late Friday.

Our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity, PayPal said

U.S. officials have said that, although the documents have been made public, they are still classified and it is still against the law to read them.

The US Social Security Administration has warned its employees that even browsing Wikileaks could be a criminal offense.

But Wikileaks has been fighting back. On Saturday, the whistleblower group announced three new URLs, registered individually in Germany, Finland and Netherlands.

The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops, Wikileaks stated in a Twitter message.

Meanwhile, Sweden has refused Assange's request to drop the sexual charges, and has asked Interpol to put Assange on their Red Notice list, which is a means of asking other nations to help capture Assange and bring him to Sweden.

Assange has said that he had consensual sex with the women in question and is bering wrongly accused. Sweden originally dropped the sexual assault charges against Assange shortly after they were lodged, but then reinstated them a month later.

Assange had been hiding out in London before deciding to turn himself in. He asked a London judge to block his extradition to Sweden. The judge refused and sent Assange to jail until his next extradition hearing on Dec. 14.

U.S. Secretary of State Robert Gates, while visiting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was told that Assange was now in jail in England.

That sounds like good news to me, he said.

Prior to releasing the embassy cables, Wikileaks published 92,000 secret U.S. documents regarding the Afghan war in July and, in October, the site released the largest classified military leak in history -- 391,832 reports on the U.S. war in Iraq.